We make our way from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.

On the way, we stop at a bus station serving up deep-fried crickets. With chillies. Mmmm.

Phnom Penh, like other places we’ve been (Luang Prabang, Vientiane),  is on the Mekong river. We have several errands to accomplish before spending Christmas at the beach.

(First warning – ’tis the Season to be Jolly and all that, but the rest of this entry is pretty bleak. You might want to stop reading now.)

After our chores are done, we go to a few of the obligatory dark places in Phnom Penh. One is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, formerly known as S-21 prison, in what used to be a school.

This place is chilling beyond description. Very graphic and disturbing. We’re surprised that some people bring their children here. For little ones, we’re not sure if a lesson in Man’s Inhumanity to Man has to be this stark.

Later that day, went to this place, Choeung Ek, about 15 KMs south of Phnom Penh. After interrogation at S-21, 17,000 people were brought here, executed, and dumped into mass graves.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Phnom Penh

(Warning: quasi-philosophical musings, part 2, follow!)

Samuel Johnson said:

‘A man is seldom more innocently occupied than when he is engaged in making money.’

…or something to that effect. Being an arch-capitalist, I tend to agree.  The Cocal Cola corporation doesn’t want to take over the world. It just wants to sell Coke in every country in the world. Their ability to short-change consumers or underpay workers is constrained.

On the other hand, the inhumanity and cruelty of those advancing a world-conquering religion or ideology – like the Khmer Rouge and their Marxist nightmare – is staggering. Bottomless. Without limit.

Teenagers and university students may pound the dinner table in a petulant frenzy and splutter ‘But what about the Victims of Capitalism?’

You can direct them here.

In the twentieth century alone, the victims of ideologues number in the tens of millions. Any time people begin to speak of the Shining City on the Hill,  the new Golden Age, the 1,000 Year Reich, be very afraid.

You end up with Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia. (Or ISIS, beheading their way into Allah’s grace, one journalist or aid worker at a time.)

You will end up abducted in the middle of the night with your family. Loaded into the back of a truck. Stuffed into freight cars. Tortured, murdered, and filling a mass grave somewhere or as a puff of smoke trailing out of a crematorium. You end up with this.

Of course, hard-core ideologues will squeal ‘Oh, but that was imperfectly-realized <insert ideology here>. Next time, we’ll get it right.’

Or historical relativists will bleat ‘We’re just as bad as this. What about <insert trifling human-rights infraction here>?’

They should try saying so standing in front of this tower of human skulls.

</quasi-philosophical musings, part 2>

A strange thing happens as we leave our guest house in Siem Reap.

A woman (kiwi, I think) rushes up and says ‘Excuse me, are you Al Franken?’

We’re only vaguely aware of who Al Franken is. The name is familiar in connection with the rogue’s gallery of outed Men Behaving Badly.

I noticed this woman staring intently the evening before. Turns out she thought I might have been Al Franken, escaping to the other side of the world to get away from bad publicity.

(I doubt a senator – even an ex-senator – would stay in a US$12.00 guest house. More like the Four Seasons. On the taxpayer’s dime, of course.)

Al Franken looks like this.

I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.

When I was younger, people would ask if I was Bruce Cockburn. Bruce Cockburn looked like this at the time.

From introspective poet to sleazebag politician. That’s progress.

But I digress. We spend the next two days ambling around Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat.

It features lots of these Apocalypse Now– style stone faces.

Among other things, Bayon is known for its extensive bas-reliefs. They even include rabbits, thus proving how enlightened they were.

Another view of Bayon.

This is Bapuon, another building in the Angkor Thom complex.

An arched corridor at the top.

In the neighbourhood is Angkor Wat itself.

As everywhere in Angkor, the stone carving is superb.

Last stop of the day is Ta Prohm. Angelina Jolie filmed a Tomb Raider movie here.  I’m sure the original builder (King Jayavarman VII, in 1186 A.D.) is well pleased.

Me and a really big tree.

Site or Insight of the Day – Siem Reap

While cycling back from Angkor, we pass the office of APOPO and slam on the brakes for a visit.

This is an organization that trains rats to detect mines. I recently saw an article somewhere about using rats to detect mines (probably in The Economist), so coming across this office is pure serendipity.

The rats are very good at it. And they’re too light to set the mine off. We get a demonstration.

Adrian is put through his paces.

