The Cham: Lingams, Yonis, and a martial tone in a tonal language; Communism: My Son, The World Cultural Heritage

When I used to hunt for thrift-store vinyl (whole LPs were going for about 25 cents each in the late 90's), I always looked for albums which made a strong stand for some clear aesthetic, but without any (effective) irony. This resulted in a record collection replete with cowboy and Christian music, with a distinct peak somewhere in the early sixties, where a certain kind or lack of self-consciousness reigned, that strikes the post-modern mind as nakedly psychotic.

This was what our tour guide reminded me of. We had reached My Son by private buses, en mass, about 150 tourists; and I am fairly certain that his shrillness was an adaptation to the sheer crowd size who arrived now to see the ruins of one of the great temple complexes of the Cham people. An adaptation by way of Viet Cong drill sergeant, with the guttural intensity of a samurai, attacking us with facts, leaping about and hacking the aair with an intensity that recalled Bruce Lee at his best, when he had made his martial art, Jeet Kwan Do, JKD, into a lifestyle, a momennt-to-moment philosophy, quick-footed and adaptable, unphased by the presence of powerful adversaries.

And so he bristled with energy as he gesticulated and adressed us in Tour Guide Vox Yakuza, bringing a high-school basket ball coach intensity to Cham factoids. He betrayed his military background by referring to our visit as an "exercise".From what he shouted I gathered that the Cham were a people of Javan descent, who ruled a sizeable chunk of the center part of modern Vietnam for almost a thousand years, beating back the in turn the Han, Viet, and Khmer empires while worshipping a muscular and fertile Hindu-inspired pantheon, their lust for life still bursting through the eroded stone.

Inside each temple with its tiered, stone animal and green plant-bedecked roof, was a table-like altar with a holes in the centers, the building's yoni, which our guide joked was realistic-looking but he could not say for himself due to being single. Outside were several ceremonial stone lingams which would be carried into the temples and inserted into the yonis to bring the various gods and spirits into union, perhaps to re-start the cycle of fertility. Not surprisingly, our guide made a big show of getting women in the group to touch one of these hefty divine dildos.

Vietnam's south: Hue - a mellowing, and a veteran...

Hue is a bit less hectic than Hanoi but still deep in the grip of the horn-blowers, a noise that one's brain learns to screen out and ignore -- I stop noticing how my ears have pulled tight like fists, but at the moments you walk into a secluded courtyard, or emerge from a bus into the countryside the silence washes over like a cool, ethereal drink, lusciously the fists uncoil, the channels open, and not just the ears. We visit the emporers' tombs west of the city (great tombs are always placed west of cities, so that the sun sets over them), and the dense calm inside the walls is almost crippling, one wants so badly just to lie down and soak it in.

We were headed out of town on rented bikes, dilapidated big-wheeled cruisers that everyone rides there, and an older local on a scooter pulls uup next to us and strikes up a conversation. Whispy beard, North Face jacket. Now Vietnam, like most ppoor countries with a tourist trade, is a land of perpetual come-ons, but After a little while I felt that he was being genuine, and in any case spoke pretty good English (somewhat unusual in Vietnam) and had interesting things to say (unusual anywhere...). His name was Yung, pronounced like Jung the psycho-analyst, spelled Dung. Dung had fought in the war, for the South with American training, and it seemed he wanted to talk about it, as it was not something he could safely discuss with most Vietnamese. He had fought in this area for the U.S. Army, and he wanted to show us around the battlefields, which happened to include some impressive ruins and scenery. These included the tomb of the great king Thieu Trii, who (according to Dung) was a great king because he didn't place much burden on his people (esp. compared to the wild extravagances of Minh Mang's later reign, which we had seen the day before). One of the evidences of his munificence was the fact that the tomb itself, a round, walled zone about a hundred meters diameter, was left open to the public, for anyone desiring peace and quiet; Minh Mang's tomb was grander but entirely sealed; in fact, the doors were never opened, and his body was introduced to the tomb through an underground passage which was then filled. One can infer a lot about how many close-at-hand enemies each emperor had.

