In which I'm almost home...

My flight to Taipei leaves in 11 hours. I'm running out the clock in Bangkok, too exhausted to make a shindig of it. But I did get a couple days of beach time, my passport's been sorted out, and I'm fully packed (and WAY over the baggage allowance.) Now I need only wake up at 4:30 AM tomorrow and drag myself out to the world's lousiest airport, and then I'm home free! See you soon...

In which I bid a fond farewell to Chiang Mai...

My bags are packed, my excess stuff sold or donated, and a massive box of trinkets has been shipped to my parents' house. I'm down to my last hour in Chiang Mai, and I just ate my final bowl of Khao Soy, a delightful dish available nowhere else in the world. The experience would have been more poignant had a massive splatter of coconut curry oil not arbitrarily erupted into my left eye, causing searing and undignified pain, but I'm still heartsick at the loss of the stuff.

Weird to be leaving Thailand, it is. I haven't got a job arranged in Vancouver for when I get back, and nor am I certain where I'm going next. I've been looking at something in Ethiopia, but I may have sabotaged that by losing my passport last week and thusly depriving myself of the time necessary to do their 10-page questionnaire. I may just take a few weeks to do a hardcore job search back home - I've got a long history of taking the first job that comes up rather than searching out the best one for me, and maybe I should switch that around.

But in the meantime, I'm heading down to Bangkok on tonight's overnight train, and spending some time whining at the Canadian Embassy to give me a temporary passport. Then, hopefully, I'll spend a few weeks at the lovely Ko Chang island, going kayaking and snorkeling and surely getting sunburnt into a smoking black ooze. Then back to Bangkok and, Vishnu willing, home to Vancouver on August 14th. A year passes quickly. My tribulations last week derailed my blogging plans (yay, more excuses!) but I did find a bit of bandwidth to upload some of my New York photos. I'll post photos from around Thailand and Burma when I get home and can access the sweet joy of true broadband. See you all soon.

In which I got nuthin'

Well, that was a miserable attempt at consistent blogging. Shortly after my return from New York, work overran my entire life. I discovered I have inadequate bandwidth for uploading my photos en masse, and my computer became an objecct of terror simply because I'm writing curricula and job applications on the damn thing for 14 hours a day. My blog has suffered accordingly.

But the cheery news is that I'll be home in a mere two weeks. I'm wrapping up my final days with Earthrights, spending a week at the beach, and then toddling home to Vancouver for an indeterminate period of time (probably a few months, depending on work etc.). You'll see just under 1500 photos posted shortly thereafter, but more importantly, you'll see me devouring every piece of sushi I can find (I've been a little deprived over here).

In which OW!

No poetry to this one. I just had to suppress a sneeze while rinsing with listerine. I unintentionally sucked a hefty swig of the stuff directly into my sinuses, where it sits still, burning holes directly into my brain.

With the possible exception of eyelid surgery, this may be the most painful thing I've ever experienced.

In which nature confounds me yet again...

I just watched two tiny songbirds, both of which could easily fit in my hand side-by-side, locked in an epic, acrobatic battle that spanned city blocks. While I rode my bicycle to work I saw them collide in midair, pecking and squawking furiously at each other, feathers flying. They disengaged before hitting the ground, and that round's losing combatant fled a hundred feet down the rode. The other bird zoomed after him, Neo-and-Agent-Smith-style, and with shocking precision and brutality, slammed into him again once they'd both gained some altitude. The would-be victim dished out some hurt of his own, and this fascinating process reversed and repeated itself again and again, over at least half a kilometre that just happened to run alongside my bike route. It was like watching two feathered superheroes locked in eternal combat. My main question: just what makes a two-ounce bird that pissed off?

As you've likely figured out, I'm back from my fascinating, educational, expensive trip to New York. I'll be offering up many details and some of the 950 photos I took, as soon as I can process them. I'm slightly occupied at the moment by preparing to leave my job, but I'm back on a regular blogging schedule and you'll hear about my recent travels very soon.

In which I land on another continent...

And now I'm officially in New York for a couple of weeks. I think I managed to thump my jetlag into cowering submission quickly, simply by refusing to sleep until the appointed hour. I spent yesterday wandering around midtown Manhattan, eating hideously unhealthy New York food and trying not to doze off in the middle of intersections. But despite my sleepiness, I can't escape the obvious conclusion that New York is my kind of town - crowded, kinetic, and entirely loopy in all sorts of interesting ways. I've never been here before, and now I've got some time to explore (and look for work here). I'll be spending most of this time at the UN, but if anybody reading this is in town and wants to meet up, drop me a line in the comments. More to follow...

P.S. I've been sufficiently busy with prep for New York and the concurrent disintegration of my work situation in Chiang Mai that I almost forgot it's my birthday tomorrow - joy!

In which I'm so very sleepy...

I'm in Taipei at the moment, about to head out to LA and then New York, so my blog silence is likely to continue for a couple of weeks yet. I'll do what I can, though.

In other news, wish me luck - I need to find a whole buncha cash for my University.

In which I continue, unavoidably, to procrastinate...

My work and my preparations for my trip to New York continue to consume my waking hours, and this blog is unlikely to be back in full swing until the first week of July.

In lieu of a proper post, I offer instead this brief, not terribly deep, but still quite interesting article about junk science and misconceptions in Rachel Carson's landmark environmental tract "Silent Spring". Thought-provoking reading for politicians/enviros.

In which I offer a short news flash...

The military government here in Thailand is about to rule this afternoon on whether the top political parties, including the one dethroned in last year's coup, will be permitted to run in the elections promised for December 2007. Anticipating a disbarment (which rather defeats the label democracy, doesn't it?) and ensuing civil unrest from those party's supporters, the whole country is rather on edge today.

The police forces are boasting loudly about how "effectively" they'll clamp down on any disorder, and the military has mobilized 13,000 soldiers and MPs to prevent the mass migration of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin's rural supporters into the cities for the next few days. Many schools have closed in case of street violence, we volunteers been warned away from politically sensitive areas of Bangkok (not a difficulty for me, being 800 km away in Chiang Mai), and we've been given explicit instructions to stay the hell away from any protests.

I don't really know what to make of it. There are signs that the potential for violence has been blown out of proportion by a jittery military, but only time will tell. I'll follow with more news as it happens.

In which I catch my breath...

Well, I'm finally back in Chiang Mai after nearly a month of constant motion. Getting up at 5 AM every day to move on to the next town is not my kind of vacation, but it was enlightening and gave me some new side projects to work on. (Anybody know a good place to find funding for an AIDS orphanage? I need about $40,000.) I saw bits of pretty landscape in my wanderings, but mainly I enjoyed talking to various folks in some startlingly difficult situations. I was variously mistaken (unintentionally) for a doctor, a missionary, a soldier, and an Australian. I ate things I would prefer never to eat again (Betel leaves are most unpleasant). I got very sick (by my rather fragile standards, not theirs) on three occasions, and even talked politics with far more people than I expected to. I caught wind of an unfortunate amount of raw sewage but also walked through beautifully terraced rice paddies and saw some manmade landmarks on par with the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

I'll post more details when time permits, but in the meantime here's a photo of three Karen children, lifelong residents of the Mae La Oon refugee camp, a cheerful but unthinkably crowded patch of otherwise unusable land in east central Thailand. This is the first photo of processed from about 1100 that I've taken in the last three weeks.

In which I fail to apologize...

Sorry for my silence the last two weeks, folks - it's been unavoidable. I'm preparing to leave for some field work at some refugee camps in Southern Thailand, and the planning thereof has taken all my time. It's also going to take me out of communications range for about three weeks - my phone will work intermittently, but I'll be neglecting this blog further. Once I get back I'll resurrest my earlier pay-per-blog contract.

See you in three weeks!

In which I dance for joy!

I'm going to New York! Yay!

In late June my university will be running a two-week advocacy project to lobby UN members and NGOs for long-term institutional and financial support. I've been chosen to join them, and it'll be nifty all around! More details to come, since I'm still under the weather and my bed beckons. But yay!

In which I crawl back into bed...

I've neglected my blog because I've been poisoned. Possibly it was the junk food and popcorn I ate while watching a movie yesterday. Or the khao soy and tom yam I had before the movie. Or the ladles of kim chi that followed the movie and preceded karaoke. Or the massive Thai meal that I indulged in after karaoke. Either way, I've been pretty much reduced to a sleepy, enfeebled mass of whininess.

Between the hospitalization exemption I offered when I started my pay-per-blog option, and the fact that my promised 30 days of consecutive blogging is up, I'm going to take this opportunity to go into a coma and neglect my blog for a short time. I'll renew the deal as soon as I'm no longer in a torpor.

In which I procrastinate for a good cause...

I know I owe you a post, but it's the last day of Songkram, and I'm not spending a big chunk of it typing. Instead I'm going out for lunch and then back into the fray.

In other news, I should find out about my New York trip within the next day, and I may yet go on another couple of international excursions before I wrap things up here in Thailand (probably Malaysia, Cambodia, and possibly Vietnam). There will also be another trip in May which will remain mysterious for now.

More to follow on Songkram, after I've gone out into the crazy.

In which I'm traumatized yet entertained...

