Category: Travel

Day 4: DMZ to Sokcho

First off; last night I did a long city walk up to this representation of Korean, sky-scraping, phallic magnificence.  Lit up like a Dutch Christmas tree and looming over the city from atop the highest peak in Seoul, the North Seoul Tower (Namsan Tower )stands 480 meters above sea level and boasts a nightly festival at its base complete with street dancers, painters, venders, several restaurants and even a dance club.  It’s truly something that’s not to be missed.

And when it started raining on my way up, I thought it might not be the best time to come and see it.  But, because of the hordes of people I saw evacuating, I figured that it worked out for a better photo opportunity free from the masses.  And, as it turned out, it was just that.  I wound up getting some great shots from under my umbrella and it didn’t even rain the entire time I was ascending the hill.

On the way home, I met up with this great couple who were looking for a place to eat and were headed for my general area of town.  So we had this great barbecue at a place right down the street from my hostel.  It was nice.  And the food was spectacular.  I am finding that Koreans LOVE BARBECUE!  It’s everywhere.  And that’s certainly not a bad thing.  In fact, as far as Asian cuisine goes, it could have gone much farther south.  It could have just as easily been pork testicles boiled in squid ink or something like that.

Walking back to my place, I passed by the Gyeongbokgung Palace which I had walked around earlier.  It’s just as grand looking at night as in the daytime – possibly even more so.  And the surrounding Bukchon Hanok Village, tranquil as if it was cast back to the 14^th century during maritime – the clouds slowly sifting down to blanket the entire town.  I ended up snapping a photo from a fence post in front of the main gate.  I just had to take the camera out for one last shot before making it back to the hostel to crash for the night.  I did a lot of walking yesterday, so passing the [expletive deleted] out will not be an issue.

On to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which, besides being able to cut the stress, eeriness and paranoia in the air with a katana, is quite a nice place to spend a day.  I was told that I had to leave before the day was out because I looked too much like a journalist.  But before that, I had an amazing and enlightening day.  It was filled with highlights like being questioned by teenie-bopping soldiers about the size of my… camera (yea right, they just had camera envy); I got to enter North Korea (I even got the stamp in my passport to prove it) for about five minutes to photograph the train station that (maybe) will eventually board people on its train that leads all the way to London, England on a 45-day stretch; almost fall into a mine field; and given a full length history that they don’t teach you about in U.S. History class about the fratricidal war that started when the North Koreans got permission from the Soviet Union to invade South Korea in 1949.

Approaching the DMZ on our military escort northward, our tour guide told us all kinds of interesting things.  ‘No photos when we pass the Freedom Bridge; no taking photos of the soldiers; don’t leave the tour area; there are mines here and there, don’t worry, I will remind you when we get there; At the end of the tour you can buy 2kg of ginseng for $230.’  Stuff like that. 

And all the while, little by little, we’d start to see very strange and slightly more alarming things along the road.  The barbed
wire was expected, I guess.  But then we started seeing sirens and cameras.  Then there were the guard posts all along the river.  Then we passed over a multitude of road sensors.  Then, in the distance we’d see drilling which, our tour guide would tell us, were the South Koreans digging for finding more North Korean tunnels that may be currently underway to bring in arms and soldiers for their next invasion.   Eventually we were seeing military vehicles following us.  And then we were stopped, boarded, questioned and smiled at while being told to have a nice day and to enjoy our tour.  Pleasant, really.

After the gate, we were instructed that no more photos were to be taken on or off the bus unless expressly given permission to do so.  This was a big disappointment for me for two reasons.  Firstly, for the cost of the tour, one would expect that photos could be taken.  But more importantly, thousands of people come here each year which means that artist’s renderings, notes, personal memories of the place are undoubtedly being jotted down in blogs (like this one) and ultimately a huge mental map can be made from this.  And this is not to mention that the area can be seen from Google-maps without a security clearance of any kind.

Once in the militarized (and yet entitled ‘demilitarized’) area, we skipped the first stop to get ahead of the crowd that was already there and went ahead to the next stop.  There we entered the third (but not most recent) tunnel that was discovered on –or under – South Korean soil.  I was surprised at how well I did in there.  You’d think I would have knocked myself clean out after a few steps.  But, alas, I only hit my head once.  In fact, I think it’s because I am so tall that I did so well in there.  I am constantly looking up for objects that have taught me a lifetime of lessons in the form of goose-eggs on the old noggin.  In fact, I was behind a crowd of the shorter measure and they were doing pretty badly.  But then, when have they had to watch their heads?  Suckers!  Tall guy’s revenge!

This tunnel was discovered by drilling down into the ground 400 meters and filling the holes with water.  Because the stratigraphy below the soils along the Korean Peninsula is mostly made of very hard rock layers such as limestone, it must be blasted instead of drilled by hand tools which are all that would fit into a tunnel.  So when blasting, it would be apparent because the water would shoot back up out of these boreholes and therefore indicate the location of the attempted infiltration.

Once found, they knew they’d been successful in finding others that had similar evidence and drilled down to all the locations they’d found to be blasting areas and, in total, found four tunnels to date – that they’re letting us know about. 

And speaking of what they’re telling us; I kept returning to the feeling that most of what was being said was some hard-lined propaganda.  I know that the North Korean leadership must be guilty of brainwashing its citizens into hating the South Koreans in a manner describable similar to the way that the Japanese government kept feeding good news to their people even though they were losing the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.  But the things that they were feeding us were a little ridiculous.

One (again, very young) soldier told me, as I was overlooking the Dora Observatory, that all of the nice houses that I was seeing 12 kilometers in the distance were all facades and that inside them all were barracks used by military and people that the government paid to live there.  He also said, when I made a remark about the hillsides being very beautiful, that it is important to note that there were no trees on the mountains – that the people were forced to cut them all down and use them as firewood because the government didn’t pay them enough to support their lifestyle.

In a discussion that I had with another youthful combatant, I found out that in the past all the electricity in the country went to power the electrical fence on the North Korean side of the DMZ.  They said that now South Korea sends electricity over to their factories, that they employees from the North and that they pay them more than they would make if they made goods for their home country because the government requires them to turn over 50% of their wages if they work for a foreign government – hence their ability to work for South Korea in the first place.  But when I started inquiring about this further, I found out that the south pays the northern workers US$7 per day, that all the workers live in these homes and essentially it’s the south that turns off the electricity when the workday is done and that they think it’s “good” to send this money and electricity over there and help out the government.  They seem convinced that because of this nice thing that they are doing, the north will eventually become peaceful and invite them to have a unified peninsula once again.

Another soldier came up during this conversation and asked me if I was a journalist.  I didn’t respond.  He told me that journalists were not allowed here because it was the property of the United Nations and UNESCO and they didn’t want journalists here because all they publish is about how South Korea uses the DMZ – ultimately an area which should not be used as a tourist depot because of its hazards, in my opinion – as an attraction or to profit off the viewing of some other, impoverished nation.  I asked the young man if South Koreans were getting tourist dollars from the viewing of North Korea and he said ‘yes.’  And then I replied, “Well, that kind of makes it true, doesn’t it?”  Then I was asked to leave.  Clearly I was asking too many questions for their liking.

I started to ask something about speaking to a U.N. representative to speak for themselves, but not only did I think that route to be fruitless and a waste of time, but I already knew that it was the Koreans – and not the United Nations, who ultimately stand independent of the press and who don’t generally have the reputation of getting bad press for supporting in times of war – that didn’t want journalists entering.  After all, they might be writing something like this!  HAH!

