Richard's Travel Blog

Y’know those awkward times when you’re checking into a motel with someone you really should be doing that with? There is a wide open industry here to handle those concerns. For starters, certain motels are known as “love hotels”. You can spend a night there, but you have to check out during the day so they can rent the room for one or two hours at a time during the day. You don’t have to get the fish eye from the hotel clerk because you can pull into the parking garage and pull the garage door behind you, go directly to you room, slide your card and make yourselves comfortable.

There are even pictures of the rooms above the garage door so you know just what your getting into.
I’m going to try to blog more often than once a month. So, since my last entry we’ve done what we often do, that is go out somewhere for some kind of activity for at least part of the day. Like, yesterday we took a local bus to a place where we then walked about 5 miles to a waterfall. That “69” love hotel was one of many on the way to that pretty place.

I changed the setting on my camera and got an interesting blue hue to the base of that waterfall.

After that we went to Myung’s Friends’ restaurant and chowed down on Korean barbeque with them and other friends. I didn’t have take any pics there, but it was some of the same crowd that are in this picture from last month which I posted earlier.

Today we’re going to the local market, what Americans would usually call the farmers’ market. It’s every 5 days on dates that end with 1 and 6, except the 31st. It’s the cheapest place to get fresh food including fish and meat. It’s a regular activity for us on market days. I think I’ll take a few pictures and get back to this with them after we come back.
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Hi again. We lazed around watching the Democratic convention on CNN then walked to the market. I should have taken a picture of the ‘hood but didn’t think of it till we got to the river. They are working at beautifying it. It should be nice when it’s done. So far they have cleaned it up, put in bike paths on both sides as far up as our neighborhood, and made some crossings and steps down.

You walk through town a while and get to the area where the market is, which is basically about four blocks of blocked off lanes. Here is one of the entrances.

I took a bunch of pictures of the stuff in there, mostly some of the stuff we bought today. It’s like most Asian markets in most ways, very traditional. Nothing is pre-packaged. I’ll just post all of these, even though you’ve seen so many market pictures and potatoes aren’t exactly exotic. Here’s Myung buying white potatoes.

Here she is buying doraji, a root similar to ginseng. She sauteed it tonight with seaweed in sesame, garlic, red pepper and probably something else. Most things are prepared with those ingredients here, in varying amounts and proportions. Obviously this vendor is selling many other things.

Here’s some ginseng. Most varieties are inexpensive here.

One common way of eating is to wrap stuff in leaves and pop it in your mouth.
Probably the most popular leaf is the red leaf lettuce Americans are quite used to. Another popular leaf is sesame leaf.

Koreans like to buy their carrots still dirty. Myung says they are fresher that way.

Here’s rice and legumes mostly.

Here’s the kimchi. Myung makes ours, but this gives you the idea how many kinds are common. There are actually dozens of kinds.

Apples and peaches. the peaches look great, but they aren’t very juicy or sweet. The apples and Asian pears are great, though.

Mushrooms are one of the few things that are cheaper here than in the States.

Bored yet? This will be over soon. If you like steamed corn, like most Asian markets, you can grab a bite while your at the market.

Or stop and smell the flowers.

Lastly, I’m down to the phish photos. Today we bought these squid. We often eat mackerel. there are many kinds of fish but most of it is pricey. Those long ones are razor fish. They are good but not too heavy, so $5 each is a bit much. The third pic is of dried little fishes of different sizes. They can be eaten as is. or lightly sauteed with, what do you think, garlic and red pepper. The last pic is of these tiny rockfish about the size of your hand. Pathetic. They barely qualify as juveniles, I’d guess. They have to be 20 years old to reproduce. Oh well. It’s happening all over.

So, we got home and made dinner. Most of it was Myung’s doing. I made a traditional American salad with red lettuce, onion, bell pepper and carrots with thousand island dressing I made out of mayo, ketchup and pickles Myung made. I forgot to put in the cukes. The pot has kimchi stew. You can see rice there, doraji with seaweed, these pancake things like Indian pakora which she made out of sweet potatoes and greens this time, spicy long green peppers with sesame, and the little fishies. Typically, Koreans have a multi-course meal like this. As you can see, I didn’t exactly make the table look picture perfect. It’s our one table and it’s gets used a lot.

Okay, that’s it for now. Be well, all of you.

My favorite bathroom signs remain the ones that were at Donahue’s coffee shop on Disappointment Slough near Stockton. The doors were labelled “Inboards” and “Outboards”. For those of you who may be not boat literate, boats with engines inside are inboards and boats with engines mounted on the back are outboards. You go from there.
It’s hard to believe my last blog entry was almost a month ago. How time flies! It’s been pretty warm and rainy for the month. Usually the temps have been in the 80’s F (That’s high 20’s C) which isn’t too bad even given the humidity. Just in the last week, it’s been getting cooler in the evening. From Late July to about last weekend when there was a three day national holiday weekend is the tourist season. Several times we joined the throngs and went somewhere popular. One day it was estimated 6 million went to the beach somewhere. Now, Korea has a very long coastline, but that’s about 12% of the total population. We went a couple of times with friends or Myung’s sister’s family. We also went alone a couple of times. At no time was it your romantic, lonely stroll. Those are Myung’s friends, Geong Ja and Il Hwan, and me in the shade of a “pavillion” on the beach.

