A Final Pilgrimage

Five days is not enough time for Cambodia. We came with laser-focus: to see the temples of Angkor Wat. The flights booked, the countries skipped, even the malaria medicine, all were in the service of our pilgrimage to the ninth-century Hindu temples of one of the world's great civilizations, which had since been colonized by the jungle. Our pilgrimage was ultimately successful. Three full days were spent exploring crumbling towers overtaken by tree roots, archaeologists, and monkeys. We walked some, we biked some, we even tuk-tuk'ed it some. I even got my one luxury hotel squeezed into our trip, complete with a garden-enclosed swimming pool and a spa.

You'd think that I would be satisfied.

Except that Cambodia was a marvel of a country. For the first time in weeks, we weren't hustled, we weren't in a throng of tourists, and we weren't walking dollar signs. As we cruised up the Mekong River from Vietnam, concrete houses and speed boats gave way to thatched roofs and golden temples. Children ran down to the river's edge to wave at us; as the sun set, boys led their cattle to the river for a cooling bath. They giggled and waved as we snapped pictures. This was the ridiculously bucolic place I had imagined as Vietnam! And then Phnom Penh was surprisingly cosmopolitan and lush. Sidewalk cafes, river-front verandas, international restaurants, and an opulent royal palace made us wish we were spending more than a day.

That day, though, was loaded with the complexities of Cambodia. We toured the Royal Palace and the National Museum, but we also toured the Killing Fields, the site of Pol Pot's genocide of his fellow compatriots. The stupa here is filled with thousands of skulls--only a small fraction of the millions of Cambodians massacred. What is strangest is that the Killing Fields are in the middle of a suburb of Phnom Penh. Aside from the area of the memorial, they are pasture fields for cattle and a playground for local kids. Ask the little boys running around where they are from, and they respond, eerily, "I am from here, the Killing Fields." The area of the museum itself is quite small, but lest you forget the magnitude or the recentness of the Khmer Rouge's genocide, shards of worn fabric poke out of the ground at every step. These are the clothes that Pol Pot's victims wore when killed, just barely masked beneath the surface of the earth.

Ross and I were still processing the juxtapositions of Phnom Penh when it was time to catch our share taxi to Angkor Wat, a five-hour drive on Cambodia's only paved road. We had paid extra for the transport of our by-now-bursting bags (this was the end of the trip, after all), but what this had actually bought us was the entire back seat. Given that one gentleman was uncomfortably squeezed on top of another in the front, we invited him to share our spacious ride. As he climbed over the front seat, he introduced himself in English. This was Ratha, and he would prove to be the most memorable part of Cambodia.

Ratha is 35, the same age as Ross. As a boy during Pol Pot's rule, his father sent him to a Buddhist monastery to become a monk; this was the only way to ensure that Ratha wouldn't be recruited as a child soldier. He was sheltered there for years, and in the process he became the first in his family to be educated. Along with Hindu mythology and Buddhist philosophy, Ratha taught himself history, literature, and multiple languages (German, English, even ancient Sanskrit). He remained a monk into his twenties, when Cambodia finally reached a truce in its decade-long civil war. But Ratha and his fellow monks made the mistake of protesting the corrupt "democratic" elections of 1998. Ratha explained to us that all of his fellow monks--his dear friends--were gunned down and killed by the government. Ratha, however, was spared, and he was smuggled into Thailand by a UN-affiliated NGO. Here he lived in hiding for several years; his family thought he had been killed and held a funeral for him. He had no way to communicate that he was alive and sheltered by a Thai monastery.