Little did they know, though, that I’d already gotten all the photos I could ever want from the observatory.  And in these photos were two that I am particularly proud of.  Apparently, at some point in time, the North and South Koreans started erecting taller and larger flags.  North Korea would calculate the size of South Korea’s flag and put up a larger one.  This would be followed by the same action on the other side.  On and on it went until they have what we see in the photos here.

At this point the North Koreans have a flag that’s nearly 650 lbs., spans 18 by 36 meters and sits on a pole 160 meters tall – proof that the world’s largest pissing contest does have its fringe benefits after all.

Next stop was the border crossing for the Dorasan Train Station.  Through our guide’s broken English, I came to understand that there was a small portion of North Korea that we could enter if we paid a small fee, promised not to take off running down the train tracks and made sure we stamped back in with our passports.  Photos were allowed here.  But I didn’t see anyone from the North Korean army there.  Wonder why.

Then, after a quick bite of steamed bugs and chicken guts on a stick while taking a walk through this great park with awesome bamboo sculptures and what appeared to be a pinwheel farm, I hurried back to the bus for the ride back to Seoul.

Once we reached Seoul we were all herded into this huge ginseng sales pitch in an attempt to get us backpackers to spend basically our entire travel reserves for a huge, inconvenient package of compressed roots, we enthusiastically boarded the bus for the last leg of the tour – being dropped off in the middle of downtown Seoul.  What a relief.  No stress there.  Pay up, get out.  Good luck finding your way around suckers!

It was okay, though.  I knew where I was and it was easy to find the national bus terminal because I had my handy-dandy Lonely Planet and I actually read it.  So that got me sorted and after a huge plate of curry chicken at this sweet restaurant overlooking the shopping district, it was off to board the Dongbu Express headed for Sokcho where I hoped to be dropped in enough time that I was assured a room at a coveted hostel (per Lonely Planet, anyway).

The “House” Hostel, Sokcho, was where I was headed.  And once in town I snapped a couple of cool night shots and was off down the main drag to find this place.  I read that its atmosphere and service was top notch.  And while I could have slept in a bunker under fire, I’d just as soon have the good energy of a nice, clean place. 

It was all that it was advertised to be.  The owner, yu, is a great little guy who immediately sits you down and gives you a map, scribbling all over it the directions, bus numbers and routes to all that Sokcho has to offer.  That, alone, was a tour in itself.  But it was nice to have.  And the book was spot on.  They pipe in the coolest of light jazz and plush waiting room furniture greets you just as the subtleties of this peaceful place set in.

Everything is clean, they are all private rooms with their own private bath.  All the amenities that Korea just throws in there (free shampoo, laundry, internet, cable, etc.) were included as well.  They have this miniature husky, Gulumi, perched happily outside in the open-air vestibule.  Famous, old black-and-white photography line the quirky-painted walls of all three floors in the joint.  And its chock full of the coolest people that pass through this part of the world.

But beyond all the niceties, I was hungry, tired and slightly dazed from the long day on my feet and humping it through four-foot-tall tunnels.  So I dropped off my bags on the cushy, full-sized bed and headed down the road to the first thing that smelled tasty.  And that wound up being this really great “Korean Buffet.”  Which is nothing like the phrase offers to western ears.

Basically, you sit down to eat at a table that’s made of an old oil drum with a bolted-on metal top that has a huge hole cut into it.  In this hole sits a small charcoal pit and griddle.  Atop this fixture, you’re expected to grab your fill in variously seasoned meats (pork, chicken, beef and/or fish), cook it over a slip of tin foil and guzzle it down with rice wine.

The locals look right at home cutting up the meat with scissors – cigarette in hand – and scooping up conglomerations of veggie-meats rolled up in a piece of romaine lettuce and, of course, swilling back shot after shot of this white, viscous mixture that remains on the breath for days (so I’ve noticed).

bbq en

I, of course, looked like an ape with live chicken running around on my table to these people.  And clearly that was too much for the cook who came out several times to cut up my meat, drag what meat I thought was cooked back off my plate and back onto the bbq for more cooking and select for me the “correct” portions of all the veggies, sauces and meats.  It was a little comical.  I grabbed way too much on the first go, so I wrapped up my “take away” and was laughed at for being too much of a pansy to finish it – even by the wait staff.  It was great.

Then I went and passed out.

G’night!

 

 

 

 

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Day 5:

No post for Day five.  Only spent the day eating hunting down camera shops, eating local foods and editing photos for the journal.  A nice, lazy day in the mountain town on the coast of the chilly beaches in northern South Korea.

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Journal 28: Day 8: Jakarta to Bogor to Cibodas

Bogor was supposed to be another town away from Jakarta, but because the train never passed an area of countryside or farmland, it seems more like a suburb.  Jakarta is huge and sprawling.  It’s really something.  It’s probably even as big as Bangkok proper.  But looking at it from what I have seen, I don’t think it would be the same size if you included Bangkok’s outskirts.

Nevertheless, Bogor was pretty cool.  I got off the train and immediately got lost in this huge market abutting the train station.  It was really great.  Live animals hung helplessly, soon-to-be-cooked fish of all shapes, colors and sizes squirmed around in little plastic bins gulping at what little oxygen was in the water.  And the buzz of people swimming through the bird shops, meat houses and covered clothing depots really came together to form an energy that I can’t quite describe here.

One of the best things about Indonesia, as a photographer, is that you can wander down any street, allyway or corridor and find interesting things to shoot without the worry of getting lost.  With so many bike taxis and becaks, there’s always someone who’s happy to give you a ride back to the main drag.  So there’s really no reason to ever dive into a map.  In fact, getting lost in the back neighborhoods, mile-long markets and slums gave me some of the most interesting subjects and the warmest smiles.

The men would come up to me and want me to take their photo and they would want to take a photo with me.  In fact, on one occasion, two friends came to me with their camera phone while one shot and the other posed, another man tried to walk into the photo and be a part of the action and the two men almost beat his ass right there in the street.  It was pretty comical and it spoke to their interest in my foreign presence.

There has been a constant familiar smell that I have not been able to place.  But as I walked through this market, I finally figured out what it was: clove cigarettes.  And now that I notice them, I see them everywhere.  Almost every single man that I have encountered smokes cloves.  Perhaps it is a national point of pride since they are grown all throughout the islands here.  But whatever the case, it’s really staggering once you notice it.

Now, when I talk to people, I look down at their hands and their classic sixth, white-paper finger is never absent.  It’s like an extension of the people here.  It seems to be less of a custom and more of an expression or a unifying cultural item.  It’s hard to believe that everyone does it so consistently, but that’s the way it is.

Once I left the market, I headed through this scary looking road into a ghetto and got a few photos of some pretty derelict places and faces and caught a bike taxi to the gardens.  And then lesson number one came crashing upon me: Name your price before getting into the taxi.

Now, to say it like I am just now learning the lesson doesn’t quite ring true.  I have been taking taxis in dubious places for the last six years of international travel.  And I have known full well that if you take a ride with someone before settling on a price, it’s up to the cabbie to come up with the price when the ride is over.  And, oddly enough, that price seems always to be just a little high.

On this particular occasion, I simply slipped up.  I tried to speak to him about a price before I got in, but he didn’t speak any English at all and didn’t seem to understand when I drew out what I thought was a reasonable price on my palm.  He stared blankly.  And instead of choosing another becak, I just hopped into the seat and hoped for the best.  I snapped away at the passing items on the street as the man pedaled me into town.  It was about three to four kliks, so I didn’t figure it would be that expensive.  But when we arrived, his level of English comprehension jumped to a staggering level.  He informed me that I owed him 50,000Rp for his efforts.  This is about US$7.  Even in New York, to drive 10 blocks wouldn’t cost that much.  So of course I told the man that I would not pay that and within seconds a crowd developed.

