Great White Giant in Cambodia

Bitches and queens

2012-01-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

It’s raining cats and dogs! Or rather, it’s bleeding catsand dogs. Where? In Cambodia. When? All the time.

Cambodia's bitches and queens (female cats) are alwayseither pregnant or in the midst of getting pregnant. Dogs stuck together at theasses are common middle-of-the-street sights. Cat love is less visible, but waymore vocal. Shrieking feline sex yowls are part of my nighttimesoundtrack.

These yowls lead to lots of kittens. Lots and lots ofkittens. At last count, nine cats were living outside my host family's house.They sometimes get inside the house, but don't really live inside. The discarded bones and leftover rice from lunch anddinner are the only things that keep them around.

The impregnator doesn't join the lunch and dinner action.He's too busy chasing pussy. He only comes around at night. Like all players, he's big and black.

Knocked-up Cambodian cats stay in pretty good shape comparedto Cambodian dogs.

With their saggy tits that brush the ground as they walk,Cambodian bitches look more like cows than dogs.

Pregnancy takesa lot out of the dogs. It almost took the life out of Miro, one of theorphanage's dogs.

"I think she will die." Those were the words of aFrench guest about Miro.

Her half-dozen pups were sucking the life out of her. Itdidn't help that Miro was raised on French sausages and now refused to eatanything but meat.

This in a country where "dog food" is leftoverhuman food. There's never any meat left over. Only rice, veggies and bones.

Luckily for Miro, the visiting French guy was good atfinding her meat. He fed her a whole sausage one day, just like old times.

So Miro didn't die. But the orphanage wasn't taking any morechances. Miro is now the only dog I know on birth control.

Miro is a beautiful bitch, especially compared to mostCambodian dogs. Her brown and white dappled fur is sleek and thick, not mattedand patchy.

Most Cambodian dogs are hairless, mangy and rabid. They linenot only the sides, but the middle of the streets. They lounge in the dirt wherethe median should be, only bothering to move in the face of approaching car,bike, moto, truck or tractor wheels.

During a scavenger hunt, Peace Corps Trainees were taskedwith finding and taking a picture of the mangiest, ugliest dog. The hardest partof this task was deciding which mangy, ugly dog to photograph.

Before coming to Cambodia, I read cautionary tales from PeaceCorps Volunteers who carried sticks to beat dogs away.

Volunteers receive a smorgasbord of rabies shots. But therewas still an uproar when a Volunteer was supposedly bitten by a rabid dog.

Dogs used to go after me when biking. One dog in particular— a big, white, crazy beast. A lot like Kasey, the German Shepherd my family waschained to for 10 long years — but fluffy. Like Kasey, this white Cambodian dogis a biter. It bit me on the leg on two separate rides. Luckily, no rabies.

I began to fear this white puffball, and biked meters out ofmy way to avoid it. The dog's image took over my dreams, or I should say,nightmares.

My fear of this dog and every dog grew stronger afterviewing an Animal Planet specialdocumenting packs of wild dogs taking over the world. Their method? Mauling andmurdering.

My childhood fear of dogs was returning. As a kid, Icouldn't enter the homes of people with dogs until those dogs were locked inbasements or spare rooms.

But all this was before I learned the secret to dogdomination.

During my early Cambodian days, my defense against dogs wasto yell and bark. While this strategy sometimes works, it often doesn't. Thedogs call your bluff and realize that their jaws can easily rip off yourface.

Aggression isn't the secret. It's the opposite. Non-aggression.Disengagement. Disinterest. Pretend the dogs aren't even there. Don't look atthem. An internal chant of "calm, calm, calm..." also helps.

Disengagement is how most Cambodians treat dogs. Except fora few cases in Phnom Penh, Cambodians don't consider dogs pets. They're forguarding the house. (Although most the time they're busy guarding the middle ofthe road.)

You know the clicking sound that people in the States maketo call dogs? Cambodians make that sound, too. But here, that sound doesn'tmean "Come." It means "Go away." Grunts and huuuhs are alsocommon "Get the hell out of here" sounds.

The most common dog engagement is violence. Raise a hand topet a dog and the dog's gone. Hands are for beating, not petting.

Dogs aren't allowed in the orphanage's cafeteria. Unless thedog's name is Centhuit. (pronounced Sanweet.) This black and tan puppy gets VIPprivileges.

Why? Because the young French woman who lives and works here has adopted him as apet. In French, Centhuit means 108. That's how many orphans are at theorphanage. As you can tell, the French woman and Centhuit are very close.

Centhuit is fed meat from the cafeteria tables. Meanwhile, anotherlittle tan thing of a puppy is left to whine at the wooden gate at thecafeteria door. But this little tan thing is clever. It wriggles through thehole in the gate, even after this hole is blocked with flip flops, mats andblankets. It simply pushes these obstacles aside and barges in. It wants meat,too.

But the little tan thing can't have meat. Its name isn't Centhuit.It's yelled at and put back over the gate, and it soon grows too big to squirmthrough the hole.

This is what it's like at the orphanage when the Frenchfounder is around. When he's gone, the cafeteria is a den of doggy mayhem. Centhuitisn't the only one allowed in. The tan pup is also admitted, along with Miro,Luke and an ugly bitch whose name I can never remember.

These dogs don't wait docilely for scraps either. They stillare reduced to eating scraps, but they actively go after these scraps bygumming the bones off the tables.

To help me pronouncethe name, the French woman tells me that Centhuit sounds like sandwich. Whichreminds me of another dog-domination technique: eating them.

Woah, woah, woah, before you get all huffy, I don't meaneating all dogs. One will do the job.If you eat just one dog, other dogs will know. They can smell that stuff, justlike they can smell fear.

And what they smell is power. They smell someone whois stronger than them, because that someone can, and will, eat them.

Power. That's what eating dog is all about. Eating dog givesyou power and energy. It's energizing. Especially black dog.

That's the kind of dog I want to eat. The best kind of dogto eat is black and the best time is now, before the sweat-drenched hell ofMarch, April and May.

Organizing this eating of dog shouldn't be difficult. Mytownmate and fellow Volunteer, Rachel, has already found a place. A couple ofmy Cambodian friends have agreed to be escorts, so we don't end up withdysentery and giardia like an Australian volunteer in town.

(Rachel maintainsthat anything could have given theAussie volunteer that combo, especially the warmed-up duck fetuses he likes to scarf.)

Next you hear from me I will be a proud, card-carrying dogeater. Now I just have to find out where to get one of those cards.

"If you get a tattoo on your face you will be unsuccessful."

2011-12-29T22:32:00.000-08:00

I used to believe that I had to wear a certain pair ofunderwear to have a good day. Then I believed I had to match my underwear to myclothes. Next I believed I had to do everything in increments of fives: Fiveminutes, five pieces of chocolate, you get the idea. I don’t have such specificregimens nowadays, but I’m still partial to the number five, and I'm still superstitious.

I have never wanted to know my future. The thought ofknowing what to expect out of life scares me. I don’t know if people really canpredict the future, but I have never wanted mine predicted. I have never wantedto go to a fortuneteller. But I recently went anyway. (A recent nine monthsago!)

It was an assignment for MangoDreams, Peace Corps Cambodia’s prestigious literary magazine/newsletter.Serious stuff. I couldn’t refuse. I also thought it was time to confront myfear of the future.

The fortune teller I saw is the town’s best. He lives on ahuge spread populated by lots of animals — monkeys, crocodiles and children. My Cambodian friend Rath tells me his predictions areaccurate some of the time.

We sit at a polished disc of tree insides. We is me, fellowPeace Corps Volunteer Rachel and Rath, my friend, teacher and fortune-tellertranslator. Oh, and fortune teller Young Lem and his non-fortune tellingdaughter Lem Savry.

Lem, a compact man of 50-something is wearing a whiteChairman Mao pantsuit. His daughter, a woman of about 30, is wearing a peasantblouse.

Lem begins with questions.

What’s your name? How old are you? What year were you born?What month? What day? What time?

He then writes down a lot of numbers on sheets torn from ayellow legal pad. It looks like he’s using the prediction method used in thegame MASH, when you try to predict your friend’s futures by writing a bunch ofstuff and then drawing a giant spiral to zero in on the truth.

But it’s not MASH, daughter Savry says. It’s the methodoriginated by the man she calls Napoleeeown (Napoleon).

Once Lem finishes his Napoleonic scribbles, he startsspouting my future life’s secrets. His foresight is very comprehensive. Hestarts general, then goes through my future life month by month for the remainingmonths of 2011.

His insights bolded, mine not.

General insights:

• Your good fortuneyears were ages 26 and 27. OK. Those were good years. I didn’t win anylotteries, but good years.

• When you are 29 youwill meet a problem. The reason is you will have one guy, you will help a man.

• If you would liketo choose one you love to get married to, ages 30-35 are good opportunities forgood fortune.

• You are kind andgenerous. You want to help people.

• Your successfullife will start at age 31.

• Your adventure lifewill be ages 22-31.

• You want to hideyour secret thing but you cannot. You cannot hide your secret. I don’t haveany secrets — yet.

Monthly insights:

• April – Be carefulof a traffic accident on Thursday and Sunday around 1 and 4 p.m. I musthave been careful, ‘cause I wasn’t involved in any traffic accidents.

• May – You will geta good boyfriend. Nope.

• June – You will geta very big, very good fortune. Probably your supervisor or manager will helpyou. Approved to stay inCambodia another year. Does that count?

• You will go toanother country. I did go to another country! America!

• July – You willlose your stuff. Probably lost some stuff. I lose my stuff every month.Almost every day, even.

• August – You willmeet a good opportunity. Your friend, some guy, will provide a good job, good news to you. Nope.

• September – Youwill get good, good news again. Probably from a supervisor or manager. Goodnews, good job, good opportunity. Not so much.

• October – You willget sick. You could see a Cambodian traditional healer if you want. Maybe acold. Didn't see a traditional healer.

• November – You willhave an argument with a coworker. Maybe a little one I don't remember.

• December – You willbe worried about your friend in USA. Nope.

Fortunes by the dayand month for my whole life:

• Sundays and Mondaysare the best days to buy the main stuff you need in life, ie: a car or a house.Specifically, the best hours are Sundays from 5-7 a.m. and Mondays from 5-7a.m. and 7-9 a.m.

• Sundays and Mondaysyou will have success at work.

• Thursday – Don’t doimportant stuff on this day.

• Saturdays and Wednesday– You always fail on these days and you always lose something on these days.They are not good days .

• October – December– You have a struggle during these months every year – because of your spots.By “spots” he means two moles I have, one in front of my right ear, one infront of my left. “The spots here arenot so good. You should have them cut off.” My Cambodian dermatologistdisagrees.

Predictions based on my body parts:

• Every human has aspecial thing on their body. Your teeth bring you a lot of luck, and your chin,too. If you change your teeth or chin you will lose your luck.

• If your teethremain until you’re 60 or older your fortune will be greater and greater.

• If your coworkershave nice teeth you will work well with them. Teeth are very important.

• If you get a tattooon your face you will be unsuccessful.

• Your chin is goodand your face is good. It’s not good to get new teeth.

• Don’t change yourface. Don’t put anything artificial in your face. The shape of your face isgood luck from nature. If you change it you lose your luck.

• At the beginning ofyour job your coworkers seem uninterested in you. If you talk to them they willlike you – because of your chin and teeth.

• Your forehead seemslike you think a lot. Even when you sit in the bathroom, you think a lot.

Next, Lem’s daughter Savry asks if I have any questions.Questions like when I will get married, etc.

“No,” I say. I don’t want to know.

But Rachel does. “When will she die?”

“Nooooo!” I yell.

Lem gets the hint. He feeds me more harmless insights.

• Your whole life youalways like traveling, you don’t want to stay at home.

He draws a picture of my house and then tells me my house iffull of success, but I don’t want to stay in my house. I want to leave my house.

Whew. That’s it for me. Rachel didn’t come to have her fortuneread, but Lem’s got something he’s got to tell Rachel. Something no one wantsto hear.

Her chin is very pointy, Lem says. Its pointiness meansshe will either get her business idea or husband stolen. Yikes. Thank genes for my non-pointy chin! Now if I can just stay away from face tattoos...

A Week of Seoul Searching

2011-11-20T19:58:00.001-08:00

“What city do you think that is?”

That’s what my mom asks on the top of a mountain overlooking Seoul.

That’s how big Seoul is. It’shard to imagine that an hour's subway ride away, we're still in the same city.

But we are — technically. A bunch of cities are grouped into the SeoulNational Capital Area. A bunch of people are grouped there, too. More than 25million.

You thought New York was crowded? Seoul's population density is almostdouble. Most everyone is Korean.

"I feel like I'm in a pod movie. Where they steal my identity andwe all look the same." Mom says this during one of our cross-currentswims through a wave of people crashing over us in a mall.

So many people and so much to see. We have a week. So little time, butso much done.

At least by Mom and me, who weren’t tied up at the TallBuilding Conference like my engineer dad.

We went from museums and palaces to markets and malls. From traditionalvillages and performances to TV tapings and spas. Plus the mountain, and, ofcourse, lots of restaurants.

We ate lots of Korean — barbecue, bib bim bap, kimchi and Buddhisttemple food, plus Korean pancakes, Japanese noodles and sushi, and plenty ofWestern-style breakfasts.

We did everything but hobnob with Korea’s ubiquitous pop stars. Oh, andmake it to North Korea. Maybe during a future Tall Building Conference.

Below are some of my reconstructed memories of our trip (hopefully minusthe boring bits).

Day One –Cambodia to Bangkok

I leave in the morning by taxi and arrive in the afternoon by van.

My flight doesn’t leave ‘til nearly midnight, but I’m here early for thebest Bangkok has to offer: pad Thai, Thai iced tea and movie theaters.

That means MBK, a massive mutant of a mall. The van drops me near MBK. Or at least I think it’s near. The driver points oneway, but no one on the street has heard of the mall. Ifollow one helpful girl up and down a huge concrete overpass and end up at abus. With my huge rolling suitcase? No thanks. I retreat and ask the firstwhite person (hopeful English speaker) I see.

She directs me to the Skytrain, Bangkok’s above-ground subway. It's upanother huge staircase, but this time a kind woman helps lift my beastly bag.

Finally MBK. The promised land of free Thai iced teas — at least forforeigners with passports. The drink’s more ice than tea, but hey, it’sfree.

The phad Thai line is slow so I make for the movie first. The Three Musketeers — in 3D. The flick’sentertaining but feels like a rip-off of several movies, including The Piratesof the Caribbean franchise. Except these boats fly.

Dinner isn’t phad Thai, but some other noodly Thai dish.

Sky train to the airport and then five hours to Seoul. We leave atmidnight and arrive at 7 the next morning. I sleep most the way.

Day Two -Settling in Seoul

The subway from the airport to the hotel takes about three hours. It’slike coming from a different country.

The train goes along highways, past the sea, towers of apartment rowhouses, mountains, flatlands and treelands.

Many of the passengers are old. Those who aren’t old obviously value theold. Seats are given up. I’m not old, but I want to sit. I pretend not tounderstand the seat-giving custom. This gets me a dirty look. I finally standup, but long enough after the dirty look so it looks like my idea.

I immediately notice that Seoul is a high-fashion place. Most men are in suits and women in heels. Even on Sundays. Big, blackBuddy Holly glasses are on lots of faces and black tights are under skirts andshorts on most women's legs.

I expected lots of bright colors and crazy clothes, but it's mostlyblacks. There are also lots of uniforms. Preschoolers wear matching sweatsuitsand older students skirts and blouses and shirts and trousers.

The city is also very uniform — and very clean. No trash, and lots oforder. Escalators have yellow lines down the middle and subway platforms havepaintings of feet showing boarders where to stand. No jaywalking.

I arrive at the hotel 10 hours before my parents. I’m not expectingcheck-in rights. But the deskman takes pity on me and lets me check in early,even without a credit card.

I head downstairs to the Hyundai Shopping Center while waiting to check-in. No cars here, only a luxury food court. After several lookarounds, Isettle on sweet potato salad that I think is a steal at $2. Turns out it’s $2 agram — $6 total.

Our room is faaaannncy, but has only two twin beds. I’m good with arollaway, but my parents are past their twin days.

Back at the desk, I ask if I’m in the right room. The deskman assuresme I am. No rooms with double beds. Maybe Koreans do it twin style.

It’s the wrong room. So say my parents. We move twice. The room’s stillwrong (too noisy), but the best we can get.

Day Three:Hop on, Hop off

A hop-on,hop-off bus takes us on a two-hour course around downtownSeoul.

Through the bus windows we glimpse markets, museums, a palace, ashopping street for extra-large clothes (aka foreigner clothes), towers andmore.

We hop off near Dongdaemum Market — South Korea’s largest market — butwe can't find it. A girl points us toward a row of outdoor shoe stalls lining adumpy building. The stalls end in dark alleys.

The dumpy building is full of dumpy clothes for old Korean women.

Later we hear that the market is inside two enormous glitzy buildings wesomehow missed. Better luck next trip.

On our way to the non-market I buy a hot dog. Not just any hot dog — ahot dog on a stick coated in a cubist batter. I think it’s tempura, turns outto be french fries. A french-fried dog!

Korea's orderly, but still in Asia, so there are few lines. There's noline for the hot dogs. The seller is ignoring me and letting others order aheadof me. I get proactive and grab my own dog.

The seller’s alarmed. “Don’t touch!” she yells, and puts the tarnisheddog back on the pile. She then grabs a new dog for me, squiggles ketchup on itand wraps it in paper. Yum!

Post-market, we hop back on the bus and continue the tour past moreshopping areas and another, more important,palace.

That night we eat at a Thai restaurant. Nothing Korean on the menu, andmy parents convince me that’s OK. Not every meal has to be native.

Day Four:A Palace, a Museum, and Temple Food

The day begins for Dad and me with Omelette Oh My God! Served withtriangular croutons masquerading as toast. Mom gets breakfast with a lessprofane (and therefore less memorable) name.

Gyeongbokgung Palace is next. Once the most important of Seoul‘s fivepalaces.

In those days, importance wasn’t measured in architectural bling. Thepalace, in muted burgundies and greens, has few adornments.

Leaders of the Joseon Dynasty were into simple Confucian stuff. Thepalace's brochure calls the architecture "dignified and restrained."

