Joe/Dick in Africa/Asia 2008

End note

2008-05-06T04:07:00.002-04:00

Some of you have asked if the cyclone hit here at all. The remnants of it touched northern Thailand, but in Bangkok it's been nothing but hot and sunny. Burma has been devastated, as you know, with very great loss of life. The junta is cruel and stupid, but not so cruel and stupid that it has refused entry to international relief groups. Alhough, the country was such a wreck to begin with that the helpers surely will have a hard time knowing where to begin.
Joe is especially concerned about a Chin village where he spent a night on his last trek. A steep hillside had been cleared for planting. Joe asked his guide if landslides might result during the monsoons. The guide said yes, but the villagers---who lived at the bottom of the hill---didn't understand that.
The regime still plans on holding its sham constitutional referendum on Saturday. It is madness.

Today is our last full day in Thailand. We spent the first part of it slogging around Bangkok in the heat scouting locations for scenes in the tenth Strachey book. I'm on chapter 11, out of about 25. It might be titled "Not How Anybody Wants to Die." Is that lurid enough? (Consumer note: "Death Vows", the ninth Strachey book, about a gay marriage gone wrong, will be out in September.)

Our plan for The Last Supper tonight is tom kah gai, fried morning glory vines in spicy sauce, and duck red curry. Does this represent a failure of imagination?

This is the end of this blog but not the end of Dick and Joe's Endless Cycle of Travel Death and Travel Rebirth. There will be no Travel Nirvana for the likes of us, ho ho.

Pattaya

2008-05-02T00:12:00.006-04:00

It's a Cancun-like Gulf of Thailand seaside-resort city that got going in the Vietnam era---a U.S. base was not far from here---and took off in the age of Southeast Asian industrial tourism that followed. Pattaya has a reputation. Some Thais in Bangkok were surprised, even disgusted, that we were planning to visit here. This reputation has been earned. Some years ago a foreign writer injured high-level Thai sensibilities by describing the country as "as a brothel with temples." In Pattaya, they forgot the temples.

While much of Pattaya is indeed squalid, some of it is bright, clean and more or less wholesome. The distinctions between unwholesome and more or less wholesome Pattaya are sometimes clear and sometimes blurred. They are clearest in Somtien Beach, south of the city, where Fritz, Leonard and Num live. They are the reason we came here.

Fritz Blank is Barbara Wheaton's old foodie buddy from Philadelphia. For a couple of decades, he ran Deux Chiminees, considered by many the city's finest restaurant. (Fritz also has degrees in dairy science and microbiology.) Barbara and Fritz see each other most years at the Oxford Food Symposium and otherwise exchange erudite and marvelously witty e-mails, some of which Joe and I have had a peek at.

Last year, Fritz moved to Thailand full time to be with his boyfriend since the early '70s, who had settled here several years earlier. Leonard Bucki is a former Philadelphia trial lawyer who Fritz says "never lost a case" and retired happily at age 51. Now they live in Somtien Beach, Fritz in a flower-draped hillside townhouse of his own, Len in a gorgeous modern beach house with his Thai boyfriend Num. Fritz also has a Thai friend with whom he seems to be---in the parlance of the '50s---going steady.

Fritz and Len are two warm, bright and delightful men, and we are grateful that we have been able to have breakfast with them every day and dinner on a couple of nights. We also spent a day at the gay beach with Fritz, who is a well-liked fixture there.

It was at this beach where Len met Num seven years ago when he was 23. Num is a lovely man, and Fritz told a lovely story about him. The three men travel together and once spent Christmas in Philadelphia. Num was reluctant to accompany Fritz to an open rehearsal of Beethoven's Ninth. Len---who has educated this former farm-boy-then-beach-boy-masseur---talked Num into tagging along, and said he could always leave during a break in the rehearsals. At the break, Fritz asked Num if he preferred to duck out. Said Num: "Oh no! I stay. It make me feel all funny inside." I've never heard it summed up better.

Joe and I are staying in town at a place called the Hotel Ambiance, and it's got plenty of that.

Tomorrow we return to Bangkok, where Joe will receive a final onceover by his surgeon and physical therapist. The shoulder is doing well, although Joe's metal-slinging activities will be restricted for a couple of months, an inconvenience.

Wednesday we fly to Delhi, then on Thursday toward Newark and on to Boston, landing at Logan Friday morning. We will be happy to be back with our family and friends and our good lives in the Berkshires. And within days, our Great Shlep of 2008 will likely feel as if it never actually happened. But luckily, it did.

Wet again

2008-04-25T22:30:00.004-04:00

The monsoon rains don't arrive until the end of May, but we've had wild, drenching rainstorms for at least part of each of the last four days. Fierce winds have toppled trees in Lumpinee Park, where only a few days earlier Joe had sat on a bench in the sun and watched a three-foot monitor lizard devour a three-foot fish it had dragged out of a canal. Joe said the lizard ate the fish's enormous head in one gulp.

The wind blew over a number of billboards around Bangkok. One man was killed by flying debris, and another billboard crashed down on a Cal-Tex station in our neighborhood. (Photos of some of this should soon appear on the blog.) The city government says there are two-hundred-and-some illegal oversized billboards that it considers hazardous. Has it ordered them to be dismantled? No, the city has advised residents to steer clear of these billboards on stormy days.

We had wondered about drainage in the streets. Now we see that, basically, there isn't much. Many intersections and driveway entrances fill up with water. Some people slip off their shoes or flip-flops and carry them across flooded roads and byways. I saw a Thai man in a business suit, his trouser legs hiked up daintily, completing a footwear portage across a lake that had just formed in front of the Dusit Thani, a five-star hotel.