But the openness of the tomb had an unexpected consequence. Hue is close to the DMZ, the border staked out between North and South Vietnam by the UN, and so the region was the first to be attacked by northern soldiers. A group of these sneaked iinto the tomb and began using it as a sort of giant bunker, a base for guerrilla attacks; and Yung was part of the ARVN group who surrounded and stormed it. Mute witnesses to the violence, all the statues showed bullet holes and bits of shrapnel.

As he showed us a crater from a 300 kg bomb dropped from a B-52, (seen in the picture), I began to see that for Dung the war had been a terrifying experience but also an exhilarating, world-opening one.

I realized that most of my media experience perception of Vietnam has been through war fiilms -- Apocalyse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon. Now I had to expand my notion of the war as a tragic, bloody blunder, a terrible mistake; and instead see that even something as generally destructive as a war can have a completely benign side, that some of the inadvertent participants had ultimately enjoyed it, even treasured the experience, at least in retrospect. Weird, but the kind of thing you learn from traveling -- the world is much richer, more complex than you can imagine.

Hanoi -- plunging into communist chaos, dust, cold and The Tet

Apparently our Thai travel agent hadn't known that we would be arriving in Hanoi right at the beginning of the Tet -- kind of like arriving on Xmas day, but even more so -- and the already authoritarian planes of marble that defined its architecture to me -- already reminiscent of Moscow airport -- were rendered colder by the dim cloudy sky, the lack of people, and actual cold -- a real shock after Bangkok's sweaty shorts weather -- the driver who was supposed to meet us is missing, and we are suddenly surrounded by a frankly predatory knot of grinning taxi drivers trying to get every last dong out of their holiday overtime. We got into the cab of the lowest-bidding driver and he immediately began talking about how we were going to pay him more money; then he started honking his horn continuously to an empty road, only increasing his auditory antics and wheeling-dealing as we began to hit traffic, completely disregarding lane markers and any rules of the road as he hurtled through the dusty, noisy, dreary city. He was quite upset at only receiving several dollars more than the price we agreed upon, would not help us with our luggage, and was still demanding more money as we walked away.

This turned out to be an appropriate introduction to Hanoi, and soon we were just trying to figure out how to get out of this deafening, dusty dystopia, heading north in a gray train dimly lit by green fluorescents, sitting on wooden slats for eleven hours as all other berths were taken due to Tet, surrounded by locals clearly wondering what the hell white people were doing in their car.

In the cold, misty mountains we met sweet, mostly shy folk from hill tribes -- the Black Hmong and Rainbow Hmong mostly, who wear their traditional clothing made by hand from scratch -- including large panels of shiny, iridescent purple cloth that I was certain must be some sort of synthetic, but which they make by repeatedly banging the cloth against the limestone rocks of the region. Came back with a big bundle of their gorgeous handicrafts, greatly refined haggling skills, and great hopes for the warmth of the South.

Thailand's beautiful islands, in peril -- Koh Tao & Koh Phi Phi

In my '94 Thailand visit, when I reached Koh Tao I had an epiphany -- this was what I had been looking for without knowing it, life in a jungle hut by the ocean, snorkeling in the gorgeous reefs just off the beach every day, no electricity, no worries. I canceled the rest of my planned trip and spent the rest of my time there.

But sometimes a treasured memory, like any posession, can become a burden. Coming back fourteen years later, I find that like so many other places in Thailand there has been much construction, and now where there was a simple pier and a few ramshackle buildings a whole town jammed tight with tourist-oriented storefronts has sprung up, and where there were only foot paths now stretch concrete roads abuzz with 2- and 4- wheel traffic. The reefs have been impacted by all this development as well, obviously by trash, tires and water bottles, as well as by the many boats stirring up light-blocking dust and wastewater causing excess algae growth. Ocean acidification and global warming will be only the final nail in the coffin for these already exploited ecosystems. Sadly there seems to be no signs of awareness or action toward protecting what is left, not even basic information.

