Good-bye to Southeast Asia

We have finished our Southeast Asia journey.  What an incredible trip!  Southeast Asia is a part of the world that blows you away with its beauty and breaks your heart with its history.  It makes you smile, makes you laugh and makes you cry.  The people are unfailingly warm and hospitable with beautiful smiles and yet some of them live in conditions that are appalling.   We walked by a store in Siem Reap and inside we could see the family sleeping on the floor yet a little girl came running to the door with a brilliant smile to say “hello”.

Laos was everyone’s favourite country.  Although it is land-locked and has no sandy beaches often associated with tropical destinations it was stunningly beautiful.  From our “cruise” down the Mekong River, to our trip through the mountains it blew us away.  The people are more laid back and it was nice to have someone wave at you from across the street just because you were there. 

Anyone know of an elephant Chiropractor

Vietnam had personality.  And coffee.  Oh…. the coffee!  Hanoi was frantic and abrasive with narrow streets and everyone loved the sounds of their horns but it was funky.  Ho Chi Minh city (aka Saigon) was having a serious identity crisis but it had great energy.  Hue and Hoi An were more laid back but still had that good ol’ ADHD feel.  Over indulgence in that incredible coffee…

The quiet streets of Hanoi (Horn oi?)

Cambodia broke my heart and healed it.  We saw beggars there for the first time and we saw sights that were incomprehensible.  We also saw the sweetest kids in the world and Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat.  We had Christmas in Siem Reap with tons of laughs and a feeling like we were amongst friends.

The incredible kids

Angkor Wat on Christmas morning

Bangkok was shabby and Thailand itself seemed tawdry compared to the rest of Southeast Asia.  Having said that, the food was marvelous!  The people?  Southeast Asian- lovely smiles and great warmth.

The standard of beauty in Southeast Asia is something that puzzles me.

 In Thailand there is the “Lady-boy” thingy.  They even have their own beauty contest.  Lady-boys confuse me.  What is their target?  I cannot be straight men – they look like women but have a penis.  Gay men?  They have a penis, but look like women.  Straight women?  Probably not – same problem.  Lesbians?  Uh, uh – the penis thingy again.  In the Thai language you have to add a word at the end of your sentence to identify your gender.  If you are a woman you finish your sentence with “Ka” and if you are a man you finish your sentence with “Kop”.  I guess gender isn’t always obvious from strictly visual clues.

Counter-intuitively women find me attractive here.  Again, this is confusing.  Where else in the world is an aging, overweight, bald man considered hot?  One of the things that seems to be considered sexy here is my pelt.  I have caught women staring at my fuzziness and, in some situations, staring is quickly followed by touching.   I am used to having my fur stared at, there is a certain horrible fascination to it, but it is more often followed by nausea rather than touching.

Petting the Neanderthal - a favourite pass-time in SE

Having said that, it is common to see very attractive young Southeast Asian women in the company of old western men.  This is, I think, a good thing.  It works for both parties.  The women are looking for someone with money to look after them and their potential off-springs whereas the man is looking for someone who is devoted to them and will look after them as well.  Apparently having “white” babies is a very good thing.  It was interesting to see how even hardened security guards, customs officers and police will stop and make goo-goo eyes and smiles at white babies

You cannot talk about Southeast Asia without talking about Buddhism and War.

Buddhism is an integral part of the society.  It seems reminiscent of Europe during Medieval times where the Christian church had so much presence that it figured into everything that people thought and did.  Buddhism seems to have that same presence there.  When I spoke to other amateur artists they were all very keen to draw or paint Buddha and that seemed to be their only subject.

I told them, “No!  I will not pose for you!”

Buddhism does not seem to have the power structure that the Christian church does.  There are no huge hierarchies or attempts to control the population.  The monks go into the monasteries voluntarily and can stay as long as they want and can leave any time they wish. 

Buddhism, to me, seems to make the most sense of any religion in the world today.  It seems more like a philosophy where the goal is enlightenment.  However, like all religions, people use it for their own ends.  

Buddhism today is, I think, not exactly how Buddha wanted

The people of Southeast Asia are not warlike. They have been victims of the “Game of Thrones” indulged in by America, China and Russia.  I think the sculpture in the center of Phnom Penh of the gun with the barrel tied in a knot says it all.  So many people have died horrible deaths there from the interference of the aforementioned power-hungry countries and continue to do so thanks to unexploded bombs and crushing poverty.   These are not soldiers but are innocent victims like women, children and non-combatants. 