The madness of Songkram continues. I would conservatively estimate that this massive water brawl involves a quarter of a million people at any one time, and stretches around the 6 or 7 kilometres of Chiang Mai's central moat. The moat, a rectangular canal 20 metres wide and god knows how deep, surrounds the core of the city. It's filled with a perplexing green fluid I hesitate to call water, which dyes clothes a sickly yellow. People fill their buckets from the moat and fling the odd contents on passersby, who retaliate with relentless streams from hoses and water guns. Pickup trucks whose beds typically host 8 or 10 bucket-wielding combatants and 2 massive garbage cans full of ice water circle the moat (at something less than walking speed), dispensing liquid fury at everyone within range. Riding around in such a vehicle of destruction was how I spent yesterday morning... and I think I'm going back out to do the same now. Toodles!

In which I briefly recount a day of trauma...

It's 5:15 PM, Friday afternoon. Since I've woken up I've had a plastic bucket shatter on contact with my forehead. My right foot was overrun by a pickup truck. My student group "accidentally" left me behind in the fray while they headed to a lake 20 kilometres away - and they took my wallet, keys, and phone with them, leaving me thoroughly stranded and defenseless while smiling nitwits dumped ice water on me. I'm sunburned and wrestling a touch of heatstroke.

OK, that's the bad stuff of Songkram, day 1. I'll tell you the good stuff after I've had a couple of hours of recuperative coma and maybe hit the streets again tonight.

In which civilization is collapsing...

I'm not exaggerating - I sincerely feel like I'm in a zombie movie. There are students pounding on the locked and barricaded door of my office, trying to terrorize me with squirt guns and vast buckets of a mysterious clear non-alcoholic liquid. The presence of pricey electronics has deterred them not at all. All pretense that they're preparing for their field work has been abandoned, and the compound has descended into a Hobbesian anarchy of flying ice water and piercing screams. Deranged cackles fill the air and the puppy is very confused. Confused and sleepy.

All this madness simply because we're on the eve of Songkram. The bloody holiday hasn't even started yet, and somehow I absorbed three buckets of water from roadside children merely on the ride back to the office from lunch at the nearby hole-in-the-wall. Daily I ride past what I infer is a brothel on my way home - yesterday the ladies made sure to drench my nether regions with a tub and hose as I bicycled by. This all par for the course, I'm told, and though Songkram doesn't officially start until tomorrow I'd bet my frontal lobe that Chiang Mai itself will be a roiling cauldron of sheer pandemonium by the time I leave work tonight. I am on the precipice of Ragnarok, and the savage hordes thronging at my door are legion.

Fortunately, they're expecting me to emerge unarmed, and yet I have three empty plastic bottles, a good-size bowl, and an adjacent bathroom with a functioning faucet. I'm going out to play.

In which I'm grumpy...

CUSO has officially witheld permission for me to go to Burma and help my students with their fieldwork, on the grounds that the Burmese secret police might have been following our activities - and possibly this blog - and could be waiting for me with open handcuffs. Argh. I was really looking forward to that trip.

Maybe the adorable 7-week-old puppy that has adopted our school will cheer me up. More to follow.

In which a movie review sends me off on weird tangents...

I don't know why Sunshine opened here in Thailand before anywhere else on Earth, but I'm damn glad it did - and not merely because it affords me a rare opportunity to gloat. I'm one of the three people on Earth who liked The Beach, by the same team, so add the appropriate grains of salt hereafter.
Sunshine's admittedly implausible premise follows a desperate mission to jumpstart the dying sun with a vast fusion bomb, thawing the snowball Earth and rescuing the remnants of humanity. Try to suppress your disbelief at this central conceit, and you'll find a very rewarding film.

Sunshine isn't nearly perfect - its thoughtful pace might less charitably be called sluggish, and its latter third introduces a needless, jarringly incongruous horror element that threatens to drag the film into the witless realms inhabited by the grossly inferior Event Horizon and Supernova, or even the hideous, little-known Solar Crisis. The superficial similarities to these films may alienate some potential viewers, but this movie is stylistically far closer to director Danny Boyle's own 28 Days Later, with obvious inspirations from 2010 and (presumably, since I haven't seen it) Solaris. Substantively, it's much more like... ummm... nothing else I can recall.

I loved Sunshine because it gives a better sense of the naked, audacious vulnerability of space travel and the titanic energies at play out there in the universe than any other film I've ever seen. 2001 was a glorious film about the cosmically unfathomable, but Sunshine at its best is a movie to make one simply feel very small - an experience hard to find in even the best films. Space kills in this film, very quickly and plausibly, and the radiant indifference of the sun vaporizes unprotected matter in microseconds, imbuing space with an awesome and entirely fitting dread that I've never felt in another sci-fi movie. Cold vacuum and the unrelenting solar wind are more palpable and terrifying in this film than anything a slasher or zombie flick has ever thrown at us.

I was so enthralled by what I saw that I barely registered the acting, which I belatedly realize ranged from serviceable to excellent. The human story revolves convincingly around the psychological stresses of years spent in space, which is nicely underlined by a creative but not overly conspicuous score. But the setting offers visuals of unexpected ingenuity and power: the replicating sparks of nuclear fusion inside a fantastic bomb; the inferno roaring along the surface of a kilometres-wide solar shield; a brief but gorgeous journey into the core of the sun. Every one of these drove my heart into my throat. If you've ever enjoyed a space film, you'll find Sunshine a surprisingly moving experience.

Brief and extremely nerdy tangent here (which might offend a highly sensitive few): I wonder what it says about me that the concepts and cosmic settings like the ones in this film affect me far more than any religious story I've ever read. I had this thought towards the end of the movie, and spent the walk home pondering it. I concluded (probably not for the first time) that my key frustration with religion is that it shrinks the entire universe down to a human scale. I know this is the main attraction for many - religion thus infuses random events with a mostly benign agency, and provides a comforting . But in depicting the cosmos as a construct built mainly for our benefit, faith closes most religious minds to the vast wonders that are out there for anyone to see if only they're interested in looking.

In all seriousness, walking on water and turning it to wine are laughably feeble "miracles" next to the awesome forces at work every instant inside an exceedingly ordinary star like our own. Are we really supposed to be impressed by this? How can I get worked up over a story of one man rising from the dead 2000 years ago - even if it's true - when we can look out into the universe and see galaxies colliding with one another at this very moment? Nothing in horrors of the Biblical Apocalypse, even approaches the scale of the furious energy the sun releases in a microsecond. It's not just Christianity that cripples itself so. No religious tradition that I'm familiar, from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Bahai narrative to the entertaining inventiveness of Hindu mythology, even hints at the energies the universe flings about with routine abandon. Even less do any of these traditions help us to understand real miracles like the spectacular births of galaxies. Dig through every religious text on earth for something that sounds like the unimaginable beauty of a supernova or the mind-wrecking weirdness of a black hole - you won't find a thing. Great minds like Carl Sagan have worked to reconcile this incongruity not by shrinking the universe down to a human scale, but by trying to expand the concept of God to encompass the wonders we can now see. (Go read Contact. Now!) But far too few even try.

Nothing we see through a telescope precludes the possibility that it was all created by a supreme being - indeed, some of what we see suggests that may be exactly what happened. But it does make the "greatest stories ever told" look awfully small by comparison - and more than slightly patronizing. To my eyes, the world's religions all share one unforgivable fault - a pitiful poverty of imagination.

In which I regret my impulsiveness...

My attempt to fix/supercharge the lesser of my two hydrocannons was ill-advised, to understate grotesquely. I have done incalculable property damage so far in excess of the $10 value of the water gun that the entire venture seems a cruel self-parody. My apartment is a splish-splosh swamp, littered with the tragic remains of supermarket-bought dishes and cracked Chinese plastic. The gun itself, once merely broken, is now far too volatile to touch. It sits on the floor of my shower stall, hissing angrily at me and occasionaly belching great ugly gouts of water without asking permission.

I don't think I should be allowed to own a screwdriver.

In which I prepare for the worst...

One of the interesting quirks of Thai life is that there's no greater loss of face than that of losing your temper, particularly in public. Actually getting pissed off is a social shame on par with being dumped by your girlfriend while being pantsed on national television. No doubt this helps to maintain social cohesion in a densely populated country with a history of blah blah blah... The relevant aspect, really, is that this reservedness allows people to pull off acts of startling buffoonery - like hurling buckets of icewater at passing cyclists - without fear of getting slugged in (highly justified) retribution. In any other country on Earth, the life expectancy of such a miscreant would be measured in femtoseconds.

But if you can't beat em...

All this is a maddeningly loquacious way of saying that the buildup to Songkram continues apace. I got nuked again on the way home today by an unseen assailant in a passing SUV. For reasons unknown to me, work crews are constructing a fiberglass submarine in the parking lot of the mall next door, and the populace is arming itself with a Mississippian fervour. I thought it wise to do likewise, but what started out merely as prudent planning morphed into a fine opportunity to take my inner adolescent out for a rampage. I am now the proud owner of two lovely and even matching water cannons, each of approximately the same mass and atavistic ferocity of Tsar Bomba. Should I encounter God in my travels, God himself will be soaked.

In which I'm horrified beyond all comprehension...

