Wanderlust

Kho Tao: Where titans lurk

gregoviviasia — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 02:20:46 +0000

At this point making last minute decisions, like booking a flight from Phnom Penh to Bangkok, a train from Bangkok to Chumphon, a ferry form Chumphon to Kho Tao, all in less than twenty four hours, became second nature. All of this for the rush of diving in the Gulf of Thailand, a crunch considering we only had three weeks remaining and still needed to get to Tokyo in time for our return flight home. Planes, trains, boats, by now we had extensive techniques for passing the time between destinations. Endless cribbage tournaments, playing music trivia matches while listening to the ipod on shuffle with split headphones, reading, if still enough, or trying to decipher the life stories of the people around us was more than enough to keep us busy. Bangkok, like Delhi and Luang Prabang, would be another city revisited, and like the others, all the effort to find our bearings on the first visit pay off on the second and third. You feel rewarded for simply knowing where to get food and store your luggage. We arrived to the small island of Kho Tao with a purpose. The first afternoon was spent courting diving outfits and finding lodging. We finally settled for a small, relaxed operation and a shack on the rocks. From our balcony we were told leopard sharks could be seen prowling around the shallows in the morning. With a rented moped to shuttle us from the seaside shack to the diving boat, our days in Kho Tao were mostly linear affairs between A and B and A again. Most of the excitement happened underwater. It was also the first time that we were diving recreationally, not as students. Although, for all practical purposes you learn something new every time you enter the water. Our most vivid lesson: don’t mess with a territorial titan triggerfish near its nest or you might find yourself in a heap of trouble. Five minutes into our third dive, while it was pouring on the surface, glad to escape the nauseating swells and walls of cold rain on the boat, we were attacked by a titan. With mouth agape, showing us a strangely human assortment of blunt snaggleteeth, it chased us straight up to the surface. Stef, our fearless guide suffered a welt on his leg as a result of the fish’s relentless charges. With the rain hammering on the backs of our heads, we kept looking down into the water, regulator in our mouths, monitoring the depths for the titan. After collecting our breath we descended again, half scared, half thrilled. From Kho Tao we would start the long leg to Tokyo, marking the final phase of our trip. Japan.

delayed night train in Bangkok

Chumphon

ferry to Kho Tao

on the ferry, unseasonal rain ahead

on the ferry

our seaside shack, next to the leopard sharks

we love the sea (shark island in the distance)

Kho Tao mamma

between dives (or our surface interval)

Stef, 100% Canadian

This is not our photo, but to illustrate a point we will make one exception. A titian trigger fish. 75 cm of unpredictable meanness

we need beer after our submarine confrontations

its kind of like a bath tub but bigger

weather over shark island

shark island covers the moon

Phnom Penh: Hot nights by the river

gregoviviasia — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:01:21 +0000

After a temple scouting detour in Siem Reap we returned once more to the Mekong. We met Chanthou at a corner cafe on the main drag along the river. It was immediately calming to see a familiar face. Chanthou invited us to her beautiful house in the outskirts of the city where we dipped in the pool, listening to the lizards cooing, and ate our first home-cooked meal in months. We stayed in her empty downtown apartment overlooking the river, each night fighting the day’s heat trapped inside. Like an unwelcomed guest, moving from one corner to the other, the hot air was pushed around the room by an over-worked ceiling fan. Tepid midnight showers proved useless. The heat would subside slightly in the early morning only to be replaced by the noise of wakened traffic on the street. Our sleepless nights left us lethargic during the day. Our time in the Cambodian capital was brief and somewhat blurred by a transitional moment in our trip. By then our days felt numbered and we were anxious to get back to the coast to dive one more time before returning to our land-locked home. We spent the better part of two days in an Internet cafe, figuring out exactly which coast. Would it be Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, or further south to Malaysia? We decided to head back to Thailand, this time going south to the islands on the gulf. Unable to penetrate Phnom Penh’s urban reality, we allowed ourselves instead to be charmed by the riparian edge, favorable for tourists, sipping gin and tonics, going to rock clubs, and, in typical fashion, stuffing our faces with spicy delights.

