In this edition: Kathmandu; Bangladesh; northern Thailand; Cambodia

Yowza!  It's been a busy month!  Pinch your nose, 'cause we're diving into it:

(First of all.  An Italian in charge of India?  Turn the flag sideways, boys. Just how long do you expect THAT government to last?? All I can say is it's been a big week for political widows. When I'm in Malaysia next week, getting blasted by a water cannon, I'll be thinking of the poor fallen husbands.)

After returning from my Himalaya trek, I spent the next few days in Kathmandu, spitting out grit and trying to figure out how to get out of Nepal.  My airline, Royal Nepal, was on strike, and all the other airlines suddenly booked up for a month and a half.  It was beginning to look like I was going to be stuck in the Mountain Kingdom until early May, and have to hunker down during the upcoming election, for which everyone was expecting the traditional riots and violence.  (Such is democracy in other countries, where the people still care.)

But at the last moment, Cathy suggested I try flying with the airline she took: Biman Bangladesh.  I mentioned it by e-mail to Chris, my trusty San Francisco-based travel agent (who himself was en route to Nepal for a vacation), and he called it "the airline for the truly brave." It was for me!

I booked. Cathy and I headed out on the same day. I missed meeting Chris by 20 minutes at the Kathmandu airport.  Instead, Cathy and I found ourselves in scenic Dhaka, Bangladesh, where we were scheduled to wait for a flight to Bangkok the next day.  I imagined Bangladesh would be very flat, very wet, full of cranky Muslims, and someplace the people slaughtered cows just to piss off the Indians next door.

BANGLADESH

I'm afraid my limited impressions of Bangladesh--Country #27--only serve to underscore the cliche.  Shirtless children at the airport reached into the miniibus to pinch Cathy's arm, giving her a light bruise. Men who looked like 1979 pimps (the prevailing fashion for poor Muslim countries) were sleazily eyeing her. From above, it was snaked with silty rivers and down on the ground, the land was indeed pancake-flat.  And the hotel staff, even though they knew we were only there for a day because of a Biman layover, tried to charge us for water and kept coming into our room (even getting us out of bed) to solicitously spray everything with mosquito repellent.

Those other Westerners on our flight, "the truly brave," pigged out on dal bhat around a common dinner table: me, Cathy, a German, and three Japanese backpackers (who, let's face it, are really filthy).  Scene from dinner.  German: "Where are you from?"  Me: "New York.  Why?"  German: "You can EAT!"  It was true.  My body was still ravenous following my trek.  Besides, if you have four plates of rice and lentil sauce, are you really gonna turn into a Pennsylvania porker? No.

In the morning, Bangladesh revealed itself in all its glory.  As we waited for the minivan to return us to the cement-and-surly pleasures of the airport, I found a goat adorably dressed in a marigold blossom necklace. Charmed, I took a photo of it and went inside.  Not two minutes later, there was a commotion outside, and I went back out to see my goat, its throat slashed, expiring in spasms in the dusty road.  A cleric, wearing a robe and cap, stood nearby with a machete and bloodstained hands.

It was a Muslim holy day--the one where they slaughter as many animals as they can (pretty much) and then have a blowout feast.  The cleric and a band of exuberant young men then advanced on a docile-looking cow in a nearby garbage-strewn lot.  They wrestled it down and hog-tied it while I brandished my camera with true touristic relish.  Then, the money shot: The cleric got down and pushed his knife through the cow's neck like it was made of warm cheese.  As the Western tourists stood breathlessly by, gallons of fresh blood pooled from the gash.  The cow licked its lips desperately as the men yanked its head back and the slot in its neck widened into a stump.  Worst of all was the gruesome sound of air wheezing from the severed tubes.

After that, they rounded us up and put us back on the bus for the airport.  So that was my Bangladesh.

