One last sight

I'm home. I flew into BWI last night after about 33 hours of travel. I'll write more when my body adjusts to the time change. In the meantime here's one last travel photo

The first leg of my journey home was from Hanoi to Nagoya, Japan. After eight of the longest hours of my life there I flew to Detroit. On the way we flew almost directly over Mount Fuji. It was a clear day so I had a great view of the perfectly conical, snow-capped mountain, perhaps the iconic sight of Japan.

I was asked how high Fuji is compared to Everest. Fuji is one of the world's most beautiful and photogenic mountains, but it's only just over 12,000 feet high. Our cruising altitude was about 27,000 feet here, which means the plane was about a half-mile lower than the summit of Everest.

Cu Lao Cham

Just off shore from Hoi An, and within sight of Cau Dai beach, is Cu Lao Cham, or the Cham Islands. As the name suggests it is an island inhabited by people of the Cham ethnic group. There are eight islands, only one of which, Hon Lao, is populated. Basic tourist accomodations are available but most tourists visit the islands on a daytrip.

I expected the tour to be like Koh Phi Phi Ley in Thailand or Nha Trang in Vietnam: meaning beautiful terrain spoiled by thousands of tourists. I was happy to be proven wrong.

It takes about 25 minutes by speedboat to get to Hon Lao from Cau Dai beach. The group I was in was friendly and fun, which is good since we were stacked on the boat like cordwood. I should note that the crew insisted we wear lifejackets, which was reassuring, since I've been on tour boats that didn't even have them.


The first stop was the fishing village at Bai Huong, or Huong Beach. I would have preferred to go straight to the beach, but the brief tour of the town was enjoyable and our tour guide was surprisingly competent. This was a nice touch I hadn't seen before.


We stopped at a small visitor center where we learned about, among other things, land crabs. These migrate from all over the island to a common mating ground once a year, following the lunar cycle. No one understands how they know. They're friendly, too!


To get to the visitor center we had to walk through patches of drying rice.


Our boat is the small white spot in the top left corner. The village is visible in the distance. From there we walked through rice terraces where a farmer was tilling with help from a buffalo.


We went to a small temple where there was more rice drying in the courtyard.


This is a peek inside the temple. Note the red swastika on the small Buddha statue's chest.


The village has little tourist infrastructure. It's a working fishing village. Here are some locals weighing the day's catch of squid.


From there we took the boat to a reef where we could snorkel. Or snoke, as this boat says.


The water was surprisingly cool and refreshing but there wasn't much to see underwater. We went to a small restaurant where the food wasn't great, but it was plentiful.


We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the beach. Our restaurant was part of a small guest house. There was another small resort further down the beach. But we were the only people there! I've been on boat trips where the beach and the snorkel spots are packed with boats and tourists. We had the whole beach to ourselves. Bliss.

The only other boats there were a couple fishing boats. The mainland is visible in the background. Fishermen paint eyes on the front of the boat to help find fish.

Scatology, or TP RTW

RTW is backpacker-speak for Round the World. This post is about the wide world of toilet paper.

And poop.

There are no pictures in this post but still, I wouldn't recommend reading this before or after a meal.

Get a group of dog walkers together and after the initial pleasantries the conversation will usually veer quickly to the dogs' bowel movements. Don't ask me why. I don't have kids but I notice that friends and family with newborns spend a lot of time talking about diapers and what's in them.

I've written several posts about "Things that may interest only me". This is one that will interest everyone. People just like to talk about poop.

Travelers are no exception. One of the joys of traveling is seeing the little ways in which other countries are different. For instance, a friend of mine, whose name I'll change to protect his innocence, returned from his first trip abroad. How was it? The first thing he mentioned was using a bidet for the first time. I jokingly asked him if he was going to put one in every bathroom now. No, not every bathroom, every room.

It's a subject of interest for even the most experienced and jaded travelers. I traveled for a few days in northern Thailand with a German photographer. Michael has seen more of the world than anyone I've ever met.