urban temple

on the streets

Russian market

tin fantasy

iced tea

ripe for the picking

in front of the Central Market

Central Market

riverfront

lunch, of the Mekong variety

awake, too hot to sleep

Angkor 2: The center and the periphery

gregoviviasia — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:07:31 +0000

…After the fact contemplations about the durability of our monuments aside, our time in Angkor was mostly peaceful. We interacted with the place much like one would with a distant older relative’s living room, assessing the passing of time, reading into the images fragments of stories, smelling, sitting, drinking, and pacing around some more. The further afield we went from the main temple complex, the closer we were to Cambodia outside the hermetic environment protected from the ravages of the present by conservationists and international aid. Besides walking around a local festival at the Roluos temple group and roadside scenes from the vantage of our tuk tuk, we did not come close to life outside the margins of tourism in Siem Reap. After feeling like we ‘lived’ parts of India and Laos, looking back at it now, it feels odd that we did not approach northern Cambodia much in the same way. At the time, we were engrossed in the temples, in uncovering some meaning from the glyphic walls, and perhaps, in our own separate ways, in attempting to piece together some preliminary conclusions about our trip as we were planning the last month of travel.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat, east facade

6:00 am

inside Angkor Wat

inside Angkor Wat, dry pool

inside Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat, SE gallery, Judgement of Yama, a relief depicting Heaven and, in this case, Hell

Angkor Wat

Preah Khan

outside Preah Khan, Sponge bob

driving to Roluos

festival outside the Bakong temple of the Roluos group

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looking at Bakong

Bakong

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Pre Rup

Banteay Srei

Banteay Samre

Angkor 1: Silent faces, gnarled limbs

gregoviviasia — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:09:09 +0000

Siem Reap in April is sweltering. Despite already having over four months of travel behind us in increasingly hotter climates, nothing could quite prepare us for the midday furnace that ignites the Cambodian flats. That said, we simply adapted our daily schedule around the inclement afternoons by avoiding them altogether. Siem Reap is a small city near the Tonle Sap Lake. Although it is rapidly growing as it accommodates a larger tourist infrastructure, it somehow manages to retain the tranquility of a provincial center – that impression, of course, could also have had something to do with the debilitating heat of the season. Besides the manageable scale of the place, Cambodians returning from abroad and investing in the city have added an air of cosmopolitanism. Sensitively designed cafes share the street with the expected variety of noodle stands. Our attention, however, was turned slightly outside the city to the temple complexes of Angkor. For four days we kept to a strict schedule based on the day’s temperatures. Starting early at 5:30 in the morning, together with fellow temple scout Sue West, we would hop in a tuk tuk and go to the ancient Khemer city, having the buildings to ourselves in the freshness of the morning until the first buses arrived two hours later. By noon we were covered in sweat, quickly losing focus and fluids. After a long afternoon nap we would return to the temples until sundown. It was an interaction with history and form based on the elements. In fact, everything in Angkor felt elemental, not in its simplicity – for none of the structures or the epics carved in bass reliefs along the walls can be called simple – but rather because the work, so deftly authored by hand, is inescapably committed to the natural environment, sometimes quite violently. The slow rage of the ficus trees in Ta Prohm reflects the impermanence of the built environment. There is no intention of coexistence. The roots, frozen by careful conservation, are ripping through the laid stone. Their pace is imperceptibly slow, but brutal nonetheless. That archaeologists have decided to freeze this instance, like a video still of a car crash, beautiful and terrifying, is a miracle, a rarity in a world where we more often than not prefer to render our monuments new, glossing over the marks that make them alive, in a sense, denying them their mortality.

Siem Reap: welcome to the city of light-starved geckos

improvised gas station for the tuk-tuks

entering through the South Gate

South Gate sentry

South Gate sentries

South Gate

admiring the bass reliefs at the Bayon complex

Bayon

epic wars in Bayon

where does one start…the bananas really complete the composition, don’t they?

Bayon’s frozen faces

admiring the Baphuon temple

Naga, the multi-headed snake

Ta Prohm

ficus roots take hold of the temples in Ta Prohm

Nature over man, Vivi over nature in Ta Prohm

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Vivi and Sue in Ta Prohm, waiting for the rain to cease

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“All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. Here are the dead fathers. Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us” (Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy)

Let this be proof that even those lithic structures, obdurate as they may seem, will eventually subside. It’s just a matter of time.

