Kip it riel

My arrival in Hong Kong concludes 35 days on the road. I have a private bed, communal kitchen (I have always loved the hostel atmosphere in a communal kitchen) wifi, air conditioning, and a magnificent high-rise view of the mountainside. I will need a haircut and some pants.

Although my exhilaration at being here, and the passion and competence of the people I've met, have prompted a few mental circusninja posts, I value my summer and year-round jobs too much to discuss them on the Internet.

So circus ninja will be hanging up her stars for a while, unless I see a truly unforgettable mistranslation on a tee shirt or road sign. In the meantime, please enjoy the impossibly clever pun on Laotian and Cambodian currency provided in the title of this post.

It has been a trip, folks. Thank you for reading and responding. Among the highs for me were "Eurydice" and "Circus Camouflage..." as well as the entire journal I filled up with more personal revelations from a month of noisy, sweaty solitude. I'm grateful for God's uncanny sense of humor and powerful warmth; for my parents' support of a daughter who must at times have seemed left on their doorstep by Gypsies; for rides to the airport and encouraging emails from true friends; for robust good health and a pair of shoes to match; for the summer job that funded the entire thing; and for the "real job," and real home, to which this time I know I will return. 

All told, I have to say, it was a real Goat Masterpiece.

I'm also grateful for this dress.

The Quiet American

I've arrived in Hong Kong, though for at least the next few years I'll be starting every sentence with "When I was in 'Nam," and a haunted shudder. 

I arrived looking rougher than usual. My layered dresses, so polite in Laos, look country here. My bangs need trimming. I miss my mascara for the first time in a month. 

And how do you say, "thank you" again? Should I be learning it in mandarin or Cantonese? What's the story with Putonghua? There was an article about it in the free in-flight magazine. Hong kong's multilingual identity is political and personal.

I've decided that to avoid hurting anyone's feelings I will just say "THANK YOU" in English really loud.

title credit Graham Greene

Good morning, and afternoon, and evening, Vietnam!

I keep repeating to myself, "Stay calm. It is MUCH easier than it used to be for an American to get out of Vietnam," but it doesn't feel that way when I arrive at the airport counter to find that my flight has been canceled without warning. It doesn't help that the clerk describes the situation as a series of questions: "Um, typhoon in Hong Kong? Storm?"

If that's the case, why can I get a booking from a different airline, seven hours from now? I'll have to tell my job I'm missing evening orientation, if I arrive tonight at all.

"Storm of empty seats," quips the guy behind me. It's the joke that will get me through this day.

I had my "arrived in Hong Kong" post all queued up and ready for blast off. I'm disappointed, to say nothing of the anxiety I feel about showing up late to work - I may be the type to traipse around on my days off with a half-empty backpack and an open visa, but I NEVER miss work.

Sigh. I'm grateful for wifi, coffee, and an electrical outlet that accommodates my finicky power converter. I would really love to get out of Vietnam.

This boat is real

You're the reason I'm traveling on, but don't think twice...

There are sixteen of us on the boat, plus guide and crew. I chose a mid-price tour but it feels luxe to me; my cabin is all dark wood and air conditioning and a very soft, rather tilted bed. With the exception of two Spanish couples traveling together, the guests are all native English speakers. I'm the only American. 

Ordinarily I pretend not to speak Spanish so I can get all the good dirt, but I feel sorry for the Spanish speakers. The guide speaks English well but they are struggling with his accent. His Spanish sounds pretty good to me too but it's difficult for him to deliver an entire tourist spiel and then start over all in Spanish. They've begun clucking with confusion, and he shoots me a grateful look when I sidle over and start translating. The Spaniards reward me too - they are three retired teachers and a librarian, and especially the librarian lady is the sweetest, most appreciative, cutest little thing.

My favorite, though, is Ray, the Australian professor of sociobiology traveling with his two grown sons. The younger is in school studying pre-law (reluctantly), and the older is a psychology PhD candidate who left a successful theater career which included four years of training in London. He, needless to say, is fascinating, and we monopolize an entire dinner conversation with a detailed analysis of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. He once played Rosencrantz. 