We were having dinner at a restaurant in the soulless ex-pat enclave of Chiang Mai when he got up to use the toilet. He came out laughing with a delighted expression on his face. "Did you see this?" he asked, pointing towards the toilet. "The lemons in the urinals?"

What follows are some observations rendered as tastefully as possible.

Squat toilets are the norm in Asia, although places that are accustomed to tourists will have western-style tourists. I can understand why people might find them uncomfortable or awkward to use, but I am surprised at how absolutely apoplectic some people get about squat toilets.

To a certain type of traveler anything other than a squeaky-clean western toilet is clearly an indication that the people in that area are morally defective and should be wiped off the face of the earth. These are generally the same people who travel to faraway lands to eat at McDonald's and spend half their day in internet cafes.

I'm a guy. I don't care. Squat toilets take a bit of getting used to, but they make hygienic sense in that you don't have to touch any part of the toilet. There's also a lot less hardware involved. Also, from a practical standpoint, you're less inclined to take the newspaper in with you and sit for 20 minutes.

When you're a man the world is your urinal. I try to be discreet but it's not necessary in this part of the world. Men will pull over on the side of the highway and urinate in plain view of passing traffic. I saw an old man in Hue standing on the sidewalk peeing into the sewer drain. This wasn't a side street, it was the main thoroughfare running parallel to the river.

It's refreshing to see a culture with a more relaxed attitude towards what is, after all, a perfectly natural thing to do. Perhaps it shouldn't be necessary to go to so much trouble or to build elaborate cathedrals for a simple bodily function. People who live on boats just sit on the edge of the boat and go, often in view of passing tourist boats.

One thing I've seen throughout SE Asia that I'd love to see in the US are outdoor urinals. I see them mostly at service stations and rest stops. A row of urinals with partitions is bolted onto the back wall of the building. I'm a man so I love this. If I were a woman I wouldn't be as thrilled, since there aren't similar facilities for women.

In most parts of the world I've been the plumbing is not as sturdy as we're accustomed to in the US. Toilet paper doesn't go in the toilet, it goes in a small wastebasket. If you put tissue in the toilet it will back up. As a result you'll see signs in the stalls asking you to please put the tissue in the basket.

These signs are usually written in all capital letters and have lots of exclamation points, clearly evidence that the sign was made by a flustered employee who had just finished cleaning up yet another mess caused by a tourist who still hasn't figured out the system. I'll have to remember to switch back when I return to the US!

One thing I'm really looking forward to is not having to carry my own toilet paper with me. Most places I've been have toilet paper as a rule. But you only have to make that mistake once, using the toilet without any tissue, before you remember to bring your own.

In some places you'll have to pay to use the toilet, such as bus or train stations. Often they'll charge you for a wad of toilet tissue. I've been places, such as Nepal, where the tissue is sometimes made of plastic and is just slightly better than using nothing at all. But at least there's tissue. Some places don't use it at all.

Please indulge me for just a moment while I go off on a wild tangent.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was from a well-to-do family in Buenos Aires, but even then he bathed so rarely that his friends called him el chancho, "the pig". Later in life, when he became a communist revolutionary known as Che, his lack of hygiene was legendary. The CIA dossier on him famously noted with questionable grammar that "He is really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty".

And yet even Che was appalled by the habits of the Quechua people of Peru. He observed that men there don't wipe at all while women use their skirts to wipe themselves and their children. In "The Motorcycle Diaries" he wrote the women are "veritable warehouses of excrement".

I can say from personal experience that this is still true.

When I was in Peru in 2005 I spent a long two hours on a local bus from Ollyantaytambo to Cuzco. My friend and I were the only tourists on the bus. I was standing in the aisle next to a woman who had the most offensive odor I have ever encountered.

It was not organic. It was not of this planet. It's what potpourri will smell like in hell. It was so bad I literally gagged. My eyes burned. I spent the entire trip holding my sleeve over my mouth and nose to keep from getting sick. No one else seemed to even notice. I had to keep reminding myself that I was the visitor and, whatever I might have felt (or smelt), by local standards it was normal.

