Cambodia and the return to China

An excerpt from a blog entry I attempted to write a few days ago: "Tibet is no longer in the plans. It's disappointing, but okay. I'm not sure I had enough time to do it well anymore, and I'm looking forward to what I will be doing instead. " Would you have believed me? I was lying! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Picking up where I left off . . .

Hospital Discharge . . .

As my time wound down in Bangkok Hospital I was unsure what I was going to do when I got out: return home, maybe travel southwards towards Australia, return to China? As I believe I mentioned previously, the doctors told me I was clear to go anywhere I pleased, so long as it wasn't at a high altitude. Like Tibet, for instance. In my last conversation with the doctor there, however (a day or two after I wrote the blog), I happened to ask a question that proved fateful for the course of my travelling: how long I could expect it to be before I would be able to travel to altitude again. After the requisite "It depends on the person," he said that it could be as little as a matter of weeks. Also on this last consultation they told me I was scheduled for a follow-up appointment two weeks later, in case I was still in the area.

I was discharged on a Friday, and my dad was booked to leave on a Monday, so we went up to Chiang Mai to pass the weekend until his flight home. We had a good time, visiting the highest point in Thailand-- about 8000 feet, so even anemia-boy (my anemic alter ego) was able to handle it-- and some other sights nearby on our first day, and stayed more local on the second day, seeing pretty much all of Chiang Mai's wats (Buddhist temples) in the morning and trying to stay dry through the rainy afternoon.

As the weekend passed, some idea of what I wanted to do with myself began to sift out of the depths of my consciousness, or sub-consciousness, or whatever/wherever may be the source of such convictions. I came to see that I didn't feel ready to return home-- a week in the hospital didn't seem a fitting end to things; it was as though I had unfinished business. With Australia, as I looked into it I came to see that, due to cost, it wasn't really an option for me. By the time we returned to Bangkok Monday, I had settled on a plan: travel to Cambodia and hang out there until that appointment in Bangkok came around, hoping that by then I would no longer be anemic. In all the glory of all my hoped-for oxygen carrying capability, I would return to China (courtesy of travel insurance and something called "resumption of travel") and once more try to head to Tibet.

Cambodia **this section (divided into three parts) is long and has no bearing on other sections or what I'm up to now; in other words it can easily be skipped entirely

Temples

Monday we returned to Bangkok and my dad caught his flight home. Tuesday morning I set off for Siem Reap, Cambodia and the famous temples of Angkor Wat. The next four days were a frenzy of visiting temples; that and taking obscene quantities of pictures very much like those taken by each one of the 999,999 other tourists who go there each year (though some opt to videotape everything instead). Angkor Wat itself, said to be "the world's largest religious building", is impressive. People also like to call it "Man's Greatest Temple to his Gods," and though it would seem from what I've read that it was built more out of love of self than any higher being, it illustrates that impressiveness. It really is huge: it takes ages-- and a lot of going up use-your-hands steep stairs-- to get from the entrance to the center of the thing. As is the case with all the Angkorian temples, there's loads of fine stone carving throughout, some of it pretty well preserved. Despite all of this, however, I felt a little disappointed by Angkor Wat itself. A case of too high expectations perhaps, though for what it's worth I didn't feel the same way about the Taj Mahal.

The rest of the temples in the area (and there are dozens) I generally enjoyed very much. The ones I enjoyed the most were those least eagerly "restored." Cambodia is nothing if not tropical, and so following the abandonment of the temples many centuries ago they were overtaken by the surrounding jungle. Trees with the most massive roots I can conceive of grow out of the temple walls . . . I really don't know how to describe it. A meek attempt: the power of the trees is so vividly apparent; there is this incredible dynamism in the roots, with all their growth and former positions suggested in their current state . . . Anyways, just look at the picture. It comes closer to doing it justice than my words can. [It turns out I can't put up pictures on this computer, but I intend to do so at some point.]

As April and May are the hottest months in Cambodia, it was beyond humid and fairly sweltering oftentimes, and so I spent the better part of each day in the state of sweaty-mess. This sweat combined with my scrambling about jungley ruins made it such that I finished each day a very dirty person. Cold showers, already pleasant in hot season tropics, never felt so good. Or necessary. The upside to being in Cambodia in May is that it is low tourist season. And by the middle of the month, when I arrived, the monsoon is gradually setting on, so most days had some cloud cover and a brief spell of torrential rain. Besides making it cooler than it would have been otherwise, I loved seeing such violent storms move in for twenty minute then disappear, like some kind of fun-size hurricane. There's something really beautiful about it.