My students and coworkers have begun to play Celine Dion songs, and it's not a welcome accompaniment to my daily efforts to facilitate change in Burma. It rather reminds me of the saccharine soft rock that's always the very worst part of visiting my dentist - yes, much much worse than the searing dental pain. Pain passes, wounds heals, and teeth are rebuilt, but a long day of Celine songs leaves a black mark on my soul that may as well have been burned in by an arc welder.

I think it's my cue to go home for the day.

In other news, prompted by a conversation with my friend Raf (who's currently in Darfur), I'm beginning to wonder neurotically where my next job's coming from. Something always comes up, but the UN's webwork of personal connections and patronage is a hard thing to break into. Once you're in, you're in, but getting one foot in the door is a daunting task. A few of my friends (like Raf and Natalie) have made that much-coveted transition to well-paid development work, so I know there's a way in... I just have to find it.

In which Songkram comes early...

Though Easter passes unnoticed here in Thailand, we have a four-day weekend of our own coming up: Songkram, the Thai New Year's festival. In Chiang Mai, girdled as the city is by a kilometres-long moat, Songkram takes the form of a massive four-day water fight. All civility and reserve are quickly jettisoned and the entire city transmogrifies into a vast arena of dueling buckets, hoses, water balloons and super soakers. It will be unphotographeable - you'll have to rely on my terrified first-person retellings. During Songkram, there's no stigma against soaking the defenseless or the unaware, and those in moving vehicles are considered particularly luscious targets. Songkram will begin next Friday, and the drenched buffoonery will continue through the following Sunday.

At least that's the official schedule. As I enjoyed a pleasant open-air tuk-tuk ride across the river to a friend's confirmation party, a random shorts-wearing farang appeared from nowhere took sociopathic aim at me with a water cannon the size of a bazooka. One impeccably precise burst left me drenched as I passed by, unarmed and anyways too stunned to retaliate. Thankfully, I had to stop and pick up new shirts en route anyway (yay for having a personal tailor!). It may seem obnoxious and malicious (and maybe it is) - but it's just the way of Thailand during Songkram. Whether you're ready and willing or tremulous and fleeing, you're going to get soaked. If this happened today, I dread what next weekend holds... and I'm buying an arsenal of my own first thing tomorrow morning. May as well go down fighting.

In which I wish all a Happy Easter...

Thailand being a Buddhist country (and the largest religious minority being Muslim) nobody much notices Easter over here. This is a great frustration to my students, most of whom are Christian, since they didn't get the day off yesterday for Good Friday... but I've gotten an Easter visitor! My friend Elisa from grad school is in town with her parents, and I'll be joining them for Easter brunch tomorrow - joy!

In other news, my internet was completely and profoundly broken all morning - hence the delay on my post. My apologies.

In which I offer another post of interest to few...

There's a surprisingly gripping blogalogue you'll find here, in which Catholic pundit Andrew Sullivan and committed atheist Sam Harris have been arguing civilly and passionately for months about the existence of g(G?)od. Fascinating if it's your thing.

You may have presumed that this post is an excuse for me to put off the last of my Laosblogging for the day, and you'd be right. But now I've wrapped up my non-violence class and will be getting back to such joyful frivolities as soon as I've repaid my massive accumulated sleep debt. See you in a day or three.

In which I'm beginning to get annoyed...

As Corinne noted in her comment on the last post, other bits of gross nationalism are popping up all over Thailand at the moment. An exceedingly stupid 57-year-old Swiss man has been sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting the king. Outraged over restricted alcohol sales on the King's birthday last December, the drunken fool spray-painted over four posters of the monarch in full view of security cameras, and was promptly arrested. Thailand's draconian lese-majeste laws, enshrined in the bleeping Constitution, forbid any criticism, however benign, of the King. The King himself doesn't seem to want such insulation, but they're part and parcel of Thai nationalism - which, by the way, is really starting to get on my nerves.

Bottom line: if you're not Thai, you'll just never get it - or so we're told. Hence, foreigners are socially proscribed from criticizing the government for handing down a 10-year sentence for petty vandalism, or when all of Youtube is blocked because someone showed a video of feet touching a picture of the King. I grasp that these acts are monumentally disrespectful and show a disgraceful contempt for the standards of a society that has kindly welcomed we foreigners. But there's something far more vile about a decade's incarceration for a crime that robbed and injured no one. The government should have deported that asinine fool and been done with it.

As usual, I reserved my real frustration for the foreigners who defend the government's actions on the grounds of cultural sensitivity and the like. I've talked to more than a few of these folks, and they're driving me batty. There's cultural tolerance, which I'm all for, but defending such a foul move goes far beyond that. These people have let cultural relativity erode their core personal principles, and that's pretty reprehensible.

Myself, I'm disgusted. I really enjoy life in Thailand - it's not a difficult place to carve out a pleasant existence. But it's not a free country here, in some very important ways. I'll surely be glad to see the last of ugly Thai nationalism when my term here is up.

In which dark clouds continue to gather...

Today I encountered a day-old Bangkok Post which informed me that the leader of last year's military coup, General Sonthi, is considering becoming Deputy Prime Minister in order to help keep the government on track. This, despite his insistence that the government would be run by civilians. Last week he fired all military officials who were considered to be loyal to the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and replaced them with Sonthi devotees. Last month the main pro-Thaksin TV station was shut down, ostensibly for non-payment of licence fees, and replaced with a more coup-friendly broadcaster. And I've read, increasingly, that "unnamed figures" high within the military bureaucracy are pressing the "civilian" government to use its expanding powers to crack down on the feeble pro-democracy protests that spring up from time to time in Bangkok.

Nearly seven months ago, when the coup happened, we were told that by now Thailand would be putting the finishing touches on its renovated democracy and preparing for shiny new elections. But there's not a whole lot in the above paragraph that sounds like the actions of a military government in the process of giving up its power - despite all promises to the contrary. I'm going to park myself in front of a stack of newspapers and see if I can make sense of all this. In the meantime, I promise that when I leave in August and the military government is still firmly clenched to the reins, I'm going to have a romping great round of I Told You So. I will start, with no small amount of dripping contempt, with the half-dozen Western aid workers who've schmuckishly told me that they actually cheered the coup. Idiots.

In which I attempt to plan travels...

One of the lesser qualities of a life on the road is the lack of certainty. When each job lasts a year or so, and itchy feet set in after six months on the ground, it's awfully hard to know where one's paycheck is coming from a few months into the future. The end result is that perhaps a third of any given year is spent sending out various job applications - though thankfully not outright unemployed.

At least I feel like I'm climbing the ladder a bit. I've just applied for a spot with the World Food Programme in Rome - a hypercompetitive position I'm unlikely to be interviewed for, but it's not so farfetched that it's not worth a shot. Jeepers, I'd love to live in Europe for a little while and stop struggling with craptacular internet access. If I got anywhere with it, I'll probably find out in the next few weeks, but it wouldn't start until September.

Other travel plans abound. I've applied to join an expenses-paid advocacy trip to New York to lobby UN members to assist my grad school. That one I'm very optimistic about, rating my odds at about 70%. Cross your fingers for me, and I'll find out on the 16th.

Meanwhile, I'm attempting to weasel my way into Burma for a little fieldwork. My bosses think it's a great plan and thoroughly safe, but my neurotic paymasters with the Canadian government are rather less sure. They've denied my initial request for travel authorization, but I whined and appealed and I'll learn more this week. Wish me luck again.

In other news, my Nonviolent Social Change class isn't going entirely as planned. I had my students act out a meticulously planned roleplay of an Alabama lunch-counter sit-in during the 1960s. Instead of learning key lessons about nonviolent assembly, they cheerfully thumped the tar out of each other with water bottles for twenty minutes. Oy. Can't I teach a class about violent social change? Seems more in line with my expertise...

In which I complain and plead for clemency...

Posts are likely to be both brief and unexciting for the next couple of days, folks. I've stumbled into a busy week. I'm teaching a class on Nonviolent Social Change all day, every day, which is a bit odd for me, given that my expertise tends to be in the *other* kind of social change. At least my students and I have found common ground - neither they nor I are wholly convinced that Burma's problem can be solved without some judicious application of brute force. But we'll see if we all change our minds after watching Gandhi tomorrow.

So you'll get your daily posts, but the brutally time-consuming work of Laos-blogging, accompanied by cropping and tuning photos, will have to wait until Friday afternoon or so.

In which I whine...

The hot season held off longer than expected here in northern Thailand. Normally it hits by March, immobilizing this chunk of the country entirely. Thankfully, probably due to the aforementioned suffocating haze, we got a welcome reprieve through most of March, and the weather was merely brutal.

Now the hot months have fallen on us like a hammer. The temperatures routinely crack 40 degrees in the afternoons. Movement of any variety is sheer suicide between about 10 AM and 4 PM - at all other times it's still quite foolish. My decision to commute under my own power no longer looks so sage as it did in fall.

All of this explains why Friday's brief and lovely rainstorm was so welcome. The sky darkened and cooled, the wind picked up, and the skies eventually opened for a blissful half-hour, pouring torrential rain down on us. It's tough for a Vancouverite to go without rain for six months. All the male students cowered indoors, but the teachers (myself included) and several of our female students converged upon the two-inch-deep lake that appeared on the former site of our soccer field. We quickly discovered that it's impossible to kick a floating soccer ball - the mightiest strike only creates an epic splash as linear motion converts into angular and the ball is left spinning madly on the surface of the water.

