A woman alone in Indochina

“A woman alone in Indochina” – that would make a good title for a novel, but the idea scares actual women.

I have talked to several women who said they were considered traveling in Southeast Asia, but were afraid to go alone. Literally afraid, for their safety. I spoke with a Brazilian woman who expressed a great deal of concern over visiting Vietnam. Exasperated, I finally had to point out that Brazil has 20 times the murder rate of Vietnam, and that an armed policeman on a busy corner in São Paulo was in more danger than a woman walking down a dark alley in Hanoi.

How to Pack: Pet Peeves Dressed Up as Travel Advice

Pan Am put the first 747 into service in January of 1970, inaugurating more-or-less officially the modern travel era. Unless you’re, well, old, you’ve lived your whole life in a world where flying overseas is routine. So packing to go overseas should also be routine.

But no, whenever I get on the plane to Jakarta or Rome or Hong Kong, there are always hundreds of other people aboard who haven’t a clue how to pack the right way. Or at least, they don’t how to pack my way, but that’s a very minor distinction.

The Larks Still Bravely Singing Fly

This article was originally published on Five Thôt.

We found Choeung Ek more or less by accident. It was on the way.

I love Southeast Asia, I always have. I am treating my mother to a road-trip from Saigon to Bangkok as a 70th-birthday present but also because I want her to love it the way I do. The trip is going well. She grew up in the tropics, and this place, with its mangoes and palm trees and firecracker sun, brings her back to her childhood.

The ten-mile tuk-tuk ride to the memorial costs us five dollars round-trip. Everything here is priced in American money. Admission is five dollars per person and includes rental of a high-tech headset that serves as an audio guide for the tour. Dante had Virgil, I get this gizmo. Headsets are available in English, German, Spanish — almost in any language other than Khmer. Choeung Ek is for foreigners now.

It isn’t what I expected. 

Mad Tourist Disease

This article originally appeared on FIVETHôT.

Two cows are talking, and one says, “You know, Bob, I’m worried about this ‘mad-cow disease’,” and the other cow answers…

There are about 10 endings to this joke and my favorite is “and the other cow answers, ‘Holy crap, a talking cow!’”

My second-favorite, and more relevant to this article I’m trying to write, is “and the other cow answers, ‘Well, that shouldn’t affect us chickens.’”

Fifteen’ll get you twenty

Michelangelo was just someone I knew from online. I would post something, or comment on someone else’s post, and he would agree with me. All I really knew about him was that he had adult children here in the Bay Area, that his marriage had fallen apart rather kinetically some years earlier, and that he wanted to be a writer, although not enough to actually write.

How to frighten your parents

It’s a little unclear whether I did this to them, or they did it to me, but I stayed outside while they went inside.

My family and I were in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany (as it was then known). I was looking in a shop window, and my parents went into the store next-door. They didn’t notice I stayed out on the sidewalk, and I didn’t notice that they’d gone inside.

Did I mention that I was three years old and did not speak any German?

How I learned to swim from a giant, carnivorous lizard: a true story

I’ve been swimming “daily” — that is, every day I’m not too busy, too lazy, too tired, or otherwise distracted; in practice maybe 70 days a year — for more than six years.  And I would never have started if it weren’t for a (to my mind, wholly reasonable) aversion to being eaten by giant, carnivorous lizards.

Inside Hpa An

Hpa-An, 40 kilometers up the Salween River by twice-weekly ferry from Mawlamyine, looks pretty much like any other Southeast-Asian one-water-buffalo town. Dusty ragged streets, tiny stores and restaurants, cheerful children and their watchful mothers, harassed-looking pariah dogs slinking by.

Some things, though, are subtly wrong, subtly off. The rice shop is so stuffed with bags of rice, stuffed to overflowing, that the owner and his clerk do their sums not inside where it’s cool but out on the sidewalk, with more stacks of rice-bags as a desk. The children are particularly cheerful, playing on complicated Chinese- and Thai-made plastic riding toys. My hotel cost $25 a night, twice what I had paid at Mawlamyine, and the electricity, water, and sewage systems are all far from reliable, but the room is provisioned with full-sized tubes of Close-Up and genuine Sprite instead of the local equivalents. There are more hotels in the town than there are tourists (after a day we know the name, nationality, and quarters of any white face we see) but every hotel claims to be full. What is going on here?

It took me over a day, chatting with those of the locals who speak English, to find out.

Weird stuff that happen to you in other countries: Part II

I was coming out of the Ho Chi Minh museum and the 40-ish Asian lady asked me where I was from.  I answered  “Hoa Kỳ” as I always to do to street hawkers; their surprise at a white man’s saying he is American in Vietnamese gives me a few precious seconds to get out of pestering range.

“That is America, right?”  The woman didn’t sound Vietnamese at all.

“Yes. I live in California.”

“My niece Maria is moving to Torrance.  You know Torrance?”

I did, vaguely, and the woman didn’t seem like a vendor, so I decided to chat with her.  She said her name was Susanna and she was from Manila, in Saigon to visit her brother, who lived here with his Vietnamese wife.  Her sister Anna, slightly older, also came over.  We sat on the half-wall next to the sidewalk and it was somehow decided I should go to their brother’s house for lunch.

Now I’m not a complete naïf. 

(Almost) All You Need to Know About Electrical Convertors and Adapters in South-east Asia

First of all, some nomenclature: a converter changes the voltage (and sometimes even the frequency) of electricity. An adapter just makes it possible for your plug to connect at all to the local socket; it doesn’t change any aspect of the juice you’re getting.