Crash

The view from our 'Hotel Crazy Guy' It's amazing at all times of the day, but especially at Sunset. Labuanbajo, Flores.

I am on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Everyone stares at me, no matter where I go.

There is a crazy (or possibly just retarded) 21 year old handcuffed to a bed in the house next to our hotel who makes 'da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da' noises all day and into the night continuously.

It's very hard to arrange transportation and I never seem to know what is going on.

We all spent a few days viewing Komodo dragons and snorkeling in some of the most wonderful waters I have seen. We took leave of Lauren, Zubeyir and Lindsay who were bound for Bali and thought we would hire a car to get across the island. With five of us, it seemed like a reasonable proposition.

Of course, I have noticed a negative correlation with reasonable propositions and occurrence of the phrase 'not possible' wherever I go in the world. And this is a not possible part of the world.

Me and my sister with some pretty lazy Komodo Dragons. Not that I am being judgmental...

We bargained for a car and driver for the next week. One deal came together then fell apart. One driver demanded all $200 for the week upfront. No Way. Another man kept injecting himself into every attempted transaction until my sister sent him away because when he was around, everything seemed worse. Finally we struck a deal with a driver, Hermans to take us and we were off.

Flores, like much of Indonesia is volcanic- really recently volcanic in fact. Time has not had the chance to flatten out the youthful exuberance of a geologically active island. Roads are narrow, steep and winding all at once. Our diminutive driver could not see over the irresponsibly placed strip of tinting that covered the bottom third of the windshield and thus we had many hair raising brushes with the mountain as night fell and visibility reduced to the domain of pathetic. At this point, you might expect that I tell you we had an accident. I was expecting that myself, but no, it was not to be until later.

Creepy shrine-like thing of Komodo Dragon leftovers. (Deer and Monkey). Rinca Island.

Instead, we got to our hotel safely and checked in for the night. It was not until the next afternoon, just minutes after lunch that the course of events would change for the real worse.

It is amazing to take a moment- an instant in time- and freeze it in your mind, rewinding it and seeing just how easily things could have been different. It's so simple that we could have stopped to buy a soda at a store, or left behind something at a stop and gone back for it. Or even paying the bill with exact change and getting on the road again an half minute earlier. Any one of these, or an one of an infinite number of other changes to time would have prevented us from colliding with a motorbike carrying two Indonesian men and a sack of rice. If almost anything had been different, I would not have looked down at my ipod and felt the crush of metal and plastic only an instant later. If I had just gone to the bathroom, we would not have loaded the delirious man with a huge patch flesh hanging from his leg into our car to take him back to the clinic 2 km away.

It was not our driver's fault. He was on the correct side of the road, taking the left turn around the corner slowly. It was just pure bad luck that the guy on the motor scooter hit us, but it really changed lives. We got the two damaged men to the clinic and the doctor on call sewed the enormous wound up. Of course, no effort was taken to repair what must have been serious damage to the muscles and ligaments that will ultimately cripple the man- there just aren't resources for that or the expertise on this island.

At the clinic, people started to gather. We are in a town where there is not much to do, so all the people doing all that nothing gravitated to the clinic grounds. At first it was 10, then 20, then 30 then it was 50 or 60 people all huddled around us staring.

Just staring.

It was creepy in a way that I don't think I can explain to someone who has not seen it. We moved to our scratched hired car to retrieve our bags. They followed us, silently, without expression. We decided it would be best to get out of town. We left on the next bus that came through town and were glad to be rid of the whole mess.

Chapter 2.

One of the deal-clinchers for my sister in deciding to come to Indonesia as opposed to somewhere else was a particularly fabulous volcano with three lakes at the summit, each a different color. So it was to Kelimutu that we continued on towards.

I get to play dress up for reasons that are not clear to me with a hawker at the summit of Kelimutu just after sunrise.

