Cleaning out the Closet

Having hit my 30 day expiration date in Thailand, I have now jumped ship (literally, aboard a two-day "slow boat") for Laos, the country that I very morbidly joked marks the beginning of what I should call the "apology tour" of Southeast Asia.  Even the least worldly of Americans is aware of the disaster that was the Vietnam War, but I wonder how many are familiar with the Secret War waged on Laos and Cambodia that went on during that same time period.  I was familiar enough to know that we had dropped bombs on both countries that caused massive devastation and helped to set the stage for the takeover of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but with talk of Henry Kissinger back in the news of late thanks to the circus that is our current presidential election, and finding myself actually in Laos, I decided to do a little more reading up on the subject. It was two hours of some of the most depressing reading I've done in a long time. 

To say the US dropped bombs on Laos, in particular, is a massive understatement. From 1964 to 1973 we dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos over the course of 580,000 bombing missions. That's equivalent to one planeload of bombs every eight minutes, day and night, for nine years.  For those keeping score, that's more than double the amount of bombs dropped on Germany and Japan in the whole of WWII, and a whopping 210 million more bombs than we dropped on Iraq in 1991, 1998, and 2006 combined! Thanks to us, Laos now has the unfortunate honor of being the most heavily bombed country in the world, per capita, and through it all most of the locals had absolutely no idea what was happening or why. The official excuse, concocted by Nixon and Kissinger (who had dreamt up the whole plan and executed it without consent from Congress), was that we were targeting known Viet Cong bases and supply routes running through the country, despite the fact that the bombs were being dropped from heights that made it physically impossible to target specific sites.  The truth, I think, speaks to a general disregard for human life in the name of preserving a political legacy.  Nixon and Kissinger were heavily invested in preventing a tide of communist takeovers in Southeast Asia during their tenure, and so as much as they may have been targeting Viet Cong bases, they were also "supporting" the Royal Lao Government against the communist Pathet Lao, even if that meant leveling the entire country in the process.  In addition to the bombings, the CIA recruited members of the native Hmong tribes to fight a ground war against the Pathet Lao, acting as agents of the United States. When the bombing ended and the Pathet Lao wound up in power anyway, these Hmong "soldiers" and their families were forced to flee the country to avoid persecution.  Many of them still remain in exile. 

As if all this isn't bad enough, consider the fact that up to a third of the bombs dropped on Lao during that time period didn't explode, leaving the country contaminated with massive amounts of unexploded ordinance (UXO).  Over 20,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO in the years since the bombings stopped.  Farmers out plowing their fields. Builders attempting to clear a site for new development.  Children playing with what looks to be a shiny yellow ball buried in the dirt.  Nearly 40 years later, only 1% of this UXO has been destroyed, with the US contributing a relatively paltry $51million over 16 years toward the effort.  That's as much as we spent in just three days dropping the bombs in the first place. 

To read about the devastation the US caused here is shocking, and it gives me tremendous respect for the Lao people, who have been nothing but kind and hospitable during my time here.  How easy would it be for them, even after so many years, to harbor hostility toward the US for the completely senseless destruction of their country (which has contributed heavily to making them the poorest country in Southeast Asia) and loss of life?  If such hostility exists, I've seen no sign of it.  Even after confirming that I'm American I've been met with warm smiles, polite conversation, and some delicious home cooking! Sure, they rely heavily on tourist dollars to prop up their struggling economy, which means that we wind up paying more for busses, hotels, food, and tour packages than they're probably worth, but considering the havoc we wreaked here for nearly a decade, paying an extra couple dollars for a sandwich seems like more than a fair trade-off. 

I've spent just over a week in Laos now and I've been massively impressed not only with the people, but with the sheer rugged beauty of the place that was far too great to succumb to destruction.  I've trekked through jungles, kayaked rivers, homestayed in tiny villages, and explored the bigger "cities" and through it all one thing is clear:  There's a spirit of peace and happiness here that stands in contrast to the country's dark history, and I think it provides a valuable lesson in forgiveness, tolerance, and understanding.

 

 

 

 

On Travel and Digestion

It's nearly noon on a bright and sunny Thursday afternoon and I find myself in one of the nicer hotels I've stayed at on this trip in the "new city" of Sukhothai.  Looking out from my private balcony (which is carpeted, interestingly, in fake grass) I'm trying to muster up the strength to go out and join in the bustling city scene below me.  Ordinarily I would have happily left the hotel hours ago, but today I find myself on the tail end of a rather nasty stomach virus that took me completely out of commission for a solid day and a half back in Ayutthaya.  Sparing too many gory details, suffice it to say it took the form of your typical wellspring of yuck, spewing forth from every direction for a good solid 10 hours, followed by general weakness and slowly attempted rehydration. TMI? Maybe, but that's how I roll. Anyway, by yesterday it had cleared up enough that a couple preemptive Imodium pills were enough to get me through a full day of transit to Sukhothai:  from a songthaew to a train, to a pit stop in a city overrun with crazed monkeys, to another train, to another songthaew, to a minibus, to a motorbike taxi.  Whew! By the time I got to my hotel, I was exhausted, and starving after two days of nothing but a bit of toast and water.  A good sign, I thought.  Not wanting to overdo it on the first day out I stuck with some yogurt, a few "cereal cookies" I got on the train, a packet of crisps (for some much needed salt), and a bit of iced tea before calling it an early night.

