La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Vancouver and Taiwan

Of course you the reader do not necessarily believe everything I write when I describe the cities visited on these expeditions. Yet. Yet. In the life of a minor bureaucrat there is a moment which follows pride in the triumph of a project, with the concomitant mastery of knowledge, and the melancholy and relief of knowing that he shall soon give up any thought of knowing and pursuing it further. It is the desperate moment when he discovers that his triumphs over others, which had seemed the sum of all wonders, have made him the unwitting heir of that repeated undoing. 

Of course you the reader do not necessarily believe that I believe everything I write when I describe the cities visited on these expeditions, but you do occasionally attend to my recounting of them with greater attention and curiosity than I have thought they warrant. Perhaps during that sense of emptiness that comes over one at odd moments—when smelling the stale aroma of the carpeting on the floor in the building where one has worked or lived for years, tasting the food from one of the same few shops one has eaten at for some decades, seeing a heavy rain bouncing on the pavement one must soon walk yet again—a story can divert us from the sure wreckage of the future and provide a tracery of hope, like the lacèd veins exposed in a decomposing leaf, that elsewhere in the world there may be hope in abundance. 

Of course I do not necessarily write everything you the reader believe when I describe the cities visited on these expeditions. Western history is riddled with guides who recounted the unbelievable East: von Boldensele, Polo, Calvino, Odoric, Mandeville. Tales of venturing East then changed to tales of going further West: west to reach the east, west to the unknown frontier, west to the havens, west to the abode of gods and heroes. Such tales came to a necessary end with the definitive conclusion that this world is but an imbalanced oblate spheroid of generally agreed but morphing dimensions. Maps became dull recountings of what is rather than what is not and those peculiarly European dreams of freedom ended in the wooden streets of Pacific coastal cities. There cultists could go no further west, found disillusionment, and ended up becoming ecoterrorists in a still-ongoing fit of speciesist self-loathing that has yet to come to culmination. 

So, from the far West to the Far East via the Western Road. 

Vancouver

Departing from there and arriving here, you come to Vancouver: a city that isn’t. Built in equal parts on bedrock, silt, and a coiled sleeping dragon, it is a cluster of petty towns that guard their independence by binding themselves tightly together. Though each has its own identity, its citizens who travel to far lands refer to their home only as Vancouver.

The city itself looks best from an airplane when the sun shines in a rich blue sky; so it remains a mystery why the founders established it where the low Pacific greyness palls the city for weeks at a time. Pockets of high rise towers are moated by low-rise housing in a city plan based, one thinks, on a cardiac arrhythmia plotted on three axes. This design—likely developed by a local artist who once found international fame for some moments as the seminal neologiser of his generation—provides citizens with needed opportunities for condescension towards their neighbours given—as mentioned—that this city is an agglomeration of many cities, the precise number of which has never been officially recorded lest any one city actually feel included. 

It is a city of balance and trepidation despite or perhaps because of its plenty, having the luxury of forested mountains, an abundant sea, and a wide fecund delta. The city motto is now and forever “progress without change,” though the citizens—who delight in civic consultation—have yet to find an appropriate way or place to enshrine said motto that meets the virtues of equanimity and unanimity. 

Vancouverites are of two classes: those who want what other cities have and those who want other cities to have what Vancouver has. The city teeters between the excesses of one tempered by the protests of the other. Winding trails of concrete rail beds high above the streets are notable examples that Vancouver can have the progressive virtues of mass transit like other cities while ensuring that those trains didn’t actually go anywhere useful (though there is some recent indication that the balance has shifted). Where the classes meet is in their shared opinion of the uniqueness of their city. Its streets and buildings are proudly unlike the streets and buildings of other cities despite being virtually identical to them. Vancouver emulates its fellows with the unsubtle mimicry of a superannuated mime.  

Despite this delusion, Vancouver has some noteworthy deviances that the ethnographic traveller may find diverting. Where other cities tell tells of past glories and future idylls, Vancouver is a city that delights in questioning its misdeeds. A countercurrent to the millennialist push from the east was the influx of people from the Far East—which is in fact to the west—who failed to comprehend this nihilism and sought only to enrich themselves and their families in ways they could not in their decaying cities far away down the whale road. All of these were layered forcefully and murderously on top of the original inhabitants of the area whose continued existence is now a point of civic pride. The city’s civic shield is, one hears, shrouded in sackcloth over which various mayors spoon ashes each day. Vancouverites bemoan or aggrandize the scars of their past proudly and enjoy most being consulted on how best to share their shames. The grandest civic monuments memorialize the theft of the land on which it sits, the morphing racism of successive generations, and the general inhumanity of its citizens to one another. The traveller is advised to not rely on older maps as the city fathers (of whichever gender or lack thereof) are happiest when using their time to rename the city in ways that are progressively conservatively authentic. Thus the Centennial Square became the Art Gallery Square, became Vancouver Art Gallery North Plaza and is most recently (at the time of writing) šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl'e7énḵ Square, deliberately untransliterated vis-à-vis the lingua franca to lend an air of false authenticity only comprehensible by career anthropologists.  

On the whole, the traveller passing through Vancouver will be alternately enchanted and disappointed. Upon leaving the city one will note that the specific details of the place will fade into vague impressions like that of a visit to any number of seaside holiday town over one’s life. It may or may not have had a pier, may have been the place with the Japanese hamburgers or the place with Hebridean tacos, was either gloriously sunny or depressingly opaque with gloom. Only these half-questioned thoughts remain, which is fitting for a city that is itself a question questioning itself. In all other respects it becomes buried under new memories; only trace echoes and visions, like those rumoured to be found in the Samarkand desert, remain.

You leave the end of the New World, travelling westwards across the vastness of the ocean, crossing into the Orient. Where once people walked, then sailed, then propelled their boats by steam and diesel, you fly. This crossing of a third of the world in some few hours creates a dreamlike haze of jet lag that adds to the strangeness of this old land like mist around a street lamp. 

Taipei

Although it is located on an island of magnificent proportion and variety you may choose to enter Taipei by rail on a viaduct winding through verdant rain forest that gives way to an eerily still city. Taipei is a necropolis—a city of the dead—of uncertain grandiosity. The most massive buildings and spaces above ground are reserved for the memories of past rulers. These are palely reflected underground with similarly massive stations for the movement of the living. 

Ancestor worship cohabits uncynically with belief in Buddhist rebirth, often in temples side by side: the bustling and sensorious Bao’an temple is suffused with incense while the Confucian temple beside it has an incinerator to wing messages to heaven. The Longshan temple pays homage to the Iron Goddess of Mercy (which is also the name of a famous tea). Animism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, the later Ibrahimic faiths: with so many ghosts and the fear of various hells the wise traveller is advised to hedge bets and pray or contemplate (as appropriate) at all temples and churches regardless of belief. Perhaps this manifest inferiority to the spirit world explains the ubiquity of underground trains and passages: a desire of the citizenry to forego as many religious sites as possible in their perambulations. This would be understandable as they live between the memory of their past dead and the looming possibility of their future dead, threatened as they are by the vast empire of the other China on the Asiatic mainland. These stations are great breathing spaces in which the need to think about either can be put aside for some moments of time, though they also present a daily reminder of the need to shelter from the holocaust that could be rained down upon them at any moment. One is given to think that the for the same reason human form is not to be represented in Taipei culture. All advertisements from the government, business, or religious sectors feature pigs, cats, hippos, anything in fact that can be rendered into anime. Perhaps it it to avoid tricky problems of racial privilege. 

Modern caravanserais, hotels and hostels often start many floors above ground level, perhaps due to an atavistic fear of flooding. Rooms are often windowless, again possibly reflecting the desire to avoid the ghosts of past and future. The anxieties of the city are also reflected in the obsessive cleanliness and lawfulness of the citizens; perpetual newness is a fig in the face of existential discombobulation. Despite this, some older streets in the Dihua neighbourhood have been retained, even if primarily as facades, and the traveller can get a sense of the stages through which the city has passed in the modern era. 

But the traveller is not to read this pessimistically. With luck one can come across some shining moments, like a saxophone player alone in a park, making sweet sounds reminiscent of Tony Scott’s seminal Jazz for Zen Meditation. Fine local beer can be had in settings that are soothing and peaceful. A small but bustling area known as Xinmending plays host to various costume shops and an old factory is the setting for creative shops and cinema, though seems woefully light on creativity. All of this portends a small but rebellious generational shift. To capture the sense of this the traveller is advised to seek out those purveying some truly excellent teas that are jealously guarded and rarely exported. This island nation is insistent on creating (and creating a parochial pedigree for) unique strains of tea that can bring to its people peculiarly Taiwanese calm, Taiwanese energy, and Taiwanese solace. In its drink one finds the heart of a people’s city and that tremulous and resilient heart of this city is subtle and inspiringly hopeful. One can taste the subtle shift in the populace from veneration of the mausoleums and catacombs to an appreciation for artistic life in the streets. One senses that the tombs may soon be overturned and the ashes of the dead left to dissipate in the rivers and streams that lead away into the oceanic past.

Of the rest of this island nation I can say nothing.

La città risibile, an ASEAN odd-yssey: On certain cities of the Thai 

 Bangkok

Arriving there, you enter Krung Thep, colloquially called Bangkok, in a fog. It is a city characterized by its negative space. What matters is what is unsaid, what is left undone, what is excluded in its architecture, and who is not there. 

The city“of angels” is conspicuous by their absence. When land is cleared to build a house or other structure, the locals are careful to build a small house, judiciously located, to harbour the spirits of the land who have been displaced. The care and feeding of these ethereal beings is often more important than that of the dusty and sick corporeal beings selling some few fruits or gewgaws in the streets, which situation captures the pull of the competing religions in this city of hungry ghosts. This has not changed since the author’s first recorded visit to this city—the initial odd-yssey—two decades ago.

You are struck by the verticality of Bangkok, with its streets, roads, and rail lines layered on top of each other. At its extreme you have to climb seven or eight storeys (two stacked underground lines, concourse, ground level, elevated walkway, two stacked elevated train lines) to get from the lowest underground train to the uppermost elevated train. On both sides of these vertiginous roads rise vast buildings whose architectural conceit is that you have to study them to see what school of architecture has not been represented in their olio of pediments and rosette windows. Like in some dystopian film, the haze of smog from cars perpetually trapped in this layer cake offers glimpses of street level hawking and elevated luxury bicycle dealerships. 

Climbing the Golden Mount near the heart of the old city—a welcome blend of misted shady paths and scorching whitewashed steps—you see this Metropolis tightening around the low rise heart of the city with its palace and temples of gleaming gold. The memory of the city lies in its rivers and canals which have largely been paved over or used as inky black sewers but you can find some still in use. Because the city has turned its back on them they offer glimpses into the lives of denizens who inhabit the shacks and crumbling piers, wading into the brown and black water to catch fish that can rarely see sunlight even in the shallow depths. The slowest moving of these canals are dense to the point that stray light just gets absorbed into them. Careful travellers will take care not to fall into one of these canals as there are stories of people bouncing and burning on top of the viscous liquid like sodium on water. 

From these waterways, or from the elevated heights of the Golden Mount or the looming skyscrapers you see that the city is a network of temples. The people live and work in the polygons created by the ley lines that connect the temples to each other. Largely white and gold, these temples offer space and contemplation and are topped with spires to pierce the evils spirits that come from the sky. A golden idol, the Lord Buddha (né Siddhartha Gautama, an Indo-Aryan and supposed descendant of Alexander the Macedonian Greek who, one remembers, butchered his way across southern Asia) repeated endlessly serves to remind citizens of what they are not, what they have failed to be in previous lives. Woven around these idols are figures you might recognize from the mythology of the Great Khanate, or the pantheon of Ind. This city is ostensibly welcoming of many gods.

What is the city is what you cannot see. The emptiness that is the spiritual centre of the temples is but one such thing. The motivations behind the well-known smiles of its inhabitants, is another: travellers meet with a profusion of smiles but need beware of malignant intent as well as beneficent. Why are certain building left incomplete? Why are particular bars left alone to flourish while others get shut down? What are the topics that subjects and all visitors are not allowed to discuss? Like the enigmatic smile on the Buddha idols, the smiles of the city inhabitant you meet are meant not to elucidate but to maintain a placid obscurantism. Understanding that which is not said is crucial to living in such a place. 

Ostensibly the capital of a constitutional monarchy, this city’s legislators have little choice but to vote unanimously in favour of the accretion of financial and military power to the throne, given that the crime of lèse majesté is strictly enforced. The city, which manages the king’s nation, smiles while the monarch’s absolutism continues to grow. The traveller is well advised to avoid business dealings with lesser royals, whose positions become more precarious daily, and with major royals who tend to disappear at too regular intervals to be influential. The king is all; he is the perfect man, and the traveller is well advised to heed that basic truth whilst within the borders of said king’s control.

The business of Bangkok, despite the politics, bureaucracy, and paramilitary infighting, is business. Everything is for sale, including the past, and the traveller is likely to see an unfamiliar city rise from the smog on successive visits for it is like a hydra gone wild, feeding on itself and growing in the process. Little wonder the most royal of beasts is the seven-headed Naga serpent that rises from the river. 