Sorry if the rest of the story is not so dramatic. We ended up at the lovely town of Moni and went to the top of a truly magnificent volcano at 4:30 in the morning to catch yet another mountaintop sunrise.

One of the lakes of Kelimutu. Just beyond this lake is a darker green one. The pH is an incredible .37 (extremely acidic). In case that doesn't mean anything to you, this lake is probably about like condensed battery acid. It would kill anyone who got in it.

Lousy Thieving....

So, I am a bit bummed out because for the first time in all of my travels, I was robbed of something other than a decoy wallet.
Good news is, it wasn't irreplaceable. Bad news is, the theft included my computer's power cord. (WTF?)
This is troubling because at the moment, I am precisely in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia, closer to Australia than I am to Jakarta- closer to timelessness than the information age- and certainly nowhere near a Mac store. Now I have an extremely well designed, state of the art, 3.6 pound $1000 backpack ballast.
I know it might seem like, hey man, you are at the beach, you should just chill out! Why don't you go to Komodo Island and see some giant reptiles? Well, I will do that, but dammit, I want to use photoshop...
grumble grumble
Being gone this long, I realize that I really like having a couple of things that make anyplace home for me, and the computer was a big part of that.

Ok, aside from the temporary loss in faith in humanity that is inevitable from being robbed, I am happy because I am with a huge crew- Paula, Arturo, Alex (my sister) Lindsay and Lauren Harrell, Julie, and Zubeyir. It's pretty sweet to have such a big crew. Aside from causing huge crowds of very bored locals to form around us whenever we go anywhere with backpacks, it's entertaining to have so many friends around. I don't really know how it worked out this way, but I am glad that it did!

Sweet Mantis Video

Above: A praying mantis chows down on a beetle. Caught on tape!

I am in KL, Malaysia right now on my way to Indonesia to see my sister and a bunch of friends. I expect to visit among other things, the Komodo Island (and its famed Komodo Dragon monitor lizards), volcanoes and additional sweet beaches. But until then, I am in Kuala Lumpur, which is arguably the world's largest shopping complex. For anyone who maintains the bizarre notion that conspicuous consumption is a western or American failing, please take note: you have seen nothing until you have seen KL.

It's actually disgusting, and I have been to Beverly Hills.

I mean, how many Cartiers does one need? Apparently quite a lot, and not only that, one needs access to such fineries at multiple locations within walking distance of one another. On a related side note, I think that Luis Vuitton is really pretty ugly stuff.

Anyway, please enjoy this sweet Praying Mantis video that I shot the other night in Thailand outside my room.

Are you disappointed?

Why be sad about tiny images? Click above to see the Himalayas in all their glory!

Something that I am not completely excited about in Blogger (the site you are on right now) is that my sweet travel photos are tiny....

Well, if you ever want to see more detail, just click on the picture and make it big! Easy as 1-2..

Burma and the Water Festival

A street kid who hung around our guesthouse. He didn't beg really, but would accompany us out and sometimes we would buy him food.

Burma is the sort of place that, upon arrival, you are left with the feeling that you have made a mistake. The error is not one of having come there, but one of having not come there sooner and for long enough. I was feeling pinched for time in the timeless Yangon upon arrival with three weeks still to go.

A view of some of the temples of Bagan (more on this later)

Although the internet and TV have finally (and pretty recently) come to this very isolated country, it still maintains its own pace and time in the universe. At times, it is perfectly in sync with the rest of the world and at others I feel as if I am in a Rudyard Kipling novel. DVDs are sold by the truckload in the market right next to a man who polishes brass by hand on a cloth on the sidewalk. My beard has grown long and neglected, so I pop into a dirt-floor barber’s shop (which is directly across from the Samsung showroom filled with new flatscreen TVs and freezers) and treat myself to a 20-cent trim. The young male barber works cleanly and precisely with his scissors, frequently snip-snipping them for added flourish when they are nowhere near my beard, and makes me perfect in the length of two Celine Dion songs.

