My Protanoptic Life

As I was planning, and thankfully the hackers were keeping up, I was able to jailbreak my iPhone and install network unlocking software on it which would enable me to use it as a phone outside of AT&T’s network. I downloaded the tools to do this and did so while I was also diagnosing and reconfiguring the shoddy wifi signals at my hotel. I was able to successfully unlock my phone while doing nearly all I could do with the wifi network in order to make access at least a little more than non existent to the 4th floor. There was still one huge core change I wanted to make but didn’t want to risk taking down the upper floor networks due to inaccessible 802.11 APs which were acting as chained repeaters rather than point-to-multipoint bridges, which would’ve been more efficient.

In the end I had chat and e-mail worthy and nearly web surf worthy wireless access in my room, and a jailbroken and unlocked iPhone 3g. With that completed, I headed out to get dinner and to find a SIM card to test out the network unlock. I was already to select from a list of about 10 carriers, but my AT&T card wasn’t working on any of them so they were no more use than information on what was available.

I got dinner at a chain restaurant I’ve seen around here called NYDC which serves east coast American food and offers free wifi to its patrons. I had pizza and my first glass of wine in nearly a month as I played with Cydia, which was somewhere between the glory of my first jailbreak experience and the horror of my second. Some of the things I wanted weren’t immediately available, like iPhysics and Trism.

After dinner I walked around looking for SIM cards and ended up at the Siem Reap night market, which was just like the day market but more cozy and warm and quiet, but with still the same “hello sir, can i help you sir, you buy a t-shirt sir” people. I was offered about 50 tuk tuk rides that I didn’t need, motorbike rides which was maybe a first for Cambodia but was frequent in Vietnam, weed and cocaine among countless trinkets and novelties. I was really just out to see it though, just to verify that there wasn’t anything worth seeing beyond the experience of having visited the night markets in Cambodia. Many people were having fun bartering and buying, but progressive minimalists like myself had no business in a place like that. With that in mind I went to a market, bought a bottle of Singha and an international SIM card and headed home.

I stayed up late chatting with Tien and friends who were waking up on the other side of the planet. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to open the tray that held my AT&T SIM card, so I wasn’t able to try it out. That was OK though, in time I’d figure it out. It was more of an educational experience anyway, I didn’t really need it.

In the morning I woke and chatted, listened to music, which had surprisingly been missing in my entire Siem Reap experience, showered and headed out for the much needed coffee and breakfast. I found a restaurant I wished I’d have found a few days earlier. It was a little hole in the wall stall across the street from the more ritzy western restaurants, and they had bread, eggs and white coffee for $2. I was delighted. I also managed to find a cool trick to get the SIM tray on an iPhone open without using a paperclip. Just shove a round toothpick into the hole snugly, then pull the tray out. There is enough grip to open the tray, and so I was able to swap my SIM and being trying out this Asian mobile scene.

I couldn’t figure it out. I forgot which provider was mine, and the girl at the restaurant didn’t know the logo.

I was getting tired of Siem Reap and wanted to leave, so I wandered a block and found a travel agency to check out what options I had for leaving. It turned out I could leave to Bangkok in 3 hours for $145. I went back to my hotel, grabbed my passport and three $50′s, checked the SIM card provider info I’d gotten, headed back to the travel agency to buy my ticket and on the way saw a man at a fruit stand showing a tiny ~.22 caliber pistol to a local boy of about 13. What followed was a hurried series of events which involved me paying for my ticket and handing over my passport, hiring a tuk tuk driver to take me back to the hotel and wait, packing my bags as fast as I could because it was exactly check out time and I had to be at the airport in 30 minutes, checking out, going back to the travel agency to pick up my ticket and passport and then heading straight to the airport. To top it off, my tuk tuk driver barely spoke english and drove a slow tuk tuk which was passed by more than one on the way to the airport.

I was happy though. The rush was a little bit of excitement in my very lazy Cambodian experience, and I was finally leaving Siem Reap. It was a western town with lounges and western restaurants and expensive drinks and meals. I was tired of not being able to look people in the eye, trying to avoid contact with people for fear of being hounded instead of smiling and greeting and talking with people.

On the way out of town I saw a kid with a Che Guevara t-shirt on, which was more interesting in Cambodia since he was a communist who murdered hundreds of innocent people senselessly, just like the Khmer Rouge.

On the way out of down town I set my iPhones cellular network to the one correlating to the SIM card I had and it soon began working. I had a phone for the first time since leaving SF almost 4 weeks ago.

We passed many large hotels, bigger hotels than any downtown, five star resort style hotels. I felt like I was driving through Aspen until I saw a guy on a scooter with about 20 dead chickens hanging by their legs. I then saw a Nikon D200 advertisement and wondered if it had really been there for years.

We arrived just after noon which gave me slightly less than the suggestion of checking in two hours before departure. That was ok though because checking in at the airport, passing through security and passing through Cambodian passport control was easy. There were few people there, it was a tiny airport with only 4 gates and only one was in service. There were 3 flights scheduled within the hour. Prices were astronomical, $3 for a small bottle of water, $3.50 for a can of soda. I bought a bottle of Japanese “wine” and found out it was 20% alcoholic soju after I poured a glass. I didn’t bother finishing the bottle since it tasted like vodka and I had no intention of getting wasted. Plus there were ants crawling on the marble bar.

