Return to Thailand: the Adams Family, more demon possession, fighting the church Filipinos, good French Toast, and Amtrak through a winter wonderland

I spent one night in my usual guest apartment at the hospital, got caught up with school stuff the next day, then took the overnight train north to Chiang Mai. I’d booked ‘Second-Class Fan’, but the train car seemed a bit more worn out than my previous Thai train. And just my luck, there was a gaggle of drunken Australian kids at the far end of the car. Fortunately, I had my I-pod and could drown them out for a couple of hours.

I met a German guy named Victor on the platform as we disembarking from the train early the next morning. We caught a Tuk-Tuk into the town and walked around a bit pricing various guesthouses. We took rooms in a clean place set down a quiet narrow street. My room had hardwood floors and a mattress on the floor, and a nice bathroom. It was a bit upscale from what Victor chose but I felt like splurging. He was spending eight dollars a night and I was spending something like eleven or twelve. We walked around the neighborhood a bit before Victor decided to go take a nap. I was lucky to come across the Paris Bistro, a cafe fronting the street where I had a good latte and something to eat. Over the next couple days, I visited with the British manager and his Thai wife, enjoyed a few lattes and salads, and the free Wifi.

The following day, I took songteow to The Chiangmai Adventist Academy, located about an hour out of town in a rural area of fields and low hills. The academy is a school (primary through high school) set on a 100-acre complex with a two-story academic building, a new church, and a dozen other buildings including boy’s and girl’s dormitories. I met and interviewed an American named David Bell, who gave me considerable information about the school—and later I met his wife Annabelle, a kind woman who provided me a thermos of hot water so that I could drink the hot chocolate and tomato soup that Faye had packed for me back in Bangkok. One morning, I had breakfast with them in their home, and the following day I went with an American guy and his kids to see some waterfalls. These falls were rather fun because they were flowing over calcified rock—allowing us to easily climb up or down the rocks over which the water flowed.

Mae Sariang and the Adams Family: I checked out of my Chang Mai Hotel and caught a tuk-tuk outside to take me to the bus station. In fact, the same guy who had brought me to the bus station a day earlier to buy the ticket. He’d laughed and joked all the way there but I couldn’t understand what he was doing—due to his poorly accented English and the blowing of the wind. So this morning, waiting for the minivan’s departure, I took a few thousand baht from the ATM at 7-11.
The ride to Mae Sariang was comfortable enough in the minivan, and we arrived into this small town after three hours. I noted one main street lined with shops, and at a bus station that was little more than a gravel parking lot and a few bamboo cafes, I met the Adams. They were sitting in their ‘ambulance’, a gold-tinted and somewhat well-used pickup truck with a back covering. Paul Adams, in his forties, is tall with graying hair. A man from rural Montana, he and his wife Lena have been in Thailand about a year. Together with their four kids, they live a rustic life in the Thai hinterlands that most back home could never imagine—taking care of over 100 children from an ethic minority, many of whom have escaped from Burma.
After the introductions, Lena said that we’d be going for lunch first. “We almost never get to town,” she said. “So this is a treat for us.”

“How far away do you live?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s about three hours from here, on the Burmese border. Actually a no-man’s land between Burma and Thailand.” I couldn’t believe that this couple had been willing to go three hours (each way) in order to pick up a total stranger that had told them he was collecting inspirational stories. The café where we drove for lunch consisted of several small booths in a garden; the owner and waiter was an animated fellow in his thirties, full of good humor and spouting decent English. After our meal of various rice dishes, we hopped in the truck, Paul and I sitting in front and Lena with nine-year-old Josiah and his older sister. During the long return trip, we passed fields and hills and jungle and villages, all against a backdrop of jungle-covered mountains—and the mountains were mostly in Burma. Lena, originally from Sweden, told me about their life: “It’s primitive,” she said. “A plain wooden house, a couple of rooms, no western toilet. And the conditions for the Karen people are much worse. There are refugees that after crossing from Burma just settle illegally along the river and survive anyway they can. They’ll hunt, fish, eat fish, bugs, rats.”

Here’s the thing: most Americans (most anybody) have never heard of the Karen (pronounced Ka-reen) people, who live in parts of northwestern Thailand and in Burma. They are victims of a continuing civil war in Burma but there is also a Karen ragtag army. The politics of who is fighting whom is complex, but tens of thousands are now in Thailand. Some survive on the land, others remain in refugee camps. The Adams family take care of over 100 children, some of whom are orphans, and all of whom live in various plain wooden ‘rooms’ built on stilts. Lena and her twenty-one-year-old daughter Melissa act as ‘nurses’ for the kids and villagers from the nearest villages. “Without training,” Lena said. “Although my second daughter, Maria, just returned from the States where she had months of emergency medical training.” There’s also a nurse living on the grounds with her two teen-aged sons.
Some three hours later, Paul pulled the pick-up into a rough dirt driveway and parked in front of the house. Tall trees, including a row of teak trees, and jungle growth, surrounded the home, from which extended a large wooden porch about seven feet off the ground. Barely a kilometer or two away stood a range of green-covered mountains. Tall graceful palms were abundant, down here and on the mountains. This was the quintessential jungle wilderness, in my mind.

I could see right away that ‘primitive’ was the correct adjective, and yet Paul and Lena and their hard-working kids all have carved out a home here. Past the door were two metal cabinets, one filled with medicines, the other with books: titles included This Day with God, Quintessential Herbs , Village Medical Manual, and Cooking. The main room were a couple of mats, and aside from a couple of black plastic trunks, a short two-foot high little table in one corner, and a dinky fridge, the place was wide open and empty. “Very often we keep the sick kids in here,” Paul told me. “Last night there were four patients spending the night.” The vertical windows, I noted happily, all had glass-paned shutters that swung out and were screened. Things wouldn’t be crawling or flying in as they had at the Maddocks’ place in Phenom Phen.

Paul indicated a door leading to a second large room. “We sleep in there.” Three or four floor mats lay beneath their individual mosquito netting. There was also a kitchen and bathroom at the back of the house—the bathroom was truly Thai. The toilet was one of the squat affairs with a concrete basin beside it filled with water. One poured water into the toilet after use in order to ‘flush’. In the next stall, a larger such basin filled with water was for hand washing, etc. On a table was a two-burner propane stove, a few cooking implements, a table for chopping veggies and a plastic bucket or two.

We’d arrived shortly before dark fell, and Paul said that we’d go down to the evening worship, held in the girl’s dorm. He led the way as the family hiked down a dirt pathway through some low trees, on either side of which were huts here and there. Not even huts, just bamboo and wood floors supported by poles and a simple roof. The girl’s dorm was such a structure about eight feet off the ground. I followed Paul up some steps and onto a platform where dozens of kids of all ages sat on the floor watching a man who read from a Bible. He spoke in Karen so I have no idea what he spoke of.

As soon as the Adams and I had sat down, the kids all rose to sing a song of praise. Considering that all these kids are either temporarily or permanently away from their parents, and that their lives had been filled with hardship, their faces showed contentedness, their voices as they sang with gusto. After the song, we sat again. One little girl was so cute that I chastised myself for not bringing along my camera (no chocolate for me for a month!). She couldn’t have been more than five or six, and wore a pink and red dress and a strange high hat. Her bible was open on the floor in front of her and she gazed down at it. A few of the smaller lads sitting next to me, not more than four or five, smiled shyly at me, cute as hell. Josiah sat with them.

In front of the house, a bit later, I met Gail, a tiny lady in her fifties, I’d guess, who hailed from Montana. She’d been here for a few months, along with her sons Bradley and Micah, and had been an answer to prayer; she was the lady who dealt with the serious medical issues. Her son Bradley, 16, drove their makeshift pickup “ambulance” almost daily to the nearest hospital or clinic, usually with Gail in attendance. Micah, 14, had a lot on his plate for a kid: he was teaching math at the school (on the second level of the bamboo platform); he also owned a scooter that he used to make medical delivery runs. Gail, a chipper woman with a clear desire to serve the Lord, said, “I usually wind up going early most mornings to the hospital with patients.” I asked her how long she might stay in Thailand. “Oh, I’m moving here.”

My sleeping arrangements were simple: a mat on the living room floor with a tent of mosquito netting over me. “We’re in a severe malaria area,” Lena explained. “The most prevalent is the kind that affects the brain. It’s extremely painful.” Just what I wanted to hear. “And it gets cold at night, now,” she added. I got the loan of a jacket, which I put on. It wasn’t cold yet, but I was determined to protect my sweet blood from the bite of a mosquito.

The morning came way too early! Life starts returning to all manner of man and beast around 5am; Paul had told me that on a good morning when they could sleep in (in other words, when patients didn’t bang on the door), the family might rise and shine as late as 6am. As they retired to their family sleeping room, I stuffed in my earplugs, downed a couple of melatonin, prayed I wouldn’t need to pee in the middle of the night (I’d been told that there might be a frog or a scorpion in the bathroom), I tried to drift off to sleep. Lying on a hard floor does not make this an easy task. If I lay on my back, after a few seconds my lower back hurt; if on my side, my shoulder hurt. My pillow was my jacket, which I had taken off and rolled up. It wasn’t chilly yet, but I had taken one of the woolen blankets to cover up with. “They’re new,” Paul had said. “The old ones you wouldn’t want. Sick kids and other patients have all kind of left their marks on them.”

So at 5:30am, I awoke to Gail rummaging in the medical cabinet, speaking softly to some Karen individual that I could barely see in the shadows; the sun hadn’t risen yet. Already, the family was stirring in their room, and one of the girls came out with a flashlight and entered the kitchen. I tried to catch a few more winks of sleep, but soon enough was up and looking out at the scene from the front deck. The fields near the house were covered with mist and the mountains were shrouded. After awhile, we sat about the living room with plates of hot rice covered with yellow bean broth and slices of fresh pineapple. I craved tea or coffee but was thankful to the Adams family for their generosity in letting me stay here. I’d interviewed them a bit the night before and gotten good information; tonight, there would be more.
Micah showed up with his scooter helmet and ate a plate of breakfast.

Lena asked him, “Are you going to pick up the saliva specimens from the village?” Not something one hears everyday at breakfast, of course. He said he’d have time to do that before he began teaching at 9:45. Paul suggested I go along to get some pictures of the village. “It’s just a couple dozen huts near a stream in the middle of the forest; they’re all refugees.” I said I’d love to and outside put on the helmet that Micah offered me. Maria, the girl who had studied EMT in the States, was going to follow on a second scooter. The road was well paved with lots of twists and turns and forest on either side. As we sped down the road, the morning wind was cold. We’d gone no more than three kilometers or so when Micah shouted out, “I don’t know where Maria is. She should be right behind us.” We doubled back, and rounding a bend, saw Maria sitting in a ditch on the side of the road, the bike several feet away where it had crashed into the brush. Micah pulled to a halt and we got off. “You okay?” I asked. She was rubbing her head but wasn’t crying or anything.
“Yeah, I think so,” she replied. “Just let me sit for a moment.” I walked over to where Micah was standing. He asked, “Did you get hurt?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I lost my shoes.” Micah and I pulled up branches, kicked back leaves, and finally Micah picked up an orange flip flop, broken and unusable. He straightened the bike, hopped on and started it. The engine turned over and it purred, so he drove it up the slight incline to the road and shut it off. “Least it runs,” he said. “Not like when Andrew crashed.” Andrew was the volunteer I’d visited with at the Maddocks’ place in Phenom Phen. He’d visited here several weeks earlier. Maria stood, a bit wobbly at first, and showed us a bleeding toe. “I think it’s broken,” She said, very calmly if you ask me. We advised her to go back home. Without shoes, Micah pointed out, she wouldn’t be able to walk on the rough paths going to the village. So while Micah used his pocketknife to cut off part of a plastic piece that had broken on her helmet, Maria climbed on the bike and started it. She zoomed off and Micah and I started off again for the village. I was thinking how resourceful a young man Micah was. How many fourteen-year-olds back in the States were accomplishing so much in their early adolescence? Not many, for sure. And all in a foreign country under difficult conditions.

The Karen village was barely a village. The huts looked like something out of a South Pacific movie—though more bamboo than palm fronds. Here and there, squatting around a fire or sitting on a bamboo platform, were people in little more than rags. A number of pigs and piglets (cute things) ran here and there, snorting and playing. Chickens joined in the fun as well. And kids, little ragamuffins, grinned and smiled and waved at me. Micah and I crossed over a primitive hand-built bamboo bridge that forged the stream and walked to the hut where he was supposed to pick up saliva samples. Coming out of the hut, he said, “They didn’t get delivered. It’ll be afternoon, so we might as well go back.” Re-crossing the bridge, I noted that there weren’t any roads. Or paths, really. It’s like the village was set down on field of dirt from which a few plants grew.