Later, when I was preparing to leave the country, I stop by again to get spruced up. The same young man trims me, but this time the power is out and a storm is coming. While he works by the light of a dim LED desklamp with hand-operated antique trimmers, the rain kicks up. I don't notice at first due to the dim conditions, but water is flowing into- no, through- the shop. The sewer has overflowed somewhere deeper in the block of buildings and now a small river is escaping to the street right through the lean-to shop. Cockroachs, mosquitos and some some alarmingly large red centipedes come up from somewhere below my feet to avoid the rising black water to seek shelter on the wall in front of me. The barber works on, ankle deep in the streaming tributary. He gets me a stool to put my feet on. He finishes and I pay my 20 cents, grudgingly dropping my feet into the filthy torrent. I walk home in the rain because I just want to get clean.

A tin-roof Buddhist monastery where we slept.

When I was doing a bit of research on Burma in Bangkok to prepare for our arrival, I saw that the weather forecast for Mandalay was to top 107 degrees. Slightly concerned by this fact, I packed as little as possible in my bag so that at least I wouldn’t have too much to lug around in Bikram-yoga heat. I was in for a pleasant surprise when we arrived in Burma- the Burmese New Year was about to begin. Normally I think festivals are over rated. Either you get some sappy made-for-tourists ethnic dance routine or, frankly, you (the common tourist) are not invited into the Byzantine rituals of the locale. This is certainly not the case in Burma. New Year is one part street party, one part music festival and one part water park. Little boys, young women, old men- everyone produces buckets of water to dump on everyone else. Southeast Asia knows a thing or two about fantastic quantities of water from above, so believe me when I say the days are wet. The idea is that it cleans the bad luck of the past year, but I less than secretly suspect it has a lot more to do with just having a good time. After all, if water is to wash away bad luck, what is all of the whiskey for?

Arturo takes a break from all the action in Burma at a tea shop. Ok, it's true, we spent at least half of our waking hours in tea shops...

Everyone is invited (a little too enthusiastically, sometimes) and if it is a show for tourists, it would have to go down as the most ingeniously executed tourist show of all time for we foreigners, as always, are few and far between in Burma.

Arturo asked the question: ‘Where is the line between homosexuality and simple aggressive fun?’ I still don't know the answer to that one. In their enthusiasm, many elated Burmese guys pull us by the wrists into the street, in front of the stage where bands played and dozens of volunteers spray endless quantities of water on the parading traffic and revelers. We would dance there in strange waltzes, jigs and water stomping dances in the inches-deep accumulated water in the streets. If I could describe Burmese music, it would be like this: Burma is a country that has lost the words to a comprehensive collection of American hit songs from the past 4 decades and is perfectly happy to just make them up. Nearly every song is familiar, but sung in Burmese and many people you talk to don’t even realize that these are not the originals.

Strangely, for a country strongly affected by the monsoons, Burma's roads love becoming small lakes.

As foreigners, we are almost like visiting dignitaries and manage to get into all the VIP water spraying stations. We get up on the large stage and are handed firehoses. I open it up on the dancers and open top trucks and jeeps bursting with people which are trawling the grand avenue in front of us. It is a serious amount of water and joining me are dozens of others dowsing the revelers below as the band plays on to our left. A helmeted police officer tries to make sense of the scene and direct traffic to move along as there is a jam waiting to be sprayed for at least an hour behind them. It is so crowded that even though the street is six lanes across plus a generous median, I have difficulty passing through.

Miles of smiles- People are really happy about the water festival. I mean it.

At six pm, the festivities promptly draw to a close for the day. This is fine by me, since the guys are getting a little drunk and rowdy. We start walking back to the hotel and a young boy, perhaps five years old, spots me. He is holding a jug of water, and I am holding nothing except a towering stature over him. He starts toward me with the jug, and playfully, I start toward him with mock bravado. I lunge straight for him with my arms high above my head. The kid howls and diverts off to the side with a comical timing, I could not have scripted something better. A policeman looking on cracks a smile and reveals his red and deeply rotted betel nut stained teeth.