The man became very irate, inviting others to join his cause.  But after he told the surrounding people the fare he wanted to collect, they seemed to lose interest in supporting him.  A few of them leaned over to me and said, “Just pay him 20,000Rp to be finished with his pestering.  He’s just an old drunk!”  I did so and his argument seemed to follow his pride (and his money) as it sunk (into his pocket).  Mildly perturbed but knowingly being called out on his public display of dishonesty, he pushed his squeaky becak back down the road.

The gardens were gorgeous.  But I wouldn’t want to do it again.  Essentially, once you have taken any of the hikes in the area, the gardens pale in comparison.  Their grandiosity (and strangeness) is something I am glad to have seen once.  But the strange displays of old relics with the backdrop of jungle seemed more to be thrown together in order to charge foreigners money to come and take a look.  The skeleton of a blue whale is on display and there are tons of foot-sized beetles to make up for the sweaty hike through more than 870 hectares of park reserve.

After the park tour, I headed back into the urban maze by way of another sprawling market.  Naked people and tourist shops lined the roadsides as I made my way around.  The scents were still bold and sometimes overpowering.  But I came away with quite a few nice shots.

[add gallery here]

The people in the market were quizzical at first.  But the second that I started smiling and waving “hello” at people, they became quite engaging.  They ran up to me to practice whatever English they knew.  One teenager ran up and said, “Good afternoon, Mr.  Please  allow me to introduce myself,” and then ran back to laugh about his boldness to his friends.  Older men came up to ask where I was from, how long I had been in Java, where I was going, what was my name and on and on.

Beyond the market lay another slum that I walked through.  School children ran alongside me in their little, brown uniforms.  Girls squealed and boys struck poses when my camera came out and all of them waved “Goodbye, Mistah,” when I walked on.  On down the road a little way, a mostly naked man seemed oblivious to my camera as I snapped him walking up a main drag leading into the ghetto.  I ran in to get the shot and then went back into the slums.  I needed to find some good shots of local things.  I had enough of what was on the tourist drags.

I came upon a couple of guys seated above a drainage pipe filled with feces and trash.  They just sat and ate in the hot stink that rose from the ditch.  As I shot them sitting there unaware of my presence, I wondered how it was possible to eat within any proximity of that stench.  But it’s a different place with different mores.

Coming out from the edge of the ghetto to a main road, I found a motorbike taxi that I paid to bring me to a hotel.  We agreed on a price of 15,000Rp and he set off.  We stopped by one hotel that was overpriced and then moved on to another one which was more my speed.  Once there, the driver argued that I owed him more money for multiple stops.  I indicated, through the hotel owner who spoke English, that we had not agreed on that price and another hassle broke out.

The driver lowered his additional price so that I would be more inclined to pay, but I stood my ground and went about my business talking to the hotel manager.  But the manager suggested that I pay the man.  I asked the manager if they were friends and he said that they weren’t.  So I asked why it would matter to him what I paid the driver.  And he simply replied that I should pay him.  The driver was bickering on and I assumed if I did not say something that the charade would go on for hours.  I finally told the manager to tell the driver that he would not get any money from me in addition to our agreed price.

A few words were exchanged and the hotel manager reached in his drawer and paid the man 5,000Rp.  The driver looked at me holding up the bill and laughed.  I then laughed back louder than him and stopped suddenly, staring him in the eye with my sunglasses pulled down so that he could see that I would not be intimidated by him and he nearly stumbled backward over his bike.

I had, by that time, found out that every price is negotiable, apparently even after settling on one.  So I have made a special note in my negotiations to stand my ground even if the price difference as it translates to US dollars amounts to very little.  I am sure that I would not be doing the next fare any favors by giving into every US$1-2 every time someone complained that I am not giving them enough money.

The hotel was okay.  I needed to dry my clothes off since I had been sweating in them for a few hours.  But when I went into the bathroom to use the faucet, I found no faucet.  In fact, looking around, I found no showerhead.  There was also no toilet and no evidence that any of these items ever actually existed there.  So I promptly checked back out and caught a “van-cab” back to the terminal where I hopped on the first bus to Cibodas where I might be able to chart a course up the mountain.

Leaving Bogor, I saw the last thing that will probably stay with me for a while.  There was this statue of a man stabbing a tiger in the back with a huge sword.  The man was valiant and daring and his muscles stretched the fabric of his uniform.  The tiger had massive testicles and was positioned as though outstretched and ready to pounce with its mouth was open showing its huge, sharp teeth as if to scream out some silent, perpetual shriek of having been dominated by this unstoppable man.  The whole thing just glowed with some misplaced sense of masculinity.  It was pretty bad.

Driving through the mountains here was amazing.  The terraced fields and tea plantations lining all the mountains in view were really impressive.  It must take a lot of work to supply the world with Javan spices.  And this must be where it all takes place.  They stretched out for miles.  They were amazingly long and amazingly green.  Quite a sight.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get but a few photos because of the poor light, the speed of the bus and the seedy-looking characters on it.

Nevertheless, we arrived in Cibodas (Chee-BO-dahs) and I hopped off and headed up the first mountain I could find.  It wasn’t long before I found a motorbike taxi willing to bring me to the gates of the mountain park of Gede Pangrango.

Inside the park office, there is a model of the mountain.  It’s quite nice and must have taken a lot of care in creating.  And looking at it, I could see that I was completely out of shape to be attempting to summit it.  But, that is what I was here to do and that was my goal.

Around the model are photos of all the wild animals that inhabit its jungles.  Yellow tigers the size of the trunk of a Cadillac, huge rat-like evolutions, hoards of monkeys, squirrels, mongoose (mongeese?) and a good variety of birds.

In trying to secure a ticket into the park and up the mountain, the permit officer told me that I was not allowed passed the waterfall without a guide.  This would cost me a lot of money (per my budget), so I had to really want to do this and be dedicated.  So I managed to push myself through the decision and purchased the ticket.  The guide would be a little harder to track down, though.

That’s where Freddy comes in.

Freddy has to be 80-years-old but has the energy of a howler monkey.  When he talks, it looks like he is being electrocuted.  The wrinkles in his face stretch as his big mouth moves forward in what looks like an exhausting effort to produce words.  And he kind of sounds like eldest Klopek, the pathologist’s older brother, on the 1980s movie The Burbs, with Tom hanks.

This is the man that the park sends all its visitors to in order to arrange a homestay, connect with a guide and set up transportation arrangements for the surrounding area.  And he is an interesting choice in the public service sector.

Upon my first encounter with him, he gloated about his losmen as if it was the best guesthouse in Java.  It had the nicest beds, world class cuisine and a shower made for a king.  What I found out, though, was that was a third rate, condemnable structure that had sectioned off upstairs rooms with disassembled bunk beds, the food was made by his wife and the leaky bathroom looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade.  I wouldn’t want to wash a dead rat in it.  Well, I wouldn’t want to wash a dead rat at all.  But I wound up having to bathe in its icy dribble after the hike.  So I guess you do what you gotta do.

I don’t mean to knock the cooking either.  The old lady does a hell of a thing with not a whole hellofa lot.  She has this magic trick where she turns chicken into crack.  It was actually pretty tasty and left me wanting more.