The rest of the day was busy for Paul and Lena and the kids. Paul was supervising the homeschooled lessons of both Anna and Josiah, their youngest, as well as keeping things clean and doing the odd job here and there. There were patients for Lena and her daughters to contend with, and the principal of the school came up to help translate on the front deck. I did some schoolwork and talked to Anna a bit, who also got permission from dad to show me around the school again. I observed a group of a dozen students at their English lesson—the kids sitting on the lower platform beneath the raised bamboo structure. They scrawled lessons on sheets of paper; the teacher of the class, Emily, sat cross-legged beside her students, writing words on a small whiteboard. Up on the main floor, Micah sat in front of a group of urchins learning math.

In the evening, the house became a mini-clinic. It quickly became evident that I wouldn’t be spending the night alone in the living room. The little girl who was brought in suffering from brain malaria needed to remain here for the night; another man, whom Nurse Gail had spent the day with at the distant hospital, was practically in a coma I gathered, and was spending the night out on the deck. Three other children with scabies came in to wash in the bathroom but then left. By 9pm, Paul had erected three big mosquito netting covers with mats on the floor. In one were two sick little girls; in the middle ‘tent’ was a sick lad with Nurse Gail spending the night beside him to make sure his condition didn’t deteriorate. And the last one was mine—thankfully closest to the bathroom. There’s a feeling of ‘camping’ in the air, but for the Adams and Gail, this is routine; it happens a lot.

My admiration had increased tenfold these last 24 hours. What these people were accomplishing was inspiring. And I hadn’t even heard the story yet about the demon possession.

Lena Adams, an educated woman who strikes me as imminently practical, told me “Demon possession is real.” But she said that I ought to hear the story from Gail, who was witness to the whole thing, along with her son Bradley. So as the children were sleeping beneath their protective mosquito awnings, Gail told me, with Micah breaking in to add bits of the narrative that Gail had forgotten. The story revolved around one particular twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of the camp cook, who had been possessed. There were several bizarre elements to the story: an attacking Burmese army, a cook who had offered spirit sacrifices, the theft of Micah’s wallet, and demons dancing in waterfalls. All of this, of course, will be in a book I’m writing, so I’ll just skip on over to my return to Bangkok for the time being. But keep an eye out for the book (or article)!

In pre-dawn chill, we woke, prayed and piled into the ‘ambulance’, Paul driving, and me riding shotgun. Lena, Anna and Josiah sat in the back for our two-hour drive to the town of Mae Sot, where I would catch my bus to Bangkok. On the way, as dawn began to creep up over the jungle-clad hills, Lena told me more stories about their life. At one point, too, we passed the United Nations refugee camps that house thousands of Karen refugees; There were bamboo and wooden ‘huts’ by the hundreds and hundreds, mile after mile. I would have loved to go in and see but that required a UN pass.

We arrived at the bus station and said our good-byes. I’d miss the Adams. I told them that I thought their work was inspiring, and not for the first time imagined my own life and those of nearly everyone I knew—lives where the quest for material blessings seems to be the order of the day. Well, I hoped I could make some alterations to my lifestyle once I got home.

The all-day bus was fine if not tiring; my seat companion was, once again, a young monk with a shaved head. The guy spent all his time staring straight ahead with hands clasped in his lap. Probably some sort of discipline-meditation act. I arrived in Bangkok at around 6pm, bought my ticket for Ubon, and wandered over to the KFC to feast on chicken and mashed potatoes, which I did while checking email. Thank heavens for free wifi.

The all-nighter to Ubon chugged along at 30-40 mph at times. I enjoyed my sleeping berth with curtains pulled shut while I listened to my I-pod. Arriving early, like 6:30am, I caught a tuk-tuk to the hotel where Carla had made a reservation for me. I was staying this visit at Natseri Mansions, the four-star hotel owned by Napat.

Basically, I had a nice five days to visit with Carla, Napat’s family, and Andrew, the owner of Peppers Café, where I frequented during my second trip to Ubon. Again, I rented a bike and enjoyed pedaling the streets of my old home-away-from-home. The only oddity was a meeting one evening at the church between myself and Carla on one side, and the dog-owning Filipinos on the other side. The pastor moderated. The plan was to address the issue of the pet dogs—a couple of which had attacked students—and why four Filipino families living on church property continued to let them run loose after having been instructed by the conference to get rid of them. Carla had seen one little boy—one of the school’s students—being attacked, barked and snarled at mostly, by a black beast, and one of the creatures even stole a sack lunch that one little girl had brought to the school to snack on before her English lesson. I myself had been barked at and chased while passing on my bike, and it amazed me that these four families had utterly disregarded the conference’s demands. Not only that, but because Carla had emailed her superior about the matter, the Filipinos held her in contempt, shunning her and acting in a most unchristian matter.

The meeting was a farce. The young Thai pastor was reluctant to even bring the matter up, and only when I forced the issue, did he agree to the meeting. He’s a nice guy, but so typically Thai, hated confrontation. One Filipino couple, a woman named Betty and her husband Toto owned 2 dogs. Wynn and 'Boy', another couple, own 1 black dog who tends to nip at heels. Also, there was Esther and Fred, who had 5 dogs now. Lastly, there was Chris and Joy, who own no dogs but were at the meeting. Joy was a wonderful woman, very kind. I’d seen her at two Sabbath services leading out, translating Thai into English. Her husband, alas, was the most sarcastic of the group at our meeting and utterly unfriendly. He’d also been fired from his position of school director a year or so earlier. Well, the meeting produced mostly insults to Carla (one woman even had the nerve to suggest Carla wasn’t a good missionary); Betty and Esther made a lukewarm promise to tie up the dogs, but the pastor pretty much said that sometimes they do things their own way ‘in the field.’. I pointed out that dogs attacking human beings was not a simple matter of autonomy. Well, we stood for prayer, in a circle, and one Filipino man who had been observing did a pretty decent prayer of reconciliation. The pastor suggested we all join hands. When I glanced over at Carla, she was crying so I gave her hand a squeeze. How can human beings, particularly Christians, treat each other so horrendously? It never failed to amaze me that ‘religious’ folks—be they Christian or Muslim—could possess an unfathomable depth of cruelty. After the meeting, outside in front of the church, I asked Betty whether she could be friends with Carla, her retort was, “No, it can’t be again.” Well, so much for forgiveness.

I biked to Peppers Cafe to have breakfast and see Andrew one last time. The Australian rustled up some delicious French Toast in no time, and I relished in the breakfast and my last edition of the International Herald Tribune. We talked about Ubon's barking, snarling dogs, traveling, and how he found it hard to keep a cook employed. I was sad to exit the cafe for the last time. Peppers Cafe has probably the best breakfasts in all of Ubon, and certainly Andrew's positive and friendly attitude only makes the place that more desirable.

On my last evening in Ubon, Napat’s family invited Carla, Angel and myself to lunch after their English lesson at the Kodak Shop. Angel didn’t come along, unhappy with me for getting involved (but as I told her, isn’t it any human being’s business to get involved when injustice is apparent). Napat, Sita, her brother Pi-nut and his wife were all there; we had a great lunch and exchanged emailed addresses. When Carla asked me how I would be getting from the hotel to the train station, Sita said, “Oh, we will be taking him.” A rush of gratitude overcame me, and I reflected the difference between this generous family of Buddhists and the type of Christianity I’d seen at the little church. Anyway, I spent the rest of the day biking around, a little sad that my long journey would soon be at an end, but I was also looking forward to the train ride from San Francisco to Omaha.

That evening, Pi Nut, Sita and Napat met me as planned in the hotel coffee shop and we then walked through the garage to their car. Somehow, my dusty old backpack didn’t have any right to be placed in the trunk of a shiny BMW, but I stuffed it in and off we went. At the station, they walked to the platform with me as night fell. The train was available for boarding, so after a couple of pictures and a round of hugs and handshakes, I waved as they left.

The too-well air-conditioned train delivered me back to Bangkok by early the next morning, and I took a taxi to the hospital and checked in, napping for a half hour or so. Dr. Nick and Faye had left the day before for California and a well-deserved furlough. I claimed my insulin from Panit, the Call Center manager who had been kind enough to store it for me in her flat, had a visit, and then went off to do a bit of sightseeing. Over the last two days of my Asian experience, I played the tourist and shelled out the ten bucks to see the Royal Palace—a complex of ornate and gorgeous temples that impressed even me after all these weeks of temples. In the night, I walked through Independence Square, where the celebrations for the King’s birthday were in full force. Throngs packed the square, the temples were alit in all their glory, and the smiles of the people told me that they were pretty happy with life. I myself happily wandered dark streets where spillover groups from the square walked, talked and laughed.

It’s ironic that I don’t remember much about my last day in Asia. I’d been to Independence Square and other places in Bangkok often, so I did nothing except relax, walk a bit, and pack to go to the airport in the mid-afternoon. The flight back, on China Airlines, was fine—and long at something like fifteen hours. The Pacific remained far below me and invisible. On long flights---particularly across the Pacific, one becomes sort of catatonic, numb. You watch a movie or two, down the chow they give you, stretch your legs in the rear of the cabin, and hope the ordeal is soon over. When finally the pilot announced that we were descending on our approach to San Francisco International Airport, my heart wasn’t the only one to lift. I wished he hadn’t mentioned the temperature: forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. I had been sweating the day before.

San Francisco’s skies were gray and a bit drizzly for part of the afternoon. I wandered around the Haight with “Jim”, a young Japanese guy I’d met at the hostel. This was his first day of a month-long trip to the USA. We explored a bookstore, mostly to keep out of the cold air, and took a couple of bus rides. We ate supper at an authentic Chinese restaurant in China Town. Climbing a narrow set of wooden steps, we came into a narrow and none-too-clean dining area all of seven or eight feet in length. A half dozen goofy, silly teen females sat about waiting for their food to arrive. The place looked utterly Chinese, that is to say cluttered and filthy, and I was disappointed with my sweet-and-sour chicken, the taste of which was more sour than anything. The chicken wasn’t the gristle and fat of Hong Kong or Beijing, but had it been served in an Omaha restaurant, there would have been a lawsuit, I imagine.

I’d been to San Francisco several times in the last few years, so seeing the sights wasn’t so important. I enjoyed meeting a few interesting characters: the African-American city bus driver with whom I chatted and chuckled as we passed down Market street. The old man who boarded the bus and glanced around for a free seat (there wasn’t one), and to whom I offered my seat. “Thank you, sir,’ he said, and we struck up a conversation that covered quite a lot of ground—mostly political in nature. Out of the blue, he said, “…and what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, absolutely horrible. All that talk of ‘never again’, why don’t they remember what Hitler did?” He’d shake his head. “And I’m Jewish! I’m in exile from my family.”
“Quite a few Israelis are against their own government,” I added.
“More than quite a few!” he added. “The majority. But Americans don’t know it.” We came to his stop and as he debarked, he said, “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, sir,” he said. And we shook hands.

And then there was Matthew, in his late fifties but looking a bit weathered and worn. We met at breakfast in the hostel dining room. An Indian guy in his twenties had just arrived in the city looking for work (likely planning on working illegally) and Matthew had taken him under his wing. Explaining to me, he said, “I don’t know what it is but I’m always able to help people. I do that, I volunteer at the soup kitchen back in Denver.” I asked him what line of work he was in and he chuckled. “Unemployed at the moment. I’ve got some stocks but they’re not doing too well.” He was an interesting character. I learned that he’d dabbled in the business world, the IT world, played with stocks—mostly unsuccessfully. But he’d tell me about getting clothes at the Goodwill, and here during his five days in San Francisco, he was relying on the free hostel breakfast and then trips to Safeway. He wasn’t riding any public transport, just walking. And yet in the midst of what was obviously a lower point for him economically, Matthew was willing to help out this Indian fellow he’d just met. The first item was to locate him a more permanent place to stay. “I’ll find him a place today,” he said. “I just have this magic touch with helping the poor.” Obviously, though, that magic touch didn’t extend to his own financial success.