The Floating Village

After four days, I had seen quite enough ancient temples to hold me over a very long time (not itching for more yet . . . ). I spent a day doing very little, which felt good. Slept in, sat about talking to other people in the guesthouse, embarrassed myself playing pool (no, really), etc. The next day was maybe my best in Cambodia: I went with three others from the guesthouse out to a floating village on Lake Tonle Sap, one of Cambodia's defining geographic features. Much of it's importance has to do with the tremendous quantities of fish caught from the lake each year, and much of that fishing is done by the people who inhabit the floating villages spread about the edges of the lake. There's a famous, touristy one nearby, but a woman at the guesthouse was there to research the floating villages and so in the know about how to get to another, rarely visited floating village.

[What follows in this next paragraph is probably all too technical to make for interesting reading, but I describe it because this village was way up there as one of the very most interesting things I have seen in the past seven months.]

Each year during wet season the Tonle Sap expands something like 100 fold in volume and then recedes again as the dry season sets on, the product of some strange dynamics that, in the interest of length, I won't go into here (which is good anyhow because I'm not sure I really understand). Naturally this means that seasonally the location of the shores of the lake vary a great deal--think in terms of miles rather than yards or feet. What, then, is a fishing village to do? Build your village on the wet season shore and you have poor access to the lake in the dry season; build on the dry season shore and you have poor access to land (necessary if you wish to sell your catch) in the wet season. The solution is the floating village. Each has two parts: a permanent part, set high on stilts perhaps midway between the two shores, and the so-called floating part. In the wet season the floating part sits alongside the permanent part. When the dry season comes somehow--I have no idea how it works-- the floating bit is moved the several kilometers to a point a few hundred meters inside the dry season shore-- and set on stilts (lower than in the permanent section, maybe to buy time as the lake rises initially in the early wet season, but this is a guess), again I don't know how. The able bodied people occupy the floating village in the dry season, while the permanent village is occupied by mostly children, their mothers (we saw some women in the floating part work same as the men) and the elderly. I don't know how much people go back and forth-- it wouldn't take much time at all to bike between them. Come wet season the floating part is moved again and reunited with the permanent part. I would never have dreamed such a thing existed.

Battambang

I finished my time in Cambodia with a brief and uneventful stay in Battambang, Cambodia's second largest city. A distant second to Phnom Phen, the capital, it is really a medium-sized town. I'll mention two things from my time here. The first was a visit to the local "killing fields." This requires some background, though I suppose many of you are familiar with all this, especially those of you a generation or two ahead of myself. However, I wasn't much, so I'll explain a bit here: Cambodia's modern history goes far beyond tragedy. Starting in the mid-seventies, the Khmer Rouge took power for five years, during which time they undertook a campaign to "change society" that makes China's cultural revolution seem mild and tolerant (according to the little bit I've read; I'll confess I wasn't there). They did things like brake apart families in the interest of creating a "collective" or some such notion, and then killed people who resisted or didn't seem entirely pleased about what was happening or were suspected of as much. After about five years of this the Vietnamese (that government the US had some quarrels with in the sixties) decided to overthrow the Khmer Rogue and did so, but in doing so they also kicked off almost twenty years of bloody civil war that included much of the country being covered in landmines intended to kill civilians. The logic was that the more people were killed the more demoralized people would be and the more demoralized the population was the weaker the government in power would be . . . and so they put countless mines in places like rice fields. This continues to haunt Cambodia. There are a disproportionate number of people missing legs. I was in places where it is said that to leave the path is to risk losing limbs if not life. To expand and improve highways (and Cambodia easily has the worst highways I've seen, which is saying something after time spent in India) requires that every bit of road first be swept for landmines. They make shirts for tourists that say "Danger! Landmines." I don't think they're very funny, though my guess is the Cambodians might (almost every night I watched movies or parts of movies with the people who own/work at the guesthouse where I stayed, and they all thought bloody violence was hysterical). In yet another example of Cold War insanity, the US government managed to get involved in this mess, providing funding to the opposition-- that is, the remnants of the exiled (fanatical Maoist Communist) Khmer Rogue-- that was planting those landmines. The British taught them how to place landmines.

I'm sorry, I said more than I intended. All of this had very little obvious direct connection to my experience, and yet there were constant reminders. And one can't help but think about all that has happened there when visiting, especially when talking with people who you know lived that nightmare. I feel like there's so much worthwhile stuff I've left out!! Like how amazingly nice the people are, and that comes through even when they're being really aggressive trying to sell things around Angkor, or how the country is terribly, terribly poor and kind of paralyzed by rampant corruption. And I forgot to mention that most the temples at Angkor were Hindu, and that the cultural roots trace back to India more than China due to trading, or that the people tend to look more like what you might think of as "Pacific Islander" [note: since writing I said something along these lines to an Australian couple, who told me this comparison was off, and they would know better than I] or "South American Indian" rather than "East Asian" (unlike the Thai or Lao or, as I understand, Vietnamese people that surround them).