 "You're very literate for a biology teacher," Ray observes. I shoot back, "Thanks! That was a very British compliment for an Australian."

Ray rewards me with a rich belly laugh and I know he's a keeper.

Later that evening the younger son finds me on the front of the boat, lackadaisically squid fishing with a reed pole and a light. (And catching nothing. You really have to want it.) "Do you play 500?" he asks. It turns out 500 is a card game, a lesser relative of bridge, that's best played with partners so their family of three needs a fourth.

And so it comes to pass that - because, they later reveal, I "seemed competent," - I spend a densely humid summer night on the back of a junk in Vietnam, lit by a lone bare bulb, drinking Hanoi beer, listening to Bob Dylan, and holding my own at cards among the Australians. I don't know if it was the temperature, or the locale, or the light - or perhaps it was just the easy way that Ray had with his boys, each so evidently enjoying himself - but this ranks as one of the more memorable evenings of my life.

title credit Bob Dylan

I got a nautical-themed pashmina afghan

For the final three days of the trip, I consented to joining a tour group. At the time it just seemed the most expedient way to get onto one of the many boats that troll Vietnam's famous Halong Bay - one of the seven natural wonders of the world, at least according to my tour guide, who has almost no reason to lie to me. 

It was also a handy point in the trip to pay someone to cart me around for a while, rather than making all of my decisions myself. I think part of this is plain old foreign language fatigue. 

It's Laos's fault. I'm so intent on learning more Lao that I'm getting lazy about acquiring Vietnamese. It would have been easier, though: typical that, of all the languages on this trip that employ the Western alphabet, I have to fall in love with this one:

That thing the the right of the yellow flower? That's a word. 

I felt secure in my tour decision the moment our minibus passed out of Hanoi city limits and I tried to imagine myself alone on a public bus for a four-hour ride, arriving at the harbor in the midday heat and "seen chow" and "seen loy"-ing my way onto somebody's boat. 

It would have been crazy white chick who walked in from the airport all over again. At least this time I have local currency. At 20,000 dong to the dollar, my favorite game of late is to take the equivalent of five bucks and "make it rain" all over my bed. 

Art and other misadventures

I need to write a children's book and call it "The Sad Topiary." It's about a plant cultivated in the shape of a baby elephant that lives all by itself in a hot, dry climate.

My second book, a work of Young Adult fiction (I plan to grow with my readership) is called "Landlocked." It's the story of a mermaid with big old lopsided tits who lives on some Australian guy's arm. 

She's looking for love. Aren't we all?

 Don't ask me where I get the inspiration for my books; it will just make you sad too.

Once I started with the semicolons I couldn't stop

When we visited the Ibsen house on one side of the country and, days later, the Grieg house on the other, mom asked the endearing question, "When you travel, do you always learn this much?"

There's just an awful lot of world out there. 

I tend to learn more when there's been a war; something about post-war zones and the attention they garner crystallizes what was most important to that culture and what was lost. I'm thinking of Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall; of Sarajevo and the bridge at Mostar; of Tsfat and the Golan Heights; of the UCA in San Salvador; of General Patton's gravesite in Belgium; of Londonderry, still defiantly called "Derry" by the northern Irish; of the fall of Yugoslavia that gave me a country count of 54 instead of 48; of the Lithuanian partisans who took to the hills for many long years after the West considered the war over; of the Romanian slander campaign that has surely influenced what we can truly know of Vlad the Impaler; of the Soviet execution chamber I stood in in Budapest; of the refugee crisis at the Thai/Cambodian border of Ayutthaya/Poi pet; of Hanoi's general kindness to American travelers.

I read that list and think, "I must get to Cuba, and soon."

I finished "The Lost Executioner" profoundly informed about the Khmer Rouge abuses of the 1970s (and, less widely known, of the 80s and 90s) but ambivalently spoiled by Nic Dunlop for all future nonfiction literature. I'm now reading "The Girl in the Picture," an account of the life and family of the subject of the Vietnam War's most searing photograph. I bought the book on the street in Hanoi but am shy about letting people here see its cover. Hanoi makes no apologies, though: the napalm bomb that severely burned, but did not kill, nine-year-old Kim Phuc was dropped by the South Vietnamese army in a misinformed air strike.