I spent an hour in the ground-floor shopping and restaurant arcade of an office tower I had ducked into while I waited for one downpour to subside. The marble floor inside a side entrance was an inch lower than the marble terrace outside. So every time the two security guards holding the double doors shut against the wind and rain opened them to let somebody in, a sheet of water cascaded through the opening. Cleaners in blue uniforms soon arrived with galoshes on their feet and broad-brimmed straw hats on their heads. Three of the cleaners wore stacks of three hats each. Wielding brooms, mops and broad window-washing squeegees, the cleaners tried to shove the water back out the doors---though this of course required opening the doors, so it didn't work. Also, every time a door was so much as cracked, the straw hats blew off, and the guards and cleaners collapsed with laughter.

When the rain let up, I plopped a newspaper over my head and hiked with wet feet the two blocks down to the BTS Sala Deng Skytrain station, and rode over to the Siam Paragon Mall and Cinema. I met Joe just in time for the 7:15 showing of "The Hidden Kingdom," a surprisingly enjoyable new Chinese-American kung-fu flick. You know you're not in Cannes anymore when the most interesting actor on the screen is Jackie Chan.

We also sat through 35 minutes of ads and explosion-packed trailers---New Yorkers would have been throwing objects at the screen---and then stood with the rest of the audience for the royal anthem. Sepia-toned snapshots of King Bhumibole floated across the screen, none of them unflattering. At the conclusion of the bombastic ditty, the legend "We love our king" appeared on the screen in Thai and English. Recently, a Thai youth refused to stand for the anthem and will soon stand trial for lese majesty.

It was still raining after the movie and the taxi queue in front of the mall was impossibly long. We walked up the street and found a tuk-tuk, whose young driver agreed to a reasonable fare. He produced a towel to wipe the rainwater off the double seat in the back, and we had a warm, pleasing, semi-soggy ride for the mile or so back to the hotel.

The other time we got wet recently was at a restaurant we like called Northeast. We think the name means the food is mostly Issan, which can be plenty spicy. The waiter asked if we wanted our mixed seafood salad and vegetable stir-fry "Thai-spicy" or "farang-spicy," referring to the number and types of chilis to be included. Sometimes farang-spicy can be too bland, so we said Thai-spicy. As we ate, steam shot out the tops of our heads and we could have used towels to sop it up as hot water streamed down our necks.

Keeping dry in Bangkok can be a chore, but we don't mind. Tomorrow we take the bus to Pattaya for six days. Will we get wet at the seashore? We think so, one way or another.

Visa slog

2008-04-20T22:13:00.003-04:00

Not much fun, but the job got done. We're legal. We never made it to a casino. It was four hours from Bangkok to Aranyaprathet on the Cambodian border and four hours back. The three and a half hours in between consisted of sitting in tourist-trap rest stops ("purgatories," Joe called them) and standing in immigration queues in the pounding heat. Lunch was a bag of rancid peanuts at a 7-Eleven.

Among the other travelers in the 12-passenger Toyota van we rode on ($30 RT) were:
---young Swedish and German backpackers with that overland-from-Cologne-to-Saigon determined look
---a thirtyish American named Chuck who used to scout movie locations in California and now runs two internet cafes in Bangkok. Asked about the U.S. presidential election, Chuck wasn't sure who was running. Joe told him. Iraq? "I can't express an opinion on that, because I don't have all the facts."
---a fifty-three-ish German jewelery dealer living part-time in Bangkok who has a wife in Wurzburg and two Thai girlfriends, "one 23 and one older." He "saved the life" of the older one by buying her a house. The man's wife has taken a younger boyfriend, and he's not happy about that. His name---we saw his business card and could barely contain ourselves---was Herr Schmuck.

Among the several unanticipated costs of this unavoidable excursion were an extra $12 each for expedited "VIP" handling of our documents at the Cambodian checkpost---i.e., backhanders to the Cambodian officials, with a cut for the Thais arranging them. We never got more than a few feet inside Cambodia.

Then, back in Bangkok at 6:30, the driver of the van that had picked us up at our hotel in the morning dumped us and six or seven others along an expressway and cheerfully told us to hail a cab. He had put together a private deal to drive four Koreans to their distant hotel and we were in the way. We'll complain to the travel agent who sold us our tickets. Mai pen rai? Yes and no.

Blog comments

2008-04-20T21:51:00.004-04:00

Thanks to Dennis Drabelle, who wrote that Joe "has invented a new travel genre. Surgical tourism."

Thanks to Barbara Wheaton, whose opinion seemed mixed on Songkran's "folkloric manifestations."

Thanks to blog chief copy editor Bill Ullman, who expounded at persuasive length on the folly of going into surgery minus a wrist-ID---and without a companion to keep an eye on the proceedings. Joe concurs, although at BNH he had made such a big deal of the missing ID band that it became an OR joke, and nobody was about to forget that he was "Mr. Joseph." Joe says he has read that many nurses, when they are hospital patients, bring along a nurse "buddy" to watch out for errors. They know.

An anonymous blog reader asked if we had witnessed the "Olympic torch hubbub" in Bangkok.
We did not. The Thai government warned that it would expel any foreigner protesting unlawfully, so we played it safe and didn't go at all. It came off peacefully. Dully even. A handful of pro-Tibet sign wavers booed the torch brigade, and every Chinese student within a fifty mile radius was rounded up to wave the flag of the Peoples Republic and boo lustily back.

The news

2008-04-20T21:35:00.004-04:00

I promise you and myself not to fill up the blog with The Mysterious East news stories. But this one, from the April 18 Daily Express, a local tabloid, is too good not to reproduce in its entirety. The writing is suspiciously farang-like, but I'll bet the story is true.

"'WIFE SLITHERS OUT OF HOME
"The python-wife of an Udon Thani man has left him. She crawled away sometime this week.
"The 35-year-old Ban Don Yanang villager Satien Kankudlung tearfully says python Sitthida, whom he wed recently, fled the marital home.
"The snake is believed to be his soul mate of more than 600 years. He found her in a local swamp and married her after she would not leave.
"Visitors flocking to witness the bizarre union and hopefully get lucky lottery numbers are being left disappointed.
"Satien believes Sitthida left before spiritual figure Yuan Kongsuwan came to take her away after a deity told him his wife was wanted. A fortune teller told him earlier the reptile would flee after Songkran. Satien says he'll wait for his wife's return, forever."

