Burma is a place that feels like a third world country, because it is. I went there during the hot season, March and April, 90-100 degrees and humid in the day. The landscape is typically dusty and brown. The tropical sun is blinding as usual.

Buddhas are known to sprout in soil with low levels of vegetation.

In the cities the wide main throughfares are well-maintained, but the side roads are broken and gravelly or dusty and rocky. The more interesting roads are cluttered with street vendors, pedestrians, honking cars and motorcycles trying to bully their way through the crowds, and lined with restaurants and shops in big open garage-like spaces or under bamboo roofs, walls optional.

Roving vendors take to the streets early in the morning, to get a head of the competition.

In the bright wet heat open shade is preferable to the indoors. Most Burmese cannot afford air conditioning—or the expensive power regulators to prevent them from being fried by the poorly maintained electrical grid, if there even is an electrical grid. This electricity is sometimes rationed. So is the water. The fancier places run their own generators and wells and septic tanks. In the poorer areas people count themselves content with have four walls and a roof. Some have no walls and a roof.

The lake houses of Inle.

Even after the opening of Burma a few years ago and the subsequent tourist ‘boom’, foreigners are still rare here. Many of the tourist spots are primarily for Burmese, particularly the (relatively) wealthier Bamar majority. The popular attractions include the many and varied tribes of Burma and Buddhist holy sites. Westerners are always targets of curiosity.

By the way, if you want to go to Burma, go soon. As part of a series of reforms starting around 2011, Burma opened itself to almost all travelers. Already there are lodging shortages in the high season, although there was not much lodging to start—guesthouses must bribe the military to obtain expensive ‘foreigner’ licenses. Burma also opened istelf to heavy industrialization and international investment—a lot of that from the Chinese.

For much of its modern history Burma was a closed communist dictatorship like North Korea, with a dictator who was perhaps less competent and more insane. It is this dictatorship that gave the country the disputed alternate name ‘Myanmar’, named after the ethnic majority. Burma was once plugned into an economic crisis because General Ne Win, then the superstitious ruler of Burma, banned all currency and replaced it with a new series based on his favorite number 75 to celebrate his 75th birthday. Later on, he decided his favorite number was actually 90 and there followed another economic crisis and a coup d’etat. Now the Burmese prefer crisp American dollars printed after 2009, each bill carefully inspected before being accepted. Bills with ‘CB’ serial numbers are rejected because, I am told, ‘CB’ stands for ‘counterfeit bill’.

The traffic in Burma obeys the same rule as geese attempting to mate: the right of way belongs to whoever is largest and honkiest. The roads are crowded with blaring big rigs, busses, minibusses, trucks with a few or a few dozen locals sitting on the beds and clinging to the sides, these half-motorcycle half-truck jalopies, old cars from past generations, scooters, the oocasional sport bike, the occasional Jeep or Land cruiser, bicycles, pedestrians, bald monks and bald nuns and processions thereof; but the most common vehicle on the crowded, broken roads are cheap, single-cylinder shifter-scooters that daringly weave through the chaotic traffic from point A to point B, in accordance with the Pythagorean principle that the fastest path between two points is one most likely to kill you. Most cars are left-hand drive even though traffic flows on the right. Legend has it that General Ne Win was advised by a soothsayer to “move to the right”, and the generalissimo took this admonition more literally than was perhaps intended.

As a tourist you will often find yourself on the motorcycle-trucks, the preferred way to get around routes that don’t merit a van in places that don’t merit taxi service. The front half is a bike with a giant single-cylinder engine, the rear half a welded steel cabin with two or three minimal benches. It belches black smoke as the big air-cooled two stroke spins the whirling crankshaft that drives the rear wheels. You can squeeze into one of these maybe eight tourists or maybe twenty Burmese. Don’t relax your posture—the naked steel bars smack you uncomfortably as your ride bounces chiropractically over the rough dirt roads.

The landscape around the cities is visible through a haze, darkly; the further mountains rendered greyer in the distance until the grey horizon engulfs all beyond. Burma is about as polluted as you would expect from a poor area being overrun by Chinese factories and slash-and-burn farmers. Rice paddies are cleared and burned twice a year, and, due to lack of infrastructure, trash is burned all year round. The wet heat makes the smell particulalry acrid. The cities are dominated a cacophony of blaring vehicles, hawkers, shouting children, shouting adults, Buddhist cantors, pagoda bells, the occasional Muslim prayer tower, the occasional stray dog. The streets smell of food, sewage, and burning trash. The sun beats down an intense heat, delivering twice as much solar radiation as we get in America, averaging 96 degrees during hot season. Mosquitoes (carrying malaria) swim in the stifling air. Air conditioning is rare even in those guesthouses that are licensed for Westerners. Traditional food comes from pots that have been sitting out in the heat, and is served with side dishes: hot chili, various vegetables, sauteed leaves of some kind; the waiters brushing away the flies as they move them from one patron to the next. But the Burmese also like food fried to order; you might want to eat that instead.

Sugar cane for freshly made juice… do you want flies with that?

I wanted to never leave. It is hard to say why. I don’t want to say something like “despite the inconveniences…” It is not that the good outweighed the bad. It is more that there was something in the air in Burma, even in the cities; some feeling of reality that made the bad seem not so bad, maybe even necessary, inseparable. But of course any such ‘bad was outweighed by the good, no contest.

The Burmese are deeply religious, and although their religion did not reach the architectural and cultural heights of Thailand or Cambodia; they compensate in volume, audacity and devotion.

These ‘monk trails’ are a relatively common sight. This one has over a thousand monks.

The world’s largest reclining Buddha. There is some kind of diorama exhibit in his head.

Inside Buddha’s head, Buddhists are warned about how sinners are punished in the afterlife.

A confused-looking child is paraded before being pledged to a monestary, for life.

Pagodas are often found in hard-to-reach places, like this big rock in the middle of a lake.

It’s easy to immerse yourself in this country—the harsh climate and lack of comforts forces immersion upon you. The heat and light and atmosphere puts everything in Technicolor. There are no cell phones, very little Internet, no screens everywhere to distract you from where you are.

English is surprisingly common in the cities but disappears as soon as you venture out. The language barrier will not stop people, particularly children, from shouting things like “Hello bye bye!” in various permutations. Many of the homes are partially enclosed, and the Burmese are wont to hang out outdoors anyway in the hot weather.

I have not encountered a friendlier group of people. The Burmese are infalliably open, friendly, full of cheer. As in neighboring Thailand, negativity is a sin, a bad interaction a loss of face for everyone involved. Their honor is legendary—I have several stories about travelers losing things—fat wads of cash, wallets, iPhones worth six months’ farm wages—but never once heard of anything bad happening to a traveler.

The traditional one-legged style of rowing.

She spoke no English but made fantastic food.

There and back again

This likely concludes my travel blogging. Among the places I ended up not blogging about were Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Bosnia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, China, and Korea, and that is a lot of places. Over time, the wonder of sightseeing gave way to the fun of experience, and traveling became mostly about living in a culture. Reflecting on these experiences in the form of a blog post seemed almost inappropriate, as though the act of reflection would take them away. In addition, I had been freelancing and keeping busy with work on the road, and these two factors made blogging less compelling, but there are some places that deserve a blog post.