I decided to use my international minutes while I still had the chance and called My, my friend in Bangkok, and told her I was pretty much on my way there. It was short notice, way shorter than I’d planned on giving her, but it was notice all the same and if she couldn’t pick me up I was planning on finding my own way. Luckily she had nothing going on and said she’d see me soon.

I walked around a bit and looked at the airport. It was a nice building with decent tropical landscaping outside. It felt like the kind of airport you’d see in a tropical resort, and then I remembered that’s pretty much what it was. A sign in the bathroom instructing men not to wash in the urinals reminded me that I was still in a 3rd world country.

I walked around the shops in the airport and as happy that I could actually look people in the eyes without the fear of them aggressively hawking their goods. It was nice. I was tired of having to pass through a crowd as if I saw nobody, it felt alienating and I was the alienator. I took some photos of the airport and as I passed the bar the bartenders teased me about being drunk, but I wasn’t since I hadn’t finished even half of the bottle. It was funny and we laughed about it. I played around with the networks and stuff on my phone, trying to figure out the details of this SIM swapping thing that is so different from the US. At one point two Japanese girls came running by, quickly passed through the gate and ran for an airplane that was out on the tarmac.

I boarded the plane and the flight attendant gave the usual speech about disabling communications devices and I thought about that annoying sound that the iPhone puts into some speaker systems. There was no safety demo and we were quickly in the air. I was sitting underneath the wing with a prop engine outside my window. We had a meal and I ate my first muffin since leaving SF where muffins were a pretty usual breakfast with coffee. I had coffee with my meal and it was the worst coffee I’ve had in years. It reminded me of the hot black tar we’d drink at Actiontec.

As we flew I looked out at the beautiful clouds and remembered my flight from Hanoi. I looked down at the earth and thought about all of the beautiful places that were hidden in those green polygons. I saw the reflection of the sun passing from rice paddy to rice paddy and then the earth disappeared behind a turbulent cloud.

On our descent I noticed that the land surrounding Bangkok was back to the familiar Vietnamese landscape of rice paddies for miles. The next thing I noticed was that people were driving on the left side of the road. I only had time to listen to two orbital songs before I had been told to take my headphones off for landing, the entire flight was less than an hour and at 2:50 I was in Thailand. The new airport in Bangkok is eye catching and modern. Entering the country was very easy and no visa was required.

After passing through passport control I went and found a new SIM card with a phone number that people could call me on. In Thailand, inbound minutes are free. With Skype, you can have an inbound number in any country that they support, and any state in America. I have a California Skype number. I also have an unlimited world calling plan. Those three things together allow people to call my Skype number in California and ring my cell phone in Thailand without incurring any additional fees for international calling. My SIM card also provided data access, which is actually a little irritating since any network activity on my phone will drain my phone balance, and I can’t disable only data. I had a working phone though and I was again thankful that the iPhone cracking team got the 3.0 unlock out just in time for my arrival in Thailand.

I called My on the phone and told her that I was several hours earlier than I had expected and she said she’d be at the airport in 15 minutes. In the time between I walked around and took in the crowd. There were many beautiful girls, many fashionable people, many people who looked like transvestites, and many girls who looked manly kinda scary and made me wonder about this sex change capital of the world.

My was there in the 15 minutes she said and her father whisked us away in a luxury Toyota sedan. I hadn’t been in a car that wasn’t a Saigon taxi in a long time. The highway system was very modern, the airport surroundings were very modern, the landscape was clean. This was very 1st world and it was odd. There wasn’t a single scooter around, which made sense since we were going over 120km/h. When we got off the highway though things started to look more familiar. I saw some bicycles and scooters and cement apartment buildings that weren’t painted and it felt like the SE Asia I know.

My’s family’s place was more modern though, more like what I’d expect to find in Korea given the Korean movies I’ve seen. It was a three story building with air conditioning, several laptops set around on desks, wifi, and a Wii. There was a book called “Engineering Mechanics Dynamics 11th Edition” that was full of complex mathematical algorithms with diagrams applying the principles to real world things like cranes and roller coasters. There was a piece of paper inside with a hand sketched on it and delicate decorations around the word “sleep” and I could tell what My’s classes for her automotive design major were probably like.

We played on her hacked Wii for a bit, did a round of golf and a round of bowling and played Wario something else that was really crazy, then she, her father Max and her sister Mint went to dinner. I hadn’t had a Thai meal in about a month. I quit eating Asian food a week before leaving San Francisco in order to get my fill of American foods so that I wouldn’t crave them, but I love Thai food and had been anticipating eating here. It was delicious. I got a desert and it was also delicious. It was heavenly. I can’t wait to eat again.

We talked about school and America mostly. Mint is My’s younger sister and she will be going to the USA in a few years for a foreign exchange program. This is the same program that introduced My to Alaska and my aunt Wendy, which is how I met her. My said that she travels 2 hours one way to get to school, which I think is ridiculous.

