June 2007

Vietnam, on kind of a whim. I just spent the last five days in and around Kampot, a seaside town in Cambodia, and site of this plane crash. I was actually up on a nearby mountain on the morning of the accident. I didn’t see/hear anything at the time but the weather was so bad & visibility so poor, it doesn’t come as a total shock. This morning I saw helicopters returning from the mountain, transporting, I was told, the bodies of the dead.

It cast a pall over what was a very enjoyable time in Kampot and the surrounding areas–the old and hollowed-out French seaside resort of Kep, the spooky abandoned hill station of Bokor, the beach town of Sihanoukville for a night.

I met many interesting people in Kampot. Last night I ate porcupine. It was good–I was about to write “surprisingly good” but the thought of eating porcupine had honestly never, ever crossed my mind until I was about to take the first bite, so I really had no expectation to confound or overcome. Porcupine tastes like venison. I can report this with a high degree of accuracy because I had both at the same meal, a late-night affair with a Sri Lankan restaurant owner named Lucki and a Cambodian named Thom.

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Lots to come about Cambodia, but I wanted to finish some thoughts about Myanmar first.

During a blackout a few nights ago in Siam Reap, I got into a conversation in a restaurant with a French-Canadian guy (who travels the world as a teacher with Cirque du Soleil!) I told him I had been traveling in Southeast Asia for the last four months. He asked if I had been to Myanmar. When I said yes, he said instantly that he loved it, that it was one of his two favorite countries, Brazil being the other, and asked what I’d thought of it.

I couldn’t, and still can’t, come up with a short answer. I loved it, yes, but I felt a lot of other things too: pity, despair, anger. My conversation in the restaurant was not the first time I’d heard or read someone say that Myanmar was one of his favorite places, and it’s not impossible to see why. Some of it is as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been, the people are awesome, and it is simply so different. Refreshing, as long as you don’t think of the brutality and suffering that make it that way.

I don’t know, I think to some extent you find what you’re looking for when you’re traveling, and I know I was partly drawn to Myanmar because it was a “bad” place. I wasn’t disappointed on that front, but then the whole experience turned out to be so much more than that: wonderful, eye-opening, heartbreaking, perspective-changing.

Anyway, notes from the last week or so I spent in Myanmar:

Monywa

After Hsipaw, I went back to Mandalay and then northwest to Monywa, a trading center on the Chindwin River. Not many tourists go there, which is exactly why I wanted to; it turned out, as these places generally do, to be a fun and unpredictable excursion. Highlights included seeing the movie I wrote about below; hanging out with a Catholic priest and some young seminarians; and drinking toasts with a group of drunken men in a Chinese restaurant.

A great site I visited near Monywa was Thanaboddhay Paya, one of my favorite temples so far. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen before: the outside is all Easter egg yellows, pinks, and blues; the inside has over half a million Buddha figures; and the top is a stupa surrounded by small spires that the guidebooks compare to Borobudur in Indonesia. Being among all the Buddhas was like standing between two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity. I remember thinking: if Michel Gondry designed a Buddhist temple it would look like this.

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I’m in Cambodia. I saw Angkor Wat today. Initial reaction: “This place makes me proud to be human.”

Angkor Wat

In a town called Monywa, I went to a movie at the Moonlight Cinema. From the outside, it looked like a charmingly past-its-prime old movie hall. Inside, it had more of an apocalyptic ambience. It honestly looked it hadn’t been touched in decades and had just been left to rot. Huge panels on the ceiling were either missing or water-damaged and hanging perilously. The dust was so thick I could taste it in the back of my throat. And there were bats. Bats swooping around my head.

At first I had the theater to myself, though only the balcony was open; the entire orchestra level, composed of long wooden pews, was closed, probably for safety reasons. A teen boy & girl came in right before the movie started. I heard her popping gum for a while, then it stopped, but I didn’t turn around to see if they were making out.

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From Mandalay I headed 44 miles east and 35oo feet up to the town of Pyin U Lwin. Pyin U Lwin was once a British hill station known as Maymyo, and it retains more of its colonial past than anywhere else I saw in Myanmar–there are horse-drawn stagecoaches, leafy estates, a clock tower in the center of town that was a gift from Queen Victoria.

Thanks to the altitude it was at least 20 degrees F. cooler than Mandalay, and my mood improved immeasurably. I had left Mandalay under the cloud of an argument with a trishaw driver, who was trying to take me for an unnecessary ride by lying about where to catch the bus. (”Just tell me the truth!” I finally yelled/pleaded, not just to him but to all the trishaw/tuk-tuk/taxi drivers of SE Asia.)

When I got to cool and drizzly Pyin U Lwin, I could feel my pulse rate slow and my shoulders drop. I checked into the awesomely-named but dumpy Dahlia Motel, and ran into V., a girl from Montreal I had seen earlier in Mandalay. It’s been such a common occurrence that it hardly seems worth mentioning now, but it really has been a remarkable phenomenon of traveling in SE Asia–the frequency with which you run into people you met weeks, cities, countries earlier. I can go a year without bumping into an ex-girlfriend in New York, but here I’ll meet someone for an hour in a bar in Laos and two months later we’ll recognize each other on a dirt lane in Myanmar. Of course, it makes you realize you’re all pretty much following the same paths. It’s not exactly like two arctic explorers running into each other in the middle of a snowstorm, but still.

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