Burma was a place I did not want to leave. The broken ground below you and the bright sun above, the naked simplicity and poverty, the swimming hot air, the sights and sounds and smells, the society that wants to welcome you with its best face, the traffic that wants to kill you. The cities and towns and villages of Burma are charged with reality and all your senses make you aware of it. But as a traveler you enjoy privileges these people do not enjoy. You can afford a room with air conditioning, if you need it; medical care if you are sick; a ride to wherever you want to go; unlike most desperately poor places, Burma is a safe place where nothing bad will happen because you can afford for nothing bad to happen and there are no other dangers… So here is life in a more raw state, but for us, with a safety net. The charged reality is not so real to you as those who must suffer it, for whom a mosquito bite or a fever could be a death sentence and the daily bowl of rice is no guarantee. The people here would abandon it all, they might even kill—indeed, in Burma’s history people killed for far less—for a grasp at the comfortable Western life that seemed now to me so unconvincing, like a painting of something too good to be true.

Credits

The headline picture of Bagan is in the public domain.

Stirling is home to William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, the Scottish Monarchy, and “Scotland’s only African safari”. Stirling—as readers of this blog know—was the key to Scotland; the only convenient gateway between the Highlands and the fertile Lowlands. And the key to Stirling is a river crossing between two groups of hills.

On one hill is Stirling Castle, one of the UK’s great castles. The castle and its battery of cannons watch over the village below. It was for a while the favored residence of the Scottish monarchy, and has been beseiged sixteen times, variously by English fighting the Scots, Scots fighting the English, and Scots fighting other Scots.

On a crag near the other hills, the Wallace Monument.

Look in the middle, on the shadowy hill.

Down below is Stirling Bridge.

In the 12th century, a conquering English army had been cutting through Scotland, and only a barely organized rabble stood to oppose them at Stirling Bridge. The English were confident and decided to cross the bridge three abreast. A relatively unknown minor Scottish noble named William Wallace had taken command on the other side, and decided to let about half the English cross the bridge, emerging disorganized onto the muddy banks, while the Scots stood ready. You can guess what happened next.

The bridge, it is said, collapsed as the English piled up on top of each other in retreat, a desperate mass of bodies living and dead. That might be a legend, but the current bridge is not the old one.

The Highlands

Past Stirling are the Highlands, and past the Highlands are more Highlands. There’s a whole bunch of touristy stuff in the southern Highlands. Loch Lomond and Glen Coe are here, as well as a large number of holiday towns and Scotch distilleries. The Southern Highlands are a favorite holiday destination among the English, among the most beautiful places in the United Kingdom, yet not too far from the civilized Central Belt.

Here us Americans have an advantage, because unlike the English we are used to bountiful nature, and we are used to long drives. Many of the spots in the Southern Highlands had a beauty that were—for me at least—slightly routine. They are breathtaking as such beauty usually is, but there are a thousand places that, whereas they might not reach that stunning level, have overall a similar feel. So, you adventurous travelers (inasmuch as driving in a car is adventurous), brave the roundabouts and the narrow, wrong-way-oriented roads and keep going. The Great Glen Fault divides the Highlands in two, Loch Ness settled in the long fault valley. Pass the fault, beware the monster and avoid the tourist traps and eventually reach this alien land…

This is a desolate land. Many of the roads have one lane for both directions, a design with which Americans might not be familiar. If you meet another car one of you will have to pull over, or reverse to the nearest spot with enough room to do so. There are more sheep than people, and there are wild sheep also, with few natural predators to bother them. There are also free-roaming cows of the hairy and non-hairy varieties, and various other animals, but the sheep are seen more often because under their placidity lies a paradoxical, blithe adventurousness. They wandering over roads and hike up precarious, scrabbly slopes upon which men and Scotsmen fear to tread. In an economic system called crofting—held over from feudal times, written into law uniquely for the Highlands as private capitalism overtook most of the farmland in the UK—land rights come with the right to graze sheep on public land. Often, these lands are public parks, and the trails and roads are shared with the free-roaming sheep.

Haggis in its larval form.

But the Highlands do not have hours-long stretches of total depopulation as one might find in the States; there are always little towns here and there, often with only a few dozen or few hundred people. Nor is the scenery ever boring. There are few flat places in the far Highlands.

The Highlands are the source of most things that we have come to think of as ‘Scotland’. Kilts, tartans and tweed; bagpipes and Gaelic songs; the impoverished crofters with communal farms; Highlander warriors and the thin red line; these all belong to the Highlands. The Lowlands were fairly Anglicized throughout history—the Scots language itself coming from Middle English[1]—until the revival of Scottish nationalism in the late 18th century onward.

The ‘Thin Red Line’. Highlander infantry face down Russian cavalry in the Crimean War. The Russians were so intimidated by their fearlessness they turned back, from almost certain victory, on their own accord. No kidding. And yes, they really did wear kilts and crotch purses into battle.

Don’t expect to find many kilts or Highland warriors today, however, but you will find people who are quite friendly, down-to-earth, and very very Scottish. But not too many of them: The upper Highlands are sparsely populated and sparsely civilized, with almost no industry. The economy breaks down approximately like this:

• 33% tourism
• 33% sheep
• 33% vast quantities of nothing
• 1% Scotch whisky

and the far reaches are like something from a science fiction movie, maybe one directed by Ridley Scott. They are remote and alien. There are fewer people per square mile than Sweden, Norway, or almost anywhere else. The weather is by turns sunny and stormy, and like a quantum field, it is constantly changing, defies prediction, and sometimes exists in several states at once.

The sun breaks as a wave of clouds passes overhead. A beautiful day. Now turn around…

Two pictures, same spot, same time, facing different directions. And in an hour things will change yet again.

John Fogerty once sang about rain on a sunny day. He should have visited the Isle of Skye, the only place where I’ve seen hail on a sunny day. But, one supposes, hail on a sunny day doesn’t have the same poetic quality, especially when you are caught in it.

I could have stayed here a lot longer, as I had not even reached the strangest and most remote areas, but I made promises at my next destination…

Bonus pictures

A foggy graveyard below the halls of Stirling Castle.

Driving through the southern Highlands at sunrise.

Eilean Donan castle.

Abraham Lincoln in an Edinburgh graveyard. Why is Abraham Lincoln here? Who knows.

There he is again! This time, outside the UK Supreme Court in London.

Footnotes

[1] There are some people who like to argue about whether Scots is a language or a dialect. The former camp has gotten around to making a Scots Wikipedia. Wikipædia is a project tae big a free encyclopædia in mony leids. This Scots edeetion wis shapit on 23rd Juin 2005. We hae 18,130 airticles the nou.

Credits

The Thin Red Line, painted by Robert Gibb in 1881, is in the public domain.

The green line from Stirling to the Firth of Clyde, the fjord pointing toward Glasgow, is about twenty-five miles; craggy and embroidered with rivers, and is most conveniently crossed near Stirling. (If you cross further west, the Highlands will likely force you towards Stirling anyway). Most of the great battles of the Scottish-English conflicts were fought in the circled area, and hereos were born fighting over that green line[1].

