From the mountains to Hanoi

The photo shows what happens when the village youth gets their collective hands on a tablet. First they win three consecutive Solitaire games, and then they guide a knight to victory against fire-breathing zombies. A normal day in the village.

I took the night train to Hanoi and spent the day there. At dawn I watched people at the lake in the center of Hanoi do their morning gymnastics, T'ai Chi, weight lifting, and mass back massage. After the days in the remote village up north it's odd to be in a place with traffic, tourists, cafes, and password-protected WLANs - in Lao Cai at the train station they are all unprotected. I know Hanoi, I don't need a guide here. I can practice my street-crossing skills again: at the right moment, just walking into traffic, oblivious to the endless swarms of motorcycles, walking at a slow steady pace and watching the traffic flow around me. Becomes second nature quickly, but it would get me killed in Berlin.

Speaking of which - something has come up and I need to return home. Besides, I need to recover from this braindead blogging app by Google. My plans to see Taiwan and the Philippines will have to wait. This blog will be silent for a while but expect more stories in the future!

Rural life in Vietnam

A friend invited me to his family's home in a small village in the mountains of northern Vietnam, close to the Chinese border. I was welcomed at a small homestead by three generations for three days. The house is built from bamboo cement and wood. They have six dogs, three cats, two buffalo, two pens of pigs, and flocks of chickens and ducks. Meals are eaten on mats on the floor, with a view of the fields and mountains surrounding the house. For the last dinner, one of the ducks had to die. One of the small children was gnawing on the duck's head all evening. Animals are not pets, they serve a purpose.

Amenities are basic, but there is a hot shower (a bucket filled with hot water), a kitchen with an open fire, opulent wooden furniture, a TV running at all times, and a scenic outdoor toilet behind the pig pens. It's all very homey and comfortable. There is electricity but no Internet anywhere. (Hence you'll be reading this after I return to Lao Cai.) I had a wonderful time there, everyone really made me feel at home. In a Vietnamese family, people do not disappear into their own rooms.

We spent the days visiting the surrounding villages, friends of the family, a market, and generally following the beautiful trails between the hills and fields. The harvest will begin in two weeks, so the men in the villages have time to play dominoes and card games. Wherever I go, everyone stops what they were doing to stare at me. I am the first western tourist visiting these remote villages, ever, and people are curious about my size - I am at least a head taller than everyone else -, the hair on my arms, my camera, and my lack of Vietnamese vocabulary beyond hello, good bye, and thank you.

The trail to Vietnam

Why is it that every next leg on my journey requires taking a bus at six o'clock in the morning... And one of those local things, built for people a head smaller than me. And the local buses always operate in "never full" mode... Anyway, to my surprise they run a direct bus from Muang Khua in Laos to Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. The border formalities were easy. One of the border policemen pulled out his wallet and offered to change kip to dong with a really horrible exchange rate. Moonlighting as a currency scammer, how exotic.

Dien Bien Phu is known as the place where the French lost a major battle against the Viet Minh guerilla, and afterwards pulled out of Indochina. It's a modern town with some nice war memorials and museums but I didn't come for those, so I got on a bus to Lai Chau in the very far north of Vietnam, using highway 12. Which turned out to be a rutted trail full of potholes, deep mud, and big rocks. It's too narrow for passing, so I saw a lot of daring maneuvers that are not  commonly seen on European roads. This is odd because in general the roads in Vietnam are excellent. Once we forded a river in the bus, with steam rising up from the hot engine where it touched the water.

The reason to do this trip was the fantastic mountain scenery, following deep valleys and lakeshores, in never-ending twists and turns up on the edge of the mountains. We lost a few hours waiting for road crews resurfacing the road, with absolutely no discernible success, but it was fun to watch them kick huge rocks into the river from high up. Spent 14 hours in the bus.

Travelling the Nam Ou river

The Nam Ou is a tributary of the Mekong, coming from the mountains in the north and joining the Mekong near Luang Prabang. I am hoping to cross the border to Vietnam there, and travelling on the river is the most scenic way there. I had to stop at Muang Ngoi, a small village stretched along a single dirt road,  and spend the night there because upriver travel is slow. They have no Internet, no cell towers, and no electricity except for a few generators that run for a few hours in the evening. The guesthouse charged €3.50 per night.