While in Thailand, he won the affections of a German woman working for his NGO. She flew him to Germany; she wanted to marry him. After all he'd been through, you'd think that he would have jumped at the chance to flee Cambodia and possible persecution (or execution) forever. But Ratha found Germany like a prison: so cold, so serious, too much work. He chose instead to return home to Cambodia, where the government accused him of being a "false monk" and required him to renounce that life. He obliged to save his life. No longer a monk, Ratha decided to moved to the city--Siem Reap, the nearest town to Angkor Wat--to start a new life. He married a widow ten years his elder, with her own children and her own house. He loves her, but he is also practical: He was starting a new life, and she had the wherewithal to help him with that. But now, with her three older children and their nine-month-old son, Ratha and his wife are struggling to get by. As a teacher in a government school, she makes only $30 a month. Ratha's work at a private school teaching English brings them about $100 a month. Still they need more, but without formal education (his years of study as a monk don't count without an official university diploma), Ratha cannot find other work. And so Ratha moonlights as a translator, a tuk tuk driver, and now even an Angkor Wat tour guide.

After our five-hour car ride, we hired Ratha to take us around the temples for our first day. We were regaled with blow-by-blow recounts of the Hindu tales the Ramayana and the Mahabaratha. We were regaled with detailed lessons in Cambodia's ancient and modern history. We were taken to a dance performance, we learned about Ratha's dreams of becoming a published poet and writer, we were even invited to his house. By the end of the day, we were friends...and we'd fallen in love with his home.

As he took us around Angkor Wat, Ratha explained to us, "I want you to see the real Cambodia, the good and the bad." He made sure of it. And like Ratha, despite the horrors of it's recent past, we can't wait to go back. Because five days is just not enough.

Vietnam For Sale

"You buy something from me, Madam? Very cheap!"

So begins every excursion in capitalist...er, communist, Vietnam. Rice paddy hats, dragon fruits, war paraphernalia, rip-off North Face gear, even donuts are aggressively peddled wherever you go. Think you're safe at dinner? No way! Teenagers selling photocopies of Lonely Planet Vietnam and war memoirs follow you in, begging you to buy a pack of gum, if not a book. Duck into a bar, and you're blind-sided by an MTV-style, table-dancing three-year-old. After he gyrates and booty-grinds in the middle of the bar, he busts out the watches and Zippo lighters that his mom outside is trying to sell. Plying down a Mekong River byway in a wooden canoe, you are passed by endless empty tourist boats whose paddling captains hold out their hands and ask, "Tip money, Madam?" Even in the middle of Ha Long Bay, on your own private junk, miles away from the nearest floating village let alone the shore, as you're about to dive off the roof and swim ashore to a deserted spit-of-sand beach, a four-foot-tall woman comes rowing a ten-foot-long raft loaded with all the worldly goods you could possibly imagine--crackers, beer, rain ponchos, fake Crocs, Jim Beam. And as she frantically paddles in place so as to be within earshot of your boat, she orders you, "You buy something from me! Very cheap! My beer cheaper than boat." And when you ignore her sales pitch and dive head first into the South China Sea, you swear you can hear her uttering Vietnamese expletives at you while she paddles furiously onwards to find the next foreigner-filled and dollar-blessed junk.

Man, were my notions about Vietnam all wrong. Intellectually, I knew that Vietnam was one of Southeast Asia's tiger economies. But romantically, that's not what I pictured. After all, my visa took weeks to process and came back proudly stamped: Vietnam Socialist Republic. In my warped vision of Vietnam, I pictured Soviet-style propaganda plastered across the country, bucolic rice paddies, and newly opened cities where Ross and I were among a handful of intrepid travelers. I imagined countless war memorials; I imagined strolling through empty towns looking for just one tailor who spoke English to make me a suit; I imagined street vendors selling fresh spring rolls and unidentifiable local delicacies; I imagined girls walking through the market in their ao dai carrying baskets of exotic foods. Really, I imagined some fantastical, romanticized, country that one might see in a movie. The country I thought I was visiting bore little resemblance to the country I spent two weeks traveling through. Man, was I embarrassingly out of touch.

