Retro-spek!

Due to leave South-east Asia in a few hours, I wanted to see if there was anything else I could squeeze out of my mind about this place and our experience here. We have been without TV since 2004, yet we read the newspaper somewhat regularly to get updated. It is unknown to us how you people in America are coping with that President, and Iam not sure even if we really want to know. But if there is anything you would like to vent out do leave it in the comments. When we first arrived in Thailand, we were impressed with its modernity and was a relief for a while from the dirt and clutter of India. For a while I was even unsure if I would recommend people to go to India instead of coming to Thailand, but as we started travelling my thoughts started to change. In Ko Lanta, first place we visited outside Bangkok, it started to become obvious what was missing here that India had alot more. The island of Lanta is filled with nice tourist places, much nicer than Goa in India, but other then the beach there is nothing there. Whereas in Goa when you dive inland there is a sense of purpose beyond tourism industry, of just life as it is. Thailand being so open to tourism with its natural beauty is sort of like an inflated balloon, much on the surface yet hallow inside. All in all it is still worth seeing, more for the food then anything else, but I can guarentee if you wanted to come to a beach for a few weeks and take it easy while eating good food (albeit not for cheap) Thailand is superb. Yet in Bangkok the street stalls with stuff on sticks, noodles and shakes has been our greatest pleasure. We have been doing very little shopping as we don't have a house to shop for, but using the malls to cool off. Our last memorable experience in Thailand was last night as we delibarated for an hour and a half in if $5 was too much to pay for a T-shirt or not. After walking around that long and giving ourselves a backache we finally snapped out of it and got two rockin T-shirts just as the last and best T-shirt stall set up. Then we proceeded to our Chee-Wan #3 joint where we had our luminecent cocktail and finally for the third night in a row to our favorite Tom-Yum stall, where we thought we would get one Tom-Yum for the memory of it. After we had our third bowl and hopefully making some history, we vanished into the alley across.
alp alcazar isin II

Farewell to South-East Asia

our final days in thailand have found us once again grovelling at the feet of the owners of the Bamboo guesthouse. despite being perhaps the most un-hospitable people in Bangkok, we are forced, like abused housewives, back into the shelter of their large rooms, ornate headboards, and camoflage blanket/curtains. for a mere 50 cents more than what we would pay for a box-like room with space literally only for a bed in other more friendly establishments, we are a two minute walk from our favorite tomyum street stall, which, as if it could get any better, now offers fruit shakes of all varieties to cool one's spicy tongue. we spent the last week in the northern city of chiang mai, awaiting our next set of indian visas. after crossing our fingers, everything turned out rosily with the babus. it has gotten seriously hot and we are not ashamed to say that we spent much of our time there reading books aloud in our room, hiding from the midday heat and enjoying the only reasonably priced bookstores in all south-east asia. we tried to relive the fun of renting bicycles and lazily exploring lanes, but thai traffic is not nearly as langourous as that of laos or cambodia and we were traffic hazards when we weren't waiting for minutes to cross the streets filled with a continuous flux of cars and more cars. to tell the truth, of enthusiasm for temples and cultural sites has waned considerably, though we did make it to one fairly ancient teak wat and chatted with a monk for an hour. in chiang mai, there is a system set up for the many monks in the city to meet up with foreigners and practice their english, hence the term "monk chat." it seemed to me though that the impromtu chat did us as much good as the monk, as we hardly speak to any one but ourselves. monk chat= alp and ingrid's reintroduction to being sociable people.
ingo

Well we have had a few people that stumbled on our path that we had a good conversation with, but a lot of foreigners are of a different mind set then us. As an example let me offer the Chaing Mai night bazaar, which is supposed to be famous yet all you find in six blocks of things is the same thing one after another. Thailand's openness to tourism has created a tourist industry so well trimmed for the vacationer that the street stalls are selling what you are buying in department stores in America. The other is the hill tribe trekking offered in Chaing Mai, it sounds nice yet it is the most intrusive thing you could do and the travel agents fill up minivans and buses everyday and take gawking tourists, some wanting to go there to smoke opium while others go to buy the traditional clothes off the people's bodies. This activity causes the hill tribe to lose their tradition in the fastest time while they get nothing from the money the travel agents make from taking the gawkers up there. These are the mojority of the people that are in our vicinity. Just how would they feel if their christmas party became a tourist attraction they do not think about. But there are also interesting people, just in very few numbers. So the last party we went to you were there too. But we are getting along wonderfully together and we think of this as the longest date we have been on. What you get out of being on the road for this long cannot be called a vacation although it is true that we are not being productive we are priming ourselves, dreaming and storing up the energy and enthusiasm that is required to accomplish them.
al' pino

ps there are pictures of Laos and Cambodia in the pictures link below. And you can help our alienation by commenting.