Two handlers slowly guide Adrian on a line between them as he goes back and forth. He hits pay dirt with a small TNT-scented object and is rewarded with a piece of banana.

These are giant pouched rats (from Africa) – a different animal from the mangy urban vermin variety – so they have more of a cuteness factor.

We leave a donation and head back to town.

We travel from the 4,000 Islands in Laos to Siem Reap, Cambodia, the town nearest to Angkor Wat.

We cross the No-man’s-land between the two.

Cambodia uses the US dollar as its currency. Quelle surprise! Even though there is such a thing as a Cambodian Riel, it takes 4,000 of them to make a US buck. Even the ATMs only dispense crisp new greenbacks.

Angkor Wat. I’ve wanted to come here ever since reading about it in Volume 1 of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization as a youth.

We rented E-scooters again. Angkor Wat is about 8 KMs from Siem Reap. Our first stop was a site called Banteay Kdei. It was in small letters on the map, signifying a minor site, of lesser importance.

It didn’t seem very minor to us.  It’s like a poem in stone. Unbelievable skill went into building this – and every other site here. There is fine, fine stone carving on every surface. Even the roofs are made of stone. On one of its axes is this magnificent artificial lake.

After an hour or so of ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’, we move on to Pre Rup.

This is a temple made largely of brick. A multinational film crew is making some kind of documentary while we’re here, including drone shots.

After a healthy climb, we get this view.

Almost all the sites here have multiple stone lions as guardians.

On the road to the next stop. These E-scooters are a blast to ride.

We pass a baby water buffalo that doesn’t want to get out of the (mud) bath.

Next stop, Neak Prean.

Dates from the 12th century. What was going on in Europe in the 12th century? Quite a lot, in fact.

After lunch and a charge-up of the bikes, we arrive at Preah Khan.

We love these trees that take over the ruins.

Maria consults our guide book.

The 2 axes of the building meet in the middle. Looking down the corridors gives a hall-of-mirrors effect in every direction.

More buildings.

The roofs are impossible-looking arches of stone

We try to imagine what this looked like in its heyday.

Another ruin-devouring tree.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Angkor Wat

(Warning: quasi-philosophical musings follow!)

We are immersed in an ocean of history.

Like a school of small fish halfway to the ocean floor in the middle of the Pacific, we don’t need to be aware of more than the few cubic metres of water in our particular habitat.

People don’t need a knowledge of history to live, or even to thrive. Many people know absolutely none. Others know only what someone else has told them. Some learn just enough to buttress their own particular set of biases and beliefs, then stop.

But overarching all of these is a sort of uber-history: what has undeniably been, manifested in concrete form, unchangeable by the fairy tales and agenda-driven propaganda of history-as-an-identity-crutch.

Angkor Wat is like that – it’s overwhelming in its HERE-ness, the product of a million minds and hands from people long dead. Many things have changed in the intervening centuries, but Angkor Wat remains to boggle the mind. (Well, my mind anyway.)

</quasi-philosophical musings>

We make it to the 4,000 Islands in southern Laos, after our character-building trip from Kong Lo. Our buttocks still haven’t forgiven us the five hours spent bouncing around the back of a truck.

So a few days spent in sybaritic idleness is called for. On our way, we see a big snake on the road – our first in Asia. It’s supposed to be good luck.

From the village of Ban Nakasang, we hire a boat to one of the islands in the Mekong.

The island we have in mind is Don Khon.

This archipelago is popular for its river view guesthouses.

There’s not much to do on these islands except relax. We rent bicycles during the day and circle the island.

This is the neighbouring island, Don Det.

The paths are free of traffic.

I can check ‘Pet a live pig’ off of my bucket list.

Halfway around the island.

The French built a railway here to carry gunboats past the Mekong rapids in order to further their insatiable greed for imperialist expansion Mission Civilisatrice.

We look forward to getting back to our veranda.

At the end of the day, we relax and watch the sun go down.

Sight or Insight of the Day – 4,000 Islands.

Yuletide is rapidly approaching. There are reminders, even here, of the holiday season.

‘Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams
I’ll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams’

Happy holidays, everyone.

More epic bus journeys to Vientiane and Kong Lor.

We read so much about Vientiane being one of the least attractive capitals in SE Asia. Not so. We find Vientiane a lively place to visit.

This is the rest area of our hotel.

We visit the Laos Military Museum, but it’s closed because of a national holiday.