On the flight to Bangkok, I read the new copy of AsiaWeek magazine, which is published by Time.  Inside, there was a photo of some Indonesian boys holding aloft two just-severed heads of their enemies.  You could see the horrified expressions on the dead men's faces, and the machete marks where the hacking got a little inaccurate.  The article talked about how their body parts were eaten by the victors. This is the Asia I was entering.

Oh, lord, I thought.  Turn this plane around.

THAILAND
(People per doctor: 4361. The US:387)

Bangkok was nothing like the past 6 months of my trip.  It was familiar.  Flowers growing in planters on the car parks.  Carpeting and ATMs.  Burger Kings and Dairy Queens. Big glassy buses. And that was just the airport!  My sense of culture shock was total--and wonderful!  With my arrival in Bangkok, I had traveled as far from East Coast U.S.A as I could--and it felt just like home.

Flat, corporate buildings, traffic. Overhead expressways in the middle of the city. It felt a lot like Miami, actually.

Hot hot hot.  Evil hot.  Over 6000 degrees daily.  Humidity like the bottom of a lake.  Walk two steps, curse religion.  You can do about two things a day before retreating to AC.  I wandered the city on April Fool's Day, listening to Rufus Wainwright (guess which song?) and dripping like the monsoon.

Lots of travelers detest Bangkok.  I was thrilled.  It's a city any American can feel at ease in--particularly after months in dust-pits like Nepal, India, and most of South Africa.  Here were banks, ornamental parks, cell phones, frivolous teenagers!  I KNEW these people! But most travelers hate Bangkok because all they know is the tourist ghetto: Kao San Road.  At first I couldn't put my finger on what made Kao San Road such a completely depressing experience.  My fellow travelers lined the bars and restaurants on the street, looking defeated.  All the men had strange beards and pretentious proclivities for jazz, and the women uncomfortably wore hair beads and tried to pretend they weren't spending Daddy's money.  But no one looked happy.  No one looked excited to be traveling.

Look a little harder, and you can see what's wrong.  A sign on the Bonny Guest House: "We do not welcome HEROIN use or possession in Guest House."  Beat the ground a little, and you find out about the Drug Tours of Northern Thailand.

Ten years ago, northern Thailand became a hip place to trek.  You go to a few villages, meet some locals, ride an elephant, raft on a river, and go home feeling adventurous.  Gradually, though, some villages such as Huay Nam Dung and Mae Wang began attracting the young and directionless with opium.  Today, almost half of all people who return from trekking in the north report being offered drugs--usually opium or pot, but sometimes heroin--and a significant number of guides are addicted.

Bangkok has its share of drugs, too, lots of them centered on Kao San.  Mainstream Bangkok doesn't acknowledge Kao San in its day to day life, even though it lies between the Royal Palace and the tourist shines of Wat Pho and the Wat of the Emerald Buddha.  In fact, the big English-language daily the Bangkok Post doesn't even conform to the standard spelling of the street, calling it Kaho Sarn.  Like many "tourist areas," including Thamel in Kathmandu and Paharganj in Delhi, Kao San is an enclave created for the service of a certain class of people--Western young people--and not a legitimately "local" area in most ways.  Yet this is where the vast majority of backpackers stay.  It's the reason, I think, Bangkok is so unpopular.  There is the odor of moral rot on this road, of cheap rooms and cheaper pleasures.

So I escaped, heading over the ferry-plied river to Bangkoknoi, which with Thonburi constituted the original part of town.  Cathy's friend Shane, a Coloradan who lives here, found it for us; it's kind of a residence inn. It makes the best pad thai and green papaya salad I've had in Thailand.  Plus coffee shakes, which I have sent to the room at night.  From Bangkoknoi, we could explore Bangkok proper across the river (just jump in a cab--they're cheap) or head out into the neighborhood to mingle with REAL locals.  Who, it turns out, live just like we do.