So badminton became the new lake sport, and we six or so batted the birdie back and forth until the clouds abruptly dissolved and the sun reappeared. When the rain died shortly thereafter, one of my students stamped her feet in annoyance, looked at me with an indignant pout and demanded "Teacher! More rain!". I didn't have the heart to tell her that I don't control the weather - and I like to keep the fear of god in my students - so I shrugged noncommitally and wandered, soaked and slightly filthy and supremely entertained, back to my desk.

P.S. My pay-per-post policy has come back to bite me. I owe Christian $10 for missing Friday - but it ain't retroactive, since you're out of luck for Wednesday. This policy exists to keep me blogging and to keep people reading, so the castigation must come more quickly to be valid. And to Sunshine - sorry, my blog is on Pacific time, so I think I managed my Saturday post.

In which I pray for rain...

After several days of 40-degree temperatures, the skies have abruptly darkened for the first time in months. The wind has picked up and vanquished the worst of the heat, and the entire compound is buzzing with the news of rain.

In other news, my students unexpectedly got the Friday afternoon off, and are now spending it watching my DVD of Children of Men - the best movie of 2006, to my mind. It's written with brilliant economy, in equal parts terrifying and hopeful, sincerely acted by all, and marked by probably the most astonishing cinematography I've ever seen. If you haven't seen it, go buy it right now, or you're not allowed to read my blog anymore.

But I wonder if it'll traumatize my students - a strange worry. After all, most of my students have seen armed conflict, and more than a few have lost family members to the brutality of the Burmese regime. It seems a little odd to worry that a violent movie, of all things, will unnerve them, but they're not used to cruel realism in their entertainment. Besides, there's that eternal teachers' handicap: the endless, insidious tendency to refer to one's students as "kids" and think of them accordingly. My students are mostly my age, and a few are older, and yet still I feel (wrongly) that it's my job to filter out inappropriate materials... hrm.

In which I narrowly evade death by cow…

(Mostly written on March 8th, 2007)

On some level, I’m annoyed at myself for enjoying my time in Vang Vieng. I wanted to come away from that backpacker haven scorning the artificiality of the place. Sadly, I went and spent $15 on an all-day river tour, had a hell of a time, and temporarily crippled my freedom to rage against backpacker culture. Fifteen bucks buy you a lot in rural Laos. I rose at 9AM this morning, foolishly skipped breakfast in favor of a titanic bag of peanut M&Ms, and got sidetracked on the way down the stairs. Vang Vieng looks lovely in early morning, when the haze is muted and the backpackers haven’t yet recovered from the previous night's revelry. My guesthouse balcony furnished some pleasant photos.



Canadians are a plentiful bunch overseas, though less so in Southeast Asia than many other places. My kayaking group included three Canucks, two Americans, one Londoner and a Hungarian, of all things. We sat in the back of a truck - surely the world’s most revered form of transport and drove 15 km north of Vang Vieng, to an appealing gravel bank of the Mae Nam Song, across a bamboo bridge that unnerved us yet stoically withstood several motorbikes, and into an “authentic” Lao tribal village.



Authenticity is difficult to quantify in tourist country, where rural life often molds itself around the lucrative backpacker traffic. Half the time the “village” is a row of stalls selling mass-produced Chinese pottery billed as genuine local handicrafts. I’m not sure how long this particular village has stood, but the modest temple in a hollow in the cliff overlooking the town lent credence. So did the clearly well-worn rice terraces. The obviously newer restaurant, and the rustic but functional pay toilets, suggest more recent renovations to accommodate wandering westerners.



As a side note, I’m sure it amuses locals to no end when foreigners toddle through their villages and compulsively photograph the livestock. On this front, I’m a worse offender than anyone – my Flickr page reveals the extent of my fascination with cows. The ducks, the dogs, the chickens and the monkeys – none escape my lens. But if I stop to think how it would look if I wandered through South Burnaby, taking four hundred photos of sleeping domestic cats, I start to feel a wee bit silly. I’m sure the friendly and accommodating Lao villagers are used to such odd behaviour. Besides, if I have to tolerate their cruelty to monkeys, they can bloody well live with my obsessive documentation of their food animals.





The village was of course just a way point – en route to an impressively deep and dark river cave. I swore that I’d never go into a cave again after seeing “The Descent”, but once again I proved weak of spirit. We seven explored this in the safest and most sophisticated way possible – in swimsuits, lying on our backs in inner tubes, paddling frantically in an attempt to avoid submerging the bare wires of our battery-powered headlamps. The cave itself was prohibitively difficult to photograph, given the dampness, disturbing lack of light, and the certainty that there wasn’t much there to look at anyways.

But it was fascinating in the way that caves always are: in that compelling hint of a little-explored parallel world just out of sight. We drifted and splashed a few hundred metres along a pitch-black underwater stream, perhaps five metres wide and bounded by a inverted half-pipe of bare wet rock. I laboured, almost successfully, to avoid smashing my head into the stone ceiling. Once all light had vanished and we had lost all sense of direction, we simply lingered in the dark for a few minutes, fascinated by the otherness of the place.



Of course, by the time we moved out, my headlamp had failed and I was nearly stranded in the darkness. Everyone’s ass was freezing from being suspended in cave water through the inner tubes. Having enjoyed our time and glad that it was done, we had lunch. The occasion was pleasant but unremarkable, save for an adorable puppy of perhaps 5 months, rolling around at our feet and playfully demanding table scraps. As we headed out a local man picked up the dog in both hands, held him out gently at arms’ length and seemed to weigh him. Dissatisfied, he released the dog, who scampered playfully away. I hope that didn’t mean what I’m almost sure it meant. Speaking of animals, one of the most troubling sights you’ll see in rural Southeast Asia is the casual imprisonment of monkeys for no discernable reason. Usually anchored to a tree by a six foot line, these poor critters live out lives of grotesque boredom. Wild monkeys aren’t playful – they’re greedy, grabby, often vicious creatures who need little provocation to scratch at or steal from human passersby. But they never deserve to live like this, and I’m sure the confinement does little to improve their legendarily sour moods.



Kayaking itself was lovely. I got the lone single-seater kayak (everyone else was doubled up) much to my joy. Our kayaks were of the open-top river variety, ensuring that tiny waves and splashes would ride over the rim of the vessel and deposit several liters of water into the butt-retaining depression, ensuring a permanently soggy rear end for all participants for the duration of our adventure. And yet we had great fun. Central Laos has all the glorious scenery you’d expect of a textbook tropical paradise. Thick lime-green jungle, sheer black cliffs in all directions, and an azure sky so bright that even the omnipresent haze couldn’t fully mute it. The river was broad and slow and calm – far too calm for my tastes, frankly, but the near-torpor freed me to use my camera to my heart’s content without fear of abruptly feeding it to the Mae Nam Song.



The water, at the peak of the dry season, was rarely more than a couple of feet deep, and often much shallower, and we grew accustomed to the grinding shrieks that announced a sudden mid-river kayak beaching. But we made good progress – the river flowed at less than walking speed, so we quickly learned that only our own sweat would propel us the 15 kilometer to Vang Vieng before nightfall. The sights were uniformly utopian but don’t gain much on the repeated retelling: deep green water, broad-leaf palms, grass huts at riverside, occasional fishermen wading at water’s edge. Pictures tell the tale better.





Oh yes, and there were cows! Many herds of feral water buffalo, wading eagerly and devouring mouthfuls of delicious river weed. They regarded us with either suspicion or boredom – not the good-humoured affection that years of cartoons have told me to expect from wild animals. How disappointing. But they sure looked nifty!



For an hour or three we drifted down the river, periodically splashing each other with oars until that grew tiresome. Just as boredom threatened, our course abruptly changed (metaphorically speaking). The Laotian tranquility dissolved into a cacophony of Christina Aguilera tunes, and the riverbanks were abruptly lined by dozen of bamboo platforms bending under hordes of drink-sodden backpackers. Vang Vieng’s principal claim to fame, you see, is the tubing experience: travelers rent an inner-tube for $2 a day, souse themselves up, and float downriver for a few kilometers until bored or dead from drink. Along the way they buy BeerLao from enterprising locals who have set up booze booths mid-river, allowing the floaters to re-beer themselves without ever leaving the slothful comfort of their tubes. BeerLao is an eminently drinkable local lager sold almost exclusively in 660mL bottles – a good indicator of the level of drunkenness that it engenders.



The tubers’ experience is much like ours, except boozier (duh) and a whole lot slower (with only the vaguely feeble Mae Nam Song). We parked our kayaks and clambered up a mud slope to the largest and noisiest of the party platforms, a multi-storey bamboo monstrosity bloated with half-clad westerners and a handful of Laotians. We settled in with beers and Frito-Lays (very incongruous amidst the rural scenery, but whaddya gonna do?) and joined in the foolishness.



The prime attraction at this celebration of Western decadence was a rope swing that launched from a high ladder, at least 15 or 20 metres above the a deep point in the river. Many of the platforms we’d passed had such swings, but ours was the highest and apparently the most popular. Our little group, having carved out a bamboo platform of our own, watched with contempt as wave after wave of alleged daredevil launched from the swing’s platform, and then hung placidly from the rope until they could drop peacefully into the water with barely a ripple. Egged on by my comrades and my own fool sense of competitiveness, I set out to upstage the lot.