Wealth affects the substance of the neighbourhood but not the form. Or vice versa. The poorest overwhelm with their crowded profusion of shops and stalls all selling what are ostensibly the same goods, but so too do the richest with luxuries, though in this case the marble and gold are a thin veneer on the true wealth, which is the empty spaces they afford, less horizontally than sensoriously vertical. This verticality is the modern representation of the cosmology of the city and karmic forces at play: from the climb up stairs in the lower purgatorial levels to the street level suffering of the human realm, to the mansions of the lesser gods who idle in abundance, to the clarity of nothingness above the smog, the wheel of life spins in full display. The earthly realm is the city streets, the intensity of life spent slurping soup some few inches from a constant flow of motorcycles, people, flaming propane elements, boiling water, hot stirfry flinging high in the air. That roil of turbulent, truculent humanity is the cauldron out of which Buddhism is born. One may wish to remain in the sanitized and luxurious environs above the streets but dwelling there one is apt to forget the greater need to strive for nirvana. Thus, although efforts are increasingly being made to keep the visitor either high above or below ground in cooled-air trains, the traveller is advised to keep to street level for there is where the true city seethes unchanged for decades at a time and there is where one is most reminded of the importance of accumulating karma: the physicality of the city is fundamentally irrelevant; the truest smiles are on the faces of those who inhabit the negative spaces and escape the perpetual suffering that is life.

Comestibles are the real joy of Bangkok, the denizens whereof gourmandize with discrimination. Rice, noodles, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, the market stalls bursting with the best of Chinese, local, and recently transplanted ingredients. Despite rumours, the food need not be fiery, though some dishes are best avoided (or medicinally applied) as they will act by morning to radically to clear one’s system of any comestible matter. Such evacuation is painful and comes in two bouts of two but, almost immediately after the second of the second, induces euphoria and a lightness of being that sustains one until the next morning’s bout. These effects aside, it is unlikely the traveller will find a more perfect cuisine in all her wanderings. 

Khrun Kop

Outside Bangkok, and visible from the rail lines is the city of Khrun Kop. It is an unfortunate place, and one that cannot be visited for—whether by design or from ignorance—it has become completely ringed and fenced in by expressways, dual carriageways, parkways, and Bangkok’s ring roads. The unsleeping traffic is fierce and the inhabitants of the city can rarely get out nor others in. Consequently, this city is cannibalizing itself in the face of inexorable entropy: the only building materials come from other, more ruined buildings, furniture is patched together from older furniture, windows are replaced with the plastic bags that blow in from the expressways. One can only wonder about the food supplies and when the inhabitants might resort to extreme solutions. As it is, it is a city going backwards in time, unable to grow and only able to feed off of decay. Such are the reports and such is what can briefly be verified from the train window as you leave Bangkok towards the north. 

You take a train through the night, a train that bears the hallmark of a bygone age in which all is metal and mechanical: overhead fans that rotate on two axes, the solidity of latches and catches, toilets that are black holes emptying onto the tracks below, and the clacks and midnight creaks of the tonnes and tonnes of the carriages weighing down on thin metal rails while a monstrous diesel engine overcomes gravitational resistance to claw its way north past the slumbering ruins of ancient imperial capitals. This tunnelling through the night allows all to outrun the intestinally preponderant heads that are the Thai ghosts who emerge in the night to waylay the ignorant or befuddled. 

Chiang Mai

You are funnelled into Chiang Mai by the broad valley that confines it. You can choose to enter the old city through the cardinal gates on any of its four walls. You realize immediately that this is a city that has known peace for too long. Though only founded some seven hundred years ago, it sits atop an older city still. In fact, the city pillar is now buried in that older city where it is protected from the menstruation of women. The moated city walls are now in ruins, having seen off the Mongols but fallen to various dynasties and later, in revolution, left to rot depopulated two hundred years ago. Since then, Chiang Mai has know only slow expansion, its old architecture a riot of temples and bazaars; the newcomers spilling over the moat and into a faubourg of some 2 million souls. The walls remain in ruins as the inhabitants are confident that the Buddha (with royal spiritual assistance), from the vantage point of Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, high on the mountain overlooking the city, will guard them against strife, either civil or tectonic. This temple casts peaceful dreams over the valley and is worth a digression. Founded some six to seven hundred years ago when an elephant carried a piece of the Buddha’s shoulder blade to that spot, trumpeted three times and died, it houses not only that relic and the ashes of said elephant, but those of successive hermits who cared for the place. Syncretic to a degree peculiar even to the Thais, one would not be surprised to find a Romish Christian devotee carrying a large crucifix up its three hundred-some-odd steps. 

Outside the city walls themselves, some forty minutes by motorcycle, is the Chiang Loi village (now a district of the city) The traveller is well advised to take the time to visit here even though this requires sharp bargaining with the local drivers who profess that it is closed and that their uncle’s gem shop would be more conveniently and profitably visited. The temple here is said to be unique in that it is the only significant shrine in South East Asia tended exclusively by nuns. The large and fetching rounded stupa is supposed to contain the ashes of all the single breasts cut off by Amazon bowwomen from the Black Sea. Relocated here after that region was Christianized and Islamicized the ashes are contained within the stupa. Some small temples surround it. Otherwise, the temples display the usual syncretic olio of religious iconography. Women are allowed to wander freely in the temple precinct but men are required to go barefoot and to cover their heads and shoulders with shawls provided for that purpose. Whether or not this fantastical tale will be proven or disproven remains to be seen; nonetheless, the fact that it is a nunnery in a region of monasteries makes this temple worth the traveller’s time. 

With so many gods and notables watching over Chiang Mai and with the network of temples in the city itself, one can easily be lulled into a drowsy earth-bound existence with few thoughts but how to accumulate merit for the next turn of the wheel. Given that the founding warrior-king Mangrai died in the market place when lightning took effect on and in his too-ornamented body this is a risky attitude to take and one would be wise to take care of what business needs doing and continue onwards lest one become a lotus-eater oneself. 

If the traveller has the time, he is well-advised to learn some cookery from the locals. This allows knowledgeable access to the food markets and the opportunity to determine which foodstuffs may be profitably introduced into his own city. Like most things that appear magical, the execution of the recipes is far simpler than finding the potent components. 

You continue in caravan to the north east through fruitful fields and thatched shelters. Sun and smooth roads give way to winding valley and jungle roads, rain and stretches of red mud where the road surface is being replaced. Traces of the Khmer empire appear in the form of corncob temples, guarded by hooded naga water serpents. On these roads, as throughout the domain of the King of Thailand, travellers must beware that the natives take great risks to pass others and obstacles. Some natives are narcotized to such an extent that they fixate on their destination with a Bodhidharmic intensity that, would they could, they would bore through other vehicles, people, and the earth itself like ghosts. Many buses are now fitted with devices to guard against this behaviour on the part of their drivers.

This parkland gives way to a long valley and a straight road under the sun towards the city of Chiang Rai and the mountainous Golden Triangle where three countries meet and it is said that the milk of the poppy is so plentiful that it pools and flows and rains from the skies. 

Lek San

 In the lawless northwestern-most reaches of Thailand, remotely located along bad roads that travellers will not want to traverse except to get to this endpoint destination, is said to be Lek San Dari Kam Kha Phong, a border city comprising former itinerants and indigents, those who have roamed too far from home, had to flee, were exiled from their villages, or otherwise have nowhere else to settle. The city itself is a more ramshackle affair than most, owing to its isolation, I suspect, and is on the lee side of fierce mountains and the edge of a vast desert. The core of the city is a grid of streets, largely pedestrian, allowing for easy movement. There are few young people but their exodus to other parts of the world is counterbalanced by the influx of immigrants who settle wherever they can make space, giving the outer edges of the city a ramshackle and dog-eared appearance. The city is reputed to have been first settled by deserters from Alexander the Great’s forces who were tired of the ceaseless battle across the continent and flitted away during the campaigns in northern India, beyond the pale of the Alexandrine world. Despite their rejection of the young king, they followed his practice of naming their newly established city Alexandria-beyond-the-world in honour of his renown. No traces of Greek remain, if this is in fact the true history of the city, except in the paler skin of the natives and the ceremonial headdress of the city leader. Said headdress is the head of a ram with great curling horns. This style of clothing is found nowhere else in Thailand or the region but, one suspects, is no more indicative of Macedonian origin than the supposed origin of the Khmer as a lost tribe of Israel simply due to some commonality of words. 

Along the road to Chiang Rai you come to a temple that appears like a skeleton blanching under the tropical sun. Wat Rong Khun is the work of an artist who dedicated himself to a seventy year project renovating and building the temple into an art offering to the Lord Buddha. This bid for immortality has attracted earthquakes and visitors in like numbers, which should serve as a warning to the traveller that impermanence and nothingness are to be respected far more than history and solidity. Nevertheless, the traveller is recommended to stop here to see what individual creativity can produce when merged with traditional form. 

To get to The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, a fraction of the former Kingdom of a Million Elephants Under the White Parasol, you continue east from here until the people no longer speak Thai.

Chiang Khong

You come off the plains and down through jungle to meet Chiang Khong which moulders, forgotten and foregone since the building of a bridge across the Mekong river and into Laos. A few restaurant bars try to live in the past, try to attract the ghosts of travellers by their cult-like devotion to western musical titans of the eighth and ninth decades of the past century. Otherwise, the town sleeps, increasingly reclaimed by the jungle and the river, by the geckos and the birds. A few solitary modern shops fight the trend with gleaming white walls and highly reflective windows. 

 I will now tell you of a place of which I have heard but not seen. Some short distance north, in the Empire of China, is Yunnan province where some of the world’s greatest teas are grown. Yunnan, the mountains of northern Burma, and those of northern Laos are the ancestral home of camellia sinensis v. sinensis and the resultant brew we know today as tea or cha. Alas, such liquor as that is not appreciated by these southern nations who favour an insipid brew sweetened to drinkability by evaporated, condensed, or merely ensugared milk. 

The fabled Mekong River winds its way southeast from here, forming the border with Laos. Crossing is now aided by a newly constructed bridge, showing that geography can now be easily transcended and ignored if great powers decide to expand their reach.  

La città risibile, an ASEAN odd-yssey: On certain cities of the Lao 

You cross into the country of the Lao at Huay Xai where the roads are immediately of lesser but still decent quality. No matter, as the voyage is now by river boats that are broad and long, at the stern of which a family lives, the rest given over either to cargo or passengers. The Mekong is a river rich with earth, winding through the hills. Lined with fragile rocks—shattered, broken, and enclosing silt beaches—it gives rise to jungle on both sides. Elephants and water buffalo as well as more domestic animals can be seen either drinking at the river or floating, bloated and ripe, along it. There are some few rapids but not such as to give the modern traveller any discomfort. To sit at the bow of one of these boat and watch the profusion of hills twist and turn around oneself is the height of relaxation. 

Pak Beng

Some eight river hours later the village of Pak Beng is simply an extended caravanserai partway to Luang Prabang with nothing to recommend it. I will write no more of it save to say that the beds suffice and the restauranteurs will often proffer a bottle of state-produced whisky as enticement to patronage. 

Ca Lau Mon

Were one to stop and venture off of the boat into the northern mountains, one would come across a series of villages, the largest of which is Ca Lau Mon. Exceedingly poor, the inhabitants of this region are likely those who fooled Mandeville into reporting the existence of people with heads in their chests; in fact, the people are so twisted with Scheuermann's Kyphosis and scoliosis that their heads are almost level with their hips. This provides an advantage for growing rice but the correlating reduction in lifespan means that there is little chance of alleviating their poverty. A clinic established by a German charity in the late nineteen hundred and nineties is now abandoned and currently serves as a court for a form of shuffleboard practiced by the locals involving brooms and inflated snake bladders. Lodging can be found in the form of “home stays” established by UNESCO but infrequently occupied. The scenery is tremendous. 

Ban Pak Ou

Continuing along the Mekong and just prior to reaching Luang Prabang, the traveller comes to Ban Pak Ou, a village of no note. Opposite the village, however are the caves of Tam Ting and Tam Theung for which the village was once given royal patronage to tend (whence the “Ban” in its name). It is recommended to stop at these two caves, the lower of which the traveller cannot fail to see from the river. These caves are home to hundreds if not thousands of idols—golden, wooden and otherwise—of Siddhartha Gautama, the Lord Buddha. Used in times of crisis to house national treasures, the lower of the caves also contains a long vertical pole placed between cave floor and ceiling, placed there by the last king who said “when this timber falls, so too will the monarchy.” The pole remains intact but the king did not. He was moved with his family in the nineteen seventies to remotest northeastern Laos where they died of neglect and malaria. Nonetheless, the caves survived and are a pilgrimage spot for idolators the world over. 

It is not uncommon for travellers to dwell on the Buddha idols that they have seen: they can be recognized in their various poses as being of Siddhartha Gautama by the tight curls of hairs, long hands, svelte torso, and a symbol of enlightenment on top of the head (perhaps a lotus leaf or spire) much the way the Romish and Orthodox Christian major and minor gods can be recognized by the halo of light surrounding their heads. The material or condition of the figurine is less important than the posture, upon which one is to dwell, signifying as it does a different aspect of the Buddha’s enlightenment. 

Other idols are those of notable monks or subsumed local gods, most particularly Ho Tei (a Japanese god of contentment and enlightenment who is sometimes called Budai or the laughing Buddha and not to be confused with the Lord Buddha, though there is a school of thought that Siddhartha had, has, and will be everyone; at any rate it is said that there can be many Buddhas but only one Lord Buddha) whose meditations were disturbed by the attention of women attracted to his physical beauty so he ate until he was enormously fat and could more effectively teach the sutras. That is but one story and there are at least four different ones regarding the obesity and function of Ho Tei (or Budai) so the reader can clearly see that the religions of pagans, like those of the more saint-ridden Christians, are confused, confusing blendings of legend, fact and fancy. 