At any rate, I was connected to the guide and we spoke about how and when I wanted to make the trip.  I indicated that I would like some morning sun because I had noticed that a mist rolls in around 10 a.m. and doesn’t fade away until after the afternoon showers had dispatched all the moisture from the sky.  He responded that we would have to leave around 1 a.m. so that we could get to the top by sun-up.

Amazed, the idea of that kind of hike hadn’t occurred to me.  I didn’t know that it would take that long to reach the top.  He told me that it was a 10 Km hike from start to finish and that it would take five to seven hours.  And because that didn’t sound too bad, I decided that would be an okay time to start.

Knowing that I had to be up in six hours to start the trek, I grabbed some food and water from in town to bring along the hike and headed for bed.

My watch woke me up at 12:50 a.m. and I began throwing things on for the trip.  My new shoes would pay their dues and I would be rewarded with a wonderful view of the entire area in just a few short hours.  So I thought.

[Notes from immediately after the returning home and eating, and just before I crashed on the bed after 13 hours of hiking, follow]

Okay, so it was the most ridiculous, prettiest, most annoying, most entertaining and longest hike that I have ever done to date.  Among the highlights are: My muscles are numb, my stomach empty, my skin burned and my head pounding, I am finally home.  I paid too much money.  I saw three volcanoes, two hot springs and a waterfall.  I think I am going to die and there was a penis-shaped root sticking up from the ground at some point.  My guide lied about how long this trip was.  We hiked through some huge plantation to reach the other side of town.  And just when I thought it was all over, we took a one-hour van ride on a rusty bucket of duct tape and bolts through a monsoon that turned the roadways into flooded canals to get home.

Okay, I am going to sleep now.

I wrote all that as soon as I got back to the hostel because I knew that I wouldn’t remember it when I woke up.  And I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to recall any of it if I hadn’t written it down.  I knew that I would have to go over all the highlights in greater detail later.  So when I finally woke up, I ordered some strange dish from my electric host, Freddy, and took my freezing shower.  The food was really interesting.  I think that the lady fried it with a pan full of garlic and oil.  Very interesting and the most different tasting chicken I have ever eaten.  Then, of course, I was overcharged for it.  But that’s how things seem to be going here in Indonesia.

Well, the sights were great in the forest.  I didn’t really see any large animals.  But there were plenty of birds, monkeys, bugs and a couple small poisonous snakes – vipers or maybe asps, I think.  The foliage was all gnarly and grown-in with everything else.  Just like the rainforests in Central America, everything was growing off something else.  It was a huge real estate competition and it looked like everyone was winning.

At the beginning of the hike, we left the hostel and headed up the road to the gate.  On the way, we passed many of the area youth still awake, smoking cloves and laughing at the big white man as we walked by.  There was also what looked like a huge area where many buses had just pulled in to drop off about a thousand praying Muslims.  That was a little unexpected.  But we reached the gate, passed over a bridge and met up with the “park ranger” who checked our permits and bid us a good morn.

Then it was onto the millions and millions of stones that would lead us up the mountain, over to a waterfall and stop just before the tough climb.

It took us about three or four hours to finish this part of the trek and we saw the waterfall on the way through this part.  Well, we kind of saw it.  We mostly heard it and squinted at it through the silvery light of the moon perched in a watery mist overhead.

Along the way, there were several concrete erections created to house passersby from any untimely rain that surprised them.  But those weren’t the only erections.  As we were walking up to the two hot springs, I tripped over something that almost made me fall.  When I turned around I had to look much closer to realize what I was looking at.

My eyes saw it.  They sent the message back to my brain.  My brain received it and it was pretty clear what it was.  But the hard part was accepting it.  Was it a penis?  Was there some poor bastard buried just below this earthen cover who’d died with a hard-on the size of my forearm?  I crouched down to look at it – but mostly to prove myself wrong about what it was.  But there was no explaining the realities that my consciousness was forced to toggle between a million times in those few seconds.  I went from disbelief to denial and back to acceptance.  Finally I kicked it.

Sure enough, it was just an amazingly sculpted root sticking up from the ground.  My brain settled as the cylindrical stump reverberated back into its original position.  Finally appeased, my mind was able to ponder just how this knotted phallic protrusion could possibly have come to be shaped so perfectly.  First, I thought of some bored, stoned, hippy hiker who stopped here to spend hours carving this upshot root into the veiny, triumphant thing that it is.   But it was smooth – weathered.  I think you could actually saw this thing off and walk it into the nearest sex shop and walk out with a handsome profit.  Then I thought that maybe it was part of some symbolic thing left over from the ruins of ancient Javan tribes-people and I was the lucky happener who discovered it.  Half of me wanted to find the rest of this statue by digging at it right then and there.

Eventually, though, I figured it was just a coincidence and stood to find my guide staring at me as I dazzled over this stiff, timber organ.  I can only imagine what he thought as I kicked at it and spent so much time being amazed over it.  Hopefully I was seeing it for what it was and he was too far away to notice.  It would at least come with a good chance of him just understanding me as another nutty westerner amazed at trivial, Asian nothingness.

Just after the next switchback, we came upon two gushing hot springs.  One was piping hot and the other was simply warm.  Either of them would me a fine bath, though.  I imagined climbing back down this way and jumping in for a quick warm up and refresher as we smelled the salty, sulfur mist.  It made everything white all around us and as we passed open areas, I could tell just how big the mountain really was.  We were not even a fourth of the way there.

Nevertheless, my guide, the slowest mountaineer I have ever met, turned and told me that at the next covering, we’d be taking a rest.  Once there, I figured I would hydrate, eat come of the bread/jam conglomeration that I had prepared and then get back to it.  But by the time I finished my snack I looked over to find him asleep on the concrete bench.  I tried to rouse him, but he indicated in his broken English that we’d be fine here for one hour and to wake him then.  There was no moving him.

Just a minute before, I had seen him puffing down a clove cigarette and now he was asleep.  Very strange.  But I thought about it a little bit and figured it might do my feet (which were already starting to throb a little bit) could use a rest.  So I set my watch and leaned over against the cold, earthen wall and closed my eyes.

Waking up to the sound of my watch, I stretched myself back into consciousness and went over to nudge the guide.  He wouldn’t come to.  Finally I shined a flashlight in his eyes and he stirred.  It took him a little while, but we were finally back at it.  It was a long, slow haul up the mountain.  I was quite annoyed at what I had bought for my money.

The day dragged on and the five-hour stretch that I was promised turned into six.  Then seven.  Then, finally, eight and we were at the top.  And from early this morning, I had to go to the bathroom.  Of course, I urinated along the way.  But I wasn’t talking about that kind of bathroom break.  And the further up we climbed, the more my leg and gluteus muscles massaged my colon.  Eventually it was like a challenge to take each step and squeeze with all my might to keep colonic pressures at bay.

We passed lots of really scenic foliage and every so often we’d come to a clearing that would remind us how far we’d come and we’d get a small reward for our hard clambering upward as we could look out over the early light from the morning sun and see across the expanse of the plantations and jungled mountaintops.

There were two volcanoes that we passed getting to the top.  But we weren’t really able to see them.  We just smelled their sulfuric smog leaking into the air around us.  At one point I noticed that there were no mosquitoes attacking us as there were in all other rainy, tropical areas that I had been in.  But then I thought about the sulfuric smell that had hugged the mountainside for the length of our ascent and figured that must be the culprit.