A couple of weekends ago it was her sister’s family we went with. Here they are inland from the beach at Seoraksan National Park, way up in the northeast.

And here is a spot near there.

Here are some pics of Seoraksan. It’s yet another beautiful place in this country.

Of course there are temples. Here are the obligatory temple pics. I still don’t tire of how they look from all the angles.

As long as I’m talking friends and family, here’s one of Myung’s childhood friend, Yung He and her husband, Geong Yoerl. They all went to grade school together.

This week we went on another little road trip, this time by ourselves, down to Hallyeo Maritime National Park on the south coast. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s beautiful, like a poor man’s Halong Bay in Vietnam. The other is a famous naval battle between Korea and Japan happened there in the 1590’s.

The main naval battle was fought here. It actually is interesting. The Korean admiral utilized the world’s first iron clad ships, called turtle ships because they had covers like turtles with spikes to deter anyone from jumping on. Secondly, he used the then new strategy of flanking the enemy ships and attacking at an angle. Before, they charged and passed, like the European navies still did a hundred years later, firing canons and trying to board. He engaged the front of the Japanese formation with his invinsible turtle ships while the smaller ships cut them up from the side. It all happened here.

After that we went up to Deogyusan National Park. Need I say it’s exquisitly beautiful?

Then we went to Maisan Provincial Park near there. It’s mostly famous for this temple built by a lay person over the course of 30 years. There is no mortar, not even on the little towers. Needless to say, there are many signs telling people not to touch. Someday somebody’s going to mess it up, no doubt.

Some of our travelling together is very nice. Sometimes….

The picture of the guy in the upper left sums up my feelings after a long day somewhere and the then the sometimes long subway ride to Yangsan after a long bus ride.

Let’s talk food. I’d say we eat fusion. Actually, I probably get more American food than when I’m travelling because I can have anything I can find the ingredients to and make it myself. That’s as long as I can cook it on the stove. Koreans don’t usually have ovens. They fry everything. Even Korean barbeque is essentially frying, as it’s on a hot plate over coals or gas. You just grease it up with pork fat or something and fry whatever you have. The outer part of the BBQ surface is a moat where you boil up soup the way you like it. The ingredients are all on the side. This is what we have whwen we are at Geong Joerl and Yung He’s restaurant. Anyway, at home we often have fusion or a little of this and a little of that. We do eat the Korean way, that is we have one or two main things and several side dishes which invariably include a couple of kinds of kimchi. We may also have an American salad with oil and vinegar type dressings or thousand island I make up out of mayo, ketchup and pickled cucumbers Myung makes. We even have balsamic vinegar. This is foreign food to Myung. Also, she is “the noodle queen”. I pronounced her that after watching her eat noodles maybe nine out of ten days we were travelling. She wasn’t that wild about Indian food and steadily enjoyed noodles. So we have spaghetti a lot. I’m not that busy, so I kind of like chopping up the excellent tomatoes they have here and adding the usual ingredients. I wish we had fresh Italian seasoning, but I was able to find dried McCormick’s in a store in Busan. It’s looking like I make breakfast, so we always start with filter coffee with beans ground at the store we get them. Sometimes I even drink my coffee with sweetened condensed milk, a habit I got into after eturning from SE Asia in ’99. Then I often make eggs. You don’t want to know how many eggs I eat. If I had a cardiologist I think he’d have a heart attack. I like the way I cook eggs, nice and soft over low heat. I’m afraid the Koreans like them flash fried hard over high heat. That’s why I’m the breakfast cook. I often make omelets and scramlets with various things I’m familiar with, like mushrooms, tomatoes, bell peppers, onions and ham. The ham here is like spam, but what the heck. I also like to make home fries. Myung likes this fine and lets me do my thing. Oh, we found Quaker’s Oatmeal in Busan. We went through that in no time. For a price you can get raisens. Also it was good with granny smith-type apples and cinnamon. Lunch may be sandwiches or Korean food. You can by whole wheat bread with too much conditioner, and that’s what we have around the house. We have ham a lot, usually with mustard, onions, tomatoes and lettuce. Sometimes we have american cheese. Real cheese is expensive and a little hard to find. I’m not going $8/pound for cheddar, thank you very much. One good thing is that Myung doesn’t have preconceived notions about foreign food, so what is old hat to me is fun for her. She even likes peanut butter, mayonaise and lettuce sandwiches with me. The folks back home laugh at that one. As for the Korean food, Myung is a fine cook. Sometimes it’s a little hot even for me, but it’s just the way we like it, ain’t it boys. I’ve eaten practically everything you can eat someplace or another, so nothing “funny” bothers me. Koreans generally use only a few spices, salt, black pepper, much red pepper, sesame, soy sauce, onion, garlic and ginger. Other seasoning is in gourmet cooking, but you don’t see much of it. Delicate spices don’t exist. Most of what she makes is fried or sauteed. What the Koreans lack in seasoning variety, they more than make up with food variety. We eat a million kinds of greens, tubors, beans, ferns, whatever. Our main meat is mackerel. We bought a hunk of pork last week. That was a first. Beef’s expensive, though it’s come down since Korea started allowing American beef after many years. That’s a long story involving mad cow fear, saving the domestic beef industry and competing political entities. The kimchi is of course not fried. We have a rice cooker. That’s handy. We also eat a lot of soups and stews. She really is a good cook.