Good shoulder

2008-04-19T03:00:00.003-04:00

Joe had his stitches out on Thursday and received an excellent report from the surgeon. The doctor did say further daily physical therapy would probably be helpful. So out of what might be an excess of caution, we're postponing our seashore visit and will stay in Bangkok for another week. Also, instead of going to the unspoiled far South, we'll take the bus to Pattaya for six days. This is the well, er, um, somewhat non-unspoiled resort town on the Gulf of Thailand that is sometimes known as Costa del Bangkok. We do not want to miss Pattaya, because Barbara Wheaton's renowned-Philadelphia-chef pal Fritz Blank lives there. We have wanted to meet Fritz for years. Then it's back to Bangkok for a final look-see by Dr. Somsat before heading home via New Delhi May 7, arriving in Becket May 9.

The entire shoulder episode has been gratifying. Joe had a long-standing nagging medical problem expertly taken care of. Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital was friendly and considerate. The only bad moment, he said, was on the day of the surgery. The OR staff decided to remove his wristband ID; it might get in the way of the surgeons, they said. He worried that he might be mixed up with another patient and have the wrong surgery performed. He joked that he particularly did not want sexual reassignment surgery, one of BNH's specialities. That, of course, would not have included shoulder surgery---unless somebody was after that Joan Crawford look.

Tomorrow we go by bus to Cambodia on a visa run. Some of the same Thais, no doubt, who came up with the 30-day-tourist-visa rule, have built casinos just inside Cambodia, where we will be deposited for four hours before returning to Bangkok. Also, the Cambodians charge $45 each for visas, even though we will be in the country for just a few hours. Quite a racket.

Yesterday and the day before, it rained in Bangkok. We had wondered what it was like here during the monsoon rains that start in late May. Now we know. It came down in buckets for about an hour, and it was glorious. It didn't cool it off, though. Whew.

Wet

2008-04-15T03:03:00.004-04:00

The signs posted around our hotel gave notice:

"Dear Value Guests,
"As you may be known that on April 13-15, 2008 is 'Songkran Day' (Thai Traditional New Year). We will celebrate throughout Thailand!
"During this period everywhere throughout Thailand will get WET! As Thais are enjoy with this festival.
"Whenever you decide to go outside! Please keep your Valuable Things i.e. Wallet, Mobile Phone, Money inside the Plastic Bag (or wherever away from water!)
"Happy New Year and Best Wishes to you and your family!
"The Management
The Pinnacle Lumpinee Hotel"

The only factual inaccuracy in the signs was the time period. (With my pathetic six words of Thai, I am not about to correct any Thai's English.) The "Songkran Day" is really about five days, or maybe six. Another sign at the Pinnacle warned that three to four hours might be needed to get to the airport (instead of the normal one hour) on the first and last days of the annual water festival, on acount of "BAD TRAFFIC"---unwelcome news for those fleeing the country.

A significant portion of Thailand's tens of thousands of foreign residents leave during Songkran, viewing it as a good time to, say, fly back to Birmingham and check up on how mum is getting on. Others stay, however, and, between dashes out to the pubs or noodle stalls and back, compose letters to The Bangkok Post. One on April 14 read as follows:

"SPARE US THE POETRY
Once again the Bangkok Post publishes another stomach churning eulogy fron the king of pap, Glen Chatelier, director of the Office of International Affairs, Assumption University (PostBag, April 13).
"Whilst I do value the right to freedom of speech, I also value, and would like to defend, my own right to the freedom to read without puking.
" 'Of sprinkling lustral waters into the hands of elders... Of the harmony of music emanating from simple hearts...' Alternatively read: 'Wet through to my underpants... Four thousand decibels booming from speakers the size of townhouses...'
"Please Glen, the amateur poet lives within us all---and that is exactly where it should stay.
"Hopefully your words don't reflect the teaching content of the Assumption University curriculum. However, if your intent is to ingratiate yourself enough to qualify for that elusive Thai residency visa, it might just work!
"Daniel Cox"

The onslaught, it has to be said, is relentless in some unavoidable locales---hotel entrances, the sidewalks in front of every 7-Eleven, main intersections. And the water-weaponry is impressive---buckets, hoses, waterguns with the thrust of bazookas. Some of these are wielded by kids and young adults with backpack refill tanks. Rummy, eat your heart out! Joe, with his arm in a sling, has been spared on some occasions. I have not. Yesterday I thought I had found a safe route through one area. But the teenaged water-hooligans giddily drenching tuk-tuk passengers as they rode by had unxpectedly split up and opened a second front on my side of the street, and I got it good.

Songkran has its deficiencies, including the occasional over-aggressiveness by both some Thais and some participating foreign tourists. And the drunk-driving rate goes way up, mostly in rural villages. Today's headline in the Post read "Death, injury toll soars above last year's figures."

But overall the highspiritedness is harmless and really quite wonderful. Last evening, Joe and I managed to make it into a taxi un-drenched and rode over to Central World, one of Bangkok's biggest and most chic shopping malls. The vast complex is a marvel of modern design and anything-your-heart-desires consumerist excess, with cinemas and food courts and big atriums for exhibits and performances.

In one atrium, Songkran's origins were on captivating display. Thais were queued up by the dozens to purchase garlands of flowers and colorfully wrapped monks' robes (with the proceeds going to local temples, we think). Four praying monks knelt on a carpeted platform to receive the gifts. Then all the earners of karmic merit moved to another queue, where cups of water scented with hyacinth blossoms were sprinkled on an array of golden Buddha images. This ritual of cleansing, remembrance and appreciation---for the Buddha, his teachings and the monks who preserve his teachings---is what Songkran was before squirt-gun mayhem pretty much took over. And it's probably not a farang's wishful thinking that in most Thai hearts and minds this is what Songkran still is.