On the surface, of course, some of my ridiculous notions were catered to. In every city, there were war memorials and tailors and street vendors and ao dai-clad girls and Soviet-era billboards. But the hammer-and-sickle posters proudly celebrating the farm worker and ordering families to have two children sat side-by-side with Toyota and Nokia billboards. The girls in ao dai were not wandering the markets (those girls wore jeans and American t-shirts) but wearing the requisite traditional garb at their jobs in the tourist industry. And the exotic-food street vendors? Nope. Baguette stands, slathering their ham sandwiches in imported Laughing Cow cheese, were more plentiful even than noodle and spring roll shops.

But I was especially wrong when in came to the empty towns and the hunt for English-speaking locals. To give myself some credit, I was helped along in this notion by a friend of ours who spent the summer learning Vietnamese here in Madison. When he heard we were spending two weeks in Vietnam not knowing a lick of the language, he gaped at us. Clearly we were crazy. And so at 11pm the night before our 6am flight, Jeff came over with a Vietnamese phrase book and gave us a crash course in the six tones denoted by various little squiggly lines over words with other sounds marked by various squiggly lines. As we sleepily fumbled to repeat after him, he shook his head hopelessly. On his way out the door, he turned to us and oh-so-seriously wished, "Good luck." After that desperate language lesson and somber farewell, I was sure we were heading into an unknown jungle.

So imagine our surprise when we stepped off the bus at the dock of Ha Long Bay--thinking we were headed on some isolated, peaceful, remote three-day cruise--and were greeted by hundreds of junks and hundreds of thousands of tourists. This was high season, baby, and the Europeans were there in full force. We've got Cancun, they've got Vietnam! That phrase book Jeff so nervously supplied us with? The only time we opened it was when we returned home, trying to translate a note he left us. We did learn how to say thank you in Vietnamese, but our attempts to say, "Cam on," were usually met with a giggle and a perfect English, "You're welcome." The bucolic rice paddies? The quiet byways of the Mekong? The jade islands of Ha Long Bay? All seemed to have been Disneyfied for the benefit of tourists. Somewhere out there was the real Vietnam, but it bore little resemblance to either my romanticized images or the Disney-like reality.

This most hit home in Hoi An, a town whose primary delights are an architecturally stunning old town and getting clothes custom-made by a local tailor. My imaginings: a quiet city center with beautiful buildings, quiet Vietnamese restaurants, and a handful of ancient, non-Anglophone tailors. The reality: The entire city center is a museum you need a ticket to enter. Still peaceful and beautiful, but certainly globalized: hip bars, French bakeries, and endless souvenir shops. And those handfuls of tailors are actually blocks and blocks of over 200 different tailoring shops, with prices and quality to meet a variety of travelers' budgets. The tailors boast signs, in every language imaginable, declaring the worth of their wares. They have suits copied out of GQ, party dresses straight out of Cosmo, and tailor-made shoes that could pass for Campers. The tailor we ended up with was Miss Yum Yum, a thirty-year-old single Vietnamese woman who just bought the shop from her retiring boss. While measuring us and periodically slapping my butt (which is significantly larger than most Vietnamese butts, and so undoubtedly a novelty), she grilled Ross about his single friends at home and whether there were any that were rich and would like to marry her. Not the English-challenged, back-alley, old-man tailor I was picturing. Then again, nothing about Vietnam was quite as I pictured it.