It's as Asian now as pagodas and wats (which are in glittering plenitude in Thailand).  The mall. Had a Pizza Hut and some Auntie Ann's pretzels.  We went to a movie at the multiplex. Unfortunately, the movie was "Life is Beautiful" and it was subtitled in Thai.  I ended up seeing "Pleasantville" yet again--subtitled in Thai.  Which was fun.  And before every movie, you have to rise during a filmreel of the Thai national anthem accompanied by shots of the King doing kingly things like accepting plaques, honorary degrees, and sitting next to Bill Clinton with a stern expression on his face.  They love the King here.  All over the main thoroughfares in town, they've embedded such p.r. shots of pseudo-events into giant golden seals, and erected them along the medians.  He wears tinted glasses, like the a.v. nerd in school did.  A lot of Kings wear those.

Traffic in Bangkok is beyond imagination.  You can wait in a seemingly interminable serpent of traffic for fully 15 minutes before the light turns!  I'm not joking.  The traffic lights are timed incredibly slowly to let as much traffic go as possible.  It can take a half hour to go three city blocks.  Luckily, I've got dollars, so it costs me pennies a serving.

Speaking of pennies a serving, the medical care is dirt cheap, too.  Strangely, at the tail end of my stay in Kathmandu, my heart developed a disconcerting habit of skipping beats.  Sometimes it would skip every second or third beat!  Naturally, despite all the web accessible wisdom that told me not to worry, I was slightly freaking out.  Finally, after a night of a jittery chest and tapping out my erratic beats for Chris, I decided to go to the emergency room in Thonburi.  They gave me an ID card and whisked me right through (I think I got preferential treatment because I'm white), but my heart wouldn't skip beats for the nice doctor.  It was like I had Michigan J. Frog in my chest.  Finally, they got a sweet woman to grease up the suction cups and put me on an EGK--which presented a challenge for her, since most of her patients are hairless as baby mole rats.  They gave the EGK, nothing showed up (which didn't stop the doctor from offering to prescribe medicine--how American!), and I was sent home.  The charge?  About 20 bucks American. (My heart has since fallen back into line on its own.)

I must admit, though, though it first-world comforts are not wasted on my tired traveler's body, I'm a bit unimpressed by Thailand.  There's nothing world-class about it, no sites of historical importance outside of its borders.  The food is good, but I've had pad thai on 8th Avenue and 17th Street that might be even better.  And, like I said, the Westerners here are sullen and too often here for the hedonism--be that drugs, alcohol, or the prepubescent looking Thai women.  It's so unadventurous.

With Chris, whom I met on Biman, I went up to Chiang Mai, near the border of Myanmar and Laos.  There, the hotel owners pretty much threatened to evict us if we didn't take a trek. I got a Thai massage, during which a two-foot-high Thai girl attempted to disengage my muscles from my skeletal system (1 hour, $2.25). We visited old wats and sweated twice our body weight in a half hour. We were accosted by a drug-addled middle-age hippie ("I'm low on bread, gov...") who spat bile at us when we refused to indulge his habit with our "bread." (SO many lost Westerners here! They make the vaccuum-brains in India look like Stephen frickin' Hawking)  Then we went down to Sukhothai, site of Thailand's capital 500 years ago and now the location for some beautiful ruins; we rode bikes around all day but my world didn't quake.  In Phitsanulok, we went to a restaurant on the river called Flying Vegetable.  If you order morning glory sauteed in garlic, they throw it up to a waiter who stands atop a parked van with a dinner plate, who catches it and serves it to you.  These are the tourist glories of Thailand if you don't want opium or kiddie porn.

We also hit Kanchanaburi, where the Japanese World War II forces killed thousands of Allied troops during the famous building of the Death Railway to Burma and the Bridge on the River Kwai.  The scene of such agonies is now a cheery tourist trap complete with floating restaurants and pineapple vendors.  I whistled that work ditty all day.  You can walk on the bridge if you want, and we did, but it didn't lead me to find God or anything like that.  The museum is an eerie freak zone with dummies of British POWs in the throes of torture and death.  And, in the spirit of remembering the dangers of extreme nationalism during war, the curators charge all non-Thai nationals twice as much to enter.  Irony, anyone?