We ambled around the mall through the happy crowds. No water was being tossed inside, though plenty of people strolled about blase-ly soaked to the skin. One display had mannequins in fancy gowns made entirely from hundreds of small twisty-balloons. In a performance space, appreciative audiences enjoyed jugglers, and then a brilliantly funny reenactment by three young Thai actors, using music, lighting and frenetic pantomime, of all the fight and chase sequences in a James Bond movie.

On the big outdoor plaza in front of Central world, we stopped to watch a spectacle that struck us as one of the things that makes Thailand Thailand. Thousands of young people had gathered for what the signs said was a "Wet Party Free Concert." The high-decibel music from the onstage band was alternately hip-hop, punk and some local hybrid we didn't quite get. There were the usual rock-concert smoke machines, too, and flashing lights---and water!

Joe and I stood off to the side with the other unwaterlogged wimpsters, but the entire cheering and arm-waving young audience in front of the stage was being sprayed almost nonstop with undulating waves and sheets of water!

It helped, of course, that the air temperature at nine at night was in the high 80s. This type of New Year's celebration wouldn't work in Times Square at the end of December. But it wasn't just the climate that made this succeed. There is a gentle-spiritedness in the Thai people that made it possible for a raucus rock concert to come off with not a single cop or security guard anywhere in sight. There was exuberance with no loss of control.

I hear American voices asking, but then, was this really a rock concert? Rock is ABOUT rebellion, defiance. Minds keener than mine will have to sort that out. But I'm telling you, what we witnessed we thought was very fine and satisfying, and the Thais seemed to think so, too.

I should add that we have no illusions that Thailand is Shangri-la. The political system here is rotten, the cops can be brutal, and the greed and carelessness of the upper classes in this essentially feudal society would make Dick Cheney weep with envy. It's a shizoid society that I know I will never really understand. But every day we see things about Thailand that are deeply lovely, and rarely is that loveliness more vividly on display than during Songkran.

(Footnote: Joe and I wondered if the Burmese water festival might be subdued this year, in the wake of last fall's violent government crackdown on protesters. A wire-service report from Yangon today said the New Year's celebrations there were actually wilder than anyone could remember.)

Joe's first meal after leaving the hospital

2008-04-10T04:24:00.002-04:00

1. Guay Teow Moo. "Assorted noodle in spicy condiment." It's a soup, with roasted pork bits, minced pork meatballs, flat rice noodles, lettuce, bean sprouts, peanuts, scallions, palm sugar, garlic, fish sauce, apple cider vinegar.

2. Larb Moo Nam-tok. Larb is a spicy meat salad. This one had grilled pork with fresh coriander, basil, chilis, scallions, shallots, lime juice, palm sugar, fish sauce, mint. Accompanying it was a side of chilled cabbage leaves for picking up the larb and making a little wrap if we wished to (we did), and fresh, crisp long beans.

Medical update

2008-04-08T05:51:00.002-04:00

The operation was a success. The doctor said it was good Joe had it done now. The cartilage was so badly torn, from repeated poppings-out, that the bone was starting to wear away. Fixing the shoulder later would have been more complex and difficult. He gets out of BNH tomorrow. Each of you has two shoulders. Never take them for granted.

Medical tourism

2008-04-07T07:43:00.003-04:00

This morning, Joe had his shoulder repaired.

As many of you know, he has been bedeviled for several years by a serious shoulder problem. From time to time, his left armbone has popped out of the shoulder socket. He has had to reinsert it with his right hand. That hurts.

Once, he landed in the Berkshire Medical Center emergency department to have the arm put back where it belongs. The unpredictable arm has been painful, disruptive and worrisome. It misbehaved recently during his Burma trek. The arm also slipped out of its socket while Joe was photographing a tribal woman in India. He said he kept grinning, so as not to frighten her. But he is sure his gyrations (and his grin) made her think he was possessed.

Specialists in the Berkshires examined this shoulder more than once but remained vague, inconclusive and unhelpful as to what might be done about it. Before heading off to Burma, Joe had the shoulder looked at at Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital. BNH is the fine medical center that successfully treated my leg last year after an insect bite in Vietnam developed a staph infection. Last week, Joe returned to BNH for more tests, including an MRI.

On saturday, Joe was informed that his problem was a torn cartilage that could be repaired at BNH. When asked when he would like the surgery done, he said as soon as possible. "How about Monday at eight?" asked the doctor.

This morning, Dr. Somsak Kupthiratsaikul performed orthoscopic surgery on Joe's shoulder. Minimally invasive, the operation is done with precision tools and a tiny camera inserted through a relatively small incision. There is no reason to believe the operation was not a success, although Joe won't talk to Dr. Kupthiratsaikul until tomorrow. Joe was groggy afterwards, though not too out of it to keep him from introducing me to a nurse named Lemon.

Joe will remain at BNH for two nights. He requested Thai food and was soon to receive some when I saw him a few hours ago. He is to remain in Bangkok for two weeks of check-ups and physical therapy. His motions will be restricted for a number of months. Full recovery can take 8 or 9 months, although he can be back in his studio this summer. (About 1 percent of these surgeries develop complications. So far, there are no signs of any with Joe's.)

We were to have traveled in southern Thailand in April. We'll still do this for about ten days later in the month. We'll also have to do a "visa run" at some point---probably take a four-hour bus ride to the Cambodian border and back.

This is all fortuitous. Joe gets to have this nagging problem put behind him. Blue Cross-Blue Shield gets to have this operation done for probably a third of the cost in the U.S.

And, we'll be in Bangkok for Songkran! This is the big holiday in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos that celebrates the lunar new year. Also a pre-monsoon "water festival," Songkran used to center on the bathing of Buddha images and on young people sprinkling water on the hands of elderly monks. Now, however, it's an (often alcohol-fueled) bacchanalia lasting for several days with most of the population giddily dousing anybody who dares to go out in public with hoses, buckets of water and, we have heard, high-powered water guns.