Be exceptional with your goat masterpiece

Accept no imitations. Masterpieces only. Goat big or goat home.

Wishing for the 1,000,000th time that I could photograph a flavor because watermelon juice

Thanks for taking us to that movie, Dad. Still a favorite memory.

"Boy it's hot. I mean it's like Africa hot. I don't think I can stay here if it's gonna be this hot." -Biloxi Blues

Except, see, I imagine Africa would be a dry heat. This, this is like nothing I could have imagined. Stepping outside is like dipping your whole body into a bowl of warm hominy grits. I feel like I need a spoon to breathe.

What America needs more of...

Baby where you been all my life

Dibs on this truck.

Huh. I didn't do that on purpose.

Errr, happy Fourth of July from North Vietnam.

America, f*ck yeah.

Playing hard to get works every time

The other thing I love about Laos is that the people here couldn't care less about me. They minister to tourists capably, without fawning. They are amiable and polite but fall short of friendly. They present an overall unavailability that I'm confident could be breached completely, but only by learning to speak Lao. The language isn't globally useful; if I learn it, I'm telling them in no uncertain terms, "I want to know you."

Monks' robes are bright orange, saffron if you're nasty

Those acquainted with my nickname ("fratboy," as much for my juvenile sense of humor and the state of my apartment as for my penchant for breakfasting on cold pizza, over sink, in boxer shorts) will get a good laugh out of hearing that I joined a daylong Laotian cooking class. I made fast friends with an Australian tour group and earned the dubious distinction of getting all of my ingredients to end up the same color. 

No matter what step we were on, the instructor kept coming over and peering into my wok with an utterly hilarious, and equally inimitable, look of "How did you manage to do THAT?" Upon completion of the first of five dishes, I noticed that mine had brown sticks floating in it. There were no brown sticks in the demonstration version, and there were definitely no brown sticks on the ingredient list. 

Five sweaty hours later, I had produced a soup the color of monks' robes, a perfectly edible pork casserole, and a downright delightful green salad. The brown sticks remained a mystery until tasting time, when it became apparent to me that I'd burned the lemongrass, a feat normally only achieved in lemongrass's natural habitat, and then only during the war.

Laos

Laos

Laos

Finding it

Eurydice

I can say, "I'll come back to Laos." And I can come back, especially because I'm me: fearless, pragmatic, willful, resourceful. Knowing me, I'll study Lao online and then find a Laotian expat community and get a language partner, and next summer I'll spend a month here and the summer after that volunteer in a school.

Who am I kidding; knowing ME, I'll write a to-do list with all those things on it and then show up at the last minute with a one-way plane ticket, three American dollars, and a wet bathing suit, expecting someone to bail me out. 

But regardless of how I come back,  I can never come back to it THIS way, where I'm so in love and everything is ahead of me. This way, where everything is unknown and dripping with meaning, magic, and the unfamiliar. This country has given me something I never, ever thought I'd have again. It has given me Costa Rica, in the earliest days when that was the bravest and most exotic thing I had ever done. 

Bananas are not a neutral. Dammit people.

Stop putting bananas into things that don't usually have bananas in them. They've been excluded for a reason. 

Fifty two

Although I was only dimly acquainted with the Laotian Capitol of Vientiane and had never heard at all of the town of Luang Prabang, the guidebook persuaded me to go by using words like "captivating" and "spellbinding." 

Perhaps it was guidebook peer pressure, or the fact that we landed at sunset, but I was indeed captivated before the plane even touched down.

The sun was well gone by the time I began to rethink my decision to walk from the airport into town. I had read that it was only a few miles, and knew it was my last chance for an airport walk - I've done them in Estonia and Jamaica (oh! And New York, thanks Andy), but Hanoi will be much too far and in Hong Kong I simply won't have time before orientation for my job begins.