After dinner we walked around a little sidewalk market and then went home to do what any wired, high tech group of people does; we geeked out. They have a room that they keep air conditioned where most everything happens. There’s a TV, refrigerator, a few computers, cups, a sound system, a few couches, a few guitars, a bunch of desk toys, etc.. Basically a really playfully packed office living room kitchen. The cool room reminded me of my grandmother’s sitting room in Texas where she would sit and cross-stitch while watching the discovery channel or the movie channel.

My friend George helped me test out the inbound calling setup that I had rigged with Skype and it worked great. We talked for about 30 minutes about life and what we’ve both been up to and it was good to catch up with an old friend one-on-one, essentially off the grid. It was also great to have at least the inbound function of my phone working again. It is also good to be in Thailand. I wasn’t really sure what to expect since I’d heard so much about it and it has so many different reputations. I’m still not entirely sure what to expect, or even what I’ll do tomorrow since My is going to be busy all day, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. There are certainly more options here than in Siem Reap.

Along the way to Siem Reap it began raining heavily and shortly afterwards we pulled off for a rest. Some kids were playing in the warm rain that was dripping off the roof, running back and forth under it. Some of us ate little meat filled buns. Taka ate some scorpions and grasshoppers. I told him I fully intended to try them, just not in the middle of a bus trip.

A little while later I decided to take a photograph so I could see where we were by looking at the GPS data, but after I took the photo the GPS info was missing from the file. Further investigation revealed faulting wiring in the proprietary connector on my Geomet’r. So there I was on my way to one of the largest most beautiful man made sights in the world and my GPS wasn’t working. “Wonderful…” I thought.

We arrived in Siem Reap in the dark about an hour or so after I had expected to be there. It was muddy when we got out because it had been raining, and it was nearly pitch black because wherever we were dropped off had like one light. So, in that darkness Taka and I negotiated with a tuk tuk driver to take us to one of the hotels we’d found in the buide book. He wanted to take us somewhere else but we made him take us to where we wanted to go. I’m not so sure this was the best idea because after I’d checked into the hotel I realized that their free internet was not working. Internet was pretty much the only thing I had wanted from a room. They said it might be working the next day.

Taka and I agreed to meet at the gate of the hotel the following morning at 5am, and so we did. When I went to gate it was locked with me on the inside. One of the employees of the hotel happened to be sleeping under a mosquito net on the front porch and he opened the gate for me. Taka wasn’t there yet, but the employee went and woke him up for me. We negotiated a day trip around Angkor with a tuk tuk driver, $10 for the day, and headed out to see the sun rise at Angkor Wat.

As a side note, Angkor Wat is only one temple among many many temples that are in the same locale, and as glorious as it is, it may not be the most beautiful and is probably not the most enchanting of the temples.

Angkor Wat was larger than I thought. I thought we were driving around a lake, but this lake ended up being merely the moat that surrounded the temple grounds. The driver dropped us off at one of the only two places where you can pass over the moat. There were two monkeys sitting at the waters edge preening each other. These were the first monkeys I’d seen on my trip. They were extremely cute and adorable and human like. I took a few photos of them, which seemed silly when there was the glorious sunrise behind the glorious temple.

Angkor Wat ended up being very large. I think that is really the appeal of it… it’s like many of the smaller temples, just enlarged. It’s not more complex, it’s not more beautiful, it’s simply on a larger scale. It’s really awesome, and it’s in better shape than a lot of the other temples too. The problem for us was that there was scaffolding on two of the towers and it didn’t look good. Throughout the rest of the day we would end up seeing tons of scaffolding, some cranes, tarps, and all sorts of other temple reconstructive devices. The trick was to get as few tourists and as little construction equipment as possible in a photograph.

On the way out we were talking about breakfast just about the time we came upon some stalls. We were introduced to the familiar chants of persona that could easily be programmed as bots in an Angkor simulation. “Three bracelets, one dollar! You buy!” and “You want cold drink? I have cold drink for you! Water for one dollar! You want beer?” and “You want buy shirt? I have many colors! You buy table cloth! You give to your girlfriend or mother! Just one dollar!”

We went outside the moat and found cheaper breakfast with some nice folks. Sweet milk coffee, eggs with vegetables and bread. Yummy. A good breakfast for what would be a long day of climbing steps and exploring temples in the hot humidity and sun.

As we were leaving there was this little girl following us trying to sell us bracelets, five for one dollar. She was adorable. She was 10. She kept putting on this sad face, but I’d smile at her and she’d smile, look away and try to put her sad face back on. I didn’t buy anything from her, but I took her photo and gave her 100r which she took very reluctantly. She was the first of many adorable children I encountered throughout the day who would try to pity me into buying shit that I didn’t need or want.

When we got back to the tuk tuk my glasses fell apart. It just wasn’t my day. My GPS broke, my hotel internet broke, and here was the right-hand lens of my glasses falling out because a tiny screw had come undone.