We headed south from there, to the more-virgin Koh Phi Phi, where coral fairy architecture is still in full swing, and one can dive down into the octopus's garden with anemone tentacles rippling in the waves, clownfish darting in and out, scintillating rainbows of hundreds of kinds of fish, iridescent lips of giant clams, urchins bristling with eighteen-inch spines, brilliant christmas-tree worms popping in and out of the coral, and even a two-meter shark, darting past us in one exhilarating moment. Add to this sheer cliffs of limestone and rainforest swarming with birds, shot through with sea caves and pretty beaches, and wow! Certainly the nicest spot we've found in Thailand. But the signs are everywhere -- ceaseless construction, stray wrappers and water bottles, proliferating water taxis -- that no lessons have been learned, and so ultimately these reefs are just as threatened.

Bangkok. Step into chaos.

Bangkok - BKK

When I came to Bangkok in 1994, the airport was classic "developing country": small, crowded and noisy, hot and steamy with concrete walls, chipped tile floors and throngs of touts tugging at your sleeves to sel taxis and hotels, shaggy Euro-backpackers dozing in the corner. I haven't been living under a rock since then, so I've heard a lot about the Asian tigers and double-digit growth, but still I was staggered by the glittering, sterile, spidery mass of glass and steel that greeted me, at least as impressive as any outside Dubai (the current capitol of architectural excess), and the ribbons of multilane elevated highways that carried us to the city.

In the city, though, much was familiar - decrepit concrete buildings striped with elaborate stains and peeling paint (now sporting bristles of satellite dishes) over bustling markets immersed in a sea of human and mechanized traffic -- though the traffic had changed as well, from being dominated by the chainsaw roar of two-stroke rickshaws and the belchy rumble of Soviet-style disel trucks to the more-subtle rush of scintillating tertiary colored Japanese and Korean (chinese?)) taxis - magenta, lime green, and hot pink.


We head straight to Khao San Road, which is still a 365-24-7 open air festival for the international backpacker scene - and though it has both expanded and densified, it has also lost some of its seedy, desperate edge, mellowed out even -- even backpcker families are in evidence, toddlers as squirmy baggage -- though the physical space is as chaotic as ever, with sidewallks over-run by stalls, carts, and sprawling restaurants, with tourist vans, taxis, motorcycles, rickshaws and scooters pushing through the crowd, and dozens of touts pulling sleeves to offer tailoring and other unlooked-for services. This may be due to the presence now of a police station at the foot of the road, promoted by a well-signed "Men In Brown" campaign, the idea being that these otherwise paramilitary-looking dudes will not hesitate to supply accurate, even affectionate direction to hapless monolingual tourists. Be that as it may, the trained eye still sees many john-prostitute pairs wandering about, a little sheepish this far from Patpong, surrounded by more innocent offerings.


But hooray! Into all this charges Mr. Thailand pedaling his vainglorious bicycle rickshaw spangled with colorful advertisements, forming a sort of Mardi Gras-style mobile throne for slightly embarassed tourists booming encouraging pop music, e.g. Johnny Cash's "Goin' Down To Jackson, gonna mess around..." The man himself sports sunglasses and flowy robes, a Spock hairdo and a perpetual grin. A Burning Man-style reinterpretation of the city, he is easily my favorite thing in this country so far, beating out petting tigers, giant temples made of colored mirrors, aquatic markets, snorkeling marred by pollution, and the mounds of fresh fruit that are my second favorite thing (come to think of it, Mr. T is a fresh fruit as well...) By plunging into the ubiquitous (to me, exhausting) tourist trade so wantonly, he creates his own peacock tail from the tawdry trappings of faceless capitalism, making his own native statement in a place defined by cultural exploitation. Hooray for Mr. Thailand!