Luang Prabang

Entering the city of Luang Prabang where the Mekong and Nan Khan rivers meet, you immediately notice that it is a city of cultural fluidity, of the blending of waters. Vendors sell trinkets in the dust beside vendors of vehicles from the Bayerische Motoren Werke proving, as always, that no matter the system of government it pays to be in a position of power. The city presents a face both of French colonialism and Lao tradition. Sealed roads and rutted alleys. Pastries and rice cakes. It is a city comprising fifty-eight adjacent villages, central to which was the abandoned seat of the royal government that fell in nineteen hundred and seventy five, said fall hastened along by the Kingdom’s having been bombed by its ostensible ally (the independence-loving peoples of America’s United States) with more explosives that the Allied forces dropped on Europe during the second world war. 

Everything about Luang Prabang is less intense than cities seen along the route from Thailand, smoother edges to the corner spires on the houses, more restrained (and consequently more beautiful) temples with—to be expected given the Communist ideologues of the nineteen hundred and seventies— fewer monks, but, the exception proving the rule, the shrines to the household spirits are much larger as though to compensate for those years when such domiciles were frowned upon. The naga is ever present in this city: the water serpent god is well-honoured in this river city and landlocked country. 

The old city sits peninsularly at the confluence of the two rivers so there are fine opportunities to escape the heat at riverside watering holes. Hostelry in this city can be quite agreeable at reasonable rates and the setting is one of bougainvillea and frangipani that welcome lotus eaters. Laos is a country of minorities and languages all jostling for space and that jostling feels like a temporal confluence as well as physical, with past, present and future selves passing through each other. Simply put, Luang Prabang feels like a place the traveller has visited in the past. It is a city of déjà vu, of scenes remembered from dreams. This cannot be described, only experienced. 

The old quarter of the city retains some of the charm of its past as the royal capital and has fine examples of French colonial architecture most of which are now given over to the trinket trade, eateries and massage parlours for the footsore traveller. The curio dealer will find little to entice her, the poverty of the country during the last decades of the last century and the ideological inclinations of the communist regime have had a deleterious effect on such things. More of interest is to be found among the entrepreneurial youth who are creating jewelry and gewgaws that combine traditional techniques and fashions with modern designs. Among this merchandise there is an air of humour, unlike the poorer market vendors who merely sell what pan-Asian frippery others are selling in hopes of clawing some few thousand kip (the currency of the land) from their neighbours. Current renditions of traditional fabrics and other mongery are also to be prized when found.

The early morning sees monks line up with their begging bowls, offering people the opportunity to gain merit by feeding them. In Thailand the monks are suffering from an epidemic of obesity (so generous have they been in allowing people to provide them with nourishment). Here the monks suffer from a surfeit of ignorant travellers who unknowingly purchase spoiled food to feed them. It is hard to see who are the parasites: the begging monks, the patchouli-or-Prada mélange of visitors who jostle and try to pose the monks this way and that, or the old ladies selling poisoned food to the visitors to give to the monks. The wise traveller to this or any city is well advised to leave local religion to the locally religious.

The food of various empires collide here: the baking and adapted cuisine of the previous French rulers, the dishes of the region—though less spiced than elsewhere—and a particularly cohesive purple sticky rice that is served in small baskets from which one must use one’s hand to slowly pry a handful from its unyielding nest. A peculiar liquor exists called Lao Lao which, I believe, is a form of farm vodka made in Siberia. Siberians transport to Mongolia what they themselves refuse to imbibe. The Mongols drink what they can; what they cannot tolerate goes to the most rural of Chinese villages. What they cannot stomach makes its way through Vietnam in like fashion before arriving and becoming the de facto national drink of Laos. Perhaps they use it to replace the fiery chilies missing from their food. More benign is the local Lion or Black whisky, easier still the BeerLao which is generally recognized as the best mass-produced lager in the region. Generally, here as elsewhere, travellers are recommended to drink soda water because it cannot be easily counterfeited (unlike still water) and it has the enviable property of softening the bite of the Lion/Black whisky, a bottle of which is cheaper than a large bottle of beer: about the price of a chocolate bar.

The sunsets of Luang Prabang from the top of the central hill in town are said to be the envy of Asia. Of this I cannot write.

Some two dozen kilometres south of Luang Prabang at Kuang Si the traveller will find a cascade, water falling spectacularly to and from tiers of limestone pools. Modesty in choice of clothing whilst bathing is advised. Here too, one can find moon bears and black bears. Such animals do not pose a threat to traveller in the countryside as they are largely extinct, their intimate parts being highly prized for magics practiced to the north in the land ruled by the Han. To kill and sell one of these bears can earn a local the equivalent of an entire lifetime’s salary so these ursine unfortunates are only safe in captivity. One can be forgiven if he were to mistake these frolicsome creatures for some sort of enormous boar rather than a small bear.  

Leaving the drowsy hum of Luang Prabang, the traveller may reflect sadly that it has absorbed some of the grosser characteristics of other cities visited, with streets of vendors selling the same products, all made in China or India. In fact, at many cities across these lands, trade has been such that the traveller could visit only one and walk away draped in Tibetan, Indian, Balinese, and Wisconsin frippery, convinced that such are the trappings of the local people. This is but a pale representation of the rivers of people who flow across the land: Bangkok was forcibly settled by Laotians from Vientiane, the Thai peoples came from southern China and Tibet, the plains of Laos and Thailand were awash in Khmer, all as dynasties rose and fell. Even the Hmong hill tribe—considered by neophytes to be the most indigenously ethnic—were Mongols who only arrived in the early nineteenth century. Like the germanic Franks who settled France, the Norse, Angles, and Jutes who settled England, the Scots and Picts who settled Ireland, the Irish who settled Scotland, and the Thule who displaced the Dorset, there appear to be no place in the world where one people can claim ancestry for more than some hundreds or thousands of years, certainly not for the length of a Buddhist eon which is somewhat like the lifespan of a galaxy, and over ninety-one of which the Buddha is said to have remembered all of his past lives. The human, you feel in Luang Prabang, is essentially a nomadic life form, one which succumbs to curiosity, aggression, expansion, rebirth, and transmigration. And as a nomad, you leave your city, this city, all cities, and enter into new ones.

Far to the north of Luang Prabang, almost at the border with China, there are numerous places of pilgrimage and oddity that one hears about. Guides with sufficient knowledge or linguistic ability seem to be in short supply and it is not advisable to venture too far into the hills and jungle without them nor without proper supplies of tobacco, leech repellent, currency, and gin.

Lak Med Vaph 

To the north, the remote city of Lak Med Vaph is renowned primarily for the prodigious feats of memory its inhabitants demonstrate. Wedded to their oral tradition, they have resisted the use of paper or even the development of a unique script, leaving anthropologists to devise a tonal phonetic script which only they can read (and entirely misses the point). The people of Lak Med Vaph can and do continually recite their history back ninety-three generations. This is not merely a recitations of ancestors and legends, it includes the daily life history of each of the ancestors and even the living, including feuds, illicit affairs, daily meals, and the arrival of travellers such as yourself. They believe that by constantly reciting the history of the world and the history of the present they are preventing the world from disappearing. For this, visitors are persistently hounded for alms—though the beggars see it merely as their due rather than begging—and it is wise to ensure one has a large supply of small coinage to distribute as they do not accept paper money. One wonders whether there is a connection between this place and the Hebraic Tzadikim Nistarim: those anonymous saintly people for whose sake alone the world is not destroyed. This is more likely a case of parallel cultural evolution. There is a splendid riverside beach here where a traveller can find refreshment but the constant chattering of the locals does encourage one to move on fairly rapidly. 

 Road 13 is the old highway completed under the French with Lao labour in the year nineteen hundred and eleven. Old French-style road markers give distances in Laotian and Latin script. A newer road south exists but is unsealed. These roads wind around an infinite horizon of mountain, the teak forests punctuated by strips of village that came into being wherever the engineers left enough space on either side of the highway to allow locals to build wooden huts overhanging the cliff on one side and propping up the limestone on the other. Children play on the highway, dogs sleep on it, cows cross it. The locals dry chilies on their roofs, and their wares—encased in plastics opaque with age—flutter in the breeze created by the lorries that pass by. This is a road, after all, and all roads must lead somewhere. 

Pho Xiang

Pho Xiang is a city that, it is said, you come to along the other route south. In Pho Xiang the traveller can easily get through the city or, once within it, from starting point to destination, but there are no streets: that is, there are no thoroughfares where the principal function is to go from side to side, as in a western Main Street or High Street. It is a city of roads and roads alone. This seems to pose no problems for the locals who always know the specific place they want to go and there is always a road to take them directly there. This city is thus a nest of roads connecting every point to every other point and would be confusing for the traveller were it not that guides report that there is nothing else to distinguish this city from any other and one can merely continue on the road through the city and on to the next. 

Road 13 would stretch out for a long distance but it is a partially uncoiled spring: if one is not curving around a mountain, one is curving into and over gullies cut into the sides of the mountain. Somewhat more than halfway between Phou Khoun and Vieng Kham, two insignificant hamlets, at Phookhoune Phiengfar, the traveller comes across a victualler and watering hole on a long promontory from which splendid views of the karst peaks abound. These are said to be prehistoric coral beds that have morphed with time into limestone and been pushed tectonically out of the ocean and further into the sky where they are eroding into magnificent improbable shapes. 

Naduang

Naduang is not a city, nor should you have any reason to come to it; however, if you should find yourself there near evensong when the earth’s rotation pulls you almost horizontally away from the sun at somewhat less than twenty-eight kilometres per minute, you can find a meal at the headman’s house and a bed in any one of a number of villagers’ houses for a somewhat reasonable fee. It is merely some few kilometres from Vang Vieng and that city is where the youth work while their parents tend the rice fields and livestock. As in many such villages there is a distressing amount of litter ground into the earth underfoot.

The local ingenuity can be found in the number and variety of jury-rigged wagons towed by the front half of an old tractor: disparate motors and belt driven flatbeds, the rattle of mishmashed mechanisms rolling along the highway indifferent to the massive lorries passing them. Numerous items are made from the casings of American cluster bombs. 

Being erected through mountains, over rivers, and through green fields where Lao farmers still busily grow rice, are a great number of meticulously situated colossal concrete columns waiting to support a high-speed railway that will connect China with Laos as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. When completed, the railway will cut the time it takes to travel from the border cities of Mohan (China)/ Boten (Laos) to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, from three days to less than three hours. It will connect northwards to Kunming in China and south to Bangkok in Thailand for a 12 hour journey. All the PRC asks for in return is repayment of a massive loan, exclusive use of Chinese construction companies, primary use of Chinese labour and construction materials, and the right to keep any minerals they excavate along the way. Such rail lines and roads are cutting across Asia, ensuring that “all roads lead to Beijing,” facilitating trade and allowing the expeditious movement of Chinese troops into these countries if they default on their loans, try to curtail trade, or otherwise act contrary to the Chinese interest. The railway is just another, more efficient, road for those who can afford it and from it one will be able to avoid local streets altogether. 

 Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng exists because it exists. A US airforce base gave it life. It stagnated during the more communistic years, and has found new life as a stepping-off point for adventure sports. The karst creates canyons to kayak, there are caves to explore, dubious zip-lining, suspicious ballooning, bicycle riding, and a large blue lagoon in which to relax. The city itself has little to offer an urban traveller, though sitting on one’s balcony in full view of the massive, sheer-cliff mountains while catching up on one’s scribblings, enjoying a pipe of fine Danish plum cake tobacco, and listening to the reverberating Chinese music piped across the river has its charms. 

The sun sets behind a series of dramatic peaks, creating the impression of a volcano glowing orange and red in the distance. Cavalcades of adventure seekers make their way back over the bridge, trucks slowing to ensure the old structure can take the load. Eateries fire up for the supper hour and wood smoke suffuses the senses. Some quite decent bakeries can be found but bars are more common than cafés even though Vang Vieng is tamer than it is fabled once to have been. For many years travellers could purchase mushroom milkshakes or marijuana cigarettes and languidly watch repeats of American television. Or they could purchase small buckets filled with Lao Lao liquor, Red Bull caffeine syrup, and Coca-Cola and wander the evening streets with nary a care in the world, knowing they had a bucket at hand when the inevitable purging would be required. Some few deaths from this cocktail and consequent ambassadorial complaints have tamed the city and Vang Vieng is that which it is and nothing more. 

From Tan Heua to Hin Hoeup expect similar twists and turns as the 13 road continues. Tan Heua sits alongside an artificial lake created by one of the many hydro electric dams that contribute to the gross domestic production and sells dried fish. 

Despite the desire you may feel to leave the main roads and venture to parts remote, this is not advisable for five interlinked reasons: one, Laos holding the record for having been the most heavily bombed country in the world; two, the Americans who ran the bombing sorties did not feel compelled to follow normal ‘rules of engagement,’ as this was a war conducted in secret; three, they used ‘cluster’ bombs which are designed to open and scatter dozens of smaller apple-sized bombs; four, these were not just dropped on primary targets but randomly dropped whenever bombers had extras and were returning to base (it being cruelly dangerous to pilots and others to attempt to land with munitions on board); and five, approximately thirty percent of these ‘Proudly Made in the USA’ bombs and bomblets failed to explode as specified but remain active to this day. Farmers, children, and scrap metal scavengers are the primary victims these days, but you, the visitor, despite perhaps being none of those, is not precluded from accidental maiming or death. 

Of all the countries in the world, Laos remains among the least regarded but most secretive in its politics. The Leninist principle of Democratic Centralism ensures fidelity to the will of the majority of the minority, and that minority enjoys privacy. Even when fighting for its independence and for the communist ideal the true party remained hidden behind the more famous Pathet Lao. Such secrecy is infectious and holds sway today when the rulers are elected despite the lack of electors. Still, for a country that is landlocked and beholden to so many of its neighbours, Laos remains fiercely independent, much like Vichy France, the SSRs of the late twentieth century, and the lapdog democracies of today.