The Amtrak trip across the country was a joy; my first winter crossing of the American West meant I’d have plenty of snow to view. In fact, snow blanketed most of the Sierras, the desert flats of Nevada, and by the time we got to Salt Lake in the middle of the first night, big flakes of snow were coming down. During the second day, the snow stopped and the scenery was breathtaking in eastern Utah and Western Colorado: the low ranges that precede the Rockies were all images of green-brown pines, tens of thousands of bushes, snow, frozen ponds, the Colorado river with ice blocks floating slowly. The whole wilderness was a winter wonderland, and I shared it with an interesting collection of folks:

•Richard: a forty-something Californian whose ex and kids lived in Boulder. He wore his gray hair slightly slicked back and was unfortunately suffering the pain of a bruised knee, the result of a meeting between his leg and the boarding door of the train. Fortunately for him, a witness included the wife of a prominent attorney in Boulder. I gave him my vial of Tylenol. During one of our several conversations, we came up with a list of Dick Cheney’s crimes against humanity.

•Rabbit: yes, Rabbit is the guy’s name. In his late twenties, he and his girlfriend Cijay sat with Richard and I in the dining car during dinner. Note: Amtrak seats passengers together. I was convinced after one minute that Rabbit was gay as can be, but when he talked about his ex-wife, 13-year-old son, and cuddled up to Cijay, an attractive young woman, I was stumped. He’s smart about IT, though. The small company for whom he works just invented a complex system of server networking that HP just purchased.

•Taj and Mary: Taj was an Indian from New Delhi, also in IT. He and Mary, his Canadian wife, were making a big train trip across the entire USA before flying back to India. Mary kind of weighed upwards of a couple hundred pounds, I estimated, but had a laughing kind soul.

•Joe: the Amtrak employee in charge of the snack area in the lounge car. He gave free coffee refills to me as we chatted about travel, Dubai, and which were the best Amtrak routes.

•Eric: In his fifties, apparently, but seemed older, somehow. Rabbit, Cijay, Taj and I were playing UNO at night in the lounge car when Eric wandered by. He asked us if we were playing UNO, which seemed an odd question, but we said ‘yes’. “I loved playing UNO years ago,” he said, so we invited him to join us. He sat down but started rambling about how he’d been on 3 trains in one week, and related a hard-to-follow story about someone trying to kill him and his grown son in Ohio bringing him out to live next door.

Along with this cast of characters, I enjoyed a winter wonderland; in fact, we all enjoyed a variety of scenery. But when the train pulled into Omaha on a blustery and snowy morning at 6am, the conductor announced that there would be a smoking break here. “If you wish to stand outside and stretch your legs, you may do so, but you may wish to keep in mind that it’s a chilly zero degrees!”

I’d imagined my homecoming: a chilly but sunny day, and I’d walk the two blocks into the Old Market and enjoy a cup of coffee before boarding a city bus to take me out to western Omaha. The plan evaporated as soon as I stepped onto the platform and braced myself against a freezing wind. I hobbled along in my woefully inadequate light jacket towards the station to catch a taxi. Forget the bus; the pain wasn’t worth it. I looked up at the train, saw Eric at the window of the lounge car, and thought about all the people I’d met on this trip. Smiling, I hurried on to the station.

And that’s the end of a seven-month journey.


The transport stats:
FLIGHTS: (11)
• Omaha to Chicago
• Chicago to London
• Frankfurt to Beijing
• Beijing to Hong Kong
• Chengdu to Lijiang
• Guilin to Kunming
• Bangkok to Phuket
• Ubon to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Phenom Phen
• Phenom Phen to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Taipei
• Taipei to SFO

TRAINS: (58)
• Somewhere in bloody England to near Glenn
• The Hague to Hannover
• Hannover to Berlin
• Berlin to Brno
• Brno to Bern
• Bern to hiking place
• Hiking place to Bern
• Bern to Milan
• Milan to Venice
• Venice to Belgrade
• Belgrade to Thessaloniki
• Thessaloniki to Sofia
• Veliko to Bucharest
• Bucharest to Brasov
• Brasov to Vienna
• Vienna to Hannover
• Hannover to Hamburg
• Hamburg to Copenhagen
• Copenhagen to Oslo
• Oslo to Trondheim
• Trondheim to Oslo
• Oslo to Copenhagen
• Copenhagen to Hamburg
• Hamburg to Hannover
• Hannover to Basel
• Basel to Bern
• Bern to Lausanne
• (Somewhere) to Bern
• Bern to Lyon
• Lyon to Brussels
• Brussels to Cologne
• Cologne to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt Flughafen
• Frankfurt flughafen to Cologne
• Cologne to Hannover
• Hannover to Celle
• Celle to hamburg
• Hamburg to Hannover
• Hannover to (town)
• (town) to Hannover
• Hannover to Stuttgart
• Stuttgart to Munich
• Munich to Salzburg
• Salzburg to Munich
• Munich to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt flughafen
• Frankfurt flughafen to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt
• Hong Kong to Beijing
• Beijing to Chengdu
• Kunming to Guilin
• Laos border to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Ubon
• Bangkok to Chang Mai
• BKK to Ubon (2nd time)
• Ubon to BKK
• SFO to Omaha
Long distance BUSES: (16)
• Sofia to veliko
• Heathrow to Cambridge
• Cambridge to London
• London to southhampton
• Southhampton to London
• Lijiang to Kunming
• Guilin to Yangshua
• Yangshua to Guilin
• Kunming to Luang Prabang
• Luang Prabang to Vientiane
• Railay Beach to Bangkok
• Phenom Penh to Siem Reap
• Siem Reap to PP
• LIjiang to TLG
• TLG to Lijiane
• Mao Sot to Bangkok


BOATS: (2)
• Ipswich to Hoek Van Holland
• Lake Geneve

SCOOTERS and Tuk-tuks: dozens!
1 weak horse

Cambodia -- where you’ll hear about the Killing Fields, an orphanage, a demon possession, and the fixing of my sunglasses.

The Air Asia flight from Bangkok to Phenom Phen, Cambodia took only an hour, and as the plane approached the capital city, out of the window I saw a quieter, greener world. To the north of the country had been the jungle-covered mountains that separated Thailand and Cambodia; and after that had been green fields and spots of jungle and forest and villages. As the plane now dipped low on its approach to Phenom Phen, there was a great expanse of dark brown water, like a flood plain. Rivers and streams forked out of it, and in a couple places were peninsulas of land with houses on them. But on either side was water. Coming low for the landing, we flew over low buildings (no concrete high-rises here!) and homes—all of which had roofs of red or blue or brown. I could tell this would be a more colorful, down-to-earth place than Bangkok, a concrete jungle of unimaginative buildings.

The airport was a dinky thing, thankfully, although visa procurement was both efficient and inefficient at the same time. The Cambodians have the process down: passengers line up, turn in their passports, and the passports are passed down a row of several workers behind a desk, each glancing and stamping and writing. A man at the end of the row then calls out the name of the passport holder, who emerges from a knot of anxious passengers to claim his document. Sometimes the name gets mangled by the poor fellow whose job it is to call out what must be to him nearly unpronounceable names. Well, finally the man called out for “Scote Sootan” and I was legally allowed into the ancient land of the Khmer.

I carried only a light pack with me so escaped out into the world of touts and taxis and tuk-tuks. I paid the seven dollar fee at a counter for my ride into town. The tuk-tuk driver exited the airport and proceeded on down a main avenue on either side of which were the kinds of shops I’d come to see as commonplace in Asia. But unlike Bangkok, these buildings were usually three to five stories, at the highest, and mostly open to the street. The population looked poorer, too. In fact, just about everything looked different, which in my mind was a grand thing. Gray was now replaced by buildings in more earthy tones. Even the dirt along some of the side streets, I noted, was red.

As dusk fell on Phenom Phen, the tuk-tuk driver made it to the ADRA office, where I’d been expected (ADRA stands for Adventist Development and Relief Agency). I met the director of ADRA Cambodia, an American man named Mark Schwisow, and his wife Ann. In their office on the ground floor of a three-story building in a quiet residential neighborhood, I took out my laptop and went online while Mark and I chatted a bit about the work they are doing: water projects, sanitation projects, teaching projects, etc. ADRA has a solid reputation in any country where they are serving; in fact, the US government has hired them for projects due to their reliability and honesty.

At any rate, I was supposed to catch a midnight bus, another dreadful overnight bus, which would take me north to a town called Seim Reap. “Is it safe?” I asked Mark. Judging by Cambodia’s turbulent past and the fact that there existed much more poverty here, I thought it prudent to ask. I expected to hear “Oh, safe as can be.” But Mark said, “Uh, I think it’s probably pretty safe.” This didn’t inspire me. However, Mark was kind enough to speak to the guard and arrange for the guard’s brother-in-law, who had a scooter, to fetch me down to the bus station. After Mark left to go catch up on some work in his adjoining office, I logged on to the Lonely Planet website forum on Cambodia and typed in various phrases like “Cambodia night bus danger” but couldn’t find any discussion on the forum except for one traveler who thought night buses were dangerous because the roads were potholed, cows sometimes laid down on the roads, and for that matter, sometimes people slept on the roads. I don’t know if the traveler knew what he was talking about, but I prayed about it and decided to take the chance. I remembered a phrase from a movie, where a man played by Scatman Crothers says to his friend, “Life is risk, Mr. Conroy.” I guess it’s like “no pain, no gain” or another sign I recently had seen: “Show me a man who hasn’t made a mistake, and I’ll show you a man who hasn’t done anything worthwhile.” Plus there was the old Star Trek adage: To Boldly Go Where No one has Gone Before!

A couple hours before my bus would depart for its night-time voyage through rural and dark Cambodia, the guard knocked on the door of the guesthouse room where I was resting. I gathered my pack and went out to the main gate of the high metal fence that surrounded the ADRA office (and every other home on the street). The guard pointed to a youth, on a motor scooter. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, but he offered a friendly smile. “What’s your name?” I asked, climbing on the seat behind him.

“Men,” he said, and when I asked him if he spoke much English, he chuckled and said, “No, maybe ten words.” So I was off to a potentially risky bus station with a kid who didn’t speak English and likely drove like most Asian males—that is, a bit maniacally. In fact, while enjoying his bouts of acceleration, Men slowed down at key intersections where scooters and bicyclists (and cars) from four directions tended to merge. I was reminded of those scenes of space battles in Star Wars, where dozens of ships come within inches of each other without colliding. Scooters in Asia weren’t quite as cool as that, but came close.

We rode along a wide boulevard that followed the river, which of course I couldn’t see at night, but there was a palace, and large roundabouts all alit, colonial-style hotels, and everywhere people: human beings walking along the road or shopping at any one of the ubiquitous stalls and stands selling foodstuffs (including, I’m sure, roasted bugs) and fruit cocktails. We pulled up in front of a large open-air night market, and Men pointed to a sign that had a picture of a VIP bus on it. “Bus station,” he said. There was no structure, no building, just a sign, beneath which were several parked tuk-tuks and their drivers. I would have thought it all a bit shady except for the fact that the street here, due to the activity in the market and the street lights, was well lit. There were a few white faces in the market, and a pair of policeman loitered. A rather rotund man asked me, “You go bus?” I said that I was, and he asked, “You have ticket?” I said ‘yes’ and he looked crestfallen.

“Okay, bus coming 11:30.” I asked Men for the time and he glanced at his watch, and then showed me. The time was 10pm; there was plenty of time to kill. Men must have known that because he said, “Come, go ride, later, here.” (Five of his ten words). So I hopped on and off we went for a very pleasant and exhilarating ride through the riverfront area of Phenom Penh. Afterwards, he returned me to the ‘bus station’.