I climbed the unnervingly high ladder, grabbed the rope, silenced that nagging voice of wisdom that lurks in the back of my skull, and flung myself from the platform. In accordance with my earlier resolution, I held on only until the rope reached the apex of its swing at the other side, yanked myself up another couple of feet, and let go. The movement of the rope imparted an unforeseen spin and wobble to my plummet, which was dramatically farther and faster than I anticipated, and I hit the quiet water with nothing resembling grace or style. I think I won points for sheer force, though. The water caressed me all the rage and subtlety of a furious mule, and turned my entire upper torso into an angry bruise before continuing up my body and slugging me in the mouth with enough power to make all my teeth bleed. My technique seems unwise in retrospect, but it earned me the grudging respect (or guilty empathy) of my fellow kayakers, whose groans of sympathetic agony I think I heard even while submerged.

By the way, my second attempt, which used the same technique and is better documented below, was considerably more painful.



Having had my fill of self-flagellation, I joined my troupe and we headed downriver once again. The clouds of tubers became increasingly thick, and more than a few of them begged for a tow downriver. I’d be bored too, lying on my ass for five hours in the merciless equatorial sun. But they had beers, which I suggested would make an ample payment for my pulling them down the stream. None obliged. We passed many more lean-tos occupied my soused Westerners in the remaining hour or two of our trip. More importantly, we passed more cows, giving me some fine chances to document more livestock. I’m pretty sure that these cows wanted to eat me (seriously, look at them!), but their general laziness inhibited their murderous aspirations.



The predictably anti-climactic end of our trip came about eight hours after we set out for the day. We pulled up at the riverside in Vang Vieng, about 15km down the river from where we launched. I hauled my kayak ashore, dug out my soggy shoes, and wobbled back to my guesthouse. I had big plans to visit a party I’d heard about from folks at the rope swing, once I’d tended to my naggingly empty stomach and surveyed the day’s injuries.

Instead, and probably to no one’s surprise, I collapsed abruptly in the guest house after wolfing down some sub-par Indian food. Beat to a pulp by the force of my own foolishness, nursing an impressive but unexplained gash on my ribs that I probably acquired on some underwater rocks, and exceedingly satisfied with the day’s exertions, I made a rare concession to common and simply passed out. I’ve decided that any vacation should include new scars, and this one qualifies heartily.

Now I’m off to Luang Prabang, the French jewel of Northern Laos, mainly to gorge myself for a few days. Laos is shaping up to be among my most entertaining trips yet – let’s see what transpires on the infamous road north from Vang Vieng.

In which I discover another link that defies description...

Amazon has started selling "Tuscan Whole Milk" online, delivering it straight to your door. For reasons that I don't fully comprehend but which I heartily applaud, posting hilarious reviews of this milk has become something of an instant internet fad. At last count, 900 reviews in the forms of poetry, prose and occasionally shadow-puppetry testified to the glory of this milk. It's oddly addictive to read.

In which I offer a silly link...

That's only funny if you're as nerdy as I am...

You've been warned.

In which I learn a valuable lesson...

Namely, never complain that you don't have enough to do at work. Now I'm drowning in various tasks and struggling to find time to submit applications for a couple of conferences. Meanwhile, I've just discovered I have to do oodles of paperwork for CUSO today or I'm out 800 bucks - big money where I live. So this will have to suffice as my day's blog entry, though it is neither entertaining nor informative. Tomorrow, when my schedule clears, you'll get a big post about some self-inflicted injuries.

In which I realize, once again, the importance of writing posts quickly...

I was supposed to write last month about North Korea's nuclear disarmament deal, namely the fact that the DPRK is absolutely guaranteed to renege on it at some point. Then I got distracted by Laos and the like. And then, today, I read this. Surprise, surprise.

The point of this is not to gloat - though I believe I've made the same point in the past. The moral of this tiny fable is, rather, that if I have a thought I should blog it now and await the results, rather than trying to convince people of my prescience after the fact.

And by the way, North Korea will never relinquish its nukes willingly. The North's leadership is in fact composed entirely of deranged old men, but even if they weren't they still wouldn't disarm. The rational reasons for having nuclear weapons are entirely too compelling, no matter how much the rest of the world offers them to disarm. Period. The US and everybody else needs to understand that these summits and the like have precisely zero chance of ever leading to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. Thanks again, Dubya.

In which I muzzle myself, for once…

(Written (partly) at the Erawan restaurant, Vang Vieng, Laos, 9:00 PM, March 8th, 2007)…

Over the years, I’ve incubated a huge rant in which I unleashed all my frustrations with backpacker culture. I finally wrote it out, borrowing liberally from Alex Garland, and yet now the rant sits untouched in my notebook. It won’t make it onto my blog for now. Why not?

Because here in Vang Vieng, the quintessential backpacker town, nearly bereft of local culture and bloated with what wealthy European and American adolescents consider an “authentic” travel experience, I still had an absolute blast. I did so largely by avoiding the backpacker haunts (with one notably entertaining exception), but I still think I should shelve my tirade for now. The real post follows...

Vang Vieng is an unspeakably lovely little town enwombed in sheer karst cliffs and pristine tropical grass forests. The village lies about 170 north of Vientiene, a distance that takes about 4 hours by bus along Laos’ main highway, which is two lanes wide and windier than my worst imaginings. Our driver was more generous with the horn than the brake pedal, but I still had time to watch a chunk of Laos pass by at a somewhat leisurely pass. Small herds of water buffalo cooled themselves in dark streams and foraged in terraced paddies awaiting the planting in May. Freshly burned fields explained the smoke shadowing the entire region; farmers scorch their fields of excess vegetation, briefly nitrogenating the soil at the expense of much of its long-term fertility.

Houses of unpainted concrete or woven bamboo (with an implausible number of satellite dishes) lined almost the whole route, but I rarely got the impression that human habitation stretched more than a few hundred metres back from the road. At all times and in all directions imposing limestone hills, thickly forested and apparently untouched, cordoned off further sprawl.

Laos is thinly populated, six million people in a mountainous country more than four-fifths covered by virgin forest. The same economic and political repression that has mired the populace in poverty has oddly left much of the wilderness unscathed. I have very little idea why this happened in Laos while all her communist brethren suffered immense environmental destruction.

Now that I’m here, I find Vang Vieng to be cute and friendly despite the grotesque backpacker bloat. Virtually every building in the centre of town is a guest house, restaurant, or laundry shop – and usually all three. Dozens of “TV bars” litter the key streets – tiny restaurants, all with identical uninspiring menus, in which a handful of zonked-out westerners chow down on French fries and stare blankly at bootleg reruns of “Friends” or “Family Guy”. You can sit in one bar watching one episode of Friends and hear a half dozen other episodes of the same damn show echoing from the adjacent TV bars. Authentic travel it ain’t.

I’ve avoided the TV bars for now – I watch enough bootleg TV back at my place in Chiang Mai, and don’t need it on vacation. Instead I ate dinner twice at two different restaurants, both equally lackluster and poorly served – neither time did my meal arrive even remotely as ordered. But I’m full, so I’ll call it a marginal victory, and I have a gigantic bag of peanut M&M’s (a great rarity in SE Asia) that I bought at my guest house. Life could be much worse.



Between dinners I took a walk around town as the sun vanished abruptly. In the darkness, at least, there’s very little to see here beyond the aforementioned guesthouses. I did meet quite a few friendly locals, curious cows and apprehensive street dogs. I also encountered a bridge marked on each end by two unexploded American bombs half-buried in the soil. Given that unexploded ordnance (UXOs) continues to kill hundred of Laotians a year, this light-hearted reference was a wee bit discordant.



Sure, Vang Vieng proper might not have much to salve the soul – but I’ve found the remedy to that. Tomorrow I’ll be spending the day out on the Mae Nam Song river – first on a lighthearted caving diversion deep in the mountains to the north, and then kayaking 15 kilometres downriver back to Vang Vieng. If I were to do this whole lovely trip again, I’d reverse my course and head north to south, from Luang Prabang to Vientiane. That way I could kayaking all the way from Vang Vieng down to the capital, a three-day trip amidst glorious scenery. I’m sure it sounds like more fun than it actually is, but hey – still worth a shot. Meanwhile, tomorrow should be a fine time all the same.

In which I bubble with minor pride...

This has got to be one of the best pictures I've even taken. Wasn't easy.



In other news, I've worked out a fantastic deal with the fine lady who runs the little hole-in-the-wall where I eat lunch most days. The place make great, ultra-authentic food for microscopic prices - about $0.75 a plate. They're so low rent they don't have menus, and the corkboard tables are disintegrating - it's about as Thai as you can get. But I've grown tired of eating the same half-dozen dishes (namely, the ones whose names I know). So, with the help of my Thai phrasebook (using it for pointing rather than speaking, of course), we've worked out a new deal. I no longer order lunch. Every day she makes me whatever she thinks I'll like. In return, I eat it. She's never steered me wrong yet, and she instinctively understands that as I'm a weakling foreigner she'd best tone down the chilis. It's a good way to go.