Nam Tha: Jungle, leeches, and thieves

gregoviviasia — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:36:56 +0000

The Golden Triangle is an area loosely bounded by gentle mountain ranges that cut through western Burma, northern Thailand and Laos, and parts of China’s Yunnan province. Along with the Afghan and Pakistani ‘Golden Crescent’, it is famous for being one of the world’s most productive opium cultivating regions. Eager to see this northern edge of the country, we took a government bus from Luang Prabang with a small group to Luang Nam Tha, a boom town at the edge of an enormous national park famous for its varied flora and river communities. More recently, the region has come under the influence of Chinese economic expansion. The Chinese, eager to facilitated trade with Thailand, are forcefully developing the Laotian territory standing in the way. Large infrastructural projects such as dams and mega-highways are expected to transform the relatively isolated communities and ecosystems in the region. During our four days in the jungle we walked and canoed from river valleys to bamboo covered highlands and were able to get an intimate look at the diverse hill tribes that share the narrow trails and river passes along the Nam Tha park. That said, we also encountered a new level of discomfort: leeches. Awakened from the recent rains with a primordial hunger, every inch of ground was writhing with emaciated leeches ready to latch on. Our treks took twice as long since we would have to stop every five minutes to strip leeches from our shoes or in worse cases from the dark, dank crannies of our body. Occasionally one of us would see the bloody aftermath of a satiated leech on another. Sucking us dry seemed to be a growing theme during our time in northern Laos. After the jungle treks we headed south to Nong Kiaw, a godforsaken speck of a town surrounded by limestone cliffs. The town is cleaved in two by the Nam Ou river heading down to Laung Prabang. Intended as a one night stop, we were marooned in this purgatory. Minutes after we arrived while we were performing the ritual negotiations for a guest house, I dropped my money belt containing the rest of our cash for Laos. Quickly noticing what had happened I retrieved it from the person who had picked it up, a small boy. The boy, however, had given the purse to his mother who proceeded to extract our entire savings for Lao. She returned the purse with our documents and a single bill, a minute fraction of was there to begin with. Robbed, broke, and dumbfounded, we entered into a vicious cycle of hope and disappointment that lasted a week. Along the way we learned a great deal about the many faces that exist in a single community. We met extraordinary people both helpful and warm as well as extraordinarily corrupt people. In the end we left Nong Kiaw the day before my 30th birthday with a quarter of our money back, a minor triumph. With the little we had left, Vivi treated me to a lavish retreat in Luang Prabang and we made haste to Cambodia, leaving Laos with a sour taste in our mouths.

Luang Nam Tha, the rains waking the leeches

on the Nam Tha river

a Khmou village

lunch by the shoals

delicious!

lunch by the shoals

entering a Lantan village

a Lantan village

our first night at a Lantan village

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we had a singing contest. they had a larger repertoire

in the jungle, already looking our for leeches

fortunately you don’t feel a thing

yes, it made sense to look there too

the Nam Tha crew

a recently settled Khmou village

after a hard day’s trek

exhausted

the second Lanten village we stayed in

our very comfortable house

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and improvised shuttlecock, played with both hands and feet. fantastic

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in the highlands, away from the river, the wet, the leeches

bitter bamboo soup

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hauling a blackboard up the mountain with flip-flops!

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Nong Kiaw: Purgatory

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the Nam Ou

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throwing firewood down to the bank for the boat race festivities

Nong Kiaw

slash and burn afternoons

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Luang Prabang: Saffron robes and water guns

gregoviviasia — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:09:01 +0000

There are few things to complain about in Luang Prabang. A charming little city at the confluence of the Mekong and the Nam Ou rivers, it has grown accustomed to travelers since colonial times and rewards its visitors with French bakeries and beautifully aged temples (unfortunately, temple architecture in this part of the world is often over-restored, leaving no traces of the past). We quickly fell for the sticky rice, the curries and chili pastes, the cold beef salads (lahp), and the river fish. And all of the spicy meals we ate were lubricated with Lao’s most famous export: Beer Lao. For under a dollar a large bottle, we never tired of the tasty lager; a much better alternative to Indian or Thai beer, especially after we had gotten used to draining the glycerin from Indian bottles before pouring, realizing that the preservative syrup not only tastes like river slime but depending on the batch can leave you with a lasting headache. April in Laos is a languid time. The heat is only multiplied by the humidity and the air is scorched from slash and burn agriculture around the hills. It is also a period of the year when it is difficult to stay dry. Besides the sweaty membrane covering every inch of your body, April is when the Thai/Lao new year is celebrated, bringing forth an onslaught of water wars, pitting tourists, locals, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, civil servants, merchants, essentially everybody who braves the street against each other. Gangs on pick-up trucks with buckets of ice water momentarily paralyze the unprepared stiff on the sidewalk. Super-soakers, hoses, balloons, ladles, and all forms of improvised containers become the city’s motley arsenal. Although hard to make out in the haze, the country around Luang Prabang is a patchwork of verdant fields and even denser forests. It’s easy to imagine tigers about.