From Phonhong, a risible place, the 13 straightens out considerably. Turning off at Sikiut, a place of no repute, one approaches Vientiane.

Vientiane

Descending onto the plains that bake one’s soul all the way back through Thailand to Bangkok, you come to Vientiane or, more closely transliterated: Wien Tchan. Vientiane is a city with a dangerous sense of humour and an affection for confectionary architecture. It is a relatively new city in its present incarnation, and sadly has not learned from the mistakes of its neighbours when it comes to city planning. Jumbled architecturally, it has a few nice pieces remaining from the French days when it was essentially resurrected, its populations taken to Bangkok or executed en route some century or so earlier. Prior to that it was a city rotting in the jungle, having been razed by the Siamese. Even its proudest monument, the great golden stupa, said to contain yet another piece of shoulder from Siddhartha Gautama, had not been spared. It was likely the city’s predilection for Las Vegas style glitz that irritated its neighbour, having as it did the Emerald Buddha (now in Bangkok), much gold and statuary, and its enormous golden stupa. The French rebuilt the stupa and other buildings from sketches made prior to their destruction and planned to fill the city and country with relocated Vietnamese for reasons of their own. Independence intruded on those plans.

The second most impressive site reflects the city’s ongoing self-destructive sense of humour. Given some sixty thousand tonnes of cement to build an airplane runway that could accommodate American bombers, the Laos instead used the cement to built a replica (with Lao decorations) of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe and, to spite the French, made it one metre taller than the original. Sometimes called Vientiane’s Vertical Runway, even the Laos consider it remarkably ugly—and advertise it as such—and have filled most of its seven-floor interior with the tattiest of tourist tat.

America not being noted for its sense of humour may have remembered this affront to its ego when it conducted its illegal and indiscriminate bombing of notionally Communist areas of Laos some years later. Thus, the third site of importance, the CUSO centre that educates about the dangers of unexploded ordinance and manufactures prosthetic limbs and such. Here too there is a potentially dangerous, patent infringing, sense of humour: they sell T-shirts with the slogan Hello Cluster Bomb and the picture of a heavily maimed Hello Kitty underneath. 

Avoid any hotel-provided razors as they have been specifically designed to demonstrate both solidarity with the Vietnamese who have propped up the Lao regime for some decades and irritation with the Chinese: to whit, the razors could be used to shave Ho Chi Minh’s face, given it would be a case of gently running the razor around his few wisps of beard, but Mao who was a hairy man— cf. definition of “Mao”—would be crying in pain. The razor is only to be used, it seems, when it is not needed, which is in keeping with the ethos of punishing humour peculiar to this city. 

 To pass into Vientiane is to enter a cut-price plastic surgeon’s recovery room. With one’s torn and bleeding face—or legs, armpits, whatever—one walks streets filled with architecture built from plans likely stolen from Las Vegas or Macao designers’ waste bins. Pastels are in fashion but only to the extent they clash with their neighbours and with themselves. These buildings connect into the energy grid at poles that stagger under the weight of hundreds of power lines all twisted and bundled together. It seems that if one wants, for example, to plug in a toaster, one does not bother with a wall socket but sends a child scurrying up a bamboo ladder to splice into the power supply directly.

In the grounds of Hophakew museum, formerly a stupendous temple, rests a large stone jar brought here from the Plain of Jars. That remote location has thousands of such jars, some large enough for a person to climb into. Unlikely to have been used by a society of Diogenean kynics, it is likely that these empty jars were once used for ritual, funerary, or otherwise pagan practices, for what else can get human beings to create such pointlessly difficult things?

 To leave Vientiane via Wattay airport is to be reminded of the authoritarian nature of the State. Immigration Control seem scowlingly designed to remind you that life is subject to the whims of those in uniforms and they may choose to keep you in the country. The airport presents a modern face but proceeds at a monopolistic pace. Once through immigration and in the relentless ambiguity of statelessness, old Laos reassert itself. There are seven departure gates but they share three doors among them. Proceed slowly and calmly; Lao people do not like surprises. This is why the absence of stop signs or traffic lights at most Vientiane intersections does not pose a problem: so long as one can assume that all others will proceed as formerly with no abrupt changes, traffic can weave through itself. It appears that a decade of being bombarded on an average of every 8 seconds does tend one towards a quiet life.

 Nadi Hong

 A minor detour from Vientiane of some eight hours to the southeast takes you to a city of some particular interest given how it is said to have developed in response to the unexploded ordnance in their area (a spot most directly on the route back to Bangkok from North Vietnam, hilly and thickly jungled, so a natural dumping ground for those US bomber pilots who preferred not to drop their materiel on more obviously inhabited locales). Here the village-that-was saw itself flattened during the secret war and many returning citizen killed in the later years when their cooking fires or hoes would detonate a buried cluster bomblet. The village, which became a town, built its stilt houses higher than the norm and connected those houses by hanging bridges or planks set across gaps. The town specializes in poultry production and, to meet the growing demand since the 1990s, the town has expanded into the jungle, with construction taking place in and around trees, the inhabitants working from above rather than ground level except when absolutely necessary. The jungle grows thick under their houses, fed by their defecations and those of their poultry, and is by no means safe to walk through. However, one need not use the ground, being able to traverse this extended leafy city some metres above it. The subject of a recent documentary, the city is able to use its new-found fame to further its poultry business and extend into tourism with a specifically Chinese focus. All visitors have to be weighed before entering onto the city platforms so many travellers are unable to view the city except from afar. Many will have to limit themselves to enjoying the fertilized duck eggs, the preparation of which foetuses the city is renowned for.

 Before leaving Laos, you should take care to unburden your purse of all Laotian kip as it is not accepted in any other country in the world. This is a feature of particular regimes: the non transferability of currency. One wonders why, if this is desirable, the country does not merely use its postage stamps as currency, given that stamps have the same function, viz. a cheap, portable transferable piece of paper that retains value until redeemed for an equivalently valued service from the government. In fact, this last aspect makes it more akin to a gold standard than the trust-based system currently in international vogue.. Beneficially, unlike gold, which can still be transported out of the country, cancelled stamps can be tracked and the Politburo will know exactly how many new stamps it can create to maintain the money supply. I once heard tell of a city-state that operated on this principle but as it was said that this city resided on a disc on the backs of four elephants, themselves standing on an enormous turtle I have discounted the story of said city’s existence and even the possibility of a postage-based currency.

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: On certain cities of the Vietnamese

In moving from one place to another place you leave the land of the Theravada Buddhists and enter that of the Mahayana. The two schools are distinct in their similarities, or perhaps similar in their distinctions. The land of the Kinh people, also called the Viet people, takes its Buddhism from India via Tibet and China, rather than via Sri Lanka. This is the Buddhism most seen by the West: the flamboyant, mystical Buddhism that flaunts its meditative qualities and flouts the convention of quiet self-control. At the same time it is stricter, demanding lifetime commitments from its monks, thus removing them from everyday life and elevating them in stature. This is their great strength and their great weakness. 

Hanoi

Hanoi is a city of flow. In entering this city from Vientiane via air travel you are thrust immediately into a bombardment of movement. Where Vientiane intersections lacked control due to low use, Hanoi lacks them due to their inherent inefficiency: in a country where there is a scooter or motorcycle for every two people, cars are lumbering brutes and buses even more so. As individuals who are inches from death, moto riders trust each other to operate in self-precaution; intersections—even those where six streets meet—see traffic slow but rarely stop as the motos journey in roughly straight lines and thread through each other in a tight weave. This may involve switching into the oncoming lane if there is space available there, or it may involve using a patch of sidewalk. It is a joy to watch. The pedestrian traveller must take the same perspective: crossing a street, a road, an intersection just requires that you point yourself at your eventual destination and start walking into this cavalcade of tooting, revving, belching life. Trouble only occurs when you move abruptly or unpredictably: you must maintain the flow, like one liquid diffusing in another. 

The people of Hanoi also never cease moving. Walking, selling, eating, drinking, working they are constantly in a state of motion. Even when a resident is seated alone on a dusty step, her eyes are darting back and forth. The building succumb to entropy at an almost noticeable rate. The city as a whole moves like a heart, constantly pumping, circulating, straining at potential blockages, pulsating with a slightly aberrant beat. You find yourself being carried along like plaque along an artery, not even aware of your momentum unless you catch on something—are brought to a halt—and then you feel the monstrous weight of the flow behind you, pushing you along. Like a balloonist who cannot feel a breeze because he is moving at the same speed as the wind, you relativistically adapt and accustom yourself; you move at the pace of least resistance, balancing the pressures that come at you from all sides. To fight the flow is as pointless or difficult as fighting to change your earth-bound gravitational momentum and leap into the air towards the moon: to do so would require external propulsion that would crush you under its g-forces.

Hanoi is one of the world’s finest cities. Invading armies from all sides agree that it makes a fine capital and it has been such off and on for more than one thousand years. Despite invasion, revolution, occupation, and re-occupation, it so emphatically presents itself as a great city that it is one. The Chinese took it for twenty years in the fifteenth century and the French for some seventy years in the nineteenth and twentieth, otherwise it has been largely an object of internecine warfare. Alas, for the aged traveller who might have seen Hanoi before the French imposed a particularly Gallic sense of order on the place, the old city of gates, walls, and guild-controlled neighbourhoods is gone, only to be remembered in the continued dedication of certain streets to specific products: this street to buy ladders, this one to purchase embroidery supplies, the other for moto repair. One street begins with bins, boxes and storage containers, continues with waste bins, and ends with coffins and funeral accoutrements. Interspersed on whichever street you walk are food vendors: the sidewalks are blocked with parked motos, tiny stools and tables, people washing dishes. The pedestrian walks in the street, either with or contra traffic.

Through these streets, particularly through the old town’s chaos of narrow streets, the traffic flows; so too do the people. The flow is controlled, where necessary, by the state. It recently required moto riders wear a helmet. This being “communism with Vietnamese characteristics,” the definition of helmet includes pith helmets, skateboarding helmets, baseball caps and hoods. The state also requires decorum at venerated locations, such as the mausoleum that houses the body or waxwork of the founder of the state, Ho Chi Minh. Queues that can stretch for miles under the midday sun move at a slow, sedate, deferential pace both outside and through the building. Whole swathes of grass and paved sidewalks are untouched by the hoi polloi. 

Of note for the architect, Hanoi typifies a style that is imported from the countryside, with tall narrow buildings rising above a shop level, reminiscent of Amsterdam or some other crowded city. Although this “cows underneath, family above” architecture can be found everywhere—although now the cows may be replaced by motor vehicles—they are exceedingly narrow here. The Viet people are taxed once—when they purchase property—based on the size of the lot; thus, the incentive to push into the sky space. 

Hanoi seems to crawl along beside you as you attempt to leave, trying to keep pace and ensure you never leave. Some people never do and just settle in the dust at the side of the road: dust that attaches itself to them and creates a shell of bamboo, then concrete, and finally an air-conditioned shop.

Houng Son

Houng Son is a city of no intrinsic merit. It is, however, southwest of Ha Noi and is the point of origin for gondolas that take the traveller down the Yen Vi river to the Perfume Pagoda, the central Buddhist shrine in the entire country of Viet Nam. If you are fortunate, you will be transported along said river in a wooden boat oared by local virgins of ethereal beauty who sing Buddhist hymns to prepare your soul for the spiritual journey ahead. If you are not so fortunate or imaginative, you will have to contend with overweight Franks of a certain age who have no concept of balance in what is essentially a flat-bottomed canoe, a grandmotherly rower who demands gratuities before landing, and riverside bars dotted amidst riverside graves playing popular music to draw custom from some kilometres away. 

At a certain time of year—the three months preceding the new year—the Perfume Pagoda—actually a series of shrines around a central temple, crested by an inner temple in a cave high in the limestone karst—sees some ten to twenty thousand visitors a day and the walk around the humps and hills of the area is lined with stalls selling offerings and tourist tat. At other times of the year it is relatively quiet and you pass the presentation shrine, devoted to an early military general, and enter the outer pagoda (the heavenly kitchen) which houses the base temple, devoted in large part to the Boddhisatva Quan Am (or Kuan Yin in Chinese, the Iron Goddess of Mercy) who represents, similar to Mary, mother of that Jesus who is the supposed Christ, the feminine virtues of the sublime. From here you can rise above the merchandising and take an aerial gondola through the pimply mountains to the Inner Temple, though many steps both up and down are still required. A steep staircase takes you down to the cave mouth, which is—if you have the imagination of an asiatic—a dragon’s mouth. This foremost cave under the southern heavens has inscriptions dating back several centuries, a series of shrines underneath and among the stalactitic and stalagmitic pockets. Charmingly, the main altar, piled deep with various figures including a fetching Quan Am, ends at the back with three Buddhas haloed by electronic whirligigs. 

In the limestone, rubbed smooth by millions of hands, one sees burled shapes, the swirls of images, the images of gods long forgotten and gods-to-be. A series of particular rocks along the lip of a well show a variety of figures including, despairingly, a bust which is decidedly that of Cthulhu, most feared of the Old Ancient Ones. Sadistic tendencies and masochistic leanings: these are inspired by caves as much as are deep reverence and stillness. 

Exiting the cave, you can take a fortune or offering to the ancestors; that is, to a small portal for burning and sending to the heavens. Your correspondent did so, reckoning that to do so on such a high peak would, among other things, provide the greatest chance of seeing a young fellow of distant connection free himself of the justice system in Siam and return home. 