Lack of education, corruption and poverty plague these countries.  They are all interlinked.  Education is supposedly free but because the teachers are paid so little you have to pay for each of the lessons and you cannot pass unless you pay again.  For people that have little enough it becomes a terrible burden and often that expense becomes secondary to food.  It is not uncommon to see new cars driving around but apparently those belong to government officials who get paid huge amounts of money and drain off extra as well.

My mind keeps returning to my little sweetie in the village and I wonder what her life holds for her.  Is she going to end up worn out and worn down like the ladies in the village - looking 70 years old when she is 40? 

I keep wondering what I can do to make her life better.

Telen Writes

Visiting 4 countries i.e. Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia in a month has been an intense cultural experience for me.  Unlike Rand, my genetic makeup means that I blend in easily with the locals until I start to speak.  I therefore was not as “popular” with the locals, especially the women, as Rand.

Having seen the devastations in SE Asia from wars, colonialism and political conflicts, I conclude that all people want in life is to live in harmony with each other.  Wars such as the Vietnam War and the Pol Pot regime did more destructions than good.  The gentle and kind spirits of the people in these countries impress me.

The culinary experience has been most flavorful.  Having taken a Thai cooking class in Bangkok and a Vietnamese cooking class in Hoi An, we now are more confident to prepare our own Thai and Vietnamese dishes at home.  The food has been delicious.  A lot of the ingredients are produced and purchased locally, and this means FRESH.  Rand and I both feel trimmer in spite of never having missed a meal.

Sharing Christmas dinner in Siem Reap, Cambodia with 13 other group members was a lot of fun and filled with international goodwill.  I am not sure how but there was a roasted turkey, cooked to perfection.   We even had a “secret Santa” gift exchange.  I certainly felt blessed.

Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia are developing nations, with the usual issues such as illiteracy, lack of clean water, high infant mortality rate etc.  I certainly witnessed some of these issues in the villages we visited.   Yet, the cultures are rich and I sense a pride in the people.

We have just arrived in Bali now to “chill out” and to reflect on our fascinating experience.

 

End of Days

Telen Walsh - Tomb Raider!

What is the antidote to heartsickness?   

Kids.

At least for me it is.  After the heart-wrenching visit to S-21 and the killing fields we all needed something to help lift the weight from our mood.  On our way to Seim Reap we got that help.  We stopped at a spot where the local people sell fruit, vegetables and tarantulas.  A bit of an unusual combination.  You hoped you did not get a combination you did not expect i.e. fruit and tarantula or vegetable and tarantula.  You could get tarantula live or stir fried with oil and garlic.

There was a throng of children there to sell you the goodies.  They immediately swarmed us as we got off the bus and they tried to make a close personal connection so we would buy the fruit from them specifically.   They played the “cute” card right away.  Or maybe they just were cute.  Sort of like girl guides selling cookies. 

So I bought a lot of fruit.

Once they had sold you the fruit, vegetables or tarantulas they needed to help support their families they became regular kids again.  I engaged a few of them in conversation and they got excited to tell me about school, friends, how old they were and who was their best friend etc. etc.  As they talked they started talking over each other and getting louder and louder, giggling and shrieking.  Just like kids anywhere.  They were learning English in school and seemed eager to practice with us.

The second dose of kids came at a village off the beaten track that we stopped at.  It was a poor village and we had all bought small things like hair elastics, combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap and such like for the children.  We were not prepared for the volume of kids.  I swear they were just materializing out of the ether!  I think there may have been as many as 40!  That meant we ran out of doodads before we ran out of kids.  Unfortunately some kids were disappointed.

Then we brought out the soccer ball Tony and Yannig had purchased for the village.  Immediately a game broke out – girls against the boys- with the tourists mixed in with both teams.  It actually became just a melee.  The rules, if anyone knew any, just disappeared and the excitement level meter buried the needle.  Things peaked when a stray kick hit Mick directly in the family jewels and he dropped like a stone.  Everyone, except Mick, was in tears with laughter.  Mick was just in tears.