I met a Venezuelan man in Ulaanbaatar who had just returned from a 30-day tour with his wife and two small boys. They went to western Mongolia to watch the solar eclipse. What a cool dad! He said he had thought Russian toilet paper was rough (it is) until he saw a young Kazakh girl by the side of the road wiping herself with a rock. He said he'd never complain about toilet paper again.

I always have multiple rolls of TP in my backpack. It's cheap, lightweight and doesn't take up much space. And it's something you never want to be without. Whenever I check out of a guest house I steal the TP and the soap. I almost always have a roll on my person.

This comes in handy when I'm at a restaurant that doesn't have napkins. Unlike American restaurants, where we take a six-inch stack of napkins, use two and throw the rest away, in other parts of the world you might get one or none at all. (Hopefully it's clear which method I'm criticizing.) Napkins in Vietnam are the size of post-it notes and have the absorbency of aluminum foil.

I will change my eating habits depending on my travel schedule. If I'm taking an overnight bus I'll try not to eat or drink anything, otherwise I might have to use the toilet in the middle of the night. I have made the rookie traveler mistake of drinking a couple beers to help me relax and sleep. (Trust me, it's a bad idea.)

I also don't want to take the chance of getting an upset stomach. Buses will make rest stops but you don't want to be the guy that causes the bus make an unscheduled stop because of your tummy.

Indoor showers are also a western convenience that have to be retrofitted into bathrooms in other parts of the world. If there is a tub it probably won't have a curtain. Because space is limited there usually isn't a tub or even a shower enclosure. The shower head will be put on the wall wherever it fits, which is usually over the toilet.

This method makes for an efficient use of space but it also leaves the toilet seat wet and standing water on the floor. If you need to use the toilet you can wipe the whole area down with a towel, but it makes more sense to just take off all your clothes!

I could go on but I think to do so would violate even my low standards of good taste.

Once more unto the beach

The first time I was in Hoi An I spent a day at Cau Dai beach. It's leisurely 20-minute bike ride from the town. The day was windy and overcast and downright chilly when I got on the beach. But the beach itself seemed quite nice. I wondered what it would look like on a clear, sunny day.

Now I know. It wasn't just hot and sunny. It was probably the hottest day I've ever spent on a beach. The sand scalded my feet even through my flip-flops. Even in the shade of a beach umbrella the heat was suffocating.

But the water was refreshingly cool, so I got in every 20 or 30 minutes or so to cool off. In Thailand, by way of comparison, the water is so warm that it doesn't cool you off. It's hard to tell where the air ends and the water begins.

One of the knocks against Vietnam is that, even though it's a beautiful country and easy to get around and the food is delicious and the people are wonderful, the beaches don't compare to Thailand.

I don't get it. I was hugely disappointed by the beaches in Thailand. The ones I visited were narrow, crowded and loud. It's impossible to relax while you're fending off a never-ending stream of beach vendors, 10 or 12 per minute at times.

The beaches in Vietnam are long, wide and relatively undeveloped, although that's changing quickly. Nowhere in Vietnam did I see anything like Hat Chaweng, the biggest beach on Koh Samui in Thailand.



I had plenty of time to check out the Vietnam coastline from the air this past week because I flew four times. Danang-Hanoi, Hanoi-Danang, Danang-Saigon, Saigon-Hanoi. Long story.

There are miles and miles of pristine beach with no commercial development whatsoever. The water isn't as clear as I've seen in other parts of SE Asia but aside from that I like the beaches in Vietnam much, much more than those in Thailand. I don't want to be too hasty in my appraisal, though. I think this warrants further research. I think I should spend a few more weeks beach-hopping before I submit an official opinion.

I've mentioned before how I think it's funny how overweight, pasty-skinned tourists suffer through the scorching mid-day heat in skimpy clothes while the locals do everything they can to avoid the sun. Women here will cover literally every inch of skin during the day: sunhat, mask, scarf, long sleeves, gloves, pants, socks and sandals. The only part they don't cover is their eyes.