In which I wax ecological…

(Written at La Gondola restaurant, Vientiane, 6:30 PM, 2007)

This afternoon, between first and second dinner, I walked out to the middle of the Mekong. At its peak the mighty river is at least two kilometers across, but now, at the height of dry season, it has narrowed to perhaps a quarter of that. I’m glad, since in wetter months my walk would have been a touch more harrowing. As it is, I was able to get a fascinating hint of the lifeblood of this entire region.

Cutting sneakily through the main tourist waterfront drag of Vientiane, running a gauntlet of “Tuk-tuk!” and “Hello! Where you go!” was the first step in my walk. Past the shops and restaurants, I elbowed through head-high grasses and edged down a steep footpath and found myself on a narrow mudflat that twitched with ruddy-coloured frogs no larger than my thumbnail. They were so small and moved so erratically that I first thought they were bugs, and I may have stepped on some before I even noticed them. Stepping lightly and slowly didn’t scare them from my path consistently enough and I eventually took to crouching and blowing furiously at the ground before each step. This odd behaviour seemed to scare off the tiny beasties (who were far too well camouflaged for their own good) and, more important, much amused the five Lao teenage boys who greeted me at the water’s edge.



They waded in a torpid stream that branched off the main river for about a kilometer before rejoining it. Like a dozen others I passed on my walk, they were fishing by hand. Taking turns, each would vanish briefly in an explosion of bubbles and, and then re-emerge clasping a wriggling six-inch fish between both hands and smiling in triumph. The water was too muddy to open one’s eyes underneath, so they must have been fishing by touch alone, and yet they rarely resurfaced empty-handed. I couldn’t tell if they were doing it for food or sport – I didn’t see a bucket for storing the catch, and their infectiously cheerful competitiveness reminded me more of a game of street hockey than a work session.



They and several more obviously industrious hand-fishers along that tributary gave me a tiny hint of what the Mekong river and its branches mean to the people of this region. Most Westerners (myself included, until today) know the river mainly as a charnel house for American soldiers during the Vietnam War (known here, by the way, as the Second Indochinese War). I wish more visitors here would try to get to know the river a little better – drinking a Beerlao at a waterfront bar, while great fun, doesn’t really count.

I picked my way across a makeshift bridge of driftwood across the muck and mud and onto the vast sand island, at least a kilometer wide, that sits in the middle of the Mekong. I met six kids playing an amusing game of piggyback boxing. They smilingly obliged my photos.






A few more locals whirled on dirtbikes in the distance. At the edge of the river proper, a few dozen Lao leapt briefly (or were shoved) into the water. The river was several hundred meters wide, swift-moving and unnervingly deep. The occasional small ferry plied its way – too late in the day for much traffic – and in the fading daylight I could dimly see the distant lights of riverside industry through the rust haze of the burning season.



Why am I making such a fuss over this simple river? Because there’s a casual intimacy in these people’s relationship with the Mekong that took me by great surprise. At home, a river is mainly an obstacle to be bridged, and then rarely considered except by those who make their living on the water.

But here the river provides everything to virtually everyone. The Mekong is not merely the lifeblood of the people of Southeast Asia, it’s their highway, their playground, their supermarket and, let’s face it, their sewer. A quarter of a billion people in six countries live and die by what happens to this river. Until I saw it I had no idea of how important it is. At the least, I’m newly convinced that no traveler has really visited Southeast Asia until they’ve set a foot in the Mekong.

In which my gradual creative rehabilitation continues...

I'm in the midst of a massive reworking of my flickr page, hence the lack of Laos posting today. More to come. Plenty of photos are up from the first couple of days of my trip, but in no particular order and with inadequate description... soon this will be corrected.

In which I complete my journey through Laotian history…

(Written mostly at Kop Chai Deu restaurant, Vientiane on March 6th, 2007)

The Lao National Museum is, to put it succinctly, an odd place where communism is worshipped and Laos overflowed with prosperity once the foreign oppressors were vanquished. Skipping over a vast and (to me) completely uninteresting exhibit on the historical interactions between Laos and the Netherlands, I poked through the museum’s core, a series of dry and dusty rooms chronicling Laos’ endless conquests by, and wars of liberation against, pretty much everyone.

Local leftist luminaries (again I applaud alliteration) like Kaysorn Phomsivane, the founder of the revolutionary Pathet Lao, stood in sculpted and painted form alongside better-known international symbols like Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, Marx and Lenin. The main hall runs through a gamut of international occupations of Laos, from ancient Burmese and Khmer overlords, to the Japanese, the French, and eventually the Americans who attempted to hobble the Laotian communists through their Hmong tribal proxies. The room is speckled with paintings of villages forced to toil for the occupiers, and sun-faded black-and-white photos of cruelly injured civilians and victorious Lao revolutionaries. Interspersed throughout are glass display cases full of American M-16s, empty artillery shells and CIA field binoculars, among many other paraphernalia of war.

The 1962-75 proxy war that raged between the CIA and the North Vietnamese along Laos’ eastern border with Vietnam is known as “The Secret War” for good reason. It was one of the most underreported news stories of the 20th century, and yet it was staggering in scale. It’s vastly more complex than I’m able to relate – I have only the dimmest understanding of the war. The North Vietnamese essentially occupied half of Laos to gain vital strategic territory for the fight in Vietnam; the Americans responded by bombing the living shit out of the entire country. Sorry for the crassness. I wish I had a more polite way to describe it, but I don’t – over the nine or so years of the Secret War, the US ran nearly 300,000 bombing missions to support a thousand CIA agents and the 75,000 Hmong insurgents they were training. Those sorties dropped more tons of explosive on Laos (about 3 million tons, if memory serves) than were dropped on Japan or Germany during World War II – the unexploded remnants of which continue to mutilate Lao civilians by the hundreds every year. Yet the US government at the time refused to acknowledge that the war was even underway, while the CIA bomber pilots flew in civilian clothes lest they be captured.

Eventually, despite all this, the North Vietnamese crushed the US-supported Hmong rebels and their CIA “advisors”, driving the few Americans out and brutalizing the surviving Hmong. Why the history lesson? Because as little of this information was on display in the Lao museum as there is in the typical American history book. According to the government-approved histories I saw at the museum, the heroic Lao forces fought back against the cruel American imperialists, and through pluck and brilliance and ideological superiority, singlehandedly drove them out. I couldn’t find one mention of the fact that it was North Vietnam that invaded Laos first, nor that the NVA carried the major burden in evicting the Americans again; come to think of it, the entire country of Vietnam went unmentioned, along with the fact that Vietnam colonized Laos after the war and that Laos remains a Vietnamese political vassal to this day.

The government-approved storyline, one of triumphant communism vanquishing oppressors and unshackling the poor, apparently left no room for military occupation by Laos’ ideological brethren in Vietnam. Come to think of it, according to the museum, Laos’ history more or less ended entirely in 1975 when the last of the Americans were driven out and a workers’ paradise was presumably established. There was no mention of the grinding poverty that continues to enslave most Lao, nor of the periodic peasant uprisings in response to government oppression. There was certainly no talk of the sporadic and ongoing Hmong insurgency and the vicious ethnic persecution the government has launched to quell it.

There was a small room full of ascending bar charts which, though untranslated, clearly meant to indicate ever-expanding prosperity and a handful of photos of shining breweries and pharmaceutical plants. But the numbers don’t lie – Lao’s communist revolution was embarrassingly brief and unsuccessful even by the miserable standards of real-world Marxism. It gained traction in 1970, was renounced in all but name by 1990, and left the people as poor as when they started. Laos’ literacy rate (58%) remains a disgrace, rural poverty is some of the most oppressive you’ll see outside central Africa, and the Communist Party still clings furiously to power. Life in Laos, for the vast majority, remains nasty, brutish and short – not to mention illiterate and oppressed.

Needless to say, my one glimpse of official Laotian ideology left me perplexed and a touch pissed off. The Lao government has been very explicit that it has absolutely *no* interest in fostering multi-party elections, permitting political criticism, or loosening the tight reins on the press. Fortunately, some other things are changing here, and not a minute too soon. Economic growth has begun to take off and life is haltingly starting to improve for ordinary Laotians. It’ll be interesting to see how economic growth affects one-party rule – like a micro-China, perhaps.

In the meantime, at least all those vicious oppressors left Laos with some great food. I’m going out for pasta now – I’ll write more when I hit Vang Vieng tomorrow and start doing some outdoorsy stuff.

In which I take an entertainment break...

I watched 300 yesterday, and heartily recommend it to anybody with an appetite for big, pretty action flicks. It's admittedly a little thin in the story department, even considering the paucity of the underlying material. But it's well acted, expertly paced, and full of inappropriately entertaining violence. Most important, it's about the most gloriously shot movie I've seen in years - it's satisfying to finally see the green-screen revolution be used in service of serious visual art. Go see it if it's at all your thing - and if you've got a reasonably strong stomach.