Those are breakfast dishes we had a few days ago at a restaurant while we were travelling. I had the tripe soup and she had the congealled blood drop soup. I had blood soup before in Asia. I preferred the tripe, with three cups of coffee. Fusion.

The food is so hot here that I wear a headband to keep the sweat out of my eyes.
Y’know, I could really write endlessly about this time in my life. Maybe if I wrote more often, the entries would 1) be more digestible and 2) have more written content and fewer pictures, at least at a time. Well, I’ll try to get more in here. I’m not sure who reads this anyway. I get very little feedback. I think I’m doing it mostly for myself, like a diary. Someday it may be of interest to me. The pics I’ll have on CD’s and DVD’s.
I’ll close for now with a few more pictures I just like. The first is of one of the huge black butterflies here. The others are just pics of Myung and me. Be well, all of you.

I say this a lot these days: I’m not that busy. Myung and I just hang out much of the time. Usually we do something during the day. Occasionally we go somewhere overnight. Sometimes, especially in bad weather, we stay in and do stuff on the computer, read and watch TV. I must say, sometimes it is a little boring, but so is travelling all the time and working. I’m caught up on much of the news by reading it on the net and watching news channels like CNN and BBC. I’ve become probably more of a political junkie than I was, and that’s saying something. Today we were going to go up the coast to Chilbo and watch a couple of evenings of jazz on the beach, but the weather is threatening and sitting on the beach in the rain doesn’t sound like fun. Maybe we’ll just hit the beach with our friends on Sunday when the weather is supposed to clear. Korea is at the northern edge of the monsoon so although it isn’t very hot, only occasionally over 30 degrees C (about 90 F), it rains a lot at this time of the year. It should be dry and warm/hot from about the second week of August till the second week of September. Then it will cool down and be beautifully colorful by mid to late October.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of pictures. Finally, duh, I figured out that the pixelated pictures are the ones I’ve rotated, so from now on I’m going to post only the horizontal ones. Too bad in the camera and when viewing them the computer or on a CD/DVD, they look fine. These don’t need much narration. They’re mostly of nice places. The soldier is Myung’s nephew who got a weekend off from his universal draft duty.

Needless to say, this period of my life is interesting. Living here has had many facets. There’s Korea still being a new place, yet there is no rush at all to see every little thing. We’re getting around to stuff in due time. I’m getting used to the place. I even understand Korean a little and can concoct a sentence or two. So, there is also the experience of settling in. Then there’s the experience of settling in with Myung. Add to that the likelihood we will travel again in not too many months. That means, yet again in our lives, both of us are following a path that doesn’t have clear signposts. We’re playing it a lot by ear. It’s like travelling even when we stay at home. What’s around the corner and what do you want to do today? Well, “shanti, shanti”, as they say on the backpacker circuit in India. The small stuff and the big stuff will come about in due time. Unusually for a Korean, Myung doesn’t need to rush around and achieve as much as she can. She has already succeeded and doesn’t need to prove anything. I did, too, to my satisfaction. So what now? There must be something we’re supposed to do, or be. When I think of something, I’ll let you know. Myung says she is fine. “Fine” works for me. For now, I think we’re both fine with taking our time to have a seat and let things emerge as they will.

Until today we were staying in Yangsan, a suburb of Busan (Pusan), with these friends of Myung’s. I know it’s all pixelated, but it came from another camera. The woman, Kwong Ja, is her friend from all the way back in elementary school. The man, Il Hwan, is that woman’s husband. We decided to stay here for a while, and today we moved to an apartment. Those friends gave us some stuff to get started with. Other than that, moving was no harder than packing our packs up and going over there. Here is Il Hwan in his studio. His work is applying images to surfaces of window curtains, tiles, or any other surface. His stuff makes one want a place where you could put it up.

In a way, Myung and I have taken a step closer together. In another way, we are taking a break from travelling. Myung is from this area and knows people. It makes sense, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with Myung and getting to know the place I’m in better than I usually do. I’m going to try to pick up some Korean and see if I can become halfway functional here. Should be interesting all the way around.
Myung’s friends are all very nice. One of them has a restaurant. Here is Myung with assorted friends.

Becoming Korean takes a little rewiring of my circuitry. For example, many people just love kareoke. Doing this requires taking a deep breath and doing as the Romans do.