A MIG jet fighter – From Russia , with Love.

We visit the Gate of Victory. There is a possibly apocryphal story about this concrete monstrosity. It goes something like:

‘The monument was built using American funds and cement actually intended to build a new airport. The Royal Laotian Government instead built the monument, which earned it the nickname of the “vertical runway”‘

 

Still, you get a great view from the top.

The next day, we make our way to Kong Lo cave.  We get a tuk-tuk to the bus station, catch a bus at 10:00 AM that – in theory – arrives in Kong Lo village in five hours. Of course, after seven hours, we are dropped off at a bridge too narrow for the bus to go through and left to take another tuk-tuk an additional 40 kilometers to Kong Lo village, where we arrive in the dark. Such is travel in Laos.

We stay at the delightful Chantha House hotel.

Kong Lo village in the daylight is breathtaking. The aforementioned bridge means that life beyond it goes back to a pre-industrial idyll. No noisy trucks or construction debris everywhere. It’s quiet. So quiet, the friggin’ roosters wake me up well before dawn. Surrounded by mountains.

We’re here to visit the Kong Lo cave (various spellings – to repeat, transliteration of Asian place names is very free-and-easy).

Actually, I think this is a primitive kind of tobacco kiln. We asked our hotel guy what were the small green shoots that people were planting in the surrounding fields and were told ‘tobacco’.

On the way to the cave. The Kong Lo cave features a river running over seven kilometres under the mountains. You travel through in a narrow motorized longboat and pray that the boatman remembers his twists and turns correctly.

This is the mouth of the cave on the Kong Lo side.

Inside the entrance, you board one of these narrow longboats.

Inside the cave – at one point, we are let off the boat to walk a few hundred metres along a path. When you turn your headlamp off, it’s really dark. We’re talkin’ Stygian darkness here.

…and seven KMs later, out the other side.

This side of the cave is even more untouched.

The nearest village is Ban Natane, two kilometres away. We start down the road to stretch our legs…

…for about a kilometre…

…and back again.

Back down the river to the Ban Natane entrance.

Approaching the Ban Natane mouth of the cave.

At last, back safe on the Kong Lo side.

Of course Maria, being a water baby, must take a dip in the Hin Bun river.

We thought getting to Kong Lo village was a challenge. To leave and go south – our plan – means sitting in the back of a crammed tuk-tuk for a gruelling five hours to Tha Khaek, then catching a (thankfully full-sized) bus for the seven-hour trip to Pakse.

As I’m fond of saying to Maria, ‘Gee, I wouldn’t want to be doing this if we were old’.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Vientiane and Kong Lor

Remember the dog we called the cutest dog in Myanmar? This guy is a contender for the cutest dog in Laos.

 

 

 

Vang Vieng is famous for two things: caves and tubing.

In truth, Vang Vieng is infamous for the number of dumb visitors dying from broken necks and drug overdoses, but has cleaned itself up in recent years.

We manage to do a bit of both (caving and tubing, not neck-breaking and overdosing.) Our first day after arriving from Phonsavan, we rent bicycles and cross the toll bridge to the other side of the river.

The town itself is no great shakes, but the surrounding landscape is awesome.

We ride the picturesque road between ranges of karst mountains.

Our first cave. We walk for what feels like kilometres down a dry riverbed and through a jungle path to reach it.

We cycle to the ‘Blue Lagoon’, but it’s a bit too overrun for our tastes. On the way back we head for the Pha Kham watercave, crossing rice paddies and rickety bamboo bridges..

This is more like it. A subterranean pool with nobody around.

We emerge from the cave.

Walking back to the bicycles, the late afternoon sun lights up the mountains beautifully.

Next day, we go tubing. This means floating down the Nam Song on an old truck tire tube. There are riverside bars where you can stop and buy overpriced drinks while being subjected to bad techno music played at atom-blast levels, if that’s your thing.

Skipping the bars, it’s nice drifting down a river for a few hours. There’s a Huckleberry Finn sense of leisure about being afloat and free to think about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

At the last stop, Maria had to negotiate a ride back to town for us, as the standard operating procedure is to keep people here to consume unhealthy amounts of booze for 3 hours.

 

Sight or Insight of the Day – Vang Vieng

Interestingly, right down the spine of the town is a long open space that now acts as a bus terminal and marketplace.