 

There were plenty of little freshwater buckets chiseled into the ground where mosquitoes could lay their eggs.  And, presumably, there were plenty of animals from which to get their supply of protein.  So really, that’s the only reason I could think of that would keep them from completely making us miserable the whole time.  But, as it stands, I don’t think I remember being bitten once on the hike.

The downside, of course, was that we’d gone what had to have been eight or nine Kliks already and we were only peaking the last passes of the highest part of the mountain before you could see it bow into itself and no longer see it rise from the side.  Then it opened up and gave us a quick peek at what we’d climbed up.

There were two big boulders sitting their implanted on the side of the mountain that I climbed up on for a few shots.  It was really nice.  And we could see the steam from the hot springs and the rise of sulfur from the volcanoes.  Not long after that, we were at the summit and it was amazing.  So, naturally, I had a shit.  It was the movement my innards were awaiting for 10 Kliks, now.  And finally I could concentrate on something other than my stinging cheeks.

The volcano had clearly been full of activity for what looked like millions of years, growing up and then erupting back down; and then filling back up only to respire its built up, ashen contents.  This was evident because of the layers of rock that were exposed in steppes alongside the western-pointing face of the inside of what was originally the cusp of the volcano.  It was definitely an interesting view from a geological standpoint.  I stole a few volcanic rocks from the top and put them in my pocket, appreciating the climb even more now that I have a prize only found at the site of the reward.

I snapped a few shots, reveled in the victory and decided to go down the other side of the mountain to the town below.  But before we descended, I asked my guide, Chadu, the actual distance that we’d be traveling this time.  He told me three hours.   I asked him if he was sure.  He ensured me that he was positive and that we’d be at the bottom before 11 a.m., being around 8 a.m. currently.  I inhaled the last of my crisp, mountain breaths and turned to follow him down.

While easier, the climb down the mountain was knotted, rooty, uneven and treacherously damp with silty, shifty soils underfoot.  So not only were my knees wrecked from all the unexpected forceful movements on my joints and muscles, my back got rocked from those jolts that occurred when unexpected sturdy ground met my hard steps down.  It was not pleasant.  But I had to keep reminding myself of the fact that, with all its challenges, this was still preferable to the uphill scramble that took me longer than expected.

And speaking of longer than expected; by the time 11 a.m. came around and no clear shot at flat ground was anywhere in sight, I began to wonder when we might get to such a place where we might be able to rest up and eat a little bit – maybe hydrate and give the knees a rest.  But it wasn’t until an hour later that I finally started asking about it.  My silent guide had probably noticed my questioning demeanor and had probably thought it best to maintain a good distance buffer between him and myself as I probably began looking more and more frustrated the further we got.

Then it happened.

The rain came down from the sky in big, sweeping waves as if the switch had been turned and the heavens could no longer hold back their soggy clouds.  But it wasn’t the rain that I had a problem with.  I had planned for rain.  I was wearing good gear.  I knew that my camera was nestled tightly in its four-liter Ziploc bag which was tucked under my arm.  And I even welcomed the cooling effect of the water.

What I had a problem with was the fact that it came just as we made our way to a clearing where Chadu had told us we’d be on flat ground.  But it wasn’t flat, and it wasn’t ground.  It was a sodden, mushy plantation that we had to slog through in order to get to the other side – just five short kliks away.

I am not going to lie, this walk was the most beautiful I have ever taken.  It was really amazing and I am glad that I took that route back instead of back down the mountain where we’d come up.  It was astonishing being able to walk through these fields that were painstakingly plowed and farmed and nurtured every day.  They expanded for miles in every direction and some of them simply stopped at a muddy cliff face and fell into the abyss while others overran with foliage and bursting with color, simply tiered their way down in staggered stages bursting with vegetables, spices, teas and fruit.

The smells matched the magic of the views, full of life and splendid strangeness.  The herbal essence that drifted around me as I walked felt as if it was cleansing me and washing through me.  It surrounded even my senses as I was overtaken by the moment I was in.  And then I remembered how pissed off I was at this fibbing forecaster for leading me astray – not in direction, but in time.

Ultimately, I didn’t have a problem hiking for 12 hours – mostly.  But I just would have liked to know about it beforehand.  I don’t think that I would have gone on the trip if I knew that the guides were like this.  And if it was just Chadu  that was slow and unsure of this trek, that’s fine, too.  But I would liked to have been more prepared, better warned and have brought more food.

But then again, it’s all about the experience.  And I can’t say as it has been a bad one.  And then, as we were leaving this lush carpet of tea fields and farming estates, we came to a little town.  The rain had slowly subsided and we found a rickety van that would transport us into town.  Well, it would transport us to another van that would transport us to another van that would transport us to town… where we’d have to take another van back to Freddy’s.

But that’s not the important part.  The important part was that, just as soon as we jumped aboard this van, the rain started pummeling the rooftop.  Water started coming out of everywhere – every hole in the pavement, every pipe on the street, every gutter at the foot of the road, every drain and trench and groove and tube designed to channel this historically predictable, afternoon cloudburst downward.  And it all wound up in the road that we’d have to navigate in order to get back down into town.

Of course this made the already horrible roads even worse.  And as we bounced around the mangled thoroughfare, the van would toss us left and right as it hydroplaned over massive deluges from incoming smelly sewer troughs and muddy grooves beside the sidewalks.  If it weren’t for the disgusting nature of what you knew was floating around in the water, you might be inclined to kayak your way down into town.  It would certainly be faster.  Of course, you’d have to dodge all the trash that people thoughtlessly toss onto their beautiful land.

The maniacal driver of this yellow rickshaw would honk and shout at locals as they’d pass, offering them rides.  Then he would return to wiping the fog from the wiperless window and peer between the streaming rainwater as it made its way down the windshield.  His constant clove-puffing and laughing wiggled his cigarette, sending ashes all over the front of his shirt and pants.  And he’d just look at me and smile; his three teeth pointing at me.

Among the passengers stuffed and cramped into the back, there was also a strange array of what looked like farm equipment that the driver was transporting for someone into town.  The pieces of heavy metal would drop and crash around the back as people would try to protect their babies and their own heads from the metal members flying around.

By the third bus I was so weak and irritated that I could have slept right there until the driver dragged me to the curb.  But I pushed through.  I finally made it to Freddy’s.  And as I stepped out of the bus and dragged my bag out with me, Chadu came up to say goodbye.  Our conversation went something like this:

Chadu: Well, my friend, we made it.

Me: My muscles hurt.

Chadu: Which ones?

Me: All of them.

Chadu: Oh.

Me: Actually all but my legs and feet.  I can’t feel them anymore.

Chadu: [chuckles] Well, goodbye, my friend.

Me: Goodbye.

It was coming up on 2 p.m. – 13 hours since the start of the hike in the wee hours of the morning.  And I was ready for some sleep.  I was also caked in a sort of saturated funk that I have a hard time describing.  Freddy stopped me at the entryway and wanted to talk about my trip and if I wanted any overpriced food from his wife.  He seemed to be going on and on and I just wasn’t capable of computing anything anymore.

I finally let out a very unexpected and unapologetic fart and he stopped talking.  He stared at me for some sign of a response or acknowledgment of the foul fragrance I had brought into his house.  But when nothing came, he simply said, “Well, I guess you need to go shower, then.”  I nodded and walked past him, dreading the climb up the stairs to the room.   Once there, I stripped down, contemplated a quick freshen-up and sat down on the bed exhausted.  My head found its own way to the pillow and I woke up the next morning about as hungry as I had ever been.

