This has been an amazing trip. My
parents, my little brother, and I went out to South East
Asia to help my dad get an understanding of what the area’s like.
I went as a graduation gift to myself.
I’m not really sure how to
encapsulate it, but I’ll give it a shot. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not
exactly right about number of days at X place or whatever. So much has happened
in such a short time I can’t keep facts straight.
I went:
America to
Thailand
for 1 day
Bangkok, Thailand to Chang Mai, Thailand
for 1 day
Chang Mai, Thailand to Bangkok,
Thailand
for 1 day
Thailand to
Vietnam
for 2 days
Vietnam to
Cambodia
for 2 days
Cambodia to
Thailand
for 1 day
Thailand to
Laos
for 2 days
Laos to
Thailand
for 1 day
Thailand to
beach resort for 4 days
Resort to Thailand
for 1 day
Thailand to
America
You can see it was a fast and
furious trip. Airplanes pretty quickly lose their glamour with a schedule like
that. We arrived in Bangkok
and met Truck (that’s how his name is pronounced) who drove us to the Kanary
Hotel. The next day we flew up to Chang Mai to meet with a family there. They
are involved in an international school there. We drove around the city and
talked about opportunities for the university to be involved in it. We flew
back the next day to Bangkok.
We left my little brother with some
people we knew and flew into Vietnam.
Now that’s a cool visa to have in your passport. Paul Dobson was there to pick
us up from the airport, much to our surprise. Some of you know who he is. We
hadn’t even known he was in the country. He took us around and gave us an idea
of the country. It’s an amazing country. There were a billion motorcycles. You
ever seen a school of fish? That’s what the traffic looked like. And to cross
the street, you just have to trust the drivers to see you and slowly walk out
in the street. And they just swarm around you—crazy. We got to visit a friend
who runs a coffee house near a local university. The second night it happened
to be the Christmas/New Years party and they had a present exchange. This was an
amazing experience for me. Everyone was so genuinely excited for each other’s
gifts and would break out into cheers and clapping when each person got his/her
present. There was an incredible feeling of care for each other and I was drawn
into it.
We also got to see a museum about
the Vietnam War. Truly horrific. It was interesting to see it from the opposite
view than we typically see in America.
We flew from Vietnam to Cambodia. The first day we were
given a sight of some of the country. The country is largely Buddhist so there
were temples everywhere. We were going to meet with a friend that evening, but
until then we had some free time, so we wandered around and took pictures like
tourists.
We went to one of the sites the
Khmer Rouge had used for killing people. Oh goodness, it was heartbreaking. Much
like Hitler, they had kept meticulous records of the people before they killed
them. They would capture a certain number of people accusing them of crimes
against the state, and then torture them until they would falsely implicate
other people. Then they’d bring those people in and do the same thing. It said
they found that “children are more malleable” so they would target children for
torture. And often it was kids as young at 12 doing the actual torturing. They
took pictures of every person then kept meticulous records as to what they
said. So the museum had these pictures displayed in wall after wall after wall.
Thousands of pictures, and as many women and children as men. This went on for
a time, then the people of this regime turned on themselves (doesn’t evil
usually do that?) and started arresting and torturing members of their own
organization. Only 7 people survived the camp. And this is was only 1 killing
site. I won’t take the time to really convey the sense of horror I felt (this
only happened some 20 years ago!), but it was truly horrific. This is a picture
of the secondary school turned prison.