Cambodia

Clothes unearthed form a mass grace at the killing fields near Phnom Penh

My abbreviated loop from Laos through Vietnam and back to Thailand has brought me necessarily through Cambodia. I am not here for long.

In the capital of Phnom Penh, my little backpacker ghetto du jour is situated along what I will call a “little lake,” for lack of a better term (though a better term might be swamp). It’s pretty laid-back, with wooden guesthouses hanging above the mosquito-laden waters. It’s not a Thai paradise beach, but it is far more relaxing than one would expect from an Asian capital.

In my little world on the lakeside, everyone I meet on the street has exactly three things to offer me - a room, a ride on their scooter, or drugs. The first two of these things are usually said out loud, the last one under their breath as I pass by. I walk to breakfast and someone from behind me hisses “you looking for something?” At nine in the morning, I assure my new ten-step escort that the most exotic thing I am searching for is a mango. As if the innuendo was not perfectly clear, he continues with me for some predetermined distance extolling the virtues of his (I’m sure) quality product and assuring me that his ‘stuff is the best one.’

I can’t blame Cambodia for its lack of economic sophistication. It endured probably the worst genocide in the last century, yet the atrocity is not well-known. For those of not up to speed on their Cambodian history, let me offer a quick primer:

First, the French colonize Southeast Asian country(s). Then the French split, and the American war in Vietnam spills over disastrously into Cambodia. Country is destabilized and group of psychotic whack jobs (Khmer Rouge) come to power and kill half the population for no reason. They get testy with Vietnam and attack its border. Vietnam responds by invading Cambodia and deposes the crazies. World learns of atrocities, but does nothing to help. Got it? Good.

'They have human form but their hearts are demon's hearts...' -Killing Fields Memorial

So this is how I find myself at a horrible place called Tuol Sleng. We are taught in schools that the worst, most inhumane people ever born were the Nazis. Having seen the activities of the Khmer Rouge, however, I am no longer so sure about that.

Skulls of two victims of the Khmer Rouge. There are 9000 at this pagoda alone.

Everything in the world was turned upside down under the rule of the Khmer Rouge (KR). Education, art and even eyeglasses were banished; these were seen as signs of the elite that must be eliminated. The KR was going to establish a ‘perfect’ egalitarian peasant state where everyone would work in the fields together in harmony. Phnom Penh was evacuated -- the ‘soft urban parasites’ were sent to the country to learn the virtues of hard work in the rice fields. Most were worked nearly to death. When they were too weak to produce one more grain of rice, they were taken to pits in the red, red earth and cracked on the head with a piece of iron. Tuol High School was covered in barbed wire and became Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison where the most horrible tortures were used to extract false confessions.

Chain, gruel pan and ammo-box toilet in a cell at Tuol Sleng

Being at the prison, I am struck by the immediacy of the place. I am walking in the very places that unimaginable atrocities took place. I feel like I am in a dream. The place is haunting, and probably haunted. Photos of tortured victims shackled to iron beds are displayed in the very rooms where the photos were taken. The beds and shackles are still there.

By starving, torturing or clubbing the inmates to death, the KR hoped to spare their precious bullets. One thing they did expend their time and resources on was documentation. Each man woman and child was photographed, usually in a chair with their hands bound behind them. They made exhaustive archives of the victims like twisted librarians.


My Visit to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng

The other tourists and I don’t exchange greetings or smiles. We glide silently through building after building. It’s as if we are all ghosts moving through this torture-school. My eyes are down as others approach; the shame of this genocide belongs to the whole world.

In contrast to the propaganda-laden Vietnamese war museums, there is little interpretation here. There really is no need for it. A crazy group of ideologues ruthlessly and pointlessly murdered three million of their own innocent people. What must really be said about a mass grave or the bloody photo of a torture victim?

