Backpacking, Backtracking

We inched along the riverside boulevard of downtown Phnom Penh, our tuk-tuk driver hugging hte curb and glancing back at us impatiently. The night breeze, carrying faint whiffs of garbage and curry, lapped gently at our clothes. Johnny rolled a cigarette, unperturbed by the wind, stray strands of tobacco floating lazily into the air. If you're traveling slow enough to roll cigarettes, you're traveling too slow. "This isn't exactly how I remember it," I muttered as the driver sighed and pulled over for the nth time. So much for a relaxing nighttime cruise.

Cambodia seemed easier the first time around. I visited the country in 2010 with my friend Jeff on our first excursion out of Korea. We hit the main sights - the Choeung Ek Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, the Angkor temples of Siem Reap, the beaches of Sihanoukville. This time, our itinerary looked much the same. Which worried me.

My first trip to Cambodia was, and still might be, the greatest travel experience of my life. The things I saw, heard, and tasted left an impact on me that is impossible to explain without resorting to superlative-ridden cliches. It cemented one of my closest friendships. It was my first personal encounter with the tragedies and marvels of human history. It reintroduced me to the culinary delights of seafood. In short, it set the bar ridiculously high.

So high, in fact, that I wasn't all that keen on returning. When the Tet New Year rolled around, Cambodia didn't make my list of places to see. First I wanted to go to Burma. When money and visa concerns squashed that plan, I decided to take a solo bike trip around Vietnam and explore some of the vast and mysterious country I now call home. That actually sounded like a perfect plan, until I remember that motorbikes suffer dents, punctures, and other nasty things on long rides. I couldn't subject my pretty little '67 to that road torture - vanity won out. I briefly considered a diving trip to the Philippines, but the whale sharks weren't in town. So it was back to Cambodia in the end.

As we clambered onto the bus on Pham Ngu Lau Street, our eyes bleary in the early morning haze, I felt a nervous pang. I guess I was afraid Cambodia wouldn't live up to my memories; or worse, that they'd somehow be tarnished. The whole excursion felt like a return to the site of your greatest first date. Years later. With a different girl. The opportunities for a massive letdown seemed endless.

In one sense, my fears turned out to be entirely reasonable and well-founded. The Cambodia I saw bore very little resemblance to the place I'd quietly cherished for years. The food was more expensive, the tourist bars had louder stereos, even the sand flies felt  malevolently aggressive. At times I felt like my grandfather complaining about 'the world today': "Used to be, when a man wanted a coconut, …."

Yet there was something undeniably relaxing about retracing my steps. I didn't feel the need to photograph every temple, or frantically scramble through sites in a vain effort to see it all, or meticulously record every meal eaten over the course of ten days. The novelty might have been gone, but so was the pressure. For the first time since I arrived in Asia, I wasn't traveling. I was vacationing.

And my inner tourist loved every minute of it.

I ate more ice cream than a fat 12 year old. I played mini-golf for the first time since the Backstreet Boys were cool and 'The Simpsons' was funny. I bought two pairs of identical sunglasses and zero traditional trinkets. I wore a 'Same Same But Different' tanktop with only the faintest sense of irony. I had tacos, pizza (several times) and seafood barbecues without twinges of guilt at skipping the amok. I called all the girls 'darlin'' and all the guys 'brother'. And it was actually kind of nice, to be honest.

I still did the things that Nick-travel usually entails. I read the confessions of Khmer Rouge Cadres and foreign 'spies' at the Tuol Sleng secret prison. I crouched in doorways and gaped at the gnarly tree-tentacles slowly swallowing Ta Prohm. I went scuba diving and tanned on the sundecks of boat ferries while contemplating the nature of human experience.

Much to my surprise, the two Nicks managed to coexist quite peacefully.

In the anthology Best American Travel Writing 2010, Peter Jon Lindberg wrote an excellent piece titled 'In Defense of Tourism'. His basic argument was that travel snobbery accomplishes little beyond depriving its adherents of some genuinely cool experiences. Tourist traps aren't (necessarily) mere evil, manipulative ploys to squeeze extra dollars out of foolish holidaymakers. There's nothing inherently bad about following the herd - sometimes they're on their way to awesome stuff.