Wat Nong

midday

temple porch

widow to a temple dormitory

dried mushrooms?

beans and rice

grubs, banana leaves, and wild herbs

charred possum and unidentified bird, honey and honey comb, peanuts, and wild broccoli

ox ends

river fish with glaucoma

pork

‘Souksan Vanh Pee Mai‘: Happy Lao New Year!

water, beer, sweat

After several attempts from the edge of the enclosure, Vivi finally roused the sleeping tiger. It looked back towards us superciliously and yawned, making sure to show us every canine, incisor, premolar, and molar, just in case we had forgotten who was in charge.

neaby falls

about to escape the heat

ahhh

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Luang Prabang from Wat Phousi

Wat Xieng Thong

down from Wat Phousi

around Wat Phousi

Mekong: Down by the riverside

gregoviviasia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:04:42 +0000

At some point before entering Laos the thought of spending two days on a lethargic long-boat creeping its way down the Mekong sounded like a fantastic idea. I think most people still take the trip out of some romantic desire to interact with the great river – and to a certain extent the stretch of Mekong between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang does unfold in front of you, ever so monotonously, like a bald python slowly unwinding its grip. However, the memories of our trip downriver are most vividly inhabited by cramped quarters and hard, unforgiving benches We were surrounded by a combination of local families and merchants invariably carrying twice their weight in meticulously wrapped parcels and tourists unsure if to look at the milky stew in front of them or to read their books (neither option ever taking hold for the guilt of ignoring the landscape always prevented them from becoming engrossed in their literature and, alternatively, staring at the landscape never quite captivated enough to make them forget about the paperbacks on their laps). Still, state borders that are defined by natural barriers are always more dramatic than toll booths and welcome signs. Crossing from Thailand to Laos across the river is an accentuated act of leaving and entering. Not to mention that the settled air of comfort and prosperity in Thailand is immediately replaced by a still fresh, if not volatile, mood of national awakening that makes the Laotian border town of Huay Xai boom with optimism, an optimism that can easily be misread for blatant thievery. For us, leaving the comforts of Thailand behind filled us again with a sense of curiosity that we missed since being in India. We felt at last like we were truly on the road again.

the Mekong’s bounty

hives and grasshoppers at the last Thai market before entering Laos

garlic and river grass

walking in downtown Chiang Kong to the border crossing

‘Gate to Laos – China’

crossing

we had to wait a day in Huay Xai before taking the trip downriver. it was hot

in the heat of the day in our hotel room, they couldn’t help but taunt us with their furs

national pastime, french colonial residue

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long boats or slow boats, as you wish (neither appellative describes speed)

Mekong life

getting ready to leave

Mekong life

the Thai bank

on the boat

upriver

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our midway point in Pakbeng

Mekong life

entering Luang Prabang

Chiang Mai: The Dregs

gregoviviasia — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:59:10 +0000

Sometimes you unexpectedly hit lows on the road and everything seems dull, drab, forced. Senseless. We hit a low in Chiang Mai. Wary of tourist traps advertising elephant tours, jungle treks, or authentic villages, we drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and wandered around the town aimlessly. As usual our spirits would lift while eating – and we ate very well in Chaing Mai – but for the most part we were hot and uninspired. Had we been more alert or curious or tolerant of other tourists we surely would have gotten more from the place. That said, Chaing Mai still felt like a pale, over-exposed version of the exciting northern Thai city that I heard so much about. The night markets were neat and orderly and as a result completely boring. Much of our time was spent spectating. Incapable of joining in on the fun we simply watched others coming back dusty and frazzled from a day spent on the backs of slow moving pachyderms. We sulked and pondered how to get on with the trip, looking ahead to Laos and other promises. During our last night we caved in and bought tickets to the local kick-boxing event. It was a revelation. As if vicariously, our idleness was beaten out of us. We were ready to move on.

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musicians at the temple fair

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night market

learning about local toys

round one for the kids (they are 14)

we wondered if he had that killer instinct

prep-work

bets are on

ref

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he did not have it in the end