South of there is an expanse of empty lowlands, the so-called “Uplands”, which are even less populated than the Highlands. There’s almost nothing there but hills and they only present a two days’ march for an English army. But beyond, the terrain, the population, and “neck” of Scotland presented natural defenses against the English.

Edinburgh is at the very edge of the Central Belt and on the wrong side of all those natural defenses. The English never took Scotland by force[2], but they took Edinburgh repeatedly. Edinburgh was once invaded by the English after the Union of Great Britain, perhaps for old times’ sake, and was also twice invaded by Scots.

But Edinburgh sat next to the best port Scotland had at the time (called Leith, about two miles away) and so it became the economic and cultural capital–and eventually the real capital–of Scotland. But owing to its unique defensive situation—that is, the lack of one—while other old cities built outwards, Edinburgh built up, and over, and sideways within the city walls.

A maze of twisty little passages

Edinburgh is a city of mazes. Everywhere is a maze. Many parts of the city live on two or three levels. You might try to access a building from the George IV bridge, only to find out you should have entered from the Cowgate, which crosses thirty or so feet under the bridge. The old roads tend to snake up and down the hills, and new roads plow over and through and atop buildings. Between them are a maze of alleys called “closes”, often covered, that go through staircases and old stone archways and hidden secluded squares. One gets the feeling of being in a Dungeons and Dragons city, or perhaps an open-air Hogwarts. (The first of the Harry Potter books was written mostly from cafés in the Old Town.)

One of Edinburgh’s hidden squares, accessible only from dark alleys.

A dark alley, perhaps useful for finding hidden squares. If you have a wizard in your traveling party, make sure to cast Level 2 “Find Traps” before proceeding.

The George IV bridge from on top. Note the street going down and left…

The George IV bridge from below. There aren’t any stairs, you have to take the slopey, twisty side streets and alleys to get down here. There are some allegedly haunted vaults and a lot of good bars.

These buildings are built right up against each other, and often shops, pubs, hotels, and hostels span multiple buildings. The hallways are themselves twisty and go up and down where they don’t align. One hostel I was at had a staircase to nowhere, just a blank wall at the top. One hotel required you to enter from a completely different street if you were on a certain floor, even though the floor was in between two others accessible the normal way.

When all this was built and lived in, the plumbing was inadequate and waste tended to flow down into a lake beyond the walls and below the castle cliff.

Not pictured: the city walls, since torn down. Also not pictured: a giant lake made of poop.

On some days, the winds over the lake of sewage blew in an unfortunate direction, which is how Edinburgh got its nickname…

Auld Reekie

In the old city the wealthy and the poor and the educated and the illiterate lived in the same towering stone buildings. Social classes could not avoid each other as they might have in London, and matters of birth and station in life mattered far less to Scots in the first place. An English observer wrote:

On the same building lived families of all grades and classes, each in its flat in the same stair—the sweep and caddie in the cellars, poor mechanics in the garrets, while in the intermediate stories might live a noble, a lord of session, a doctor or city minister, a dowager countess, or writer; higher up, over their heads, lived shopkeepers, dancing masters or clerks…

The city tolerated Catholics, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, atheists, loyalists, Jacobites, nationalists. They did not live in peace, as Edinburgh (and Scotland) frequently erupted in violence. But they lived together, in the closest of peaces that the Scots would tolerate, probably. Social circles were highly mixed with many people of many trades and social classes frequenting the same pubs and clubs. One influential social club—the “Easy club”—would turn nobody away. This sort of densely packed social mingling, part perhaps due to Scottish attitudes but certainly partly forced, was unprecedented in history, and it created an outpouring of thought unprecedented in history. After the Union of Great Britain, Edinburgh became the center of the “Scottish Enlightenment”, which produced the philosophy of utilitarianism, the field of economics, and significant contributions to humanism and empiricism, among other things.

Dramatic pose + lens flare = great philosopher. It is known.

How natural, one imagines, that Adam Smith lived in Edinburgh, who first peeled back the layers of society to examine what made a society prosperous instead of poor. And David Hume, perhaps when walking these old cobblestones in the bustle of the crowd, observed:

“that however other nations may rival us in poetry, and excel us in some other agreeable arts, improvements in reason and philosophy can only be owing to a land of toleration and of liberty…”

and Hume, the empiricist atheist who rejected most religion and philosophy as the work of fools, no doubt was grateful that he lived in a city of “toleration and liberty”, or at least the closest you could get in that time of history. As these two men virtually invented modern economics and science, respectively, one must admit that of toleration and liberty did a pretty good job. I have not even touched of the dozen or so other famous philosophers and writers that lived in or passed through Edinburgh.

The end of the whole mess

The city began expanding outwards starting in the mid 1760s, and the acceleration of its expansion coincides with the dwindling of the Scottish Enlightenment. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The new homes for the wealthy, built across the valley north of Edinburgh, were large, single-family, and were planned with entire separate alleys for servants and deliveries. I wonder if they thought they were leaving anything behind in the smelly, cramped old city. But when we shelter ourselves and choose our circumstances and comforts, we hide from part of the world and miss out on some categories of humanity, as Edinburgh lost its Hume-anity as its top citizens depopulated the city and the light of the Scottish Enlightenment faded from within its walls. This is a good lesson for the traveler: live in the world, eschew those segregating comforts and luxuries, and learn.

Credits

The map of Scotland is in the public domain.

The first picture of Edinburgh Old Town is by Ronnie McDonald and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The “hidden square” in Old Town is by Mike Pennington and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The picture of the Scott Monument through Advocates’ Close is by (Eve Anderson)[http://www.eveanderson.com] and is licensed under the Creative Commons 1.0 license.

The picture of the George IV Bridge is by Derek Harper and reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The picture of the George IV Arch over Cowgate is by Kim Traynor, and reproduced here under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Kim’s photographs are all over Wikipedia, and a few of us actually met him taking a picture of the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh, whereupon he gave us about a half hour lecture on Edinburgh’s Old Parliament, Mercat Crosses, and quite a bit more.

The identity of the author of the engraving of Old Town is unknown to me.

Footnotes

[1] Specifically, William Wallace at Stirling Bridge, and Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn.

[2] Cromwell managed to take more or less all of the Lowlands, but it’s arguable whether that counts as England invading Scotland, since it was all part of the big civil war.

That sounds like something from a James Bond movie. A villain sits in his villain chair, petting his cat, cackling, “When my grand plan is complete, civilization will be destroyed and remade according to my plan, for my people.”

But I mean that this was actually attempted. A military group seized control of Cambodia and set to work emptying cities and eliminating entire classes and groups of people. Their leader, Pol Pot, was a man ordinary in intellect but unusual in his unbalanced paranoia; fear of of other races, other classes, and hidden forces. He struggled academically when he studied in France and fell in with Marxist anarchists before dropping out and returning to the revolution in Cambodia. He must have had some talent for leadership, because he ended up in charge, and his philosophy had sufficient appeal among the violent.