In which I get sidetracked…

(Written at 4:30 PM March 6th, 2007 at the Kop Chai Deu Restaurant, Vientiane)

Overfed and a wee bit bored, this afternoon I toddled through the supremely lackluster Lao National Museum, a sun-bleached and inconceivably dusty monolithic shrine to Laos’ past sufferings (admittedly plentiful) and great victories (rather more scarce). I dutifully paid my 10,000 kip (about one US dollar) and retreated from the lethal tropical sun for an hour, hoping to get a glimpse of Lao politics, of which I know very little. I certainly accomplished that, but only by reading between the lines…

Apparently attempting to broaden the museum’s appeal beyond diehard communists (a devout but notably dwindling demographic), the Ministry of Information and Culture has added new (i.e. slightly less dusty) exhibits celebrating prehistoric Laos.

Yay! Larb! Larb is a delightfully pungent and simple Lao stirfry made from bean sprouts, fresh dill and basil, nominal quantities of veggies and peppers, and a generous mound of ground beef. It’s served with a cup of sticky rice so structurally sound that I’m meant to tear it apart by hand rather than use a utensil. Yummy! You may have inferred that I tend to write while I wait for my food to arrive. It’s a good system.

Where was I? Oh yes, the Lao National Museum. Anyhow, there was a large room, complete with cheesy dinosaur diorama, dedicated to prehistoric Laos. Apparently this country has been inhabited for a *very* long time, and is an archeologist’s paradise. I even got to see one of the massive urns – millennia old, a metre wide and half again as high, weighing 300 kilos and carved directly out of a single block of stone – that I won’t get to see on the Plain of Jars. It was a welcome tidbit. Unfortunately, most of the exhibit was clearly intended for people with a passion for rocks (which I don’t have) or for amateur archaeologists (which I’m not), or at least for people who can read Lao (do you even have to ask?).

Fortunately, the rest of the museum focused on two of my abiding passions, politics and human foolishness, with a healthy dose of ideological self-worship.

Interruption.

2 women in their 20s, ragged with hard poverty and each with a swaddled infant at her hip, appeared beside my patio table to beg me briefly for money. I told them no and turned back to my food, rather less comfortably than before.

I don’t give money to beggars – ever. Hell, neither does Muhammad Yunus. I’ve long since acknowledged that even if beggars were to spend the money carefully and wisely (hardly assured), giving to them is about the least efficient way to help the poor. It doesn’t benefit from the foresight and economies of scale that larger, well-focused charities do. It does nothing to reward local creativity and entrepreneurship (and probably works to crowd them out, in fact). Besides, I usually tell myself that the work I do more than balances the karmic scales.

So why the hell do I still feel so guilty? In part, it’s because the decision not to give to beggars is *much* harder in the developing world than back home, where panhandlers receive some government support and the charity they receive most often goes straight into their veins. Here there’s no government support of any kind, for anyone. No welfare payments, no health care, no soup kitchens. The poor and hungry and sick stay that way, and for too many of them begging is the only thing that sustains them. All the reasons I listed above still stand, but they’re a lot harder to rationalize in Laos then they are on Vancouver’s East Side. Hell, I probably feel guilty mainly because I’m hungrily chowing down on my larb, while in full view of four people who are right now hungrier than I’ve ever been.

The Australian couple at the next table simply turned their heads when the begging women arrived, and refused to speak to them or otherwise acknowledge their existence. For all my reasoning, is there really any difference between me and that consciously oblivious couple? The two women and their hungry children surely don’t think so.

Bloody hell. I’ve lost all desire to write about the museum right now, surreal though it was. Sorry for a downer post. I’ll try to write something funny tomorrow.

In which I speak surely too soon…

(Written at 12:00 PM, March 6th, Le Grillon French Restaurant, Vientiane.)

Having whiled away a fascinating morning standing in line at the Thai consulate, awaiting my visa with hundreds of other Westerners who are also pretending not to work and live in Thailand, I haven’t yet seen much of Laos. I did wander a short while around Vientiane, and I’m ready to launch into some surely premature observations on this tiny country.

Someone better-traveled than I, but cursed with a sadly unmemorable name, wrote that “Laos is one of the last quiet countries”. If that’s still true, then Vientiane is surely not the place to prove it. This small capital of about 250,000, a forest of low-rises and small temples, fed by pleasantly broad French boulevards and narrow lanes, isn’t lurking in some silent pre-industrial past.

Ooh, my pizza just arrived! Onion, garlic, pepper, mushrooms, ham and criminally large quantities of respectable French cheese. Looks tasty.

Vientiane buzzes with far more energy than I’d expected. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t Bangkok or Singapore. Laos is a desperately poor country, near the very bottom of Asia’s economic ladder. The literacy rate here is a disgraceful 58 percent, life expectancy… and the per capita income is much closer to the hardest parts of sub-Saharan Africa than to Laos’ next-door neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam.

But there’s still a world of difference between destitute societies on the way down and those on the way up. In Zambia, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, for example, the finest buildings were the remnants of old colonial infrastructure, rotteing amidst grinding poverty and gruesome kleptocracy. Especially in the first two examples, there was a palpable sense that the good times (such as they were) were long past, and few people expected growth to reverse their grim fortunes. A side note: A belated Happy 83rd Birthday to Uncle Bob, the feckless thug who personally ruined the most promising country in Africa. May it be his last!

Laos is in the same league as Zimbabwe for poverty (or at least it was until Zim began its sickening nosedive six years ago). But, following the lead of its ideological brethren next door in China, the Lao Communist Party began liberalizing the economy by increments in the late 1980s, without much loosening political restraints. The results have been dramatic. Funded by tourism and a moderate resource boom (whose environmental consequences are not yet clear) the economy is vigorously expanding, at least here in Vientiane. New buildings and infrastructure are under construction everywhere in sight, small businesses are sprouting, and shiny tuk-tuks and quite a few very new vehicles jostle on freshly paved roads. It’s on a very modest scale, of course, but when we consider Laos’ miserable starting conditions, this is remarkable progress. It’s not hard to imagine that this is what much of China looked like 15 or so years ago, when their own liberalization was taking root.

Of course, I’m looking in a very small place in a fairly large country. 90 percent of Lao live in rural areas, and subsistence agriculture employs 80 percent of the workforce. It would be foolish for me to judge the country’s progress based on a walking tour of the showcase city… so I’m heading out of town. I don’t have all the time I’d like to explore the country – that’ll have to wait until July or August – but after I collect my visa tomorrow I’ll head straight out of town. Lamentably, I don’t have time to visit the remote Plain of Jars, but the trip north to Luang Prabang should provide a better opportunity to see the real Laos, even though it runs along the country’s most developed corridor. Until then, I’ll devote myself to walking around town and, more importantly, eating six times a day. More to come.

In which I offer 3 conclusions, illuminate a problem, and offer a strange solution… (kindly bear with a long post – there’s something in it for you)

(Written in Vientiane, Laos – March 5th, 2007)

I haven’t heard so much French spoken since my first trip overseas, to England and France in 1998, traveling with my father and enabled entirely by his generosity. Not surprisingly, Laos couldn’t be much further removed from France, and her days as a French colony ended half a century ago, but a handful of connections make Vientiane a very pleasant place to spend a couple of days.

Although few Laotians bother to learn French these days, the country’s remnant francophonism and, more importantly, the legacy of fine French food continue to lure French tourists. Several of the occupy the tables on the 2nd-floor balcony of the Le Creperie, where I now enjoy a shockingly authentic caramel-and-meringue concoction while overlooking the darkened central square of Vientiane. Though I can understand little of their conversation, Spanish having rudely elbowed French out of my verbal cortex, their chatter is surprisingly soothing – a touch of unexpected elegance.

The food here in Vientiane is supremely tasty, more than compensating for the monolithic architectural drabness that appears to accompany Laos’ vestigial communism. Having enjoyed a delightful chicken-and-wild-mushroom baguette, a hefty order of chicken tikka, and a couple of desserts (a three different restaurants in total), I suppose I didn’t really need another food fix here at Le Creperie. But I felt I needed a suitably cosmopolitan spot to navel-gaze, so I hauled my pen and notebook across the street and up the stairs, so best to scribble out the following:

Conclusion 1) I’m in a bored funk. Not here in Laos (which is spiffy), just in general. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy, merely that, Thailand and all notwithstanding, I face very little challenge in my daily existence. Life here is comfortable, but more routine than you’d expect – wake up, bike to work, toil lightly, eat well, hit the gym if so motivated, and wrap up the day hanging with friends or incinerating digital aliens. Save for occasional weekend sightseeing and a handful of kickass trips like this one, life here differs very little from life at home in Vancouver.

My work is pleasant but unchallenging. I don’t have as much opportunity to teach my students as I would like – though that’s likely to change a bit in coming weeks – and I fill the rest of my time with the same necessary but mundane tasks like writing web copy and editing papers for which I would have been much better-remunerated were I still labouring in corporate whoredom.

None of this sounds terribly difficult, I know – and that’s precisely the point. I feel like I lack opportunities for much personal growth here, even though that’s exactly what I came here to look for in the first place. I’ve been surviving here (quite well, in fact) but I feel static, and uncreative. The solution, it seems, is to force growth and creativity upon myself. My ideal solution would be to travel like mad around Asia at every opportunity, but financial reality has already drowned that option. Nor can I afford the new camera I so desperately crave to feed my growing interest in serious photography. And so, lacking creative aptitudes in virtually all other fields, this blog must be my outlet.

Every single damn bloody %*$%*# day.

I’m going to force myself to blog more as a solution to my (admittedly trivial) problems.