Ba Pho Math

The mountainous country beyond Saba to the northwest of Hanoi is sparsely populated, though at one time thrived due to the abundance of high volcanic lakes and fecund foliage. Here, some days hike away from main roads (which can be partially alleviated by motorbike) is the legendary Ba Pho Math, a city of uncertain provenance but its last occupation has been dated back to the late nineteenth century. Here are the remnants of what must have seemed skyscrapers of wooden construction, built backing onto the steep sides of the mountain. Giant flumes took water from the large lake in the defunct volcano’s crater and brought it into the tops of these building whence it fell to ground level, turning water mills of various size which the inhabitants used for the purpose of milling and ventilation, among other things. The outflow of water passed into ground-level houses and thence to irrigation channels for crops and animal husbandry. Had the city survived, doubtlessly they could have adapted this to provide electricity. However, disease, recorded by a succession of French surveyors, and fire laid waste to the ingenuity of this city’s people and what remains is preserved only due to a foundation set up by the Cadbury family (of chocolate fame) that is intent on preserving the remnants of our lost societies. Had it been made of stone rather than wood it would likely rival the great cities of Angkor or Borobudur. Being as it is no rival I did not take time verify its lost grandeur.

Cat Ba

Northeast of Hanoi, one gets to Cat Ba island by boat and it forms the southernmost extent of Ha Long Bay, the beauties of which shall be divulged later in these pages. A stupendously tall series of poles telegraph to the observant traveller that an aerial gondola will soon take travellers across from the mainland to the island, obviating the need for most of the boat traffic. The traveller will still need transport to journey the forty-five minutes or so to Cat Ba town. This city is synecdochic in the way only beach resorts can uncreatively be. Every block of the town is but a representation in miniature of the whole town, every hotel/restaurant/bar in the block is representative of the entire block. The sheer volume of construction indicates that this will grow fractally, with each town representing the larger aggregate city, and the city representing in miniature the horror of tourism.Nestled in and among the island/city’s limestone peaks a plethorically infeasible amount of narrow hotels rise vertically above restaurants that also function as tour offices and bars. The city harbour functions as a nesting ground for floating restaurants, fishing boats, and overnight cruise ships that might take one to an island full of monkeys—the only ones of which the traveller will see are rescued, traumatized, self-harming beasts—various islets and beautifully clear waters. 

Interior to the island are said to be dramatic caves, one of which housed a Viet Công hospital during the most recent unpleasantries with America’s United States and the australiatic continent/country of Australia. Of these, I can say nothing because in the shoulder season one can have an entire rooftop swimming pool and bar to oneself for most of the day.

Ha Long

Ha Long is a city of growing emptiness: the vacant eyesockets of half-finished construction gaze disapprovingly at you as you pass through this waypoint in search of a boat to take you to Ha Long bay. The city provides hostelry for those nationalities that have an aversion to sleeping on a boat; otherwise it can be easily disregarded. 

Ha Long bay is the Monument Valley of Southeast Asia and is a meeting point of cultures, of peoples, and of boats, all racing and squeezing between the cliffs of its two thousand islands. The politically correct—in the original sense of the term—number of islands is one thousand nine hundred and sixty nine. Locals and cartographers may privately quibble about that number but it happens to accord with the year Ho Chi Minh died so it would be impolitic to suggest that it is other than the true number of islands. Regardless, the islands are dreamily cast in mist and greenery, enormous karst buttes that defy easy description. If you happen to have the opportunity to canoe or kayak around these monstrous limestone monoliths you will have a sense of your insignificance and the vast inaccessibility of heaven. The existence of long, wide cave systems in the islands themselves will be of some interest to the smuggler. To be avoided are beaches and islands with staircases rising to viewpoints as these will invariably be crowded with geriatric imbeciles. It is as if every Asian country releases ships of fools into Ha Long bay in hopes that they will expire whilst climbing some hundreds of uneven steps in stiletto heels. A popular pastime for those who have succeeded in that endeavour is to pose endlessly—or to photograph those posing endlessly—with long flowing scarves. At night the sounds of karaoke from innumerable ships chase away the stars. If one is lucky, one will have no encounter with flying cockroaches the size of a silver dollar that might make their way up from the bilge or kitchen into one’s bedroom. Nonetheless, Ha Long bay affords privacy if one but looks for it, affords solitude if one ventures within oneself, and affords a sense of the grandeur of nature if one but looks at it.

 Pipe smoke remains an effective prophylactic vis-à-vis mosquitos of the malarial persuasion.

Returning south, the night train from Hanoi to Hué passes through corridors of housing and shopping, across intersections brights with the lights of thousands of vehicles, and into the darkening countryside. The lullaby rocking of the train provides welcome from Somnus and sweet drifting from Morpheus and one awakes to the cries of the coffee and tea vendor prowling the corridors. The train pulls into Hué at a mercifully quiet station a world distant from the explosive traffic of Hanoi. 

You are intrigued by your passage from city to city, handed from one to the other along a road that leads you-know-not-where but will likely end where it began. As each city takes hold of you and—whether gently or roughly—swings you round to the next you find that some are more memorable than others and those are not always the ones you would suspect. Memories of cities blend into each other, particularly the easiest and prettiest. With or without your connivance your memory will tell false tales of places you have been and you will be— as are all who move from point to point— a fabulist, a liar, a dotard before your time. One city becomes another in your mind because—in a subconscious attempt to know the ideal city, to embody the archetypal city—to come to grips with what it means for a city to exist—you necessarily lose the boundaries between them and they bleed through such that, in your dreams your brain ends up sliced into microscopically thin wafers of loosely constructed and violet-stained tissue, suspended side by side in air and twisting. Or such is the dream you have before arriving in Hué.

Hué

Hué is a sedate city, a city of pagodas, a city of calm. The intensity of Hanoi, diffused over the course of a night trip by train, prepares you to give way to a gentler, Buddhist placidity, one that is a welcome respite from the foggy freneticism of the major cities. Once the imperial capital of the last dynasty it bears the scars of the French and American wars like a society beauty ravaged by venereal disease and blindness who never knows the wreckage of her face and no one dares tell her. She is the pure heart of Buddhism in this land, albeit a Buddhism that knows its place alongside the ancestors and old gods of the earth. In the remnants of the Imperial palace and the Forbidden City, Hué dreams of itself and in its dreaming it carries itself erect and proceeds at an elegant, stately pace. 

Na Bang Na

Inland from Hué, villages and towns suffered heavily during the American war, particularly from the use of defoliants such as Agent Orange that continue to produce horrendous abortions and twisted children. Na Bang Na is a city wherein any number of children were born with the relatively minor defect of polydactyly, that is, excessive numbers of fingers or toes. This defect has become diffuse and scientists believe it to be one of the first cases of externally imposed genetic mutation being subsumed into the hereditary system of transference. The inhabitants of Na Bang Na find work in Hué and other cities as masseurs and masseuses and are largely responsible for Viet Nam’s swimming successes in the recent Pan-Asian games. Despite this, they are considered unlucky and are largely shunned, so most return to their city of Na Bang Na and consequently perpetuate via propagation the very genetic distinction that brings them remuneration and repudiation in like measure. The city is of no significant merit for the traveller but the nightly competitive bouts of cat’s cradle and similarly dextrous games has amusement value. 

To come to Da Nang from the north you may take a tunnel or climb the mountain pass. The latter can provide stunning views of wilderness and then, from the peak, a look down onto the beaches and metropolis that is Da Nang; however, the tunnel is the better option unless you have a particular interest in the different road routes, watchtowers, and bunkers that successive regimes used along the route. Death is a constant companion on this road as are trucks full of swine. Even a mere six piglets in a wire cage on the back of a moto can generate a stench of defecatory fear that lingers long after they have passed. 

Da Nang

 You find Da Nang an audacious city, one that is following a centrally planned destiny to become a rival to Hong Kong (though why that is the chosen comparator is beyond comprehension). This is a city of verve, a city that vibrates with civic creativity, unencumbered by irony. Of note is a particular bridge—one of nine in town—the supports of which are designed to resemble a long golden dragon. Cau Rong bridge breathes fire and water both on weekend evenings. A massive Ferris wheel allows one to take in the city—both its business district and the development of massive resort complexes along the ocean for the spiritually insecure. Said developments include replicating Venice, Sorrento, and Amalfi on the island Dao Phu Quoc and connecting them all by aerial gondola. Of the rest of this city, I can relate nothing, having had occasion to hurry through to its neighbour, Hoi An.

Hoi An

The measured streets of Hoi An are finely stitched together to provide a comforting fit for the itinerant visitor. The city is a city of tailors and on its fine fabric it bears their chalk marks, loose pins, and an eye that will measure you up and offer unto you that which suits your budget, your sense of style, and your temper. The tailors are as sharp as their needles, so the trader will want to come to the city well rested in order to force a decent price. Beware the unscrupulous who will substitute inferior products for those actually bartered! This seventeenth century trading town boasts an impressive small bridge that joined the Chinese and Japanese quarters, exquisitely coloured lanterns that provide a serene glow, floating coruscating paper boats lit with candles, and light music. However, from across the new “bridge of lights” comes the arrhythmic thumping of bars and restaurants that cater to the more vagrant itinerant. Such cannot be helped: the world has always been filled with the self-obsessions of youth and the scruffy insouciance of those who believe they can find peace through cultural discard.

 In the early morning, as the sun rises over the East Vietnam Sea (as the South China Sea is locally known) and begins to lighten the city, the streets and riverbanks of Hoi An are at their most peaceful. The fishermen are bringing in their catch, the fisherwomen are cleaning the catch, the fishmongers are selling all sizes, all pieces: live crabs with their claws tied with palm leaves, sardines, larger fish chunked out for display, clams, all sorts. The other end of the market is fragrant with women shaving papaya, chopping and gathering spring onions. Up the side are the sellers of noodles: vast bundles of thick, thin, wet, dried, all sorts; each noodle has a purpose: phở, bún, ghang, such that you need only know see the type of noodle a particular street cart has and you will know what dish you will feast upon. Taro, tapioca, chilies, lettuces, shredded pork and fish. And the old streets are remarkably free of business, just lightening with the first rays of the sun. The tide is rising, the individual houses come alive, no longer veiled by the masses of tourists, bicycles and rickshaws. A funeral procession with a brass band in white, priests in yellow, a vast golden casket on the shoulders of ten men in yellow brocade, the family crying in rickshaws or walking behind—some in white, others with white wrapped around their heads—the city pauses and watches as they prepare and then stands silent as they process and then comes back to chattering, moto-sputtering life as they move along. 

Hoi An demonstrates an appreciation for tea that is sadly lacking elsewhere in Vietnam. Perhaps this is a remnant of the Cham kingdom that once ruled these lands. A connoisseur, or even a mere weary traveller will find a restful stop at the Reaching Out teahouse, staffed by the deaf and dumb or otherwise disabled. One need only hold up wooden blocks that set out requests and one is served within the serene atmosphere found in the hard-to-join Diogenes Club. The exquisite handiworks of the disabled are also sold, though not in the sort of quantities that would interest you if you are a merchant. 

One can imagine that on the second floor of one of these buildings, looking out onto a courtyard, there is a young woman fragrant like a lotus with a hint of jasmine, who sits waiting for you and only you. She weaves a silk tapestry that sets out the course of your life together and if you are to leave, it will be unravelled and rewoven for another. Or perhaps one can imagine that there is a young woman in every room on every second floor who is weaving a tapestry that sets out all of your possible pasts and possible futures under a blanket of frangipani flowers. In this city of Hoi An, the yellow buildings and tiled roofs stretch out along an infinite river delta that floods annually, receding beneath the sea in Aqua Alta, before emerging once again to trace your life in yet another incarnation. 

Ma Pa Ou Dong

Ma Pa Dong to the east of where you are is an extraordinary city, scarcely credible until actually seen. More a small town or even village than a city, it warrants mention for the belief system on which it is built. Its inhabitants believe that they live in the world and to step outside it and into another world (or the afterlife) requires merely that one have a door to the outside. So just as we Westerners live inside a house and step out into the wider world, the people of Ma Pa Ou Dong build their houses with the interior facing outwards so they can live in the world as we know it but, at some specified point, open their “front” door into the next world. Living facilities are therefore largely open to the street on all four sides, and the “outside” walls squarely contain what must be a small courtyard that is unseen. The inhabitants believe that there is no courtyard there but some place beyond our world. Outsiders are not given the opportunity to verify these claims as this is a central and most sacred part of the tribal religion. Family members have ceremonial clothing consisting of layer upon layer of fine cloth with golden borders for when they eventually pass through the door. The rooms that open onto the street are much like the rooms of other houses around the region: concrete slabs decorated by a calendar or two, a house shrine, some modest furniture. What bedrooms are not contained within deeper building seem to be more intelligently designed than traditional enclosed rooms in these climes: one need only unroll a mosquito net from the ceiling and affix it at the sides and floor and it is done: air circulation is maximized due to this lack of a wall facing the street or yard or neighbour.

Otherwise, the city contains shops, temples, and some mouldering colonial architecture not unlike other towns of its size. The environmentally minded traveller will despair at the litter in the street, almost exclusively plastic-based, but one becomes inured to such things as one travels through these lands.