There are a lot of buildings (not as many as the original 120) butnothing more than a few tapestries and tea sets inside.

A visit to the nearby Folk Museum includes snooze-inducingentertainment. A sappy, skipping video tells the story of a girl and guyfalling in love.

A zither!

In between showings of the video is traditional music made with abassoon, cello, keyboard and zither. I fall asleep and wake to hear I missedthe brief dancing.

The best part of the museum is the snack bar. I suck down a brightmagenta cactus aloe juice and a ginseng drink and eat a pumpkin and eggsandwich, which is like egg salad with pumpkin.

On our way out of the museum, Mom and I are interviewed for TV. Justa three-minute clip for an English-speaking education channel, but stillexciting.

Before we start, the interviewer tells us not to worry if we can'tanswer her questions, we can make stuff up.

Then she asks if we have ever lost our appetites.

"No," I answer. I'm always hungry.

But haven't I ever been sick and not wanted to eat?

"OK, yeah," I say.

"That’s what I'm talking about," she says. "Remember, youcan make it up."

I tell her a true story about having giardia in Cambodia. Mom spins atale about peanuts.

After our three minutes of future fame, we cruise down Insadong (a hipshopping street) on our way to Sanchon, a temple restaurant. The restaurantisn't in a temple, but its food is the same stuff Buddhist monks would havescavenged for in Korea's forests.

But we're not monks in a forest, so the food's expensive. ($40 a person)

The price includes a traditional dance show and lots of courses. No meatand few spices.

Courses:

1. Lentils, bread, turnip, rice and seaweed

2. Lots of tempura vegetables, soup, hot pepper tofu

3. 20 bowls of food including greens, kimchi, potatoes, sweet red beans,tofu, glass noodles, sticky rice and turnip

4. Cylindrical, sweet rice puffs and small cups of a sweet, possibly alcoholic drink

Green tea comes with the food.

Dinner is eaten on cushions in front of a low wood table. Mom's finecross-legged, but the posture is a stretch for Dad and me.

The traditional dance show is 45 minutes of eerie howling andscreeching.

The three of us are invited on stage for the grand finale of foreignerswalking in a circle beating drums.

Day Five:Market Day

Breakfast at the hotel. The buffet has waffles, soups, seafood, cereal,eggs, pastries — everything one could desire — except a fair price. It's awhopping $37 a person. Still not as pricey as the two orange juices and coffee Dad orders during a meeting in the hotel lounge. That trio of drinks costs him $50.

It's a day of shopping for Mom and I. First is Namdaemun Market, Seoul'soldest.

Mostly junk. Mom gets a nightshirt and we offer fashion advice to a guywho wants to know which pajamas he should buy for his 60-year-old father-in-law:Burberry or pink cartoon cows?

Mom and I vote for Burberry. He votes for the cartoon cows.

Lunch is Korean pancakes. Mine is octopus and seafood and Mom's is redchili. We split a sushi roll.

After a brief, unsuccessful shoe shopping trip, we end at Insadong, thehip shopping street.

I want to try Korean tea. We find it in a five-story building decoratedwith antique phones and signs advertising Parisian coffeehouses. The tea's expensive($7 per mug), but delicious. I get five flavors and Mom cinnamon.

Dinner that night is bulgogi beef barbecue. Bulgogi means "fire meat." The meat, in this case, beef, is cooked over fire.

Day Six:Korean Folk Village

Keep out, bad spirits!

Breakfast is the Dunkin' Donuts' equivalent of Egg Mcmuffins and a fruitand yogurt cup. The fruit and yogurt also has an extra healthy add-on of cakeand whipped cream.

Mom asks for a glass of water and gets two, one hot and one cold.

Today is a Korean Folk Village, a swath of land covered with modelhouses from the late Joseon Dynasty. (The dynasty lasted 1392 -1897.)

A middle-class home.

The houses range from one-room thatched huts to stone mansions occupyingseveral buildings.

Each house has a different type of animal caged outside. The rich get a fluffy white dog, the middle class, geese, the poor, pigs, and thevery poor, mules laying on their sides in poop.

Not real humans.

One of the houses also has a human inhabitant. I notice white rubber shoes outside the hut and a fake Coach bag inside. My mom doesn't notice thesedetails.

"Where do you sleep?" she asks, before peering inside.

"In here," she answers. "Here he is sleeping."

As we're walking away I ask her why there's a real guy sleeping inside.

"There isn't," she says. "He's a model."

I insist he's real. She goes back to check, squinting at the realman's face. He opens his eyes and glares at her.

"Oh! He is real!" she shouts.

Headless horseman?

We see more real people standing atop horses galloping around a ring."Equestrian Feats," the show's called.

The acrobats swing and twirlround the horses like the beasts are no more than stationary gymnastic props.

Dancing (and drumming)

Day Seven:Climbing the Bugaksan

Today we conquer Bugaksan mountain.

The road to the mountain looks like the road to Mt. Everest. It's linedwith dozens of shops selling every kind of hiking accessory imaginable. Boots,super lightweight moisture-wicking jackets, pants and shirts, hats, visors,bandanas, gloves, collapsible chairs, cups, towels, walking sticks...

One of the stores has a familiar red and white square logo. Instead of TheNorth Face it's called The Red Face. Is this supposed to mean Korean faces arered? Or just their mountains? The store's logo is "Born in the Nature1966." The North Face was also founded in 1966.

Everyone we pass is decked out in extreme hiking apparel. I can't helplaughing, but surely they're doing the same at the inadequate jeans and T-shirts mymom and I are wearing.

The man at the information office certainly laughs at us.

Is this our first time here?

Yes.

Do we have hiking shoes?

No. Mom's wearing tennis shoes. I'm wearing Birkenstocks.

Our apparel disqualifies us from all four of the trails except one — theone for "senior citizens and the weak."

I'm annoyed. I forged streams and slid down cliffs in Mondulkiri whilewearing only flip flops. I can darn well handle a dinky Korean hill.

I'm even more annoyed because the guy won't stop talking about the bestof the four trails, which is "so beautiful it's beyond words."

What about our trail?

"It's only scenery," he says.

I'm disappointed we won't get to hike along the ancient fortress wall, andwe won't be required to flash our passports to gain entry into the VIP area. But I try to focus on the positive.At least I can walk!

Many of our fellow hikers doubt I have even this simple ability. Atleast a dozen of these Sir Edmund Hillary look-a-likes stop me on the way up —pointing to my sandals and saying the Korean equivalent of"Impossible!"

I just laugh and curl my arms like a body builder.

Partway up Mom overheats and has to sit down. She says she feels likeshe's about to have one of the fainting spells she had as a young girl inchurch.

I force her to guzzle water and eat cookies. A nearby group donates acouple bunches of enormous grapes.

I'm puzzling out how to carry Mom down on my back when she recovers.

We continue up until we come to a resting point. Also a hula hooping point.

That's the activity two hikers are engaged in. Several hula hoops hang from a nearby tree.

At another stop I give a group of women some cookies. They reciprocatewith a mini package of strawberry Mentos.

The women point out their course on their map. They will go all the wayto the top and down the other side.

Mom and I don't think we'll make it all the way up. We surprise ourselves.

The way up has several top-of-the-world views (or top-of-Seoul views),but the top is the best. Seoul is reduced to a smoggy haze of buildings.

A Korean man beckons me close to the edge to check out the rock that

looks like a cow's ear lobe. Mom discourages me. She's just read the newsabout a Japanese tourist who fell to her death at Niagara Falls. Nevermind thatthe girl was dumb enough to step over the rail.

I go close enough to see the cow's earlobe, but no further.

The way down is much easier than the way up. The paths are clearer andsome are even paved. Maybe this isthe path for the senior citizens and the weak, and we took a tougher one on theway up. We can't wait to brag to the information guy about our lack of seniorcitizenry and weakness.

The bottom of the mountain looks like a day spa. People are lounging onthe flat rocks, eating rice and dangling their feet in the water.

Farther on are more rocks, these ones vertical and implanted with waterspigots for filling water bottles.

Even more intriguing is a shoe-cleaning station equipped with vacuumsfor blowing dust out of eyelets.

Four hours after our ascent, the information man looks impressed that wemade it down, but insists we only conquered the weak and elderly trail. We should come backand do the most beautiful one, he says. "Next time," we lie.

The information man has an annoying habit of looking at and talking onlyto my mom. He also karate chops her arm while talking. Is this Korean flirting?

Day Eight:Dragonhill Spa

Dragonhill Spa in swankier times

I experience my first motion-sensor escalator on the way to DragonhillSpa. The stair machine looks broken until I step on it.

The subway station also looks broken. It's an above-ground station,which means it's not as popular, and I have to wait longer for a train.

Articles in the New York Timesand on CNN's website made the seven-storyspa sound swanky. The outside is anything but. Metal scaffolding covers much ofthe building and the bamboo grove entrance is crumbling.

No one greets me when I enter. I'm confused. My confusion is finallynoticed.

Is it my first time? Where am I from? Do I want a massage?

No, I just want to use the spa... This is a spa, isn't it?

I get a green T-shirt with the spa's name emblazoned on the front and apair of matching shorts, two small towels and a bracelet with a key and anelectronic payment tracking chip.

I pay $10 to enter, put my shoes in a locker and take the elevator tothe women's changing room on the third floor.

Not naked women, but a clever Korean toilet

I am greeted by naked women of all ages. These women seem not the leastbit shy of their flabby, saggy or taut skin as they primp in front of mirrorsand strut downstairs to the baths and saunas.

I don't see any of the Russian models Lonely Planet promised, but maybe some of the Japanesetourists.

I follow the lead of the brazen women surrounding me and get naked,bringing my towels and my clothes downstairs just in case I need them. I don't.They just get wet.

First a shower. Then the baths.

There's a regular hot tub, a hot, hot tub, a really hot, hot tub, and acold tub. There's also a massage bath. Down the hallway are the special baths:an event bath (no event today), a hot bath and a saltwater bath.

Next I try the ocher sauna. I last only a few minutes before retreatingto the cold bath.

I return to the saltwater bath, trying the recommended five minutes in,10 minutes out, repeated three times.

My first 10 minutes out are spent reading the poster advertising thespa's massages and body scrubs.

No one's around to perform these services, so I get back in thesaltwater.

But my interest has been noted. A few minutes later, a uniformed womancomes down and tugs me out of the pool. I tell her I want only the body scrub.No massage.

She nods and strips down to a black bra and undies. Like the womenupstairs, she's not at all embarrassed by her swinging stomach flab.

She pours a tub of water over the vinyl table and motions for me to get on it.I lay down and she pours a tub of water over me. It's warm.

She starts scrubbing. I feel like the block of wood belonging to theshop class nerd. She flips me from one side to the other, from back to front, sanding everywhere, under my pits, between my legs, everywhere.

After the scrubbing comes a goopy gel rubbed over the raw patches.

Thena shampooing and neck massage. All part of the "just a body scrub"deal.

After washing off the goop, I'm back in the salt bath, then upstairs tothe saunas.

Two of the saunas are housed in a pair of pyramids. One is supposedlygood for the mind, and in it is a woman studying. The charcoal kiln smellsgood, but the fire sweating room is too fiery. The building is shaped like an igloo, but has adoor like an oven, and feels like one inside. I have to duck to get in, and thefloor burns my feet. My glasses immediately fog.

Maybe it just takes practice. I later see a girl enter the igloo ovenwhile chatting on the phone and sipping a Coke, like she's ready for a day atthe beach.

In between the saunas I visit the ice room, inhabited by two snowmen,each made of two balls of hardened snow.

The crystal shining saltroom is my favorite. Socks are required, so Ibuy a pair for $1. Then I lay atop a towel draped over a bed of rock salt,close my eyes and imagine all my body's toxins seeping from my feet. That'swhat's supposed to happen in the saltroom. My feet do feel tingly and warm. Isthat what exiting toxins feel like?

I won't let a person massage me, but a mechanical chair's OK. Or so Ithink. I spend the next 10 minutes grimacing while my back is pounded with whatfeels like sledgehammers. I paid $2, so I refuse to move 'til it's over.

I reward myself with a snack — three eggs the color of used tea bags andstrawberry banana juice.

One more visit to the saltbath and I'm done. I'll save the acupuncture, cupping, eyelash perming and horse riding for next time.

I make it back just in time for Dad's speech. Some dope messed up hisbio for the Tall Building Conference, first calling him a lowly administrative assistantand then leaving out the description of his speech.

Nearly 100 people still show up to hear him talk, and the emcee callshim “One of the most creative and energetic engineers.”

Dad's talk is about a better, faster way to build tall buildings. A wayhe's patented.

Photographers snap his picture and pictures of my mom and I, who seem tobe the only non-engineers in the room.

That night is Korean barbecue. The picture looks like beef, but it'sactually four kinds of pig: ham, bacon and two kinds of sausage. Also mushroom,fish cake, broccoli and bok choy.

The sides are kimchi, a shrimp, greens and onion mixture and a redmixture, plus an over-mayonaised macaroni salad.

Day Nine:Gym and Home Again

Dad and I hit the gym in the morning. We both borrow shoes from the desk. I get apair of white Air Jordans. No socks. Dad gets kicked out of the pool for notwearing a bathing cap.

After lunch we taxi to the airport. I board a plane to Bangkok and my parents to Toronto.

So that's a wrap for Tall Building Conference 2011. Next up: TallBuilding Conference 2012: Shanghai. I can hardly wait.

Five weeks in the Land of the Free - oh, and Canada, too

2011-10-13T22:42:00.000-07:00

Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms can be eaten in bars?

I was told there would be panic attacks —in cereal aisles, at crosswalks when cars actually stop for pedestrians, at the cost of everyday goods.

Many Peace Corps Volunteers experience such attacks upon their return to the United States.

Still, I thought, surely such mental havoc couldn’t disrupt the life of super-adaptable me.

After all, I grew up in the U.S., and had only been away two years. Sure, with its swampy heat, garbage-littered dirt roads and sluggish pace, Cambodia, the country I had been away in, is worlds apart from the United States, and even Canada, where my parents and sister live. But, come on, it had only been two years.

I’m proud to report that my super-adaptiveness won out and the panic attacks never came. But turns out my adpativeness may not be as super as I thought.

I did experience a fair dosage of shock during my five-week stay in the land of plenty. As predicted, this shock came in cereal aisles, at crosswalks, and at the cost of everyday goods.

This shock typically exited my mouth in this sentence: “There are so many things!” And a moment later, “These things are so expensive!”

Things like drinking fountains! And showers! And hot water! And washing machines and dryers! And city buses and subways and streetcars!

And so many types of entertainment! Movie theaters that play 3-D movies in actual 3-D, concerts where I can understand what the singer is singing, acrobatics and ice shows, men shooting out of cannonballs, swamp boat races!

And the food! Genuine Mexican, wholesome wheat bread, peaches, plums and berries! Deep-fried pickles, candy bars and soda pop! Dutch babies and beaver tails and restaurants that serve only raw food!

At times the land of plenty was too much. Like the time my dad abandoned me in a convenience store because I was taking too long to decide between the five varieties of Whoppers malted milk balls.

And the constant times when I asked friends and family if the prices at restaurants and stores were normal. Any meal over $5 seemed extravagant compared to Cambodia’s meals of $1 or less.

Fortunately, I had five weeks to readjust to Washington (state, not D.C.!) and Toronto’s vast assortment of things and the vast prices of these things.

Below are some high (and low) lights of my trip home to Toronto, Wenatchee, Lake Chelan, Seattle and Toronto again.

Cambodia to Toronto – a mere 30-hour trip!

It all starts with a flight: Phnom Penh to Taipei. Five hours. Then another flight: Taiwan to San Francisco. Twelve hours. By this time I am having so much fun I just have to get on another plane for one final flight: San Francisco to Toronto. Another five hours. After 22 hours of flying (30 hours including layovers), I finally arrive in Toronto around dawn.

My flights are filled with movies: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (in preparation for Part 2 on the big screen in Seattle), Lincoln Lawyer, Blood Diamond.

Taipei airport is a good segue into the developed world.

I take my first drink from a drinking fountain in two years. “Please feel safe to drink,” reads a sign above the fountain.

Fabulous. I then roam the airport, gobbling samples of teacakes and visiting nearby gates, each decorated like a highly specified museum. Among the exhibits: bicycles, books and the country’s postal service.

The Taipei to San Francisco flight has tasty food, but I’m still hungry when I arrive in San Francisco.

Only three restaurants are nearby, and they are expensive! Sandwiches for $8? Is this normal?

Worth $10?

I swallow my thriftiness and shell out $15 for tea and ramen soup at a Japanese place.

Dawn in Toronto is early afternoon in Cambodia, but I’m still pooped.

Week one: Toronto

My parents abandoned the United States for Toronto several years ago. My sister followed. That makes my home base Toronto. But I’m not Canadian!

Me and Archana on Toronto Island.

I spend my first week back in North America partying with my sister, shopping with my mom and roaming the city with Archana, my Seattle-turned-Boston friend.

Toward the end of her visit, Archana and I try Rawlicious, a restaurant that serves only uncooked food. Carrot sticks and dill dip it’s not. Rather, the menu boasts a variety of dishes, including pasta bolognese, pizza, pad thai, a taco wrap and lots of shakes and juices.

We order tropical pizza and zucchini pasta with a medley of vegetables and neatballs.

Neatballs are meatless meatballs. I ask our server if we can get awesome balls instead. She doesn’t laugh.

Psst... we're not really noodles.

How can pasta be raw without being crunchy and gross? Well, with Rawlicious’ zucchini pasta, the pasta is the zucchini — curled in a spiralizer.

The pasta isn’t the only part of the dish that’s deceiving. The “medley of vegetables” is in fact two fingernail-size broccoli florets and maybe six slivers of sundried tomatoes. Each of the three neatballs is half the size of a golfball. The whole meal is served in a dish much too small for its $14 pricetag.

Like pasta, you’d think pizza couldn’t be done raw. Oh, but it can. Try making the dough out of buckwheat, the cheese out of cashews and the mangos and pineapples out of, well, mangos and pineapples. The buckwheat foundation is so weak that the slices crumble when we try to pick them up. The slices, I should mention, are only two baby pieces. For $11!