Waiting for the bus, I started chatting with an older white man who sat on the plastic chair beside me. The bus waiting area consisted pretty much of a half dozen chairs sitting beside a booth and table on the corner of the street. The market was closing down; the tuk-tuk drivers were laying down in their front seats to sleep, and a couple of teen-aged boys behind the desk were watching soccer on an old TV. The man I spoke with was named David, who looked to be into his sixties. I remember only that he seemed a bit jaded and cranky. He had been living “for some time” in Siem Reap and loved it. He hated Phenom Penh, declaring that the place was a deathtrap and that motorcyclists here would just “run you over without even looking back.” He added that you could forget about any help. “You can lay in the street and die, and forget any medical treatment. My god, it’s medieval. I took this young Cambodian girl that I’d gotten to know, just like a daughter of course, to a hospital…” He took a sip of water, so I asked if she’d been sick.
“No, she’d gashed her leg somehow; the calf looked god-awful, ripped open and festering. So I took her to the government hospital and right there in the emergency room, which looked like something from a horror movie, some kind of doctor, without even washing his hands, started poking and prying while she screamed. I had to leave.” I asked what had become of the girl, and David said, “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her around. Maybe she died.” Well, that statement certainly punctuated the end of that discussion. David introduced me to a friend of his, a man who’d sat quietly on a nearby chair. “Sim’s a dentist,” he said. I introduced myself to Sim and asked, “Do you think the bus will be crowded? It would be great to have two seats to myself.” I’d been hoping for that, anyway. It’s the way to survive a night bus. I longed for the Chinese sleeper bus, now.
“Oh, forget that,” David exclaimed. “We’ll be lucky to get any seats, isn’t that right, Sim?” Sim nodded in confirmation. “Very full, I think,” he said. The bus, he said, was coming from a nearby town; Sim had already confirmed with someone that there might not be seats. “Or maybe they’ll place a few short plastic chairs in the middle of the aisle; they did that once on a bus ride I took. It’s horrible, absolutely horrible.”

My hopes for a night of relative comfort were dashed.
But when the bus arrived, a rather large bus where passengers climb to the second level, a few passengers (mostly exhausted looking backpackers) disembarked. But by the time David, Sim and I had boarded, the very dimly-lit bus was packed again. I noted that someone was sitting in my seat, a European at that, so I showed him my ticket and mentioned that I’d like my seat. He looked like he’d comply, but along came a little Thai dude (bus employee) who glanced around, double checked the ticket, noted an empty seat behind my assigned seat, and ushered me to sit there. An aisle seat, darn it. And in the window seat was a long-haired Thai youth who looked none too happy. He’d been stretched out rather comfortably, and now came a white foreign devil to make him scrunch up. David had walked up and down the aisle twice already, and he’d muttered a couple of words that a good Christian wouldn’t want to hear. Finally, however, he got a seat towards the front.

As the bus driver navigated the unlit potholed road, the only illumination coming from the headlights, I got to talking to two chaps across the aisle from me. Two backpacking buddies, Martin hailed from Switzerland and his friend from Poland. The Polish dude fell asleep by some miracle right away but Martin and I chatted amiably for at least an hour. I think we knew sleep would be elusive, so why not talk? The topics were the city of Dubai, the organization of the Swiss (my comment) and the narrow view of many Swiss (Martin’s comment). Meanwhile, the Thai youth beside me stretched out one leg into my leg territory, which irritated me. I stretched mine out, kind of laying it against his leg, hoping the physical contact would dissuade him, but it didn’t. I attempted to apply just a bit of pressure, but already this guy was snoring. I gave up and kept chatting with Martin. Eventually, the invading legs withdrew to their own territory when the Thai guy changed positions, going into the fetal position, head dropping against the window. The bus driver, apparently looking for adventure, developed the habit of honking at any vehicle in front of him (not that there were many on this largely empty road). He’d hit the horn and pull over to the other ‘lane’ (not that there were lanes, really, on this great path of hard soil). As soon as he’d cleared the ‘slow’ vehicle, he’d weave back in front of it. This pattern continued throughout the journey, along with a tendency to locate potholes. I’d experienced frightening turbulence on flights, and this was worse—and continuous, hour after hour.

We arrived at dawn into Seim Reap. Actually, we arrived on the outskirts of Seim Reap, on a potholed road of rust-colored soil in the middle of jungle—or what Asians call ‘jungle’. More like rain forest but with tall coconut trees, broad-leaf plants, vines, etc. Very exotic but at six in the morning I was more interested in getting to the hotel that Mark had been kind enough to reserve for me by phone. First a few of the backpackers, including Martin and the Polish guy, watched as an evidently new bus driver tried to maneuver an empty tourist bus into a small driveway, where our bus was parked. A half dozen locals were motioning, shouting, and waving while guiding him in, but the front corner of the bus swiped our bus, smashing the mirror.

I took a private tuk-tuk to the Safir Hotel. The place was three-star at best but clean with a friendly staff. I slept for an hour or so until woken up by some idiot talking through a loudspeaker somewhere. Going to the window, I peered down to where there was a shed, a small grassy area, the usual junk lying around (it’s everywhere in Asia), and an old water-tower from which hung a speaker. Who would be quite chanting—and it sounded like chanting—at this early hour? Downstairs at the main desk, I queried the young twenty-something manager, and he said, “Monks, maybe the monks.” Well, honestly, I thought to myself. Why did they have to do their prayers via a loudspeaker next to a hotel? The sound was much worse than the Imam’s voice coming out of the mosque speakers in Dubai.

I walked across a little bridge that spanned a narrow, dirty river, and immediately loved the scene of tall elegant trees on either side of the river. I walked along the river for a few minutes, then cutting right and into the tourist district. The buildings were somewhat dusty and worn, but still attractive, mostly two-storey affairs. A few tourists walked along the street; others were parked at various cafes, sipping coffee and smoking. The usual thing. A middle-aged Cambodian guy, looking similar to an oily used-car salesman, asked me if I wanted to buy a massage. I said “no” because I absolutely despise massage (I know, one of the few human beings on Earth to say so), and the guy then asks, “You want boom boom?” What I wanted to say was, “No, you sick perv, I want to smash your face,” but simply said, “No, I’m American.” And walked off, no doubt leaving him perplexed. As I strolled into a mini-mart, I thought that perhaps there were as many American perverts as European perverts, but Europeans get those grand six-week vacations so can take the time to travel to Asia (where European men are always being arrested for one sick crime or another).

Anyway, I’m happy to report that at the minimart, I found Diet A&W Root Beer, a terrific bit of luck. As I drank it out on the sidewalk, glancing at a touristy road filled with dust in the air due to road construction, I thought, “This isn’t for me.” It was time to phone an Australian couple named Tim and Wendy Maddocks—who look after nearly 200 orphans just out of town on their multi-acre complex.

After speaking with Wendy on the phone and being invited to share a meal with them, I caught a tut-tuk in front of Safir Hotel and watched the busy road give way to country road, deeply red and with puddles and potholes here and there. We passed rural homes just outside of town, several skinny wandering cattle (sometimes urged on by a little withered old woman carrying a big stick). The ride was bumpy to say the least; my insides were jarred, but we arrived just at dusk, and Tim hopped in the tuk-tuk and told the driver to take us around the property for a look-see. “There’re some of the classrooms,” Tim said, pointing at a one-story building across a wide lawn. The tuk-tuk bounced as we followed a rough dirt path through the trees; here and there, dim lights glinted through buildings, homes. In an adjoining field, farmers were heading home after their labors, and a few cows stood doing nothing in this perfect quiet time at dusk. It did make it difficult to see the complex, however, so we headed back to the house.

Here’s the Maddocks’ story in a nutshell: An Australian couple in their 40’s, with their teen-aged kids, run an orphanage here. Living in a Thai-style wooden house with glass-less windows, with an adequate number of geckoes and mosquitoes, and sleeping on a floor mat, they live a lifestyle not many from the West would go along with. They’ve dedicated their lives to building an orphanage for the Cambodian homeless children—and their charges are numerous; but the entire complex of homes and school is impressive and touching. Tim and Wendy have lived here for several years in the forest/jungle with its collection of bugs, frogs, and the like—but also with the spirit of God and a few volunteers who make the place a home in the wilderness.

Their home, surrounded by trees, is a two-storey wooden house in the Cambodia style. The ground level, walls of dark wood, consists of an entryway, tiny kitchen, and a room in which a couple of teens were on computers. The kitchen was a one-person-at-a-time affair with little more in it than a small electric stove and fridge. The real basics. Wendy came out and introduced herself and sent her husband and I upstairs so that she could finish preparing the dinner. A steep flight of steps led up to a large room that was simply wood. Large glassless windows let in fresh air and anything that wished to fly in, though to be fair the place seemed to be bug free. That’s probably due to the geckoes in the place. They know how to keep a home bug-free. A short deck had on it a pup tent, which is where the son slept. At one end of the room was a web of mosquito netting covering mattresses on the floor. “That’s our ‘bedroom’, chuckled Tim. I couldn’t believe that a couple of westerners had chosen to live in this fashion for the last decade. How many people did I know in Nebraska that would play at camping in the Cambodian forest for ten years or more? Not many. Certainly not me.

Wendy came up and laid a tablecloth of sorts on the floor. “That’s our dining room table,” she said. Her daughter and son carried up some pots and pans, Tim brought some plates, and soon we had a mini feast: tiny bananas along with other tropical fruits (don’t ask me, I’m pretty much a ‘green apple’ man), sticky rice, tofu, some salad. Tim’s kids must have skipped dinner because it was just Tim, Wendy, myself and Andrew, a 20-something volunteer out from Montana. During the meal, I learned quite a bit about the operation.

At the orphanage were 170 orphans, from babies to near-adults planning for college. These kids are all divided up into ten different families, each headed by two ‘parents’ who look after not only the adoptees, but their own kids as well. “Can you imagine,” said Tim, “having a two or three bedroom apartment but more than a dozen kids?” Altogether, in what is known as ‘orphanage village’, there are about 220 people. When I asked how they can accommodate so many, Tim replied, “Everything is on faith. These are people God has sent to us; He will fund them. If they need a home, we take them.” He also stated that they operate on an empty bank balance. “We’re not funded by the church or any nonprofit organization. Somehow, when we need the money, God sends it. It’s always provided.” This takes faith, certainly, I think. Their budget is ten-thousand dollars a month, which goes for food, generators, trucks, repairs, and to build more buildings. Currently, the Maddocks have plans to build a TV studio in order to produce programming that will build the faith of the existing membership and beyond. “We want evangelistic programs that will touch the hearts of the Buddhist community—and for the talented young people here that are into the production process.”

They do have a satellite dish, but unfortunately, a lightning hit took it out of action for a while. When the service returned, all the channels were there—except for the Christian channels. “They were gone,” Tim said. A chill ran down my spine. After dinner, I interviewed Andrew, and then Tim took me over to a volunteers house, where I met a young woman who will share with me via email her story, and where on the front porch a frog jumped at my back, blast the thing. My cry of fear was obviously amusing to Tim and the girl. “I’m a city boy,” I explained sheepishly.
Tim got out his motorcycle in order to run me back to town. That in itself was an adventure, shooting through the night, weaving around potholes in the dirt road heading back to Siem Reap. As we pulled up to a street near my hotel, I told him, “That ought to be a ride at Disneyland,” at which he laughed.

The next day was Angkor Wat, one of the man-made wonders of the world. You can go to Google Images or the blog, but I won’t even attempt a good description here; it’s one of the places that has to be seen, experienced, absorbed. But basically: a collection of ruined temples covering many kilometers in the Cambodian jungle. They are ancient; no one knows for sure who built them or for what purpose. The whole complex was discovered by French archeologists in the late 19th Century after they heard reports of a lost city in the jungle, something only rural forest people had been rumored to know about. The place today has become a tourist mecca, of course, with the usual army of hawkers, touts and sellers—especially children sellers. After you buy the ticket at a ‘gate’, your private tuk-tuk driver hauls you down the road a kilometer to the biggest and most famous temple: Angkor Wat. Fortunately, at none of the temples are sellers allowed to hawk their bottles of water, T-shirts, etc. They are required to maintain a distance, usually hanging out in parking lots near the tuk-tuk drivers, who laze about or nap while the Westerners are inside climbing around temples.

I’d hired a tuk-tuk driver and guide at the Safir Hotel, and basically I spent a fascinating five hours wandering through various spooky-looking temples of dark rock. At my favorite, gargantuan tree roots above ground have wrapped themselves (through the centuries) around huge temple walls, around fallen stones, through doorways. It’s absolutely other-worldly. At one pyramid-shaped temple, the top of which I could reach only by climbing what seemed a thousand stone steps (but was more like fifty or sixty), I met two young women: Daniela and Annalenina. We were admiring the view of the surrounding jungle and catching our breaths, and as travelers do, started chatting. Annalenina was from Moscow but living in Dubai, which of course led me to ask a lot of questions about Dubai’s current news. Daniela turned out to be from Hamburg, a city in which I’d recently visited, so we chatted about Hannover. After a while, the three of us made our way down the steep staircase, quite slowly and deliberately because one slip and…no more traveling. Once down and on the narrow road towards the next temple, I suggested we meet up in the evening for supper. Daniela said, “Sure, that’s a good idea. But where shall we meet?” We determined that our hotels were an equal distance from the touristy street, so Daniela said, “There’s a minimart and petrol station right on the corner. Let’s meet there at 7:30.” That agreed upon, we found our respective tuk-tuk drivers.