There are popular songs in English too. I sang “Hotel California” by request. Everyone clapped along and played tamborines.
“On a dark desert highway/Cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitis/Rising up through the air…”
In another way, I’m still travelling alone.

“We haven’t had that kind of spirit here since 1969”.

The couple we were staying with, Il Hwan and Kyung Ja (Don’t ask me if I’ve transliterated that correctly) have a 14 year old son, Dong Ei. He’s the number two student at his middle school.

A few days have passed since I wrote what you’ve read so far and added the photos. Since moving to our new place, I haven’t had much access to a computer. Finally today, we went to Il Hwan’s office (the man we were staying with) and I have a little time to send something. He has to go in about a half hour, so I think I’ll make this entry shorter than I originally intended.
Our studio apartment is perfectly suitable for us, especially since we don’t have stuff to fill a big place. It has a nice view out the window. The tomb os some ancient king is out there. Ther second picture is just panning to the right.

Yangsan is situated along what you might call the Busan-Ulsan strand in southeast S. Korea. This strand goes between two low mountain ranges, if you can call 500 meter hills mountains. So, either way you go to the side is almost completely uninhabilted greenery. Some roads and paths go in there., and there are a few popular places and temples. It’s like East Bay Regional Parks behind the urban East Bay area of the San Francisco Bay Area. The main difference is that S. Korea is 70% like this, so it goes on and on. Here are some pictures of one of the ways into the hills by Yangsan and a temple there.

Il Hwan needs to go in about 10 minutes, so this is it for blogging for now. My sincere apologies to those of you who haven’t gotten responses to emails for a while. I had hoped to be able to use Myung’s notebook, but it turns out no carrier wants to ship a notebook for fear of damaging it. We tentatively plan to to pick it up and do some other things in Seoul on July 5, so we can get it then. Meanwhile, I should be able to use a computer between now and then.
So, until between now and then, be well all of you.

I haven’t had much access to a computer for most of the time I’ve been in Korea. After a few days in Seoul, Myung and I went to a nice place in the mountains then another place without easy access. Then we went to Jeju Island and stayed well out of Jeju City. There, one day I imposed on the guesthouse owners to use their personal computer, but only once in the 11 days we were there. It’s hard to believe we’ve been here three weeks already. Finally, we are staying with friends of Myung’s in Yangsan, a suburb of Pusan, also spelled Busan.
I guess I’ll go chronologically and begin with Seoul, which is where I landed on my flight from Hanoi. That first picture is of a river through downtown Seoul that was reclaimed after being buried under city for a long time. From the beginning, this going around in Korea has been very different from almost any other travelling I’ve done. Obviously that’s because I’m with a Korean. She’s basically taking me around to all these nice places. I don’t have difficulties due to the language barrier. Taking buses other public transportation is a snap. Having an authentic experience is easy, as we can relate to the people ever so much easier, not to mention sometimes we are visiting or staying with friends or family.
It occurs to me I should be taking pictures of her friends and family. She has some pics on her camera. Maybe next entry I’ll get hers uploaded onto here. In Seoul she has a couple of sisters. We visited with them, but stayed in a couple of hotels, one very nice one the first night we got back together after I was exiled to Vietnam and one cheay backpacker place.
Seoul isn’t very photogenic, but my impressions are that it’s really pretty nice for a megalopolis of 15 million people. It has clean air and streets, doesn’t sprawl all over northern South Korea because most people live in highrises, doesn’t have a lot of oppressive traffic as most people use public transportation, and the people are nice. It reminds me of Singapore, though it’s not as affluent as that.

I only took a few pictures there, and that one of the little kids was one of them. There are a couple of a changing of the guard ceremony at the palace.

One of the cool things we did there was watch this traditional music and dance program. It’s too bad photography wasn’t allowed, but at least the performers went out front to mingle with the audience after the program.

After that we did some temple visiting and scenic walking. I’m tempted to just insert a blizzard of all my temple pictures now instead of naming the places and all that. Hmm, I think I will do the ones before Jeju, that is, Hwaomsa and Haenam. They do show what a pretty, green country Korea is. Often routine buildings are set nicely in the surroundings. Korea is almost all hilly, and because they build up, the hill and mountaintops aren’t covered with development like in the US.

Originally we thought we might do “templestays” but have so far just gotten rooms in guesthouses or hotels. Those are interesting here. Koreans do a lot of things on the floor, like eat off one foot high tables and sleep on mats which are rolled up and put away during the day. I’m sitting on the floor now, typing on a laptop on a footstool. Traditional guesthouses are just rooms with mats. I’m kind of partial to chairs, but it’s okay. Jeju Island is off the south coast of mainland Korea. There we got a studio with a kitchenette, a regular bed and a dining table with chairs. The cooktop was on the floor, but that was okay too. Few kitchens have ovens. Here is the place.

And here is one of Myung and three members of the nice family who run it. They were having a barbeque and invited us. It was about a 10 minute walk to the seashore.
To get to the seashore you walk on one of several roads like this. This shoreline is about a ten minute walk from our guesthouse and is typical of the 200 km shoreline all the way around Jeju.