The food is edible, but a little flavorless.

When our server asks how the food is, we feed her the standard reply: “Good.”

When the server leaves, Archana scribbles an amendment to that statement: “Good, but can you cook it more?”

Weeks Two and Three: Seattle, Wenatchee and Lake Chelan

My mom and dad and I fly to Seattle. But not together. Each of us is on a different flight. I meet my mom at the Seattle airport and we spend the day in the big city waiting for my dad to arrive on his later flight.

Waiting includes shopping and, when I get tired of shopping, the final Harry Potter. My mom never gets tired of shopping.

That night my dad drives the three of us to our cabin on Lake Chelan.

Me and Grandma Merle.

The two weeks are filled with family: Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins.

Swimming, darts, badminton and eating.

In my three years absence Chelan has lost stores and sprouted new ones. Gone are a couple boutiques and eateries and “The Music Store,” a decaying hippie room with beads, guitars, records and CDs, run by a ratty guy with straggly hair and funky teeth.

New is yet another wine shop (apparently Chelan is now a hot wine destination), boutiques (including one where you can rent electric bikes), a bookshop and a clothes store where everything costs $12.99.

The lake has also lost and gained. Lost are much of the big speedboats. Gained are fleets of canoes and paddleboards.

I'm Wenatchee!

I spend a weekend in Wenatchee with my Aunt Patty and Uncle Steve. They are super-active, and every day is a triathlon.

The first day we go on a hike, eat dinner at a Latin restaurant and go to a concert at a winery.

The second day is almost a marathon. We hit the farmers’ market, go for a bike ride, watch Swamp Boat races, go swimming at my grandma’s condo and eat sushi.

The final day is breakfast with my grandma at the Country Club.

Got all that? If you’re like the recent me, you don’t get Swamp Boat races.

Just some boatin' in the swamp.

I’ll explain. Start with a field. Dig circular canals. Fill the canals with water. Put a teeny, brightly painted motorboat in. Put a driver and navigator in the boat and tell them to race around the canals as fast as they can without flipping out of the water onto the grassy perimeter or circular interior islands.

That last part’s not so easy. The boats scream round the serpentine curves at up to 80 miles an hour. The course takes about a minute. "It's like racing with your hair on fire!” claim Jim Deford and Jeff Schlagel in an article about the sport.

We arrive for the last two hours — the finals. Tickets are $20, whole day or no. Our money and IDs get us American flags stamped on the inside of our wrists and access to the beer garden, which is a set of shaded metal bleachers.

Do we look like goats?

Patty refers to the audience members as a “cross-section” of Wenatchee. This means young guys with grizzled mountain goat goatees and women the color of Chinese barbecued pork.

The white-haired Wenatchee native next to us is keeping times on a scorecard. He’s been to all three of the city’s swamp boat competitions.

We overhear one of the billy-goat goateed guys with a camo shirt calls Wenatchee’s muddy circles “the most technical track on the circuit,” and says it may be the site of the World Finals.

Week Four: Back to Seattle

A Seattle area native, I’ve lived near the Emerald City for 15 years. I’ve never had a sense of direction, and this time around I’m also missing a car and a cell phone.

The result? Lots of bus rides, direction asking and missed meetings.

Despite these handicaps, in only a week, I hit almost every Seattle neighborhood, and beyond!

My first night I get lucky and catch a free concert. Black Mountain, My Goodness and Whalebones.

From about.com

Even better than a free concert? An outdoor, free concert. At the Mural Ampitheater, which after lots of confusion and direction asking, I discover is a stage in front of a huge-ass mosaic below the Space Needle.

I miss Whalebones, but make it in time for My Goodness and Black Mountain. Rockin’ shows, despite the distraction of the shirtless liquored-up guy in the front with meth teeth. He spends the shows yelling and stampeding through the crowd.

His arms are outstretched and his index and pinky fingers are raised in the rock symbol, which he repeatedly points to the stage and then back into the audience. With each point the chicken-wing flab of his triceps swings like a middle-aged woman’s. A cigarette dangles from his mouth and from his back pocket a comb, which he rakes back through the red hair that ripples over his scalp, making him look like a brilliantined man of yore.

I get lost on the way back to the bus stop and ask a pair of twenty-something kids for directions.

“Where are you from?” they ask. “Born and raised?”

Seattle, and yes, more or less.

I answer these questions several more times during my week in Seattle. Yes, I am from here, but no, I don’t really know my way around.

The bus back to my cousin’s is packed with tie-dyed Hemp Fest attendees. With every seat taken and standers packed shoulder to shoulder, I feel like I’m back on a Mumbai train.

A frat boy with jean shorts sagged a couple inches below his gray briefs steps on my foot. Lightly. He spends the next five minutes apologizing.

Frat boy: I’m sorry.

Me: No problem.

Frat boy: I apologize.

Me: It’s OK.

Frat boy: I apologize.

Me: It was bound to happen on this bus.

Frat boy: That was really not nice.

Frat boy then goes up front to talk to the bus driver about a rockin’ Mexican place and Santana, who the bus driver says is playing Seattle soon.

An older guy joins the conversation. He’s met Jimi Hendrix and claims to have almost produced a CD by Leon Hendrix. But he's never heard of Santana.

The next day I experience more directional frustrations, compounded by no cell phone or car. My mission: to find my friend Kyle's house.

I have Kyle's address but forget to bring his phone number. The bus, slowed by Hemp Fest, takes two hours.

Kyle’s address seems clear enough, but three guides can’t get me there. I start from Safeway with directions from a greeter. An hour later, after wandering past parks, cemeteries and nameless neighborhoods, I’m back at Safeway.

I’m due to meet my cousin soon, but want to tell Kyle I’m alive even if I didn’t make it to his house.

I ask to use Safeway’s phone. The courtesy clerk is confused.

“Why?”

“I have no cell phone.”

“…Oh. Well keep it short.”

The number’s long distance.

“Keep it real short.”

My cousin can tell me Kyle’s phone number. But she doesn’t answer. So to Kyle I might as well be dead. I feel bad for telling him not to leave his apartment — four hours ago.

Dinner is a Safeway sandwich. With a Club card, a sandwich, pop and chips is $5. Without a Club card, just a sandwich is $6. My Club card’s in storage and I can’t remember my phone number from two years ago. No Club deal for me. $6 for a sandwich and a quarter for a Dixie cup of ice.

The remainder of the week is a blur of meet-ups with friends, family and former workmates. Lots of food and drinks and that Dutch baby I mentioned earlier.

Not a Dutch adult.

I usually eat only Dutch adults, but I make an exception for my visit back. Haha. This particular Dutch baby I consume isn’t so much a human as a baked, eggy pancake the size of my face, topped with powdered sugar and lemon.

Week Five: Toronto – One more time

In keeping with our recent family tradition of flying on different planes to the same destinations, my dad, mom and I are booked on separate flights from Seattle to Toronto.

Unfortunately our isolationist plan is foiled by a helpful airport attendant.

My mom and I are flying back the same day, an hour apart. She is leaving an hour before me, and has a direct flight. I, on the other hand, am stuck detouring half an hour north to Vancouver before heading east to Toronto.

My savvy attendant notices this inconvenience and puts me on the same flight as my mom, at no charge. And that’s just the start of our good fortune. At the gate, another equally helpful but less smiley attendant notices my mom’s frequent flier habits and bumps us up to business class. Holler! (Does anyone say that anymore?)

Once you’ve flown business class, you never want to go back. (But if you’re like me, and most of us, you only want to stay in business class if it’s free.)

Each of our seats is wide enough for two asses; I can fully extend my four-foot long legs; and we don’t have to expel any effort in lowering and raising tray tables, ‘cause ours are built into our armrests and therefore permanently accessible.

We get our first beverage service before the plane leaves the ground. Then mere minutes later, our choice of another drink and a glass dish of salted nuts. Our meal comes before I’ve finished the nuts. And it’s big! Salad, ravioli, ice cream and cookies.

Lots of food doesn’t mean good food. The ravioli sucks. And I’m not hungry for the dessert 'cause I gorged on leftover pizza at the gate.

Business class also doesn’t guarantee premiere entertainment. The plane’s entire system breaks down halfway through the flight.

My sister, mom and me, post dance party.

In-flight entertainment or not, we make it to Toronto, and I spend my last week in North America hanging with the ‘rents and my sister, her boyfriend and friends.

On one of my last days, my mom and I hit up The Ex (or the Canada National Exhibition, as it’s never called.)

It’s the 133rd year of the fair, which fyi, claims to be the greenest fair in North America.

I don’t notice anything particularly green about the event, but there’s certainly a lot to see and buy. One warehouse has products for sale from all around the world. Laos and Thailand each have booths, but not Cambodia.

Not a cow, pig or sheep.

Another building houses farm animals — afroed alpacas, brown, black and spotted cows, plus pigs and sheep.

I end The Ex with Canada’s equivalent of an elephant ear — the fried, cinnamon sugar pastry that is often my sole reason for attending fairs. In case you’re unfortunate enough to be unacquainted, the treat gets its name ‘cause it is about the same size as an ear of one of those wrinkled gray beasts that roam around places like Africa and Cambodia.

Canada — or at least The Ex — doesn’t have elephant ears. It has beaver tails. Essentially the same as an elephant ear, except maybe one fourth the size, beaver tails are also available in a wider variety of flavors (chocolate hazelnut, apple cinnamon, banana chocolate, Reese's and maple butter), and, according to propaganda at the stand, they're healthy.

Other healthy, deep-fried Ex treats? Pickles, Mars bars, mac and cheese and pop. Yes, soda pop. How? Why? I have no idea.

The Ex is all about unlikely combinations. Like aerial acrobatics and ice, done to a medley of Broadway musicals, including Hairspray, Les Mis, Rent and Rock of Ages. While the acrobats soar, spin and twirl on ropes and trapezes above, the skaters dance, flit and fly below.

This is dangerous.

Yet another unlikely combination? A human and a cannon. David “The Bullet” Smith, Jr. has been shooting out of cannons for 14 years.

He holds the record for the longest human cannonball shot (193 feet 4 inches), and he’s on his way to the highest shot.

In preparation, The Bullet is shooting out of the cannon at higher and higher degrees. Today the 35-foot long barrel is aimed at 50 degrees. He will shoot out fast, reaching 80 kilometers an hour in a fifth of a second.

The Bullet strides out to his cannon to the beat of The Prodigy’s song, “Mindfields.” The one with the “This is dangerous” refrain.

The Bullet isn't as sleek as a bullet. A baggy, lightweight shirt and pants cloak his solid build. Atop the cannon he buckles on a helmet.

First he’s posing atop the cannon. Then he’s in the cannon. Next he’s out of the cannon, arcing high, high and higher, then down, head first into the blue net. Then he’s rolled over and up and over the net and doing push-ups on the ground.

The whole movement is graceful, less like a bullet than like a bird — a wingless bird, soaring and landing in a downy nest.

The Final 30 Hours: Toronto to Cambodia

The ticket agent in Toronto has never heard of Cambodia. At least she acts that way. She doesn’t know how to spell Phnom Penh and can’t get my suitcase checked there. I'll have to pick it up in Taipei.

Toronto to San Francisco is a five-hour blur. After finding my TV screen hiding in the armrest I watch “Dinner for Schmucks” and some “Modern Family” episodes.

In San Francisco the gate steward says she can check my suitcase all the way to Phnom Penh instead of just Taipei. Great. Trouble is the case hasn’t shown up in San Francisco yet.

When it does, the steward promises to get me a new baggage claim tag. This never happens, but I give it a rest, and spend the next 12 hours reading, sleeping and zoning out to Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris and a Friends episode.

The ticket agent in Taipei says my suitcase never showed in San Francisco. I’ll have to ask again in Phnom Penh.

On the way to the gate I meet a five-person Cambodian family: a dad with his two daughters and their two husbands.

Their destination is the dad’s homeland of Kampong Speu, a rural province just west of Phnom Penh.

The daughters, in their early 30s, were born in refugee camps in Thailand. They have never been to Cambodia. Their husbands left Cambodia as young children and their father fled in 1979, shortly after the official end of the Khmer Rouge.

The Modesto, California daughters are full of questions for me.

What is Cambodia’s traffic like? Is crossing the street scary? Is there lots of crime? Is it easy to find clothes to buy? What kind of shoes should they wear? Will the food make them sick?

They talk to each other in a mixture of Khmer and English. A lot of their Khmer goes over my head, but they still say they don’t speak it well, that they speak like foreigners, which they are.

Back in Cambodia

We like dirt.

I didn’t have any panic attacks on my return to North America, but will I have them on my return to Cambodia?

Nah. Just exhaustion, wonder and mild discomfort.

It’s been only five weeks, but in some ways arriving in Phnom Penh feels like it did two years ago, when everything was new and unfamiliar.

Phnom Penh greets me like dog’s breath — wet and hot and steamy.

I balk at the assault of tuk-tuk drivers, each trying to shove me into his moto-driven cart. Back to the bargaining games.

We stop once on the ride to the guesthouse so the driver can fill his moto up with pee from a glass Coke bottle. Wait, that’s not pee, that’s gas! It took me months to figure that one out.

Once we’re hydrated, I watch the city traffic: five and six member families crammed on the backs of motos, crowds of workers on tractor-towed flatbeds, more workers crouched atop towers of rice sacks in the backs of pick-ups.

I'm everywhere!

Piles of dirt and trash line the back roads and the same mangy tan dog is everywhere.

Roadside stands are heaped with bumpy, green jackfruit, spiky green and pink dragonfruit, and bananas. A row of men sleeps in their nearby cyclos.

The posting on the back of my guesthouse room door offers yet another hint that I’m now thousands of miles from the US of A.

Among standard rules like keep quiet and no drugs and hookers is a request most Americans would find puzzling: “Please do not throw your garbage outside the window!”

I check-in to the guesthouse at 2 p.m. Nowhere near bedtime in Cambodia, but past bedtime in Toronto. I want to stay up and acclimate myself to the 11-hour time difference, but I’m too weak. I nap until 6 p.m. and then on and off all night long.

I wake up a few times to the sensation of ants crawling on me — and it’s not just a sensation — ants are actually crawling on me.

The next morning’s shower is cold and out of a hose, and the next day’s clothes are the same as the last two days. My suitcase is still MIA.

Fortunately, I get a call the next morning saying my suitcase has been located and is en route to Phnom Penh.

Three days later, my suitcase and I are on a seven-hour bus back to my Cambodian home.

North America visit complete. One more year and I’ll do it all again.

Meeting Mondulkiri's Mountains

2011-07-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

* This meeting happened way back in February. Proper documentation takes time!

At the beginning of the two-day trek I was sure I had a fractured toe. By the end of the first day I was sure I didn’t. But that’s still the excuse I gave for leaving a day early.

The real reasons? I was exhausted from hiking all day in flip flops, and I knew there wouldn’t be enough food. The second day began with a baguette and coffee. Lunch was going to be a cup of noodles. That was supposed to last seven hours of hiking up and down mountains.

I took the first ride out of there. It took an hour or two to make it out of the hills and back to the guesthouse, but the reprieve from walking was worth it.

Not that the walking didn’t start out fun. My fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and I ogled over lots of wildlife while hiking up and down the hills of Mondulkiri — the province Lonely Planet calls the “Original Wild East of Cambodia.”

The beloved travel guide calls Cambodia’s second most northeastern province a lot of other things, too, like the “Switzerland of Cambodia.” Oops, that’s just Sen Monorom, the provincial capital, which supposedly earned that name for its two lakes. But the whole province garners plenty of other geographical comparisons from the traveler’s tome. Africa, Tasmania and Wales: LP claims Mondulkiri’s got pieces of all these locales plus more.

I haven’t been to Tasmania or Africa, so I can’t comment on those likenings, but I have been to Switzerland and Wales. Sen Monorom didn’t remind me of the European country high in the alps, but I didn’t bother to check out the two lakes in the Cambodian town.

I also didn’t pick up on the Wales comparison, but I’ve only been to one tiny town in the tiny British country. Still, in my memory, Wales was more green and less brown than Mondulkiri. If anything, Mondulkiri is a bit like Eastern Washington, with its scrubby ground and dry hills.

Hills are something Mondulkiri has a lot of. Mondulkiri literally means “Meeting of the Hills.” Lots of hills and not a lot of people. With only two people per square kilometer, Mondulkiri is Cambodia’s least populated province. (Again, according to Lonely Planet, 2008.) Most people who live in the province are not Khmer. About half are Pnong and the other half other minorities.

So, back to our hike. We arrived in Sen Monorom (after a nine-hour bus ride) without plans. But it didn’t take long for a travel guide to sell us his two-day trek through the jungle, interrupted by an overnight stay in a Pnong village. We’d see waterfalls, animals and have plenty of food.

The guide spoke stellar English, told killer turtle sex jokes and had a jaunty revolutionary look to him (beret, silky ponytail, combat clothes). How could we say no?

Well, it turned out the long-haired guide wasn’t really the guide. He was just the moneymaker. Our real guide was a quiet Pnong man named Om who spoke Khmer but no English and made a meager $10 a day. (The hike cost $20 apiece.)

Om led us up and down mountains, across shallow rivers and through slashed and burned fields waiting to become farms.

The 20k hike was supposed to take five hours. It took 10. We stopped for a lunch of pork and rice and swam in a chilly waterfall, but much of the delay was likely my doing. I was constantly catching up to the group, because somewhere along my life’s course, I’ve become really slow. Geriatrically slow.

I had to use two bamboo poles to pull myself up and down the hills and the guide’s hand to make it across a log spanning a river.

Part of the reason I went home a day early was to spare the group another day of waiting for me.

We left that first morning at 8:30 and landed at the Pnong village high in the hills just before dark, just after 6 in the evening.

We arrived at the four-hut, 20-person village in confusion. The guesthouse we were promised, with hammocks and bamboo beds and mosquito nets for sleeping, was taken by two French girls who arrived on elephants.

With no other choice, we displaced a 12-member family and stayed in their hut, what one of my fellow trekkers called a step up from a cave.

A thatched wooden house lined by a platform for eating and sleeping on two of the walls and by a shelf for cooking supplies on the third. A fire pit on the dirt floor below the shelf.

Dinner, cooked in the fire pit, was a couple stirfry pork and vegetable dishes.