Some foreign residents flee the country during Songkran. Others barricade themselves inside their houses. But we enjoyed being in Yangon last year for the first two days of the festival---it was thrilling to see crowds of happy Burmese---and then we flew to Bangkok on the final day. We arrived just in time to hang our wet clothes over the bathtub and head out for dinner---and get soaked all over again. No one is spared. The trick is to keep your passport in the hotel safe and your money in a plastic bag.

How will Joe keep his camera dry? The Burmese were respectful of the camera---a couple of teenaged girls gigglingly asked if they could "pour" on him and then dumped ice water down his back. (The air temperature is around a hundred this time of year.) We fear the fun-loving Thais may be less polite. Whatever happens, though, we don't think Joe's arm will be constantly threatening to come loose.

Notes on Myanmar and the Myanmar blog

2008-04-03T02:38:00.002-04:00

Why is Joe riding an elephant? Our car had a flat on the mountainous road between Napyidaw and Inle Lake. We had a few hours to kill in the village of Tin Mar Bin while the tire was being repaired. The son of the richest family in town was about to be initiated as a monk novice (something all Buddhist youngsters in Southeast Asia are expected to do at some point for a week or a month), and a celebratory feast for 2000 people was about to commence. An elephant had been hired to lead the ritual procession, and we were offered rides. Joe accepted, warily, and afterwards he paid $5 towards the elephant's sugar cane and the mahout's whisky.

In his caption for a photo of a monk novice in make-up, Joe used the term "ladyboy." This was not derogatory. It's the Thai term for transsexual. The Thai word "katoey" can mean either transsexual or transvestite. A current controversy being reported in The Bangkok Post is over the age at which young "ladyboys" can be safely (voluntarily) castrated in anticipation of later gender reassignment surgery. Two Bangkok hospitals are world centers for this operation.

We mentioned briefly our visit to Themanya Monastery and the remains on display there of a beloved monk who died in 2004. An AP story today (picked up from BurmaNet, the pro-democracy Burmese news service) begins as follows:

"A group of armed men on Wednesday stole the body of one of Myanmar's most revered Buddhist monks, whose corpse has been preserved in a glass coffin since he died more than four years ago.

"Officials said the coffin containing the body of Sayadaw Bhaddanta Vinaya, better known as Themanya Sayadaw, was stolen from the monastery in eastern Myanmar where he preached.

"The officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to release information, said at least nine armed men wearing camouflage clothing carried out the theft. The officials said they had no idea who the thieves were or why they took the body."

Assorted pictures from Mandalay

2008-04-02T08:18:00.007-04:00

We left Mandalay by boat; this was the boat we opted out of.

With what seemed a disaster in the making, we just hoped that it wasn't going to tip over on our boat.

Hats drying on the banks of the Irrawaddy

Arriving in Bagan

At a performance by the anti-government Moustache Brothers in Mandalay (They are only allowed to perform in English in their home for foreign tourists.)

There is not not a level playing field in all of Burma

A market in Mandalay

Pedestrians on an ancient teak footbridge outside of Mandalay.

Old Asia fades, and doesn't

2008-04-02T07:38:00.007-04:00

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place or time one has never experienced? I think someone else has written on this subject, but I can't remember who or what. I'll go ahead---Bill Herrick joked that when a writer writes something that feels a little too familiar, but the writer can't recall where he might have seen these words or ideas in print previously, then it isn't plagiarism.

While I never set foot in the city before last year, I am vaguely nostalgic for the Bangkok of the 1960s and earlier. I've read accounts of Rama IV Road, a main thoroughfare half a block from our hotel, when canals ran along either side of it 40 years ago, and herds of cattle were driven down the street to a downtown slaughterhouse. Canals criss-crossed the entire city, in fact, carrying goods and passengers about, and emptying into the Chao Pryha river. No developer has yet figured out how to fill in the river. But the canals are nearly gone, along with most of the gorgeous old teak houses on stilts.

While Bangkok's skyline now looks a little too much like Houston's, it is still very much a Thai, not Texan, city. Houston has no Buddhist temples with gilded spires nestled serenely among the skyscrapers. And there are no "spirit houses" in front of Houston bank towers where passers-by can leave offerings of food and flowers for the natural spirits the structures have inconsiderately displaced.

An apparent real loss, however, is the consistent high level of Thai food. Overall this is still as satisfying a place to dine as anywhere in the world I have ever lifted a fork, or a set of chopsticks, or my right hand. But farangs who have lived in or visited Thailand over several decades claim that it's only the street-stall food that has stayed consistently fresh, zesty and surprising, and a lot of the restaurant food has been "adapted" to Western tastes. It's a result of the dominance of industrial tourism in the Thai economy, a decidedly mixed blessing.

While Joe and I nearly always choose carefully and eat well, we have run into the diluted stuff a few times. One was when our friend Poe Suwatchie arranged a dinner meeting with a gay Thai police official. (The cop turned out to be both fun and helpful with my research for the new Strachey book.) Because, Poe said, it would be quiet, and perhaps because it was what the official expected, we went to a place called Le Siam that was more "Le" than Siam. It had big satin bows on the backs of the chairs, smiling elephants carved in stone, and an Altoona-style cocktail-lounge singer/piano player warbling bad hits of the eighties. The food was like mediocre Chinese-restaurant food in the U.S.--- heavy, monotonous, possibly chemical-laden.

We vowed to avoid joints like Le Siam in the future, but two nights later fate intervened, this time entertainingly. At the departure gate, our Thailand to Myanmar flight was cancelled at the last minute on account of "technical" problems with the Myanmar Airways International aircraft. We and 60 or 70 others were told to come back 22 hours later. Meanwhile, for anybody with nowhere to sleep, MAI would put us up overnight at a place near the Bangkok airport called the Miracle hotel. Joe and I were in no hurry, and this sounded irresistible to us.

