febrero 27, 2006

Sick III: Bugger.

Woke up this morning to dawn chorus hammering at a head that was freshly exploded, eyes that were gummed shut, hollow aching limbs, and a brand new fever.

Oh. Not quite that much recovered, then.

Still, who needs the home comforts of kathmandu - hot hot showers, soap, edible food, clean water, people who speak english - nobody needs all that stuff when they're ill, do they?

Into the sardine-micro-bus I go.

febrero 26, 2006

Sick II: escapee

rickshaw escapee
Good gravy jebus, get me out of here. I have been sneezing and staring at the same wall for thirteen - THIRTEEN - days now! Time to run around and end up in grotty squalor congratulating myself on how 'authentic' it all is.

Am dangerously close to spending all my money on microlight flights and hang gliding, just to change what's in front of my face sufficiently.

Off to the valleys and the (choke) temples - see you Friday.

febrero 19, 2006

Sick I: Grroooogh.

I know I'm whingeing. I don't care.

Crossing-continent-squits. Nightly gut spasms.

Climate-change flu. Red hot fever alternating with ice chills and the familiar feeling of hollow limbs and a half memory that the back of your head exploded sometime back in 1983.

Getting up to brush my teeth is so much effort I have to puke.

tooth fairy

I feel like crap. Hi there Nepal. Wonder what you're like?

mp-freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Thank you for sending me music.

Kathmandu has what they call broadband, but I would call two tin cups joined by string. It takes me 30 minutes to download one song, and three hours to upload five photographs. I now have 5 megs of music on my mp3 player, another 2 megs waiting on gmail to be accessed when I have a spare week to do so, and a really varied selection of music to accompany the cowpoke and ukulele tracks.

I've sent thank you postcards to anyone who flung me masses of stuff (whose address I have, natch - if you don't send me your address, how am I meant to send you postcards?).

But I must particularly thank Paul, for allowing me the very singular opportunity of sitting in a kathoey (ladyboy) internet cafe in the Khao San Road, Bangkok, asking for help to download massive files he had entitled 'e.n.o.r.m.o.u.s. p.e.n.i.s.' and 'i.n.t.e.r.n.e.t. p.o.r.n.'

febrero 18, 2006

so where've you been? 24 Chiang Khong, in northern Thailand

See, I was on the last few hours of a three day trip up the Mekhong in a longboat. (a slowboat, to be technical; on a river heading towards China - a slowboat to China!)

sunkered!
Most people head downriver towards Luang Prabhang. Typical me to head up.
After the delights of food poisonin in Nong Khiaw, I spent most of the trip lying on a tatami platform curled up with some hilltribe ladies who'd adopted me out of sheer pity for my dilapidated state, snoring loudly. To say the trip was painful was an understatement, but at least this time the boat didn't sink.
By juxtaposing my maps of Laos and Thailand, I could just about work out the geography of the Mekhong, and calculate when we reached Bokeo province, and the western bank of the river became Thai.

I hadn't much liked Thailand the first time I got there. Crappy, overrun, too many brits, germans and sex tourists, really. The warm friendliness of the Thai people was a reminder of what horrors my country had wreaked on theirs, mostly. But to come back to Thailand from somewhere less developed, shall we say? Heavenly.

The foreigners in the boat - one dutchman, one pole, one aussie, one canadian, ten chinese - were all gazing fondly at the Laos side, daydreaming about the simplistic rustic lifestyle we would soon leave behind.

Me, I couldn't stop looking west. Roads with a surface. Satellite tv. Chocolate cake. A range of foods. Hot water. Fruit smoothies. Electricity that isn't rationed. A choice of food. Books and newspapers. Street lights. Chemist's. Books! Chilli and spices. Cars. Coaches and trains - trains! Computers, cushions, sofas. Like a bloody mantra. All the way. Satellite tv.

Then I disembarked at Huay Xai, ten minutes after the last 'ferry' (read old man with a dugout canoe) left for Thailand.

Agggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh.

febrero 13, 2006

Mail

Tiki petals
So ... I checked mmy mail address in Bangkok, but there was nothing there.

So ... I checked my mail address in Kathmandu, but there was nothing there (irritating; I know three people had written to that address a month ago).

So ... I checked the poste restante in Kathmandu - found an old teapot and a bale of straw, but no letters.
Bah, I thought: oh well, send some postcards to people.

indian journeys

So ... I sent long chatty emails to nineteen people, and postcards and letters to another ten. Seventeen of the email recipients didn't bother to reply. One person commented that they'd got a card from Laos.