Saigon

Saigon—or Ho Chi Minh City—is a cosmopolitan sprawl of a city with a population that ebbs and flows like the Mekong river. In the centre of the city one can be lulled into believing that poverty is merely something the local authorities keep around for the tourists. Saigon’s people have never taken to its new name, viewing it more as a step-father’s cognomen than otherwise. As the former capital of South Vietnam and subject to intensive re-education following its capture in nineteen hundred seventy-five, it is chary of politics and focuses on capitalism with an intensity that makes Hanoi seem tame. Drivers are less forgiving in this place and care must be taken to preserve one’s physical integrity. What can be said of this city save that it is a city, no more and no less? It stretches itself geographically beyond comprehension and radiates a supreme insecurity in that it may be the largest city in the country, the financial centre, &c., &c., but it is less loved than its fellows in Vietnam. Perhaps this is why it wishes to be called Saigon rather than HCMC; to whit, those who knew it before it became what it is wish to retain that special love they had for it while those who come to it fresh wish to be blessed by the gods of the ancien regime’s capitalism. It can be a pleasant place in its tree-lined centre but otherwise presents the jumble-wired, exhaust belching, vertical shoeboxicaity of its counterparts in this part of the world. Of special note, the former presidential palace is an architectural gem of the 1960s caught in the amber of revolution. 

Here, as throughout Vietnam, the truth flows like the motor scooter traffic. On ramps are also off ramps: traffic goes where it needs to. The reasons given for the number of motos varies as much as the models and makes of said devices: it is faster; taxes on cars are much higher; you need a licence to drive a car, a less onerous permit to drive a moto; an attractive moto attracts attractive women. The story of the happy Buddha is equally fluid: self-prescribed obesity to deflect women; a giver of gifts to children; the eater of the world’s sorrows. The Buddha of mercy: an imported goddess from China, a local princess who was married against her will; a local princess who refused to marry against her will. If all the Kopi Luwak and weasel coffee for sale is authentic then there is not a civet or stoat alive that isn’t diarrhoetically being force fed beans. There is only one truth here and it was captured by a local guide: “in developed country rich people can make money. In developing country everyone can make money; because if you know the way you can make money.” Obese Americans tourists look at the tanks embedded in the grounds at the presidential palace, tanks that smashed through the gates and took down the remnants of the American Dream; most Vietnamese were born since the American war and they look not at the tanks but at the skyline of high rises, of glowing brands, of lights waving into the clouds. Politics are just something to sell to self-indulgent tourists. “In developed country rich people can make money. In developing country everyone can make money; because if you know the way you can make money.”

As always, the merchandise that is of interest to the discerning traveller is found largely with the youth. Upending stereotypes, playing to stereotypes, enthusiastic about influences from other cultures, they prove that if one should not trust anyone over forty, one should—at this point in time—forsake everyone over the age of thirty. This attitude will fly in the face of Confucian wisdom—such as that taught for some hundreds of years at the attractive Hanoi university established in the eleventh century, now a museum piece—but is an historical truism for a global society that has been ravaged by those born between 1935 and 1953, such depredations castigated and then embraced by those born between 1953 and 1971, accepted and despairingly adopted by those born between 1971 and 1989, and, for those born since, increasingly castigated yet again. Everyone born before 1971 is essentially a war profiteer and those born since live either with that original sin or are continued contributors to the modern slave economy. Such is the state of affairs today. The years may vary slightly from country to country, such as in those whose populations were reduced by wars and famines, but the digitally connected youth—who are, at first blush, too absorbed by the fantasy of internet connectivity—are everywhere; those who are not the privileged and booze-addled scions of first world indulgence have a zest for life and a do-or-die mentality and that zest is that which is found in the Hanoi flow and what makes Hanoi a vibrant, great city. Saigon, wedded as it is to the ideals of the capitalism it had stripped away gives shorter shrift to independent thought, but here too one can sit at a “ca phé” and feel the buzz. It is a great joy to sit in any of these cities at six in the morning, before the heat of the day rises, slurping phở at a low table whilst squatting on a pink plastic stool. That, with a cup of tea, a cigarette, and some incense with which to blasphemously ask the “happy Buddha” for success in today’s business, is a ritual not to be missed.

Mai Lu Khong

The flatlands of the Mekong delta have given rise to various ethnological groups of fisherfolk. The hummocks and hillocks see people living above water level in stilt shacks and net fishing from flatbottomed canoes or from a line out on a pole. The Mai Lu Khong people live in an area of the delta lands that can be reached by canoe only: the draught is too shallow even for the long-tail motor boats, the propellers of which are barely submerged. Mai Lu Khong is a water city, one in which the people build their houses such that the lower level is partially underwater. Much like how traditional houses elsewhere see a bottom floor that is a shop or provides for farm animals, the Mai Lu Khong people use this lower level for fishing, for the cultivation of catfish, and the growing of river weed which is dried and forms part of the local diet. In the hottest days of the summer season and when the mosquitos are fierce the family sleep in large plastic rice bags or the like, submerged to their necks in the tepid waters. The humps of land that jut above the water are used exclusively for the cultivation of livestock and crops to supplement the fish diet. Night soil is used both to feed the fish that collect inside the houses and to fertilize the crops, though the richness of the Mekong soil likely needs no augmentation. Mai Lu Khong has little to interest the merchant traveller, not even—in this day of technical fibres—the traditional wood fibre overclothes which are woven so tightly that they can repel rain and resist submersion for some few seconds.

My Tho

My Tho is less a city than an accumulation of those entrepreneurs waiting to be engaged by the traveller who wishes to tour the Mekong delta in boats of termitically dubious quality. One enters this city from any direction. Other than the boat launches, there is a modern temple of some note, incorporating as it does French architectural elements, the most aesthetically pleasing sanctuary I have come across in my varied travels in these oriental lands, a monumental standing Buddha, a similarly elongated reclining Buddha, and a “happy Buddha” of such size that even I could live quite happily in one of its hams. 

The Mekong delta consists of some islands that specialize in pretending to industries one suspects are merely a façade. Honey producers proffer beehives but are reputed to sell a viscous sweetener of dubious provenance; coconut candies are made on site; cocoa producers show antiquated machinery and sell professionally marketed chocolate bars and the like. If you, the traveller, get the chance to try some of the island’s rice whisky, may I recommend the one in which are suspended cobras and other snakes of bleached hue? It has a taste slightly more agreeable than the one flavoured with coconut and the other, unflavoured, which stands on its own merits. 

The boats of the Mekong do include some luxury scows but most are elongated planks at the back of which, hidden in a box, is a hand-crank engine such as might be found on a Model T Ford. The captain sits, tweaking, at the front of the scow and uses a combination of ropes (to manage the rudder) and sloppily connected unwelded tubing (to change gears). Navigation closer to shore relies on the ability of the ‘ship’ to withstand lateral bounces off of vertical logs and dolphins and forward bounces off of concrete steps courtesy of rubber tires under the front lip of the bestial thing. 

 Some travelling scribes have been—and some are—wont to advance stories that are more than is perhaps strictly true. If some quidnunc of a reader may be so bold as to entertain a doubt as to my own veracity I merely pity such a lack of faith. To those sceptics I simply say ‘adieu.’ Go, now, before I proffer the next skein of cities which is as strictly founded in fact as those I have related to date. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: On the corner in Cambodia 

Some cities are cracked mirrors: cities you have known in your youth and have returned to in later age. Thesy expose the falsehood of memory and are seen through the crystalline brilliance of your tears, be they tears of happiness or sorrow or regret. Before you even enter such cities you are haunted by what you knew back when and what you think you knew back when. Are memories still sharp? Have the memories been twisted and warped by repeated retelling? Will you return to the same city—or even one just approximating your memories—or have you been passed by? Intimations of dread and even terror plague the traveller who returns to such a city, growing more oppressive with each step, each foot or metre one draws closer. 

There is no returning to the same city. Once within the gates of any city, one’s memories become as nothing, overwritten by that new history which has bulldozed the past and erected scaffolding for the future. At best the funhouse mirrors that greet you will be merciful to your ego.

Siem Reap

Siem Reap is a fresh city. You enter from the air to find a terminal that looks like an upscale resort. You enter from the land or from the lake to find swept streets and light traffic. This freshness is not just a new coat of paint loosely slopped on old; Siem Reap was sanded down through war, mass murder, more war, and ineptitude. Now it has the glossy latex of well-developed crony capitalist corruption to ensure that you will not have to see anything unpleasant unless you want to. In consequence, you feel almost immediately that this is a city you could spend more time in, even live in. 

It is a comfortable city. From a dusty collection of broken streets and overgrown, mine-laced vegetation (see the author’s first ODD-yssey—Reports from the Aubergine Desk—for a picture of that post-strife city of the same name twenty years ago) Siem Reap has become a polite city confident in its ability to extract American dollars—the lingua franca—from its visitors. 

Among its cafés and bars, massage parlours and yoga classes, Siem Reap also has inspirational stories and organisations: artists trying to help street children into the (life-supporting) arts, the accelerated clearing of land mines, the growth of a middle class. At the same time, the less visible hand of corruption takes its toll, with the gerontocracy of the prime minister Hun Sen having leased much of the country to foreign interests, repeated reports that the cultural patrimony—including Angkor—is under corporate (and foreign) control, and the dissolution and murder of opposition and journalists. You notice that on major rural roads there are more-or-less permanent pictures of the prime minister everywhere: like blazes on a forest trail when you pass one sign you are almost immediately within sight of another. Concerned that the European Union may remove his preferential trade status over allegations of corruption and migration toward China’s sphere of influence, Hun Sen recently called on his government’s chelonian Anti-Corruption Unit to root out evildoers. This is unlikely to affect his sons: the de facto head of the armed forces and heir-apparent; the head of the Party’s youth movement; and the head of the military’s ubiquitous intelligence unit. Nor his daughters, who run the family’s billion-dollar business and media interests. Nor his wife who runs the Party’s charitable organizations. This forty year reign and the mismanagement of an entire country is unlikely to change while people are busy trying to make families and recover from internecine strife. They grumble but they do not want trouble; thus, they grumble quietly and selectively.

Siem Reap is a fresh city but it is built on the bones of the colonial French resort town that served as entrance to the real cities people come to visit: the cities within the Angkor complex. It is a city of Hindu and Buddhist iconography, interlaced with the grandiose memorializations of god-king monarchical wars. 

Angkor

Your entry into Angkor is gradual as that skeleton of a city lacks a formal boundary. It is a city of cities within cities. The one time capital of the Khmer empire, built and ruined, raised and abandoned from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries, is slowly being pieced together by teams from around the world. 

How to sum up the skeletal remains of a city that was the largest urban centre before the industrial revolution? Again, for details I refer you to the original ODD-yssey from twenty years ago and, more importantly, the travelogue of Zhou Daguan, a Chinese emissary who visited the city in the late thirteenth century. Dream along with those, for although one can still find quiet corners of destitute grandeur, notably at Preah Khan, the city is overrun with termitic tourists who are gnawing away at the sandstone despite the authorities’ increasingly draconian attempts to keep people at arms length. 

You enter the city in the morning, having chosen to ignore sunrises and sunsets, though others might enjoy such things, and insist that you be taken to the Bayon of Angkor Thom, or to Preah Khan, in time to be there when they open, ahead of the mongrel hordes, and enjoy the cool mists that envelope those two miraculous places. 

The baroque and unnerving thirteenth century Bayon is best at the extremes of the day when the shadows are long and the profusion of enormous faces appear and disappear. You note that the facial features of the Buddha—particularly in the upper lip—is reflected clearly in the face of your driver. It is a decidedly local Buddha, repeated over two hundred times. It is such a profusion, in fact, that you feel a sense of vertigo, that there is too much mass crammed into too little space, that it teeters below, around, and above you like the last round in a game of Jenga. This temple is optically disconcerting: you cannot get the right perspective on it, you are either too far or too close. There is no comfort in the Bayon, just an overwhelming presence and you stumble through and out of it, haunted enough that you want to come back, need to come back. 

The morning mists of the twelfth century Preah Khan, on the other hand, rise and settle in and around what seems like too much space, like a temple that goes on and on, receding from you as you approach it, like a reflection endlessly caught between two mirrors. A Hindu complex, it spreads horizontally, complicated by too many rooms and corridors, fallen slabs and blocked archways. The stupa placed at its heart centuries later almost laughably magnifies the fact that this is a place for a pantheon, not the contemplation of formlessness. You want to laugh and play here, giddy with the possibilities, irritated when you see adults intrude into your view, happiest when the birdsong and frogs and cicadas are your only accompaniment. As the shadows shorten, you shake yourself awake, refreshed, and can move on. Returning on another day for the afternoon light, the shadows deepen, your thoughts turn to the profound. You leave as the hungry ghosts come out to dance, scattered only by the beams of your torch as you recede down the jungle path. 

You wisely save Angkor Wat for the later afternoon when the sun is better placed to view it in its trifold monumentalism. It is the largest religious monument in the world and, despite the profusion of saffron-robed monks, is very much a monument to Vishnu and an approximation of the Mount Meru of that cosmology. Approaching Angkor Wat is humbling in a way that Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican must have been before Mussolini razed the buildings in front of it and put that disgusting triumphal avenue up to the square, viz., you cannot see Angkor Wat until you come upon it. You approach across a moat some five kilometres in length, only really seeing the outer wall, its towers and perhaps the outline of three of the corncob towers of the Wat which look insignificant compared to the statuary and architecture immediately in front of you. Once you pass through those thick walls, galleried and full—three kilometres full—of intricate carving and statuary, you are transfixed by the expanse in front of you: the enormous fields and ponds, satellite ‘libraries,’ and the long raised central walkway. They draw your attention away from the massive complex ahead as you process towards its square galleries of bas-reliefs—three galleries, one on top of the other—that set out entire sagas, epics, bloody battles and daily life. The outer gallery is open to the outside of the temple. Passing through this—which is worth hours of study and walking in its own right—you again see the central compound apart from you, you have still not reached it. The terraces, with their inner galleries, draw you around, again so sumptuous that you almost forget the inner sanctum, but, lurching up narrow, deep steps on any one of its four sides, you finally reach it: the massive quincunx of towers/ mountains—four flanking the more massive central one—that is the home of the gods. 