Except…

Conclusion 2) I’ve thought this before, and I haven’t stuck with it long enough to make it work. I’m a champion procrastinator and a world-class squanderer of valuable time. Although I love writing, it’s all too easy every day to postpone it in favour of other pursuit that less resemble work and more resemble sitting on my ass. Time and again I’ve resolved to blog more (as you’ve likely noticed), only to have my brittle determination shattered by whatever obscure link trail I’ve started following on Wikipedia that day.

Which leads us to…

Conclusion 3) I’ll need help, and I’m willing to pay for it. Here’s the new deal: for the next month, I’m going to write at least one solid paragraph every single day. Any time I miss a full calendar day, I will award $10 to the first person who calls me on it (by posting in the previous day’s comments). $10 is my entire disposable income for one day – real money to me, folks: 5 big meals out, 10 delicious Thai teas, 4 trips to the movies, or about 6 litres of not-too-bad local beer. You get the idea. I’m good for it – you’ll get your money.

I know it’s tacky, I know it’s weird. But I’m hopeful it’ll drive me to write, and inspire some of you to put some pressure on me – probably less out of greed than out of sheer bloody-mindedness (Christian, I’m looking at you with that one.)

I’m taking the liberty of establishing some exemptions – conditions under which I ain’t nobody anything for not posting.
1. Hospitalization.
2. Total loss of web access everywhere for the full day.
3. Civil War, but only if it results in exemptions 1 or 2 coming to pass.

Ok, let’s see how it works – in a month I’ll take a look and see how much money I owe and whether I feel more creative. Thanks in advance for your help – next up, lots more Laos!

In which I offer more red meat to my fellow international politics fanatics...

There's a ridiculously star-studded (and equally depressing) roundtable discussion here about the future of Iraq. Pretty interesting stuff if it's your thing.

In which I follow one of my political passions...

Albeit with heart-wrenching disappointment. As long-time readers know, I've followed the miseries Robert Mugabe has inflicted on the once-lovely Zimbabwe. Incomprehensibly, it actually seems to be getting worse, with Zimbabwe's quiet starvation is far exceeding the far more obvious butchery in Darfur.

In which I return to Chiang Mai to discover that something has changed for the worse…

Namely the choking grey miasma that now hangs over the city. The burning season has begun, late in the dry period when the worst of the summer heat approaches. Farmers across Southeast Asia are scorching their fields (or the virgin forest) of excess vegetation in the viciously myopic hope of wringing another year of fertility from the taxed soil. So the ominous smoke of slash-and-burn agriculture, which I had expected (and found in great quantity) in Laos, is now omnipresent in Northern Thailand as well. I’ve been told that this is the worst pollution in the region’s history, and I believe it. The greyness coats my contact lenses with abrasive grit, suffuses everything with a faint acrid stink, and at times runs so thick it’s hard to spot the sun (admittedly a blessing at midday). With not a drop of rain in five months (nor any expected for three more), and the air absolutely motionless, it seems it will be some time before Chiang Mai becomes fit for human habitation once again. And yet here I’ll be. At least work is picking up.

At least while I cower in the conditioned air of my apartment, hiding from Asia’s justifiably legendary air pollution, I will at least have time for some blogging. Tonight is a time for transcription, though it may take some time: my notebook scribblings are nearly illegible even to me, a fact of which I’m vaguely proud.

In the meantime, it’s time for Paul Literary Review!!! Yay! On my vacation (which ended eons too early), I got fifty pages into Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 before losing patience with its endlessly self-referential humour and slow pace. I’ll give it another shot in a few days – I’m fairly certain I’m the only person alive who hasn’t read this book.

Instead I ran through Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which delighted me by making a thoroughly ludicrous scenario (life trapped in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, for anyone who’s been under a rock since 2002) audaciously believable, and then making it bloody entertaining. It’s a quick and rewarding read – I highly recommend it to anyone capable of silencing their inner skeptic for a day or so.

Whereas I recommend Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist only to literary masochists and Republicans. I can’t remember the last time I read a book of such paralyzing stupidity – and certainly not one that came so highly recommended. I bought it based on the (somewhat hedgy) accolades on the back cover and some glowing word-of-mouth; had I been able to break the shrink-wrap, I’d have discovered that such esteemed critics as self-actualization guru Tony Robinson are the book’s most fervent proponents. And no wonder – The Alchemist is a babbly self-help book masquerading as a novel. Its infuriating (and incoherent) preachiness (about such lunacies as The Soul of the World – don’t ask) is equaled only by its textureless prose and miserably static characters. It's a quick read too, but that's still 90 minutes I've lost forever, and I'm deeply bitter about that - I could have wasted that time playing World of Warcraft, dammit! If you’ve been fortunate enough not to read this embarrassingly lame book, then keep it that way; if you once suffered through it, know that I share your pain.

Ok, more blogging to come ASAP – and some photos and (gasp!) video of my Laotian pratfalls!

In which I'm alive and well...

Having procured some new scars kayaking down the Mae Nam Song river in the middle of Laos and subsequently leaping from a rope swing, I've finally arrived safely in Luang Prabang, the lovely, UNESCO-listed heart of northern Laos. It feels rather more like being in the French Alps, so thoroughly preserved are the remnants of French colonization. In fact, I'm about to rush out to visit what's apparently one of the world's finest French restaurants, so my post gets cut short here. I'll be returning to Chiang Mai (by plane, thank Vishnu, rather than by bus) tomorrow, and details aplenty will arrive then - including tales of the distressingly numerous, well-armed and polite(?) insurgents lining the highway to Luang Prabang.

In which I'm allergic to backpackers...

But they're everywhere! I'm in Vang Vieng, a tiny and lovely little town 200 kilometres north of Vientiane. It's my rest stop on my way to Luang Prabang in the far north... but it's overrun with backpackers! Imperious, self-righteous, homogenizing backpackers (wait a minute, did I just accidentally describe myself?). In any event, I can hear four or five different TVs playing "Family Guy" at bars surrounding the internet cafe - such is the homogenizing influence of the Western explorer.

The blog posts continue to accumulate in my notebook. Soon all will be unleashed.

In which I've arrived in Vientiane, Laos...

And I'm eating suspiciously well, given that this is a miserably poor quasi-communist country. Also, it's quite hot here in the landlocked heart of Indochina. I've been blogging plentifully (in my notebook), but limited internet access prohibits a wholesale uploading of my ruminations, most likely until I get back to Chiang Mai on Sunday. Such is life. Also, I'm concocting a tacky yet innovative new plan that will keep me blogging consistently (Hint: there's money involved, mostly mine).

More to come when technical limitations permit.

In which I go questing far afield...

In search of a decent hamburger.

For reasons which escape me, hamburgers in Thailand are all fried, McDonalds'-style, and I've been unable to find a decent barbecued burger in six months here. As fried burgers go, the local ones are fine, but nobody seems to grasp what an absurd compromise that is.

And yet, four or five months ago, someone from Indonesia told me that Southeast Asia's best burger joint is in Vientiane, the Laotian capital about 12 hours' bus travel from here. So I'm going looking for a fine authentic hamburger, in the landlocked, thinly populated geopgraphical heart of Indochina. Sure, makes sense. (And while I'm at it, I'll get a new visa so Thailand doesn't deport me.)

Vientiane (so named because the colonial French overlords couldn't pronounce "Wieng Chan") apparently has few charms beyond fine sandwiches, so once my visa woes are resolved I'll head northeast (I think) to explore the mysterious Plain of Jars. Then I'll zip over to Luang Prabang, a reputedly lovely hybrid of SE Asian charm and French food and architecture - UNESCO tells me that I'd be foolish to miss it. And then I'll fly back to Chiang Mai somehow next Sunday... I think. Lao Airlines has been a little unclear on that point.

I'll have a spot of spare time while I wait for my visa in Vientiane and ride buses around this anachronistic country, and I'm leaving my computer and DVD player at home (shocking!), so my notebook will occupy my time. This should result in many many blog posts, of the sort that have been promised abundantly in recent weeks but continuously sidelined by my newly hectic work schedule.

Wish me luck - I'll be carefully avoiding UXOs, gorging myself on the best of the local food, and avoiding some of the more noxious Lao "delicacies". More on those later, when I better come to grips with some of the profoundly odd things considered tasty in Southeast Asia. See you in a week, less if I can find a decent Internet connection - not something at which Communist countries usually excel.

In which I'm testing the potential of the New Blogger...

They won me over with a brilliant Battlestar Galactica analogy, so now I'm exploring the much-ballyhooed conveniences of Blogger 2.0, with an eye towards better use of photos and integrating my previous travel blogs dating back to Japan in 2000. Other posting is on brief hiatus until I've done so...

In which I bow to tradition...

And wish everyone a Happy Valentine's Day!

Normally one to go all out for the occasion, this year I'll settle for living vicariously through my students, many of whom have never observed the day before. Now, fully apprised of the details, they're in an absolute frenzy, making endless calls to significant others and giggling maniacally in a way that Southeast Asians seem to have a preternatural talent for. At the best of times they're inquisitive, but they've taken Valentine's Day as a license to question everyone they meet about their respective personal life, with an indefatigable curiousity that would shame Mike Wallace. It's fascinating to see, but I'm damn glad it only happens once a year.