After a Long March from one end to the other of the very large Suvarnabhumi Airport (the Thais pronounce it swah-nah-BOOM), Thai Immigration confiscated our passports (technically we had left the country), and 30 or 40 of us were placed in a convoy of vans. (See Joe's blog photo of the young woman leading the Long March.) We soon arrived, minus our passports and our luggage, at what Joe described as "an upmarket penal colony." It was the "Miracle Hometel."

Miraculous indeed was the speed with which the front desk doled out room keys to the glum MAI (and MIA) refugees. (At least there were no screamers in the group---perhaps because, except for us and an Austrian man married to a Burmese woman, they were all Asians, who rarely stamp their feet and holler.)

A miracle, too, was our room, a boutique-hip expanse of muted wood tones and rubbed-back aluminum leaf, with a bed the size of Sumatra. The flat-screen TV had nothing on it we wished to look at, but the bathroom, commodious in every respect, had on offer (new) toothbrushes and toothpaste, which we needed. (Despite rumors to the contrary, we never saw our bags until the next day in Yangon.) Our room listed at $150 a night (MAI surely paid less.) That's nothing in New York, but in Bangkok we pay $37 at the Pinnacle, a pleasant tourist hotel near the city center.

Perhaps the Miracle Hometel will get away with charging those prices because what it offers foreign tourists is safety. Especially safety from---"Earl, are they going to make us eat fried squid on a stick?"---Thai food. The Hometel dining room, whose overall decor resembled an undergraduate dining room at Penn State in 1957, had the legend AMERICAN CUISINE emblazoned across one wall. Nearby had been hung an American flag, and next to that was a five-foot gilded replica of the Statue of Liberty. Would I make this up? Yes, but this time I have not.

Our American-cuisine free meal, courtesy of MAI, consisted of a cream soup of undeterminable origins, boiled vegetables, steamed rice and, cozy under a blanket of tomato sauce my aunts in Pennsylvania in the 1950s could reliably have been assured contained no "seasoning," a slab of what I guess has to be called chicken-fried-steak fish.

The live dining-room music at our Hometel away from home(tel) matched the food. A local Thai band was playing and singing hits by the Carpenters off-key. The man at the table next to ours, a Burmese-American who sells telephone systems to prisons, applauded vigorously after each number.

Okay, okay, the Americanization of wide swaths of the tourism business in Southeast Asia (we saw similar trends in Vietnam last year) is not the worst thing that can happen in this region. Hey, remember Pol Pot? But it is sad nonetheless. It's also still avoidable---we eat wonderful classic Thai food all the time. But care must be taken, we now know firsthand.

We flew to Burma the next morning, by the way. The attentive and resourceful Henry Nyan Htun, of Peace House Travel, got us on a 9 a.m. Air Bagan flight. That's the one where the handle clanked down on an emergency-exit door, and a monk was recruited to go and sit next to it. Reassuringly, this was still Asia.

Along the road from Napyidaw to Inle Lake

2008-04-02T07:33:00.009-04:00

We happened upon a novice initiation ceremony. This woman danced while a man in another oxcart played a small horn. Sure beats a limo.

You'd stick your tongue out too

No, this is not a ladyboy in training. This is the normal get-up for the ceremony. Afterwards he will have his head shaved and be given his robes.

Grinding peanuts for their oil

Working the rice paddies

A typical array of tasty bites

This woman looked skeptical

Pictures from Chin State

2008-04-02T06:03:00.010-04:00

Our intrepid vehicle

A few pictures from Bagan

2008-04-02T05:55:00.003-04:00

child with jasmine and tanaka (bark-powder cosmetic) on face

hermit in market, women selling betal nut leaves

Temples at Bagan

Bagan temple Buddha image

Digs

2008-04-02T00:31:00.007-04:00

Flight to Myanmar cancelled at Bangkok Airport. Unhappy passengers consulting MAI agents

The Long March to our overnight accomodations. (See blog section called "Old Asia Fades, and Doesn't.)

Joe at the Miracle Hometel

On the road from Yangon to Malamyine

2008-04-02T00:22:00.005-04:00

Nuns praying at the Shrine of the Golden Rock

Kyaung Kan Len Rock Monastery

Thamanya Monastery dinner

Thamanya Monastery sayadow in front of school built with donation by Aung San Soo Kyi, and headmaster

Pictures from a day at Ya Da Nar Mynt Monastery, Malamyine

2008-04-01T23:23:00.011-04:00

Assorted pictures from Inle Lake

2008-04-01T23:03:00.008-04:00

Along a canal

Stupas

Ladies going hither and yon

A fisherman with fish net doing the one legged row

Nam Pan market, Inle Lake

Dick peering into cinema, Nam Pan village, Inle Lake. Our guide, Htun Htun, is on left. Films are DVDs, shown on old TV sets, of Burmese films and Hollywood action movies. That day's features are listed on the sign above the children. Admission 10 cents. Most popular movie ever shown in Nam Pan? "Titanic."

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Shrine, Inle Lake

Nam Pan village market

Rice cakes---Nam Pan market, on Inle Lake

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Over 2,000 11th-century stupas at Kekku

Pa-O festival, Kekku

Pa-O National Day festival at Kekku

Updated update

2008-03-29T22:32:00.003-04:00

Joe is back in Yangon from his trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back here in Bangkok late tonight. In an e-mail yesterday, he said the trek was memorable. At a village celebration he witnessed the slaughter of a bullock and a pig and said he may yet become a vegetarian. He has many good pictures, including one of a Chin woman playing a nose flute (but not of a Nose woman playing a chin flute). Photos should appear on the blog later this week.
I'm working on my Strachey book. I've told a couple of people that I now know enough about Thailand to know how little I know. Anyway, I'll just use what it is I know, if only I can figure out what it is I know.
I've gone back over the Myanmar blog and fixed some typos and other minor errors. One was a spelling for Aung San Soo Kye that I think I made up.
I just learned that we will have to do a "visa run." Tourists entering Thailand receive a 30-day visa and cannot have it extended for more than a week. We're not leaving the country until May 4, so we'll have to do what other farangs do---apparently it is a cunning feature of industrial tourism in Southeast Asia---and cross a border and then come right back with a new Thai 30-day visa. Most people take the bus to a Laos border town for the turn-around, so we probably will, too. I've always been curious about that border (last year we flew in and out of Laos). The Laos drive on the right, the Thais on the left. What happens in the middle of the border bridge over the Mekong? Maybe I'll find out. (In 1963 I was in Addis Ababa on the day the Ethiopians switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. People were terrified and traffic moved at a crawl. The problems began several days later.)