During the entire journey, I’d thus far only purchased two knick knacks: a fridge magnet of the Great Wall and a fridge magnet of Sofia, Bulgaria. The reason for this is because I have more knick knacks than I know what to do with, so why buy more? But outside of Angkor Wat, in amongst several bamboo and wooden concession stands, a boy not more than ten years old introduced himself and asked if I’d buy post cards. Naturally, since I’d already been in the complex for a couple hours, I’d been asked maybe thirty or forty times to purchase something, be it water, postcards, tablecloths (yeah, like that’s what a single guy wants to buy), etc. But this kid was cute and started out by asking me where I was from. “America,” I said. He smiled and said, “America, the president of the United States is Barrack Obama, the vice-president is Joe Biden, there are 50 states and Washington DC is the capital, and…” He kept spouting off the memorized facts while I looked at the postcards. I needed postcards as much as a hole in the head, but I felt a little tug in the usually cold heart—and asked, “How much?”

“Only two dollars!” he proclaimed as if this was the deal of the century. “I let you have for one-dollar and two-thousand Rials.” I calculated quickly; two-thousand rials was about fifty cents. Remember, in Cambodia, everything is for sale in dollars, but once you get under a buck, the rials come into play. “I’ll give one dollar,” I stated, the selfish Yankee taking advantage of a poor third-world kid. “Okay,” he said, but not in a particularly grievous tone, which leads me to believe he got a fair price. By now, a little friend of his had come over with his postcards and implored me to buy more. “But I have ten already,” I said. His quick reply: “But if you buy mine, you’ll have twenty.” Nice try, kid.

As I walked along past a group of really poor-looking musicians sitting on the ground (a sign announced that they were victims of landmines), a small girl of perhaps ten or eleven wandered over holding a bright green T-shirt. “Hi Mister, where you from?”
“America,” I replied, wearying of the badgering. “Are you going to tell me the name of the president, too?”
She cocked her head and smiled brightly. “No, that’s Barrack Obama, but I just want you to buy a T-shirt. Very nice, good souvenir.” I relented a little. “No, thanks. I’m trying not to buy any more stuff. I just bought some post cards.” She implored me a couple more times and to put her off, I said, “Maybe later.” That was a mistake, of course. As I was nearing the gate (where the hawkers can’t enter) of the temple, she said, “Okay, I’ll watch for you when you come back. I’ll remember!” She gave me a broad genuine grin and turned around to pester someone else.
This temple was just plain bizarre. There were the usual walls, broken roofs, huge fallen gray blocks that had lain for centuries. Little crude paths cut through alleys, up steps, and through the inside of several half-destroyed structures. Had I been a travel writer in the 19th Century, I would have been forced to write a three-page detailed description that would have allowed the reader to visualize. Thankfully, now we have digital cameras and Picasa Web Albums. The coolest and most impressive sight for me was the many places where humongous tree roots had wrapped themselves around and through the temple ruins. This was definitely something out of an Indian Jones type film. Roots ran for yards and yards, attached to walls, going through walls, into empty frightening rooms. I wandered for over an hour.
When I returned the way I’d come, sure enough, the girl was loitering nearby with a couple T-shirts hanging from her arm. “I told you I’d be here,” she said with a chuckle. “So which one do you want, the blue or the green?” I shouldn’t have asked the price, but I did. Each T-shirt was three bucks or so. “They’re really cheap and you need a souvenir from here anyway, right?”
“But I don’t like the colors,” I said weakly.

“No problem, you come to my shop,” she said, pointing over to one of a half dozen stalls. Reluctantly, I walked with her. I could see that her English wasn’t canned, that she did understand the language. “So why are you selling T-shirts?” I asked, wondering that kids here were allowed to work. She tossed her head ever so slightly and replied, ‘Well, for food of course.” We laughed together. I don’t remember all that we talked about, but she impressed me with her wit so I bought a T-shirt. Sigh.

My last pleasant experience was having dinner that evening with Daniela and Annalenina. We met at the petrol station on time and walked to a café where they’d eaten before. When seated, Daniela asked the waiter, “Is it still happy hour?” It was, so at the end of a hot and tiring day filled with temple visiting (and for me, apparently, souvenir buying), we washed down the dust with some Thai beer. The food took an hour to arrive, but we didn’t mind. We enjoyed talking travel for a good three hours. Annalenina would be returning to Phenom Phen the next day for a couple days while Daniela wouldn’t make it back for another couple days or so. “Why don’t we meet there?” Annalenina asked me. “We can go eat something.” She wrote down the name of her guesthouse.

The next day, I took a bus back to Phenom Phen, this time commandeering two seats together in the rear of the bus. Once back in the capital city, I got checked into one of the ADRA guest apartments and spoke with Mark and his wife Ann. I got caught up with some school stuff, watched a gecko crawl on the wall, and got caught up with e-mail, two of which were from Daniela and Annalenina, and then I hit the hay.

I had set up an interview with Sathai, the PR guy for ADRA. But first, in the morning, I had time to catch a scooter-taxi into town. I walked along the river, passing the ornate palace of the king and several equally astounding golden temples. I found a halfway decent supermarket and got some cereal and cola light. Back at ADRA, I spoke to Sathai for a good two hours about his own Christian experiences. One of which was a little spooky. I’ll say, first, that Sathai is a strong Christian. Mark and Ann had assured me of this. He even did a little pasturing. So when he told me that his sister had been possessed by a demon, I thought, “oh oh.”

One more interruption: In the West, we’re used to “mental illness”, which exists in Asia as well, of course, but so does something far stranger and probably supernatural. Buddhists believe in ‘spirits’ of all kinds, and all through Asia I’d seen what look like giant birdhouses on stilts, only the ‘bird houses’ are facsimiles of tiny temples. Worshippers place offerings of fruit, glasses of water, flowers, crackers, whatever, on a tray in front of the miniature golden temple. These are to appease various and sundry spirits, whom the Southeast Asians take very seriously. So, this strong belief in the spirit world can be looked at from two fronts: either Asians are so aware of and afraid of ‘spirits’ that any mental breakdown is seen as a possession, or there is truth to the views of Christians with whom I’ve spoken that, yes, there exists actual demon possession here. Why? More ignorant minds, the victims of true evil? Certainly, I’d heard enough stories to know that there was more going on here than just ‘mental illness.’ Science doesn’t have the answers to everything.

Sathai’s story went something like this:
My younger sister was attacked by a demon. When I went to visit her and my parents, she was just lying in the bed and her eyes were a little red. I prayed, “God, stay in my sight so I can have a victory over the evil.” The demon had come at midnight, my parents told me, very frightened. My sister’s behavior changed, she yelled from the bed. She threw an electric mosquito paddle at our father, and then my sister said, “I’m Kuko, you’re father-in-law.” Mom cried out, “You are not my father-in-law!” When I arrived, my sister never looked straight at me…I think because I’m Christian, the only Christian in the family. She would put hand to her face.
I asked it, “Where do you come from?” and it replied, ‘I’m from Svay Rieng.’ I asked why it always came at night. The demon said, “I love her, why can’t I come?”
“If you love her why not come in the daytime?”
I told the demon, “I love and live with Jesus. I never see him act like you do. Is this the way you show love?” I then added, “If you don’t go now, I’ll tie you up and pray more.”
“Okay, I’ll go now,” it said.
The demon left. “My sister woke up and asked why I was there and seemed surprised to see me. She didn’t remember anything.

I got a lot more from Sathai, including his own testimony as well as some facts/figures about ADRA and the important work they do with the poor. I arranged to go with him to a countryside church in a couple days, and left him to his work. I caught another cycle-taxi downtown because I’d left a message at Annalenina’s guesthouse that I’d be there around 6:30pm. The guy who’d answered the phone promised to deliver the message. So at dusk, I make it down one rather decrepit neighborhood and finally find the Nice Guesthouse. A young guy of maybe twenty or so was sitting in a plastic chair at the front of the guesthouse, which was wide open, revealing a row of computers, a desk, some sofas. As soon as I mentioned that I’d left a message for a friend, he asked, “Who?” I said, “Annalenina. Is she here?”
“No, she got out,” the lad said, but clearly annoyed.
“Did I speak with you earlier?” I asked.
“Maybe, I don’t know, no, maybe brother,” he hedged. “Anyway, she go out.”
“How do you know?” I asked. How would he know? Did he keep track of each guest or was he just being lazy?
“I know, Anna, I know her, she go out. I not lying!” His face twisted in a look of anger and I hoped I wasn’t irritating a case of mental imbalance—or worse yet, demon possession. Goodness, you never know. I told him that we’d agreed to eat dinner and that I’d wait. He didn’t like the sound of that, saying, “She maybe come back 7:30, I think maybe. We go dinner 8:00.”
“You and Anna, going to dinner?” I asked. This was surprising. The guy was frankly an ugly shrimp. At any rate, I couldn’t really have cared less, so figured I’d just walk around a bit, find a KFC, and head back to my Internet activities. I had had a long day anyway so this suited me fine.

As I walked down to the corner, exiting the dark alley for a more vibrant street, I realized I didn’t quite know where I was. Fortunately, a young couple came along who had a map and were Irish (both good things, I suppose). We wandered hither and thither for awhile, but when they stopped into a cheap, tawdry-looking pub (and empty to boot!), I caught a scooter-taxi back to ADRA, first directing him down a street on which I knew there to be a KFC.

I had a scare when I returned to my apartment. On the table, I’d placed a can of Pringles and some cookies. I moved over to the table and was reaching for the Pringles when something behind an empty plastic wrapping darted out and scooted across the wall. A little gecko! Harmless, of course, but I detest being startled. And what was a gecko doing with chips and crumbs? That’s not in their food chain. I got my answer to the mystery when I looked down at the table. Well, an army of ants—all in a row, mind you—were busily engaged in carrying away the crumbs of this morning’s cookie treat. The gecko, now making a B-line for my bedroom, drat him, had seen the ants and wanted them, not my goodies. Now, I had to contend with the ants. The little wagon train of ants, each ant dutifully carrying a crumb, still in their orderly procession, marched under the rim of the table and off to some dark place on the wall. Rather unkindly, and not in a mood of brotherly love, I walked to the bathroom, tore off some toilet tissue, and returned briskly to the table where I wiped out the wagon train with a couple of swift moves. I’d wetted the TP first so as to be sure to catch as many of the beasts as possible. I threw the weapon of mass destruction, on which a number of ants were clinging in terror, into the trash can. I was furious that they’d gotten into my can of Pringles with the lid on. Crafty—but no longer among the living. There’s a lesson there for all of us (but I don’t know what it is).

Nov 20th—
Today was just a really pleasant day with no stress or appointments. Of course, how does one have stress while traveling? But when you’re a backpacking online teacher, there’s usually something every day if only student email to answer. And of course I had the medical stuff going on in Thailand. But this morning I left the ADRA apartment on a warm sunny morning, riding on the back seat of one of the ubiquitous scooter taxis. I then walked along Norodom Boulevard, one of the main thoroughfares crossing this small city, and had my first piece of luck of the day: I spotted a China Airlines office. Inside, a helpful young woman behind a desk provided a much-needed service, locking in for me a reserved window seat. It may sound like a tiny thing, but now I wouldn’t be burdened in Bangkok with locating China Airlines. I then strolled further on down this street of rather ordinary three and four-story nondescript buildings, thankful though for the shade of short trees lining parts of the road.

My second bit of luck was stopping in at Phenom Phen Optical. A couple weeks earlier, I’d stupidly wiped my expensive prescription sunglasses with a sweaty T-shirt on which there had no doubt been some sunblock. This resulted in my wiping away some protective film on the left lens and creating a permanent ‘smudge’ spot. You may remember the crisis of my first pair of expensive sunglasses: the ones that were left behind on a bunk of a Swedish train. I was getting ready to toss the sunglasses and buy some cheap non-prescription ones. When I asked the girl behind the counter about cleaning my lens (in the event there was a miracle spray), she examined them and said, “Sorry, sir, not possible. Must to replace lens.” One of her colleagues, a young man dressed in a shirt and tie, took my sunglasses back to an impressive-looking machine and then returned to say something to the girl. I was readying to walk out, expecting to hear an outlandish price, or perhaps a reasonable forty dollars, so I was stunned when she said, “Six dollars. Can you come back at 4pm?”