2548 in Laos

With another set of stamps in our passports, we are newly returned to thailand after two weeks in laos. our visit in the old capitol of luang prabang coincided with the buddhist new year festival, which was basically a big santictioned excuse for everyone to get drunk, drench one another with water, and parade in the streets. we didn't really party with everyone else but it was an interesting anthropological sight to see foreigners and laos pointing water guns at one another from opposite camps. luang prabang was filled with handicrafts, as stalls set up every evening on the main promenade outside the palace museum, but we failed to buy anything. we have discovered a syndrome in our shopping: when we first arrive in a place with beautiful new things, we are consummed with thoughts of acquisition but as the days go by, our intentions shift and we become satisfied just by seeing the lovely fabrics, colors, and objects on display. if we were settling anywhere or simply there and there on vacation, we would be buying like everyone else but we know that anything we buy will simply have to be carried to the next place we go, and the next, and on and on. we left luang prabang to catch the slow boat up the mekong river, a two-day trip with marvellous scenery. the first day was hardly comfortable though, as we were forced to try and make ourselves comfortable on wooden slat seats but that made the second, with its plush airline seats, all the more luxurious. northern laos along the mekong is extremely beautiful and very lightly populated with people but heavily with bamboo and green. the water and rocks made deep whirlpools in the surface of the water and we saw pink water buffalo grazing along the banks. evidently, around this time of the year, the world's largest freshwater fish is captured in the mekong near the thai/lao border. the giant catfish grows up to 3 meters long and only a few of them are caught every year. one always feels a little silly trying to sum up an entire nation and its people in a few careless words but laos was a very enjoyable country, with pleasant little cities, a huge amount of countryside to be explored, and generally sweet people. i was hasten to add though that in this newly-opened-up communist country and along the tourist route (which i won't pretend we didn't follow), there are many many tourists and touts. it sort of takes the joy out of being in a small port town along the mekong and hearing loud foreigners and their life stories as you are eating your dinner.
ingrid

Not stayed anywhere for more than a week in quite some time now and it is getting harder to pack up and move on. Yet we can manage three full days on the road. When I think back on some of the distance considerations I used to have they seem comical now. We agreed to not write more about our plans as they allude us ever so perpetually and there is no reason to waste your retinal cells on projected futures. We are conflicted about our wanting to see more and wanting to cook our own food again. However we continue to enjoy ourselves and hope the same is true for all of you.
alp

Eats, shakes and leaves

it is hot like hell in luang prabang. my shins are sweating and alp is losing all the hair on his balls due to the sweltering conditions in his pants. just conveying you a conversation being held right now in this part of the world, "i dont think it is about a relationship, i think it is about two people being together", and i would like to turn around and say then what do you call two people being together, but instead iam blogging as it is much more passive aggresive. so you can tell by now there is not much to say, we are ignoring the sites here with the attitude that why should we go to the sites all the time, why shouldn't the sites come to us sometimes? the truth is, we have seen so much it is getting hard to impress us, beautiful waterfall, yes i would see it if it wasn't 30km away and cost $15 dollars a person to get there only to find crowds of people there, i love waterfalls and have seen very beautiful ones and will continue to see more. the thing is most people here are on vacation and they crave sites so they will go look at anything, i am not saying the waterfall is not pretty but would you like to see a pretty waterfall filled with more tourist than water in dry season? we like to eat, shakes and leaves.

Headache in Laos

Our passport pages are starting to be real works of art and a major source of pride to us travellers as we have entered our third country in south-east asia. the thais are extremely giving with their stamps and flourished signatures and free visas, while the cambodians and lao authorities have been suitably giving for the amount of visa fees we have paid them. alp is creating quite a sensation and not a little bit of disbelief in immigration officials with his burly mustache, who cannot quite comprehend that the starkly handsome young turk's photo in his passport is actually the same fellow with the mustache, the grin, and the straw hat they see before them. after scooting out of phnom phen into the land of fast cars and highways, 7-11s and tom yum that is bangkok, we took a classy sleeper train all the way to the north of thailand. we spent three days in nong khai, dozing and attempting to do a puzzle while recieving the news that we picked up a case of dengue fever as a souvenier from cambodia. it is not severe, just a bit like the flu. and yesterday we passed the friendship bridge over the mekong river into laos and its capitol vientiane. it is pleasantly more of a large town than a city and the weather has been drizzly and delightful. we enjoyed the tastiest pain au chocolat, almond crossiant, and coffee in our experience in southeast asia yet and are preparing ourselves for more baguettes and pate. next stop this afternoon is the backpacker/countryside village of vang vieng where we plan to spend more than a few days doing little and eating mulberries.
ingrino

ps for the kin who might worry, we got blood tests done in nong khai and the dengue fever is not the hemorraging kind.

pps click the title for our cambodia pictures

ppps it is the year 2548 in thailand!