The family living in the hut numbered nine children, plus a dad, a pregnant mom and an ancient, bony man who hocked loogies all night.

The loogie-hocking made sleep difficult. So did the snoring. Not to mention the cold, the hard wood planks for a bed and the laughing and shouting of the men singing and playing a flute while drinking rice wine outside the hut.

But the morning (and my ride back) eventually came.

As often happens in Cambodia, the ride back was lost in translation. I figured this out when we drove a ways and then stopped, to wait for the others, the driver said. Once the others arrived I found out the plan was to walk one hour to a waterfall and then walk about four more hours to get out of the hills.

Um, no. I was done with walking. I simply wanted to be done with the hike and go back to the guesthouse. After some back and forth about missing the main road already, I finally got back to town. Being lazy has never felt so good.

17 Days in India: Part Three - The Final Eight days

2011-06-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

Day Nine: April 13 - Bus to Agra

The day begins with a wheat porridge that Diana and I can’t get enough of. It’s a bit like eating delicious raw, hard pellets of wheat.

We take our journey’s only bus to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. The trip takes about 11 hours, and is during the heat of the day. There’s no AC, and the fans mounted above every seat aren’t turned on. The windows let in a cool breeze in the morning, but by the afternoon, the air is hot and stagnant.

We only stop once for food, at a giant bus parking lot where I promptly lose our bus. The only food for sale is fried and packaged. I buy one delicious orange, a package of cookies and another of crackers.

We see our first camel on the way, towing a cart along the highway. A man is perched atop the cart.

A driver from our guesthouse is set to pick us up at 6 p.m. at the bus station, but the bus doesn’t get to town 'til 7:30, and we’re not sure where the bus station is. Finally we get off the bus at a food stand and call the guesthouse. They tell us they’ll pay for an auto rickshaw.

Diana and Edi (a fellow traveler, Japanese) are in the back, and the driver tells me to sit in front next to him. Trouble is, my legs won’t fit. So half my body is hanging out of the cab, getting soaked in the rain.

The other half is in the driver’s way. He elbows me in the chest with every shift of the gears.

We arrive in a dark, dirty alley. Our guesthouse is at the end, totally dark. Power’s out. It comes back a few minutes later, and we see a tiny room and bathroom with a shower, but no hot water. No sink either.

The place is shabbier, but more expensive, than our last place. Diana tells me to ask for a 50-rupee discount. A mistake.

The Indian man behind the desk throws a fit. “What? We wait for you at the station for an hour and get you a rickshaw and now you ask cheaper? You pay the man!” He points to our rickshaw driver. “And you go to another guesthouse!”

OK, we’ll do without the discount.

Day 10: April 14 - The Taj, and train to Jaipur

…The Taj ..! The site Diana has been waiting the whole trip to see. I’m more excited about the desert, but of course I too want to see one of the world’s most famous tombs, what “Lonely Planet calls “the most beautiful building in the world.”

There’s no doubt that the pearly, etched stone is stunning. Kudos to the cleaners! (We visitors ease the cleaning by covering our shoes and flip flops with surgical booties.)

Inside is beautiful, too, resplendent with more carvings, jewels and paintings. But there’s not much to see other than a false tomb.

Construction of the Taj took more than 20 years. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan to commemorate the life of his third wife, who died during the birth of their 14th child.

Diana and I are in Agra only for the Taj, so we take off on a train that evening for the desert – Jaipur. The trip is only five short hours, just long enough to settle into a bunk and catch some sleep.

I am awakened by Diana yelling at me to get off the train. There aren’t any announcements, and no indication of where we are other than the occasional station sign or reports from other passengers.

I scramble to get my bag packed, but I’m not fast enough. The train starts moving before I reach the door. Diana’s outside. I can hear her yelling, “Emily, hurry!”

I stand at the door, ready to jump. We’re not moving that fast yet, and I should be fine if I just drop and roll, right? I’m ready to go for it, when a group of older Indian men urge me back.

“But my friend got off the train!” I yell. “I have to jump!”

The next station is only one or two kilometers farther. I should just wait, they say. What seems like 15 minutes passes and I’m off the train, but near hysterics. Should I wait for Diana? Will she come to the next station to find me? I have no idea. I wait for almost half an hour before the auto rickshaw guys convince me to give up for the night. It’s already after 10, and it will be hard to get a room, they say.

Diana and I had picked out a guesthouse for the night, and I am convinced it’s listed in “Lonely Planet” as a place that offers free pickup. Trouble is, I don’t remember the guesthouse name, and Diana has our “Lonely Planet.” If I can just get a copy of a “Lonely Planet”…

The auto rickshaw driver takes me to a couple guesthouses, but none have the guide. Finally I surrender and book a room at a nearby joint. A huge, clean and decorative room with hot water and TV, it’s the nicest place I stay at in India.

Day 11: April 15 - Jaipur

Despite the relaxing atmosphere, I am still freaked about finding Diana, and barely sleep. We have tickets for a train leaving at midnight, but what if I can’t find her? I wake at 6 and go out on the street, ready to resume my search for a “Lonely Planet.”

Zakir, the taxi driver, is on the right. His young friend is on the left. You can figure out who's in the middle.

But this isn’t Cambodia. People don’t wake at 4:30 with the wat chantings and rooster crowingsZakir, an energetic man with a big black taxi.

Zakir’s friend has an Internet shop stocked with “Lonely Planets.” But of course it’s not open yet. A couple chais later, the shop is open, but all the LPs are with tourists. I e-mail Diana and then resume the LP search. Zakir and I go to several places, but always get the same story. They had the guide, but now tourists have it. “Oh Shit! Shit!” Zakir says after each failure.

Finally we achieve success. A French woman has a LP — in French. She translates, finding two places that say they provide free pickup. I call both places, and the man at one of the places says Diana is there!

We’re off! The man at reception calls a flurry of rooms, asking each of the groggy guests (it’s still before 8 a.m.) one question: “What country are you from?” None of them are from the States. The person named Diana is a man from England.

But I still don’t give up. I ask at a pair of guesthouses across the street, and call a couple other guesthouses. Then I give up. We go eat at a cheapie joint where I eat the Indian cure-all for a poopy stomach: curd (yogurt), daal and rice. And it works!

After eating, I check my e-mail for the billionth time. There’s word from Diana! We’ll meet at 5:30 for dinner.

I can finally relax and see some sights. I go off on an all-day tour with Zakir. He tells me he’s 27, but he looks at least 40. Before entrusting my day to him, I ask to see his taxi license. He acts shocked, then gives me the license as collateral.

We drive through downtown, made up of crumbly buildings in faded salmon, and up, up, up to the royal family tombs. The decorative domes topping the empty tombs are bordered by a stone wall that climbs the hills like China’s Great Wall.

We pull up to the tombs with Hindi music blasting from the open windows. I feel like a wanna-be gangster in high school.

A couple grubby kids glob onto me as I get out of the car. “Chocolate,” they say, motioning to their mouths. Apparently I can buy it at a stand across the parking lot. Nah.

The water palace is next. On the way back into the city we pass an elephant climbing the hill, a boy perched high on the elephant’s back. Zakir keeps the music cranked, playing the same dance-party Hindi tune over and over.

“God gives us a second life, so why can’t we have fun and excitement?” he asks, swinging his arms to the beat.

The Water Palace is just what it sounds like: a palace on the water, used as a pleasure place by kings in the mid-18th century. A couple Indian guys ask to take their picture with me.

“I like foreigners,” one of the guys explains.

Zakir next drops me at Nahargarh, the Tiger Fort, a massive sandstone fortress rising out of the hillside. Zakir leaves me to explore for two hours while he visits his mosque. It’s Friday, Islam’s holy day.

A winding staircase leads to a courtyard; another set of stairs to the empty palace. I’m not sure I want to pay 200 rupees ($4.50) to enter the palace. I ask an exiting tourist if the ticket is worth the price, and get answered by an accompanying guide, who tries to get me to pay an additional 200 rupees for his services.

I buy a ticket and flee up the stairs in an effort to get rid of the pestering guide. I’m glad I do. The cavernous palace is nothing but hollowed-out stone, but it’s interesting to imagine the place as it once was.

Royalty once lived here. Now all that remains in the maze of rooms is the latrines, which contain a few cisterns and slots in the floor that served as toilets. But it’s fun roaming the labyrinthine corridors, which poke out to terraces with glorious views of the city below.

Most of the palace’s visitors are Indian. A couple young guys corner me in a room and take a picture of me. “Maa’am, you look awesome!” one of the guys exclaims. I leave before they can take another picture of me.

A movie is being shot in the palace’s courtyard. A white sheet billows above video cameras and guys in black samurai robes with red sashes.

Back in the taxi, Zakir pulls on his white knit prayer cap and turns on the tunes. We soon stop at a pirated CD stand. I buy a Hindi dance mix (100 songs for about fifty cents), and Zakir buys a couple discs —one, called “Hollywood,” has a collage of girls with big boobs on the front. The songs include American classics like “Barbie girl,” “Who let the dogs out?” and “We will rock you.” Zakir’s CDs are often stolen from his car, and he’s bought this CD several times.

He immediately puts on track 8, and begins dancing and singing along. “Where do you go to, my lovely? I want to know…”

I tell Zakir I can’t afford his proposed daily fare of 500 rupees ($11), and he suggests I visit a couple tourist traps so he can earn commission. The first trap is a craft mall. Zakir gives me his cell phone and tells me to look around until he calls. His call will mean he has received his 30 rupees (75 cents) and I can leave.

I wander in and out of every store, looking at kashmir, pashima, paintings, even furniture. A mall employee tails me, and tries to discourage me from entering the furniture store. I think he can tell I’m not interested in buying anything, especially furniture.

My next duty is watching laborers at a fabric store. I watch one guy stamp pink patterns on a large sheet and another guy weave a rug. I then enter the two-storied store and wander amid the expensive fabrics until I can leave. A seller wants to show me saris and sheets, but I tell him not to bother.

We drink chai in the parking lot, and then I visit a guru. Zakir’s been talking this guy up so much I think he must also make a commission off taking me there. The guru has changed lives, Zakir says. He can help anyone. Lots of tourists are mad about him. And his services are free; he doesn’t expect anything in return for a peek into your soul. What the hell, I decide. I’ll visit the guy.

He works in a jewelry shop. We enter a room with a couple guys lounging in front of the usual jewelry shop cases. Zakir talks to them a bit, then takes me to a back room, opens the door and leaves me in there.

This room is also lined with jewelry cases. At the back of the room, behind a case of stones, sits a normal looking guy in normal looking clothes. He looks more like a salesman than a guru. I stand in front of him until he tells me to sit down.

“You look like you don’t know why you’re here,” he says.

“I don’t,” I answer.

“Why do you think you’re here?”

“I heard there was a guru here…”

“I’m a guru,” he says. “I can help you. You can ask me any question. I can answer anything. So what do you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what to ask you.”

He starts telling me things about myself. Things he says he gets just from sitting across from me.

He starts out nice, then gets weird.

I have incredible energy, he says. I should help people. After my time in Cambodia I should go back to the States to figure out what I want to do.

My mother’s 56 — or will be this year. She’s been pregnant three times. I thought it had only been twice, but maybe there’s some things I don’t know, he says. (“He’s making stuff up,” my mom says.)

She also has a lump in her breast, he says. (Not true, she says.)

He tells me I had a relationship two-and-a-half years ago. I suppose that’s true, I say, but it wasn’t long.

No, he says, I have problems with long relationships because I have trust issues.

I tell him that I’m a unitasker — that I can only focus on one thing at a time, and he says that’s fine, that’s good for me, because my mind never stops.

I’m very nervous, he says, but I hide behind a façade of calm. I doubt myself a lot, and I don’t know how to breathe. My throat chakra is broken. I need to learn how to breathe. He can help me.

He places a tiny chip of dark blue stone in my left palm and tells me to cross my hands, left palm on top of right. Close my eyes, he says, and breathe.

After a few minutes he tells me to open my eyes. Is my breath faster or slower? I can't feel my pulse. It’s faster, he tells me.

I don’t know what that means, but he tells me he can help me. He can make me a pendant of this special stone that will help me repair my throat chakra and be able to better breathe and communicate.

It will take only an hour and cost only 6,000 rupees ($136). Yikes. No thanks, I say.

“No, I knew you would say that when you came in,” he says.

I ask him about the stone and he’s slow to reveal its name, saying I can’t buy it anywhere. But it’s called tangenite, he says. It’s the stone featured in “Titanic.”

After the guru and a lemon soda on the rooftop, we finally meet Diana. She laughs at my efforts to find her. We would have eventually met at the station for our midnight train, she says.

A younger Indian dude has joined us, and I’m glad for his presence. Zakir freaks me out with his touchy-feely nature. He seems to constantly be on the verge of kissing me.

The four of us eat dinner at Diana’s guesthouse and then Zakir and I go to a Rajasthani music show he talks up so much I wonder if my attendance means another commission.

It’s a puppet show that begins with a couple guys playing drums and singing. They tell me to sit in a plastic chair in front. I know this means I’ll be obligated to pay them, but I can’t politely refuse.

The performance is a puppet variety show. Several puppets perform: a traditional dancer, a snake charmer, a horse rider and an Indian Michael Jackson who can detach and reattach his head.

After the show, one of the guys gives me a speech about how he’s a starving artist and can I buy some of his wares. His art includes puppets and those strands of elephants you can buy at Pier 1. Sorry, I say, his art is very beautiful, but I don’t want to buy any of it. Then he asks for a donation. I give him 20 rupees (less than 50 cents — wow, I’m cheap)!

Next I pay Zakir the agreed-upon 400 rupees ($9). He immediately gets sulky, not because of the fare, but because I’m leaving that night for Jaisalmer. Why am I going there? I should stay in Jaipur, he says. He makes me promise to come back and visit his village. I should tell other tourists about his taxi service, he says. And I should call him when I arrive in Jaisalmer.

Day 12: April 16 - Jaisalmer

The overnight train to Jaisalmer is about 11 hours. For much of the trip, Diana and I are joined by a self-professed guru with a walrus moustache who isn’t assigned to our bunk section, but who can’t stay away from us.

He initiates our friendship by asking our help in editing a brochure for him on his yoga and meditation center. I love editing, so it’s no problem. But the guy barely acknowledges our edits. Instead, he launches into how he can do a reading for me.

Under the pretense of editing, he shows me a notebook filled with testimonies from past customers.

The guy’s nice – he buys me a couple chais, gives me a packet of biscuits and offers to give me a painting of my choice from the stack in his black duffel bag. But I am exhausted from listening to endless lectures from endless Indian men.

I try to signal disinterest in his dronings by pulling out a book — “The Da Vinci Code” — which I am finally unsnobby enough to read. But he doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he acts surprised that I am reading a book in English.

“A lot of people in America speak Spanish,” he says.

He then tells me that I shouldn’t eat pickles and that I’ll look the same when I’m 60 as I do now.

“I get such a nice feeling talking to you,” he says again and again.

A driver from our guesthouse picks us up at the train station, which turns out to be a good way to avoid the pack of wolves that are the auto rickshaw drivers. I push an elderly Indian couple out of the way in my desperate escape from the wolves.

We stay inside Jaisalmer Fort, India’s only inhabited fort. Within the 12th-century fort is a maze of streets lined with guesthouses and shops with outside displays of books, notebooks, shoes and clothes.

At the hotel, we sign up for a two-day camel safari. As Fatan, the guy behind the desk says, “No knowledge without camel college.”

He knows other rhymes, too, like “No wife, no life,” and “Beautiful wife, dangerous for life.”

I borrow a cell phone to call Zakir that night, as promised. I spent all of yesterday with the guy, and he acted like he was going to cry when he left, but now he doesn’t even remember who I am!

“Sorry, I get a lot of tourists,” he says. “I’m with three girls from England right now.”

A few minutes later he calls me back, employing a much friendlier tone.

“Hi honey,” he says. “How are you? I miss you so much.”

Day 13: April 17 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day one

Day one of our two-day camel safari. Diana and I go with two Irish lads, William and Eoin (pronounced Owen).

Each of us has our own camel. Oh, but wait! They’re not actually camels! They’re dromedaries. Camels have two humps, and these creatures have only one. Camels also have longer hair and shorter legs than dromedaries. India (and most other countries) don’t have any camels, Fatan tells us. But most people still call dromedaries camels. So we’ll go with that. Sorry, dromedaries!

My camel’s name is Bapoo. At 12, he is the group elder. You can see his wiseness in his dark, long-lashed eyes. He is also the only camel on the trip that doesn’t chew cud. (Like a cow, most of the other camels are constantly chewing their food, regurgitating it, and chewing it some more.)

Two guides lead our safari: Matar, a lively chatterbox who has been leading safaris since age 12 and knows English well, and his trainee Gordon, a quiet but goofy guy who Diana says looks like a character from “The Simpsons.” Gordon has been training with Matar for three years, but knows only a little English.

Diana and I are a bit nervous about how to get on the camels, but they make it easy for us. Matar and Gordon simply pull the reigns and make a soothing “chi, chi, chi” noise. This signals the one-humped giants to kneel on their forelegs. A jerk later, and they’ve also folded under their hind legs, and are sitting on the ground.

Each camel is covered in a blanket and a saddle. Bapoo, the biggest camel, is loaded with food and cooking equipment and bedrolls — and me. I grab hold of the saddle and pull myself on.

Gordon clicks his tongue and Bapoo rises — first his forelegs, then herk, jerk, his hinds. “Lean back,” Matar tells me.

Once I’m on, the riding is a comfortable side-to-side swaying. Still, the mere act of straddling Bapoo is a major inner-thigh stretch, and the stretch soon becomes painful.

We travel in a camel train, with each of us holding the lead of the camel directly behind. Matar and Gordon walk alongside. As we walk, Gordon sings Hindi songs and busts rhymes.

“How can we do? Kathmandu,” he says when something is hopeless.

“One, two, three, India free!” when taking pictures.

“No power, no shower,” when, well, I never figured this one out.

I had imagined the desert to be all dunes and swirling sand. It’s not. Most of the area we cover is rocky scrub land inhabited by scraggly trees and goats. It’s hot, but not as hot as I imagined. Still, I am not taking any chances with the sun. Only the strip of calf between my ankles and pants cuffs is exposed to the sun. I wear a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, socks on my hands and feet, and a hat that covers my whole face except my eyes.