I walked past Independence Monument, which stood like a towering obelisk over the square below. Trying to keep out of the noonday sun, dodge tuk-tuks and scooters, and prevent dehydration, I stopped in at a nifty little bookshop—not one of the several second-hand shops that were stuffy and uncomfortable—but an honest-to-goodness clean book store that specialized, it appeared, in art, culture, history, travel. Best of all, I found an International Herald Tribune and a coffee shop in the back. I spent the next hour sipping Indian chai tea, spiced with the flavor of ginger, and reading. While paying afterwards, I discovered that I had in my wallet only two American dollars and only several thousand Cambodian Rials (about a buck). Time to visit a bank, I thought.

This is the cool thing about Cambodia: it’s the only country in Asia that prices in dollars and where dollars are the medium of exchange. Tuk-tuk drivers, shop owners, even the owners of tiny food stalls maintained plenty of US greenbacks in their pockets. Apparently, the dollar was king. But what is really cool is that ATM’s dispense US dollars! No one else does, that’s for sure. So here I was in Cambodia, getting accustomed once again to buying with US currency. I made this monumental discovery while at a Star Mart (like a Convenient Food Mart in the USA). I celebrated by wandering down to a mall of sorts and, at an American pizza franchise named The Pizza Company, feasted on double-cheese pizza and salad.

After fetching my glasses, now complete with two clean new lenses (they apparently replaced both lenses—for a total of six dollars), I caught a scooter taxi back to the apartment. I figured I’d need some munchies for the evening as I was going to stay in and write, so I wandered down the insanely-trafficked street, crossed the dangerous road beside a woman with her toddler (figured I was less likely to get hit), and bought some Ritz crackers at one of the hundreds of side-by-side shops that are nothing more than pieces of wood and corrugated metal. The road was potholed dirt; poor folks wandered, shopped, carried kids, kids wandered, dusty and in need of a good bath), and groups of young guys either sat on their scooters or just stood aimlessly. Had I been in Los Angeles, I would have fretted about safety; but here, I didn’t worry. Of course this secondary street was a far cry from any shopping district in LA. A little boy of about seven rode a bike too big for him, and as he passed, saw my smile and offered a big wide grin in return. I probably made his day, the happy white foreigner.

On Saturday, the pastor of one of the churches that lays outside of town, picked me up and we traveled to a village in his rather nice-looking black SUV. The church congregation certainly didn’t own any SUV’s. They were poor as the proverbial church mice. The church itself was bare bones: a concrete wall, whitewashed with a ceiling of wooden boards. The floor was bare concrete. But the people, about fifty or so members, seemed joyful if not quite poor judging by their clothing. Definitely rural Cambodians. Sathai showed up as the service was beginning and we took seats in the front row—on plastic chairs. After the service, out back of the church, some ladies were cooking up a storm beneath a simply awning of fronds. The largest Wok I’ve ever seen was filled with enough soup to feed a small army; kids and chickens and dogs played about the yard, and beyond the church were rice fields. The whole thing made me happy.

In the late afternoon, as the sun hung lazily over the river, I met Daniela, as we’d planned. Actually, we’d planned to meet at a restaurant at 738 Rue De something-or-other (I forgot), but when I got there at the appointed time, no one knew where it was. In fact, such an address didn’t seem to exist. I wandered along the river, only by chance spotting Daniela, who waved at me. “I’m so sorry, that address doesn’t exist now.” She laughed. “I was looking at my Lonely Planet Guidebook, which says it’s a great restaurant, but this morning, I saw that it was gone, torn down!” Anyway, we sat and watched the sun sink a little lower in the sky. The families were out in full force and a couple of women were hawking their wares to the families and to tourists. Friendly policemen directed traffic with a smile; it seemed like the happiest land in the world, and yet in the late seventies, this had been hell on Earth during the time of Pol Pot’s rule—and the genocide that wiped out some 1.7 million people! This very city had been emptied; revolutionary soldiers fresh from the countryside, had ordered everyone at gunpoint to exit the city. For four years, the now-vibrant Phenom Phen had been a ghost town.

My last Cambodian day was somewhat somber. I visited the Killing Fields. Waking early, I caught a scooter-taxi downtown and met Daniela at the address she’d given me: a combination ticket shop and hole-in-the-wall corner café. The beggars were a bit off-putting but I gave some of my bread to a man in rags holding his toddler daughter. She proceeded to eat the bread while they squatted on the concrete. Then we got our bus tickets, and a minivan took us and a few foreigners out to the Killing Fields. Since it must be experienced (and the movie viewed), I won’t go into details here. It’s kilometers outside of town, and a scant 30 years ago, soldiers as young as their early teens were hauling out prisoners by the thousands to be executed and buried en masse. Usually the means of execution was a hatchet to the back of the head. All the torture had gone on previously at the prison, so this was the final stop. Tacked to a large imposing tree, a sign announced that here was where soldiers swung babies and toddlers against the tree, smashing their heads against the trunk. A tall memorial has been created near the entrance, and hundreds of skulls are stacked at various levels. Tourists may go up to the ground level and see dozens of skulls, 3 of which are set clearly aside to reveal some of the execution and/or torture methods: the back of one of the skulls is caved in, another has several teeth missing (torture). It’s all quite depressing and one feels a great sorrow for the innocent people, whose only crimes were being normal, everyday Joes.

Daniela and I caught the minivan back and asked the driver to stop at the prison. A number of tourists, mostly Cambodian actually, walked around a central courtyard. The place had been a primary school before Pol Pot’s troops took it over to use as a prison in 1975. Incidentally, if you are wondering if this horrible leader was really named Pol Pot, the answer is ‘no’. He named himself that, and it stands for Political Potential. The brute was a strong communist. Anyway, the prison contained now-empty rooms, the walls scraped of paint, a plain metal bed frame in several of the rooms, where prisoners had once lain in suffering agony. There is a wing that contains sketches of various torture methods used—and hundreds of photographs of the victims, taken as they were processed here. Very disturbing.

After an hour or so, we were standing outside the building with the photos, and I said, “I think we can go.” Daniela said, “Yes, really, that’s enough.” We wandered a boulevard near the palace and came across a true Thai restaurant—one without tourists in it. I ordered rice and veggies (I like to play it safe) and watched CNN news from a wide-screen TV on the wall. There were about a dozen waitresses (and one waiter, the poor man) and as many customers. But they all were very friendly and happy. The food turned out to be quite good; I should have known it would. You know a place is good if you see a herd of SUVs parked outside. The rest of the afternoon was at the Soriya Mall snapping pics from the fifth floor windows of The Pizza Company and then along the river again. This evening, a large family of perhaps eight or nine adults and several children was taking pictures of each other in a marble pagoda; a western man who sounded American asked if I’d take their picture, which I did, and then they wanted both Daniela and I to be in the photo. We chatted, the man telling me he’d recently married a Cambodian woman. That explained that. The final hours in Phenom Phen were spent viewing the river from the FCC Restaurant patio—enjoying a gorgeous sunset.

Ubon Thailand

Ubon, Thailand—where you’ll learn about missionaries, an old brothel named Disneyland, the search for my old house, and a horny leopard

I arrived in this provincial town at 7:30am on the night train from Bangkok. That may sound exotic, but in actuality, the engineer must have been either inexperienced or an overly cautious fellow; throughout the night, whenever approaching a stop, the train jerked its way to a stop, as if the poor fellow couldn’t make up his mind whether to stop or not. Or the guy had previously worked for Amtrak. At any rate, I didn’t get much sleep up in the top bunk and was happy to get off the train. I wandered into the small station and out the other side just in time to see a tall woman in her late twenties approaching from amongst some tuk-tuks and taxis. This would be Carla, the director of the SDA English Language School here in Ubon. The folks in Bangkok had put us in contact, and Carla had graciously invited me to come visit the school and my old home.

After our intros, we were getting ready to head into town in the back of a tuk-tuk when Carla spied a middle-aged Thai man walking towards us. “Tomas,” she cried in joy and with a laugh. “What are you doing here?” She spoke some words in Thai to him and turned to me. “C’mon, he’ll give us a lift into town. I met him when I first arrived three months ago.” The guy had a very nice Jeep Cherokee, and we piled in along with three backpacking women in their forties. Apparently he ran a makeshift taxi service. After dropping us at the “apartment” complex where Carla had reserved a room for me (and where she lives), I checked into a nice room with private bathroom and good wifi in the room and air-con, thankfully. I was sweating like a pig and it was only 8am.

I wound up walking with Carla a couple blocks to where the church and the school are located. It’s a nice little whitewashed church, though only twenty or so people were in attendance, mostly Thai’s but some Filipinos as well, and Angel, an American woman who is a teacher at the school. At the front of the church, a Filipino woman led out in the singing, and then translated the sermon into English with the pastor beside her. After church, I just wandered around this part of town remembering the old days and taking everything in. The town is not big—perhaps a hundred thousand, but just a collection of streets with one lane in each direction, and as in much of Asia, shops fronted the street, wide open and inviting customers to walk in. There wasn’t much in the way of English signs; and no tourists in sight. Ubon is a Thai town that offers nothing to foreigners other than friendliness and a chance to rest. Cars didn’t pack the roads as elsewhere; I could cross a street without worrying about a maniacal taxi driver aiming for my legs. Tall palms stood behind three and four story buildings that looked, truth to be told, a bit run down and tired—but that pretty much describes Asia, and is part of the charm of the place. Finally, here was a place without Starbucks or McDonalds—(or much Cola Zero, as I found out to my chagrin).

My swallowing difficulties persisted though I discovered that I could more easily swallow solid foods. Anything juicy had been giving me trouble, as if the swallowing reflex didn’t recognize “juice” as needing to go down, but in Ubon, I ate my first apple without half gagging on the juice that preceded the ‘meat’ of the fruit. I decided one morning to go find a coffee shop and read a newspaper. I’d been praying for an International Herald Tribune, VERY difficult to find in China and impossible in Laos, so imagine my joy when passing a small seemingly second-rate magazine shop and spotting ONE copy of the Tribune. I happily paid my 60 baht for the paper. So when I woke up that morning, I took my paper and headed down to the street, where I caught the “number 3 tuk-tuk”. Carla had shown me on the map the route it takes. “It’ll go up the one main street we have until it reaches Tescos,” which was a British supermarket. “And it’s bright pink,” she added with a laugh.

On the hot street under a hot sun, I waited only a few minutes for the number 3 Tuk-tuk, which was indeed bright pink. One climbs aboard from the back and sits on a bench on either side and beneath a canopy. Whenever you want to disembark, you push a buzzer and the driver pulls over, at which point you go around to the front and pay him 10 baht. Quite simple and wonderful. I wasn’t sure where there would be a coffee shop, but I figured there had to be one near the Swenson’s Ice cream parlor I’d seen the evening before while wandering about. “Western” goods and services were often in close proximity. The Tuk-tuk carried me and a half dozen other passengers along the somewhat busy main street, and only after a few minutes, I spotted the Swensons. I pushed the buzzer, the driver pulled over, and I paid him his 10 baht and stood under the hot sun glancing around as he took off. Scanning, my eyes rested on the one place a diabetic should avoid: a Mister Donut shop. There was nothing else around except for the ubiquitous Thai shops: a tire shop, a ‘refreshment’ shop (selling only sugared drinks, chips, various Thai snacks), a clothing shop, etc. I walked into the wonderfully air-conditioned Mister Donut and for the next hour or so, munched on two donuts, drank Latte, and read the paper. It was heaven.

In the evening, Carla and Angel invited me to go with them to the night market. Hopping on a Tuk-tuk, we rode a short distance to the market where there are dozens of stalls, booths, stands—all selling fresh grilled, baked, boiled or otherwise heated up foodstuffs. Fried bananas? Rice topped with either green veggies or some unidentifiable glop of something? Fresh-squeezed mango or pineapple juice? Carla opted for some grilled chicken whose aroma wafted through the air and past the plastic tables where we sat. I played it safe and chewed up my rice with chicken bits about thirty times before carefully swallowing. Afterwards, we each had a roti, which is a powerfully sweet taste treat that every diabetic and overweight person should fanatically avoid! So I had only one. At a roti stand, I watched the ‘chef’ spread a thin layer of dough over a hot circular griddle, on top of oil and grease and butter, naturally, just to make it totally bad for the health but assuring a delight for the taste buds. As it begins to cook, he lops on some butter, then squirts from a tube a steady stream of sweetened condensed milk, and sprinkles on sugar. Then he rolls it up, wraps it in paper, and you take it in anticipation of the rapture to come.