I still prefer a more 'authentic' brand of traveling. There were moments in Cambodia that felt decidedly hedonistic, and my enjoyment was tempered by the unsettling feeling that I had betrayed whatever traveler's principles I once had. Because I like being the only foreigner on the bus, and eating at places without English menus, and using the squatter toliets at long-haul rest stops*. However, I like to imagine that going back to Cambodia did wonders for my tendency to get pretentious and judgmental when traveling. Maybe, having experienced this new perspective, I'll stop mean-mugging people as they walk out of McDonald's and hide my disdain for leathery old English bargain hunters a bit better. It's nice to think that I've become a more tolerant and compassionate traveler.

*One of those claims is a bold-faced lie. 

Who knows if this will actually hold true the next time I hit the road? Old habits are hard to break for the recovering neurotic. But it's equally hard to forget some things once they pass through the mind. And I've learned that there are some fundamental differences between backpacking for months on end and taking a quick holiday. I've done both, and I can appreciate their different appeals. The reasons for traveling are as different as the people standing in front of you at the travel agent, and it's ridiculous to expect everyone to have the same priorities or desires. When it comes time for the next long journey, I hope to carry a little less elitism in my pack. Which will be a reasonably sized carry-on, of course, because the quality of a person's character is inversely related to the quantity of their luggage.

Whoops.

As for backtracking, I'm now cautiously in favor of it. Even though we visited the same cities on each trip, I saw two very different Cambodias. It was exciting to experience all the strange and beautiful things that magically appear when you put down the camera and leave Lonely Planet at home. I enjoyed the present moment, and didn't worry about what I might be missing. What a change from the usual state of affairs… It was humbling to realize that visiting a place and actually knowing it are two radically different things.You might have been there, done that - but 'that' is always changing, and 'there' sometimes does, too.

And, as much as my inner hipster might hate to admit it, I was delighted to find that mini-golf still totally kicks ass.

For My Sister

This is a letter to my sister. I've actually written her quite a few letters lately for several reasons. First, she recently graduated from university. I'm fairly certain 95% of all letters written today are addressed to this demographic. Recent grads are in obvious need of advice and the writer is just the person to give it, using fascinating anecdotes from their own lives to clarify key points. The second, and more important reason, was that she wanted to live abroad.

I have lived abroad for about two and a half years now, so I did have some value as a life coach. In her responses, she told me about the different options she was juggling. Some of them were mundane (working in a local school district as a sub) and others were exotic. She was offered assignments for the Peace Corps to work in countries most people couldn't find on a map. I had to Google 'Micronesia' in order to convince one friend that it was in fact a real place.

She ultimately decided on teaching English in Korea I spent my first two years abroad there, and it was convenient that she chose to move to a place where I still have many close friends. This was a place about which I could actually give practical advice. I made some suggestions on what to pack and promised to have friends get in contact with her when she arrives.

But I couldn't give her advice about the things that really matter. I still don't think I can, because I don't know how to express the ideas clearly. If I tried now, I think it would sound patronizing and simplistic. She wouldn't listen to that advice, and it wouldn't do her any good if she did.

I can't give her the real advice because she needs to experience life as an expatriate for herself. It's better that way. She needs to spend her own nights sleeping in hammocks on the balcony above a techno bar. She needs to befriend her own neighborhood coffee lady. She needs to do all of the idiosyncratic yet seemingly ordinary things that define life abroad. She needs to look through her own eyes at the world around her and think, 'Whoa, that's awesome.'

This is exciting. I think she is going to have some incredible adventures and make some unbelievably stupid mistakes. I'm looking forward to hearing the stories of both. I hope that I'll be able to refrain from judgement or jealousy.

For most of her high school and early university years, I was basically an absentee brother. I provided none of the support or guidance than a younger sister should get from her older brother. Conversations with her were terse, infrequent, and generally critical. I was a complete asshole.

Only after moving to Korea was this cycle really broken. From a distance, I could relate to her more easily. Enough of my self-absorption melted away that I could actually take an interest in her life. Which was great, because she turned out to be a pretty damn interesting person.

She double-majored in dance and education, worked numerous part-time jobs, and juggled a social schedule of obligations that would have left me passed out in exhaustion within a week. She went to festivals and took impromptu road trips. She studied abroad in Greece. She finally developed decent taste in music and film (in some areas at least). I learned all this and realized she had become a real person.