Because our camels aren’t really camels, they don’t spit. But they do fart. And poop. A lot. We are engulfed in a continuous farty odor. Must be from all that hay. That’s all the camels eat on the trek, aside from the few leaves they snatch from trees we pass.

After an hour or two of walking, we stop for lunch beneath a large tree.

Getting off the camels is tougher than getting on. I lean back as Bapoo kneels and then sits, but I can’t get my leg over his girth without help. Gordon and Matar stand on opposite sides of me. They both grab my right leg, one pulling and the other pushing it over the knob of the saddle. I ease myself to the ground and straighten. I’ve been riding for less than two hours, but I’m already walking like John Wayne.

Lunch begins with chai and yellow tubes the texture of styrofoam. A soupy veggie mix is next, with yellow ramen noodles and chapatti.

Gordon makes the chapatti and Matar cooks everything else. The two guides insist on waiting for us to finish eating before they begin. Dishes are cleaned with sand and hands. No soap or water.

The camels wander off to scavenge up their own lunch of leaves, but not before having their front legs tied together with a short length of rope. The guides later feed them bags of hay.

Naps and card games while away the after-lunch hours, the day’s hottest.

After lunch we visit a couple villages populated by lots of children living in squat mud huts, some topped by rounded grassy roofs, others simply squared off. The children at both villages ask for rupees and pens. At the first village the children offer us bags of chips to buy and at the second they show us their collection of foreign money, including a $2 coin from New Zealand. The second village is where Matar is from. We drink chai outside his family’s hut.

We reach our sleeping place amid the sand dunes just in time for sunset. Made up of sand that is hard yet crumbles under bare feet, the dunes rise from a field of broken-up rocks.

We climb the short dunes to a flat plate of earth. From here we can simultaneously see the sun setting and the moon rising. To the west, the sun is a neon white disc sinking in a cherry tomato sky. To the east, the moon is a marbled white circle as perfectly round as the sun, climbing a sky of a darkening bruise.

Below the sun stands a trio of windmills, each with three stagnant speared blades. These windmills stand at attention throughout the desert, generating electricity for people who live in the town, but not for the poor village residents we visit. They live without power.

Dinner is tastier than lunch, and even has an accompanying song.

“Daal and chapatti, onion and potato, camel-a safari, camel-a safari,” Matar sings as he cooks over the open fire. There’s also rice.

We sleep on the desert sand, on blankets under thick, Japan-made comforters. I’m wearing most of my clothes, including socks on my hands and feet, but I still wake up cold in the middle of the night.

Day 14: April 18 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day two

Breakfast is toast with jam, biscuits (called cookies in America), papaya, cantaloupe, and chai, of course.

William and Eoin signed up for two nights in the desert, so Diana and I decide to spend another night instead of heading back today like we had planned.

The day passes much the same as yesterday. I have to ask to get off Bapoo during a three-hour stretch of morning riding cause my inner thighs hurt so bad. Bapoo lowers himself and I switch to side saddle.

The new position is a reprieve for the legs, but makes for a bumpier, scarier ride. I am now rocking side to side, holding onto the saddle with my left hand and the bedroll with my right. I’m afraid I’ll topple to the ground if I let go.

But it’s only half an hour before we reach the big tree for lunch. The food is similar to yesterday’s noon meal: a veggie mix of eggplant and potato, yellow noodles and chapati, with an appetizer of chai, those yellow styrofoam tubes and semolina flour.

Gordon throws a rope weighted with a rock on each end into a tree to bring a cluster of branches down to Bapoo. Bapoo munches on the leaves while the other camels eat hay from bags.

We camp in a bowl amid dunes even bigger than last night. William and Eoin shoot crazy poses in the fading light while I log roll very slowly down the hill. Rolling down grassy hills as a kid was a lot more exciting. But less exfoliating. When I come to a stop at the bottom of the hill, sand has ground into every pore of my body.

There’s more sand troubles around the campfire. Because of the strong wind, Matar is having trouble keeping the fire lit for chai. But he’s not worried. He is confident the wind will soon die down. I don’t believe him, but a half hour or so later, he turns out to be right.

Dinner is the usual, sing along with me, now: “Daal and chapati, onion and potato, camel-a safari, camel-a safari.”

Gordon eats a packet of something (paan?) that makes him kookier than ever. He is full of laughter and singing. Matar accompanies him on guitar. I try to stay awake to enjoy the tuneless troubadouring, but today’s rough riding has taken it out of me. I go to sleep first, under a warmer blanket than last night.

This blanket — along with two T-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, two bandanas, a hat and socks on my hands and feet — keeps me warm the whole night long.

Day 15: April 19 - Camel safari in Jaisalmer: Day three

I wake up last, to calls for chai. Today is the last day so breakfast is a special treat — porridge! And not just any old oat porridge, but the wheat stuff that Diana and I are crazy about. I eat mine and half of Diana’s, plus biscuits and toast and cantaloupe.

I am so done with camel riding. After an hour or so of groin pain, I ask to dismount Bapoo and walk. Matar rides Bapoo for a while, sitting side saddle and singing. Then he dismounts and Bapoo gets a break from human cargo.

Today’s journey is shorter. We stop once at a circular trough for camel drinks and then under a tree just before lunch time. But there is no lunch today. The tree is simply our pickup spot. We take group photos and then play cards for an hour or more before the jeep arrives.

The driver speeds back to the guesthouse and drops us at 1:30. Our camel adventure is over.

Day 16: April 20 - Jaisalmer and train to New Delhi

After a breakfast of muesli, yogurt, fruit and chai I walk to the Jain temples. On my way, I see a dog lunge at an old woman. The dog is snarling and barking like he wants to kill the woman, but the woman has a stick. The woman passes me and the dog ceases its attack. Still, I am afraid to walk by the dog.

“It’s OK,” says a woman outside the shop where the dog is. “He doesn’t like that woman. She’s a gypsy. She steals people’s bags.” She gestures to my bag, as if to take it.

The dog retreats under a bench and I approach. The woman brings me chai and I talk to her and a nearby man. The chai is the best I’ve had in India. Spicy, not the bland, sweet stuff I’ve received for the past 16 days.

The woman tries to get me to buy stuff from her shop, of course, but I say no thanks. Instead, I take a stack of her business cards with the promise to give them to other tourists. (That doesn’t happen.)

I visit a couple Jain temples, admiring their intricate brown carved stone. Locked behind countless carved wooden doors with barred windows are Buddha-like figures, bald, heavy-browed men sitting in lotus positions. Jainism and Buddhism share similar beliefs, but the statues are not of Buddha. They are of Mahavir, or Vardhamana, the Indian guy who established the framework for Jainism around 500 BCE.

Downstairs, three women are praying to a shrine of a large figure of Mahavir as a bell hanging in the entrance rings over tinny spiritual music.

An Indian man is quickly walking around to each figure, clasping his hands in prayer and then moving onto the next figure.

Only two of the seven temples are open. The rest are closed to tourists until 11. I kill time in a couple havelis, which are really nice tall, sandstone houses that belonged to the city’s wealthy merchants. In the first one I just use the bathroom, but a guy working there still invites me to chai later. In the second one, a young guy shows me a posh room before taking me up to the rooftop, where he talks and talks while I zone out.

He talks about women from the villages who are stuck home while men work. It is not until this city that I have seen women working. Here they work in shops.

The face of his guru hangs on a pendant tied around his neck with a piece of string.

“Are you tired?” he asks, then starts massaging the skin between my thumb and pointer finger. Four seconds for my right hand, nine for my left, then opposite for my feet. When he moves onto my shoulders, I say “enough.”

The point of all this? Energy. “After this you’re ready to get up and go!”

The massaging can also help relieve aches and pains. He tells of an English girl whose pain was finally relieved by him after she had paid several thousand rupees to other practitioners.

I escape without further massage, but not without another chai invitation.

Lunch, I later discover is at a “Lonely Planet” pick. It’s a thali place, which here means six types of foods, each in its own section on a tin plate. There’s a green, rooty vegetable that’s native to Rajasthan, curry vegetables, daal, yogurt, crispy fried wonton noodles, parathas and a yellow, milky sweet. My drink is another dessert: a very sweet lassi studded with candied fruit. The yogurt is so thick I have to eat it with a spoon.

Diana and Fatan, the guesthouse host, unexpectedly join me at the restaurant. They eat and then Fatan takes us on his motorcycle to Gadsisar Lake, which is actually a water tank built around 1400 AD. A couple temples and shrines are anchored in the water.

Ahead of us is an 18-hour train ride back to Delhi. In preparation, I buy a sandwich, 10 oranges and some biscuits. I also sprint up the street for a popsicle of homemade ice cream indigenous to the region.

It’s not the mythical camel ice cream I’ve been pining for, but it’s still good, and has an odd taste, like it’s natural.

Our train leaves at 4:30 p.m. and is scheduled to arrive in Delhi at 10:30 a.m. A four-hour delay means it doesn’t actually arrive in Delhi until 3 p.m.

A man with a moustache, striped shirt and workout pants joins us for part of the journey. He gives the same speech several times.

“I’m an army man in Jaisalmer. I no English,” he begins.

Then he moves onto the weather. “Summer is very hot in Jaisalmer. Winter is very cold in Jaisalmer.”

And finally, the festival. “February is the biggest festival in Jaisalmer. Fifty thousand airplanes in the sky.”

Thankfully, the guy finally moves away from our section.

Sitting across from me throughout the ride is a young, quiet, bespectacled Indian guy who is militant about closing and opening the windows as we pass dusty fields. Despite his tactics, I have to borrow one of Diana’s socks to wipe the layer of dust off my seat.

Day 17: April 21 - Train to New Delhi and plane to Bangkok

Breakfast is on a train platform and is far more delicious than the veggie cutlet that tore apart my bowels on our first train. Potato curry and six small chapatis for less than 50 cents.

Back on the train, a woman approaches me with a shrine. A pile of coins topped with a 50-rupee note lays below the small altar, and incense smoke is curling around her face. The woman holds the shrine in front of her face and points to the money. I don’t give her any.

She is just one of the many beggars on the trains. Also prevalent are women with children and people who push rags in front of them as they crawl through the aisles.

After finally arriving in Delhi, we check in at the guesthouse we stayed at two weeks ago and then hit up a food hole with the Irish laddies. Chickpeas and chapatis and a sweet lassi for me.

I later try to casually stroll the street looking for shirts, but there is no casual shopping here. Harassment is heavy. I constantly get called at to come look at shops.

“What country?” a man asks me. “German? Switzerland?” I laugh and shake my head, scowling.

“Angry!” he says.

For our last meal in Delhi we visit Mt. Everest restaurant, a place I’d been eyeing since we arrived. The eatery is at the top of a flight of stairs so steep it’s like climbing the real Everest. I want a beer to soothe my stomach but am too cheap to pay 150 rupees for it. The only beer available in India seems to be giant, expensive bottles of Kingfisher. So I order lemon, honey, ginger tea instead, but it’s not until we leave that I realize I forgot to put the tea bag in! No wonder the drink was so lemony.

Our flight to Bangkok leaves at nearly midnight and arrives about four hours later. The ride is tarnished only by the sour man sitting on the aisle. I’m by the window, so I have to pass him the two times I go to the bathroom.

My first trip is before he sits down. I come back and he jerks his legs back a centimeter and mutters something I can’t hear which Diana translates as, “You should have thought about that before.”

A few hours later I have to pee again. When I tap the man he raises his shoulders in a “What the hell?” gesture and shifts his legs slightly. “Sorry,” I say. When I tap his shoulder on the way back in he lasers me a death stare and doesn’t make any attempt to let me by. I first try inching by with my front facing him and then realize this guy doesn’t deserve that courtesy. I stick my butt in his face and plow through him.

Day 18: April 22 - Bangkok

Our plane arrives in Bangkok at about 6 a.m. We catch a bus to the tourist district, find a guesthouse and sleep for seven hours.

Breakfast is poached eggs and toast while watching boys in swim trunks and girls in cover-ups slurp from beer towers. They look like they never went to bed.

These tourists are packed into the bars and restaurants lining the streets, buying fruit and crepes from the street carts and the same T-shirts and knick-knacks that are for sale throughout southeast Asia.

That night I go to my first real movie theater in nearly two years. The movie? A dudsy sci-fi: “Source Code.”

Day 19: April 23 - Still Bangkok

The morning begins with my first facial. The sensations are like nothing I’ve felt before. I close my eyes and imagine dolphins swimming on my face. Next it feels like the woman is kneading dough and playing piano on my face, and then pawing my shoulders like a dog for the shoulder massage.

After the upper body it’s time for the lower.

“Spread your legs,” the woman commands.

What? Am I in a brothel? I didn’t think I signed up for a happy ending massage, but I comply.

My face is swaddled in cotton and I can’t see the woman, but I feel her straddle my legs and begin massaging my calves, then up higher.

A lamp is shooting heat on my face and it’s difficult to breathe, especially through the cotton. Nearby I can hear an Aussie woman roaring with laughter about the fish chewing her feet as part of the fish foot massage.

A cucumber coating and mask and then it’s over. But wait, do I want waxing? My eyelashes tinted black? No.

The colossal but boring MBK mall is that night. Dinner is soup with five kinds of mushrooms at a Japanese fast food joint.

After dinner is another movie. “Rio," a cartoon 3-D flick that’s way better than last night’s real-people show.

A propaganda video of the Thai king plays before both movies. Within the first notes of the movie’s introductory music the audience is on its feet. The video shows the king among his people, helping with clean-ups and participating in experiments, helping advance his country.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, “an inspiration for all Thais,” the movie says.

Day 20: April 24 - Back to Cambodia

Our van back to Cambodia leaves early in the morning. Several Thai ladies of the night are strolling the streets buying fruit at the street stands, yelling to their men that they will be right with them.

The van to Bangkok 20 days ago had about six passengers, but the van back from Bangkok is packed with 20-some people. Welcome back to Cambodia!

17 Days in India: Part Two - Days Four through Eight

2011-06-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

Day Four: April 8 - Varanasi

I wake at 6:30. Breakfast is leftover chips, chai, toast and two “vegetable cutlets” (potato and vegetable hashbrowns) I will spend the next week regretting.

We arrive in Varanasi in mid-morning, but don’t get to a guesthouse until afternoon. Diana and I and two other tourists catch a supposedly pre-paid taxi to a “Lonely Planet” guesthouse. The driver and his assistant want us to stay somewhere else though, at a guesthouse they can’t stop talking about.

They’ll take us by this guesthouse and ours, they say, so we can compare them. To do this, we’ll have to walk, since the cobbled roads are too narrow for cars.

The assistant says the trip will take only 20 minutes, but it seems to take twice as long for the three of us to wind through the twisting maze of people and hulking motorcycles honking to get by. The streets are lined with shops, houses, freshly molded clay pots and the occasional guesthouse.

Signs for the assistant’s guesthouse are painted on every corner, but there aren’t any signs for ours. After 20 minutes of walking, the assistant says “Oops! Wrong way!” and we turn and churn round the maze some more. It seems as if he’s trying to get us lost. Finally we get to our guesthouse, which is disappointingly small and run by people who act disinterested in our business. It also looks too deep into the maze to ever find again.

We return to the taxi and a driver who refuses to give us our bags until we pay him an extra 20 rupees for a parking ticket he got while waiting for us. After much yelling, we finally get the bags for half the price of the ticket.

Next we strike out on our own, sort of. We follow a local who says he can take us to a guesthouse. We reject the place and choose our own atop a giant staircase above the Ganges, but the guy won’t leave.

We repeatedly tell him to go, but he stays in the alley outside the guesthouse, peering in the window and yelling that he can help us with any kind of service we need.

The vegetable cutlets start their assault on my bowels in early afternoon, and I spend the rest of the day in bed. I miss the walk along the Ganges at sunset, when people perform holy ceremonies.

Day Five: April 9 - Varanasi, night train to Khajuraho

I make up for missing last night’s festivities by waking at 6 to tour the Ganges by rowboat. I’m accompanied by Janna, a German tourist who is sharing a room with Diana and me.

Before we leave shore, a young girl sells Janna and I a lotus flower candle each, which we release into the river to bring good karma to us and our families. The girl pockets her 40 rupees and goes on to the next boat. Our young rower pushes off.

“Five fifty-seven. Half an hour, OK?”

We’re afloat in the Ganges — one of the top five most polluted rivers in the world. But it’s holy, so lots of people bathe and play in it and bring their dead to live in it.

All these people make the water really dirty, but looking at it gives only a hint of its dirtiness. Tinged army green, the river’s surface is coated with ash.

The smoky sky is the same color as the river. Bells clang while mystical music plays. Our guide rows us past tall stone buildings towering over the river at the top of steep stairs. These stairs are called ghats, and each of the 84 sets has a holy story behind it.

Men and sari-ed women gather high on these steps near open umbrellas. At the base of the steps, shirtless men suds their bodies clean. Nearby, women clean not their bodies, but their clothes. Other women loose lotus flower candles into the river. Boats loaded with tourists float past.

We’re back at the start by 6:27. At the top of the steps, a yellow-faced man wearing a matching glitter-specked costume greets us. Would we lovely ladies like to pay 100 rupees to take his picture? Not me. Janna gets his portrait for 10. (She later shoots the back of him for free.)

A couple guys lounging at the top of the stairs ask where we’re from and if we want to see a burning ghat. (Where dead bodies are burned.) I kind of do, but Janna says it’s far away, and I’m hungry.

After a day spent laying about, Diana and I catch the night train to Khajuraho, the city known for its sexy temples. Maybe you’ve heard of the Kama Sutra. Well, so had the carvers of these temples, built between 950-1150.

As I step onto the train I nearly collide with a replica of the yellow-faced man Janna and I saw above the ghats. Only this guy is in orange. He comes at me with a “Namaste” and a red thumb. Before I can dodge, the thumb is smearing a goopy red paste between my eyebrows and he’s chanting in a language I can’t understand. Namaste, indeed.

“God bless you,” he says, ending the chant.

I didn’t ask for this blessing, but I still have to pay for it. I put 10 rupees in his basket and climb onto my top bunk, where I can hide from other money grubbers.