The reason, as I understand it, and as with most things I "understand" I'm probably dead wrong, is due to a cultural belief that goes back literally thousands of years. Dark skin is traditionally a sign that the person farms or fishes or toils at some other "common" work in the sun all day. Lighter skin is a sign of wealth or refinement.

When locals go to the beach for fun they go in the morning or the evening, when the sun is low and the air is cooler. This makes a lot of sense, aside from the fact that these are the times when sharks feed.

This is a stretch of beach near my sunbed at mid-day.



This is almost the same shot near sunset, with the beach full of locals.



One way to pass the time is to watch the local fishermen working. These circular boats practically beg to have their photos taken.



Fishermen stand up as they row these with a single long paddle. This is a shot from Cham Island (which I'll cover in a separate post). Try this at home. I dare you. I think I'd be able to stay on a rodeo bull longer than I could stand up in one of these boats.



Later in the day they create just the right amount of shade for a man to play with his granddaughter on the beach.



I met a woman who lives in Saigon but was in Hoi An visiting family. She invited me to dinner at a beach a few miles up the road that I hadn't heard or read about. It was packed with people eating, swimming and relaxing on the beach. I did not see another tourist.

Tourists always pay more. I don't have a problem with that, as long as I don't think I'm getting fleeced. Even at inflated prices I pay much less than I would at home. We ordered two big grilled fish, picked the meat off and rolled it in rice paper with fresh greens. I'm sure there's a name for this but I don't know it. I was too stuffed to ask. We each had a soda. The entire meal cost about twice as much as the coffee I'm drinking as I write this!

Thought of the day

As I was listening to the pre-flight instructions on my Jetstar flight from Danang to Saigon I wondered if there is an airline anywhere in the world that allows passengers to smoke. In 2009 is it still necessary to tell passengers that they're on a non-smoking flight?

That's a rhetorical question. Even with the announcement and the posted signs I'm sure even as I write this somewhere a flight attendant is asking a passenger to put out his cigarette. I'm confident of this after seeing a passenger who wasn't familiar with barf bags.

On my Hanoi to Danang flight a guy across the aisle and just behind me got airsick. Rather than use the bag provided by the airline he just leaned over into the aisle and puked onto the floor. Thankfully it was only an hour flight!

Denouement

Vietnam is an easy country to travel in, partly due to the wealth of transportation options, but mostly because of the shape of the country. Because it's long and skinny, visitors either travel from north to south (Hanoi to Saigon) or vice versa.

I did the south to north route, entering from Cambodia, starting in Saigon and heading north to Hanoi and ultimately to Sapa. Having gone all the way up, I'm now going back down. I decided to return to Hoi An, my favorite town in the whole wide world. The sunset shot above is just one reason why.

From here I may continue on to Saigon, or I may go back north again and see if I have better luck with the weather in Sapa. My visa for Vietnam expires on May 3, so I may stay here for a couple more weeks. Or I may go back to Cambodia. Or Laos. Ask me tomorrow.

I am totally winging it at this point. The trip is essentially over. I'm just trying to stretch it out as long as I can. Luckily I'm in a part of the world where it's easy to travel cheaply.

I don't expect to be posting as much since I'll probably be covering familiar ground. After the breakneck pace of the first half of the trip it's been nice to be able to take my time and relax a little.

Another day, another protest

I was in Bangkok during the airport strike last year. I started working on a post about the political situation in Thailand but never finished it. I wish I had. I predicted the worst was yet to come. And for once in my life I was right. As I write this I'm watching news footage of the Thai military shooting in the streets, burnt vehicles being towed away, and other typical scenes of a Southeast Asian vacation.

I was stuck in Bangkok for a week when I went back to the city after aggravating my back diving in Koh Tao. I received emails from folks wondering if I was OK. The bombings in Mumbai happened at the same time and it was easy to confuse the two.

At the time I was perfectly safe at a comfortable hostel in Silom, the financial district. There was no sign that anything was amiss, except that attendance at the hostel dwindled. One night I was the only guest! On the streets there was no sign that the country had been shut off from the outside world.