I awoke this morning still not feeling great.  Oddly enough, though, this feeling was different than the last couple of days, and it was all too familiar.  Sluggish, weakened, burdened by the feeling that you're lugging around the equivalent of a large brick that's lodged somewhere in your lower intestines.  In fact, the exact OPPOSITE of what was going on two days ago. But how can this be? I've barely eaten anything in the past two days, and anything I ate before then was surely evacuated during that 10 hour stretch.  I don't have an answer. I don't get it, but it's incredibly frustrating and it's got me thinking about the challenges of traveling with a digestive system as... interesting as mine.

As I understand it, I have been cursed pretty much from the get-go with a digestive system that just does not want to play ball. When I was a kid I can't say I really noticed, but as I've gotten older, the list of foods I've had to put on the no-fly list has grown bigger and bigger with each passing year. My love affair with coffee ended abruptly 15 years ago when, out of nowhere, it began to destroy my insides so badly that the pain far outweighed the pleasure of drinking it.  Indian food was the next to go. All of it. This one hurt (emotionally, that is) even more than the coffee, because I'm pretty sure it's just one or two ingredients that don't agree with me, but I don't know what they are and so have no choice but to avoid it all... did I mention I LOVE Indian food?  Carbonated beverages of any kind are kept to a bare minimum so as to avoid blowing up like a balloon.  This makes drinking exceptionally difficult as it eliminates beer and significantly narrows my choice of mixers for hard liquor.  Hummus? Yea, same thing there.  The foods I love, one by one, all seem to be turning against me, though some of them I will still indulge in from time to time, accepting the inevitable punishment that awaits me on the other side.  When I'm at home, it's a mostly manageable annoyance, but when I'm on the road in a brand new country full of exciting and oh-so-tempting culinary delights, it's downright torture!  I spent a month in India, for example, surrounded by all the Indian dishes I used to love so much plus so many more new and exciting things to try.  I ate a lot of bland rice and Chinese noodles.  Of course I did give in to temptation on several occasions and order an Indian dish (which were all delicious) and while I didn't get sick the same way I had back in the states, those meals did almost always result in a feeling of sweaty dizziness that forced me to lie down for a good 20 minutes to recover.  It could have been worse... but it could have been so much better, too. 

Thailand, I've found, is not too dissimilar to India, culinarily speaking.  Street carts abound offering up bounties of delicious smelling noodle bowls; unidentifiable marinated meats on sticks; battered, fried vegetables; artfully designed sugary confections; and all manner of things rolled into balls.  The flavors are sweet, sour, and spicy as hell... anything but bland. 

 

 

I dove in with the kind of reckless abandon reserved for people with a much stronger digestive constitution than I (after all, I had eaten plenty of Thai food in the States and never had a problem) and I'm thinking now that I might be paying the price for it. I ate from street carts in Bangkok.  I ordered things off menus strictly based on photos. During my week at Elephants World I ate nothing but the catered meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner which featured exclusively Thai dishes (save some eggs and toast at breakfast).  They were all delicious, but as I've never eaten Thai food with that much consistency before, I'm wondering if I didn't send my fragile and very finicky system into some sort of shock that provided an opening for that vicious little stomach bug to take hold in the first place, and now is plaguing me in more of the usual way.  I don't know for sure, but I do know that it's left me hesitant to jump back into eating the local fare, no matter how tempting the sights and smells may be.

And so this is my own personal bit of hell.  Food is such an important aspect of travel (Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, Adam Richman, et al. can certainly attest to that) and it's one that I feel like I'll never really be able to explore as fully as I would like to.  For every delicious new dish I try, I risk missing out other experiences for having to lie down and "sleep off" the consequences. Best case scenario, I find myself more easily exhausted and sluggish in general while on the road, simply from the change of diet that accompanies it. Even in a place like England or Scandinavia, where the dishes are much more subdued and  closer to what I would find back home, my body still tends to protest.  I wish I could fix it, but short of a complete elimination diet to really narrow down what I can and can't safely eat, I'm not sure how.  So I suck it up and I move on. I may have already lost a good half of my day sat here whining about my insides, but I think the rest has done me some good and now the late hour will make the temperature that much cooler when I do go out. Silver lining! I may not jump back into Thai dishes just yet (though there's a night market literally next door to my hotel that's been on my mind all day) but I'll get back to it soon enough.  I'm nothing if not stubborn, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be one of those American tourists who flies halfway around the world to eat sandwiches and hamburgers and French fries. Quelle horreurr!