We went from there to a great
shopping center (in American terms, it would be closer to a massive flea
market). The manufacturing plants for a lot of clothing are there so you can
buy 20-50 dollar shirts for 4 dollars. Yay for cheapness. :)
The next day we went out to rural Cambodia to see
an orphanage being run by someone my dad knows. The man running it had an
amazing heart, and quite the entrepreneur too. Since there was no source of
income for the orphanage (he had started it himself), he had taught the kids to
do some crafts which he was selling on an international market. Keep in mind
that this
In comparison to Vietnam, the traffic is slow, but
hectic. According to the guy we met with, most of the country is just learning
to drive, and rapidly. Thus, no one really knows how to drive properly, or
understands the concepts of driving that we take for granted. For example, if
it’s more convenient for someone to drive on the opposite side of the road, for
example the store they’re going to is on that side, they’ll just drive on that
side, rather than go through all the extra trouble of crossing traffic. The
roads are pure anarchy. If you have a bigger vehicle, if you’re gutsier, if
you’re faster to the punch, then you go. Otherwise, you wait. The guy said that
he sees people dead all the time from traffic accidents. True to his word, in
the brief two days we were there, we saw a dead person on the side of the road.
Some pedestrian hit, apparently.
We flew to Bangkok
to repack (and take care of my little brother, we would leave him again until
after Laos).
The next day we got on yet another plane and flew to Laos. Now this is a cool country! I
felt freer to take pictures here than I had in any other country, so…
The country is the most rural we
visited. The country is laid back in every aspect. Since it seems to be an easy
way to compare the countries in a nutshell, the traffic in Laos was slow
and relaxing. There weren’t too many vehicles like in Vietnam and there wasn’t a total lack of order
like in Cambodia.
It’d be a pleasure to drive there. Not to mention that the country is still so
rural that the second largest city has 15,000 people. And the country has ~4
million, if I remember correctly.
We drove around the city for a
while. That didn’t take long, but it was wonderful. We went up to a village
nearby where some festival was happening. The man we were meeting wasn’t
acquainted enough with the culture yet to figure out what was happening and
why, but it was a sight to behold. There was some game where people lined up
and threw balls to each other (it looked like an egg toss at first, but that
wasn’t it). There was a cockfight arena, though no fights going on while we
were there. There was this cool hand-drawn/fan-powered hybrid carousel. I’ll
have to describe it to you. Ask me about it. You know me. Good stories take
lots of hand gestures, haha. I tried to get a picture.
Let’s see, we climbed up to the top
of a “high place” where a Buddhist temple was, and took some pictures there.
Amazing view from that high up.
Early the next morning we got up to
see the daily alms-giving. This is a tradition in this branch of Buddhism where
the monks will get up at the crack of dawn and file through the streets. People
will come out with sticky rice and put small handfuls of this rice in the
basket each monk is carrying. This is food for the monks, and serves, the
religion believes, to earn merit towards the next life of the person doing the
giving.
We rode a river boat up (down?)
stream to a nearby paper and silk-making village. The paper is made by beating
pulp of some local plant, then placing in water to sift, purify, and further
separate the fibers of this plant. With the fibers separated, a fine screen on
the bottom of the water pan is lifted up, straining the water out of the evenly
distributed fiber strands. This pan is left out to dry for a day, and voila,
you have paper. Rough, true, but with some extra work pounding the pulp and
straining out fibers, you can create higher-grade paper. I don’t have any
pictures of the paper-making (my dad does), but here’s a picture of a
silk-loom. It takes 7-10 days per silk, and they are gorgeous.
We flew into Bangkok again, this time to pick up Caleb and
our extra baggage that we had left with our friends in the Kanary Hotel. By
this point it’s December 22/23rd or some such, so we drove down to a
resort in Rayong for Christmas. My parents haven’t been on a vacation in
probably 10 years. It was time. And plus, it was really nice to spend a slow
Christmas with them. We rode bikes, slept in, took kayaks, swam once or twice a
day, went to an amazing poolside Christmas gala with live jazz and a massive
buffet… we had a great time as a family. Here are some pictures of the vacation.
We drove back to the hotel and left
the hotel at 3:30 the next morning. The latter half of this was typed on the
airplane flying between Tokyo and San Francisco, so please
put up with any typos you notice. I haven’t slept since 2:45 am Bangkok time, whatever
time that makes it wherever I am, and coach class is hardly known for having the
elbow space needed for typing, haha.
If you read all this, I’m
impressed. Leave me some feedback. Later.
Micah
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