Lots of Ice, Home is Nice, Jerry Rice?

My 36-hour day is winding down to a close and as you can tell from the title it's wearing a bit on my faculties. Something I didn't realize before taking off from Beijing this afternoon (yes same day) at 5pm is that when you fly between two cities in the northern hemisphere, the most direct route is not parallel to the equator as the in-flight catalog would have you believe, but rather somewhere over the North Pole. This makes for beautiful, cloudless, scenery below, however during the summer months, when these regions lack nighttime, it makes for a very long and confusing day.

(Beijing to Chicago flight path)

United Flight 850 from Beijing to Chicago left China about 2 hours before the sun should have begun to set; however, instead of dimming as you would expect, the light outside of the plane windows actually grew brighter as we headed north. Finally when we arrived in Chicago around 4:30pm on the same day, 12 hours into the future and, according to local time, 30 minutes into the past, the sun was nearly in the exact same position as it had been when we left. East-West 'time travel' is a convenient trick for those wishing to traverse the globe in a single afternoon, but it plays some crazy tricks on the mind, and leaves you seriously dragging at the end of what on arrival seems like a normal length day.

(North Pole ice 6 miles below; where are the drowning polar bears?)

Fortunately, my wits were not so far lost as to let me miss a new but familiar face when I touched down in Jackson, MS around 11:30pm this evening. Along with the other 50-odd weary travelers who had just arrived from Dallas or Charlotte was 13-time pro-bowler, Mississippi native, and Valley State alumni Jerry Rice. Without shoulder pads or a Montana rocket in his outstretched arm, I was slow to recognize Rice; however, after seeing the helmet tattoo on his right bicep, I quickly realized that even the greatest receiver in NFL history has to wait in line for his bags when he comes to Jackson. However, unlike myself and a handful of others from the two flights, Mr. Rice actually received his luggage. Fortunately, we had just enough time to snap a quick photo before he headed outside to a stretch limo and I headed upstairs to file a missing luggage claim at the UA desk. This last memorable moment of the trip reinforced the idea that had been driven home so many times over the last 10 weeks: no matter how much you plan your travels, things will go wrong; however, with this same unwanted uncertainty comes the chance for great adventure and the occasional pleasant surprise.

(Jerry Rice at baggage claim in JAN)

Now that the 10-week trip is over and my real job starts in a week, this should be my last post for a while (pending dire economic downturn or winning the lottery). Thanks for following along; I hope that you have enjoyed reading as much as I have enjoyed writing. There's a few extra photos in the flickr gallery so make sure to check it out one last time.

Beijing to Chicago in only an hour and a half

KT slept in yesterday when I visited the forbidden city, then we both headed out for the Pearl Market before finally coming home around 10pm with a body-sized duffle bag of trinkets, knick-knacks , and other souveniers for our families and friends back home.

I have another 6 hours in China before my United flight takes off from Beijing to Chicago (4pm). The 15 hour flight leaves at 4:20pm and amazing arrives the same day at 5:40pm, just 1:20 later. Hopefully, most of this unearned time will be spend accumulating the sleep I'll need to stave off jet lag. After the last ten weeks of catching Z's in buses, trains, airplanes, and sweaty hostel beds, it hopefully won't be too hard.

China: more than meets the eye

(Outside the Forbidden City, Beijing)

KT and I are in Beijing right now after three days in Bangkok and a whirlwind 36 hours in Shanghai. The PRC is KT's home turf, having studied here during college and returned several times since, however even with a savvy guide fluent in Mandarin, China has been an entirely different experience from anywhere else we've been. In all respects, the eastern cities (Shanghai/Beijing/etc) are 'first world' locals with all the amenities you'd expect to find at home. There's no shortage of 2 RMB ($0.25) liter beers or $1.50 restaurant dinners; however, walk a few blocks and you can just as conveniently spend $12 on a movie ticket and $6 on the accompanying single scoop vanilla ice cream cone.

Even more surprising than the western prices is the fact that almost always its the Chinese rather than the tourists who are paying them. China is a country 1.3 billion (the US has roughly 300 million) and despite the fact that the majority of these people live in the mainland on relatively low wages, those in the cities are surprisingly affluent and wealthy. This affluence, combined with national pride, means that in China, unlike anywhere else we've visited, there is very little desire to learn English. From South Africa to Vietnam, every restaurant worker, street hawker, or hotel attendant had a working knowledge, if not fluency, in English since doing so was the only way to ensure their livelihood. However, in China, unlike the rest of these places, the majority of tourists are not American, Australian, or European, but rather native Chinese. Chinese, unlike most of the inhabitants of the countries we've visited, have the money to travel as well as the desire to do so at home rather than abroad. Even on a Monday afternoon the flag-waving, matching t-shirt clad crowds of Chinese tourists in Tianamen square and the forbidden city numbered in the tens of thousands. Although most street sings are labeled in both Chinese and English, almost all advertisements and non-government signs are completely in Chinese and hardly anyone, except in the nicest hotels, speaks more than a few words of English.