This was the former Lima Site 6 (number uncertain – it was secret, after all), one of the many sites throughout Laos used for covert operations. I admit to a fascination with this hush-hush slice of history. Few of these former sites are so accessible, and none of them have many remaining artifacts. I guess that’s because they were ‘clandestine’

After a twisting road trip from Luang Prabang to Phonsavan, we come to the mysterious Plain of Jars.

I’ve wanted to come here for years. I first heard the phrase ‘Plain of Jars’ used in this context (I’m paraphrasing here):

‘The United States Air Force bombed the shit out of the Plain of Jars in Laos’

Plain of jars? Like, peanut-butter jars? I soon learn they are enormous stone jars, made by people about whom nothing is known.

We hire a guide and a van and enjoy an all-day guided tour.

(If you’re wondering why we have so many clothes on, it’s because the weather is cool here in Phonsavan. For the first time in two months, socks, long pants, and fleeces are called for.)

It’s unclear what the jars are for. Different theories abound.

They come in all sizes.

This may look like a lid, but some say it’s a grave marker. Or maybe not. Nobody really knows.

During our tour, we pass through several villages. We stop in one for lunch.

We also visit a cave, with some spirit offerings that look suspiciously like inukshuks.

 

Sight or Insight of the Day – Plain of Jars

Besides the attraction of the jars, this part of Laos is well known as the scene of much combat during the Vietnam Era. As in Luang Prabang, there are branches of UXO-clearing organisations in the area. We drop in at the MAG visitor’s centre in Phonsavan.

Our guide, Noods, is very knowledgeable about events of the war in the area, as well as being somewhat of a jar-ologist. Apparently his grandfather was a bigwig in the Pathet Lao.

In the 60’s and 70’s Laos, like much of southeast Asia, was a quagmire. Among other things, there was a nasty 3-way civil war going on in the country. Signs of violent conflict are everywhere.

Our guide extracts a metal detector from the back of the van, and within a few minutes, we come across:

• several bullets of different calibres, some unfired
• fragments of an F-105 that crashed into the side of the hill
• the pull-pin from a hand grenade
• the threaded fuse opening of a 250-pound bomb

Remains of a tank. It’s stripped bare. I try to imagine how you remove the engine from a tank.

Cluster bomb canisters hold up a structure.

Some of the hardware collected by locals.

Not even the jars are spared.

Some bullet-struck jars still have the bullet embedded in the centre.

 

Luang Prabang must be Lao for ‘nifty little town’.

Getting here was half the fun. Some of the niftiness includes streets that are easy to bicycle around.

Temples galore. This one is at the Royal Palace and contains the Prabang Buddha, after which the town gets its name.

It has French colonial architecture.

More French colonial architecture.

It’s on the Mekong River.

It’s also on the Nam Khan River.

You can climb Phousi Hill in the middle of town for a panoramic view.

You can purchase little birds to liberate ( like we did in Rangoon).

Soon to be freed.

It has a wonderful museum of local ethnography.

This highlights the fantastic textiles that Laos produces.

One of the pleasures of travel – today, we ran into a nice German couple we first met in Pagan, Burma. We arranged to meet later in the evening for a pizza across the bamboo bridge and had a delightful time.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Luang Prabang

Went to the UXO Visitors Centre here in town.

Although all sides in the Vietnam War deny any activity in Laos, North Vietnam used it as a conduit for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the Americans bombed areas of the country to smithereens trying to disrupt it.

Quote from another site:

‘From 1964 to 1973, as part of the Secret War operation conducted during the Vietnam War, the US military dropped 260 million cluster bombs – about 2.5 million tons of munitions – on Laos over the course of 580,000 bombing missions. This is equivalent to a planeload of bombs being unloaded every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years – nearly seven bombs for every man, woman and child living in Laos.’

‘It is more than all the bombs dropped on Europe throughout World War II, leaving Laos, a country approximately the size of Utah, with the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history.’

About a third of these munitions failed to explode. So there  is some nasty stuff left over from the Vietnam War. A lot of nasty stuff. This organization both finds and disposes of unexploded ordinance – which will take centuries – and educates people &  their kids how to avoid contact with UXO. 

Luang Prabang, Laos

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Rat to Mole, The Wind in the Willows

Messing about in boats indeed. From Pai, we decide to head to Laos and take the slow boat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang.