We munched on our rotis and took another tuk-tuk back to the apartments. Here, I completed the last step of my evening out: injecting a hefty 8 units of insulin into my tummy, which I’d noted hadn’t been decreasing in size although a few ribs were poking through skin. I unhappily concluded that I’d be the fattest emaciated man walking around town.

I had two joys primarily during my first days in Ubon: riding a bike around town, staying mainly on the many untrafficked roads, and visiting some of Carla’s classes. I twice did a stint as ‘guest teacher’ for her 4:30 class, which consisted of 4 children: pon, po, puey, and tang tai. And before you start snickering about odd names for kids, consider two of Sarah Palin’s offspring: Track and Trig. Pon was a pleasant but ‘naughty’ boy around 10; he and Po, about the same age, frequently chatted in Thai, heads together while Carla and I offered our lessons. Tang Tai was a cute little girl of about 10 or 11, and her English was probably best of the lot, though of course we’re talking about beginning level, the use of simple past. During one of the visits, she stammered out, “I…flew..on…plane….to…Bangkok.” Puey, a quiet, obviously introverted little girl of about 8 or 9, when asked a question, would look stunned and shy for moments before whispering a carefully worded answer. The first afternoon I met with them, Carla sitting to the side happily watching and interjecting comments, I told them where I was from, about my family, and about my trip. The two girls listened carefully but Pon and Po had to be dissuaded a couple of times from their ‘laughing chats’. I let each of them write down a couple of questions on paper (always the writing teacher), and then asked them to say their questions aloud. Actually, the questions were fairly thoughtful, Tang Tai asking, “What..does…you..father…work?”

The third morning, I met Carla downstairs at 9:15 because she was going to lead me over to a fancy little Kodak shop where she would meet the owner for some English tutoring, and where I could transfer my flashdrive pictures to a DVD. The owner was a woman in her early fifties, I imagine, and she was typically Thai: soft-spoken and gentle, and acted as if genuinely honored to have you in her shop. Carla had told me on the way over that the woman’s family was quite wealthy. “They own the shop, not to mention a five-star hotel and a restaurant.” No wonder the woman could enjoy a private tutor. At any rate, it was quickly decided that I would attend the first part of the lesson. Her daughter, in her early twenties, also studied with Carla. We all got comfortably seated around a big desk in a fairly empty (but air-conditioned) second floor room, and I repeated my lecture of where I was from, about Dubai, and about my trip, all of which they soaked in with smiles and little exclamations. The woman had traveled to Dubai and the daughter to Germany, so they were quite taken with me, as I later found out. We got invited, Carla told me, to a dinner on Friday evening. While we were chatting away, one of the worker girls brought in four big glasses of iced juice for our sipping pleasure. Very nice morning. When I tried to pay downstairs for the DVD with my pics on it, the girl behind the counter replied, “Free.”

I biked down side streets to a coffee shop named Peppers. I’ve no idea why it’s named Peppers since their menu is rather normal, nothing exotic. The owner/manager is a pleasant Aussie named Andrew, who was there that day with his Thai wife and 2 little daughters, one of whom was celebrating her birthday. We chatted about the usual stuff: home countries, heat, Dubai, life in Thailand, but he did convince me to come back the next morning for blueberry pancakes. For now I satisfied myself with Latte and the Herald Tribune. After a bike ride through the delightful roads of Ubon, past shacks, sparkling rich villas, lakes and temples, nothing can be better.
In the late afternoon, back at the school, I had a talk with Carla about the school. Unfortunately for the mission school, enrollment was way down, in fact practically nothing. This was because there was too little need for English in Ubon and too many English language schools. The fact that the SDA English Language School was a rather old two-story structure (though with a nice shady front lawn), was not air-conditioned (we sweated like hogs while sitting in either the office or the classrooms), and there was a general air of ‘old and poor’ about the place. This is no fault of Carla or Angel, who work under difficult conditions. I blame the mission ‘leaders’ in Bangkok, who do not have the foresight to see what is sorely needed in order to meet with success. It’s not enough to simply say “We are doing the Lord’s work.” To my way of thinking, the Lord would prefer if church leaders opened their purses a little more and tried using their brains. Ah, organized religion.

I started feeling lightheaded (when I get overly hot about politics or have had too much insulin). I joined Carla with Pon, Po, Puei and Tang Tui once again, though. Standing somewhat feebly in front of the four energetic students, I told them a story about snorkeling with a friend in Dubai and seeing a shark, and about my friend screaming when she saw the shark. The kids thought it moderately funny and learned the word “scary” and practiced their past tense verbs for awhile, but then I needed to get some carbs down my gullet in order to avoid fainting in the streets of Ubon, so off I went for dinner.

I chose an Italian place on the corner of the street closest to the apartments. I suppose it was the only Italian place in town, but it looked authentic and Carla had raved about the place. As the only customer I the rather cozy and well-decorated restaurant, two waitresses hovered over me as I looked at the menu. Realizing that I needed to raid an ATM, I asked a waitress if they accepted credit cards. The question was met with a blank stare, so I said, “How pay? Pay by credit card?” The girl turned with a shy look of horror to another girl and said, “Pay…pay?” Her companion was equally clueless so I withdrew my Mastercard from my wallet and showed it to her. She shook her head, “No, no, so sorry.”

“Where’s an ATM?” I asked. “A bank?” This word they knew, and the girl led me out the front door and pointed down the road. “Go to end road…to streetlights, then left” but she pointed right. We got it figured out and she said, “You take my bicycle please.” I thanked her, touched. Can you imagine a waitress in the US offering her bike to a total stranger who had only left an International Herald Tribune and a bag of red apples as collateral in the restaurant?

The girl pointed down at her bike, and I groaned inwardly. The thing was this tiny, girly-pink bike. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, however, so I climbed aboard what seemed little more than a toy, and pedaled off down the busier-than-normal street on my pink girlie bike. I got a few stares along the way, the white foreigner on a girl’s bike! I had to laugh though. How many Nebraskans were riding on a pink bicycle past tuk-tuks and pedestrians and chickens on a busy Thai road? Not many, if you ask me. Anyway, after probably making a lot of Thai folks chuckle as they walked along the road or watched from those open-front shops, I withdrew a cool ten-thousand from the ATM (don’t get excited, that’s only a couple hundred bucks). I returned to the restaurant and feasted on a big salad and spaghetti. Back at my hotel room, I had a warm shower to rinse off the day’s accumulated sweat and got caught up for the most part with my journal. I was getting used to this room, even though the ants in the bathroom kept appearing from nowhere.

I walked over to the school around 9am to meet Carla and Angel. “We’re going to a Veteran’s Day memorial in the park,” Carla said. “Wanna come along?” I said ‘sure’ but wanted to rent a bike for a couple days; Carla walked with me over to a little shop where a man did printing and engraving—but also rented out bikes. His wife, Yoko, half German and half Japanese, was a cheerful woman in her early forties who pumped up the front tire of a bike and waved happily as we three pedaled off down the street.

The next morning, the three of us attended a Veteran’s Day memorial service held in the city park; the military was represented by several hundred cadets, all of whom were simply kids trying to stay in the shade. Beside several bouquets of flowers and at a podium stood an Englishman speaking about how the city was honoring Mother Ubon, a truly elderly woman who during WWII had risked her life to give fruit to the allied POWS brought to Ubon by the occupying Japanese. The couple hundred in attendance applauded her as she collected her flowers. She told everyone (in Thai) that she wasn’t a hero, that it had been the soldiers. There were two or three picture-taking periods where the media snapped group shots, though it was never clear to me who was to be in the shots. There was a funny little Thai guy, obviously military, who was running around ushering anyone and everyone to come forward to be part of the group shot; why on earth he wanted me in my shorts and tank top, and sweat pouring from my face, to be in a photo with well-dressed (but definitely suffering) townspeople and dignitaries was beyond me. I guess I only went because my Uncle Clause had been a POW of the Japanese, and of course my own father had been stationed in England during the big war. Today was in honor of them and their service.

Then Angel, Carla and I pedaled our bikes (it’s so much fun!) to Peppers, the place owned by the Aussie, and feasted on blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup. They were delicious. Carla had ordered eggs but cooked well, so when they came out with yolk oozing from them, she wasn’t a happy camper. “They never can get it right,” she said. Well, after that, back at the SDA English Language School, I spoke with the secretary, a cute little Thai woman in her forties who speaks decent English. I’d been trying to arrange a meeting with an elderly pastor—in my search for stories of inspiration. I think she got tired of us asking, because she got hold of him and said, “He says, okay, but come now.” So just as I was dreaming about a nice nap, I instead drove with Jaroonee and her friend to the home of this elderly, retired pastor. The guy is eighty-three years old, but still pretty spry. But he said (speaking Thai to Jaroonee, who in turned translated into English) that he wasn’t sure of dates and would like to have his friend present “because she would remember more.” So we hopped back in the car and drove a few blocks to pick up an elderly woman. On the way back, one of my prayers was answered: I found the house where I’d lived nearly 30 years earlier and “Disneyland”, a place I’d visited in those days. More on that later.

In short, in the un-air-conditioned hall of the school, a once grand old two-story building, I listened to the history of the church and school in Ubon. The pastor or his friend, a genteel woman in her seventies, would alternately speak about those times and the hard life, and while Jaroonee translated, sometimes with chuckles, I’d type it out on my laptop. One of the stories the woman related, and as she sat in the plastic orange chair in this hallway, she told of how the pastor in his younger years had befriended a man named Mon, and after getting to know her, telephoned Mon, living in another town and said, “I have a girl here for you to marry.” Pastor Mun, at the time in his mere twenties, did come to Ubon, did meet her, and did fall in love. Eventually, they married and had a full life serving God in various places in Thailand and Laos. But that’s the subject of another book.

For now, after the interview ended, Carla and I biked through town to go to the night market. We stopped at Joe’s shop, where a friendly little Thai guy named Joe sells a vast assortment of semi-expensive and quality items: knick knacks to silk ties to art. He introduced us to a Chinese girl named Jessie, who is here guest teaching for six months at a small university. As we sat at a table in Joe’s shop drinking water and juice, she told us about herself, and of course we reciprocated. The cool thing about traveling is the human connection. The night market was right across the street, so we left our bikes parked in front of Joe’s and crossed over to the buzzing colorful market with its special enticing scents and deep-fried foods. I saw the same Roti maker rolling dough in which he’d sprinkle sweet condensed milk and sprinkle sugar, the same musician beggar playing his little ukulele as he slowly strolled along only half seeing out of one eye. Townsfolks and a handful of whiteys sat at cheap plastic tables munching on fried rice with assorted ‘goodies’ and drinking fresh-squeezed juices. Bugs flew here and there, this being Asia, but I thought it sad that this kind of social setting, a market, was missing from Midwestern society.

The next day, my fifth day in Ubon, I was going to bicycle up a few blocks to see the house where I’d lived in 1982—and a place called Disneyland, just down the street from that house. Carla and Angel asked if they could bike along; they, too, were anxious to see the places I’d talked about. The sun was strong and great puffy white clouds hung in the sky; we pedaled through light traffic past all the two and three story buildings (some old, wooden structures from way back) and others more modern. Passing a temple where I was sure the house had been near (and where Jaroonee had showed me just a couple days earlier), I was frustrated not to see the house. “Let’s try Disneyland,” Carla suggested. “Maybe then we can backtrack and find the house.” That sounded logical so I agreed. And within a few minutes, we coasted into Disneyland. Which requires an explanation here.

I had come to Ubon in 1982 for several weeks to teach English to Lao refugees in a Red Cross camp; the organization for whom I worked was Volunteers International. There were four of us volunteers: Clint, a rather serious youth who was technically ‘in charge’; myself, and then Jamie, a pretty young woman from California, and Duncan, an English lad of nineteen with blond hair and an amiable personality. We three gentlemen lived in one house that had been built by the church leaders two or three decades earlier; the house was a whitewashed affair that resembled an old American home from the period—front porch and all. Jamie lived alone next door. The guys’ house had an expansive green lawn on which the neighborhood boys frequently played soccer, and the house also had a collection of bats, ants, geckoes and roaches. The entire neighborhood had a rural feel about it though we could pedal into town within minutes. But this street was limited to our two houses and some wooden shacks. The road in front of our house was of dirt.