Four men in khaki uniforms sit on the bunks below, loading what I assume to be bullets into huge black

guns which I assume to be rifles. One of the men, who I assume to be a police officer, assesses me with his eyes. I say hello. He doesn’t respond. Another officer offers me his giant, sliced cucumber. I decline, and the uniformed men exit the train.

Day Six: April 10 - Khajuraho

We step off the train in Khajuraho into a swarm of auto rickshaw drivers. It’s only 6:30 in the morning, but they’re already out in full force, Cambodia style. These guys are harder to swat away though. Finally we jump in a cab with a French guy and hit it.

On our way into town, we pass women, men and children stooped over on the sides of the tree-lined road. They are plucking fruit from the ground and putting it into large baskets. The makings of local alcohol, our driver says.

After a semi-BRAT breakfast (banana rice and ginger tea) I make like a baby and head out… to the sexy

temples.

Several temples are smothered in sex poses. But one of the most unsexy temples is getting all this morning’s traffic: The Shiva temple.

Women in bright saris clutching metal tea pots and tiered tins of food climb the temple steps. Water is poured and petals scattered around the temple’s perimeter and on the shelves of shrines built into the sides. A dog follows the women around the shrine, lapping up their discarded holy water.

Inside, I dodge an Asian man with a giant camera. Outside is the Asian woman who comes with the Asian man. She also has a giant camera.

“Hello, picture?” an Indian family asks her.

She complies, and the family gathers to look at her picture.

“Yay!” the kids scream.

One of the sexy temples is caged in green bars. I take a picture of an Indian man sitting inside the temple. Inside, the man asks me the usual questions.

“Hello. What country?”

“America.”

“USA?”

“Yes. You?”

“India.”

The man takes me around the temple, pointing out notable carvings, such as: “Lady sex, lady pregnant sex and lady dog sex.” He also shows me a lady with a scorpion crawling up her leg because her sex is that dangerous.

“Picture?” the man asks as he points to each carving.

Inside, he shows me a stage for dancing and a central shrine with a giant carved ball. The man rubs his head on the ball and tells me to do the same for good luck. Foreign currency is scattered below the ball.

“Shiva likes foreign money,” the man tells me.

I don’t have any small bills, so I give Shiva his second choice: rupees. Two, to be exact. Then the guy asks me for a tip. I refuse.

On my way out of the Western temple group, I am approached by a young Indian man with long hair parted in the middle who is wearing sunglasses and clunky white basketball shoes.

“Hello, I know your friend,” he tells me. “She went back to the hotel.”

How does he know my friend? He tells me her name’s Diana and she’s Chinese. That’s enough for me. He tells me he’s meeting her at 4 at an Italian place. I say I don’t want to go there. He asks me where I want to go and I say I don’t know, I am sick.

He says he’ll help me and takes me to a fruit stand. I buy a pineapple juice and a bunch of bananas and we talk. He says he knows Vicky — the guy from Delhi — and he’s just a playboy who wants girls and their money.

This guy's not like that, of course. But he still thinks love is crucial. When I tell him I don’t have a boyfriend, he asks me how I can survive my life.

Then he asks me about the temples. Which carving did I like best? Did I see the man and the horse? Oh, and had I had love in India? He likes talking openly about love, he tells me.

Next we pay a visit to Super Mario Kashmir Goods, the shop of a guy he calls his brother, but who looks old enough to be his dad. Super Mario spends half the year in Kashmir and half in Khajuraho.

The young dude — 22, I find out — tells me to sit down and he’ll bring me green tea with cardamom, good for the stomach. I ask if I’ll have to pay him.

“Why would you say that?” he asks in a voice coated with shock.

Because I don’t know him, I begin. And because I’ve been constantly accosted by Indian men wanting tips for every little thing.

He’s not like that, he says, coming to sit next to me. Ask anyone! He doesn’t want money from tourists. He’s happy having only a little money. OK. we have some tea. Meanwhile, Super Mario starts in on the usual questions.

“What country?”

Super Mario has a lot of friends in America, he says, pointing to their pictures on the post behind him. He shows me a stack of letters and photos from these friends and a guestbook with raves in several languages. His customers love him, he says, because he sells real kashmir, unlike many of the town’s sellers. He tries to interest me in a shawl, but I decline.

Meanwhile, the young dude is telling me he can show me all of Khajuraho’s sites for free. Have I ridden on a motorcycle in India? Do I want to go with him? He can take me up in the mountains.

Maybe, I say. Don’t say maybe, he says. Say yes or no. I don’t want to say yes or no, I reply. I want to say maybe.

He’s quiet for a while. Then he starts back up, telling me he wants to be a tour guide so he can meet lovely people like me. Barf.

I tell him I’ll come back to his shop if I want to go on a moto tour with him. But he shouldn’t wait for me, I say.

“I wait for no one!” he says.

“Good,” I reply, shaking his hand.

On the way back to the guesthouse I run into another young Indian guy with long hair parted in the middle and a red dot on his forehead. He is older and classier than the last guy. He shows me the way
back to the hotel and asks me to have chai. Maybe later, I say. Now I want to rest.

When I go outside later for a soda water, the older guy’s there. He buys me a water and then tells me to ask if I need any help. His name’s Baba. He lives in Spain part of the year, and so he knows not to pressure tourists to visit his shop.

Day Seven: April 11 - Khajuraho

I take a rented bicycle out to the rest of the Kama Sutra temples. The bike’s too small and the brakes don’t work. My knees come above the handlebars when I pedal and I almost plow into a foreigner.

I meet another playboy on the way. He’s tall with vibrant green eyes and a blue scarf covers his long hair. He points me in the right direction to the temples and tells me he’ll escort me around.

After ensuring he doesn’t want any money – “I don’t take money from women” — I consent.

We walk around the temples, some Kama Sutra, some Jain.

We also tour two villages with squat houses and inhabitants belonging to each of India’s four castes. I can’t tell the difference between the houses.

I politely examine the “found objects” (aka junk) that a couple of his friends sell on carts near the temples.

One of the sellers, a boy who walks on all fours and gets around with a hand-pedaled bicycle, follows us across a bridge to the next set of temples.

“He loves you,” my escort says.

Like the other playboys I’ve met, my escort is all about love. “Love is everything,” he says.

He is constantly spouting cheesy rhymes and sayings. Example: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I have one true love, and that is you.”

He tells me he only wants to be my friend, but then feeds me loads of barfy lines, like he wishes he was my bag so he could touch me, and that the sunset is beautiful, but not as beautiful as me.

When is my birthday? I should spend it with him in India. There would be lots of candles and a little love.

I finally leave the guy with a promise to meet him at a restaurant later for local wine. I show up an hour late, and he’s not there. He probably never showed.

On my way to the restaurant I pass a group of guys. One guy calls out to me.

“Hi! Remember me? Sit down, have chai.”

No time, I say.

Come on, he says. In India people always have time for chai.

Two young boys, maybe 10 years old, accost me on the way back to the guesthouse. They’re learning English. English is very important, yes? They ask me what languages I know, and then tell me they’re collectors, do I know?

“We’re having a collection at school to see who can collect the most foreign money,” they tell me.

“Euros, dollars… do you have any? No? Well, we also collect Indian money.”

I laugh, but don’t give them any money.

Day Eight: April 12 - Last day in Khajuraho

I check out Matangesvara, a free temple with an 8-foot-tall phallus that represents Shiva.

A small group of people is gathered around a shrine outside the temple. An old man approaches me with a spool of red yarn he wants to tie around my wrist. “Shiva,” he says. I wave him away, as well as the young boy who offers me a leaf piled with red and yellow flowers.

In the early evening I join Baba and his guru on red plastic chairs in a parking lot. We watch a cloud of parrots descend on a trio of trees in the fading light. The small winged creatures sound more like cicadas or crickets than birds.

I give Baba 50 rupees to buy local wine and whiskey before meeting him at an Italian restaurant for dinner.

Over spaghetti and tomato salad Baba tells me that his dad is both mayor and part of the mafia that runs the town, along with his brother. This means everyone knows Baba and he can get whatever he wants.

Despite his pleas for us ”to have a beautiful time together,” Baba is less heavy on love than the other playboys. He uses a cheesy pun to sum up India’s love epidemic.

“Does India have malaria?” I ask him.

“No, “ he says. “But it has love-aria.”

17 Days in India: Part One - Days One to Three

2011-05-30T20:38:00.000-07:00

To celebrate Cambodia’s biggest holiday, Khmer New Year, I went to India. Hey, at least they’re in the same neighborhood!

Seventeen glorious, stressful, lovaria*-filled days. Just me and fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Diana and more than 1.2 million square kilometers of country.

We didn’t cover even a quarter of that territory, but we still got around. We made it to six cities: New Delhi, Varanasi, Khajuraho, Agra, Jaipur and Jaisalmer.

In these spots we saw enormous malls and mosques, holy burial rivers, sexy temples, the world’s most famous mausoleum, desert palaces and lots of sand dunes and scrubby bushes.

The sites were varied, but the people the same. Women were few, but men were everywhere, inviting us for chai, lassis, dinner, guru readings, into their shops, for whatever they could get.

Love is everything in India, we were told, but of course none of the guys we met were like that about love. They all already had foreign girlfriends, and certainly didn’t want money or sex from other foreign women.

These men called each other playboys. Archana, my female Indian friend, calls them Roadside Romeos.

Other men were more focused on business, and constantly called us into their shops, where they sold clothes, kashmir, knick knacks. A mere glance in a shopkeeper’s direction was cause for harassment.

The men and shopkeeper hassles soon grew old, but India rose above these annoyances. My 17 days spent on the sprawling subcontinent were vibrant and fun-filled, and too short! I can’t wait to go back.

* More about this later.

Glossary:

44 rupees = $1

Chai = sweet tea

Namaste = hello and goodbye

Chapatis and parathas = flat bread, thinner than naan.

The first part of this journey — days one through three — is documented below. Much more to come!

* Thanks to Diana for taking some awesome photos. Some are hers. Some are mine.

Day One: April 5 - Bangkok to Delhi

And we’re off! We want to leave my house at 6 a.m. I wake at 4:30, but somehow, we’re still not ready until 7.

A minivan takes us to the Bangkok airport. These vans are usually crammed with at least 20 people, but there are only six this time around. Diana and I each have an entire row to ourselves.

We get to the airport with only six hours to spare before our flight.

I come with a backpack loaded with liquids I plan to check. But for a $17 fee? No thanks.

The plane is Air Asia, the fun and games, wigs and costumes airline, if the in-flight magazine is true. It’s not. The only entertainment is listening to passengers slurp pop they had to pay for.

Delhi is plenty entertaining though. And a mere three and a half hours from Bangkok. We arrive to a city ablaze with… well, ablaze with fire.

OK, so maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the whole city is ablaze. Maybe it’s only one block that’s ablaze — or one building. But this building is in our path.

The fiery obstacle is pointed out by a man pounding on our taxi window. Our driver backs around the block to our hotel, but not without taking us closer to the blaze.

“Look!” he says.

A small “Delhi Police” jeep is coming our way. No other emergency vehicles are in sight.

Inside the guesthouse, a bed wide enough for six sumo wrestlers fills our room. It would take two sets of my gorilla arms to reach the other side, but my ostrich legs dangle off the end.

Day Two: April 6 - Delhi

After a complimentary breakfast of cornflakes, bananas, toast, sweet coffee and mango juice, we check into another guesthouse nearby. Our last one is booked for the night.

A white haired man with a matching flared moustache is behind the check-in desk. He’s yelling in rat-a-tat Hindi.

Diana laughs. “I want to know what you’re saying!”

“Today is a very bad day,” he says.

Bad because of lazy staffers who were supposed to be working at 7:30 but are still asleep at 9. And he, at 61, is working hard. Japanese workers are good, he says. His workers are not good.

Both joints are in Old Delhi, a dingier, worn-out version of its younger brother.

We’re tailed to our new guesthouse by a mother and three girls with dirty faces and hair that looks like it’s been washed with gasoline and honey. One of the girls hooks her talons around my arm, wanting a wad of cash crammed into her beak.

We catch a bicycle rickshaw (a cart towed by a bicyclist) to the Red Fort. (A local tells me India also has human rickshaws, which are carts of people towed by people. But these, he says, are only in Calcutta.)

A policeman carrying a switch butts into our bargaining, swatting our driver on the side, assumedly to ensure he complies with the 30-rupees fare.

Apparently 30 rupees can’t get us to the Red Fort. Our rickshawist drops us at the other end of a paved bridge that looks like a freeway ramp. Nothing red or fortlike is in sight.

So we hoof it. Or rather ski it. Walking in Delhi is like slalom skiing. People are everywhere. They are either walking, or packed in cars, rusty bicycle rickshaws, green and yellow motorcycled cars called auto rickshaws, white taxis, or atop motorcycles or carts.

Delhi’s humans are as varied as their modes of transportation. As in the other Indian cities we see, it’s mostly men on the streets. The few women we see are either draped in black cloth with only their eyes peeping out or in glittering folds of brightness that cover everything except swaths of side and back. Men are dressed mostly Western style, although plenty are robed, and some wear turbans or round flat-topped caps.

We weave through the people, past the endless “Licensed Refrigerated Water” trolleys — metal carts stacked with short clear glasses and one glassful of limes — and food holes whose concrete exteriors are painted with “Veg/Non Veg” signs. Outside these food holes frying pans sizzle with breads and curries.

We also pass several sidewalk dentists — men squatting next to blankets laden with metal teeth plates, syringes and scrapers. Next to each blanket is a small painted sign of a row of smiling white teeth. I watch as one of these dentists empties a syringe into a man’s mouth a couple times. After each time, the patient stands and spits onto the sidewalk.

Our first inquiry tells us the Red Fort is only half a kilometer away, but by the time we stop and ask again, it’s two kilometers farther.

We stop for lunch at a place with a chandelier, tablecloths and napkins blooming from wine glasses. We’re the only customers.

Our waiter doesn’t mesh with the finery. “He looks like Snoop Dogg!” Diana whispers. And she’s right, although Snoop has more teeth, both have horsey faces and ratty moustache-and-beard combos.

The meal starts with curry and sweet lassis and ends with a mouthful of sugar boulders and aniseed that are good for digestion.

After the meal, another waiter approaches and asks if I’m Japanese. Apparently this question is simply a segue into a spiel about how the restaurant is popular with the Japanese.

Many magazine clippings later, we find out the eatery is also popular with John F. Kennedy, or was the one time he ate there. Another famous name associated with the joint is Gordon Ramsey, a British chef I’ve never heard of, who was part of a great cook-off against the restaurant’s chef. Ramsey lost, of course.

In addition to its famous associations, the restaurant boasts staffers from almost all of India’s religions. They’ve got a Christian, Hindu, Muslim and a Sikh. Now they’ve just got to recruit a Buddhist and a Jain.

Not long after lunch, we finally spot the looming sandstone of the Red Fort. But the $5 to $6 entry fee dissuades us from entering. We’ve still got The Taj Mahal and its nearly $20 entry fee ahead of us.

Outside the fort, an Indian guy hands me his camera and says “Please.” I think he wants me to take a picture of he and his assumed girlfriend, but no, he wants a picture of his girlfriend and me! Because I’m a perfect specimen of tall whiteness? Or because my picnic-tablecloth plaid hat and flowered shirt make me look like a mismatched crazy who should be mumbling outside a grocery store?

“You should charge,” Diana says.

Next up is Jama Masjid, India’s largest, but hardly most decorative, mosque. The street leading to the holy building is lined with junk stands. Purses, scarves, dishes and thousands of other knick knacks no one needs.

At the base of the stairs to the mosque, a grubby boy with crusted yellow nostrils grabs my arm. He points to his mouth and says “rupees.”

“No,” I say. “Go away.” And he does.

“Lonely Planet” says we’ll “be awestruck” by the mosque. Sure, the place is huge, big enough for 25,000, but not so awe inspiring. Much of the square space is a tiled courtyard, bordered by narrow passages for praying. Squat onion domes and lean cucumber towers sprout from the mosque.

We take off our shoes and tie on ankle-length pink flowered smocks. I keep my head covered with my hat. Many women are bare headed.

The Allah worshipers wash their feet in a rectangular bath before entering the mosque’s passages. Inside these passages, men with round white caps are kneeling in prayer and other men and women are splayed in sleep.

I buy another ticket that allows me to climb one of the cucumber towers – the south minaret. I wind up the narrow stone staircase and come to a platform with a good view of the city. I snap some photos and am about to head down when I see a couple people emerge from another tower stretching still higher.

More stairs to climb. Up and up, past people squeezed against the curved brick walls. I climb to a circular cage packed with Indians. I feel a forest of eyes on me and my obnoxious hat. It seems like all cameras are pointed at me. I’m so vain… All the floor space is sat upon and people line the cage’s perimeter. More people are coming up. I snap some photos and go down.

After watching a woman surrender her yogurt to a demanding tabby, Diana and I leave the mosque and board the subway for Connaught Place in New Delhi. A metal detector and bag scan are prerequisites for boarding the train. There’s no pat-down, but men and women form separate lines. Granted clean scans, we wait on a strip of cement under pink signs that read: “Women Only.” The train arrives gleaming and silver. Inside, most riders have their faces pressed to high-tech gadgets I’ve never seen.

An outdoor mall done in white, Connaught Place reminds me of a less-populated version of London's Convent Gardens. Adidas, Reebok and Lee rub shoulders with grotty holes offering cards and medicine.

Outside the shops, hawkers sell beads and paan, a natural breath-freshener and get-you-high combination of areca nut and betel leaves. The red splotches staining every corner of the building are proof of paan’s popularity.

Dogs cover the pavement like drooling blankets. Always asleep, India’s portly canines look like AKC showdogs compared to Cambodia’s scrawny, sore-covered slumdogs.

Dinner is at a South Indian fast food joint. A flat triangle of bread stuffed with veggie curry, then coffee and an assortment of treats sweet enough to give you dentures.

A rickshaw takes us back to our guesthouse. The cyclist is determined to give us a show. He swerves in and out of traffic, holding his cell phone overhead as it blasts Indian club bangers. He jumps from his bike as a snarling dog bites at his tires, and a bus nearly runs us down before he can remount the rickshaw. Quite the show, but I still give him only the agreed-upon 40 rupees. He makes a face and asks for 50, even grabs my arm.