In the morning, I sat up and stretched and it took me a few, groggy moments to realize that I had something on.  I thought that I remembered taking off my shirt before I went to bed.  I looked down and saw my bare chest, but I could feel fabric on my skin.  So as I reached around to my back, I realized that I had the sheets completely stuck onto me.  Trying to pull it off felt as if the tiny particles of grit and oil had found nice accommodations in the niches of the fabric’s linen cross sections and was unwilling to part with the bond it had found.  It peeled off me reluctantly and as if trying to get back at me for the unwelcomed disturbance, it let out a waft of rancid aeration that I didn’t think was possible for one human to produce in just a few hours.

Freddy had just come back from the mosque when he came upstairs, knocked on the door and started to ask me if I’d like his wife to overcharge me for some delicious breakfast.  And by the time I accepted, that same fetid fog had come over and introduced itself to his olfactory senses.  His head wrenched uncontrollably sideways and his face crinkled up and the only words he could manage as he closed the door were, “No problem.”  He tried to smile, but knew that it was a mixture of a forced grin and trying not to breathe in any more of my polluted haze.

Freddy always says ‘no problem.’ He says it upon greetings and goodbyes.  He says it after finding your rotten, hippy stains on his “high quality” linen.  He even says it after any requests.  But something about him indicates that no matter what your request is, you’re upsetting the natural order of his established efforts of making money by doing very little.

I stood up and stretched.  My legs were on fire, but at least I didn’t have to worry about using them much over the next few days.  After my 10-kilometer midnight hike turned to afternoon torture through the thickest, tiger-infested jungle in the heart of the Javan rainy season in the shadow of the Puncak Pass and added an additional seven kliks through vertiginous hillsides on the other side of Gunung Gede in the Pangrango National Park by way of the Cibodas gardens, I would be heading for the first beach I could find and do absolutely nothing for a little while.

Journal 26: Day 5: Singapore to Indonesia:

Singapore is unbelievably creepy.  With its pastel colored, numbered, cookie-cutter condos and polished and posh corporate behemoth high-rises, I am not sure that I have ever seen quite a funny looking little doll house replicated over and over until the madness of it all finally stops at its tight, watery borders.  This little island city is like Disneyland and a million maids.

Upon coming in from the northern entrance (if there is a distinction for an entrance in any other direction that I am not aware of), the first thing I see out the bus windows is the endless assemblage of rows of finely manicured shrubberies lining the curbs of every street, ally, driveway and even the gutters.  Every blade of grass looks to have been cut to what looks like 8.33 cm, kept from growing in a precisely circular perimeter around each tree by exactly 5.2 Kg of cedar chips, thereby matching the distance of the cedar chips to the bushes aligning all walkways and terraces and all to be watered at exactly 5:30 a.m. should the courtyard’s dew index meter reading show less than an acceptable amount of collective moisture per square meter.

The rules of a community like this must fill a scroll that could make its way around the world.  This place is so clean and kempt that I am afraid I might mess something up just being white.  The most impending dread came over me as though it didn’t matter anymore than I had a backpack with me that my innocence of hippydom would simply escape me before I could even calculate the last time I showered.  There would be no fleeing my execution for charges of trampling the grass which would come swift and without trial.

This place was so clean that the air passing along the bus was being dirtied by our Malaysian road grit. Even the rain sweeping up the ground funk seemed to be clean enough to drink.  It is simply mindboggling how squeaky clean it is here.  It makes me wonder if anyone has time to enjoy the pools around which laborious attention has been paid to ridding every possible nook where refuge could be sought to any remaining specks that might one day sift down from the heavens and look somehow out of place.

One thing was for sure: I needed to leave this place immediately – if not sooner.

Enter factor number five on my list of reasons that Indonesia will be tackled on this trip.  But it wasn’t all so scary.  For instance, the architecture was really amazing.  Their larger buildings and the bridges were simply works of art – no doubt paid for by works art.  Their choice in flora abutting all the major roadways was also very appealing to the eye.

As a matter of fact, the only thing that was not completely symmetrical (and apparently left to Darwinian chance) were the [name – banyon?] trees whose finger-like branches intermingled helplessly as they scratched at the sky like dragon claws crested with umbrella-esque plumage.  Long and slender, these trees were also home to the very Asian [fern] which seemed to sprout roots in the ditches and knots – every semi-level landing pad or limb junction along the trees’ trunk and limbs – where taking root was possible.  Their cotton-like canopies seemed to explode away from the tops of the trees reaching out to procure every shaft of sunlight available.

Beyond these could be seen poking up huge communication towers and enormous signal dishes all aligned to the same innocuous point in space.  These megaliths juxtaposed the entire scene which was then made to seem as though it had all been a presentation to the visitors of the highways entering Singapore’s “Garden City” allure.  But since I wouldn’t be staying here very long, that ultimately didn’t concern me all that much.

I had to get out of here fast.  But the first stop for the cab was at what looked like a small mall.  Upon entering the building there was a merry-go-round surrounded by name brand shops from Subway to Foot Locker.  And beyond that was a small gathering of parent onlookers who had assembled to watch this post-toddler dance her fingers across the keys of a Steinway piano as if each digit was trained by Fred Estaire.  And beyond that, if there needed to be anything at all, was a full-sized water park complete with see-through tubing so that the nearby parents could keep an unhindered eye on their future investments.

I honestly couldn’t think of anything more ridiculously Caucasian.  But here I was, the only white man for miles and I was in awe of these posh, magna-riche, tennis pro dads squirming around in their yacht club turtlenecks and eyeing their Ralph Lauren wives who were busy balancing their ability to chew bubblegum and push Baby Gap strollers.

Beyond the lavish grounds of expensive, walled villas, the four-car garages, overflowing foliage and idealistically green blanket that covered this island city, there is also something to be said about their apparent dedication to education.  Or perhaps that’s what it’s made to look like.  Perhaps it’s actually educational institutions that have come here to compete for the fat pockets of the wealthy junior-elite’s trust funds.

I was on my way to the airport so that I could get out of the city as soon as humanly possible when I saw what simply floored me.  I was on the skytrain that connected the far reaches of the city when I passed what looked like a huge jungle gym.  It looked almost like a firefighter’s training camp.  There were rope-net obstacle courses, hanging walking planks, suspended rings, a huge climbing tower and many other things that I couldn’t quite place.  I kept looking and trying to figure it out.  But as the train moved on, more was revealed all within the same compound.

All within one huge city block, there was a huge sports complex complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool (lanes and launches), basketball courts, tennis courts, volleyball courts and an officially sized soccer arena – all of which sat in front of a peculiar black-tint glass building with a crescent faux-roofing.  I leaned over to ask a passenger on the train what that place was thinking that I would get some response that somehow tied together all the links in my mind (Olympiad training center, world-class pro athlete fitness center, a conditioning center rented out only to Hollywood movie stars, etc.).

As though looking at me sideways and with a sarcastic was the norm, the passenger replied, “That’s a high school.”  His glance kept mine for what must have been a small eternity before his words bounced off every nerve ending in my body all at once and finally came into recognition.  And as I tried to come up with some kind of facial expression that would indicate that I was not mentally handicapped or physically ill, the only words that I could manage were, “high school?”

The man backed away.

Click on the images for more detail.  It’s kinda scary.

I had to get on the returning train and go back to the last stop just so that I could get some photos of this place.  There would be no point in my ever going to Singapore if I had not documented the most ludicrously obtuse assault on human morality ever to besiege the wallets of mankind.  ‘How could this place exist,’ I thought, ‘when so many governments (many of them within one hundred miles) are so desperately seeking out options that would allow their country’s children to get pencils to write with?’