Never fear, our handy tuk tuk driver pulled out a crescent wrench, a pair of pliers and a nail and used the pliers to hammer the nail onto the crescent wrench like a blacksmith-to-go. Within 2 minutes I had a makeshift micro-screwdriver to use to screw my glasses back together. What a life saver he was. I ended up tipping him $2 at the end of the day partly because of this and partly because he took us to some awesome sights that we didn’t ask to go to.

We went on to see so many sites that I can’t even describe them all unless I do so with globals like “they were made mostly of stone, they were falling apart, they were being restored, and they were pretty ƒ amazing.”

At each stop, before the tuk tuk had even slowed down, people would begin shouting at you about water, shirts, flutes, postcards, scarves, table clothes, bananas, beer, and honestly just a few other things. It seemed like everybody was selling the same exact crap. Taka and I suspected that the whole show was run by one organization who only allowed these people to sell certain things.

At one stop there was a particularly beautiful girl trying to sell us water, which we did need, and numerous other things that we did not, including shirts. Taka decided to try to bargain with her by trading his shirt for the one she was selling. She said she didn’t want his shirt because it smelled bad, and when I teased her about insulting my friend she gave this beautiful smile and said “oh my gaaaaaad!” We teased her some more about various things and it was nice to have some genuine interaction with these people beyond bartering for novelties. I did end up coming back to her to buy a soda and some water. Smiles and sincerity go a long way.

We climbed up a steep temple and when we got to the top Taka started chatting up the backpacker girls like he likes to do, which is actually very useful because you end up seeing the same people over and over and you get to share info and stories and make a lot of friends.

I took some photos and found some Cambodian guy who started telling me all sorts of information about the place we were at. It ahd been struck by lightning and so it was never finished, hence no carving sin the stones. It was made from rocks brought in from Thailand on elephants and bamboo poles, hence the round holes in all of the stones. He showed me a mountain range in the distance that was the border to Thailand. He showed me how to climb up onto the roof of the temple, which was illegal, but he said you could see the tops of three of the Angkor Wat towers over the forest from up there. He showed us the library and the gallery, both of which were in ruins. He showed us very quick ways to descend incredibly steep stairwells that were more like stone ladders. He showed us some great spots to take photos. He said he’d been living in the area for 15 years and was a high school student. He spoke very good English and was really helpful so I tipped him $1 after he showed us the way back to the front.

Another one of the really notable places we went was the “tomb raider temple”, which is where Tomb Raider was filmed. It was really, really cool. There were trees that had been growing for hundreds of years that had destroyed much of the place in an really beautiful way. It was so beautiful that there were about 50 people walking around and you could barely get a photo without half a dozen people in it. It was definitely one of the coolest spots we saw today and we intend to go back tomorrow morning before the crowds are there.

While we were in the tomb raider temple we found a group of three girls from Steamboat Springs who had rented bikes. They were cool and we talked with them for a while. It was nice to run into people from a tiny place near where I had once lived. We walked with them a while but split ways when they had to go back for their bikes. Every time I say goodbye to somebody I meet I wonder if I’ll see them again down the road. So many of the travelers I’ve talked to so far say they keep bumping into people in various cities and countries that they met previously on their travels.

We went to get some food and found a nice spot with a few women managing an empty shop. We got coffee and ramen and ate some really really spicy peppers. They had a really strange bird that sounded like a trained parrot with its vocal sounds and very beautiful calls, but was black and yellow with some weird flaps on the back of its neck. It didn’t like me and tried to attack me, but I loved it anyway.

One of the girls was turning this wheel that was attached to a glass cylendar with a golden liquid in it, which I thought was juice or beer. She was filling 1 liter bottles with the liquid, then she’d turn the wheel and fill the glass cylendar again. I nearly ordered one just to try it. Taka asked her what it was and she said it was gasoline.

At one point in the afternoon we were walking around a mostly flat temple with hallways and small courtyards. It began to thunder, then it began to rain lightly, then it began to rain heavily. We happened to step into a pile of ants and were being bitten by the ants as we ran to take cover in one of the hallways of the temple. We were trapped by the rain with a couple from the Czeck Republic, so we found a dry spot for us all to sit and we talked a while about their trip to Phnom Penh and back to Thailand. When it cleared up they headed out ahead of Taka and I, who were both taking photos like mad. The rain had increased the contrast of the stones and the saturation of all of the colors and the grass in the courtyards was more beautiful than before.

The threat of rain lingered as we saw a few more temples, and then as we were on top of a very tall one it began to actually rain some more. This made the stones slippery so we took shelter and had some beer at a local shop. There were several women and children around trying to sell us flutes and shirts and things. Taka and I talked for a while and one 10 year old girl kept showing me these horribly photoshopped postcards of Cambodian life. I had discovered earlier that if you start asking questions they quit trying to sell you things, so I asked her the normal things and then began teaching her english words for things found in the photos on the postcards. It seemed like out of nowhere, all the sudden I had like 6 girls trying to get me to buy them stuff. One woman was saying she wanted me to buy here a beer, a deaf kid a coke, and a flute for myself for $4. I agreed to do it for $3 and we all had a good time making jokes and sparring in this sell/buy situation. Taka had bought a mouth harp and was trying to talk to them through it while he tried to make noise on it. I was trying to get a girl who was trying to sell me a mouth harp to twang it while I played the flute while blowing out of my nose. The deaf kid was just laughing at everything and enjoying his coke, and the young girls were were just frustrated that we wouldn’t give them a dollar for little bamboo stars and flowers and crummy post cards. It was a really fun time and we took some funny photos, ate some bananas and then headed out into the rain. It was nice to have some fun with the locals… I find them incredibly frustrating when they’re selling me things, but when we drop that whole thing and let me buy what I feel like buying and just have fun everything is a lot more enjoyable.