This morning I wanted to go further up the river, to Muang Khua, but the boat won't go with fewer than 10 passengers and I was alone. So I chartered the entire boat. Being a rich farang has its upsides. (Farang comes from "français" and means foreigner; all foreigners are automatically assumed to be rich.) So I actually made it. Muang Khua is tiny but they have electricity and an Internet café. Actually it's a bicycle repair shop with an Ethernet cable hanging from the ceiling, but I travel with a small access point for cases like this to connect my tablet.

Unfortunately the bus to Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam only goes in the very early morning so I have to stay another night in Laos. And I don't actually know if foreigners are allowed to enter Vietnam in this very remote corner of the country, cross your fingers...

Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang is the jewel of Laos, the land of the one million elephants. (Except they killed off most of those.) This town is home to buddhist monastery at nearly every major corner, with beautiful wooden pagodas painted with gold. The tree-lined streets are quiet, narrow, and lined with wonderful French colonial architecture, with no more than two floors. Simple restaurant terraces overhang the shore of the Mekong river. During the high season, which will begin around November, tourists flood Luang Prabang, but it somehow maintains its charm and dignity. Luang Prabang is far richer than its neighbors due to the money the tourists bring, but the money hasn't done damage. Needless to say, there are no Western chain restaurants, or in fact any Western stores, in town. Luang Prabang has the same charm as Hoi An in Vietnam, which embraced tourism too but did not sell out either.

Mekong cruise

It takes time two days to travel on a slow boat from Houay Xay to Luang Prabang. I went with a first-class cruise that stopped at a number of villages, all very simple affairs made from woven bamboo and wood on stilts, with children and animals running around on the dusty paths. The river is winding its way between green hills, making it more scenic than the delta. The Mekong is also much narrow here and flows faster. There is almost no sign of human activity; just an occasional boat at the shore, and fishing rods perched on the rocks in the water. The few villages have no road access, their life focuses on the river. It's all very tranquil and simple. The delta, in comparison, is buzzing with small and large boats.

For one euro to Laos

Two hours in a very authentic local bus brought me to Chiang Khong this morning. Not much to do there: one street, no traffic lights, two monasteries. Small wooden longboats ferry passengers across the Mekong river to Houay Xay in Laos, for one euro, where it takes a few minutes to "check in" to Laos. Houay Xay is a small village as well, but more scenic with a small hill with - what else - a monastery on top. It feels poorer but friendlier than the Thai side. First I had a light lunch, paying fifty thousand kip. One of those currencies with way too many zeroes.

There's a local volunteer aid program for local villages in Houay Xay, called Project Kajsiab Laos. (See Facebook.) They operate a guesthouse and restaurant, and I went to their communal dinner and chatted with the volunteers until late.

The Golden Triangle

Last stop in Thailand: Chiang Rai is a smaller version of Chiang Mai without the traffic. It's at the south end of the Golden Triangle in the border area between Thailand (check), Myanmar (check), and Laos, where I'll be tomorrow. The attraction here is nature, with waterfalls, forests, mountains, and rivers, but this time it's just a convenient stop on the way to Chiang Khong at the border.

Chiang Mai

It's a long train ride from Bangkok to Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand, over 14 hours - in part because the tracks were damaged during the monsoon season this year. The first-class sleeper ticket was a good investment. Chiang Mai is Thailand's second-largest city, after Bangkok, which is fifty times larger by population. The center is a square of nearly 4 km^2, enclosed by a moat and some remains of the old city wall. Main streets are busy and unattractive, but the numerous curving side streets instantly teleport the visitor to tranquil and green village life. Of course, buddhist temples with their golden shrines abound, including the enormous ruined stupa in the photo. A picture of the revered King of Thailand is always near. People are much more open and friendly than in busy Bangkok. The big thing here is trekking to hill tribe villages, river rafting, elephant riding, paragliding, and other adventure sports, but I had done much of that during two previous visits so I took it easy this time.

Pattaya

<p dir=ltr>Back in Thailand. After a brief visit to Bangkok I went on down the coast to Pattaya. This town has a reputation for tourism gone wild, like Palma de Mallorca, Cancun, Vang Vieng, or Las Vegas, so I have always avoided it in the past. Time to change that. It's true, the town has an unusual density of hotels, restaurants, bars, and massage parlors (follow the cries of "massaaaaage sir"), and it does have a few tourist zoos like the eponymously named Walking Street with its garish flickering billboards and gogo bars. A gogo bar is basically a brothel masquerading as a bar. But apart from those it's a large, busy, and unusually unattractive town with too much traffic and out-of-control highrise development projects.</p>
<p dir=ltr>I went there not to gawk at pole dancers, but to go scuba diving. Not bad, they have some nice corals and wrecks around beautiful islands in the Gulf of Thailand, but it can't touch Indonesia. The corals aren't as colorful, there are fewer fish, and recent rain has reduced visibility in the water to less than ten meters. In a few places it felt like swimming in pea soup, making it hard to stay oriented. But diving is always fun even if there's no mantas gliding by.</p>