I understand that each country has their own problems.  And I understand that it is not up to Singapore to float their profits into neighboring countries or to those countries around the world who cannot afford the basics.  But it is this kind of flaunting and taunting that cost the Khmer’s their early empire and their temples left to ruin.  And when there is a huge billboard rising high above a million-dollar kindergarten proclaiming “Academic Excellence,” it means someone’s got the wrong image of what a kindergarten should be.

So, on to the airport.  This was to be a quick, if doleful judgment of little speck of gold in a sea of pollution and poverty.  I was hoping for something – anything – reasonable.  Instead what I found was my sixth factor of good fortune founding the idea that I needed to be in Indonesia.

Lion Air had a one-way ticket flying to Jakarta about one hour after I arrived at the airport for about US$34 nonstop arriving at 10 p.m.  How’s that for good luck?  I made it into town and after pushing through the hoards of pigmy cabbies and toothless money changers, I found a driver to take me to the Jalan Jaksa district.  It was Hostel 35 to be my place of rest and port of call for the next two nights.  And by the time I arrived in my room, distributed my belongings around the room in the messiest possible fashion (saving for myself just enough room to crash on the bed) I wrote this journal with the firm belief that I know that I was supposed to come here and do something epic as I have had the occasion to do in many other wonderful places.

Because it was too dark outside to see anything on my way here, I really didn’t get the full picture of the effect of what years of refuse neglect and complete lack of any sort of trash management services can have on a city of 12 million souls.  But that story picks up in Journal [26] Day 6.

Journal April 10, 2010

Okay, so I didn’t make it into Vietnam as I thought I might: with ease.  Unfortunately, after leaving from Phnom Penh, I was denied at the border because I had the incorrect information that I purchased online to get in.  The paperwork that I had only allowed me to fly into an airport and at airports throughout the country, they have a network of visas on some mainframe they can all access.

This database clearly does not exist at border crossings.  Nor do the border guards care to lift any extra fingers over to the phone and dial the number to any of these airports in which my proof of valid entry exists.  But that’s okay, because I got to experience the capital of Cambodia a little more.  And it was quite interesting.

Firstly, the people are great… swindlers.  They love to try and take you for every penny you have.  I don’t blame them, though.  I suppose if my people had been oppressed for about a thousand years, I’d be doing everything I could to get a little bit ahead, too.   The people are nice enough and there is definitely a limit to their greedy nature.  It’s just kind of strange having three people following you, tugging on your clothes and all of them trying to sell you the same things.  You don’t really know whether they are selling you something or coordinating a quick dip into your back pockets.

At any rate, beyond all the personal interaction that takes its toll on the weary traveler, there are plenty of cool things to do here.  And by cool, I mean dangerous, cruel, illegal, immoral and outlandishly deplorable.

Phnom Penh will forever ring a note with me that reaches into the very depths of the most deviant parts of my soul.  And it’s one hell of a deep cavern, let me tell ya.  Here in Phnom Penh, if you so choose on any given

day, you can wake up and take a ride outside the city where you can blow up farm animals with old machine guns left over from the Vietnam war; you can then head over to the killing fields where you can still see the bones of victims of the communist torture machine poking up out of the ground; then you can go and gamble on the latest Muay Thai match — Cambodian fighters, of course; then head out to lunch where you can eat pizza cooked with marijuana seasoning and a side order of deep fried tarantula; walk around the markets and buy everything from brand new illegal movies and computer software to used shoes and sex toys; then head to your tandem hotel/massage parlor and have an afternoon nap while tiny Asian women rub your toes (and whatever else you pay for); in the late afternoon you can dash out and see a genocide museum where thousands of innocent men, women and children were shackled to beds and

tortured and brutally slain; then head home and sit out on your balcony and listen to the propaganda trucks buzz down the roads with loudspeakers blaring communist noise about the rise of terror that is soon to return; by the evening you could stroll down into town and have your choice of all manner of drugs from peddlers who walk right up to you with briefcases full of a colorful assortment of pills, baggies and needles.  And after (or if) you’ve come down off your undoubtedly intense high, you can have a beer at the local club and pay a little extra for some late night boom-boom.  It’s all in a day’s fun for the learned traveler.

And if you really just don’t have a taste for any of that you can simply pick a streetside cafe and sit with a coffee and watch the truly amazing world of Cambodia walk right by you – or more likely, come up to you and ask you for money.

It’s really striking what you can see walking down the street at any given moment.  You will see all kinds of interesting things – and not all of them human.  But definitely all of them interesting, foreign and mostly enjoyable to remember when you leave.

The markets are really a world all in themselves.  There is meat hanging in the open air waiting for hungry buyers.   When a place is so dependent on the black market, cost goes down, but so does quality.  Take your pick.

The gun range was interesting.  You can choose any number of fully automatic armaments, grenades, even a grenade launcher, and fire them at any number of animals that happen to be running around the field abutting the firing station.  I wasn’t allowed to take photos – though I managed to still sneak a few in that I will upload later – but I did get to see some interesting things.  For about $40 you can fire a fully automatic Chinese- or Russian-made AK-47, a number of Russian- and German-made automatic rifles or a .308 U.S., ground-mounted machine gun.  I saw an Australian tourist make a rooster-swiss cheese and dirt sandwich with one of the 9mm versions.  For $50 you can chuck a live grenade at one of the farm animals.  I didn’t get the pleasure of seeing anyone send off one of these.  And for $350 you can launch a shoulder-fired rocket from a grenade launcher.  For this, the target was a cow that they bring out and tie to a fence post.  Someone

goes out and paints a big, black “X” on it and then instructs the gunman on how to place the sights so that the blast will send the animal’s insides out to the maximum coverage on the hillside behind it.  I didn’t get to see this.  I wanted to.  But I missed that by about an hour.  However, I did get to see the remains of the last poor karmically deviant incarnate to have been born into the bull that now drips from the karst formations jutting up from the Cambodian soil about 150 yards from the viewing area.  It’s truly something to behold.  They told me they would sell me the gun, but of course, there was no guaranteeing I would be able to leave the country with it.  It’s like the hooker-rule: It’s not the prostitute you need to worry about – it’s her driver.  That might not make much sense now.  But come out for a visit.  You will know what I mean.

In all that I saw, I was glad that I had been denied at the border.  And though I didn’t partake in any sexual or murderous activity, I did enjoy a “happy pizza.”  All you have to do is go to the Happy Herb Pizza shop and ask for it “extra happy.”  Of course, when I got the receipt, it came with a hog-leg joint the size of my middle finger, rolled tight as a drum and stinking like a hippy’s undercarriage.  So since I had a fourth floor hotel room, I sat out on the balcony and buzzed into the evening.  Hadn’t done it in a while, so I figured, “why not?”

It’s sort of funny, the way people think of pot, here.  The way they see it, it’s pretty childish.  They kind of see it as a thing that kids do (e.g. huffing glue) – especially since the grown-ups have moved on to quite harsher things.  They have pure heroine, uncut cocaine, tons of undocumented UXO (unexploded ordinance), enough armaments to field-suite every man, woman and child in all the neighboring countries and enough of a volatile overpopulation of impoverished women to deploy an infected band of prostitutes to the far reaches of every nation on earth.  So what’s a little weed gonna do?  I guess they figure they have bigger fish to fry.