It was getting late and the gates were closing soon so we had our tuk tuk driver take us to the last big temple. This last temple ended up being one of the coolest temples we’d seen, but we didn’t have time to explore it. It was really really large, it was raining and it was late. Taka and I went in a ways expecting it to be small, but after finding several large intersections of hallways into really cool looking places we decided to give up and go home, then come back tomorrow.

We left that temple in the pouring rain walking on stones, in puddles and in the mud, all underneath the trees that reached out to each other above. The whole scene was really beautiful, the kind of thing from a great movie, and it was a really great way to finish the day.

It rained all the way back to the hotel. When we got there I asked about the internet and they said that it was broken. They said it might be working the next day.

It was too late to check out, so I went to my room and took a much needed shower and washed my clothes in the sink and hung them to dry on whatever I could find to hang them on. I need to get a clothes line type thing.

I decided to take a nap, but it began raining really heavy and I couldn’t sleep so I wrote this instead, and if only I had internet I could post it right now.

The road north to Cambodia was immediately nicer than other roads I’ve taken into or inside of Saigon. They were more like the roads on Hanoi, more modern and maintained, and this gave promise to the many construction site billboards showing the future office complexes and industry sites that I’ve seen on my travels.

I was traveling on a Mailinh tour bus and had taken a Mailinh taxi the day before and had gotten a good price. At the front of the bus which was at first playing an episode of a Vietnamese variety show but then began playing popular internet videos. This was interesting because once again there was this mix of cultures. There were videos where white men were driving luxury sports cars that I’d seen a thousand times in San Jose but hadn’t seen once in Vietnam. There were several videos with overt sexuality that I hadn’t seen yet in actual Vietnamese culture. Nobody cared about the robot dancing kid in the orange shirt but they loved the video of the man who got attacked by the mule he was trying to have sex with. I couldn’t believe such a business from such a conservative culture would be playing some of these videos.

The nonfunctioning GPS feature on my iPhone really began to bug me again when we stopped for gas and I wondered where I was. I remembered that the iPhone 3.0 firmware had finally gone public and had probably been cracked since the hackers had been keeping up on 3.0 and I resolved to network unlock my phone ASAP in hopes of restoring GPS functions and if nothing else to give me a phone rather than a PDA.

When we got to the border we all got off the bus, picked up our luggage and went into an air conditioned building with an x-Ray machine and a group of 80 or more people waiting beyond it, and so we waited.

There were a lot of white people, most Australians. A Japanese man from Hiroshima spoke with me in English. He asked if I had a visa already and when I said yes he said “fuck…” and it sounded good to hea familiar English slang. He said he was unemployed and was traveling from Saigon up to Thailand and back down to Singapore, nearly the same route I was taking bu in a mere 10 days. I told him he could probably buy a visa at the checkpoint and he agreed and wised he’d brought more American dollars. He was from North Carolina.

One by one our names were called and our passports were returned including arrival/departure cards. A man checked my passport and I went outside, exchanged my book for my camera, gave my backpack to the storage guys and boarded. Off we went for a mere 200 meters, then we had to ge off again. This was the real border.

Inside a man checked my passport and directed me to a line. A sign at the counter said they were having trouble with their computers, which were running windows and had motorized logitech webcams. They took my passport and scanned it, took my photo, stamped the passport a half dozen times and let me pass. A woman checked my passport as she talken on her cell phone and let me pass into the health quarentine where there was a x-Ray machine and a crowd of people. I filled out a health declaration and they let me pass. It felt like I was on level 3 and just needed to find the person to check my passport so I could continue, but I guess level 3 doesn’t require that so I went and got back on the bus.

The first thing I noticed in Cambodia were numerous casinos, none o which were open. There were no casinos in Vietnam.

The next thing I noticed was that they reluctant on the Thai alphabet, which I thought would be a problem for me until I saw that everything was translated into two to four written languages: Thai, some sort of Chinese, Vietnamese and English, and I can read one and somewhat pronounce another. The money is in Thai and English numerals.

At lunch I sat with the Japanese man, who was able to buy a visa at the border, and talked about phnom penh, which is where ou bus is headed, and Angkor Wat.

I drank an Angkor beer and thought about San Francisco.

The Japanese man mentioned both lonely planet and the backpacker subculture of travelers, which was promising, and mentioned that staying near the lake rather than downtown was cheaper and hence attracted more backpackers. I had the address of one guest house in my phone, but if that didn’t pan out at least I knew where to go to find English speakers and cheap lodging.