First step was to get to Chiang Khong, the Thai border town across the Mekong River from Huay Xai. Caught a bus to Chiang Mai, but the last bus onward to to Chiang Khong had no seats left. Instead, we traveled to Chiang Rai and spent the night there, catching an early morning local bus to the border.

Our first land border crossing of the trip. How exciting.

We apply for visas-on-arrival.

We finally make it to the docks in time for the 11:30 departure.

Mostly foreign visitors take this boat. A good mix of ages, with an afterdeck for the party animals, thankfully separated by a roaring diesel engine.

One of the most enjoyable trips we’ve had so far. The boat is open to the balmy air, the Mekong flows by scarcely a metre below the gunwales.  Comfortable, if not luxurious. Beer is available. Other drinks and snacks, too.

The scenery is really quite spectacular. Green mountains, interesting rock formations, tidy-looking villages, dunes of fine sand that look like they’ve been shipped in from Ipanema. 

The animals seem to enjoy the riverside life. We pass groups of cows, water buffalo, goats – even the odd pig – relaxing by the water, seemingly no people around, in Eden-like tranquility.

We overnight in Pak Beng, a single-street town that subsists mainly on providing room and board to boat passengers. Sausages are a specialty of northern Laos. I have a fatal weakness for sausages. I get my Kip out for a woman grilling up a variety of savoury snarlers on Pak Beng’s main street.

After a night in Pak Beng, we carry on down the river, stopping occasionally at small villages, letting people on and off.

A few more observations:

• The hammer and sickle flag still flies beside the Lao national flag in some places. I thought communism (at least wearing it proudly like a badge) went out with mullets. Strange, because Laos doesn’t have that drab, sad shabbiness and heartbreaking scarcity of -well, just about everything – that is the signature of communist countries.

• Signs of Chinese investment – saw Chinese companies constructing at least one large tunnel and one bridge over the Mekong. You can tell by the prominent 30-metre red banner in Chinese.
• Speaking of Chineses presence throughout SE Asia, read recently that Thailand plans to translate traffic signs in northern Thailand into Chinese due to the number of accidents involving Chinese visitors. Maybe they’re just bad drivers.

By 4:00 PM, we arrive in Luang Prabang. Staying a guest house in the Old Town.

Sight or Insight of the Day

The morning we left Pai, we were greeted in the bathroom by this spider.

For scale, that’s a biggish sink stopper in the corner. This is the first creepy crawly encountered in nearly two months of travel. She was more frightened by the likes of us – at our first slight movement, she took off as if chased by all the devils in Hell.

I remember reading about Pai in the travel section of the Globe a few years ago.

Pai is a hippie mecca of the old school. Best thing about it is its location in a scenic valley.

Almost everybody here rents a scooter or motorcycle to explore the nearby waterfalls and other sights. The emergency rooms of the local hospital must see some dandy accidents as a result of unskilled and inebriated foreigners motoring around – helmetless – in shorts, tank tops, and flip flops.

Lots of other people come here for different reasons. Some quotes from a Wikitravel article:

‘There has been a large increase in Thai people visiting after Pai was featured in a romantic Thai film, Pai in Love.’

‘Perhaps due to the popularity of the Chinese movie ‘Lost in Thailand’, which was shot in northern Thailand, Pai has seen a significant increase in the number of mainland Chinese tourists and group tours since 2014.’

Nice bamboo bridge leading to our accommodations.

Among all the restaurants, souvenir shops, tattoo parlours, and massage studios are some tranquil buildings.

The range of tourist activities in the area is wide but unappealing – at least to us. Ziplining, whitewater rafting, elephant riding (cruel and exploitative), trekking – meh. We stay in these bamboo huts. It feels like a tropical Hobbit village.

You may have heard of Cat Cafés. Pai boasts a Rabbit Café, which of course we thought was great.

I need no excuse to sneak in another bunny pic.

Besides the endless possibilities for making puns on its name, we enjoy the laid-back vibe here. Planning our next move to Laos.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Pai

A wonderful drive – by public transit – to Pai from Chiang Mai on twisty mountain roads. Stopping for a break in a small town midway, we’re surprised by a convoy of 10 or 11 latest-model Ferraris – teenagers at the wheel – screaming through the village, passing slower traffic on a blind curve.

We’ve seen this movie before. Looks like Canada isn’t the only place where Chinese criminals gift their sons with examples of sleek Italian automotive exotica costing a quarter of a million US dollars (and up) apiece. Like here. And here. And here