My god, am I proud of this person. When I visited the U.S. for my mother's surprise birthday party, I was amazed that my little sister was…well, an adult. She was responsible, thoughtful, caring and intelligent. She organized events and coordinated preparations and did the dishes afterwards. She knew how to talk to people, how to handle social situations, how to navigate the complex maze of familial relationships that offers so many opportunities for disaster. The girl knew her shit.

Which makes me glad as she gets ready to move to Korea. I know she'll get lost, mistakenly order disgusting food, maybe hop on the wrong train one morning and wake up hours from home and terribly hungover from a long night of partying. I know these things will happen to her because they happen to everyone. But I know she'll be OK. She'll survive.

Even though I know my sister is a competent and responsible adult, a part of my brain is hardwired for older brother over-protectiveness. I want to tell her to avoid the nightclubs of Itaewon because most of the dudes there are sleazy douchebags. Or to never drink somek because somebody always add too much soju and things get ugly fast. I want to warn her about lecherous old Korean ajussis and their collective assumption that all blonde foreigners are Russian prostitutes. I want to tell her to never trust a taxi driver at 3am. It'd be nice to convince her that visiting Vang Vieng (for the tubing) or Koh Phagnan (for the Full Moon Party) would be a terrible idea. That over-protective part of me is a compulsive buzzkill.

But I'm not going to do it. That's not fair to her. I hope that she does whatever the hell she wants to do (even if I don't always want to hear about it - just like Mom) and learns her own limits. And then maybe pshes them just a bit, because that's the best part of living in Asia. Your comfort zone expands so far it encompasses eating insect larva, guzzling backyard moonshine, sleeping on park benches or reasonably clean sidewalks, and being in most train stations.

She's going to do great in Asia, and I'm excited for her. She'll adapt and thrive, which is just what she does. She'll make dozens of new friends (some of them life-long, as the brochures say) and try hundreds of new things. She'll be independent and resourceful. She'll discover some wild and bizarre truths about life.

She's going to do it her own way, at her own pace, with her own style. I don't want to push any of my own preconceptions or biases on her. As her Korean adventure begins, I think this is the most useful thing I can share with her:

Congratulations on making the jump to Asia - don't worry about the visa stuff. It'll all work out fine. The universe usually does.

I'm your older brother, Lizzie, and I love you very much. Thank you for being patient and forgiving when I didn't show it. You have grown up to be an incredible young woman, and I'm proud of you. You've accomplished some remarkable things and you're going to accomplish a lot more before you're through. I can't wait to see the ways you'll make the world more beautiful.

I'm always here for you. When you want to talk, I'll listen. And when you want to listen, I''ll talk. Always confidentially, usually coherently. You can always count on me to bail you out of a jam, no questions asked. Please don't pull that card too ften. You can count on me to be your biggest cheerleader and supporter. Never feel like you are alone - if you need me, I'll be there. That's why God invented credit cards and airplanes.

I'll leave you with my favorite cliched lines from my favorite cliched book for young adventurers:

You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself

any direction you choose.

The world is yours, Liz.

Love,
Your older brother 

 

 

 

They Have Microbes in Paradise?

The air conditioner of our ancient Chinese bus wheezed grumpily, chasing away the noxious hot air with noxious, slightly cooler air. A surly Khmer bus driver climbed aboard and fiddled with the VCD player. Soon the sounds of 'Gangnam Style' filled the bus - not the original version, mind you, but a cover featuring a female singer who understood neither pitch, tone nor Korean. The small boy sitting behind me laughed delightedly. I have never been to close to infanticide.

Only sixteen more hours to go.

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Several days ago I returned from Cambodia. It is a beautiful country, if you ignore the piles of trash, tin-roofed shanties, and land-mine warning signs which remind you that the Khmer Rouge really, really sucked at governing. Honest. Parts of it look like this:

This is where I spent the last few days of my trip to Cambodia - on the sandy shores of Koh Rong and Otres Beach. The sparkling clear water gives you the inescapable feeling that God got stoned one afternoon and decided to just start Photoshopping shit. A stroll along the beach exfoliates better than the pumice-wielding hands of a thousand old Asian ladies. There are dune buggies and fireshows and seafood BBQs and cabana massages. There are happy pizzas, happy shakes, happy brownies, and happy enemas (if you know whom to ask). It is the perfect place to 'relax', 'chill out', 'take a break', or 'unwind'. It is an environment in which, as David Foster Wallace once noted, you are practically obligated to have a wonderful time.