Anyhow, the one memorial to past atrocities that I went to were the "killing fields" near to Battambang. It was actually a cave, with the entrance at the base of a cliff maybe 30 feet high. The Khmer Rouge killed some people in the cave, pushed others off the cliff. I don't know how many were killed, but at some point since all the bones and skulls that could be found, and that weren't claimed by families for burial, were collected and placed in a wire mesh kind of container just outside the cave, as a memorial. There are the remains of a lot of people in that container. It was disturbing, upsetting, and moving, while at the same time being the sort of thing that is very difficult to process truly .

The second thing I wanted to mention with regards to Battambang was that as I headed to the border with Thailand on my way back to Bangkok, I began speaking with a man whose English was unusually good for Cambodia. It turned out he lives in Long Beach, which he told me is home to the largest Cambodian community in the US. I had no idea! He's getting his masters in journalism at Cal State Long Beach, after which he'll be the Cambodian correspondent for Radio America, if I remember correctly, and I believe some other media sources as well. He was a really, really kind man, and offered to show me around the Cambodian bit of Long Beach once we're both back in the area. His father was killed by the Khmer Rogue when he was a child. His daughters are American citizens (and I think he and his wife may be too, though I'm not sure of this). He brought his mother out to Long Beach but she wanted to go back to Cambodia, saying that it was too cold.

Would you believe me if I told you I had intentions to keep this short? This time I'm telling the truth, I believe. Initially I described all of my time in Cambodia in a few sentences saying I went, I saw temples, and enjoyed my time there. But then I started saying a bit more and then . . . I found myself wanting to explain everything. It seems I have trouble with moderation in writing about what I've done (thus my inability to maintain a diary). At long last, moving on . . .

My Fourth and Fifth Visits to Bangkok

Okay, so it's a bit ridiculous to say I've been to Bangkok five times. But I really have spent a LOT more time there than I intended. It's not a bad place, but it seems to have a way of drawing me in and keeping me there, like a black hole with good satay and bad traffic. Recall that the initial reason for my stay in Southeast Asia and thus Cambodia was to get well enough to hopefully go to Tibet. I was returning to Bangkok for the appointment that would determine whether Tibet was an option for me. It wasn't. The measure they focused on this time was my hematocrite count: it was 26 when I left the hospital, 32 at the check-up, and according to the doctor needed to be 39 before I would be safe to travel to the kinds of altitude found in Tibet. The doctor said the medicine that was treating the malaria (which I had finished only days before) suppressed red blood cell production. Anyhow, Tibet was out. But I decided beforehand that there was enough interesting stuff to see in China that I would return regardless, and if I couldn't go to Tibet visit (via a several days boat journey) the Three Gorges and the worlds largest dam-- just completed-- that now sits at the end of them and will start flooding the gorges shortly, as well as Shanghai, Beijing, and maybe one or two other places. So that became my plan, and I managed to get myself somewhat excited about it.

However, I wasn't able get that plan underway as quickly as had hoped because I overlooked the fact that it was a Friday and so I would have to wait to get a visa until Monday (the appt. didn't finish in time for me to get to the embassy in time). So I went up to a pleasant town a few hours outside Bangkok (I can't remember the name at the moment but it's home to the "Bridge Over the River Kwai" for those of you who have seen the film) for a night and a day. I spent the day I had exploring the area on a rented motorbike. I tried to get lost in the morning so that I could spend the afternoon getting found again-- so it was quite a disappointment when about midday, just as I was preparing to make my way back, I found myself on the far side of that famous bridge. Meaning that somehow, after going for at least two hours and never doubling back or seeing the same road twice, I was basically back where I had started. Upon reflection I realized that, quite unintentionally, I hadn't made a right turn all morning.

Sunday night I was back in Bangkok (my fifth "visit"), and Monday I got that visa. That evening I went to find a plane ticket back to Chengdu for Tuesday. What I found was that the only ticket on Tuesday was at 3am. As in (much) later that night. Weary of Bangkok as I was, I bought the ticket and after a night with very little sleeping found myself back in China.