The entirety of the complex is designed magnificently to ensure that it does not reveal its ‘onion’ of mysteries until you have peeled back each layer. Having said that, you are also surprised at how sterile a monument can be when it is too big to comprehend. It is overwhelming such that you lose the details. It is a place of withins and withouts, of steps and walkways, of carvings and cool corners. It alone would merit a day or days of quiet exploration: exploration of it, its forests, its walls and moats. Yet the selfie sticks of base humanity approach and recede within an hour or two to meet a rigid schedule. You insist that you are different, that you will hold onto this, that you will cherish it in ways that they do not, that you will make a gallery of images along the interior of your skull in order to hold this place fixed; you will not just post it on the Internet and move on. But you know that is futile. This place, the Bayon, Preah Khan, the others belong to no one and cannot be captured in images, in memories, or in words; they have to be lived. 

The thousand-year-old Hindu Banteay Srei about which your humble narrator waxed lubriciously and loquaciously twenty years ago seems irretrievable now. In nineteen hundred and ninety nine, one periodically required a military escort to visit it in its isolation and it glowed. Oh, how it glowed in its red sandstone deeply carved exquisiteness! Now—reasonably from an archaeological perspective—it is the minute centre of a tourist industrial complex and cannot be entered or touched, merely viewed from afar; this! for a temple that yearns to be gathered up, to be scrutinized at less than arm’s length, to be loved for having saved itself virginally for one thousand years. Far better to close it off completely and let only a handful of people chosen by lottery in to view it whilst standing in its corners and doorways than this imposed vestal virginity. Your pilgrimage to this jewel is time-consuming and you wonder whether you would recommend it to others. 

You, in the time you have left—time you might have needed to demand from your driver, from others— find a corner of a temple somewhere, anywhere, and let Angkor dream you. You let its various religious periods of animism, Hinduism, king-worship, and Buddhism wash into you. Some temples are for sitting on, others are for sitting in. Where the crowd goes straight, you take a turn. Where the crowd surges for selfies, you unobtrusively slide tangentially. You do not let others see you do this for they will follow. Despite the two millions of visitors each year there are numerous, expansive places of ruined solitude in this city of armies and priests. Let the world turn awhile as you contemplate what will eventually become buried under the weight of humanity as surely as it was buried in jungle. Even so, you know that when our modern cities have fallen and rusted away these stone monuments will endure as surely as the city of Lemuria or the pyramids of Egypt.

The traumas that accompanied travellers a generation ago are present but largely ignored in this corner of Cambodia. The population has grown up: the children who—having replaced their guns with motorcycles—provided transportation are all now unrecognizable, having aged with your narrator who looks around and wonders whether this person was that person, was this the location of that $1/night hostel, can the terrors and horrors really be suppressed, all in the name of “building a legacy for one’s children”? Or were those horrors and terrors really just in my mind? My outsider mind, fearful and young? Was the imminence of violence, the intimations of death, the persistence of the amputees, just a sense-perception overlaid on an indifferent country eager for my US dollars? Was the dream-like visit merely a dream? I cannot easily open those pages in the book that is my memory.

At any rate, like a trusting leveret in the sight of the hunter’s gun, your fellow traveller will be happiest to remain indifferent to that atrocity which took place here. Let him. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Peninsular Malaysia 

‘Cities and infants,’ someone wrote, ‘what they share in common is that their innards are like paper bags of bloody water and if you’re not careful the paper may rupture and the liquid spill out.’ From countries that ripped themselves apart you now come to ones that are amalgams and confederations of city states and sultanates and kingdoms and simply places where people lived. These nations of islands have to maintain balance across races, creeds, ancient kingdoms, and current grudges like a novice juggler tossing an amniotic sac from hand to hand. Bloodshed is slow to come but quick to spew. 

 Pokor Narang 

Outside Kedah you find Pokor Narang, having insisted to your traveling companion that you must visit it after having read about it years earlier in “Ripley’s” or the “Guinness” records book or something similar. Pokor is a town that is not off the main track but is generally ignored and lost because there is nothing to distinguish it from any other of a hundred towns and cities on the peninsula that is western Malaysia. There is no profit to be made here, it is only interesting to you as a diversion, a literary conceit: you just want to see, however tattered it is now, the city built like a spider’s web. 

Some two hundred years ago, a Malaccan prince had a dream: a dream in which he pursued the most accomplished, most talented, most beautiful, most virtuous—but not too virtuous—maiden along an endless succession of streets, twisting alleyways, right angles, blind alleys, and lost her in the confusion of the place. Consulting with his oracular advisors he was encouraged to think not like a hunter but patiently, like a spider. Taking this literally, he (re)built a small city that stands at the meeting point of three valleys and laid out a network of streets in the fashion of a spider: concentric polygons, connected radially from the centre, in which was a beautifully appointed pavilion on an island in an artificial lake. His palace he built in one corner of the town, where it still crumbles today, where he might lurk and wait for her. 

Perhaps if cities existed as they do in fantasies, he would have found his princess and built a monumental empire. Instead, taking advantage of the suburban nature of the palace, his enemies—aided by Portuguese weaponry—attacked the city, slaughtering him almost first of all. The artificial lake drained away and was slowly filled in by entrepreneurial types, and the pavilion—if there ever was one—has since been spirited away in chunks for use in construction, the antiquities trade, or the cooking fire, leaving the small island a large roundabout with an unenthusiastic monument to independence. 

Outside Kedah you don’t find Pokor Narang. You just find a place where people live and work. But you smile as the driver curses the network of one-way streets that make no sense if you are trying to leave but keep drawing you back to the centre. Some times a good story trumps urban planning.

Georgetown

You come to Georgetown on Penang unexpectedly. It is a sleepy city, almost comatose. Like much of Malaysia and Indonesia it is multicultural to an extent that would make both social justice warriors and their detractors cry for different reasons. On one street you find a mosque, a Chinese temple, a Hindu temple, a protestant church and a Roman church. It is not unusual to see people of different faiths entering each other’s places of worship … though you are more likely to see Muslims, Christians, and Hindus frequenting Buddhist or Confucianist temples than the other way around (luck and superstition linger longer through the generations than repentance and servility). This balance is under some political threat by either some Muslim groups who currently accuse Christians of trying to seize positions of power, or by Christians trying to seize positions of power.

Georgetown is blessed by having been passed over and ignored through much of its life, thus preserving old factories, shops, and houses via abandonment and decay until UNESCO took an interest and the city began returning to its old urban core. Now it is a pleasure to wander its streets: streets that are pedestrian, low-rise, shuttered or not, cleaned or mouldering, with exciting street art in both paint and wire, prosaic shops alongside hipster cafés, trishaws alongside cars. Along the waterfront are quays that were built and settled by various Chinese tongs and families a century or more ago and the descendants live there still. Ramshackle, delightful. Some are geared for tourism, some are more residential. The latter are more interesting but you should be warned to be visibly respectful of people’s privacy. 

Malaysia, being a kingdom in which the kingship is swapped every few years among a number of sultanates, will feel cozier to Commonwealth citizens than other countries; do not be cozened by this air of regal insouciance. You will find yourself hornswoggled by shops with names such as: 

·    Smart E Benture

·    Puppy Love Saloon

·    Forever Fresh

·    Asq reality Ventures

·    Aussie Sizzzp

·    Mom’s Avenue

You will find that your first, second and third attempts to decipher such names to all be wrong. Do not attempt a fourth.  

Of some relief to those suffering from the heat and humidity, a trip up the steep, two-kilometre long funicular to the top of Penang Hill will bring some decidedly colonial relief. To have an hill station essentially in the city must have seemed a joy to the early administrators who tired of being jolted up the mountain in their sedan chairs and put their coolies to work building the funicular instead. Delightful views, a cheerful rivalry between Musselmen and Hindooists for temple prominence, and the chance to sit drinking tea in the upper reaches of a monsoon thunderstorm await you. I deliberately mention tea—though the locals suffer from the global crisis of not knowing their proper tea proportions—because alcohol is almost prohibitively expensive, reaching Western rates or even higher! Also of expensive note, in the more developed area of Gurney Plaza and locale, is sushi, which surprises you with the different variety of foodstuffs that compose the rolls, the maki, and the sashimi. Scallop innards, for example, are such as you will find on the menu here. You were unaware that scallops even had innards.

You find Georgetown on the up but at a pace that might not outstrip the decay of the emptier buildings. You can picture buying a contiguous row of narrow buildings that each stretch from one block to the next and punching through walls into fountainèd courtyards, into rickety third level wooden floors that can be sanded and varnished, buttressed and reinforced. You can picture creating a hidden palace, a meandering conglomeration of rooms furnished with agglomerations of curiosities and oddities and such antique things that a child might use to pass into a magical land. You cannot help thinking these thoughts in the low rise old colonial streets of Georgetown because that is what the city is in itself: conglomerated aggregations covered over with bougainvillea and even more prettily scented things. 

But even this cannot hold your attention for long because it is a city that may become what you want it to be but is not yet there, so you leave it; you leave it earlier than you might like but you leave it, leave its core, its high-rise suburbs, its higher rise new town, its funicular beetling up and down Penang Hill and you step out into the jungle and along to places the names of which you seem to have known all your life but the circumstances of which you know nothing.  

There is very good food here.

From here, like in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you can go anywhere, any direction, any climate. So you do. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Sumatra

 Your introduction to Indonesian driving reveals it to be more temperamental, less focused than that in other countries. Horns are used after the fact to tell someone that they had been a nuisance or, more practically, before entering a curve. Sumatran roads are largely single-lane in law but double lane in fact, leading to many a body meeting a body “comin’ thro’ the rye.” Sadly, rye is in short supply, the Islamicists having a lock on sin taxes in this country and few shopkeeps dare incur the displeasure or loss of custom that carrying alcohol might bring. Thus, you are forced to make this drive sober. 

Another notable difference is the existence of impromptu traffic conductors—often, oddly, with the stutteringly balletic movements of those in the grips of delerium tremens—who stand at a break in the median and try to orchestrate traffic u-turns, merging, &c. in return for tips. 

Finally, Sumatran tuk-tuks are essentially motorcycle sidecars, lending a whiff of 1930s exoticism to what is otherwise still a wild province. A tuk-tuk is usually for short journeys but your car driver is inclined to pull into every gas station to wave at, or say hello to, their friends so it may be just as fleet as a car. 

Medan

Medan is a city you skirt. It is reputed to have some interesting temples, such as a Roman Catholic Marian shrine “located near Pajak Melati road junction and Asam Kumbang Crocodile captive.” Bunda Velangkanni Bunda Penyembuh Orang Sakit is more of an architectural tribute band to the Indian “Lourdes of the East” than a star in its own right but its pagoda-like construction and series of post-2005 miracles (such as the finding of financing for its construction) give it some colour. As is typical of the loucheness displayed by the Portuguese, “[c]enturies of devotion to Mother Mary both by Hindus and Christians have evolved an amalgamation of practices … [including] the practice of tonsuring their heads as an offering and also perform ear-boring ceremony, bathing in the sea, walking on knees or rolling in the shrine as a ritual. It is also common to find traditions of offering a candle in the shape of the respective ailment – a heart in case of cardiac complications, a liver in case of jaundice.” 

Of this I have but heard; of all else concerning this city I have ignored.

So many of life’s pleasures are rooted in anticipation. This is the rule with travel. Some places, though, are the essential exception that proves the rule. Such a place is the Sumatran rainforest. 

Bukit Lawang

You know you have arrived in Bukit Lawang when you have passed enough oil palm plantations to lull you into a drowsy state. You reach the end of the road and need to walk in a stupor for a quarter-hour.  

Bukit Lawang is exactly the sort of town you have dreamed about whenever you have dreamt about reaching a final destination. Stretched out into the jungle, Bukit Lawang hopscotches the river with a series of much-repaired wire-and-wood bridges. The primary road is wide enough for a motorcycle or pedestrians and is overhung on both sides by the second level of shops, guesthouses, and homes. The fecundity of the town is palpable with greenery stretching out mossily underfoot, macaques clattering as they leap from roof to roof, the mountains rising steeply in cascades of green shrouded by evening mist. It is a place you immediately regret not having planned to stay an extra night in. It is a town onto which the morning sun gleams damply and verdantly. 

Bukit Lawang is the entrance to Gunung Leuser National Park, a wondrous bit of tropical rainforest that protects an enormous variety of life from tigers to worms, but most people come to see the orang-utans. One of only three species of orang-utans left (the other primary species is in Borneo and a third was only recently discovered further south in Sumatra), Bukit Lawang is a refuge for animals rescued from dealers, zoos, poachers, and other various riff-raff. Being the only entrance into the park, the town can keep an eye on those who might try to illegally log, hunt or fish. The biggest difficulty is keeping the boundaries of the park intact from those who wish to extend their remote oil palm or rubber plantations into it. 

Choosing to enter the park for a multi-day trek means selecting guides and porters. There are ones to serve every budget, however a few are more devoted to conservation than others and fund projects to preserve the integrity of the park, such as partnering with local farmers to grow fruit along the boundary of the park, creating a buffer from the plantations (thirty percent of the fruit goes to the animals that will raid the farm, the farmers keep the remainder and are subsidized for their loss). 