Marxists were already fighting in Cambodia when Pol Pot arrived on the scene. Marx taught that all profit was exploitation, all the bourgeoisie were profiteers, and the system was built in their interests. The exploitation of workers was encoded into society’s structure. Only a workers’ revolution, setting up the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, could ultimately be trusted with power and capital. But this is not what Pol Pot believed.

He distrusted intellectuals and felt that civilization itself was fundementally exploitative. By this point in history, it was known how the Russians had just replaced the old system of exploitation with one of their own. The pattern repeated itself throughout the Communist world and he feared it would repeat in Cambodia. There was some kind of institutional memory: the old people wanted to hang on to power and the old system tended to perpetuate itself.

When Pol Pot and the revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, took charge, they decided the system must be wiped out, and everyone that comprised it.

The house of skulls at the Killing Fields.

The Killing Fields of Choung Ek lie outside Phnom Penh, to the south. They are not far, but the drive through Phnom Penh’s chaotic, seething traffic make it seem much farther. It is one of three hundred killing fields that we know about.

In its time, the Rouge managed to kill about 1.5 to 2.2 million people, depending on who you ask. There were only 7 or 8 million people in the entire country.

The depressions are excavated mass graves. Victims were buried alive, to save bullets.

Clothes recovered from the graves.

The mood at the Killing Fields is somber, still and silent. Most here are foreigners. People don’t talk or make eye contact very much. They wander through like ghosts in a graveyard, listening to electronic guide devices that speak only to them.

In addition to all the foreigners, there are some Khmer visitors.

Bracelets are left here to remember loved ones lost.

There is a marsh on the field grounds if you want to get away from the skulls—but this is no guarantee, as rain and pedestrian traffic naturally unearths new bones all the time.

The purpose of all this killing was something called “Year Zero”. The old society would be destroyed, and a new Khmer-only agrarian paradise put in its place. The past and its memory and legacy would be eradicated. There would be no history before Year Zero.

The “Old People” of the old society were eliminated, either directly, or by reeducation via forced labor. “To keep you is no gain,” they were told, “to destroy you is no loss.” These Old People were anyone connected with the class system that exploited farmers. This included all city dwellers, bureaucrats, capitalists, supporters of the old regime, the wealthy, the well-educated, intellectuals, and schoolteachers. They also killed Christians, Muslims, active Buddhists, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, other foreigners, and anyone else they didn’t like. Rouge cadres would cross the Vietnam border for no other reason than to massacre villages of Vietnamese. Cities were emptied for the most part, with only a few cities like Phnom Penh retaining a small core governmental seat.

The Rouge took charge of the economy. Southeast Asia supports two rice harvests a year. They demanded three harvests, then four. Those who didn’t make quota were class traitors.

At the S-21 prison in central Phnom Penh you can read the confessions of those they tortured. Some prisoners would weave outlandish stories about how they worked for the CIA or the fascists or the Viet Cong, throwing in details about drugs, women, dishonesty and other sins. Other prisoners were only farmers, tortured into implicating other farmers.

The S-21 prison.

A victim of S-21.

This revolution, like many bloodthirsty revolutions, began with Marx. Such revolutionaries believed in Marxism like a religion, but they called it a science. They felt they understood the gears of the world, and could ultimately control them. It was considered proven that the revolution would come, and they would be at its vanguard. Pol Pot arguably fell away from Marxism, or perhaps just cut to its revolutionary core, throwing out the intellectual pretense but retaining the burning moral purpose and sense of inevitability.

The Rouge taught that Cambodia belonged to the Khmer farmer and him alone. The history of Cambodia was of class oppressing class and race oppressing race, with the Khmer usually on the losing end; throughout the centuries variously exploited by foreign invaders, colonialists, and their own people; starving as they farmed so others could feast. It is easy to see how this idea had appeal.

Like any good religion, Marxism (including Pol Pot’s version) has its own eschatology: the so-called end of history, the Communist paradise where there would be no power, no want, no suffering, no exploitation, not even the command structure of society; all people living in self-organized harmony. Pol Pot said, yes, this could happen in your lifetime, once you drive out all the exploiters and the system of exploitation. If you thought you were bringing about paradise on Earth, isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t that worth dying for?

Isn’t that worth other people dying for?

The Rouge lasted three years before Vietnam invaded with the intent of deposing the regime. They took Phnom Penh in seventeen days.

It’s said that 75% of Cambodia is too young to remember the Rouge, partly because so many of the old generation were killed. But some visitors to S-21 let it be known what they thought of the Rouge leaders.

I bet a lot of people go to these places because they feel they should, become sad for a while, and then go on. Floating through the Phnom Penh death museum circuit then wandering on to Angkor or a beach resort in Sihanoukville. My tuk-tuk driver seemed a little cynical about the whole thing. “Your country kill people too, right?” he asked as I returned from S-21. “America kill too, right?” I didn’t have a good response.

But it is good to see these places and get, at least, a deeper impression and knowledge of the shallow moral clarity by which man forsakes man and the eagerness with which people jump to violence. The story of Red Cambodia is not the only such story, nor the most exemplary, but it is fair to rank it among the most brutal in recent memory.

I’m drafting this post on an airplane, going back home to America. I didn’t get the first-class upgrade I wanted, but I did get an extra legroom seat. On an in-flight video, Jimmy Kimmel is directing blindfolded karate masters to attempt to kick open a rotating set of piñatas. The blind martial artists kick around in circles like epileptic Rockettes while the audience laughs uproariously. We surround ourselves with frivolity and luxury, and our home part of the world has not, in living memory, really suffered.

Angkor is an otherworld, sprawling ruins of an ancient and massive civilization, overgrown by the Cambodian jungle. How big is it? Imagine a temple so large it can take 15 or 20 minutes just to walk from one end to the other. Now imagine there are a half dozen of them.

The outer wall of Angkor Wat. The famous central towers are barely visible to either side of the main gate.

The outer moat of the temple. Would that make it the moat in God’s eye?

Inside the walls. Like old medieval castles, the temple sheltered Angkorians who lived on the grounds.

Getting closer…

The sanctum from up close.

Angkor was an agricultural society with elaborate and sprawling infrastructure. If you think of a bunch of farmers with temples and complex irrigation system, you probably think of something like the Maya. We are learning that Angkor dwarfed those civilizations. Archeologists have discovered enough infrastructure to support over a million people over an area the size of Los Angeles, making it the largest metropolis of the pre-Industiral Age, and they are still discovering more.

The Angkorians liked to put temples in the middle of their huge reservoirs, called barays.

The baray, taken from the middle of the boardwalk.

The baray temple, which has been flooded.

Wikipedia claims there are 72 “major” temples, and over a thousand smaller ones–that we know about.

The front entrance is about 4 feet tall. What is this, a temple for ANTS?

Perhaps the most interesting temple is Ta Prohm, which you’ve probably seen in stock photos or movies. Part of Tomb Raider was filmed here.

When the French colonialists began restoring Angkor, they left Ta Prohm unmaintained as a “concession to the general taste for the picturesque”.