Myung and I have been on the road for quite a while, so we have no problem just hanging out. That’s what we mostly did on Jeju. Sometimes we just stayed in our room and watched TV, only going out for little walks or something. There are some touristy sights, like an interesting rock sculpture garden, a botanical garden, traditional village exhibits and various commercial points of interest. Mostly, Jeju is about the scenery. It’s a volcanic island, so everywhere are laterite stones used for fencing and decoration. There is, as I said, 200 km of shoreline. The center is mountainous, the centerpiece being Mt. Halla, a 1900-something meter volcano which hasn’t erupted in 9000 years. It is the highest peak in South Korea. Here are some pictures of scenery.

That last one is on Mt. Halla. As you can see, the wildflowers are wonderful and the 360 secondary volcanic cones on the island are interesting. That reminds me, my leg is getting better. It’s about a 10 km schlep there and back, and I tolerated it fine.

I have three pictures from a traditional wedding a couple was having in one of the mock traditional villages. They had this dancing, and here is the bride.

Again and again, you see the beautiful curving contours of traditional buildings against a background of soft green mountains. Anywhere these buildings are, you can look at the shapes from many, many angles and it almost looks like you are looking at a different place. I wish I could capture it in photos, but I think most of you know what I mean. Well, it’s even better in person.

Those were all taken in Haeinsa, another beautiful temple area. To be sure, some of the most stunning places are theswe temple areas, but that style of building is contemporary also.

From there we went to stay with her friend from elementary school days and her husband in Yangsan. Between this friend and her other two friends from elementary school days who live nearby, we’ve had this nice combination of being made to feel at home and given options of many things to do. I don’t know how long we will stay. Myung basically shrugged when I asked her. Sometime soon I’ll blog again. Meanwhile, as always, be well all of you.

This is my last day in Vietnam before leaving for Seoul, Korea at 11:30 PM tonight. This morning about 6:30 AM I went out in the cool early morning for a little victory lap around the scenic Hoan Kiem Lake (Lake of the Returning Sword) in Hanoi’s old quarter. There on the west side was a line of a couple thousand obviously Buddhists walking slowly. I asked one westerner who was in robes, but taking pictures so I figured I could interrupt his silence, what was going on. The Buddha’s birthday was a couple days ago, so I didn’t think that was it. He said the revered Zen monk, author and world peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, was leading walking meditation. He told me “Thi” was allowed to return from exile in 2005, which I didn’t know. I walked up to the front of the snaking crowd, took a couple pictures and joined them for a while.

That’s him, second Zen master from the left, still not looking his 80-something years of age.

I have only spent about 2 1/2 weeks in Vietnam. Myung went from Pakse, Laos to Bangkok and on to Seoul. I went from Pakse by minibus to Pleiku, Vietnam and on to Nha Trang. There I was able to scuba dive for a couple of days. I was fairly pleased with the dives. The coral is beginning to turn white, like coral around the world, but it’ll be okay for a few more years. The places were fished out, with only the small clowns and like that remaining. There were many eels and scorpion fish. Visiblity was about 15 meters. All in all, I’d say they were typical South China Sea dives.
We had a little motorbike mishap back in Vientianne which I though was nothing. Myung got exactly one scrape. I got a few and big hematoma on the inside of my left knee. All the moving parts were totally fine so I just figured the hematoma would resolve. After about three weeks it was still puffing up after the slightest exercise, so I had it drained of 150 cc of fluid in Nha Trang, and chilled out there doing nothing for a few days in order to rest it. I have no pictures from Nha Trang. It’s not that photogenic.
When I determined I was good to go, I went to the next big tourist town up the coast, Hoi An. There is still much remailing of the old city of a hundred or more years ago, and the old quarter is a World Heritage site.

I’ve been staying in nicer, usually air conditioned digs ever since hooking up with Myung. This is my hotel in Hoi An. It’s typical of what I’d call upscale backpacker class.

Near Hoi An are the Champa ruins of My Son. The Cham were contemporaries of the the builders of Angkor Wat and obviously much influenced by them. You’ve seen so many ruins pictures, I’ll just post one.

Next I went to Hue, the capital for a thousand years before the French shifted administation to Hanoi and left the impotent king to preside over a useless court there. Then of course came the Americans, and that was that for the monarchy when we taught them truth, justice and The American Way. When I came to Hue in 1999, a couple of days after a big typhoon, the place was a disaster area. Thousands had perished and there was terrible destruction. Buildings were flattened and trees uprooted, like you’ve been seeing on the news about Myanmar. I plodded throught he mud wondering how they were ever going to put Hue back together, how they were going to repair the damaged historical architecture. They, of course, were looking for their loved ones and crowding around army trucks getting rice and water. Well, it rose from the dead quite nicely. There are thousands of nine year old trees. The river and other channel embankments are better by far. There are paved roads all over the place. Bamboo buildings have been replaced with wood and brick. And the sites are restored. It looks so different, as you can imagine. Doesn’t the Perfume River look nice when it isn’t devastated?