Travel update

2008-03-25T01:12:00.002-04:00

Following this are four postings on Myanmar. I'm in Bangkok to work on a book set here. Joe is still in Myanmar on a trek in the wilds of Chin state. He'll be back in Thailand March 31. He has many wonderful pictures taken in Burma but can't post them until he's back in well-infrastructured Thailand. It will be worth the wait. The photos show a lot of Myanmar life and institutions not mentioned in my text or that are indescribable. There is much in Myanmar that is blissful, and Joe's pictures capture that Myanmar beautifully.

Myanmar/Burma

2008-03-24T23:52:00.006-04:00

Joe and I are walking down a dusty side street in Mandalay. Although it's 110 in the shade, the Burmese all around us are toiling away, earning their average dollar a day. One of three sweating young men repairing car engines looks up, waves and asks, "Where you from?" "USA," we say. "Ah, America!" This is good, the land of George W. Bush. He overthrew the tyrant Saddam Hussein and maybe, other Burmese have told us hopefully, Bush will invade Myanmar and overthrow its dictators, too.

The engine repairman indicates an older man squatting nearby and says, "He police." The three repairmen laugh. The older guys says, "No police, he crazy." "No, he police," the first guy says, and all four of them laugh.

Later, in another town, we are telling two Burmese men who are interested in our travels around Myanmar that we had observed long sections of the natural gas pipeline to China running above ground. This vital provider of revenues for the military regime looked dangerously exposed as it cut through villages and across rice paddies. It also appeared vulnerable to sabotage. When I say, "Somebody could bomb it," the two Burmese look at each other. Then they laugh, too.

This place is about as schizoid as a country can get. It is deeply Buddhist and fatalistic and accepting and serene, and its people are among the sweetest-natured on earth. It is also a police state, where spies are busy in every neighborhood and temple (fake monks paid by the government worked as agents provocateurs during last September's uprising), and the elected prime minister, Aung San Soo Kyi, has been under house arrest for most of the last 20 years. The economy has been so devastated by the greedy and blundering generals that most men have only two ways of surviving, as monks or soldiers. Women are even worse off. If they aren't in a position to sell produce in a market (or run a hotel or a silk mill, as was the case with two we met), they do heavy labor on the waterfront or repairing roads.

Of nearly 60 million Burmese, 600,000 are monks. Four hundred twenty thousand are in the military, the second largest army in Asia. Wandering around Yangon our first day there, we stopped by a pagoda and noted that the couple of dozen figures snoozing in the midday heat were not monks but soldiers.

Nobody who's talking knows for sure how many monks and other peaceful demonstrators were killed or hurt last September and October. The number killed was between a few and a few hundred. The two thousand or so political prisoners who are still locked up include the man who pasted up posters around Yangon showing General Than Shwe's head on the body of a dog.

A widespread hope last fall was that the military rank and file would desert the leadership. Except in isolated cases, they did not. The soldiers' livelihoods depend on their staying loyal. (Also, to go against duty and authority in Buddhism is to risk a decent fate in the next life.) While many soldiers behaved cruelly during the demonstrations, many of them suffered, too. On a Yangon street lined with high-rise apartment blocks, residents who were forbidden to feed the monks threw food down from their balconies. When they moved in to drive away the monks, the soldiers were pelted with household objects.

Burmese hold out some hope that this May's referendum will at least further expose the regime as bankrupt. People plan to go out in droves and vote no to the generals' sham constitution. The integrity of the balloting, though, is in doubt. We have been unable to confirm this, but three people told us independently that there will be no secret ballot. Government agents will go door to door and record family members' votes. (A fourth man says this is just a rumor started by the government to intimidate people into voting yes or not at all.)

China could make a real difference in Myanmar. But its morality of fossil fuels at any cost is likely to keep the regime in power for the forseeable future. China dominates the Burmese economy---and even the country's changing appearance. Its oil, gas, gem and (it is said) heroin money have led to a building boom in cities like Mandalay and Taunggyi. Joe says these new Chinese buildings look like overstuffed sofas made out of tile.

There has, however, been no trickle-down effect from this mini-boom. With the labor glut, wages are as depressed as ever. You see people all over hauling sand on their heads or tarring roads for 50 cents a day. Do these people complain? When Joe takes their picture, they look at him and smile. These generals have a good thing going for themselves in Burma; they know it and plan to hang onto it.

Another way to get a Burmese to laugh is to say you are going to visit Napyidow. This is the country's new "capital" (it has no foreign embassies) built over the last three years in a hazy broad valley a couple of hundred miles north of Yangon off the Mandalay Road. Some Burmese say this ghastly zillion-dollar folly built with Chinese money and forced labor was kept isolated by the regime to protect it against the U.S. invasion the generals are said to antcipate. Others say the generals' astrologers told them to do it. (When the late dictator Ne Win's astrologers declared in the 1970s that he must change the country's currency to notes that add up to the lucky number 9---45, 90, etc.---he immediately did so. This system was later abandoned.)