The Tourists and the kids

 After the game we all visited with the kids.   Such beautiful children!  One shy little one just hung out with me and kept looking at me with huge beautiful eyes.  We had a group picture and since she was little I picked her up so she could be seen.  After that she was my best buddy.

Me and my little sweetie.  Who is the little fat man with the white beard dressed in red with the loud laugh?

Some of the village ladies got caught up in the excitement and started posing with some of the guys in our group.  These ladies looked like they were grandmothers but it turned out they were mothers.  Their tough life had taken its toll.  When I looked at these gorgeous little girls I thought that they were probably going to end up like that.  We live such a privileged life in Canada.  I don’t think we really appreciate just how good we have it.

The visits with the children was the antidote that I needed.  It did not make me forget the horrors of the Killing Fields but it did help take the emotional edge off.  It also made me wonder what I could do to help make these kids’ lives better.  I am still in a quandary about that.

We didn’t really do much for the village except give them about an hour of fun that they might not have had.  The little gifts we gave did not amount to much and would not make much of a difference to their lives, unfortunately.  My thoughts keep returning to my little sweetheart and wondering what her life holds in store.  Is there anything I can do?  I don’t know.

Christmas morning was spent at Angkor Wat watching the sunrise.  We had a group of rampant agnostics watching the sunrise on a pagan holiday that was pre-empted by the Christians and hi-jacked by the corporations over a Hindu temple that was converted to a Buddhist shrine.  How many people can say they did that?  Well, other than our group, lots!   The area around Angkor Wat was crowded at 5 am on Christmas morning, so the experience was not unique to us.

Christmas Morning at Angkor Wat

In spite of the large crowd, the early hour and the lack of coffee the experience was unexpectedly spiritual.  It was a beautiful morning and Angkor Wat is astounding. 

We all went out for a Christmas dinner at a local restaurant that Tony, Alec and Chloe had discovered and booked.  The whole group was there and we all had a surrogate family Christmas.  Amazingly they had turkey.  At least they said it was turkey and it tasted like turkey.  So, I guess it was turkey! 

I don’t want to look too deeply into it…

Christmas dinner with the surrogate family

We are now back in Bangkok and everyone is on to their next destination.  It feels like the lights just came on and the roaches are scattering.  We had a great group for the trip.  There were 12 out of 15 people who went the whole way and we had some additions and subtractions along the route.  We were together for 29 days and we got to know each other pretty well.   It is sad that everyone is leaving. I feel that I can call all these people friends.  

I am really going to miss them.  

  

 

Killing Fields

I need to talk about the Killing Fields.

In the previous entries in this blog I have been somewhat flippant and silly about a lot of things. You cannot do that with the Killing Fields.  Up to this point in my life I did not believe there was such a thing as pure evil.  The events in Cambodia in the 70’s are rapidly changing my mind.

We visited S-21 - one of the prisons where Pol Pot imprisoned, tortured and killed over three hundred eighty-five thousand people.  Of all the people that were imprisoned in S-21 only seven survived.  S-21 was only one of one hundred sixty-eight prisons that the Khmer Rouge kept in Phnom Penh.  The torture that the prisoners faced was unspeakable and meant to wring from them confessions of crimes they did not commit or had no knowledge of.  Some of those crimes consisted of: not answering questions quick enough, grieving for relatives killed by the Khmer Rouge, crying out under torture, or not working hard enough. 

Not only were the prisoners tortured and killed, so were their families.  Every family in Cambodia has lost at least one or more family members.

Like the cultural revolution in China all the intellectuals and educated people were taken to the country to work in the fields for sixteen hours a day and fed one bowl of rice porridge a day.  Pol Pot set a quota of 5 tonnes of rice per hectare of land – which is impossible.  One hectare of land can, under the best conditions, yield 1 tonne of rice per year.  If you did not meet that quota you were not working hard enough – a crime punishable by torture and execution.

In 1975 when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power he evacuated Phnom Penh – a city of three million people - by claiming that the Americans were going to bomb the city.  He told everyone to leave their doors unlocked and not take any of their possession with them as it was only going to be for a few days.  He then marched the people to the countryside and put them to work in the rice fields – a job that none of them had any experience with.  Thousands of people died in the march from starvation and exhaustion and many more died in the fields for the same reason. 