This last one is a reminder of the Tet offensive.
Water puppetry is a uniquely Vietnamese art for. With poles and wires they run puppets around in a body of water, usually telling traditional stories to music. They have such a program in Hue. It was amazingly hard to get good pictures. Sorry.

There is a bigger puppet show in Hanoi, with live music. At least nine years ago it was live. I was going to go the night before last, but it was a Saturday evening and the shows were all sold out. So I’m glad I went in Hue.
My last stop was here in Hanoi. I really didn’t feel like doing much, so I didn’t. It was only three days and two nights anyway. My all night bus ride from Hue left me without much energy the first day. Yesterday I went on a day tour of Halong Bay. Many if not most of you have seen pictures of this area. Here are a few.

On one of the islands is this big cave. They have it all lit up and purty.

So then came this morning. My ticket is confirmed. I’ve figured out the cheap ride to the airport, had what may be my last western breakfast for a while, and watched CNN for about an hour and a half before coming here to blog. I am so ready to see Myung again. I should be interesting, meeting her family and friends. We are tentatively going to visit in Seoul for a little bit, do some temple stays as we go south, visit in Ulsan, then chill on Jeju Island, off the south coast.
As always, be well, all of you. And Happy Mother’s Day to you mommies.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a month since Myung and I got to Laos. We’ve actually taken our time about seeing some of the stuff here. After several days in Luang Prabang, we went to Vang Vieng, Vientianne, Savannakhet, Pakse and Si Pan Don, which translates as 4000 Islands, in the far south on the Cambodian border. It’s been great and mellow at the same time. Mellow is a good way to travel in these parts during this hot part of the year. In the heat, one’s desire to do much outdoors is somewhat limited. Myung wilted, so we got air conditioned rooms for the rest of the time. Ah, luxury is nice.
Laos has changed dramatically since I was here nine years ago. There are paved roads tomany places where there were none before. There is reliable electricity and other conveniences, not the least of which are internet access and cell phones. Except for those things, I think Laos is much like Thailand was about 20 years ago. The villages are very villagey. Even the tourist places are so much less jaded than in Thailand. The down side is that the prices are up. It’s about as expensive here as in Thailand. It’s still cheap, though. Guesthouse rooms run from $5 to about $12, if you get air con, attached bathroom and a TV. There are still remarkably few cars, vans and even trucks on the road, but at least there are roads. China is obviously very invested here. Many of the businesses and investments are Chinese. The flood of capital is changing Laos quickly. My advice is to come here as soon as possible while it’s still what you’d imagine Laos to be.
Vang Vieng is as diferent as it gets from before. Nine years ago there were about three guesthouses, very little tourist scene and it was bout 1/4 as big. The things to do haven’t changed. The main things are still to gawk at the sceneryn go to caves and trekking, and to tube down the Nam song River. Drugs may be illegal, but you’d hardly know it. Joints and “happy” food and drinks, and opium and mushroom tea are on the menus in some of the restaurants. It still feels mostly like regular Laos, butnot for long, I’d wager.

We chiiled out there, if chilling is possible in the hot season, and headed for Vientianne. Need I say things are changing there too? There are paved roads in most of the city, sidewalks, and a generally western feel. It’s still boring, though. the best thing we did was go up to Buddha Park during the first part of the lunar new year festivities. This is the biggest holiday in Laos. It’s atime for renewal. The most obvious celebrating is in the form of throwing water on everybody, like Songcrans in Thailand. We drove a motorbike up to Buddha Park, getting soaked along the way, to see the religious stuary there. This place was a single man’s creation. He was trying to meld the worlds religious symbols into one,and was clearly unique in his view.

That’s Myung in the pink, taking a picture. And what’s up with the guy pulling the leg of the grasshopper? I think he was pulling our legs. They had a Miss Laos-like contest too.

From there we went to Savannakhet. That’s about nine hours by bus from Vientianne and we stopped over there on the way to Pakse. Lunar new year festivities were still going on, so we basically tried to stay dry. Here is the view from the balcony of our guesthouse.

From there it’s only about a three hour ride to Pakse. It used to be you had to take a boat down the Mekhong River, but hardly anybody does that anymore. Pakse is not much, but it is a main transit point between Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, as well as the gateway to Si Pan Don. Si Pan Don is very tranquil, though becoming a tourist center, especially in Don Det, right on the Cambodian border. We stayed on Don Khong (“Don” means “island”.) which is more “authentic”.
We stayed in Don Khong for three days and took a daylong boat tour down to Don Khong. On Don Khong we lazed around mostly, watching the colors change during the day on the Mekhong. As usual, we rented a motorbike one day and drove aound. By the way, Beerlao is as good as I remember, better than any of the Thai or Indian beers or any of the mainstream American beers.

It was a Sunday, and here was a group of people having food and fun in one of the villages.

Si Pan Don is an area where the river is dotted by many, many islands and bushes growing out of the water. These pictures are mostly taken during our boat tour.