The Khmer Rouge often took photos after they had exterminated their victims through torture.

Being in Vietnam had been a jarring experience for the brutality and senselessness of a war with America. The paranoid and insane KR managed to kill just as many of their own people as were killed in Vietnam. But they did it unassisted, and in less than a third of the time.

Several floors are devoted to the photographs taken by the KR at the complex. The portraits show a surprising range of expressions. The photos have no names, just numbered tags pinned to their shirts to give me a clue to their identities. #401 has sad eyes. #349 leans forward as if inspecting the camera. #404, an older man, is simply terrified. Another one looks imploringly through 30 years of time. It could have been taken yesterday. They all could be in the other room.

Prisoner #404

There are rows upon rows of faces, the ghostly remnants of three insane years where the world stood by as an entire country was transformed into hell. I want to take pictures of all the photos of the prisoners. I want everyone to see these gentle, innocent faces. I want to believe that some of them escaped to survive and find something other than this.

But I know that it’s not true and after many rooms of pictures I can’t look anymore.

All of the people photographed in the Tuol Sleng prison were executed by the Khmer Rouge.

There are just too many faces silently staring at me.

Cu Chi Tunnels

What's inside the ground? Oh, it's Will!

Having visited the Cu Chi tunnels outside Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), I have no doubt as to why America was defeated in Vietnam.

The Vietcong built hundreds of kilometers of tunnels. That is what I am popping out of in the video. They were narrow, dark and scary. Most Americans couldn't even fit into one. Many of the tunnel entrances were fakes with booby traps inside of them. It must have been a nightmare to be a soldier there.

We had massive firepower. The Vietnamese had massive ingenuity. They re-manufactured our bombs and other military detritus into dangerous booby traps- pits full of barbed hooks that maimed and slowed our troops. And these traps are really nasty. Imagine walking through a jungle or rice field, your face dripping sweat into your eyes. You are scanning the horizon for enemy soldiers. Of course, they look just like everyone else, so this isn't very effective. All of a sudden, your weapon and pack laiden body just drops through a hole in the ground. A swiveling peice of "ground" has just given way and you now find yourself in a pit with barbed metal spikes sticking into you. That is bad enough, but what is worse is that because they are barbed, you can't pull them out without tearing your flesh and skin further. And on top of all that, there are spikes also facing inward so that if you just pulled your foot out, you would ram it ino even more spikes. You have to be dug out and this takes hours.

We had bomber aircraft. They took our unexploded bombs or ordinances (UXO) and carefully, painstakingly cuth them open with hand tools to rebuild them into anti-tank landmines. They marked these mines and moved them around as the battlefield changed shape.

The biggest asset the Vietcong had was a home field advantage. They blended in with the population- no they were the local population in many cases and they had a lot of support. We bombed and killed and tortured and mutilated and deforested the South of Vietnam, and naturally, the villagers who bore the brunt of this abuse didn't seem to agree with the 'destroy a village to save it' philosphy.

The thing that strikes me most now, was how stupid the conflict was. A cruel dictator, Diem governed the south. We supported him (as had the French before they split and left us holding the bag) as he oppressed his own people and the anti-Diem movement grew. Deim's (and our) repression and exclusion of the communists probably falsly added to their stature as is often the case with insurgents. (There is a strong parallel here with groups such as the Taliban or the Iranianian revolution- while they fought the corrupt power structure they were cheered on bny the people. When they got to power, they ended up being as bad or worse than those they replaced.)

In the rice fields of Vietnam, I feel like it could be 1965 -or 1865 for that matter- and it seems so foolish that these power men in Washinton were scaring us into an idiotic war with this communist threat. I sit in the emerald green rice fields and watch a man in simple clothes and a cone shaped hat tend to his field and think 'is this the Vietnam the American government was so afraid of?'