I stared out the window and noticed that this road was not as busy as just about any road in Vietnam that I’d been on.

I opened a bottle of Aquatien and thought of Tien. Then I thought of Adult Swim.

I saw ducks, hens, chickens, horses, cows and fields of grass, not rice. I saw dogs, kids playing volleyball, children playing with sticks, a naked child running in a dirt yard.

I saw orchards.

I saw scooters, modern cars, a bare 4 wheeled vehicle that looked like a stripped down truck, and many small structures like fences and ladders made from thin, tall trees that grow naturally. The landscape here was notably different and had been sectioned off for ranching livestock and not just farming crops like Vietnam. The fenced off open fields looked more familiar to me since almost all of America is fenced off in much the same way. Not all people had fences though, some would tie their cattle to palm trees or simply let their cattle wander into the middle of the highway.

The architecture was mostly the same as Vietnam near the border but turned mote to wooden houses on stilts farther in. Some had hammocks strung between the stilts, most used the shade as a garage for scooters.

We stopped at a ferry where locals were selling strange fruits that I’d never seen that looked like a mix between a cactus and a muffin and other strange things. People bathed in the river. Tori Amos sang “we may be on this road but we’re just imposters in this country” in my ear and I concurred.

I wondered why the vegetation seemed so different and when I checked the location data for my last photo I found that we were at only 11° N and still at sea level, which led me to no conclusion.

I saw a man on a scooter with a barrel of piglets.

I was glad to have photography as a purpose because I didn’t feel like being lost with no purpose.

Phnom penh was different. There were expensive cars, gas stations like suburban America, and the first real graffiti I’ve seen in Asia. It wasn’t done by locals.

My Japanese friend and I shared a tuk tuk and went to a place on the lake that he had found in the lonely planet. It was all the way at the end of a narrow and winding alley and stood on stilts over the lake. It was a $5 night guest house and the crummiest room I’ve had so far. The room was about the quality of a summer camp dorm and there was no internet. The drain in the sink went straight onto the floor and the drain on the floor went straight into the lake. However, it was right on the lake and there were other English speakers around and a cafe and bar right there. The man who showed us in offered me drinks, cigarettes and weed. 

I went to get a drink with my Japanese friend and ended up with my first real dose of backpacker culture. Most people were speaking in English. Most people had tattoos. Most people had piercing. I think I’m still the only American because all the white people have English or Australian accents and everybody else has dark skin. It was happy hour and beer was $.75 a glass, whiskey was $.50 a shot. The bar tender offered us weed, which wasn’t on the menu.

We sat with a couple from London who had been traveling for six months from the opposite direction I was headed and had lots of stories, recommendations and insight. They were smoking weed and lounging around a couched area. I had a double whiskey and a beer while they talked about how they didn’t recommend Phuket, they did recommend tubing in Laos and only a day in Angkor Wat, and talked about the lunar dance parties on the beach in Ko Pha Ngan, the very conservative and honest culture in Laos, and the interesting and religious mix of culture in Malaysia. I wondered how Tien would like this and wished she were there with me.

I soaked in the knowledge, enjoyed the English conversation and then went for one last beer which I drank on the deck by the shrinking lake after being offered weed.

There are no mosquitoes here. It is the perfect temperature. There are pillows and matts at the edge of the deck where you can relax and watch the sun set at the waters edge.

This was awesome for a while, but club dance music began playing and the party turned up. It would’ve been the kind of thing I would have loved at a different point in my life but I was now looking for something a little quieter and more serene. I retired early and slept until 5:30 or so, about the time the sun rises, and went for breakfast, photos and to find a bookstore I’d seen on my way in.

I spent the morning on the subject en of a Kodak DSLR in a photo session reminiscent of that in “Lost in Transaltion”. The photographer was good though, and Tien looked ƒ incredible. I felt like a doofus next to such stunning beauty, but her sisters flattered me into a comfortable state of mind. It was fun and some of it was silly. We went through several outfits and lighting setups and it was interesting to see their techniques, so different from what I do. It was surprisingly tiring though, partly because of the waiting while Tien changed from one stunning outfit and hairdo to another. After the shoot we went and had lunch at the place where I got ill and got the same thing, but this time I didn’t eat the vegetables. Afterwards we wnt to look through photos of the shoot. Nobody has taken photos of me in a long, long time. It was odd to see myself, looking my age, balding, gaining a little weight. I quickly got over my self consciousness and we picked out all the necessary photos, paid and went not home but to a flower market. All I wanted to do was sleep at this point, but thu bought like 10 pounds of flowers and I carried them in my arms as we scooted home.

Sleep at last… Tien and I talked and I drifted off into a Lon nap. When I woke up we discussed the details of my third attempt to get to Cambodia. We would go to saigon by bus early the next morning, leaving from long xuyen.

We woke up at 3:30. I thought about how many times I’ve gotten up at odd hours of the night on this trip. Tiens brother went to find somebody to take us to the station but didn’t come back in time and we ended up motorbiking down with her dad and sister.