So ... it reminded me of writing long airmail letters while I was in the UK. I write long long LONG letters, in tiny script, usually to the same person, and whenever anyone back home saw me writing one, the cry was the same "why don't I get letters like that?"

The answer's simple.

So ... Quick reminder to all the people who watching me crafting some tiny-scripted letter on airmail paper, and wondered why they hadn't had that many postcards off me.

1. Cos most of them aren't getting through. I'm still missing six parcels myself, and I haven't spoken to anyone who's received as many letters as I've sent them.

2. Cos I send more mail to people who write back to me.
You don't write, you don't get. Kapische?

so where've you been? 23 Laos

killer saleslady
killer saleslady,
originally uploaded by digitalia.
Overriding memory of Laos, sat in mountain mist in Nong Khiaw, shivering and fevering my way through food poisoning, after spending thirteen hours on a boat the day before
(context: a boat that was meant to take eight hours. A boat that kept sinking. A boat that sank three times.
In the river Ou. The beautiful river ou, prettier than the mekhong. The river we were conscripted to fish for two legged chairs from whenever another local dug out longboat hit a rock and lost all its furniture)
I was more than a little tired and shaky. I sat and shook and tried to keep things down on a plank by the sawngthaew (ie open truck) station, watching a noodle stall seller amuse herself by trying to murder flies on the dead meat in front of her, by hitting them with an elastic band. Occasionally I squirted some toothpaste into my mouth, then spat heavily beneath the noodles (hey, if it's alright for them...) to eradicate the taste of puke from my mouth. Feeling grateful at least I hadn't had chicken noodles the day before.

As I watched a crack in the floorboards and clutched my spasming gut, a small murky face grinned up at me. A little girl, maybe three years old. Carrying bags of rubbish. Was she the noodle woman's kid? No, her feet had clearly never seen shoes, and noodle woman for all her basic understanding of food hygiene, wore the plastic flip flops common to most of the Mekhong delta countries.
Was she playing? After a few grins and darts, she waved at me, and toddled slightly uphill out from under the boards of the noodle shack. My instinctive response, accompanied by an involuntary stomach lurch was to hope she didn't touch me with the creamy sticky dirt laden hand that waved at me.
No worries. The little girl settled back to the task she'd been crawling beneath the mud shack stall to accomplish - sifting rubbish, and placing good finds into her two plastic bags.

Not playing then. Working.

Street kid. At three years old.

I thought about the kids at KOTO, in Ha Noi, and felt glad they weren't living like this little girl.

She picked her way across the filth and ordure, and found a bamboo pole. I watched to see if she'd play with it, if the instinct to play is stronger than the instinct to survive in a little kid too young to form words properly yet.
I thought so, till I realised she was fashioning a shoulder hoist - one of those poles I still haven't learnt the name of - to lift her two plastic bags more effectively.

I played the traveller game of 'thank god I'm not ...'/ 'thank god I don't ...' and wondered if any european kid would have identified a function like that, identified the pole as a device, rather than a toy. Then resumed my groaning spasms.

Looking up a moment later, I saw real delight on her face; the look of absorption you see in kids who've found something they know is worth something.
It was a machete.

Three year old kid, playing in the gutter with a machete. Delighted by its shiny blade.

Name me one place in Europe, where even a complete stranger would have failed to run to a three year old and take a blade like that from her.

I glanced around. She was invisible. The noodle lady pinged at flies. The sawngthaew driver lazed in hammock shade. The passengers waited boredly for the truck to fill up, knowing it wouldn't leave till it was stuffed with human cargo.

Nothing.

The little girl, funning with a few swiping movements, sniffed, and put the machete into her bags. Picked her way back down towards the river.

Man, the things you see are unreal. Fucking unreal.

febrero 10, 2006

I need to block out the sounds of pigs screaming in the morning

Vientiane graffitti
Vientiane graffitti,
originally uploaded by digitalia.
No, really. And no, I don't want bacon for breakfast. Khawp jai lai-lai.

After five days on boats, which can be rapidly summarised as
big hill - sandy bank - big hill - water buffalo - big hill - big hill
my mp3 collection is beginning to grind.

I didn't have time or warm enough clothing back in the UK to look out any of my own CDs so all I have are mp3s I've managed to swap with people, or CDs I heard overseas, and posted home.

Yes, I have a lot of ukelele music.

If you have any good tracks you can spare, can you show mercy on me? I have a night bus from Chiang Khong to Bangkok, then a flight to Kathmandu, plus two days of probable near house arrest to avoid the People's Democracy riots - send me some mp3s?

Puh-lease?