I had plenty of time to consider this as I lay curled in the fetal position, searching for the elusive center of my papasan chair and trying not to vomit at the sight of another hairy old European wolfing down his bangers n' mash.

We travel to places such as these for one motive, and one motive alone - the pursuit of pleasure. And there is a large and very diligent team of researchers who work tirelessly to discover new pleasures we haven't even considered yet, but will happily pay money to experience (provided the brochure is colorful and we don't have to wake up too early). As human beings we teem with desires, many of which go unmet on a daily basis. So it's perfectly understandable that we indulge the living hell out of ourselves while on vacation - after all, we deserve it. But what happens when paradise can no longer offer us pleasure?

The Fish

It is about 10:00 pm, and I'm starting to feel a bit queasy. Nevertheless, I convince my Irish friend to join me for seafood barbecue a few hundred meters down the beach. I am a recent convert to seafood, which makes me feel more cosmopolitan and cultured. So every opportunity for fresh fish must be seized immediately, like the handbag of an unsuspecting tourist on the streets of Saigon. It proves my street cred.

We settle on the 'Malin', which I assume is supposed to mean 'Marlin'. I am excited to eat a fish that is also the mascot of a professional American baseball team. In any case, the fish sets in motion a Rube Goldberg series of events that begins with mild hallucinations, proceeds to severe nausea, and culminates with me lying on a bench with my hands folded across my abdomen, staring sadly into the night sky like Ferris Bueller's buzz-killing best friend. After that it all went blank until...

The House Music

House music is , objectively, the shittiest music ever made by human beings. I use 'house' as a general term to encompass trance, dub, dubstep, industrial, art-tec, and every other form of shitty music which involves more switchboards than instruments. No other form of music has ever managed to be so vacuous, repetitive, and singularly mind-numbing than house. Ever asked a Hooter's waitress to explain her thoughts on healthcare reform? That is house music, with more imaginative vocals.

From midnight until 6:00am, the house music blared on. It blared and blared, each indescribably awful song blending seamlessly into the next. It blared like a dying mule with its hooves attached to bass drums, occasionally offering a moment of blissful silence before another crescendo of pointless noise. I tried to soothe my rage with fantasies of supplying all those dancing idiots with heaps of brown acid.

The Day After

Here is a brief list of the minor catastrophes that occurred the next day:

1) All the buses back to Vietnam were booked solid.

2) Our beachfront bungalow kicked us out.

3) My attempt to eat half a baguette resulted in some truly spectacular projectile vomiting all over the neatly trimmed shrubbery of a very nice German couple. This is the PG-13 version of the story. The unabridged version would ensure that nobody would ever invite me to their house parties again.

What I Learned

Before 'The Fish', I had enjoyed a very pleasant and traditional backpacker's holiday. To borrow PADI's slogan -  I went places, met people, and did things. All of this in the name of pleasure; not necessarily in a greedy sense, but perhaps opportunistic. How often does one have the chance to play miniature golf on a course that looks like Angkor Wat?

Once I was sick, though, none of that mattered much anymore. Simply put, I had a desire for which there was no immediately available pleasure-remedy. This is an odd phenomenon in paradise. Happiness is always available, for a price (cheaper if you sign up with a group of four). In a land of hedonism, I was an unwilling ascetic.

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All I really wanted was to lay my head in her lap, to hear her softly say that everything will be alright, and to complain about the sand in my trunks.

But paradise can't offer that.

A Foreigner's Guide to Tet

Nobody warned me that the New Year would get off to such an expensive start.

Over the past week, I've spent more on Choco Pies, sugary beverages, and assorted snack foods than I will (hopefully) spend in the rest of the year. I've also stuffed ungodly sums of money into shiny red envelopes, which are then distributed to people who have 'earned' it through friendship, helpfulness, or simple proximity. This is all done for the sake of Tet, which remains a mysterious and amorphous concept to me. I've asked at least a dozen people to describe various aspects of Tet - the food, the music, the traditions, even the exact dates. Each time I receive a slightly different answer. It is obviously an important event, yet nobody knows how to explain it. I feel like a child asking adults where babies come from.