Altogether over two million people died in the four years that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge held power in a country of eight million people. 

We visited the Killing Fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.  There is a pagoda there with seventeen levels.  It is filled to overflowing with skulls found in the mass graves.  No one knows who these people were or why they were executed.  Execution was accomplished by beheading.  They were often beheaded by using a palm tree stem – which is a stick that has naturally sharp edges.  It often took fifteen minutes or more to finish the job.   Failing that, rather than waste a bullet, the prisoners were simply buried alive.  Bullets were too expensive.

The Skull Pagoda - housing  over 8,000 skulls

Human bones resurfacing

No one really knows how many bodies there are in the one Killing Field.  As you walk through the area you can see where more and more bones are coming to the surface as the soil erodes or the ground shifts.  So much agony and fear must permeate that ground.

What hit me the hardest was seeing where the babies were killed by bashing their heads against a tree.

At that point I believed that pure evil does exist.

Pol Pot did not act alone.  He had help from Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh.  He also had deputies that assisted him in his crimes – people that actually did the dirty work.  Pol Pot did not, as far as we know, actually kill anyone himself – he delegated it.  But they did as he told them.  He even had most of his accomplices killed as he got more and more paranoid.

How is this possible?  How could someone kill children by bashing their heads against a tree because they were told to?  How could one man have so much power that everyone was so afraid of him that they committed such unspeakable crimes.  Why did they not just say “No”.  He was just a single individual.  Why would someone be so afraid that they would torture and kill their own relatives? 

We were all deeply affected by the jail and killing fields.  I find myself returning again and again to this in my mind.  I find it incomprehensible.  This affected me to the core of my being and I am only seeing the aftermath thirty years after it was over.  How must it have affected the people involved in the actual events – both the Cambodian people and the Khmer Rouge? 

We were privileged to meet a survivor of S-21.  His name was Bou Meng and he survived because he is an artist who was able to paint a flattering picture of the Monster.  There are only 2 survivors left – the other five have since passed away.  He was such a cute little man with a huge sunny smile.  He must be incredibly strong.

Bou Meng - 1 of  7 survivors of S-21

Pol Pot died in the early 1990’s of natural causes.  Such a shame – he will never be called to answer for his crimes.  Some of his deputies are still around and five of them are to be tried by international court.  One already has been and has been sentenced to life in prison.  Four more await trial.   Their sentences cannot be enough.  Nothing we can do can ever come close to justice.

And there are not enough tears.

Telen writes:

The visit to S-21 prison and the nearby “Killing Fields” was very emotionally straining to me too.  Pol Pot was an admirer of Mao Tse Tung and he wanted to change Cambodian society into a communist country similar to China.  The man was obviously very paranoid.  He wanted absolute control.  The Cambodian tragedy lasted for 4 years as compared to the Chinese Cultural Revolution that took place over 25+ years.

It seems that everyone here has lost a loved one to the genocide, i.e. a wife, children, a father etc.

I can look around here, people are struggling to live here BUT they seem relatively happy.  There is a statue of a bronze rifle twisted into a knot in the centre of Siem Reap.  It symbolizes the Cambodian people’s desire for NO MORE war and violence in the world.  May be this is why people here all seem to have a warm smile when I greet them.  At least now, they are living in peace.

The children here are beautiful.  According to Wikipedia, 50% of the population is 20 years old or younger.  The genocide has eliminated not only culture and the intellectuals, it has killed off 25% of the population.  People’s lives here are slowly improving.  Now, only 1 in 20 children will die before age 5.  10 years ago, the statistic was 1 in 8 children. 

How could anyone hurt such a child?

Our tour bus stopped in a farming village yesterday on route to Siem Reap from Phnom Penh.  We donated a soccer ball, some decorative hair bands for the girls, several bottles of bubbles, soap, shampoo and combs.  A soccer match amongst the children and several members of our tour group quickly broke out.  Rand did a “hole in one” kick when the ball ended up hitting the English fellow in our group right in his crotch.  Well, he dropped like a stone onto the group.  Everyone just laughed and laughed.  We really had a great time in spite of the language barrier.  Cambodia has suffered a lot but the spirit of the people triumphs—as reflected in their gentle smiling faces.