Being in a country which for the first time reminds you so much of home -- in its cleanliness, lack of fashion sense, body type, and taste for consumerism -- but at the same time is so alien -- in its speech and language -- has been an incredibly new experience. I don't know if my impression of China will be better or worse than any of the other cultures we've parachuted in on, but so far I do know it'll be different. Keep an eye on the flickr gallery for photos; access to the collaborative web 2.0 tools that we take for granted at home is tenuous, if legal, but I'll do my best to keep it updated.

Defying Death in Ho Chi Minh City

Below is a video that i shot from the back of a motorcycle taxi in Saigon on my way to the consulate to get more passport pages last week. My eyes were closed through most of this, but fortunately the camera I was holding in my outstretched arm kept rolling.



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Vietnam Robot Toilet

Thanks to SM and KB for letting me film in their bathroom. Make sure to keep an eye on the flickr gallery for more shots from Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh and Colonel Sanders: Same Person?

There is only one thing in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) as ubiquitous as the portraits and avenues dedicated to Ho Chi Minh and that is the Kentucky Fried Chicken's. There is no chain restaurant in the city with as many storefronts or with as wide a footprint. Vietnamese, much like the Chinese, are obsessed with KFC, yet one cannot help but wonder if this is due more to the Colonel's striking resemblence to their revered leader than to his delectable blend of herbs and spices. There are several websites dedicated to the phenomen which explore the similarities (both were born in 1890 and worked as cooks) between Colonel Sanders and Uncle Ho.

(coincidence?)

I've been under the weather since we arrived in Saigon five days ago and haven't been able to update the blog. Fortunately, not much has happened besides lots of movies being watched and gatorade being drunken. I left Saigon yesterday on a short flight to Hoi An, a tiny coastal town, which is one of the most well-preserved examples of colonial architecture in the country. Below are some pictures from the last week.

(monks posing for a photo in Phnom Penh)

(Along Route 1 - Phnom Penh to Saigon highway)

(advertisement on Sony's tuktuk)

Make sure to check out the flickr gallery for more photos from Vietnam and Cambodia.

Bazookas, Bones, and Bootleg DVD's

In the newly capitalist parts of South East Asia, there're few things that aren't for sale. Bottles of Johnnie Walker Black adorn the walls of even the smallest internet cafe, $1.50 bootleg dvd shops flaunt their wares with impunity on the main riverfront boulevard, and even the wildest fantasy is just a dusty motorcycle taxi's ride away -- including the chance to fire a rocket launcher.

(Cambodia on the map)

In the early 1980's when I was trading diapers for 'big-boy pants', Cambodia's Khmer Rouge was wrapping up a genocidal campaign that would subsequently claim the lives of nearly one -quarter of the country's population. With international disdain for western paternalism in SE Asian affairs following the Vietnam War, Cambodia was left to it's own devices for almost two decades. It took a 1978 invasion by neighboring Vietnam and a bloody decade-long war to finally remove the Khmer Rouge from power. Only in 1991, after a comprehensive peace settlement was reached in Paris, did Cambodia finally begin to rebuild.

After a $2 billion infusion from the UN and 15 years of help from governments and NGO's, Cambodia appears to be well on its way to recovery. The country is cleaner than India, safer than South Africa, and friendlier and easier to navigate than nearly any of the other places we have visited. The surface appearance of a healthy and progressive society, does not cover the scars of nearly a half-century of conflict stretching from the Vietnam war to the late 80's. Landmine victims walk the street with crudely-made prosthetics and over 60% of the current population is under the age of 30.

Bridging the gap between gung-ho capitalism and Cambodia's dark past is an industry, which in my experience, is unique only to a few countries in SE Asia. Most of Cambodia's weapons arsenal has been dismantled since '91; however, much of it still remains, and today, what Western authorities failed to destroy in the recent decades, Western tourists are slowly eliminating (for a price) through a small network of locally-run exotic firing ranges.

Emblazoned on our driver Sony's tuk-tuk is the hand-written sign -- "Need shooting rang. Want to fir AK47". Since hearing Anne's story about her experience firing an AK-47 during a trip to Saigon, it had been on my list of things to consider; however as these shooting ranges are illegal in Cambodia, it was not something I wanted to do before we got to Vietnam. Both of Sony's parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge; however, the fact that the regime's weapons are still used for tourist purposes does not seem to bother him enough to remove the advertisement from his cab.