Without a solid definition of Tet to help my understanding, I'm forced to rely on personal observations and secondhand anecdotes. This is admittedly an inexact science, though it can be quite interesting (like phrenology or dianetics).

The most striking evidence of Tet's imminence is the sudden proliferation of red in the city. Seemingly overnight, bright red Party banners are draped from every street light and sign post. There are also innumerable kiosks selling Vietnamese flags, lucky dreamcatchers, and every sort of hangable celebratory paraphernalia all in brilliant hues of red and gold.

Certain areas of the city are transformed into stunning carnivals of light. Near the great Opera House in District 1, a massive construction project has been underway for at least a week. Slowly but surely, the setting for a vast celebration is taking form. The gentle curves of bamboo cuts and circular traditional fishing boats create the illusion of an ancient Vietnamese village in the city center, contrasting sharply with the Gucci boutiques and high-end restaurants just across the street. The effect is impressive - the past born again into the present, with beverages and souvenirs available for purchase.

Closer to home, on the main artery of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, a gorgeous art exhibition forms every night on the crowded sidewalks. People mill around and gawk at the brilliant apricot flowers, landscape paintings, and ceremonial doodads, all bathed in soft golden lights that fill me with intense impressions of grace, antiquity, peace and beauty. Until I nearly collide with the 70-year old woman in front of me, who is also captivated by the scene.

Which segues nicely into my next point: chiefly that during Tet the driving in Saigon is a hellish nightmare that would make the Dalai Lama tear his own hair out, if he had any left. At all hours of the day the streets are choked with motorbikes, even by the city's usual standards of congestion. Laden with gifts, food, and multiple passengers, the drivers are completely oblivious to their surroundings (and safety). And those carrying incredible burdens are the least of my concerns - on at least four occasions I have seen old men (barely sober enough to stand up) hop on their motorbikes and tear down the street, too hopelessly drunk to consider a helmet or the possible repercussions of their irresponsible actions.

The drunks aren't the only jolly ones. Many of the local vendors get into the spirit by arbitrarily raising their prices to cover the massive expenditures of such a lengthy and elaborate holiday. A few days ago I stopped to buy a cafe da from my neighborhood cart-barista. When I offered him the customary 10,000 dong, he informed me that the new price was 20,000 dong. When I asked for an explanation, he simply replied, "Tet." Fair enough, though that iced coffee tasted mighty sour (no small feat for a beverage that is roughly 70% pure sugar).

Those merchants not involved in gratuitous price gouging sometimes seem to disappear altogether. The friendly old woman who sells me fresh fruit in the morning has been AWOL for days, putting me in the uncomfortable position of having to find alternative sources of pineapple and, horror of horrors, cutting it myself. Other merchants are present in body but not spirit. When I stopped at the local mechanic to fix my horn (it hasn't worked for days, reducing me to screaming obscenities at the various taxis and motorbikes who nearly kill me every day), he cheerfully informed me through pantomime that he was too busy getting drunk with his friends to work on my bike. It was 11:00 in the morning.

From an expat's perspective, then, Tet can be visualized best as a gaily decorated wrecking ball that smashes apart one's comfortable daily routine while blasting ABBA's 'Happy New Year' from its regrettably potent speakers (why a wrecking ball would have speakers is unclear, but I needed to slip in a reference to that singularly ubiquitous and awful song).

I had experienced Lunar New Year twice before in Korea, where it is known as Seolnal. The Koreans also had red lanterns and fruit baskets and horrendous traffic. Having said that, there is no comparison with the scale and pervasive influence of Tet. It is, as Mark Twain once said, the difference between lightning and lightning bugs.

I am leaving Saigon tomorrow for the relative peace and serenity of Cambodia, surely the first time those words have been written. I will miss the eventual exodus of Saigon's population that I have been assured takes place every year during Tet. I'm still skeptical that the streets will ever be calm again. I will depart without any substantial understanding of the holiday, save for the confirmation that it is often more mystifying to know a little about something than nothing at all.