It takes several days to see the major temples here, but I only had one. There is too much to see and everything is too big. Evidently, throughout the history of the Angkor empire, they kept getting together and saying, hey, you know what would be a good idea? If we took this square kilometer and planted a temple. You can never have too many airport sized temples.

Occasionally you spy these free-standing stacks of stones. I think it’s a Buddhist exercise of some kind, stacking up stones.

After Angkor was conquered by the Thai king Ayutthaya, the city was abandoned. Much of the evidence of the civilization, the million people that lived in Angkor, had been cleared out, except for the temples. Nobody knows why. It must not have been violently destroyed–the Angkorians must have packed up their things and abandoned it, either before, during, or after the fall of Angkor, or some combination of all three, for some unknown reason. At the very least, once the civic infrastructure went unmaintained, there was no possibility of Angkor supporting its population.

After that Angkor was eaten by the jungle, eliminating most of the remaining signs of civilization, with only Angkor Wat being (poorly) maintained. I’m told many Angkorians lived in impermanent structures inside the walled cities and temples, so those were also lost. When explorers “rediscovered” Angkor, they were baffled. Why all this stuff in the middle of nowhere, with no sign of the civilization that supported it?

At the time people knew little of Cambodian history, and did not believe the old stories of an ancient and powerful Khmer kingdom. Some theorized that some other people built Angkor, maybe the Thai or Chinese from thousands of years ago.

A French explorer wrote of Angkor Wat:

One of these temples—a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo—might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.

Imagine what that explorer must have felt. Acre after acre of ruins, closer investigation revealing they were quite elaborate when they were built.

It must have been electrifying, discovering the ghost of an enormous civilization.

Ozymandias, is that you?

If you get to an outlying temple early–around sunrise–you can maybe feel a little of what the old explorers must have felt.

But the tourist masses only take a few hours to overrun anywhere you’d like to go.

And even a reality TV show.

The whole place is swarming with beggar children. The kids sell touristy goods and handcrafts for fifty cents to a few dollars, and if you try to take a picture, will ask for money. But if you distract them with, say, a game of Angry Birds, you can get a picture for free.

Despite its fame, Angkor has only recently re-become a tourist destination. Though their government fell in 1978, the Khmer Rouge was hanging out in the area until the 90s. Having bloodthirsty xenophobic Communist fighters in the area was not good for tourism.

The GDP of Cambodia is a mere $1,150 a year–they cannot refuse the tourist dollar. The nearby town, Siem Reap, is turning from a sleepy rural city into somewhere resembling the dirtier areas of Thailand or Vietnam. The tourist feet in Angkor wear down the ruined sandstone, and criminals steal from the ruins (sometimes with arms and armored vehicles) to sell on the black market. Many places are being restored, partly out of necessity.

How long can Angkor remain Angkor? As time marches on it will undoubtedly see more controlled access, more restoration, as the ruins are lost to the opposed forces of both conservation and wear. The old is becoming new again. That’s too bad–I like the old.

Entrance to Chiang Mai’s Sunday market. from the ground. It actually goes on forever, or at least, about a kilometer.

In the Chiang Mai market, occasionally the loudspeakers will play the Thai national anthem. Then everyone stops and stands motionless for the duration of the music, like some weird science fiction movie.

Goods range from used clothes, new clothes, art, the usual touristy stuff, street food, and so on. A lot of places sell the same rotation of counterfeit clothing and T-shirts, but my favorite market find was this baffling T-Shirt, which I’ve never seen before or since:

Yes, those are Star Wars characters wearing badly photoshopped sunglasses. Google has no results for the phrase “Pimpwan Tedalive”. Maybe this will be the first?

There are also markets of a more modern variety…

A fraction of Siam Square in Bangkok, where six enormous malls together form the largest indoor shopping complex in the world.

…and markets of a less savory variety. These ‘special entertainment zones’ have a later curfew and are cordoned off by police.

Ladyboys hang out outside (they’re generally not allowed in bars) and solicit passers-by.

Traveling companion Anatoly under attack from a ladyboy. His smile is forced. I may or may not have encouraged the ladyboys for the sake of a photo op.

There are wats everywhere, particularly in Chiang Mai, the old capital of the ancient Lanna kingdom. In the old city, you can’t walk a block without encountering something like the below. Wats every corner, every block, every street. They’re all kept in good condition and you can freely walk in and out, though you must take off your shoes first.

Chiang Mai is also known for its adventure tourism.

Skateboarding in the sky. That’s a do-rag under the helmet.

The zipline company provides this manual linear cellulose brake, known to the layperson as a “bamboo cane”. You apply it to the zipline cable to slow down. Careful, it tries to jump out of your hand.

The south of Thailand is known for its beauty. Everywhere you go, you’re in paradise. Some things are famous–Phuket, Ko Phi Phi (from the film The Beach), the full moon parties of Haad Rin. Other places are less famous but just as beautiful.

The longtail boats of Ao Nang, used for beach hopping.

It’s not all beaches–the jungle has its own virtues.

The cliffs of Krabi are known for their climbing.

A Big Buddha overlooks the north point of the island of Ko Samui. The nearby beach is known as Big Buddha Beach. Easy to remember.

This is a low-key beach, with mostly Thai-owned (and not infrequently Thai-patronized) resorts and businesses. A welcome change from the party resorts that grow like a fungus over South Thailand. The time there went by too quickly.

Lastly, below is a mummy wearing sunglasses. They say he died in this exact position, while meditating, whereupon his body miraculously auto-mummified. Except for his eyes, which rotted away, so he wears sunglasses.

The chill-out eternal.

There is something about this picture that sums up the country–this revered religious figure, adorned with sunglasses, surrounded by tourist gawkers (not pictured). The sacred and the profane.

One does not often feel like you’re touching the ‘real Thailand’, but rather one feels in an alternate reality, engineered by enterprising Thais and reserved for white people, which runs alongside Thai society and sort of resembles the real Thailand but is always apart from it and always trying to get your money. The south is most like this, the north least; but the feeling is everywhere to some extent.

As a traveler you are a weird combination of high-status foreigner, low-status other, and neutral-status ATM, and you share race/nationality/skin color with a constant money-dispensing flow of backpackers, bogans, bros, adventure tourists, sex tourists, retirees, and resorters. There are few places on earth closer to paradise, yet it was a major relief to get away from that constant feeling of travel as business transaction.

I think the only way to know the real Thailand is to be born Thai. As for the rest of us: Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich wieder aus…

I could tell you how nice it was to hang out in such a paradise, to hike in the jungle, to bike through the rainforest mountains, or for a swim in the beautiful water before relaxing and reading a book and sipping $3 cocktails in the warm tropical sun when at home it’s the dead of winter. I could tell you all about how awesome that is. But I’m sure you already know that.

On the same island as the above rainforest, I saw one kid beat another kid until he could no longer stand. Neither kid looked to me to be older than 12. A crowd of onlookers cheered as one child pounded another to the ground, where he lay for quite some time.

But that’s Muay Thai, Thailand’s national combat sport, in which children suffering head trauma is an exciting way to start an event night before the grown-ups come out and repeat the exercise.