“No,” I say. “Bye bye!”

Day Three: April 7 - More Delhi and night train to Varanasi

We start the day at the train station, buying tickets leaving the next day for Agra and Varanasi that we will return in a few short hours when we find out the Taj Mahal (Agra’s main attraction) is closed tomorrow.

Breakfast is at one of the Veg/Non Veg holes lining the main street. I point to the veggie curry and parathas on the tin plate in front of the Indian guy next to me.

“I want what he has,” I say.

Instead, I get only a flat disc of bread. When I ask if that’s all I’m getting, the waiter holds up two fingers, like “Wait two minutes.” Wait two minutes, it turns out, not for food, but for someone who speaks better English. I end up with what I want: parathas, curry and chai.

After my afternoon nap I run into my first (but certainly not last) Roadside Romeo. He’s lounging on a motorcycle in the alley outside our guesthouse.

“Where’s your Chinese friend?” he asks. (Diana’s parents are from China, she’s from America.)

The usual questions follow. Where am I from, how long am I in India and Delhi, where am I visiting in India.

Vicky, this young guy with a beaky face, seems to already know a lot of the answers to these questions. He knows I came to Delhi two days ago, on the night of the fire.

He also knows a lot of things about the United States that I’ve never heard of. He knows about the bloody river near New York where a serial killer dumped his bodies, and about the biggest bank robbery ever, about five years ago, in some town he doesn’t remember the name of.

He asks me about Burning Man. He wants to know what it is and if he should go. I’ve never been, I say, but I hear it’s a big hippie music and drug fest, with lots of costumes.

“I don’t do drugs,” the guy tells me. “Maybe it’s not for me?”

I can’t answer him.

He asks me if I’m in a hurry. “No,” I say.

He then asks me to have chai with him.

“Oh, no, I’m in a hurry,” I say.

“Maybe later?” he asks.

“Maybe,” I say.

He’s not on the motorcycle when I come back, so I go back to the main street, where a tabletop shrine is set up for the Hindu festival Ram Navami. Music blares as believers approach in prayer. Sitting crosslegged atop the table is a man whose head is covered by a white kerchief.

I take a picture of a guy wearing a misogynistic T-shirt and he takes a picture of me and his friend. Another guy approaches and asks if I want a taxi, then asks the usual questions.

“What’s your name?”

“Mary,” I say.

“Mary, marry me?”

“No!” I yell.

He asks me to go somewhere more quiet to talk. I turn him down. I’m already tiring of India’s chattery

playboys.

I run into Vicky, the original beaky playboy, on the way back to the guesthouse. I take him up on that chai and

he pays a young boy to buy me a bunch of bananas.

Vicky tells me the Taj is closed tomorrow, and takes me next door to show me Internet pictures of where we should go instead. His friends regale me with stories of their foreign girlfriends — a Swedish bird in

Bangalore and a Brit somewhere in England.

Diana and I change our train tickets, then auto rickshaw it to another Indian fast food eatery, which has eateries throughout the world. We order bread puffs exploding with saucy vegetables, plus daal, yogurt , sweet lassis, chai and sweets.

Half the food’s still uneaten when we finally leave the restaurant four hours later. I take it with us on the rickshaw back to the train station, where we have a couple more hours before our night train.

We wait on the plush couches of the International Tourist Bureau near a sign that reads: “WAITING IS NOT ALLOWED, AFTER BUYING THE TRAIN TICKET PLEASE PROCEED TO THE WAITING ROOM ON PLATFORM NO. 1.”

A band of 15 Japanese tourists invades the room while we’re waiting. Nearly all sport owlish black plastic glasses the same size as the ones my parents wore in the ‘80s.

The bureau kicks us out at 8 p.m., and we go to wait with the natives on the train platform. People sit and lay on the dirty concrete floor, others cross the tracks with suitcases atop their heads. Women in saris pass with huge boxes balanced on their heads. They take the place of luggage carts.

We finally board the night train to Varanasi around 8:30 p.m., after six hours of waiting. I’m on the top bunk of our three-bunked sleeper section. The bunks are grimy slabs of blue vinyl, and the top two have only enough head clearance for sleeping.

My only view from the top bunk is of the flabby gut of the man sleeping on his side on a bunk across the aisle.

We’re in the cheap, non-air conditioned section of the train. This means ceiling fans that start off inept against the scorching heat and then, when the cool night air moves in, become too adept, whirring up a constant, freezing gale.

I wear virtually my whole backpack of clothes, including socks on my hands and feet, but I’m still cold.

The lights switch off and on and off and on the entire night. Another constant is the cries for money from beggars, some crawling, others singing, and the vendor calls of “Chai… chai…”

Working the rice field

2011-02-24T02:56:00.000-08:00

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ve read about rice. Most of Cambodia is rice fields, Cambodians eat the stuff with every meal, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve lived in Cambodia for a year-and-a-half. I’ve been to rice fields before. Once for swimming and again for what I had thought was work. Turned out the only work was finding my way out of the field.

Only now can I finally, honestly, say that I have worked a rice field — with only 30 or so helpers!

We visited the orphanage’s fields on a recent Sunday, the only free day for school kids in this country. (Not counting the ridiculously high number of holidays.)

But this Sunday is not a day for lounging. It is a day for working.

I was invited to the fields by the Cambodian man who supervises the orphanage’s children. He gave me permission to simply watch if I didn’t want to work. I assured him I wanted to work. For just one day I wanted to engage in the sweaty, malaria-prone and back-breaking work of a Cambodian rice harvester.

The abundance of laborers ensured that the work wasn’t exactly back-breaking. But we’ll get to that later.

The day starts as all my days start: with the clang of the breakfast bell. The morning clang usually means it’s 5:40 a.m. But this morning, because it’s a Sunday, the clanging means it’s closer to 6. Maybe 5:45.

Breakfast this morning is me soup. No, not soup made out of me, but a basic ramen soup. Nothing added, nothing subtracted. Some days the soup arrives neutered of its salty broth, and in essence, soupless. But today its liquid has been preserved.

Me is the least filling of the orphanage’s rotating trio of breakfasts. Rice porridges at least have organs, fish, or eggs and beans to protein them up. Me is nothing but noodles.

Like one raised during the Great Depression, my greatest fear is going hungry. So after the me and before settling into the rice truck I buy two stale but sweet baguettes from a nearby food stall. These should fill me until lunch.

Upon arrival at the field, I receive another sweet baguette, this one fresh. You can never have too many baguettes!

Most of the day’s workers are middle school and high school students who live at or near the orphanage. Joining the kiddies are the heads of the place —the old Cambodian guy, the old French guy and the young French girl. And then there’s me.

It’s probably between 60 and 70 degrees outside, and we’re all freezing. Of course, the kids are bundled in sweatshirts, socks and gloves, jeans and wool hats. But I am forever underestimating Cambodia’s cold and am wearing only a lightweight long-sleeved shirt, jeans and a bandana.

To get to the work, we stamp over flattened, tawny colored stalks that look like hay. During my last trip, in September, the field was soaked in water up to my mid-thighs. Today, hard ridges of dirt are the only indication of water’s previous presence.

Up ahead rises a mountain of the hay stuff. Kids are sitting up there, hanging out. I’m mostly a kid, so of course I want to sit up there, too. The other kids encourage me. So I scramble up the side and get a couple pictures.

I think this pile is just a pit stop before we get to work. But, no, the pile is the work. It’s not hay, but rice. Or soon-to be rice. Our job is to feed bundles of this rice into the threshing machine, which will extract hard kernels of almost-rice from the hay stalks. But first the threshing machine has to show up.

After maybe half an hour of posing and picture taking, the blue-piped contraption rolls in on a tractor.

We workers circle and are separated into two groups. I’m in group two, along with several of the 10th grade girls I teach every night. Group two’s first job is to wait, so I join my group mates in the truck bed, watching group one get started.

The labor looks simple enough. About 20 workers stand on top of the rice pile and throw bundles to the small man seated on the thresher. His job is to push the rice through the machine. A motorcycle helmet protects his head from the crush of the incoming bundles.

The machine’s mouth is a smallish slot, so bundles of rice quickly pile around the man. Every few minutes the workers have to stop throwing so the man won’t be buried in rice stalks.

The machine sheds the almost-rice of its surrounding straw strands and sends the kernels rolling down a metal ramp and into the burlap bags and plastic buckets held below.

Meanwhile the straw strand bits, looking like dust and dirt and fragments of grass, shoot skyward through a metal pipe. By noon these fragments have formed two massive mountains of huskings.

The workers who aren’t atop the rice pile are bagging the kernels.

“Sky sa-aaht,” one of my girl students says, pointing above us. Sa-aht means beautiful. She’s right. The sun is just beginning to filter through the patchy clouds.

Soon it’s group two's turn. Each group works 20-minute shifts. We work three or four cycles before lunch and the ride home.

The work is much easier than I expected. I stand near the mouth of the thresher and repeat the same action over and over again. Bend over, pick up a bundle of the rice, toss it on the thresher ledge.

“You interesting in rice field?” one of my 12th grade students asks after I’ve completed my first round.

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes,” I say.

“You not tired?” he asks. “I very tired.”

“No, not tired,” I say.

Lunch is at 11:30, just like at the orphanage. The food’s a regular dish, too: fried fish and sour and spicy mango shreds over rice. We even get one of the usual Sunday desserts: corn floating in a soup of sweetened condensed milk and tapioca. For drinks, there’s water or Coke dumped into a cooler of ice.

After lunch I’m ready for my usual afternoon nap. I doze in the grass until the young French girl (young, but still older than me) tells me to get out of the sun and sleep in the truck.

We ride home in the truck about an hour later, atop the bags of rice. There are only 70 bags this year, compared to last year’s 120. Too much rain. The orphanage’s director will have to buy more bags.

After all, the rice we harvested today is the rice the staff and the 50-some kids will be eating three times a day for the next year. The rice is brown, and needs a coating of soup to become edible. I’ve never much liked the taste of rice, especially the orphanage’s dry variety, but I’m betting I’ll enjoy it more this year, knowing I had a hand in its creation.

Feats of Glory: Part II, Tandem!

2010-12-29T22:34:00.000-08:00

As we cross the finish line in a blur of speed, applause erupts, engulfing us in a sea of success. Such success I had only dreamed of when signing up for the Angkor Wat Bike Race & Ride 2010 a couple months back.

But then I had never imagined I would be astride the seat of a creature as marvelous as Liquisha.

Fellow Peace Corps Volunteer and townmate Rachel and I weren’t planning on riding a tandem bicycle in the race, but there was no denying Liquisha.

She and a friend stand apart from the boring one-seater bicycles. A hand-lettered sign dangling jauntily from her first set of handlebars proclaims: “For rent.” Her red paint glistens and her basket bobs as she whispers “Come hither.” So we do.

A quick spin around the block and we're in love. Sure, she drives a bit crooked and her brakes could be more responsive, but we know Liquisha is the one.

(Note: Liquisha isn’t just some cutesy black-person name we conjured up to be funny, it was the factory-given name printed across our tandem’s crossbar. We stuck with it.)

Romantic visions of picnics and petticoats pirouette in my head as we cycle to the registration hotel. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do,” I sing the start of the only song I know about a tandem bicycle. Maybe you know it. The guy singer wants Daisy to marry him. But he can’t afford a carriage. He can only afford “a bicycle built for two.”

One of my life goals is to ride a tandem bicycle, and finally here I am, accomplishing my goal. Goal-making really works! While I am singing, Rachel is behind me giggling, somewhat hysterically, over the novelty of it all.

My legs won’t fit in back, so I am up front, where Liquisha seems like an ordinary, albeit ornery, bicycle. But in back Rachel can see that she is anything but ordinary. “You have to try it back here,” Rachel spurts between giggles.

We ride on and on in a romantic haze until a motorcycle hits us. Not fatally or even injuriously, just a brush of the side mirror against the handlebars, but still scary. Rachel begins her intermittent screams of “We’re going to die,” and the mood turns more dour.

Riding a tandem bicycle is serious stuff. I stop singing and start doubting our decision. If we were having trouble riding the kilometer or two to register, how would we fare in the 30-kilometer race the next day?

Things start looking up when Rachel’s feminine charms land us free tickets to that night’s banquet. I love free anything, especially food. Especially when the food’s supposed to cost $12 a plate.

The man who gives us the tickets is also trying to get people to sign up for the next day’s run. His method is somewhat flawed.

His words, more or less, are, “It’s awesome ‘cause you’re in this huge mass of people all running to get to the same place.”

Yeah, awesome, just like the stampede that killed and injured more than a thousand people a mere week before. That started the same way. People all running to get to the same place — off the bridge.

The dinner that night isn’t extraordinary, but it's mildly good. Khmer food wearing a fancy tux. Lemony fish soup, banana plant salad, ginger chicken with rice and sweet egg rolls for dessert. No drinks included, not even water. Fortunately we didn’t pay for our tickets.

The next day we are up at 5 a.m., ready to race. The morning begins somewhat sour when the zipper pops off my bike jersey. Another life goal of mine has been to have a bike jersey, preferably one I don’t have to pay for. And what happens? I finally get a jersey, with a back pocket and all, and I break the damn thing, turning it into the equivalent of a boob-baring evening gown. Thankfully I have a sports bra, so I can still get away with wearing the flawed jersey.

Next bummer: The tuk-tuk driver who had quoted me $1 to the temple doesn’t show up. In his place are a bunch of drivers wanting $5. Forget it, dudes. We need more tandem practice anyway.

A unimpressive pic of the impressive Angkor Wat taken a long time ago — also at sunrise, although you can't tell.

We arrive at Angkor Wat before the sun is up. The race is supposed to start around 6, or whenever the sun rises. The sky’s daytime orb must do it’s job cause the sky gets brighter, but we never witness the spectacular sunrise that The Lonely Planet calls "a must-see."

A gunshot starts the race. But we’re not off until well after the smoke has cleared. Want to give those die-hard 100-k-ers some space. They’re the ones wearing aerodynamic helmets, biking shorts and bike cleats. None are riding tandems.

We spot another tandem in the race, and only refrain from running it off the road since a small child is the back-seat rider.

Despite Liquisha’s competition, we get plenty of attention, partly because Liquisha doesn’t have a bell and we have to scream profanities to let people know we’re coming through.

One 100-k-er tells us to, “Keep it up” in a condescending tone seeming to imply that because we’re riding a tandem we must be retarded.

Still, most of our attention is in the form of wonder and admiration. We ride along to constant cries of “Tandem!”

A former Peace Corps staffer praises us for being creative, as if we built Liquisha. We wish. Maybe if we had, she would ride better. She constantly veers to the right, and my right arm is almost numb with the pain of forcing her to the left and back on the road.

I had imagined the race route would be on a narrow dirt path winding through wild jungles packed with crumbling temples. It isn’t. It’s on a two-lane paved road. Still, we pass by several temples, dating from the early 10^th to the early 13^th centuries.

We stop at a few of these temples, and also to refuel at the tables of free fruit (unfortunately only the rejects are left by the time we roll up).

And in a flash — only two-and-a-half hours! — it’s over.

My three protein bars are gone and we’re whizzing through the finish line, drawing major decibels of applause. We soon learn the applause began because the crowd mistook us for the first of the 100-k finishers.

We didn’t win any prizes in the race, but we still crossed that finish line. And not atop just any bike either, but atop Liquisha, a flawed but glorious bicycle built for two.

Taking a cop for a spin post-race.

Feats of Glory: Part I, Water Festival

2010-12-11T02:10:00.000-08:00

* Acknowledgment: All photos but the one of Banteay Chhmar are compliments of awesome Peace Corps Volunteer Keiko Valente. Thanks Keiko!

In the past two months I’ve competed in two official races – one on water and one on land. I lost both races, but I had fun while gaining new experiences, and that’s more important than fame, fortune and glory, right? (Don’t answer that question.)

The first race was by sea, and was in honor of Water Festival, the annual Cambodian celebration marking the end of the rainy season and the beginning of the twice-annual magical and mysterious reversal of the flow of the Tonle Sap River. Tonle Sap means “Great Lake,” but it’s a river, too!

For the momentous occasion, seven friends and I (most of us fellow Peace Corps volunteers) joined several boatloads of oarsmen in races down and back a section of the moat surrounding Banteay Chhmar.

An ancient temple no one knows much about, Banteay Chhmar is in a town of the same name. Chhmar means cat, so my students call the temple and town Banteay Meow. Banteay means fortress. Put the two together and what do you get? Cat Fortress! Terrifying.

In the waters of the Cat Fortress our team —Che Piasa Khmer (meaning “We can speak Khmer”) — twice rowed our hearts out (thankfully not literally) , but the only glory we achieved was the glory of ridicule, and that’s not very glorious.

The announcer’s phrase of the day was “Kenny no win.” Unfortunately, Kenny was in our boat. But Kenny wasn’t to be blamed for our failures. As our boat’s only Banteay Chhmar resident, Kenny was simply the only name the announcer knew.

All eight of us were to be blamed for our losses in the two-boat races. We were paired up with, and lost to, the same team both times — another do-good organization in the form of a French orphanage.

Although Che Piasa Khmer crossed the finish line second, and therefore last, we were successful in other aspects of the race. We didn’t tip, we didn’t sink and we did cross that finish line. Pretty good for a crew of virgin Water Festival rowers.

My last, and as far as I can remember, only rowing experience was last April in a kayak in Laos. I didn’t emerge from that kayak feeling confident about future rowing endeavors. During that expedition our guide first told that I didn’t know how to paddle, and then kicked me out of the kayak.

My Banteay Chhmar watery competition was more personally successful. I was again told that I didn’t know how to paddle — by our steerer, who told me that I was folding in my arms like a dinosaur when I should be extending them to their full gorilla length. A former white water rafting guide, our steerer knew what he was talking about. But at least this time I wasn’t kicked out of the boat. Success!

Che Piasa Khmer celebrated our success by touring the great cat fortress, or Banteay Chhmar temple, which is now more ruins than temple.

That evening we risked our lives once more, but this time above the sea and ground, in cages of death more commonly known as Ferris wheels. Despite the creaks and groans of the ancient wheel, we didn’t die, and basked in our survival by watching people try to punch and kick each other to death. This is more commonly called kick boxing.