China, Part II

I'm going to borrow from an email I wrote to cover the next part. Hopefully the original recipient won't bear any grudges! Okay:

spent a few days there [in Chengdu] doing very little, though i did visit the panda research center (like a panda zoo as far as the visitor is concerned) and eat hotpot (originally a sichuanese thing), which are two 'to do' things in chengdu. i found myself sulking about, however, because everybody in chengdu is on their way to tibet, and so i became sad about the fact that i couldn't go to tibet.

It was in the midst of this stay in Chengdu that I tried to write the blog from which I took the bit with which I started this blog. I was lying, perhaps wanting to put on a good face but at least as much trying to convince myself that I was excited about what I was planning to do. But huge mountains I couldn't go to lay in every direction but east, where I was headed. By this time I was realizing that I would never have wanted to do the Three Gorges trip if it weren't for the fact that they're about to be gone. Which, if you think, about it, isn't really a good reason to see something. Nearly everyone dislikes the trip as a whole, even if they say the gorges are nice and the dam incomprehensibly large. On top of this Chengdu itself is a depressing city-- entirely lacking in character and so polluted that the sky is permanently gray and the sun always faint and orange.

last night i caught an overnight train to chongqing, where i now find myself, apparently china's largest city. at the very least very large. it's also the starting point for the three gorges 'cruise', which i was supposed to begin tonight at 8. my plan for today was to pay a brief visit to fuling (rivertown), which is relatively close. however, by the time my train arrived this morning i couldn't deny any longer that i was feeling really poor. more specifically, i felt the way i had between fevers during the period i had malaria-- it was really a dark few hours for me. i went to the hospital and got my blood checked.

During which time I was thinking, "I can't believe I'm back in a dingy Chinese hospital, feeling like crap." Initially they wanted to make me an inpatient, but by now I know better than to let such things happen. I was expecting to be told that I needed to be hospitalized again, and envisioning running off with my results and booking a flight to return Bangkok yet another time. Back to the email:

it turned out that what i had was a cold (according to them, based on four different aspects of my blood test), so they fed me some antibiotics through an iv (in my all too substantial experience this seems to be the preferred method to administer antibiotics in china) for two hours and proscribed me some chinese medicine. more importantly however-- and the first thing i looked at when i got my hands on the results-- was that the blood test showed my red blood cell count to be normal!! just to make sure i ran the results by the doctor who treated me in bangkok (via phone), and she said i wasn't at any special risk with high altitude given these most recent results.

Crazy, huh!?!

so my current plan is to get myself out of this boat trip and start making my way back westward into the mountains! i'm not getting my hopes too high just yet, because i don't yet feel great and so i can't be sure, but the prospect of actually getting up to tibet is quite exciting.

I started feeling better that afternoon. I managed to get a partial refund on that boat trip (not so much money, really), and that night caught an overnight train back to Chengdu, just as I had come from Chengdu the night before. For once in my life, I acted with complete conviction-- no hesitation or self-doubt. I got back the money I could, got a taxi to the train station, and was on my way. In the morning I got on a bus to the town of Kangding, kind of the beginning of the Tibetan world, in terms of culture and (at 2500 m) topography, if not lines on a map (some borrowing from other emails going on here . . . ), where I now write from.

[Next paragraph very much non-essential.]

Yesterday I made a kind of acclimatization trip up to a nearby lake at 3800m (I'll let you convert if you care) with a really nice Israeli couple from a Kibbutz who I met on the bus here. Last night I had dinner with a total of six Israelis, which was a really interesting and good experience, because all of them seemed like nice, interesting, thoughtful people -- which stands in contrast to most of the Israelis who I have met travelling thus far. It isn't just me that thinks this-- they even spent a while talking about this type of Israelis that have given Israelis a very bad reputation in much of Asia, especially India and Thailand. It was also interesting when they talked about politics-- I wouldn't have thought it possible to meet Israelis (only some of them) so far to the left in terms of Zionism and Palestine.

I got stuck here an extra day because once again I lacked sufficient awareness of the day of the week. Yesterday was a Sunday and I didn't get to the bank to withdraw money before it closed. All westward buses leave by 7am, so I just had to wait it out an extra day, as I don't know that I'll see another bank capable of foreign exchange for a couple weeks. The good news is that this gave me time to write this blog-- I've certainly taken advantage of all this free time I have, haven't I!?! One last question for you: would you believe me if I said they've been playing the same terrible R & B song on repeat for over two hours in this internet cafe where I'm writing from? They have!! I wouldn't have thought this possible either-- I guess it's true what they say that travelling opens your mind!

Anyhow, I'm feeling well, planning to keep going west into Tibet, maybe as far as Lhasa. Wish me luck . . .

--Josh