Bangkok is the main hub not just for Bangkok but for all of SE Asia. If you fly to Rangoon or Hanoi or Phnom Penh the odds are pretty good that you'll go through Bangkok. So by shutting down Bangkok the protestors were effectively shutting down the whole region.

I was fascinated at the time by the way the story was being covered, not just in the American and Western press, but also in the SE Asian media. They totally missed the point. I read the English-language reports online and in the local press, and the story was all the same.

A group of peaceful protestors from the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) shut down the airport because they wanted to force out a corrupt prime minister (Somchai), who was actually just a puppet for a previous corrupt prime minister (Thaksin), who is living in exile to escape justice in Bangkok.

Sounds perfectly noble, doesn't it? The protestors were well-behaved, articulate, organized and had the best interests of the country in mind. Right?

Not so fast.

The former prime minister who is living in exile is actually wildly popular and was elected in a landslide. He was forced out of office in 2006, not by an election or even a trial, but a coup. The people who are protesting now want him to return.

His successor was likewise elected in a landslide election. Both were successful because they understand one fundamental truth in politics, no matter what the country: There are more poor people than rich people.

Both PMs appealed to the rural poor of Thailand, the farmers and the fishermen. They've been accused of buying votes. A scathing commentary in Forbes magazine during the protest explains how these votes are "bought":

"Thaksin and Somchai are loved by the rural poor whom they have showered with grants and subsidies, some of them venally political in nature, but others more worthy. They have nudged elitist and stuffy Thai banks to open up affordable credit lines to impoverished farmers, which is no small thing given that for generations those same people have languished in misery, forgotten and despised by the urban elites and unable to raise any capital whatsoever outside of ruinous loan sharks."

http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/12/02/thailand-class-airport-oped-cx_lo_1202osborne.html

In other words, sure there were some shenanigans, but they instituted policies that would help the poor become ... not poor.

Thaksin also made the catastrophic mistake of butting heads with the king. Thailand is a monarchy, remember. The people there love the king. It's no act. They literally worship the guy. It is genuine, but they are required by law to do so.

The Thailand constitution says:

"The King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated. No person shall expose the King to any sort of accusation or action."

The Thai Criminal code further states:

"Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen or the Heir-apparent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to 15 years."

By all accounts, though, King Bhumibol Adulyadej has been a good leader. He has used his almost literally infinite wealth to sponsor thousands of public works project. (In 2008 Forbes ranked him as the world's richest monarch, with an estimated wealth of $35 billion. Thais will not pass up an opportunity to vigorously dispute this, as they believe that the king's wealth is Thailand's wealth and vice versa.)

During his reign there have been a bewildering succession of coups and changes in government, but the king has managed to remain respectfully above the fray.

Which brings us back to the PAD. They wear gold to show their allegiance to the king. The People's Alliance for Democracy is actually a pro-monarchy group. But you'll only find that crucial nugget at the bottom of news stories, if at all.

“If Thaksin’s puppet government returns or they make any attempt to amend the constitution in Thaksin’s favor or reduce the king’s power, the People’s Alliance for Democracy will come back,” protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul said during the airport strike.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aezhA7mHQmIc&refer=asia

So the story was grossly misinterpreted in the way the media completely missed that this "democratic" organization's goal is to solidify the king's power. The two PMs appeal to the vast numbers of rural poor, so what can the educated/rich/pro-monarchy group do?

They want to take away the vote from poor people.

I am not simplifying or paraphrasing. That is the stated goal of the PAD. A news article says the PAD "is now considering moves to take away the power of the vote from the rural masses, with parliament members to be appointed."

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=420664&publicationSubCategoryId=64

The legislators would be "appointed" by members of certain professions, professions which, not coincidentally, happen to make up the bulk of the PAD.