Don Det really is a lovely place. It’s no wonder it’s attracting tourists in droves, as droves go in Laos.

There are numerous waterfalls along the Mekhong down there. The largest is Khone Phapheng. It’s the largest, by volume, in southeast Asia and looks like a little Niagara Falls, about a third as big, I’d say. I couldn’t get it all in one picture. The normally placid Mekhong falls off here and forms a natural boundry with Cambodia.

One of the big attractions there are the Irrawaddy dolphins. I presume they are the same as the Irrawaddy dolphins which live in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy River, and slightly different than the highly endangered Gangetic dolphin in India. They are endangered but there is a place in the Mekhong where it forms the border with Cambodia where there is a thriving community. Now, anybody who has tried to photograph dophins can tell you, it’s hard to get a good picture of them, even the nonthreatened oceanic types. We saw many, and here’s something like a picture.

I’m never going to get a job as a National Geographic photographer. Plus, my little camera isn’t going to take good pictures of moving animals at 50 meters. WE finished dolphin watching at sunset. Here’s the stretch of river where we were taken to see them.

Between Pakse and Si Pan Don are the Angkor period ruins of Champansak. It’s no Angkor Wat, but not as crowded with people as I’ve heard Angkor Wat/Siem Reap is now.

I’m writing this from Pakse. Myung took a morning bus to Udon Ratchanburi in Thailand and I’m going east to Attapeu this afternoon. From there, I’ll go to Pleiku, Vietnam, tomorrow. Myung is going from Bangkok the day after tomorrow to Seoul where she is going to patch her bones after 8 months on the road herself and figure out what she wants to do next. She may decide to stay there a while or go to China or Nepal. Maybe we’ll travel some more, maybe in China, or maybe she’s go to Kathmandu to send handicrafts back to Korea. It’s likely at this point that she’ll stay in Korea of a while. She’ll let me know in a couple of weeks where to meet her. Any place is fine with me, though the way she tells it, Korea may be a little expensive for me. Whatever. I look forward to being with her again. For my part, I’ll go to Pleilu and decide what to do next. I may go straight on to Nha Trang where there is good diving. I wanted to dive there nine years ago, but a typhoon trashed the coast of Vietnam just while I was there and, needless to say, diving was not an option.
So, that’s it from me for now. Be well, all of you.

Myung and I have been in Luang Prabang, Laos for six days, just hanging our, trying to get around to doing something every day. It’s generally pretty hot, so it’s easy to do nothing. Luckily the two rooms we’ve taken are cool even in the middle of the day. Luang Prabang has a lot of history and the whole town is a world heritage site. That said, there isn’t all THAT much to see here. There are 31 temples, some of which go back several hundred years, but there isn’t much else left from it’s ancient days of glory. And the temples could be better cared for. There is a lot more money around here than there was nine years ago when I was here last. It has changed tremendously. It was a neglected city where some but not many tourists went. The temples were in even worse shape. And it was quite poor. Now it’s a bustling tourist center with all the things you would expect at such a place. There are dozens of guest houses and restaurants catering to foreigners, bars though not much of a nightlife, and such things as mostly reliable electricity in many places, internet and bank ATM’s. You can tell by the tourists here that Luang Prabang’s biggest problem may be in absorbing a really boisterous, western party crowd. They look so out of place here, but times change and so will Luang Prabang.
I have many pictures. I’ll just start putting them in. I think I’ll go chronologically. We crossed over into Laos at Huay Xai, spent a night there and took a minibus through the mountains of northern Laos for 13 hours to Luang Prabang. Many people take the popular two day boat down the Mekong River, but we heard and subsequently confirmed it is uncomfortable. Along the way, you could see things had changed, and not changed. There are more people dressed in pants and t-shirts and less in traditional style, but they are still doing what they have always done. What you see on a bus ride is people along the road, often selling stuff. This is like Thailand was a long time ago. I assume before long Laos will be as “boring” as Thailand has become. Anyway, here are pictures I took of some people along the road who were mostly selling and bartering, but socializing a lot.

Most of the old wats and what is the world heritage site called “Old Luang Prabang” is on a thumb where the Mekong meets another smaller river. The center is dominated by a hill called Phou Si. Here are shots of the surroundings from up there.

If the communist government here ever discouraged Buddhism, you would never know it. There are shrines and devotional activity everywhere, about the same as in Thailand, which makes sense since Laos was in Thailand before the French took it away during their Indochina colonial phase. Every morning at about 6 o’clock the monks file by with their begging bowls in groups from the different wats. Mostly people give each monk a small handful of sticky rice, but there are other things in the bowls except rice, like money. It’s a good thing they get something other than rice from some people, as mostly people give them more than enough rice to starve on. I haven’t seen a fat monk here yet.

As you can see, we did get a little unseasonal rain, but not much. After watching the monks, Myung and I usually walk up past the main tourist street to the market where they have the cheapest baguette sandwiches and Lao filter coffee, with sweetened condensed milk like I like. This is our western food fix of the day, usually. You can get it with Lao fillings of tofu or chopped boiled eggs, plus lettuce, tomato, cucumber and onions, or you can have canned tuna, American cheese singles, Oscar Meyer type sandwich ham or BBQ chicken. You can even get Best Foods mayonnaise or French’s mustard. Like I said, times have changed.