You try being a Turk and see how it is

It is very hard not to start every blog with "We", and this is a last attempt at trying not to do that. But we are in Phnom Phen, the capitol of Cambodia and haven't been to the killing fields or the holocaust museum, maybe we will go tomarrow maybe not. Our plans to go to Vietnam have been cancelled by my turkishness as I had to jump thru some bureaucratic hoops that we dont have the time, patience, will, or money to do. So we will head back to Bangkok and then head for Laos. We can get a 14 day tourist visa on arrival there and then... After Angkor there is not much to do in Phnom Phen and it is a big city and the people have gotten a bit ruder around tourist circles. There is still and open invitation to meet in Manali in May and ride motorcycles thru Ladakh and Leh, the highest motored pass in the world. Also if there is interest to meet in Turkey in the fall, we plan to get there by September. So if there is an itch that we can scratch, let us know.
love all who read this blog, and trying to love others who don't,
alp

Angkor What?

Three day temple tour extravaganza~score! our hopes for ruins galore were not disappointed by Angkor and its vast park of buildings and rubble. starting our first morning by motorcycle-drawn rickshaw, we came to Angkor Wat and its huge promenade over a massive moat before dawn. it was eerily exciting to approach the huge three-domed temple as each moment the light increased, not knowing a thing about what we would see. we climbed all the way to the terrifying top, enjoying the wind and the statues of large-bosomed dancers with hairstyles reminiscent of anime characters, while most of the tour groups below sat at the base, waiting for their perfect "sunrise over Angkor Wat"photographs. The famous temple was majestic but I was personally most impressed with the wackiness of the Bayon, another renowned building with tens of humongous faces carved out of dark stone, peering in different directions with mona lisa smiles. Likewise, the jungle-temple of Ta Prohm also was gorgeous, as it was left by the french to look as it had when it was first found in the latter half of the nineteenth century by an explorer searching after butterflies. there were massive trees towering out of buildings and spilling over walls. the last two days, we decided to cycle around the ruins, which turned out to be a rather serene way to enjoy the scenery. we were even blessed with some fabulous weather this morning as the sky broke into an impromtu mango rain (the rains that proceed the monsoon season and herald the beginning of the mango season) for ten minutes and clouds shaded our path for the rest of the day. Ruin tourism is probably my favourite form of cultural sightseein; it encourages independant exploration, gives one an appreciatation of the landscape of a place, and makes one feel awe for the mysterious collapse of civilizations.
Ingrid

Most of Angkor's high quality structures were erected by the king Jayavarman VII. Angkor Wat, Bayon, and the Angkor City plus a wealth of other structres. What makes the style of this king so apparent, other then the higher quality rock used, is the topless women relief carvings on almost all the walls of the buildings. The man had a harem of coutless women and put their carvings everywhere. What is fascinating is that in a place like Angkor Wat which is located on a kilometer square, making it the largest temple in the world, there are hundreds of these women carved on the walls. The wat is the funerary temple of this king who apparently believed in an Egyptian style afterlife idea. The wat is really impressive with a moet around it that is 150m wide. The circumference of the temple has a wall that has bas relief carving of their creation myth, battles from ramayana and so on. It might take us a while to upload pictures, but we wil let you know when we do.
alp

The Ripping Fields

Well were we wrong. After the thai border, we journeyed six or seven hours on a road that reminds you of the outback. No asphalt with plenty of holes and bumps. And this of course excited us seeming like we were going to a place less travelled. When we arrived in Siem Reap what we saw was a different picture. Plenty of giant and fancy hotels and civilization. There is an airport in Siem Reap which apperantly brings plenty of tourists with dough. So far we have not ventured to the Angkor Wat, mainly getting ourselves adjusted to carrying three currencies and finding the cheap and authentic food. The latter is proving to be problem as we are overcharged for everything from water to bread. It is a hassle and brings an annoying quality to this town. Unlike Thailand everyone speaks english, at least enough to rip you off. The tourism in this town has made it perfect for tourists and frustrating for the traveller. Tomarrow we buy our three day ticket to Angkor Wat which will make it worth the hassle. And we hope as we venture further into South-east asia this place will be the most touristy place we have visited.
alping