Surgeon Noppakoon Lagum, one of the airport protestor said: "Rural people have good hearts but they don't know the truth like we do in Bangkok. It is our duty to re-educate them."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081204/ap_on_re_as/as_thailand_political_unrest

It is astonishing that in 2009 a political group can so boldly and nakedly embark on a program to disenfranchise poor people simply because they're poor without anyone even noticing! You have to give the PAD credit for the way they managed the media. They were so well-behaved and so darned reasonable that no one in the media -- not even locally -- bothered to question their motives.

The PAD was able to steer the conversation in such a way that the story became "Look at all these poor stranded tourists!' They were able to engineer the situation in such a way that the media, even the local media, focused on how it was affecting foreigners, and not how it would stand to affect Thais.

Maybe it's because the situation is so hard to simplify into terms Western readers can digest. The Forbes commentary I quote above says "make no mistake that this is class warfare. But forget the usual categories of left and right. This is class war in a consumerist Theravada technocracy ruled by an uneasy mish-mosh of divine kingship, a shadowy military, business interests and inherited money. It is outside Western categories."

I was sure there would be a backlash. When a small minority engineers not one but two coups in as part of a systematic attempt to take away the vote from the vast majority of the people, the people whose votes are threatened are going to react. Again, it's important to remember that both PMs won huge victories in democratic elections. The minority doesn't like the results, so they're going to change the entire system of government.

I am a bit torn on this because I believe -- and I love dropping this conversational hand grenade -- that universal voting rights are a bad idea. The Founding Fathers instituted the Electoral College because they felt the vast majority of the population was quite simply not educated or informed enough to make a responsible choice.

Of course they were all rich, white, educated landowners, aristocrats who felt they were best-suited to run the country. They never in their worst nightmares imagined a scenario in which everyone could vote.

A person can live in a Unabomber shack in the woods and stumble into town once every two or four years and cast completely arbitrary votes. His vote counts the same as mine. If someone votes purely along party lines, without even knowing the names, let alone platforms, of the candidates, her vote counts the same as mine.

Voting is a right but it is also a responsbility. If you do not take it upon yourself to make the most informed decision possible, sorry, you don't get to vote. And yes, this rule would apply to me in some recent elections.

I met a girl last year in Nepal who said she wouldn't vote for Obama because he's a Muslim. If you vote on one issue, you don't get to vote. Period. If you vote on one issue and you are demonstrably wrong about it, you don't get to vote for the rest of your life. The 25 percent of people who still approved of Bush when he left office? No more votes, sorry.

I question whether voting rights should be universal but it's just plain evil to take away votes from poor people simply because they're poor. Wealth, class, profession -- these are not reliable indicators of a person's intelligence or political acumen. There is a certain rich private-school guy who served two terms as president even though he is as dumb as a box of hammers.

Back to the king. When I first arrived in Bangkok much of the city was shut down for a state funeral. The king's sister had died several months before. The official explanation for the delay was a "national period of mourning" or something along those lines. I was told on the sly that the delay may have been due to the king's health, that he was not well enough for full-day of ceremonies. The funeral was delayed until he was up to it.

He turned 81 in December. He traditionally gives a radio address to the nation on his birthday. This year his son, the crown prince, gave the address. Last month he was hospitalized.

The PAD wants to protect the power of the king. The king is truly loved by the people but that doesn't mean future kings will necessarily inherit the goodwill he has built up during his 63-year reign. He is the longest-serving head of state in the world. There hasn't been much for the royal heir to do .

A 2002 issue of The Economist was banned in Thailand for criticizing the crown prince's personal life. He's on his third wife. He put the lèse majesté laws to clever use during his first divorce. He claimed his wife was totally at fault for the failure of their marriage. Because she was forbidden by law of accusing or criticizing him, she was unable to refute his accusations!

So if the PAD achieves its goal it will be just in time to see the king's newly-solidified power pass to the hands of the crown prince, who does not enjoy unquestioning adoration as his father does.

The situation is obviously far too complicated for an American tourist to grasp, although I do think I see the finer points of the controversy better than most of the journalists paid to cover it.

One thing I know for sure: I'm glad I left Thailand when I did!