The rest of the town is just a lot of power lines and car dealerships. Rurally, Thailand is moderately picturesque--dark brown wooden houses on stilts, old men on bicycles, a few of those lampshade straw hats here and there--but mostly it's hot and too full of boring buildings on dusty streets.  However you slice it, most of Thailand is like the ass end of Tampa.

But if you're coming from the West to here, I suppose it's more exotic than you've ever seen before.

CAMBODIA
(Life expectancy: 53 years.  People per telephone: 555.  The US: 1.3)

But Cambodia!  Oh, yes!  I haven't loved a country this much for a while now.  Cambodia is the best.

I have a lot to say about it and very little time.  What I knew about Cambodia I knew from childhood ("Eat your food--there are starving children in Cambodia") and the movie "The Killing Fields."  I also knew it could be dangerous to go.  Here are the basics: in the mid-to-late '70s, the Khmer Rouge regime wanted to create a country of peasant communist farmers, so anyone who didn't fit into that ideal were tortured and murdered.  Intellectuals, cripples, old people, artists, teachers, journalists (including Westerners)--all of them slaughtered. (Of the 1000 people employed by the French to restore a major archaeological site, only 2 survived.) The capital, Phnom Penh, was totally empty for four years while its residents were exterminated or forced to plant rice in the countryside.  By some estimates, like those of Yale University, about 2 million of Cambodia's 8 million residents were killed.  A full quarter of the people--gone.  There wasn't a person who was affected by that.  If you weren't killed, then you probably survived by working in a camp.  And this happened while the rest of us were watching "Mork and Mindy."  This is recent--anyone under 28 has some memory of it.  In the early '80s, arable land was destroyed as a tactical ploy to thwart Cambodia's enemies--and so after all that killing, then people started to starve.

The mastermind of such evil, Pol Pot, only died a little over a year ago while in hiding with his cronies in the jungles of western Cambodia. Today, the international community is trying to devise a way to try them for genocide.  Cambodia's courts are by all accounts incapable of justice, so right now a system is being invented.  It'll probably involve a multinational tribunal but some nervous nellies think a simple "truth commission," like the one South Africa had, is the answer.  But that wouldn't allow for justice, only the voicing of facts--and there's growing evidence that even South Africa won't be satisfied in the long run by its own "truth and reconciliation commission."

So that's what I knew.  And now you know, too.

On the twin-prop flight to Phnom Penh, I met Marijn, a Dutch woman my age who lives in Hong Kong.  Together, we explored Phnom Penh, of which several things surprised me.  One, it has the most exciting market culture of any Asian city outside of India.  Two, it has a burgeoning cafe culture to satisfy the Westerners who are only now beginning to trickle back in.  Marijn and I spent several lovely evenings by the Tonle Sap River, drinking Angkor beer and eating light suppers.  One hangout was the Foreign Correspondents Club, set up for Western journalists, and a cozy sunflower-colored room, the walls dappled with geckos, where it's easy to sit back in big chairs and watch the night go by. We also went to the first Internet Cafe in Cambodia, which opened a week before and still smelled of fresh paint.  The charge: a whopping $8 an hour.  (If you're Western here, you pay dollars for everything, and it's usually New York prices.)

Three, the people are extraordinarily nice.  It was our luck to be in Cambodia during the Khmer New Year, when everyone takes off work for three days of picnics and festivities.  Phnom Penh, just 20 years ago an echoing shell of a city, was alive with families celebrating.  The streets were buzzing with mopeds, each one balanced with grown-ups and heaps of their children like some kind of circus act. Monkeys entertained people from the rooves of vans, women deep fried whole baby chicks in skillets set up on the curb.  In front of the Wat Phnom, Marijn and I were both assaulted by giddy kids who smeared our faces with baby powder--another New Year's tradition.  It was a blast.