Muay Thai, like other forms of fighting in Southeast Asia, is designed primarily to be real-world useful in, for example, a street fight.

A Thai street fighter faces a Japanese challenger.

Excluding ground wrestling, almost anything you’d do in a fair fight is legal. This includes elbows, kicks, shin strikes, knee strikes, some types of throws, and upright grappling. However, unlike mixed martial arts, Muay Thai is expressly a combat sport–so there is no ground game, because whereas ground fighting is effective one on one, it’s too vulnerable in combat or street fighting. Nevertheless, Muay Thai is overall the preferred striking art of mixed martial arts fighters. It’s realistic, unrestrained, brutal, and effective.

The right way to watch Muay Thai is to go to the locals’ favorite stadium in Bangkok, and sit in the stands. I didn’t do this so I had to settle for a more touristy fight in the gulf coast island of Ko Samui. There were plenty of locals there, also, and the atmosphere had a rowdy, low-budget feel.

About 1/4 of the audience.

I first learned of the match from a promotional show at the local market. A giant-headed mascot wandered around handing out pamphlets while the boxers demonstrated their fighting prowess. The mascot was popular with kids.

A traditional Muay Thai demonstration, promoting the next day’s fight.

A cartoony mascot lures a child to violence.

These fights on Ko Samui are still of a high-quality, attracting many locals, and tend to pit local champions against top foreign fighters. The foreign challenger comes out first to loud music with a flag-waving herald. The Thai native follows.

Also note the flags above the arena.

Unlike in, say, Japanese sumo, the Thai seem open and enthusiastic about fighting foreigners.

Each fight is proceeded by a ritual. The boxers must pay respect to the corners of the ring, then spend a few minutes doing a little dance to stretch and limber up. The dances are quite strange. They remind me of a Tae Bo instructor with a hangover.

These dance rituals allegedly are full of meaning, conveying information about the dancer’s attitude, fighting style, origin, gym, trainer, &c. Like any good Buddhist ritual, going through the motions helps the fighter recall his life and his training, and helps him focus on the match ahead. Likewise, the dances (which are several minutes long) also helped me focus on a purpose–to go get a beer before the fighting starts.

The halftime show was a performer who called himself the “Son of Rambo”. (It turns out Rambo is highly admired in Southeast Asia.) The Son of Rambo stood on a tightrope and juggled things. Sometimes he would drop something, whereupon he would dismount with a flourish, conveying the message, ‘I meant to do that.’ Whether or not he did, I don’t think the Son of Rambo will be following in his father’s footsteps anytime soon.

The fighting itself is in five rounds of three minutes, and can end in a knockout or a decision. Traditional musicians play while they fight. The music speeds up and becomes more urgent as the fight draws to a close, like in a video game.

Muay Thai is a careful sport, with boxers throwing jabs and light kicks testing the other boxers. There are many ways to strike or be struck and you do not want to be vulnerable. But if the boxers end up in close quarters, or one of them smells blood, the fighting becomes frantic and vicious.

If you’re further interested, here’s a Reddit-recommended fight on Youtube: Link

Lisa: [to Homer] By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.

Homer: Oh, how does it work?

Lisa: It doesn’t work.

Homer: Uh huh.

Lisa: It’s just a stupid rock.

Homer: Uh huh.

Lisa: But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?

Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

It is hard to argue with this reasoning demonstrating the powerful anti-tiger properties of certain “stupid rocks”. Though it might appear the rock “doesn’t work”, Lisa demonstrates that the statistical evidence is clear. There are tigers in Thailand, so I purchased one as soon as I got to Bangkok (a bargain at 2000 Thai Baht) and by carrying it around with me I saw, in fact, no tigers at all for almost two weeks.

But one one trip to Mae Rim, in the rainforests of northern Thailand, my rock must have ran out of power or something, because this happened:

The first dangerous part of the trip to Mae Rim was the bus ride. The preferred local form of transportation is the songthaew–imagine Elmer Fudd trying to say ‘songtail’–a converted pickup with a roof over the bed and two benches.

The songthaew driver managed to pack 19 people (by my count) into his truck. Six on each bench, three (including me) on stools in the center aisle, two hanging on outside, and two in the cabin. The truck seemed to struggle with the weight.

I was the only foreigner on the truck. Inches from me was a monk and his assistant. Some of the Thai seemed amused that I was riding the locals’ budget transportation. The monk did not appear to be amused. You’d think someone who devoted his life to Buddhism would hide his feelings a little better.

They got off over the course of the journey. By the time I reached the outskirts of Mae Rim, out in the jungle north of the city of Chiang Mai, it was only me.

The place is called Tiger Kingdom and it’s the place to go if you like tigers. The other major ‘tiger spot’, the Tiger Temple near Bangkok, is known to drug, beat, and chain their tigers. The Tiger Kingdom does not use inhumane methods. (They do, however, carry little wooden sticks. They hit the tigers’ noses with it to sting them. The sticks are quite puny–it’s hard to imagine inadvertently hurting a tiger with them). Western tiger activists work with the tiger trainers to ensure humane conditions. (I would wager that the Thai trainers probably don’t need Western help–they’re just there for credibility.)

I ended up meeting a random Dutch fellow at the park and we became each others’ temporary travel companions and picture-taking buddies. He worked in the dyke industry. I didn’t make any jokes and am a little proud of that.

It being about 95°F that day, the tigers were pretty docile. Some of them, however, were pretty frisky. Watching them bask and play, I was surprised how much the tigers were like big cats–or perhaps how much housecats are like small tigers.

These frisky tiger cubs are 5 months old.

The tigers are naturally playful–even the big ones in the intense heat–and the trainers are worried about the tigers trying to play with visitors. I was unable to get a good video of a big tiger playing, but you can imagine the effect of such an animal trying to play with a human. Roy Horn, of Siegfried and Roy, was mauled when his trained pet tiger got confused during a show gone wrong and attempted to drag Horn to safety. Imagine a tiger mother carrying a cub by the neck–that’s what it did to Horn. The tiger failed to anticipate that this maneuver would not have the intended effect when applied to squishy human flesh.

Fortunately, the park is fully insured, according to the FAQ posted on the wall:

That’s $3400 and $270,000 respectively. It’s nice to know human life is so highly valued.

But tigers are dangerous not out of malice but because they naturally don’t know to be gentle with humans. All will be fine if you follow the rules they set out for you, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Don’t approach a tiger from the front. They might try to play with you.

• Don’t look a tiger in the eye. They might try to play with you.

• If you pet a tiger, rub it very hard. A soft pet will feel like tickling to them, and then the tiger might try to play with you.

• Stay away from playful tigers.

Then as I lay down and hugged a six hundred pound apex predator, the trainer tells me, “Don’t hug too close or he bite you.” And–as seems to happen often in Thailand–I felt a brief moment of heightened awareness for the fleeting nature of existence.

Credits

Songthaew photo is due to Philipp L. Wesche and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

The builders of Wat Pho really liked Buddhas.

There are hundreds of them.