Journal 14: April 9, 2010

I heard a man say at a funeral once that we come into this world with nothing and we leave it the same way.  But I can’t say as I agree with that.   Whatever god that inspired that phrase, I believe that coming and going with nothing isn’t really good business if the idea is to get better with time.

For the last few years, after the many things I have seen, all the stories and memories and feelings of friends around the globe I believe that I will be leaving this world with much more than I had when I  came into it.

And, speaking of god and nothing:  God and nothing have a lot in common, I think.  And that is been exemplified in every new place I see.  People really want to believe that there is something greater than ourselves out there.  It’s essentially become a system of ethos.  It takes lots of forms and it’s believed in different lights no matter where you go.  Sometimes it’s resembled in golden relics; sometimes in the flora and fauna that surround a people in a given demographic; sometimes it’s embodied in the form of celestial manifestation connected in a web of shimmering specks woven across the night sky.

I tend to believe that because it may well be so much greater than us that we can’t begin to imagine its true greatness with our feeble, little minds, how, therefore, can we deify an object which we can comprehend in order to represent it?

In any case, this marvelous place has plenty of proof of worship to the higher order of things.  Of course, I am speaking of the temples of Angkor.  The sheer size of this place is almost unimaginable.  The entire city was once the bustling capitol of the Angkor Empire.  And it’s hard to imagine it but there are no definitive answers as to why it was abandoned.

Recent history has given us many clues as to why most of it has been demolished.  From World War Two to the Vietnam War when it was used as a stronghold, bombed by opposition and even defaced by the communist regime, it’s surprising that there is really any of it left.  Nevertheless, though, I did get to see the one place that I have been hoping to see ever since the July, 2009 edition of National Geographic came out, detailing the recent theories as to the ultimate demise of this wonderful city whose presence here dates back a thousand years.

To get the greater understanding of just how massive, organized and functional this place once was, you have to look at it from the bird’s-eye-view.  Actually, you would be better off seeing it from the satellites hovering over us in space.  The Mekong River, which I have already crossed once so far in my journey through this beautiful chunk of the planet, is the most powerful and life-giving resource to this area (aside from the sun, of course).  And to see its uses here is only too simplistic.  You must first understand that it starts high in the Tibetan ice fields.  So not only is it uninhibited by the climatic rollercoaster of monsoons, dry seasons and everything in between; it’s also a force that pushes water down to a gradually flattening plane.  And this is the greatest contributing factor that led to the success of the largest, organized, urban complex in the pre-industrialized world.

Angkor, itself, is a city that can be seen in its entirety if you rent a motorcycle and stay for a week of doing nothing but exploring.  So in my few days there it was simply impossible to take it all in.  However, there were some highlights that I couldn’t have gone without.

For my first day, I knew that I couldn’t wait to see the city’s center piece, Angkor Wat (or Angkor Temple).  I got up around 4:30 a.m. just to get the sunrise which, I was told, graces the Cambodian plains just behind it.  And, as with most of the temples throughout the Buddhist world, its symmetry is denoted by entrances in the four, cardinal directions.  Therefore, when the sun rises at one entrance, it will set at another.  There is almost always a body of water to the south and, if possible, mountains to the north.  This is what is accepted by most cultures in the Asean as good “Fung Shui.”  It ensures that the proper energy flow enters, fluidly disperses itself throughout the structure and then exits – all in an organized and coordinated way.

Firstly, even just traveling to get there is an adventure.  I hired a tuk-tuk

driver to take me through the three days of studying the monuments.  And all the while I was happy I did.  There are no dirty windows to ruin shots of the local flavor.  Monks on scooters, villagers selling goods, the nature as it exists and the culture as it moves through the days here is all something pretty amazing — and therefore worth every penny of the $10/day fee for the open-air, motorized coach known throughout Indochina as the “tuk-tuk.”

In Angkor’s construction, there was a large moat surrounding the entire temple.  It was massive.  To cross it, it must have been at least 100 meters.  But its circumference around the four entrances was the really impressive part.  Not only did the moat extend for about 500 meters on each side, it was lined all the way around with a series of continuous steps on either side of the water.  This made the entire thing look more like the grandest set of stadium stands ever created by the sweat of man.  The effort of bringing these huge, stone slabs alone must have been a marvel of organization and coordination.  Looking across the moat in 180 degrees of the visual peripheral plane while seated on one of these slabs, one can imagine endless tiers of orange robes draped over shaved, tanned heads encircling this beautiful monument at the epicenter of the Angkor Empire.

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Not impressed yet?  Well, I haven’t described the wall that surrounds all of this, which is another 500 meters out from the moat.  This wall, which is overgrown by strangler figs and other flora, was, brick by brick, carved, crafted and carried from an area around the banks of the Mekong floodplain

about 400 kilometers away.  The carvings depict huge figures from elephants to gods to people and when it was complete it told a story of the successes of the kingdom as it had once reigned supreme in that area – extending to reaches farther than that of the Roman Empire.

And if after all of this you’re still not impressed, there is another wall that surrounds the entire city.  It’s just as fascinating and about ten times as impressive.  It has entryways with inscriptions and little sculptures – each one unique – that number about 1500 or so on each overarching entryway.  Each one intricately crafted and looking as though its care and meticulous attention was the devoted focus of a single man’s entire lifetime.

But back to the success and ingenuity of this place:  In reading up on the history and archeological discoveries of the area, it has been found that there were many structures – since destroyed by floods, droughts, even the builders, themselves – that are impressive by today’s standards.  These included underground tunnels, viaducts, aqueducts, and several different types of mass-water pumps which kept water in the city throughout the long, rainless months.

There were pools, moats, ponds.  There were even four massive, rectangular barays (one in each cardinal direction pointing toward Angkor Wat) which diverted water from many sources including the Siem Reap River.  A thousand years ago, to build something as large as one of these barays, as many as 200,000 Khmer workers may have been needed to pile up nearly 16 million cubic yards of soil in embankments 300 feet wide and three stories tall. It was truly a massive undertaking.  And it was so well thought-out that it was planned down to the days when the last bit of saturated soil from the retreating monsoons was set to take place.  They even knew which areas had the siltier, sandier and loamier soil that would need to be moistened first in order to keep continuous rice production.

This was the defining factor in the Khmer people’s success in rice production throughout the dry months and, consequently, their ability to extend their rule into larger and larger portions of their surrounding nations.  As Angkor was a moneyless society, all their influence came from the money-dependent countries around them.   Even today Angkor remains the largest single religious monument in the history of the world.

But that’s enough about the history.  On to the present.

The temples, the carvings, the tile-work, the massive stone structures ensconced in pagodas and tens- and hundreds-of-meters-high temples; it was almost too much to take in.  But I did my best anyway.

The gallery below should show you a glimpse of some of the wonderful things there are to see here.  Aside from the guards posted at the front of most of the temples, there is really no one that walks around telling you that you can’t climb on things.  There are a few signs here and there, but for the most part, no one really watches over you.  So I climbed.  I scurried.  I risked a broken back.  But I got lots of great shots.

Please enjoy these as I have enjoyed being here and taking them.  And thanks again for reading.  It has brought me great pride and personal pleasure to have heard back from all of you about my trips.  Keep them coming and let me know what you think, what you might want to see more of and what are your favorite parts.

I will not likely be able to write again until I reach my next top-10 must-see location: Vietnam.

Until then, all my best!

[Gallery will be posted when photos finish uploading]

A grateful thanks and citing of information goes to the National Geographic Society for the July 2009 edition of their wonderful flagship publication, National Geographic Magazine.