We got around town--and all of Cambodia--by moto.  You flag down a moped driver, hop on back, and thread precariously through potholes and giants oncoming trucks like a sperm finding an ovum.  I'll never forget (or I hope I never do) the feeling of me and Marijn squeezed on one of those things and racing along the river at 10:30 at night, full of a good dinner and surrounded by a celebrating city.

But much of Cambodia had a much more sinister edge.  One major goal of my visit was to see Tuol Sleng, or S-21, a former high school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a torture camp. Right near central Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng looks like a high school, right down to the central yard, exercise equipment, and three blocks of buildings with open-air hallways.  The rooms have the sort of checkerboard patterns a student could spend all day staring at.

Except it was left exactly as they found it.  One floor of former classrooms have a single bed in each one, along with some crude torture equipment--leg irons, gas cans--along with a grisly black-and-white photo of a victim as they were discovered.  When the Vietnamese came to liberate Phnom Penh in 1979, the KR quickly tortured and slaughtered 14 people and fled, leaving their bodies rotting on these beds, trapped by these chains.  Other rooms are lined with hundreds of photographs.  Like the Nazis, the KR was careful about record-keeping. Everyone who came through here was photographed. And almost everyone who came through here was eventually killed.  The faces were startling--boys, old men, women with babies, and babies themselves.  Some of the boys dared to look defiant, foolishly so, but most everyone else looked stunned. There were some Western faces, too, including one of an Australian journalist about my age.

For me, the worst part of the museum was a string of classrooms linked by crude slegehammered openings.  Each room had about a dozen cells made of flimsy bricks, the walls barely seven feet high, and most of the cells still had the leg irons inside.  It was dark, dusty, desperate--a kennel for the future dead.  I have been to many sites of death and historical despair, but I have never felt ghosts.  I felt something there.  I felt the muddy shifting forms of prisoners too weak to escape, their legs shifting in the gloom of the cells. On the wall were inscribed the mantras of emotional torture and the paranoid warnings of nascent regimes trying to demean its naysayers: "There is no smoke without fire."

Twice a year, monks are brought to S-21 to exorcise it of ghosts.  One ambassador's wife visited it around twilight and came back the next morning, in a frenzy because she'd been haunted all night.  Elsewhere were paintings of torture that had gone on there.  Inserting live insects under the skin, tearing out fingernails, hanging handcuffed men from the jungle-gym bars in the schoolyard.  And an entire wall of hollow-eyed human skulls shaped into a map of Cambodia. King Sihanouk recently suggested cremating the skulls to give the souls eternal rest.  He was rejected.

Seventeen thousand souls were snuffed out there.

Seeing Tuol Sleng won't be possible forever.  It's the last surviving torture camp of many.  And since there's no money for preservation, all of these things are decaying. As it is, it makes only $150-300 a month from visitors, at entry of $2 a head.  The KR regime isn't even taught in schools in Cambodia.  It wont be long before S-21 itself is just a story.

Likewise the famous Killing Fields, known as Cheung Ek.  The victims of S-21, if they survived interrogation, were taken there, in the rice paddies surrounding Phnom Penh, where they were killed and dumped in mass graves.  Usually, they were budgeoned or hacked to death--the KR didn't want to waste bullets.  Cheung Ek is dominated by a stupa, built in 1988, that holds shelf upon shelf of more human heads.  Skulls.  They're labelled by age, gender, cause of death.  Some have axe marks, others bits of blindfolds, on others moths are nesting.

Behind the stupa is where it ended for these people.  There are dozens of deep depressions in the earth where, so far, almost 9000 bodies have been exhumed.  And that's only a portion of the graves there.  The KR would bring victims to the edge of a pit piled with bodies, club them, and the new corpses would fall into the pit.  There are trees nearby, growing over the holes, where the regime would slam babies by the feet into the trunks.  In other spots, they'd toss toddlers into the air and catch them on the end of bayonets.

But the mere telling of such atrocities isn't even a fraction of the horror at the Killing Fields.  As you walk around these pits, you stumble on chunks of the victims' clothing, which still poke from the earth.  Your feet pass over bones half-buried in the earth: jawbones, legbones still swaddled in cloth, human teeth scattered like seeds.