It was completely dark, it was warm and there was a crescent moon shining through haze in the sky. We shared headphones and listened to the garden state soundtrack. There weren’t many people on the road, but it seemed that when there were they’d pass us in groups and the headlamp would shine a bright circle onto their backs.

We arrived at the bus top late and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. Tiens dad shook my hand and smiled big, then rode off on his motorbike. I thought about how interesting it is to communicate things nonverbally, like saying goodbye to your future father in law.

The morning light began to show the details of the rainclouds that had been sneaking up on us in the dark, and as I photographed them they retaliated with a gentle sprinkle. It was pretty dark and my f/4 was not giving me much as far as shutter speed and I thought about how nice it would be to have a tripod. Incidentally the guys at gorillapod.com emailed me the other day asking to use a photo I took on their website and offered to send me some gear. I wished that I had it with me already and later told Tien that when I get back to Vietnam we’d have to go take photos in the morning light if I had received a tripod yet.

As we were boarding the bus I realized that I didn’t have any earplugs. Luckily I had brought a second set of headphones so Tien and I could both listen to music, but we couldn’t share it on a single iPod. I made a mental note to remember earplugs from now on.

We made our way down the bumpy and now familiar route to saigon, the first time in dayligt. At the ferry station I watched crowds of people passing. I saw a guy on a bicycle flirting and joking with the girl he was with and thought about how great it is that mannerisms transcend spoken language. These two were happy and I could see that. Some women behind them were happy and I could see that. Another woman was in a hurry and I could see that. When you’re surrounded by people who don’t speak your language you begin paying attention to such things and they take on a bigger weight in the absence of words.

I saw a half white girl on a bicycle, easily distinguishable because of her brown hair, and realized I had seen another in a restaurant a few days earlier. I wondered if these were products of war.

I saw people taking a motorcycle riding class.

When we stopped for a break Tien and I got breakfast, eggs and bread and coffee, which made me very happy. When a skillet was placed before me I touched it to move it and burned my finger a little and cursed. Instead of the American ever-liable reaction of sympathy and placation, the employee who had set it down laughed and smiled at me and said something in Vietnamese. I thought this was awesome. People need real world conditioning, not the legal shelter from physical reality and responsibility that so many liability lawsuits in America display.

When we got to Saigon the traffic was terrible. I realized that even though Saigon is great for so many reasons I really don’t like it all that much. It’s not bad to stay a day in, but I wouldn’t recommend an extended visit over Hanoi or more rural places. Then again, maybe it’s different if you speak the language, know the hidden gems, or at least have your own transportation.

Tien and I checked into a mildly crummy and hence overpriced hotel and caught up on missed sleep. We sat on the bed and ate pringles and drank soda from the fridge and went back to bed. The best thing about vacationing is a lack of responsibility. We were free to do whatever we wanted with our time and chose to be lazy. Eventually we got up and had lunch, discussing some details of her immigration, then realized we wouldn’t see each other for a few weeks and had a sad goodbye. I gave her a few billion dong, the Vietnamese currency, put her in a taxi and was alone again in Saigon.

I spent the rest of the night in my hotel room catching up on computer stuff and being lazy some more. In the morning I shaved my head, checked the charge on my gadgets, checked out of my hotel and headed for an Australian cafe I’d seen.

Apparantly Australian cafes are not the same as American cafes, which I stupidly expected because of the shared language. I did have a cappucino though, my first in weeks, and a Vietnamese breakfast of bread and beef stew.

A Filipino man was sitting at the next table and began talking to me. He asked about my travels and my work and said he was looking for a cheaper hotel. It was nice to have a conversation and I hoped to find more English speakers on my journey through more popular tourist destinations.

I wnt to the bus HQ and checked in for my ride. I was required to hand over my passport and was told it would be given back at the border of Cambodia.

As we boarded the bus I was asked to let them pack my backpack. When I asked to take it on the bus they said no, so I took my book and gave it up. This was the first time letting it out of my control while traveling.

I got on the bus, found a seat centered between the axels and read until we began to drive away. We passed the bus station where I proposed to Tien as we crawled a crooked trail out of the city. I wished that I had my bag, or more accurately my camera.

I’ve wished several times on this trip that I had just brought along a panasonic LX3. I’ve even considered buying one and mailing my D300 back to America, but have not. Maybe I’ll buy a messenger bag instead, something easy to carry a few accessories in. A man purse.

So here I am on the bus to Cambodia, writing again on my iPhone. I really wish the iPhone had real GPS support. I thought that it did, and the accuracy of the 3g iPhone made it seem so, but I have not been able to get a GPS signal on it since leaving SF even though my Geomet’r works fine. It sucks because it’s not like I knew that before I left, it’s not something I could’ve tested. Maybe if I put in a local SIM card it’ll work…

The fact that I didn’t have a ring when I proposed to Tien did not mean I didn’t intend to get one for her, even if Vietnamese girls don’t traditionally get them. I wanted to get something for her before I headed off to travel so she’d have something to remind her that Id’ be coming back for her soon.