Yangon and Dala

Yangon is a large busy city at the Yangon River. Big rusty ferries full of shouting street vendors selling everything from jackfruit to toothpaste cross the river. The other side is called Dala, and it's a different world. It feels like a river delta village, with small bamboo and wood houses spaced widely, with forests, fields, and little lakes and channels. All that within view of a city of six million. People here are friendly and seem to have plenty of time; some guys were calling out to me and we ended up chatting for two hours. They didn't speak English, or just enough to point at each other and say "crazy". So they taught me words in their language, and had me repeat them until I got it right, sort of. Unfortunately they couldn't tell me what they mean so there was a sense of futility about it, but we had a lot of fun.

Buddha spotting

The country is full of Buddha statues, many golden, or covered in plaster, or plain brick. But on closer inspection, many of those are monks, not Buddha. Buddha is actually the title of someone who has achieved enlightenment, not a specific person. But with a capital B it usually refers to the first buddha, the Indian prince Siddhartha, and most statues depict him. The iconic fat Chinese buddha mostly found in Western Chinese restaurants is a buddha, but not the Buddha.

Buddha statues appear mostly in the full lotus position with the teaching or meditation mudra (hand position); more rare is reclining or standing up. The earlobes of Buddha statues are elongated and touch the shoulders, he has short curly hair, the top of the eyes have a little depression, he has a jewel between the eyebrows, fingers and toes have almost equal length, and the soles of his feet are covered in symbols. Any statue that fails the earlobe test is just some monk.

Inle Lake

Inle lake is up in the eastern mountains, so it's pleasant and cool after the humid heat of Mandalay. The lake is very shallow and is now, at the end of the rainy season, at its largest. There are many villages in the lake, where all houses are built on stilts and are reachable only by those long narrow wooden boats. Everything is manual labor. They have an unusual method to row their boats with their right leg, hooking the paddle with their feet and making an odd twisting motion. Looks quite precarious but I am sure nobody ever gets wet. Our boat had a motor.

This being Myanmar there are of course numerous pagodas and monasteries all over the shore, in one case with a field where some 900 stupas are packed so tightly together that one couldn't squeeze through the gaps. I also saw a huge cave some distance away with over 8000 golden buddhas and little stupas inside, like a warehouse. My hotel is a huge fancy resort with huts built out on the water, but getting there is a long, slow, bumpy ride over narrow roads. The little airport at nearby Heho looks like a bus station, and works like one; every once in a while a little turboprop lands and some people get off while others get on. Except for the resorts, tourism hasn't really arrived here.

Mandalay

Mandalay is not a beautiful town. The city center is loud, busy, and ugly. The enormous palace ground has an authentic moat and wall, but the interior is mostly an army camp now plus a hastily built imitation of a few of the old buildings. The city doesn't really have much in the way of tourist infrastructure - along the moat you'd expect souvenir shops and cafés but you are more likely to find tourist essentials such as shops selling air conditioners, buckets of paint, steel rebar, mattresses, and bathtubs. There are green and shady neighborhoods that look deserted and undeveloped, and others that are rather poor. I have walked all day and found a few gems, like the Ein Daw Yar pagoda area that looks more like a pleasant green village attached to an enormous market, where I sat and talked to locals for hours. English is surprisingly well spoken, and usually people didn't learn it in school, but by reading books and talking to tourists, memorizing a few new words every day. I hear German and French as well.

Of course I also did the temple tour. The Mahamuni temple with its gilded interior contains a three-meter Buddha to which pilgrims have attached so much gold leaf over the centuries that it's now 20cm thick. Mingun across the Ayeyarwady river has a 150m unfinished stupa, built from solid brick to support a height that was never reached; it has enormous cracks from an 1838 earthquake. Kuthodaw pagoda has 729 chedis, each housing a tablet of Buddha's writings. On top of a hill is a mirror-tiled pagoda with great views. And around the pagodas hawkers sell bottles of "cocacolawaterverycold", so I am afraid Myanmar isn't immune to Western brands after all...