Our guide was there when they unburied these people. "I was there.  I know.  Bad smell."  That's what he said.  He leapt into these pits as lithely as a dancer to show us bits of skull protruding from under a tree root.  Meanwhile, placid white cows grazed nearby on the grass nourished by the blood of thousands of innocents.

It's not the fate of the victims that scares me so much.  It's the torturers.  If they could do this, any of us could.

[[For more descriptions and some photographs of S-21 and Cheung Ek, go to my friend Andy Carvin's website--he visited a few years ago: http://edweb.gsn.org/seasia/killingfields.html ]]

I have much more to say about this.  But it has to wait.

Finally, after a nasty bout of food poisoning from a mysterious source (I barfed it up and felt refreshed), we went to Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia.  It's the site of Angkor, a series of cities a millennium old.  They were erected by the sophisticated Khmer society, and once sprawled across the countryside; today, only the stone structures remain.  To say that Angkor is large is an understatement; you can travel for an hour and still not go end to end.

It's real Indiana Jones territory--temple after temple, overtaken by the jungle, crushed under the slow embrace of fig trees and time.

I hired a moto driver to serve as a guide (his name was Visal), and he ferried me around the enormous spread of jungle, from ruin to ruin, as I trailed a steady stream of sweat.  Each area had its own personality: Bayon has over 50 towers carved with more than 200 giant grinning faces; walking amongst them felt like exploring a magnificent chessboard.  Ta Phrom is a huge compound, once home to over 9000 people, but now clogged with trees and ruled by the steady chirp of birds.  You can climb its rubble to stand high in the trees on its stone rooves. Angkor Wat is a magnificent monument of such colossal size and expansive artistry that you can walk its grounds and climb its towers for weeks and still only scratch the surface. Its towers are also the icon of Cambodia; it's on the flag.

Because it was New Year, it seemed as if all of Cambodia turned out at Angkor.  Marijn and I were usually the only white people, and some of the natives were from remote villages and had never even seen Angkor Wat, let alone Westerners.  Wherever we stood, we attracted a crowd of staring people.  Some of them were so bold as to reach out and touch us, to see if we were real.  It was encouraging to see them so interested in us, and to see them so interested in visiting the mark of their national heritage.

I've been to a number of abandoned cities now, but Angkor Wat, along with Petra in Jordan, ranks at the top.  I have rarely had the feeling of discovery and exhilaration--and imagination--that I had as I roamed from ruin to ruin, peering into ancient shrines, standing eye-to-eye with nymphs carved by hands that worked 1000 years ago.

Just a few years ago, Western tourists were being killed here--in 1994, at Bantrey Srei, 25 km northeast of Angkor, one American woman was shot when her armed guards fled. Today, you don't even have to have guards.  In fact, I went to Bantrey Srei, which was a like a temple of delicately carved gingerbread.  And clogged with cheery Cambodians out with their families for the holiday weekend.  Lining each other up for family snapshots.  Just two years ago, I would have been shot in the head if I'd been seen here.  Today, it was a party, and everyone gathered around me to make friends.  Now, the only danger I was in was of being doused by water by celebrating children.

But the day was even more symbolic. It was April 17th--the 24th anniversary of Day Zero, when the Khmer Rouge came to power and cleaned out the cities, condemning its country to cultural suicide. It's a date inscribed with blood in the history of Cambodia, and one which everyone there marks as the Day One of the country's hell.

Such are the shifting sands of politics here. Visal and I saddled up the moto, and puttered happily off to see the next ruin.

Love, Jason

Day: 329  Countries: 29

PS Today I'm off to the island paradise of Ko Lanta in Southern Thailand, then Malaysia (not sure where--the jungle?) and Singapore.  I'll be in Hong Kong on the 8th of May.
 

--- Right now I'm in: Bangkok, Thailand