The walk to town was reasonably safe for a main road, and no one bothered me. Even at dusk I was hot in my layered dresses but didn't dare take one off; I wanted to make a pleasant first impression with my shoulders and knees covered. (A sweet thought, but I'm dusty and covered in sweat and it's dark and I'm some nutjob white girl who just walked in from the airport. Literally when I tell a waiter that he looks at me like "wait, I thought I understood English but clearly I missed whatever you just said.")

Immediately, I feel something here for the people that I felt in Costa Rica. I want them to like me, and I want to know them better. Impractical as it sounds, I instantly want to learn to speak Lao.

I can't describe what else is so bewitching about this country. The hills. The foliage and occasional bursts of night-blooming jasmine. The bridge I crossed to get to town, pictured below. The vehemence of concrete and corrugated tin against a season of mud and a season of dust. The whine of jungle insects I can't identify mixed with the singing of a language I can't begin to understand. The slow takeover of night and stars; the carnival optimism of Christmas lights strung in the roundabout on the approach to town.

I also hit a wall in Laos, for reasons I don't fully understand (editor's note: dehydration). I didn't prepare properly, learning only the Lao word for "thank you" and that only when I was already on the plane, so it wouldn't supplant the Khmer version. I didn't have any plan for getting to my lodging even though I knew it was far from the center of town - not walking distance even for me, and not safe for cabs to drive at night on the winding river's-edge road. And I had no Lao money. The Cambodians preferred American dollars and I thought the same would hold here. Dollars are accepted (change given in Kip), but prices are quoted in Kip and the exchange rate boggles me. 

Arriving last night and buying a beer at a bar so I could use their wifi, I was flummoxed. Ten thousand kip for a beer, can I afford that? I have three bucks on me, American.

Also, and I say this with no self-admiration, who DOES that? Who shows up with three bucks and a change of underwear? I've brought more than that to dinner parties. My arrival in Laos was almost like one of those anxiety dreams where you get to class and you have to give a presentation you didn't prepare for. 

Am I glad I walked in with no expectations so Laos could completely blow my mind, like no country has done since Costa Rica? Sure I am. But I didn't do my homework, and I do feel, just a bit, like I don't deserve this place.

Sunrise at Angkor wat

The road

My backpack has become measurably lighter. I went Pol Pot on it (sorry. too soon) after an incident upon arrival in Cambodia where I walked five miles out of my way to the wrong hotel address. 

Literally five miles; I mapped it. 

In anticipation of more plane-boarding and hotel-finding in Luang Prabang, Halong Bay, and Hanoi, I've conducted a final purge. The down coat and a cute sweater Naomi swapped me already went home with mom. The rest went into the trash. Here is a photo of what remains. Spoiler alert: don't get too attached to that lavender tank top in the left corner. 

As an unintended consequence, I've become the sort of person who arrives in a foreign country - specifically Laos, known for its emphasis on modesty and decorum - wearing two dresses layered because one is short and the other is sleeveless, carrying one more dress, a change of underwear, and a wadded-up wet bathing suit. I'm having a damn blast, though. 

Those who can't do genocide, teach

I've been getting a bit too introspect-y - it took five days from mom's departure for me even to NOTICE that I hadn't had a conversation with anyone since then, and another 2.5 days for me to mind in the slightest - so with the money dad gave me I treated myself to a book in the Siem Reap airport. "The Lost Executioner" is an incredibly well-written account of a high-ranking Khmer Rouge operative. Commander Duch led the prison at Tuol Sleng, site of untold atrocities and the grisly deaths of twenty thousand people in four years. There were seven survivors. 

Author Nic Dunlop sounds like he started out a bit like me - he liked to travel and take pictures, and he sometimes acquired odd fixations on things like whales or volcanoes or the Cambodian genocide. I was this way about El Salvador when I was fourteen; I remain this way about the Berlin Wall. (And whales). (And volcanoes). Dunlop was a substantially more accomplished photographer than I, which is ironic because his book contains few pictures but some of the best nonfiction writing I've ever seen.

Commander Duch (according to Dunlop, this is pronounced "Doik" which doesn't clear things up much for me) had aspirations to become a math teacher. He became the next best thing.