Its like buddha baby

in honour of our leaving the clean water and cinema halls of thailand for the minefields and temples of cambodia at seven tomorrow morning, i thought i should take some time to catalogue those eccentricities of this fine nation that we have otherwise failed to relate to you all. a) thais, young and old, are addicted to menthol and camphor inhalents and it is possible to see them being shoved up noses everywhere! i want to embark on a nation-wide campaign to inform people of their addiction but i think they are too nasal-cavity-fixated. b) there is a handy bum-sprayer in every bathroom, so that you needn't ever worry about being caught without toilet paper (already an obsolete item to my man and myself... we gave that stuff up months ago and you should consider making the switch yourself. do you really want to rub that shit in?) c) transvestites and androgenous people are an accepted part of the fabric of thai society. we have seen some damn pretty men. most thai women and men have the same body type anyways~ no asses and similar faces. d) even monks don't finish their food, which we think is a crying shame! everytime we approach a table just vacated by a thai party, there is enough food remaining to feed the two of us. e) thailand caters to the hardly exclusive category of male "sex tourists," who come here to DATE their prostitutes and can be seen shopping with them nearly everywhere in bangkok. there are also neighborhoods full of go-go bars, in which dozens of waifs wave their bodies around like leaves, looking exceedingly bored under coloured lights. f) as we have told mimi and jason, there is the charming tradition of spirit houses, which are miniature houses built for the fairies of the premises so that they don't disrupt the proceedings of the main building. some are very lovely looking, so go the Bangkok photos to see an example of them. g) unlike india where the depiction of phalluses is very abstract, thais prefer the more life-like approach and are alarmingly realistic, albeit often times huge. they are fertility symbols and are present at shrines, temples, and even in amulet form. h) we are very fond of the park over the canal from our guesthouse, which daily hosts a gang of people evidently practicing to be in the circus (i.e. juggling, poi, and playing with sticks), gender-bending breakdancers, and a massive aerobics course instructed also by an androgenous lady-man. have you got a clearer picture of why this is such an interesting and enjoyable place? we hope so. cambodia may be a bit behind in the internet revolution so you may have to wait a few weeks to get the next installment of notes from us. you can always rerun our previous episodes. we never did.
with jungle love~
ingrid

ingrida and i were appalled today at the restaurant of the natural history museum where three monks left their table with enough food on it to feed three other monks. this we have been seeing from other thais and had mostly thought that it was due to city ethics. well apart from these shameless monk what i want to say is, organized religion is the same everywhere, buddhism is no different. at first i couldn't figure out why anyone would convert from buddhism to islam, and i am sure there were not so willing conversions but the idoletry here is up the roof. a lot of temples there isn't just one image of the buddha but there are dozens if not hundreds, and it sort of looks meaningless. the feng-shui of a lot of temples is really whack. i can see how a mosque is much more tranquil then a wat. but ofcourse i am not defending one religion over the other allah and buddha know that i love them them both the same. the organization of the religion is really what kills the spirit of the religion. just like organized government but i will not go into that right now, suffice to say that anarshi is the best way, because it is not a description of a way. get the tao?
alp

Southern Comfort

We are back in Bangkok where the internet is more affordable and sitting in an air-con internet cafe is a more desirable event. We traveled in the Krabi province first going to Lanta island where we were too cheap to go on a snorkeling trip and came back to Krabi for more inexpensive and authentic food. Rented a bike and traveled for a day. Afterwards we took a longboat to Hat Tonsai which is the climbers central in Thailand. We somehow got the best bungalow for the cheapest price on the peninsula where we had a stupendously good time, resting, reading, and coming up with solutions to future problems. The Noam Chomsky book Hegemony or Survival is a great book for getting perspective about American actions, highly recommend it although it is bound to put a fire into your system. On our way back to Bangkok we stopped at Khao Sok National Park hoping to find the largest flower in the world that smells like rotten meat but to no avail. Now we are back in the big city and enjoying it, our plane tickets are scheduled for May 13 now and we will head for Cambodia in a few days. We were going on tuesday but in light of Jean Pierre Jeunet's new film A very long engagement opening on March 17 we will overstay our visa two days to see that and the Motorcycle Diaries, as we will probably not find those movies in our travel ahead and they are worthy for bigscreen. In the meantime we will get our Cambodian visas here in Bangkok instead of at the border which will save us some money in compansation for the twenty dollar fine we will pay for overstay. We have put our pictures up for those with pictographic memory. I miss all of you out there and we will go motorcycling in the himalayas in May particularly Leh, Ladakh and Kashmir if we can, anyone interested in meeting us in Manali? The bike rental is about $5 a day and accomodation will be reasonable since most people don't go that far up north. You can see where we want to go in the photoalbum manali, it will start with Rohtang La and go further this time. I doubt there will be much interneting that we can do until Vietnam once we leave Bangkok so till then,
alp