ref 2

the winner

Francis Bacon

man

another man

playing eight ball with Taffy

Bangkok: Another Planet

gregoviviasia — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:31:46 +0000

Shiny new Toyota taxi, the sharp scent of artificial granny smith apples clinging to the grease in and around our nostrils, our sweat from waiting outside the arrivals terminal congealing in the air conditioning, neatly stacked rows of anonymous industrial warehouses blur past on both sides of the highway, the city’s modest skyline promising nothing in the distance, we were clearly somewhere else. Our recent memories of Calcutta fight hard to find any relevance to our new surroundings – this was no longer India. It took a good day or two to begin to understand Bangkok. Everything felt incongruous and grotesque at first, beginning with our hotel, a relic from the 1930′s in the middle of high-rises and elevated train networks and alleys pulsing with sex, carnivals of flesh attended by red-nosed men in polo shirts and impossibly small women barking at each other and occasionally turning to the street to deliver well-rehearsed yet soulless propositions. We spent the first day aimlessly walking from one mall to the next, transfixed, drunk from the blinking lights and iced lattes. That first night we fought hard against all desires to eat at one of the myriad fast food chains and instead found a parking lot with impeccable stainless steel tables and food vendors frantically frying, chopping, pealing. The chillies and beer, the smell of cigarettes, the cracking speaker of the television all pierced into our stupor and pulled us out. Street food in Thailand became a mainstay – simply delicious. After the food it was the markets that took us over. Although the corrugated tin roofs of the weekend market radiated in the 35 degree heat we nevertheless became part of the stream of young shoppers sniffing out vintage sneakers and Levis jeans. By the end of our stay we had come around and accepted Bangkok’s center-less charm.

new flavors at last

gasp

the important thing is that you have to know what you want

elevated worms

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margins

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Wat Pho

Reclining Buddha

they came a long way

Wat Pho

repairing the temple

Wat Pho

Siam Center

and sa-wat-dee to you

have to admit, we found great eats at the Siam mall canteen

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break

tuk tuk

Chatuchak weekend market

quail eggs

Hualampong station, getting ready to head north

Andaman Islands: Paradise on Earth

gregoviviasia — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:57:48 +0000

No joke. We have seen paradise and it is a chain of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, reached only by the occasional ferry boat or by flight from Chenai or Calcutta. The trouble in getting there is immediately rewarded by the place. The Andamands, although closer to the Thai coast, belong to India and are populated largely by Begalis and Tamilians. The indigenous populations are hidden in the inaccessible reaches of the archipelago, tribes that have been there for millennia. Spencer Wells, in his Journey of Man, explains that the first wave of homo sapiens migrations out of Africa occurred along the coastline of Asia all the way to Australia, explaining why there were humans Down Under twenty thousand years before their appearance in Central Asia or Europe. The Andamanese tribes are descendants of those early waves of migrants. The islands are self contained ecosystmes with a long and storied history. We spent all of our time on Havelock, one of the two small islands ‘developed’ for small-scale tourism, which mainly means huts by the beach. Besides the beauty and tranquility, our reward of sorts after three intense months in the Subcontinent, we found a new passion: diving! For me, learning how to dive was like accomplishing a childhood dream, back when sharks and whales consumed my imagination. For Vivien it was entirely different. Diving became a way to conquer the fear of deep water. In Vikesh, our teacher, we found a man so composed, so in his element, and above all so generous with his knowledge that we quickly lost all of our fears and found instead another universe of sensations and sights. After our dives we played long card games into the night with Paul and Yshai. And in our days off we would all head to beach # 7, through an amazing forest, and just relish in perfectly clear water.

tired after two days of travel, waiting for the ferry to Havelock from Port Blair

time passes slowly

and it is the first time we see rain in three months

but by the time we reach Havelock the skies are clear and we are speechless

by our huts

on the way back to our hut after our first day of diving theory. we are nervous and excited for our first dive.

lobster fishermen returning in low tide

night visitor: green mantis

diving: day one

the boats were all manned by a Burmese gang. we like to think of them as our pirate guides.

Vikesh looking for the drop off

Yshai enjoying the peace after a dive

it was easy to be comfortably quiet, each one of us processing in our own way our dive

by our later dives, we all learned the basics of underwater photography. here, a school of great baracuda

buddy

holding on against the current to conserve energy

jackfish or truvalli

a territorial clown fish

forget what these are called

Vikas point us in the right direction…

…and we avoid a moray eel…

…and the lion fish…

…and we start concentrating on things at a smaller scale…

brain coral

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more brain coral

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quiet moments before our night dive

as usual, Vikesh preps us through the dive.

despite our nerves about diving in the dark, we still find ways to laugh

Vikesh, probably telling Vivi that sharks sleep too

our crew enjoying the last moments on light

we are in the water as soon as the sun sets

and surprisingly there is enough light to see a good amount of the reef, even without the aid of our lights

we find a nervous squid hovering

the urchins are active at night, moving about

while the seal-faced puffer fish are fast asleep

on our way to beach 7. just look at those trees!

they are huge!

through the forest we get glimpses of the perfect coastline.

and by perfect, I mean never more than ten people per kilometer of beach and a glorious surf

a typical moment with Paulie and Yshai

Paulie tells it like it is

a place we will make sure to return to