Monday night she, two of her sisters and I went down to Long Xuyen to go jewelry shopping. We found a nice shop and I told her to pick out whatever she wanted. The styles were a little gaudy, not delicate, and neither of us immediately saw anything we liked but we managed to find something that suited her. She also picked out some earrings and we were both happy about it all.

In English, the words million and billion are only one letter different.  In America only the filthy rich have a problem with those kinds of monetary figures. Out here in four-leading-zeros land we do have those kinds of problems from time to time.  When it came time to pay, she thought I was joking when I said I didn’t have that kind of money on me, even though I’d just gone to the ATM.  I thought she was upset when she said “fine, we’ll just go home.”  In reality she was joking and I had misheard the price as being in billions, not millions, 1000 times more than it actually was.  This is still a source for a good laugh.

We went out to eat afterwards and had some kind of omelet that you’d wrap inside leaves. It was really good, perhaps better than simply having an omelet. During dinner a man rode a scooter through the restaurant and nobody cared.  Lizards crawled on the walls.  The owner asked about my soul patch and said I was too young to have one.

On Tuesday Tien and I went out for breakfast. We found a restaurant with tables under grass huts with puppies and chickens running around. She picked out some new foods for me to try, including some weird seafood that I amazingly did not completely dislike. It began pouring rain during breakfast, and our grass hut did a good job of keeping the rain off of us as we laughed at the chickens running around looking for shelter away from the humans. We ordered some more food to wait the rain out with. Then it didn’t stop so we just motorbiked home in the rain.

Later I began feeling ill and attributed it to dinner the previous night. My doctor had warned me not to eat raw vegetables because they had probably been washed in water that had bacteria that my body was not used to. I guess she was right. It began raining and didn’t stop for hours. We tried to find ways to enjoy ourselves indoors, and I ended up finding some string and teaching her nieces how to make knots that come undone by pulling on them and other silly things.
It was a lazy day. Tien and I talked about visa and passport plans and did research about how all of that stuff works.

During one of the lulls in the rain I heard car horns from the street and dogs barking. I thought about how there might be feral dogs out running in the road, and it occurred to me that I haven’t seen any roadkill here. I suspect that because of traffic dynamics the average Vietnamese driver is more alert than the average American driver.

I decided that I would go to Cambodia the next morning. The bus left really early though and the stop for it was about 2 hours away on motorbike. Her family had been trying to coerce me into staying, they love me and were pointing out that I had some wet clothes and was a little bit ill, but I had places to go and I didn’t have much to do in Binh Hoa. I was worried that it would rain though, so I told Tien that if it was raining in the morning I wouldn’t go yet.

We stayed up a bit later chatting and preparing for my trip. I was eying one of the books that I helped Tien pick out for her English student: New Era English Conversation for Absolute Beginners. Most of this book is very, very useful, but I happened to open it to probably the least useful but most comical page. In chapter 5 the following phrases were used as conversational examples for describing things:

“His long mustache framed the side of his lips like fire from the window of a burning house.”

“The expensive cut of his suit and the quite dignity of his expression belied the single bullet hole in the left side of his head.”

Wednesday morning Tien’s alarm didn’t go off when we thought it would. We were up an hour late, and although we probably could’ve made it in time if we went really quickly I didn’t want to do this because motorbiking on wet streets and wet dirt paths is not a good idea, especially with Tien having to steer with the heavy load of me and my backpack.

Instead of going to Cambodia I spent most of the day sleeping. It felt like my body was fighting something off, so it may have been better that I didn’t go to Cambodia yet. I also got in touch with my friend Scott from San Jose who has a cousin in Saigon who works at a travel agency. Small world. I’ll probably end up going through them to get to Angkor Wat.

When I wasn’t sleeping Tien and I were doing more research on her visa situation. We called the US Embassy at three different numbers and sent a few e-mails to which we got one reply.

It rained some more.

That evening we went out to Long Xuyen to look for portrait studios and so Tien could go to school. On the way in it rained on us. It was warm though and actually felt kinda nice. When it stopped raining the air was dry and warm and it was fully night. Tien went to school and I went with her sisters to get some dinner.

Other than simple containers with no moving parts, I don’t think I’ve seen a single toothpick holder in Vietnam that isn’t broken.

After dinner I headed out with Thu and Mai to hit up the wedding portrait studios. We went to a large shop on the corner of a main street. There were large books with photos of couples in many different scenes with romantic phrases written in engrish.

A lizard crawled across the ceiling.

A lizard crawled across the face of a beautiful girl in a photograph on the wall.

Thu and Mai talked away in Vietnamese with several girls at the shop, not another English speaking person in sight, and I just through the books and critiqued the photography which was mostly very good. It was really funny to me that I’d be taking photos like this the next day, and I thought about traditions. I think that ceremony often puts a bad cover on an otherwise great book. This photography thing is not the kind of thing I would choose to do on my own, but because it’s traditional and because Tien wants to do it I’m happy to do it, even if I feel a little silly doing so. The really good stuff comes later, and that’s what I’m looking forward to. Going to America, traveling around, discovering new places, rediscovering old places and living out this dream.