Just about the only thing I got right were the war memorials. Certainly, they were plentiful: The memorial of the My Lai massacre. The War Remnants Museum. Cu Chi Tunnels. The Fallen American Aircraft display. The Hanoi Hilton. And as I imagined, they were difficult to stomach, largely because they didn't back away from describing and showing the horrors committed during the Vietnam War. But they were hard to stomach for another reason I hadn't imagined. Although Vietnam and America are once again diplomatically involved--and the tourist industry is quite eager for us to spend our dollars--the memorials and museums commemorating the "War of American Aggression" were laden with anti-American sentiment and propaganda. This is obviously to be expected and pretty understandable--horrific crimes were committed, and in the end the North, the current government, prevailed. But still, it was unsettling: In Hanoi, Ross's moto driver forced him to take valiant pictures astride bombed-down American aircraft. At the War Remnants Museum, galleries documented the horrors of war perpetrated solely by the "American Imperialists and their lackeys," while another gallery displayed how the entire rest of the world (including those countries who had soldiers fighting alongside the Americans) completely supported Vietnam's liberation struggle against the Americans. And at Cu Chi, a 1950s-style documentary reordered the timeline of war as it argued that the Americans, "like crazy devils, bombed our pots and pans for no reason." Never mind that war is a sticky, messy, two-sided affair (or that the Cu Chi Tunnels were built to ward off the French long before America entered the 'quagmire'): as the losing aggressors, we were repeatedly painted in disturbing terms that left me simultaneously ashamed and indignant, and that made me wonder if, as Americans, we were actually welcome in Vietnam.

But like most everything else in Vietnam, the official Communist party line is at great odds with real life. Ostensibly, this is a socialist republic, but actually it's the most capitalist country I've ever visited. Basic government services and responsibilities--school, garbage, taxes--have been handed over to free market competition. And the anti-American war propaganda? Well, in Hoi An, we decided it was important to visit the My Lai memorial, a relatively short distance away. When I inquired at the hotel desk about hiring a driver for the trip, the receptionist (about my age), smiled and said, "But it is so far away...at least an hour." I persisted: "We think it's important to visit." She nodded; apparently many Americans want to visit My Lai. I asked again about a car, and she looked up at me, still resisting: "That was a very long time ago. A long time ago." Whatever need Ross and I felt to pay homage or respect or penance clearly was not shared by this woman. Whatever anti-American sentiment I felt at government-run institutions and museums was not shared by the countless warm Vietnamese we met who helped us along our journey.

On one level, Vietnam is an outpost of Soviet-style communism. But on another, it is a noisy, globalized, capitalist country that has mastered the art of the sale, while still keeping some level of that communist ethos alive. In Hanoi, for example, we were followed for an afternoon by a woman selling Vietnamese communist caps. Each time I said no or ignored her, she lowered the price. She eventually got down to a quarter, but still, I wasn't interested. At this point, she grabbed my arm and yelled, "Madam, you are rich! I am poor! My hat is very cheap! You buy!"

And the Cu Chi Tunnels, where the "American Imperialists" were trounced? Well, if you're not satisfied with walking through the underground network, watching documentaries, or seeing first-hand the craters left by B52 bombers, then you can buy a round of ammo to shoot off in your very own AK-47. Yep, there's a pay-per-bullet shooting gallery in the middle of the tunnel museum complex.

I think Uncle Ho would be proud.

Simple Pleasures

A bathroom has made my week.

This was not, however, any old SE Asian bathroom. Oh no: This was the Petronas Towers' shopping mall deluxe bathroom, with such deluxe pleasures as toilet paper, toilet seats, and hand soap. For 2 Malaysian ringgitt (about $.60), travelers can take a break from the typical squat pit potties and hose-cum-TP of Kuala Lumpur's other toilets and instead pamper themselves with Shisheido cucumber waters, Chanel perfumes, and Johnson & Johnson baby lotion. All this while rubbing shoulders with the burqa-ed and chador-ed elite of the Islamic diaspora.

There was a time not so long ago when I would have scoffed at such luxuries, along with the travelers who succumbed to their lure. (After all, at Let’s Go, we ranked ourselves and our writers on a ‘hard core’ index. Any traveler who couldn’t endure—nay, look forward to—a night spent eating ants, peeing in a bottle, and sleeping on the cement in a rainstorm while fending off gypsy burglars and tourist touts didn’t deserve the honor of being a backpacking guru guide.) Alas, that was a decade ago—a lifetime ago—and I’m realizing on this Southeast Asian honeymoon that perhaps my tastes and my travels are maturing. Whereas in that past travel life, I would scrimp every penny just to see how cheaply and for how long I could travel (and spend what I saved on clothes!), I now will willingly pay a few extra ringgitt for AC, a clean shower, and toilet paper. Have I sold out? Am I missing the point of traveling outside of the Western world? Horror: Have I turned into a luxury traveler?!