We didn't make it clear to Sony that we probably didn't want to visit an illegal shooting range. So on our first day, as we thought we were on our way to the killing fields at Choeung Ek, KT and I found ourselves bouncing down a narrow dirt road wondering if we were really still behind the legions of Japanese tourist mini-buses we had been following earlier.

(Dusty ride outside of Phnom Penh)

The range looked like any of the thousands of outdoor restaurants we'd seen throughout the Cambodian countryside. There were plastic chairs set out along tables with attentive teenage waiters; however, hanging on the walls in place of the Angkor beer posters there were machine guns, and on the menu we were handed, instead of ten variations on fried rice, there were firing prices for all of the in-house weapons: "$25 for 20 anti-aircraft rounds...$36 for the M-16, $60 for hand grenades, (and my favorite) $200 for the rocket launcher."

(stock photo; cameras were not allowed where we went)

If not for the giggly British gap-yearers gritting their teeth for Rambo photos in front of the arsenal, I would have been severely weirded out. Like a deer in headlights, I stared at the menu for a few minutes trying to somehow process what I had just seen - "rocket launcher!?" -- If I'd had $200 and no conscious, I probably would have stayed; however, since our best information said what we were doing was illegal and, as we thought, somehow inappropriate considering one of the country's largest mass graves was just a few kilometers away, we decided to leave.

(actual photo; exposed human remains around Cheoung Ek)

Sony, who had probably shuffled hundreds of giddy tourists to this same site in the past, seemed a little surprised that we didn't want to stay. However, I like to think that even though he didn't see anything wrong with what we were doing, he understood how we did. Instead of firing bazookas, we spent the rest of the afternoon touring the killing fields at Cheoung Ek, the torture facilities at S-21, and browsing the enormous library of bootleg DVD's at the Russian Market. Although copyright infringement is technically illegal outside of Cambodia, it seemed more appropriate skirting the law in support the country's modern technological future rather than its dark violent past.

(Ocean's 13, Die Hard 4.0, Transformers... straight to DVD?)

Make sure to check out my Cambodia Flickr Gallery.

Goodmorning Cambodia

called called Wheeeeeeeew --- that one word is really the only way to sum up the last week since KT and I left for Thailand. It's been a while since I've posted and it'll certainly take a few sittings to regurgitate everything that's happened to us in the last week.

Since our last post we've flown from beautiful Railay (Thailand) to Bangkok, on to Siem Reap (Cambodia), met up with two of my friends from high school, seen Angkor Wat then packed up again for a six hour bus ride into Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh.

(BN marveling at Beng Mealea)

The temples surrounding Angkor Wat are amazing in both their size and expanse. Although you could easily spend a month seeing every temple, we felt as if we'd had our fill after just two whirlwind days. Despite the enormity of the site, there is very little in the way of personal space. Hoping for some privacy on our first day, Anne, John, KT and showed up at 5:00AM. Instead of a quiet, contemplative sunrise, we were greeted by tour buses, hot air balloons, and at least 300 white sock and dress shoe clad (predominately Chinese) tourists -- just at one temple. This theme carried on throughout the day with some wats (temples) being so crowded that you couldn't make it out the exit without throwing a shoulder or two pry yourself from among the sea of fanny packs.

(I think we're turning Japanese)

Fortunately, we had a car for first day and a Tuk-tuk for the second, which gave us the freedom to venture out to some of the more secluded and less-touristed spots - including Beng Mealea (the Indiana Jones temple) and Bantey Srei (one of the most elaborate and well-preserved). Beng Mealea, basically untouched since its re-discovery was by far the highlight of the stop and one of my favorite destinations of the entire trip. You have no idea how much the other wats have been uncovered and reconstructed until you see one that has been left to the encroaching jungle. A thousand years of moss, roots, trees and vines can leave one of these enormous structures unrecognizable, and I'm sure that a thousand more could easily destroy it all together.

(KT waiting out the rain at Banteay Srei)

After Angkor Wat and the surrounding sites, KT and I spent some time enjoying the city then on our last night we met up with my friend Seton and his wife Katie Bee. The two were almost three weeks into their 52-day South East Asia backpacker honeymoon. The following morning, today, we hopped a tuk-tuk to a dusty bus stop outside the city then boarded the Mekong Express for a 6-hour ride to Cambodia's capital -- Phnom Penh. We'll be in Phnom Penh for another few days while we tour the Killing Fields and sort out of Vietnamese and Chinese Visas.

Make sure to check out the flickr gallery; there's a ton of new photos both from Thailand and Cambodia.

(KTB feeding the crocs at a restaurant in Siem Reap; What a honeymoon)

(Cambodian subsidiary for Tyson Inc.)

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