Neither of the boxers was successful in his death mission, but a mob of bugs almost wiped out both contenders.

Yes, the match was effectively halted by insects — flying specks which clogged the air as they partied around the fluorescent overhead lights. The bug problem wasn’t addressed until some of the flying specks attacked a boxer’s eye.

Bug exterminators were called into the ring. Their killing method? Not the usual poisonous sprays, but tape. You know, the clear sticky stuff you use to wrap presents, not the stuff you usually use to kill bugs.

During the course of the match (or at least the portion we were patient enough to sit through), the exterminators affixed and re-affixed long streamers of tape to the upper bars of the ring near the fluorescent lights.

The clear strips soon turned black with the carcasses of dead insects. But the tape wasn’t strong enough to defeat the boxing-loving bugs.

The winged marauders continued soaring toward the holy lights and congregating in a thick mass around the boxers’ heads.

Laughable at first, the battle of the bugs soon became ridiculous and stale, and we left. (Or at least most of us left, including me and the other non-die-hard boxing fans.)

Water Festival weekend ended with a trip to the Cambodia’s northern land of scrumptious Western food: Siem Reap.

I am fortunate that my Water Festival was filled with merry making. Not so fortunate were the nearly 400 people killed and the more than 800 injured in the stampede on a Phnom Penh bridge. Cambodia's prime minister is calling the tragedy Cambodia’s worst since the mass murders inflicted by the Khmer Rouge. Donating to Sihanouk Hospital of Hope (SHCH) is a good way to help these victims. SHCH provides free medical care to Cambodia’s poor and needy. To make a donation, go to www.care4cambodia.org and click on “Give a One Time Gift.” Make sure to mark “Relief” in the notes section.

Teaching the convicts: Behind bars in Banteay Meanchey

2010-11-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

Why? That’s the question Cambodians invariably ask after I tell them I teach English at my town’s prison — not to guards, but to prisoners.

My answer: Why not?

The 16 students at Banteay Meanchey Provincial Prison are eager for something, anything, to do. Most are locked up for 10 years, some longer. My students tell me that the prison has only one lifer — a man accused of raping, cutting up and killing a young girl. Cambodia doesn’t have a death penalty.

The crimes that landed the English learners among the prison's 850 inmates are varied. Drug dealing, robbery, rape, murder.

That’s one of the first questions I ask the students, after their names and ages. Why are they in prison?

Two men volunteer their crimes — drug dealing and robbery. A third makes a crack about the rapist in the first row. The only woman in the class says she can’t talk about it. I later learn she was accused of killing her roommate by using some kind of gas.

My students come from across Cambodia, and one from Thailand. They are behind bars in Banteay Meanchey either because this is where they were accused of committing a crime or because they were transferred here from another prison.

One of Banteay Meanchey’s recent prisoners came from as far as Denmark. The businessman was locked up for about 10 months after being charged with having sex with three girls under age 15. He was arrested with a 13-year-old girl near the Thailand border. My students tell me that the Dane was joined in prison for those 10 months by the mother of one of the girls, accused of prostituting her daughter to the man.

One of my students asks if I’m afraid to teach at the prison. I’m not.

I had imagined teaching at a prison would be scary. My students would carry shivs and wear chains linking their wrists to their ankles. I pictured myself hurrying down a dark hallway, covering my ears to sexual slurs like Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. At the end of the hallway, I would seek refuge in a classroom, only to be assailed with further insults and racial jabs like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.

Fortunately, my imagination proved far worse than reality. Clad in purple pajamas trimmed in white, my group of 25-to-35-year-old students is far from intimidating. Like so many Cambodians, they are quick to laugh, and many of their faces are painted with constant smiles. Still, several of these smiles are contradicted by eyes glazed with sadness and struggle.

I’ve yet to see a shiv, but most the students wear prison-issued tattoos. Chinese characters snake up an arm, a spiderweb peeks out from a pants cuff, a tamer “I LUV U” inches along the outer edge of a thumb – all inked in army green.

“I think all prisoners have them.”

This from the guy with the spiderweb on his leg. He goes by David in class. Because each student has chosen an English name, the class is populated by Allens and Franks and Jerrys, names typically assigned only to foreigners in Cambodia.

“Really? All prisoners?” I ask.

“OK, a lot,” he corrects himself.

“I think they have too much free time; they don’t know what to do,” Vichet, my Cambodian co-teacher theorizes.

Eat, sleep and sing. That’s what the students say they do all day. Some also cook, wash clothes or do other work around the prison. Except for those who stay locked up all day, the inmates typically live 12 to 14 to a cell.

Is life difficult? It depends if your family has money or not, a student says. Visits to the prison cost about $4.

A flood from Thailand sealed out any recent visitors. It took four generators to pump out the two foot-high water. The water didn’t enter the prisoners’ cells, but because the toilets were out of order, the inmates were forced to poop in plastic bags.

“They threw the pee and shit out the windows,” the usually mild-tongued Vichet says.

White chalky powder is now sprinkled atop the dirt of the prison’s courtyard to sanitize the grounds.

An American named Lynn — another Seattleite, actually — started the English teaching program at the Banteay Meanchey prison about five years ago. She taught there for six months before she left Cambodia and Vichet took over. He’s taught at the prison ever since.

I’d known about the opportunity to teach at the prison since arriving at my site a year ago. But it took a run-in with an eccentric American to sign me up.

This white-ponytailed expat, who has lived in my town for several years, told me teaching at the prison would be the most fulfilling thing I’d do in Cambodia. He used to teach yoga to the prisoners.

This 60-something man took to me after I admitted that I didn’t know much about teaching and could use some tips. He gave me tips aplenty, but said the only reason he was helping was because I looked like a Hollywood film star.

“You know, that one in that movie who dressed like a boy and got killed for it.”

Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.

“You’re thinking of my sister,” I told him. She usually gets that comparison, while I get Anne Hathaway, Keira Knightley or Molly Ringwald.

Regardless of his motive, this big, brash American has helped me as well as the prisoners.

His portable whiteboard hangs from the roof of the grass hut that is our classroom. We teach in the courtyard, outside the saffron-colored houses for prisoners and staffers. The squat yellow buildings are accented with red roofs and blue shutters, giving them a Playskool look. The prison is at the end of a gravel road lined with trees. Dirt roads leading to villages branch off in both directions.

Because our class is just before lunchtime, smoke is often curling above the nearby outdoor kitchen. Men in yellow hard hats above bare brown chests, purple prison pants and yellow galoshes work while we study, squatting in mounds of dirt while they till the soil into rows or churn concrete for the new visitor’s building.

An old man with a buzzcut and wire-rim glasses repairs mosquito nets day after day. A cigarette in mouth and needle and thread in hand, he squats at the edge of our classroom, stitching the holes together. Others squat around him, drinking soda from small plastic bags and chatting. A mangy dog is usually roaming the grounds, along with the occasional child.

During one English class, a little girl with a plastic bag full of drink clambers onto a bench behind a desk. She is later scooped up by a woman with a long braid and a weathered face.

This girl and others, like the young boy cycling out with a pack of cigarettes in his mouth, drift in and out of the prison. Others are in for a longer stay.

A boy who looks no older than 12 is loitering around the perimeter of our classroom one morning. He wears the purple pajamas that mark him as a prisoner.

Painting and Khmer classes are starting up for this boy and other young inmates. But for the older prisoners — aside from the occasional visit from a Christian missionary — English is the only option.

In English class, we talk about the usual subjects: families, jobs, past experiences.

“Could you stay out as long as you wanted?” Vichet asks the class about their pre-prison lives.

A couple students say they had to be home by 8 p.m., (two hours past dark in Cambodia), another says 10 p.m. was his curfew.

“No limit!” yells a guy with hair spiking above a smiling face.

The guy with the Chinese characters crawling up his arm raises his hand. He could also stay out as long as he wanted.

“Yes,” he says, “I was a gay man.”

When his friend sitting next to him calls him a gangster, I realize he must have said gang man.

A game of “I’ve never” reveals more shadows from the past.

“I’ve never taken drugs,” teacher Vichet says.

Hands go up. These are the people who have taken drugs.

One of these drug-takers keeps on the same track. “I’ve never taken marijuana,” he says.

More hands go up.

Many of the prisoners have taken drugs, and some have even taken drugs in prison. Students tell me that a guard was recently locked up for selling yama to prisoners. Yama, also called yaba or ma, is meth.

The prison director and three other prison guards also landed in hot water a couple months ago when they were accused of accepting bribes and helping a Khmer-American prisoner escape.

Because bribery is so rampant in Cambodia, these four officials weren’t fired. They were simply given jobs in another arm of the government until the investigation ends.

I met the escapee shortly before his escape.

“Morning!” he chirped in a perfect American accent as he shook my hand. “Are you from the U.S? Me, too… Minnesota.”

He told me he returned to Cambodia two years ago, after a 30-year exile in America. The Phnom Penh Post identified him as only 29.

The Post said he was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 2008 for illegally detaining people. But now he’s free. Missing since late September. My students doubt he’ll be arrested again.

Guards aren’t the only corrupt characters lurking around the Banteay Meanchey prison.

A class discussion about jobs leads us to lawyers, whom most prisoners work with during their stays.

“Did you like your lawyer? Did you think your lawyer was good?” Vichet asks the class.

“No, he just wanted money,” a student replies. “He took the money and when I went to the court he did not go there.”

David, the guy with the spiderweb tattoo, has short, dark hair and perfect nails. Pail pink beds with pearly white tips, sculpted like press-ons. Beautiful moons of keratin at odds with his spiderweb tattoo and the other vicious-looking arachnid stretched across his left hand. The inking is labeled “SCORPION.”

“Very nice for me,” David says about scorpions.

Further up his arm is a white wisp of yarn, like the red bracelets monks give out for good health.

Another student with raised red circles on his forehead like the marks from cupping, a common Cambodian medical treatment that entails suctioning hot glass cups to the skin, has a tattoo on the outer edge of his thumb that reads, “JAIL AMBITION.”

What does it mean?

“I think it’s good for me,” he says. And by it, he means jail.

“I like it ... I remember it all my life.”

My monky moment

2010-10-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

(Note: This is not a picture of the monk in this blog. And I did not take this picture. The monk mentioned in this blog looks a lot like this though.)

When I walked into my host family’s house the other night, there was an unfamiliar man watching TV inside. A brown man with a shaved head whose left arm and pec were naked. The rest of his body was wrapped in orange cloth. He was a monk.

It’s hard to avoid monks in Cambodia. I’ve seen them in temples, at ceremonies, walking the streets asking for money, and even in my university classes. But I’ve never seen monks just hanging out, watching TV. What was this holy man doing in my host family’s house?

After peeking in at the guy, I peek back out, to ask my host dad why the monk’s here. He says because construction of his new house is finished. (He’d said that monks would bless his house when complete.) OK. I peek back in.

I’d heard that women aren’t supposed to make eye contact with monks or talk to them, but I don’t want to ignore the guy. I’m not comfortable kneeling in front of him and bowing in prayer like Khmer people. So I joom reap suah him, which means I say the polite version of hello with my hands in a flat-palmed prayer gesture.

He doesn’t joom reap suah me back. He doesn’t respond at all. My family laughs. I think I must have done the wrong thing and go outside for dinner. The monk doesn’t join us for the meal. Monks don’t eat dinner, my host dad says. Water is all they have in the evening.

During dinner, I grill my host dad. Why didn’t the monk acknowledge me? Was I rude? No, maybe he is rude, is my answer. Is it OK for me to talk to monks? My host dad answers by yelling a question inside. “Che Anglais? (Do you speak English?)” “Ought che (No),” comes the answer.

I continue asking questions about monk-female-foreigner relations until the monk emerges. He stands in the doorway and splits his lips into perhaps the largest smile I’ve seen in Cambodia. I smile back, then look away, embarrassed. He retreats inside, before returning a few minutes later to sit on the bamboo bed near me.

I ask my host dad if he and the monk are friends. He says no. The monk finally speaks up. He says my host dad is his brother. I think he means brother in the monky way, but my host dad’s not a monk. Yes, my host dad confirms, they really are brothers.

“What?” I ask. Why didn’t he tell me this half an hour ago when I was wondering why the guy was here?

Turns out he’s not here to bless my host dad’s house after all. He’s just here to hang out with his brother.

The monk gets friendlier after this breakthrough. He tells me he can speak a little English, and I tell him I can speak a little Khmer. I ask him about his monkhood.

How long has he been a monk? Three years.

How much longer will he be a monk? Seven years.

Why did he become a monk? Because he wants to study. Monks can study for cheap at university and assumedly for free at temples.

Do a lot of Khmer men choose the monkhood path to get cheap schooling? Yes.

What is he studying? Buddhism.

Does he like being a monk? Yes.

Is it difficult being a monk? No. My host dad says he thinks it would be difficult not eating dinner. But the monk says he can drink coffee and coke for dinner.

Doesn’t coffee and coke keep him awake? No.

What time does he go to bed? 9 or 10.

Doesn’t he have to go to bed at the same time as the other monks? No.

What time does he get up? 5.

What does he do all day? Pray.

Is it OK for me to talk to him and look at him? Yes. But it’s not OK for me to touch him or his robe.

What happens if I touch him or his clothes? Does he have to wash himself? No. Nothing happens.

How many robes does he have? Three.

Does he sleep in the robe? No. He sleeps in an undergarment, which is the same tangerine as the robe he’s wearing right now.

Why does he wear the tangerine robe instead of the maroon, dark orange or bright orange robe? He likes the color.

So a monk chooses his robe based on what color he likes? Maybe. He says there are only two real robe colors. Those monks who wear the other colors are just poseurs. (He doesn’t say it exactly like this but I don’t understand what he says.) I have repeatedly tried — and failed — to get the robe colors explained to me. Maybe they have something to do with the level of monkhood?

What will he do when he finishes being a monk? (No clear answer.)

Will he get married? Yes.

Will he sleep in my house tonight? Yes. (He then goes to do just that.)

Later, I hear him talking through the wall. “Yes!” I think, “I get to hear him chanting!” Then I realize that I can easily understand his words. He’s speaking English. “I’m at my brother’s house,” he says. “In Sisophon.” He’s not chanting, he’s talking on his cell phone.

When I wake up in the morning he is gone.

Feeding the ghosts: Pchum Ben 2010

2010-10-09T22:08:00.000-07:00

Pchum Ben is finished, my host dad says. Fifteen days of parties and temple visits over.

Then why are the shops in town still closed, and the road outside my house still clotted with cars, motos and vans?

Because it’s still a holiday.

“Today people go to play everywhere,” my host dad says. “Or some, like me, stay at home.”

Like me, too — and the orphans — holed up in the playroom watching music videos and Chinese movies dubbed in Khmer.

People don’t go to the wat (temple) today, like on the holiday’s other 15 days.

The ghosts must be full. They’ve been eating for two weeks straight.

And they had better eat up. Getting enough food from their living relatives these two weeks gives these ghosts a shot at reincarnation and admittance back into the living world. But, if after visiting seven wats, the ghosts can’t find enough food, they will remain in hell, and their families will not only have bad karma, they will run out of food the following year.

I witnessed the feeding of these ghosts during three recent wat trips. The first journey was the earliest, and was during a visit with my former host family in southern Cambodia. We — my former host dad and mom and I — set off for the wat at 4 a.m. An hour so early that not even the Cambodian early-rising sun has showed. But the ghosts, who are afraid of the sun, are awake and hungry.

Inside the wat, a small crowd sits folded-leg on either side of a long row of bowls heaped with ghost food. What do ghosts eat? Mounds of rice piled with bananas, guavas and cookies, all drizzled with red goo and black ash dripped onto the food by candles and incense.

These ghosts don’t need bowls or utensils to eat. After the food is blessed by the wat’s resident monks, we lay people take the bowls outside. Around and around and around the wat we walk, throwing handfuls of rice into the surrounding shrubbery. (The handfuls are the perfect size for the ghosts and their shrunken mouths.) While we walk, monks chant, drums bang and a gong gongs. A pair of geese stand in the middle of the hubub, doing their everyday geese things.

Then the food is gone. We wash the bowls and put them in a drying rack. My host dad and mom go home, leaving me inside the wat with the yays (grandmas), who are chewing betel nuts and spitting the blood-red liquid dregs through the cracks in the wood floor.

My host parents say they will be right back, but they’re not. I start regretting my decision to stay when a yay tells me she will remain at the wat until afternoon. The roosters have just begun to crow and the sun is lazing into view. It’s 5:30 a.m.

It takes my host parents two hours to return to the wat. In the meantime, the yays and I offer food to the monks in bowls concealed by shiny homemade party hats. We raise the bowls while the monks chant. To avoid offense, I don’t look at the row of shaved-head men and boys wrapped in bright orange, burgundy and rust orange robes.

Once sated, the monks give us their scraps — fruit, plus what tastes like rice coated in sugar and sesame seeds. After eating, I retreat to the outdoor steps during the middle of a droning report on how much money each person has donated. Next to me is a man with a plastic leg and a crutch.

My host parents show up close to 8 a.m., amid a crowd bearing more food for the monks. Each donor spoons rice into big silver bowls. The rest of the rice goes to the yays.

Then it’s breakfast time for us. Rice, meat and veggies.

At 9 a.m., I think we’re finally about to leave, but it’s time to make more food for the monks. Khmer noodles with peanut sauce and sprouts.

Once the food’s made, I feign sleep, and my host parents finally get the idea. They take me home before returning to the wat for more.

I don’t return to the wat until the next week, when I am back at home. The two visits are short. One is with my host mom and sister and the other with a truckful of orphans.

Both contain the same elements: Lighting incense and praying, donating money and spooning rice and other food into big bowls for the monks, who bless the food before passing it onto the ghosts.

Now it’s been 15 days, and the ghosts have eaten enough. We the living have too. Because aside from temple visits, Pchum Ben involves a lot of partying.

“If you go around to the villages today, a lot of people are very drunk, and tomorrow too.”

That’s how a Khmer man who works at the orphanage explained Pchum Ben revelry to me.

All the parties are to pray for the ghosts and to pray for “good money, good health, good everything,” this man added.

You can’t eat too much during these parties, he told a visiting French man who complained of a full stomach.

“Not too much,” he said. “Another day, too much, but not today.”