Down the street from us was “Disneyland.” In the 1970’s, while hordes of Yankee soldiers were based here during the Vietnam War, Disneyland was a brothel, an amusement park of sorts with undoubtedly wild rides. The place was nothing more than some wooden two-story shacks that looked like they might collapse would there be any tectonic jolt whatsoever. Then, years after the uniformed Americans departed, Disneyland remained a partial brothel but also a place where poor folks lived. I’d met a Thai teacher and his wife there, and every few days biked down the road to visit them. There was a little weedy front yard filled with junk and dust, a low fence, and a couple round metal tables over which hung a makeshift covering. A couple of chickens might have been clucking around as well as some stray mutts. There had been one young lady there, a twenty-two year old girl named Jau, that seemed to take a liking to me. For the longest time I didn’t know her profession—until one night when, at a rather seedy club, she showed up. For work, that is.
It’s like this: Jamie, Duncan, Clint and I had been teaching in the camp that afternoon. After ‘work’, we wanted to bike into town and catch a bite to eat. On one dust-covered street, inside a two-story building, there was a ground-floor eatery of sorts. But the manager insisted we go ‘upstairs’, and so we did (well, why not?). Jamie said, “Oh oh,” as soon as she saw how dimly lit the room was—and the men sitting about tables. But she was from California so made the decision to go in. Well, I’ve written a whole story about that night which I won’t repeat here; suffice it to say that the four of us, in our semi-missionary capacity, were struck dumb when a young beautiful Thai girl started doing a strip-tease. We were more shocked afterwards when some naughty boy switched on a projector. It wasn’t a home movie that you would show to an after-church potluck crowd.

Flash forward to 2009, and me wanting to locate my old house and Disneyland. It had seemed impossible once I got the lay of the land: the city had grown significantly even though it still was a very small city (or big town); I remembered nothing about the street layout of the town, and after asking a few locals where Disneyland was (and getting some funny looks—as if to say, “well, in California, isn’t it dumb kid?”), It became apparent that I wouldn’t find it. Not even Jaroonee had heard of it. But the day Jaroonee and I had gone to pick up the elderly retired pastor for an interview; she’d driven me by the house that the church had owned. A “Wednesday Market” was going on at the time on a patch of land so I didn’t get a great glimpse, but she assured me that this was the house in which I’d lived because Adventists had owned it then.

Which brings me back to my bike ride there in the morning with Carla and Angel. We pulled into Disneyland (the big sign that had read DISNEYLAND was no longer hanging between two trees) and celebrated our find with a couple of hurrahs. I happily pointed out the very same table that I’d sat at with the Thai couple and Jau twenty-eight years earlier. The memory was sharp in my mind because I’d bitten into a Thai pepper thinking it was a carrot. The resulting tears and agony had evoked a few chuckles from my Thai friends, but at least Jau, bless her, had had some compassion.

As I was relaying this to Carla and Angel, a woman (needless to say, a short, Thai woman) came into the ‘yard’ and asked, “Can I help you?” in English, a surprise. I guessed her to be in her fifties. Carla told her in Thai that we’d been looking for the place because some old friends of mine had lived here. Breaking into a smile at that information, as well as the fact that Carla spoke Thai, the woman answered some questions for me, but basically there was no Jau living here now and no teachers. Well, it had been ages ago. And Disneyland looked poorer than ever. From up on a balcony, a very old woman looked down at us. A couple other souls in poor garb shuffled across the dust-covered lawn and disappeared into one of the three shacks, two of which were closely set together. “Why don’t I get a picture of you and the lady?” Carla suggested. She was such a cheerful soul, and a real people person! She likes to laugh, and is one of those wonderful human beings that makes you feel a little happier, and her laugh gets you into a good mood so that you want to laugh too. All of us were smiling and shooting pictures when the very old woman joined us, and a new round of picture-taking began. The old woman’s face was heavily wrinkled and had seen a lot of hard times. But she possessed strong features and her lively eyes danced as she said to Carla, “You are beautiful.” To which Carla laughed hysterically and said, “You’re so sweet!”

The woman impulsively hugged Carla, which was such a sweet thing to see, and not content with that hug, she went on over to Angel and hugged her, a big full hug. More pictures, this time the whole gang, and of course with each of our cameras. “You’re good lookin’ honey,” said the old woman, first to me (with a hug, of course), then to Angel. Carla said, “Yep, she was definitely here during the American presence.” Doubtless that’s where she’d learned some of her phrases. At some point, she’d mentioned “G.I Joes”, another giveaway. Carla handed each of them a brochure for the English school though I doubted either could afford the classes. Carla would hand a brochure to Barrack Obama should he make an appearance in Ubon. But, heaven knows the school needs students.


We hopped on our bikes, waved and said our good-byes to the ladies, and rode on up the street. After crossing another road, I heard Carla say, “Is that the house?” I looked ahead and said, “That’s it!” But the place had changed dramatically; a once green lawn was now weeds and dust. A mini-market of tables, stalls and awnings had sprouted just to the east of the house, which apparently was deserted. There were some guys in chairs and a hammock under one of the coverings, doubtless shading themselves from the sun, and I asked Carla if she’d ask them if we could go up to the front porch at least. We parked our bikes and Carla went over to talk to them while I stepped up to the porch. I began to wonder if this was the house; something wasn’t quite right, but then, it’s likely my memory wasn’t quite right. Carla came over with a Thai guy in his early to mid thirties, and at the same time, a pickup truck had pulled up behind our bikes, out of which emerged a youth with shoulder-length hair. Angel at once thought he was adorable—reminding her of her adopted brother).

As it turns out, the youth had bought the house and was in the process of renovating it. In typical Thai fashion, both of the men insisted we all three go in. After removing our shoes (not that we could have gotten the floors dirtier than they already were), we walked in. I knew that this couldn’t be the house—and also remembered that Jaroonee had said one of the houses had been sold and demolished.
The bottom line was that the house in which I’d lived—with ants, bats, geckoes and roaches—no longer existed. As I looked across the lawn, I could see where the house had stood. This house we were in was the house in which Jamie had lived. Still, it was a cool and wonderful feeling to know that so many years ago, I’d been in this house and that I’d discovered my old stomping grounds. We had quite a nice visit with the guys, and Carla said, “Why don’t we get some pictures of them?” Needless to say, we are all now the owners of a fine collection of pictures—including the men because after our talk with them, we rode our bikes back into town and made printouts of the digital pics. We rode back to the house and presented them as a gift to the man who had been laying in his hammock just an hour earlier. He was pleased as punch and invited all of us for…well, some kind of fruit punch. We sat at one table next to a much smaller dwelling (one couldn’t call it a house), sipping drinks and being introduced to three young ladies who were masseurs. “Come, see,” the man said beckoning me inside the little place. The gals didn’t get an invite. I walked in to a little side room about the size of a bedroom. On the floor were three single mattresses. At the foot end of each mattress were little pink towels.
In the afternoon, we met up with Satpo and Sita at the coffee shop they own, a nice little place that makes great smoothies and has treats. Satpo also owns the adjoining hotel and insisted on taking us through two of the guestrooms, a king-bedded room and a double-bedded room. Here, Satpo learned from us to say “King-bedded room”, repeating the words slowly, and then thanking us.

Then I pedaled around, saw a temple, just enjoying riding. The one thing that made me a bit nervous was the dogs. In the temple compounds, there always seemed to be two or three dogs that would bark threateningly, trotting closer to the bike, but not too close, being uncertain about the white boy. And not only near the temples, but also ordinary neighborhoods. Underfed-looking dogs, probably not fed by owners who believe in a dog’s inherent ability to ‘catch food’, either slept at shop entrances or lurked about the streets. For the most part, I have to say, they rarely barked at me and only a couple gave chase. Usually, my shouting at them (usually in fear) dissuaded them from furthering their pursuit.

In the afternoon, I attended the kid’s class again. Tempo is a new boy, a little Thai Harry Potter. It didn’t take him too long to figure out how to be naughty, whispering and giggling to Pon while Carla was speaking to them. The kids were all rambunctious, though, and when Carla asked them if they were ready to tell Scott a story (she had told them the day before to memorize for me), they squirmed, shook their heads or looked dumbly straight ahead; so I had a quick idea: “Kids,” I said, getting up, “Let’s write sentences on the board.” Which is something they enjoyed as long as three could get up at once. They had to choose one animal that they knew and use it with one of the verbs I’d written on the top of the board. Overall, it went well. The kids expended some energy writing on the whiteboard (Carla whispered some ideas to Pon at the far end of the board) and they had good practice writing full sentences.

I rode my rental bike at sundown to the river, a gorgeous sight as a red sky off to the west made the water turn amber. This forty-something guy, who I’d seen standing over one of the many ‘cooking stands’ along the river, where one could purchase various fried or grilled foods. He must have seen a falong walk by, because all of a sudden he came up with a ‘hello’ and said some words that might have been “I see you are riding your bike down by the river” as easily as he could have been saying, “It’s my dream to kill a foreigner.” He was neither friendly nor unfriendly, and all of a sudden, the air reeked of Johnny Walker, which I doubted was emanating off the river. “Where you from?” he asked in carefully constructed English (must have been a challenge after the Johnny Walker). After mentioning “Nebraska,” he offered up this dumb look of non-comprehension. I promised to return for some of his good cookin’ the next day and biked off, keeping my eyes on a couple of mean-looking dogs as I pedaled.

The last event of the day was a fine dinner at the Rossito’s Italian Restaurant. Days earlier, when Satpo and her daughter Sita had learned that I’d be leaving in a few days, Satpo had insisted that she host a dinner for me. Carla told me one afternoon, “The ladies are quite taken with you; they loved talking about Dubai with you and think you are so neat.” She laughed. “They really like you.” I thought it was cool but wondered why I hadn’t had this effect on women when I was twenty-one. Anyway, we all met up at the restaurant, filling up two tables shoved together. Satpo had brought along her husband, who spoke almost no English and aside from Sita, her other daughter, who was married to a lawyer whose name was Pi Nut (pronounced ‘peanut’). He didn’t speak English either, so the only conversation at the table was between Carla, Sita and me at one end, and Angel at the far end chatting with Satpo. The others got some words in (with either Satpo, Sita or Carla translating) before the meals arrived, at which point there was more chewing than communicating. At the end of the meal, we had a round of “thank you”s, pictures, and handshakes. It’s never easy to have these cross-cultural dinners, but they’re usually enjoyable and make everyone feel good. It’s nice whenever people of different backgrounds (and worlds!) get along and laugh together. Stupid world leaders, most of whom in my opinion will one day be doing the backstroke in the lake of fire promised in the book of Revelations. Don’t bother with the life vests, boys.

On Friday, Carla, Angel and I caught a bus (air conditioned by the open windows) to Tiger Kingdom, an hour outside of Ubon in the middle of nowhere. It’s a zoo of sorts with only a few animals, but the thirty tigers are wonderful to see. Unlike the tigers at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, these beasts are energetic and have small yards in which to exercise. Tiger Kingdom also has a few lions, several leopards, cute monkeys (though cruelly chained or kept in cages), alligators, and bright colorful tropical birds. Highlights this day included a tiger that rose on his hind feet and pushed against the metal grillwork of his cage in order to impress me, a leopard couple, the ‘husband’ of which was clearly very infatuated (drooling, actually, in anticipation of mating; the female was less than enthusiastic, simply cowering), and a monkey that jumped at us, hitting the cage we stood beside. Well, check out the pictures.

We hitched a ride back to Ubon with a pleasant young couple in a Toyota Pickup with AC running and American pop music playing. They dropped us at Big C Department store, where we devoured some KFC before we caught our pink Tuk-tuk ‘home’. In the afternoon, Carla and I biked around, visiting some of her favorite temples. At one, we met a Thai English teacher, and I suggested that someone in Ubon start up an English club—since so many people wanted to practice their English.
In the evening, we biked along the river as the sun was going down, and then headed to a Vietnamese restaurant where Angel awaited us. The place was fairly upscale and a woman in her forties sung mournful Vietnamese love songs as a man played the piano. Not in the mood for love songs, we instead got to chuckling over movies, TV shows, and other equally important topics. This generally led to our guffawing rather loudly, I think. But the time was relaxing and fun. Sometimes, you just have to have a good time and laugh. As I biked home later, I heard “Hi Scott” from someone; turning my head, I saw the kid who worked at a fruit stand; I’d spoken with him two days ago—and he’d remembered my name. I was impressed and bought another apple.