Joe and I spent a night in Napyidow, and we can confirm that it is madness on a monumental scale: eight-lane concrete expressways with barely a car in sight (other Burmese roads are rutted, colonial-era two-lane blacktop); treeless mile after treeless mile of identical concrete apartment blocks for the government employees forced to relocate from Yangon; a locked-up "ceremonial hall" that looks like a Las Vegas dreamed up not by Trump but by Orwell; office blocks even uglier than the dwellings; Florida-style shopping centers with no shoppers (Yangon shop owners were forced to rent space whether they opened a Napyidow shop or not); a "zoological park" (Are there animals in it? "Not so much," someone told us); and two "hotel zones."

We stayed at the Thingaha. The brochure at this "The Eden Group" property described it as a pinnacle of "business chic." It was. Our immense air-conditioned room, done in wood and fabric in muted old Asia colors (no Chinese acryllics here) had two beds about 15 feet apart; a flat-screen TV on an island in the middle of the room; a tile bathroom in three sections, discrete according to function; recessed lighting, including under the couch; terry-cloth robes; an ironing board. The shower handle stuck, and the power went off from time to time, but we bathed nonetheless and had brought along our own flashlights to augment those provided by The Eden Group. There were 12 other guests, we learned, all government officials. Our room rate was $140, four times what we usually pay in Southeast Asia and a third of the annual income for the average Burmese.

In a bare valley below the Thingaha were the tin-roofed mud houses of the construction workers still laboring night and day to finish the several hotels in our zone. With their nightime candles burning for illumination and their smoky cooking fires, these settlements looked like Civil War encampments in 1863. Matthew Bradey was not there to photograph them however, and Joe was not able to do it either. He had been warned by several people to keep his camera in his bag while in Napyidow.

Myanmar index

2008-03-24T22:24:00.008-04:00

Babbling seer

1 dollar: average daily wage in Myanmar.

1 dollar: average daily wage for goverment school teachers in Myanmar.

$80: monthly salary of Ko Htun Htun at a boarding school in Mandalay Division for working 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a teacher and dorm supervisor. (Htun Htun was forced to give up being a tour guide last fall when tourism collapsed in the wake of the uprising.)

$60: Amount Htun Htun sends back each month to his wife and three children a hundred miles away in Taunggyi. (There is no place for them at the boarding school. Htun Htun sleeps in the dorm with the students.)

10 cents: bus fare from the outskirts of the city to downtown Yangon before last fall's price hikes.

20 cents: bus fare after the increase.

$2.50: price for a gallon of gas last August.

Over $5.00: price in September. (Food and other costs went up more or less proportionately.)

50 cents: cost to enter Mahabandoola Garden, a "public" park in downtown Yangon. (When we visited it, about 20 people were relaxing in this three- or four-acre nicely manicured oasis.)

$50 million: estimated value of wedding gifts received by General Than Shwe's daughter a few years ago.

$3 to $5: Daily wage paid to hundreds of thugs hired by the government to beat monks and other demonstrators last September and October. (Each man hired also received a free breakfast and a club.)

Between 11 and several hundred: number of non-violent demonstrators killed by police, military or paid gangs.

4: number of times the power went off for anywhere from one to four hours in Malamyine (Moulmein) on March 11, 2008. (Rolling blackouts are a way for the government to save fuel. No one knows when they're coming, but in many areas the electricity is off about half the time.)

6 miles: distance part way up the mountain from the "base camp" at the Shrine of the Golden Rock in Kayin state, a holy site where a huge gilded boulder is balanced atop a single hair of the Buddha.

$3: Cost to ride in a truck cab up the mountain.

$1: cost to ride on plank seats in the truck bed with 50 other pilgrims. (We rode up in the cab, down on the planks.)

Unrecorded number: the serial number of the truck we rode down on. (After the smoking truck ascending barely made it to the top, our guide checked the serial number of the descending vehicle to see if was a "lucky number." It was.)

$18: cost for a white person to be carried the last, steep mile (no trucks allowed) on a palenquin by four slender, sweating brown people in the 100-degree-plus heat. (I rode, Joe walked.)

10 pm: the time on March 9 when the monk-noviate initiation ceremony at Thamanya monastery in the building next to the one where we were sleeping took a break for the night. The ceremony included powerfully amplified music on percussion instruments that repeated clonk-clonk-clonk-bonk-clonk many times.

3:55 am: the time the ceremony---and the music---resumed.

2004: the year the venerable Thamanya Hill Sayadow (abbot) Bhaddanta Vinaya died. His corpse is on display for pilgrims at a shrine near the monastery, and despite the sayadow's not having been embalmed, he "still has not spoiled."

$3: amount foreigners (but not Burmese) must pay to enter Kaw-Gon Cave, in Kayin state, where over a thousand 18th-century Buddha statues are arrayed. Pilgrims come from all over to pray here. A monk told us many foreigners complain about the fee.

$0: donation to Kaw-Gon monastery made by the Myanmar prime minister during a visit. He admonished the monks over the dirty floors.

2: number of cigarettes smoked simultaneously by a babbling seer and counselor giving Dr. Phil-style marriage and personal advice to pilgrims who queue up inside the cave and pay for this service.

$3,500: cost of roof repairs at Seindon Mibaya pagoda and monastery in Moulmein to keep this ramshackle architectural and spiritual Burmese treasure from crumbling even further. ($500 came from Aung San Soo Kye's brother in New Jersey.)

Hundreds of thousands of dollars: estimated value of wooden carvings and other pieces of the 18th-century pagoda stolen by thieves with police complicity and sold to Westerners in Bangkok antique shops.

1: number of women from Lenox, Massachusetts Joe ran into at Seindon Mibaya on March 11 while spending the day there photographing the monks' daily life. (He thinks her name was Lisa Galvin.)

1: number of times we have heard of anybody's sandals being stolen when left outside a Buddhist temple anywhere in Southeast Asia. The theft victim was a Greek-American geologist living in Bangkok who travels often to Myanmar for "research." He told us, "The government thinks I'm a spy." Is he? "No, those guys approached me in Bangkok, but they don't know anything." Good answer.