Wat Pho is a royal wat south of the Grand Palace of Bangkok. It’s old, large, and dense. It has a lot of open spaces that seem larger than they are, obscuring the wat’s size and dimensions. Wat Pho has a large number of temples and you can spend hours there.

Don’t be intimidated by the imposing stone guards at the gates. They’re friendly. Unless you’re impure of heart, in which case they’ll come alive and kill you.

These statues were used as ballast on the return voyage from China. It doesn’t seem to be clear what’s up with them, but one theory is that they express the might of Thai trade. The Thai viewed trade not as an exchange of goods but as sort of a system of mutual respect–I honor you, you honor me. So the presence of the Chinese guards sends a message: look how the Chinese honor us, with their trade.

That might explain these guys:

Thailand is the only Oriental nation to never surrender to Western colonialism, a feat accomplished with clever politics, open trade, and by playing local and colonizing powers against each other. In particular, every neighbor of Thailand became a colony of a Western power.

(Addendum: An earlier revision of this post claimed that Thailand never conceded anything to the West. This isn’t quite true. During the colonial period, the Siamese kingdom ceded disputed zones to the West in the face of French diplomatic trickery. They retained only their Malaysian disputed territory, which they still control–and is still disputed by Muslim separatists. This ended aspirations of a great Siamese military empire, but in exchange secured independence.

After these events, the name ‘Thailand’ became popular, since Siam now consisted almost exclusively of undisputed, liberated Thai territory (and some Malayasians). ‘Thailand’ can also be punned as ‘Tai Land’, the land of the free. So Thailand never ceded territory it controlled, only imperial claims and aspirations. Whether or not this counts as ‘surrendering to the West’ depends on who you ask.)

An alternate theory, however, claims they are statues of Marco Polo. “There are four pairs of Marco Polo,” says one website. I didn’t know Marco Polo came in pairs.

Anyway, all that is just what I heard; I’m not a Thai cultural expert. It could be all the guardian statues have no meaning, and are just there because it seemed like a nice place to put them. The Western stone giants get a place of honor guarding the Temple of the Reclining Buddha.

The reclining state represents his entering Nirvana. This is the largest such depiction. For perspective, look at the wreath of flowers in the lower left.

The reverence levels paid to the Reclining Buddha were relatively low (by Thai standards). It was mostly a tourist attraction and donation center. Other Buddhas were more highly revered, particularly the one at the center of the wat.

Many Thai come here to pray and meditate, and many tourists come here to sit awkwardly and accidentally commit social transgressions. Guards are present to make sure you sit–you may not simply walk through, you must sit–and that you do not point your feet toward the Buddha or anyone else for that matter. The feet are unclean, and it is deeply offensive to point them at another human.

The wat was also the birthplace of Thai massage. I conducted some in-field research on Thai massage, and concluded the expression on the client’s face below is an accurate depiction. Notice her foot is planted on his butt–this is purely for leverage.

Part of the fun of Wat Pho is not knowing what is going on. As you wonder, you find only questions. Why are there so many Buddhas? What do their poses mean? There are mosaics and inscriptions and statues and towers–what do they mean? What is really with those Chinese and Western guards? Is the architecture significant? Why is the wat laid out the way it is? Nothing in religious architecture is purposeless. But the available English literature (read: stuff I found on Google) is sparse and contradictory.

As stated before, the complex is very large, and the size is obscured from within. It’s highly symmetrical and somewhat mazelike. It’s easy to get lost. You think, “I was just in here, this is the hall full of Buddhas.” But in this hall, they are all raising one hand, whereas they had folded hands in the other hall, or something.

There is something neat about freely wandering someone else’s deeply holy place, getting lost in the maze, continually encountering new things that surely have some significant meaning–but you don’t know what. It’s like in stories, when they explore the ruins of a lost civilization. But it isn’t lost, it’s right there in Bangkok. All you have to do is fly halfway across the world to see it.

High-rises overlook broken down slums. Modern highways and mass transit rise above the perpetual traffic jams of the main roads. Wandering down dark, roughly paved alleys one can be startled by a lurking four-star hotel, and sleepy resedential streets rub shoulders with notorious red-light districts. The city is dense and almost completely uninterrupted by green space and goes on seemingly forever.

This is just the view from my one hotel several subway stops and a half-mile-walk from the city center. Here’s another shot (not by me), closer to the center.

This gives you a picture both of the density and the unevenness. Some land is low-rise, some is high-rise, and some unused. The tree-covered areas are not parks, but cover private residences, apartments, and resorts. There is almost no public green space.

Soi sauce

Yet, unlike many other “Asian Tiger” megalopoli, Bangkok still has this vibrant, grungy third-world sense to it. Hidden amongst the skyscraper forest are $10 massage parlors and $2-3 noodle plates that put you in cramped plastic seats. I once ate a $4 noodle plate; within view was a Starbucks selling lattes at the same price, and a Lamborghini shop selling cars for a mere $830,000 (Thailand taxes automobiles heavily). That’s 207,500 noodle plates for a car that, in Thailand roads and traffic, is no better than a Subaru (actually, probably a lot worse).

While the old areas have that maze of twisty connecting streets you see in your typical city, the radiating sprawl is organized along main roads, from which snake many side roads called sois. Sois are not generally through streets and don’t often connect to each other. The largest are almost two-lane roads, the smallest mere alleys, dimly lit with walled-off dwellings and vacant lots and roads in disrepair that you would never wander down in any American city–but this is Bangkok, and through the urban darkness might be a full-service four-star hotel ($50-100/night) or the trendiest club in the area ($5 drinks, no cover). As you walk through these streets (which often have no sidewalks), beware of traffic; they will zoom around you at speed rather than stop or slow for anyone, and will not yield to anyone crossing the street.

The main streets and major sois are perpetually jammed and crowded with pedestrians and food stands and roadside shops.

Indoor markets are also everywhere:

The character is very different from an American city, where pervasive street networks form a homogenizing mesh, filtering people and cars through, bleeding neighboorhood into neighboorhood. The sois are generally not through streets, and even connections to other sois are not that common. So each soi has a distinct character. Here is Soi Arab in the burgeoning Sukhumvit district. Not too far from here small are little German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean areas. The rapid changes of character are comparable to only perhaps Lower Manhattan, and those ethnic neighboorhoods are fading fast.

Some are lightly trafficed, mainly walled-off houses, apartments, hotels. Others are busy commercial areas. Some have ethnicity; Japanese, Arab, Korean, Chinese. Some are low budget with cheap food, massage shops, guesthouses. Others are quite expensive. Of course each one is a short walk from the next one. If you peer down a side street and aren’t interested in what you see, walk to the next one.

Shrine on you crazy Thailand

Scattered amongst this vibrant chaos are a large number of Buddhist shrines, painted in the traditional Thai style. Below, worshippers offer prayer and incense to Phra Phrom, the Hindu-exported patron of luck, in central Bangkok:

They are often colored in vibrant auspicious colors, incongrous to their environments, and well-maintained even when surrounded by decay. Often you see left offerings and incense. Occasionally you catch a Thai pausing for a quick prayer before continuing on.