Ross and I confronted these existential, identity-shaking questions a few days ago while sipping beers at a traveler’s café in Malaca, Malaysia. We arrived in this crumbling colonial port after a week in Hong Kong and Singapore, the wealthy and international mega-cities of the South China Sea. Hong Kong and Singapore were exciting, full of busy Chinese markets, decadent street food, and beautifully dressed Asian punksters and fashionistas. While we were certainly in a new world—we couldn’t read the signs and didn’t quite know what meat made its way into our meals—it was still familiar: the foods of Chinatown and Little India at home, the clean and efficient subways, the endless shopping malls and fast food joints. We were in Asia, but it was an Asia that had long ago mastered the consumerist and hedonistic splendor of globalized capitalism.

Stepping off the bus in Malaca, then, was a bit of a shock. Noisier, hotter, more chaotic, more aromatic, Malaysia instantly announced its developing world status. Certainly, it has much in common with where we’d already been. Most notably, infinite shopping and infinitely friendly locals. And Malaca specifically and Malaysia in general are by no means difficult places to be. (As Tony, our guest house host, explained to us, Malaysia is a stable and content country. A large and healthy middle class; a respectful, multicultural coexistence; and a vibrant democracy ensure this.) That said, there are noticeable differences that get exhausting after awhile. Whether it’s dodging the rushing waters of open sewers or fending off the persistent trishaw drivers, a few hours in Malaca had me pooped. All I wanted was a clean shower, an air-conditioned resting place, and a menu that I could read. Which is how we wound up in an anglophone traveler’s café, sipping buckets of beer, and chatting with Aussie and British travelers. And therein began the existential travel crisis: What was wrong with me that I could be in the beautiful, diverse, and friendly country of Malaysia and want something else, something that felt like home?

After four buckets of beer and a bit of Chinese-inspired Elton John karaoke, I think I found an answer. There was, in fact, nothing wrong; I have simply grown up. Traveling, even in the developing world, is no longer about racking up ‘I almost died when…’ stories and seeing just how far you can push yourself to your limits. And just because I am willing to succumb to a few creature comforts does not make me an obnoxiously American, party-route backpacker. Rather, admitting the things I physically need—a delicious meal, a break from the heat, a bathroom with toilet paper—frees me to enjoy more my time in a place. If I’m physically comfortable, I’m mentally comfortable. And that, above all else, makes traveling enjoyable.

So I accept that every now and then I need to drop a few ringgitt or dong for a Western bathroom. And I accept that I’d rather stay at an English-speaking guesthouse for families and adults than a dingy hostel. And admitting that has opened up whole new worlds.

Thanks to our hours spent at the traveler’s café, we met the English-speaking proprietor who introduced us to the delicate flavors of the rambutan fruit. Thanks to the backpa

cker haven of Tony’s Guest House, we got a lesson in Malaysian diversity, politics, and social security. Thanks to our weariness with battling our way from airports to hotels on our own, we shelled out for an airport pick-up in Hanoi and got to actually enjoy and take in the 40km drive through rice paddies and traffic-signal-free intersections. Thanks to our willingness to prioritize good food (and our willingness to pay for a taxi to get there), we have delighted in the tastes of SE Asia, from cook-it-yourself satay to the Portuguese-Malay seafood feast we ate while overlooking the Straights of Malaka. And thanks to our need for AC and a break from the chaos of Malaysian Chinatowns, we sought out the Petronas Towers, where we observed firsthand the explosion of Kuala Lumpur’s economy, dove head-first into the fashions and pleasures of the Middle Eastern middle class, and found that luxurious, wonderful, toilet-papered bathroom.