Here are many pictures of the market area. It’s like markets just about anywhere in the developing world.

Here is how a lot of people dine out.

One evening we went to the Royal Ballet which usually is about episodes of the Ramayana. There is no photography allowed during the show, but here are a couple of the performers who posed afterwards.

You’ve already seen many wat photos, but here’s just one more, of the wat on the grounds of the theater and the palace which is now a museum.

There are a couple of nearby places many tourists go. One is a waterfall I think we’ll skip. The other is called the Pak Ou caves. There are two caves, each other many mostly small Buddha statues, some hundreds of years old. It’s an interesting place, about an hour and a quarter’s ride back up the Mekong. We went on a boat like the one below. That is what most of the people transporting boats look like here. The one picture doesn’t do justice to the emerald green hills that surround this whole area.

As in Thailand, little birds are sold to people be set free. It’s all about giving sets one free. This cute kid was selling them on the steps up to one of the caves. By the way, they are trained to return to their “owners”.

It looks like we’ll head down to Veng Viang tomorrow. It’s famous for beautiful limestone cliffs behind a backdrop of the Mekong. I’ll blog from somewhere in south Laos, or maybe Veng Viang. Be well, all of you.

Sometimes Myung and I don’t visit the main border crossings. This one is north of Mae Hong Son. As usual, we rented a motorbike and drove to the places we wanted to go. This really is better than paying for this and that ride. Plus, you get the freedom to detour.

As I said before, things have changed a lot in Thailand (and in Laos, where I am writing this). You really notice how the roads have improved, and the rest of the infrastructure, like electricity, is improved and working better. The building boom is in full stride, the food isn’t so parochial all the time, and so on. One of the most stunning differences for the tourist is that the tourist scene which was a very big deal before is even more so. Central Chiang Mai is almost taken over by tourists. another place a few hours form Chiang Mai, Pai, used to be a stopover for people headed for Mae Hon Son. There was a trekking scene, but it wasn’t much of anything. Now it’s a full blown tourist ghetto. If you get out of those places, though, things are mostly as they were. Here is tofu being made the old way.

And elephants are still used as work animals.

Along the borders with Myanmar and Laos, there are many tribal people. Hmong, called Meo here, are numerous.

“THE thing” to do when you go to Mae Hong Son is to go see the Long-Neck Karen. No self respecting blogger could post neews of his visit to Mae Hong Son without post pictures of them. For those of you who don’t know, these women’s necks aren’t stretched; their shoulders are pushed down over time. There are a lot more of them in Mae Hong Son province than last time I was here. They are evidently getting mainstreamed into Thai society, whereas before, they were refugees limited to strips of land between the Myanmar border and the border checkposts. The first picture is of one just shopping normally at the big market in Mae Hong Son.

The rest of these were taken at one of their villages near Mae Hong Son. Here are pictures of them and their village.

These next pictures are of Mae Hon Son’s showpiece lake in the center of town. Like many nice tourist areas, it’s nice in the daytime and at night. Most of the guesthouses surround it, so the thing to do is stroll around and maybe eat or have a drink at oneof the places around the edge.

Myung is into hot springs, so we have been going to some of the many. It would be nice if there were nice ones like this in the US with a one dollar entry fee.

I just had to take a picture of this sign showing where the handicapped bathroom was at another hot spring. For starters, I don’t think they would have had a handicapped bathroom nine years ago, but what I really like is the politically incorrectness of it. All that kind of stuff is so relative. One of the things you learn when you travel a lot is how relative almost everything is. There are lessons to be learned.

What we did in Northern Thailand was follow the tourist route for the most part. Chiang Mai, Pai and Mae Hong Son are definitely part of that. We then headed up to Mai Sai, a main Myanmar border crossing, via Tha Ton. There are lots of nice pictures. Here are just a couple. The first is of the hillside in Tha Ton. The second is of the river forming the Thailand-Myanmar border taken from our guesthouse in Mai Sai.

From there we headed for Laos. We’re in Luang Prabang now. The sawngthow rides to Chiang Saen and Chiang Khong were uneventful, unless you are into ancient ruins of the long gone Chiang Saen empire from the 11th century. Crumbling ruins are all over the place there. I figure you’ve seen enough crumbling ruin pictures. We crossed over to Huay Xai on the Lao side, hung out for a day, then took a minibus to Luang Prabang. I’ll blog about Laos sometime soon. All I need to say here is that Laos is sure different than nine years ago. If I hadn’t seen the changes in Thailand, I’d say you wouldn’t believe it. Internet access here may speak for itself. Electricity all over the city may speak for itself, for that matter. And, there are loads of tourists. Will wonders never cease?
It looks like we’ll just hang out in Luang Prabang for a while. Maybe I’ll even blog from here. Meanwhile, as always, be well, all of you.