Shrines and monuments to the King are numerous as well:

The Thai are just about impossible to offend, but there are two easy ways to peeve them: Insult the King, or transgress Thai Buddhism. One common accidental transgression is to point your feet at someone. At the old city’s Wat Pho, guards prowl the important temples, warning Westerners to make sure their feet are properly pointed away from anything holy.

But to get an idea how seriously Buddhism is treated here, a Muslim fanatic once attacked a famous shrine (the Erewan Shrine pictured above) with a sledgehammer. What happened to him? He was beaten to death by bystanders. As far as I can find out, nobody was convicted; presumably it was thought to be justifiable homicide.

But generally, the Thai are laid back: the worst that can happen is that they’ll become annoyed and correct you. They are slow to anger, quick to forgive, friendly, easy-going, and save face when possible.

Cliffhanger ending

Thailand and even Bangkok are far too big for one blog post. Stay tuned.

Credits

The image of Soi Arab is due to user globe-trotter at WikiVoyage and is licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

State parks are set out to preserve the wonders of nature. One often finds unusual and varied wildlife, plant life, terrain, geology. The Indiana Dunes offer some less natural foliage.

The Indiana Dunes are forested sand dunes. Such areas are rare and fragile. In many places, they have been destroyed by human activity. In Indiana, they have been preserved–partially. When legislators struck a deal with Indiana industry to preserve the dunes in a state park, they allocated an enormous industrial area right in the middle of it; the port of Indiana and surrounding factories. In some spots they are more visible than others, but where I was wandering, they made their presence known anyway.

After an exhausting hike over the dunes, you find yourself at the Lake Michigan shore. Some shores are sparsely visited, even on a beautiful Sunday afternoon–not many are willing to trek miles through the bogs and the forests and the sand.

This spot in the Illinois Valley was carved out by a catastrophic glacial flood when the last Ice Age ended. An enormous glacial lake– geologists know not exactly where or when– was breached and all the water was unleashed at once right into the valley. It stripped the valley to the bedrock, and then stripped the bedrock.

When Robert de la Salle discovered the Valley, he thought it was near paradise. But I arrived in the Valley at night, off Interstate 80, and did not see any of this at first. So my first impression was rather poor. The hotel was in Peru (that’s Peru, Illinois), and when you get off the highway you’re immediately in one of those “off-ramp towns”, with big box stores, hotels, and cheesy restaurants.

The first remarkable thing I noticed about the Illinois Valley was the water. It was foul. It tasted something like stagnant pool water poured from a rusty bucket. It had a lingering, virulent smell. That night, I was thirsty, and coming home from a local bar I drank a lot of that horrible substance before heading to sleep. I woke up a few hours later feeling very ill. I could still smell the water, the way you can still smell the tequila as you suffer a massive hangover. The next morning, the lingering smell from the shower made me feel sick all over again.

Even the local Starbucks offered no respite, the terrible taste infecting even the coffee. If, as the crazy general in “Dr. Strangelove” thought, the Commies are out to poison our water and impurify our precious bodily fluids, the Illinois Valley must be their pilot run.

The people there are extremely polite and nice, further evidence of Commie vitality-sapping.

The next morning I made the drive out to Starved Rock. Driving through the Valley during the daytime was a totally different experience. Rolling ridges, beautiful bridges, curving highways. I was only able to get a shapshot where the trails cross one of the straighter roads:

The trees are all kinds of colors. Some of the trees are deep yellow and red, in the fall spirit. Other stragglers are still green or barely faded, not having got the message. In some spots, you can see where the trees exposed to the elements and the trees shielded from them disagree on what season it is. A path might have green trees on one side and orange trees on the other. You can see the microclimates in the colors of the leaves.

The whole place is, to paraphrase a great philosopher, really really ridiculously good looking.

If you want to camp out at Starved Rock, be advised it’s 25 bucks a night. 25 bucks! Most of the people at the campgrounds were in giant American trucks with trailer homes. The campgrounds had water and electricity so that’s probably what they were paying for. There were a few RVs as well. They all were probably wondering why some dude in a sedan was paying 25 bucks to pitch tent. I was wondering the same thing.

But I wasn’t too bothered.

This is a place that changes with the seasons. The most beautiful seasons are said to be the fall and the winter. I could believe that, or at least half of that.

But to paraphrase that same philosopher, there’s more to life than things that are really really ridiculously good looking; so after a few days there, I began to head east…

The protocol for tornado warnings is, evidently, to cram every gossipy old person and vapid teenage girl into the cramped Starbucks I was in. The chain coffee shop apparently doubles as a tornado shelter. Then, everyone proceeds to be loud and incredibly annoying until the tornadoes have all been frightened away.

Though I am not a tornado, the protocol worked on me. Once the sirens died down, I promptly fled that place, returned to my car, hydroplaned back to the highway, and headed further west.

I stopped by a Thai place for dinner that day. The menu explained any dish was to be ordered on a 1-10 heat scale. This was the scale:

1. Mild
2. Mild-medium
3. Medium
4. Medium-hot
5. Hot
6-10. Thai

You might say they have some pretty Thai standards.

I later made my way to the Illinois Valley, home of Starved Rock State Park, among other things, and spent several days there. Two hours west of Chicago, this is the most beautiful place I’ve seen in the Midwest, and among the most lovely spots I’ve seen anywhere. Stay tuned…

Friday was my last day. The following few days were spent straight on packing and moving my stuff into storage. It’s astonishing how much junk there can be in a small apartment. In my trunk is a giant canvas duffel bag–42 inches long, I think–full of stuff that I didn’t pack for some reason. I could barely lift it into my car. Based on my experience lifting heavy things, I estimate it weighs 100-125 pounds. How do I fill a duffel bag with 100-125 pounds of stuff? That is a question I asked myself as I attempted it to lift it into my trunk. I dubbed it the Big Bag of Crap.

After spending Monday and Tuesday entirely on packing and moving, with only a few hours’ nap early Tuesday morning, I got in the car and drove wherever suited my fancy. My joints were aching and I was exhausted. What suited my fancy was a king bed at the Sheraton by the mouth of the river. Upon arrival, I ordered room service then slept for 13 hours. I felt pretty lame, but one of my friends found this to be “baller”. I didn’t tell him it was paid for with miles, enjoying the illusion.

I wandered Streeterville the next morning. Chicago is beautiful but I had spent the last few years taking it for granted. The riverwalk is gorgeous. There are excellent open spaces all about the NBC building, east of the Michigan Ave. bridge. Directly below them are roads. During the urban renewal of downtown Chicago, city planners took the opportunity to build a multi-layer city, streets and pedestrians on top, service areas below. East of Michigan Avenue, where much of the redevelopment took place, the roads and sidewalks taking you up and down this maze, sometimes feeling like a giant M. C. Escher painting. From certain spots along the river, you can see the multi-layer streets exposed and visible, two or three layers of roads and walkways snaking up and down.

I remember the days we–me and college friends–would go out for walks on the town, wondering and wandering and talking and taking the city in. Nowdays, everyone is always doing something and going somewhere. We never just wander. That morning everyone downtown was hurrying along, except me. Sometimes it’s better to have nowhere to go.