Being, as it is, a relatively undiscovered tourist destination, the niceties are not always observed: intimations that there will be hills to climb and descend do not suggest the reality that one is forced to ascend and—more dangerously—rappel, via jungle vine, near-vertical slopes slick with mud, leeches, wet leaves, and slimy roots. Ascension leads to mountain ridges rather than tops and then yet another descent. 

Every guide has had experience carrying out dead bodies from various places along the track: given the thickness of the bush, the corpse is wrapped in a sarong with a long pole and carried between two porters; modern cellular technology makes it easier to get help but it still comes down to two people carrying the load at least down to a place where they can raft the body down the river. The Dutch are particularly disliked as tourists because they tend to be very large and heavy to carry. This is a rare occurrence today as there are proportionally fewer Dutch people visiting and the safety record has improved.

However, for those who wish to see the rather intelligent and placid orang-utans in the wild, such difficulties are—if not welcome—shrugged off; they need to be because they are not divulged until after you have completed your controlled falls and desperate scrambles through leeches, poisonous caterpillars, and stinging bamboo and rattan. Cobras and other snakes are not a problem, being nocturnal. Sadly, so too are the pangolin and slow loris, making them challenging to see. Tigers and leopards are a multi-multi-day trek away and notoriously shy, sumatran rhinos and sumatran elephants are far off in the low lands. Taylor’s leaf monkeys are an attractive find; less so are their macaque cousins which exist primarily as nuisance creatures. 

If one is lucky, one can see numerous orang-utans, primarily mothers and children. Sumatran orang-utans rarely come to ground, preferring to avoid predators. Black eagles are a worry for the infants but if they get too high their mothers shake them down and tuck them under their fur. There are approximately thirty orang-utans in the region of Bukit Lawang, of which youare privileged to see thirteen. Most are wild though some few are more habituated, having come from places with feeding stations or because more unscrupulous guides will use fruit to lure them for viewing. One such, Jackie, has learned to dart around the guides and grab a tourists as a hostage, not releasing said hostage until she is provided with fruit. 

Though one may see such beasts on nature programs it is still a shock to see the sheer size of their feet and hands, the elasticity of their bodies, and the bristly Homer-Simpson protrusion of their mouths. To behold one such creature from a mere few metres away is a joy. They use their entire bodies in moving, and to watch their long ginger hairs backlit by the sun as they stretch and swing through the trees is striking. Their name “forest human” is well-given. They are marvellous creatures and of them no more can be said than that. 

Monitors patrol the river, looking for scraps of food. Roughly one and a half metres from tip of tongue to tail they brook little insolence. When sitting in the shallows their serpentine bodies mimic the swirl of the eddies the rive produces. They are not solely aquatic; some enjoy finding an extinguished yet still warm fire to crawl onto and warm their bellies, unlike the salamanders, which—contrary to reports—do not live in fire nor are resistant to it. Frogs, hornbills, a truly astonishing diversity of ants, flies, and wasps, and the ever present humidity make for a well-rounded experience. A day spent on a trek will open every sweat gland in your body and you will realize to what extent you really and truly smell like a sackful of used jockstraps. Though that may be the smell of the rainforest. Clothing and body can be rinsed in the river but neither will ever get completely dry: everything rots in the jungle. 

Following your days of trekking you can often raft down the river back to Bukit Lawang. Such is a damp proposition but so too is attempting the exertions of scaling the various mountainsides. 

Porters are recommended in number, particularly if you wish to have your wet bar, ice, writing table, and dinner jacket at hand. Some can be sent splashing upriver to your various encampments but most will just charge on ahead along the pathways and ensure that when the sky begins to bruise and the monsoon threatens your precarious descent down the clay slopes you can be quite secure in the knowledge that a civilized drink awaits at dusk.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” To be face to face with a man-of-the-forest in Sumatra—the orang-utan—far exceeds the anticipation of such. Far, far exceeds. 

So too does a cool gin and quinine-laced tonic.

Tusak Pakir

Known to most of the world through National Geographic magazine or the like, a solid trek north towards Banda Aceh brings you to a high plateau on which stands Tusak Pakir. A dead city that is a puzzle to archaeologists, Tusak Pakir consists of enormous, solid cubes of sandstone, some piled high into eroded ziggurats, some placed along what must have been roads and streets but, irritatingly, affording no entry point. Imagine an ordinary, if boxy, city street in which you have no means of ingress to any of the buildings. It is believed that the people here built their dwellings on top of these ersatz homes and used ladders to get to street level but that is mere supposition. Anthropologically speaking, this is a barren place with no sense of when it was built or inhabited over the centuries. Studies of the erosion patterns suggest it has been open to the elements since the fifteenth century but it might be older if successive waves of people inhabited it. If so, no trace of them remain: neither art nor middens, neither human remains nor building scraps. Interestingly, at high noon, when the light is at its strongest, the blocks of sandstone all meld together, making you feel as though you are in the centre of a sandstone ring with no escape. No matter if you follow a street, wherever you walk you appear to be caught in a bullring of sorts. This disconcerting feeling subsides with the reappearance of shadows. 

Vendors of the usual tourist tat chisel away the reddish sandstone to make a dye in order to colour T-shirts that tourists may take home with them. It is primarily for this constant degradation that UNESCO has consistently refrained from naming it a World Heritage site. 

As one of the world’s largest islands, Sumatra has so much more to the north and south but time presses, the oxen stir, and the caravan creaks to life. It is time to go. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Java, west of Krakatoa 

Java is the smart-ass sibling other Indonesian islands want to punch in the face. As with Malaysia, the story of decolonization is a twisted one. Indonesia was a patchwork of independent indigenous kingdoms that lacked a feeling of brotherhood or nationalist sentiment or any other sense of unity. Wars between these kingdoms—both inter- and intra-island —were the rule rather than the exception. Java was dominated by the Dutch for two centuries but it was not until the nineteen hundred and thirties that the Indonesian region was under (in some parts very superficial) Dutch control. In many regions natives never saw a Dutch person. 

The Dutch were dirty bastards and thugs—though they are currently revising that view—but colonization today is thought of in terms of political domination by Java, by Muslims, by anyone who isn’t from your province. The current president recently announced the moving of the capital from Jakarta to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo. Jakarta is dirty, crowded and sinking and resource-rich Borneo needs “pacifying,” so adding one million Muslim Javanese public servants to the electoral rolls will help, although so far it has only seen a revival in head-hunting. Truth. But we get ahead of ourselves

Yogyakarta

Yogyakarta is a city that wraps itself around you but you cannot wrap yourself around it. You stand in Yogyakarta transfixed, as though you are standing in a hall of mirrors. No, you think, it is not that, it is a Patrushka doll, city within city within city. Or it is a Rubik’s Cube, with each cube having equal say within the larger cube. This city … is slippery. There is an ineffable quality at play here: you feel like you haven’t done enough to know the city but you can’t figure out how to go about doing more. It continues to beguile and tantalize you.

Jojgja, as it is more colloquially known, is the heart of Javanese culture, of the arts, of heritage. It has a certain independence thanks to the sultan of the region participating in the fight for independence back when. His family continues to rule, occupying the notional governorship. This is by no means universally popular. 

A good place to set up camp is the Dusan Village Inn which sets up its own village within its neighbourhood: an oasis of greenery and calm. The only disturbance comes from the conflicting calls to prayer that emanate though poor speakers from at least a half-dozen different mosques with non-synchronized clocks. To what extent, you wonder, do the imams of neighbouring mosques compete with each other? There must be some irritation when one starts early, forcing the others to rush to their microphones. Or does each adhere to their own timepiece? How about when another’s voice is particularly mellifluous? Or when another has invested in a louder (yet still antique) sound system. Are ‘parishioners’ lured away by the siren prayer of a particularly sultry voice? There has to be some sense of irritation and one-upsmanship. Also, some music comes from an undetermined direction from time to time, resembling the yowls of a herniated cat. Compared to the palace complex of the Kraton, however, this neighbourhood is practically rural. 

Jogja is cities within a city, at the center of which is the Kraton: the sultan’s palace, compound, and neighbourhood, geometrically aligned from fire (the looming volcano) to water (the Indian Ocean). The Kraton is itself a warren of alleys and streets housing some twenty thousand souls, many of whom are employed by the palace in one fashion or another. Whitewashed walls surround this inner city. The relics of palaces past, of baths, of a notable underground well-staircasèd mosque that resembles something out of Borgès, of concubinage and concupiscence, dot the neighbourhood, as do purveyors of batik. Around that, spiralling out are other neighbourhoods, some richer, some poorer, but all displaying some art on their shop or city walls. It is a city that enjoys art.

On reflection, some days later, you cannot recall what hold it was that Jogja had over you. Was it the people? Was it the alignment? The street art? Jogja is the city you wish you found as a teenager, when you flirted on the edge of learning to really dislike yourself, of incurring wounds that never really heal. Here, you felt, that person would have withered in the heat, slipped out of your fingers, screamed away on the wind, like the pasty English sins of Lawrence in the Arabian desert; that it was a place where you could be exposed, open, lounging, smiling, alive, true. But having left Jogja, you find it impossible to remember why you felt that way, why it seemed so relaxed, charming, indolent, avuncular. And now you both want to forget the city and to walk into it again, hoping to feel that way again, hoping to forget how complex truth really is. You decide that it is a private, conflicting set of memories, and resolve that after this moment you will never speak of it again.

Indonesian nationals are obliged to adhere to one of the religions that have been selected by the government (Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism), while atheism is not an option. In such diversity, it seems, you are not allowed to refrain from taking a side; every fight will be your fight. Religions have built tremendous edifices; religions have torn them down.

Borobudur 

You come unexpectedly upon the full view of this ninth-century Buddhist temple that is the largest such in the world. It completely condomicly envelops a hill and consists of six square platforms, three circular on top of those, and then a central dome capping the entirety.It is a step pyramid in three sections, symbolizing, cosmologically, the realm of desire (everyday life), the realm of forms (think Plato) and the realm of formlessness. 

One might best think of it in terms of a labyrinth or the stations of the cross in that it was a place of pilgrimage with a dedicated path to follow some few kilometres long. The base (desire) consist of gullied corridors, decorated on both sides with exquisite bas-reliefs and niches with Buddha statues, as are the next five square tiers (forms). In all, the temple has some twenty-five hundred square metres of still clear carving: scenes from daily life, various epics, local religion and the life of the Buddha. This is quite different from the more warlike friezes of Angkor but it has the same effect in that where we pause and wonder about the stories, they would have been background to the pilgrims: well known stories and histories that would require a mere glance to evoke an emotional response which the pilgrim could observe in herself. Steps raise you to the three plain circular levels which represent formlessness and abandonment of the cycle of rebirth. The central stupa surmounting the pyramid is surrounded by seventy-two small perforated stupas, each of which contain(ed) a distinct Buddha figure. 

The congregational procession would take some kilometres to walk around all levels, representing the path through the stages of enlightenment. Seen from above, the entire monument is a mandala and the whole is a compelling synthesis of Indian and Indonesian design. The temple was entirely abandoned in the fourteenth century with the coming of Islam and the fall of the Hindu dynasties. Volcanic ash and jungle buried it until the nineteenth century when Stamford Raffles had it cleared and reconstruction began. 

More to the point, to the sense of the place, you remember—after the fact—your Classical Greek, that there are two of time: Chronos and Kairos. Your ascent of Borobudur takes a certain amount of the former, measured by your watch, and tracking the sun. Kairos is the ‘appropriate’ time: it may be as simple as that moment when you are sighting down the arrow and suddenly know it is time to let fly, or it may be the ecstatic throes of a saint. It is God’s time. It is present time. Your experience of time at Borobudur is all Kairos: metaphysical time, those moments when time passes more slowly or stands still. You wander the path of Borobudur in Kairos, entirely unselfconscious, like a child lost in play on the beach. You pass through its corridors, up its steps, around its curves and among its stupas, high above the plains, in a haze of joy. 

And then you leave, winding your way back down to the world of desires, and abandon the moment and the monument and enter a labyrinth of covered tourist stalls that weave back and forth, all selling the same wares, all being hawked in desultory voices. 

In Saigon, you saw where the Buddhist abbot Thich Quang Duc self-immolated in 1963 to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. His ability to sit still and burn under the gasoline without twitching, without a sound, is now understandable if not truly comprehensible.

Prambanam

Originally named Shivagrha and dedicated to the god Shiva the Prambanam temple complex was designed, like Angkor Wat in the land of the Khmers, to mimic Meru, the holy mountain, the abode of Shiva. It was a city of thousands of brahmins, students, acolytes, and their forgotten support staff. The whole temple complex is a model of the Hindu universe to rival the Buddhist Borobudur. It fails somewhat today due to the loss of so many of its temples. Prambanam was not one monolithic temple, it was a city of them, a collection of individual temples. Started in the ninth century it commemorates the holy trinity: God as the Creator (Brahma), the Preserver (Vishnu) and the Transformer (Shiva). Over the centuries it was added to until there were two hundred forty temples, also forming a mandala when viewed from the sky. The temple is adorned with panels of narrative bas-reliefs telling the story of the Hindu epic Ramayana and Bhagavata Purana. The other smaller temples would have had their own stories to tell but now only two out of the original two hundred twenty four smaller pervara temples are reconstructed. Piles of stones are carefully segregated and it seems a hopeless task to piece them back together. Perhaps with three-dimensional modelling each stone can be mapped and some raw computing power put to work figuring out the jigsaw puzzles.

Often in your travels you have read or heard tell that such places as this are full of ruffatory makebates who will pick your pockets or cut your purse, snatch your bags or worse. While that has happened at least once to all who venture into the wider, poorer world, here you are swarmed by schoolchildren just finished their exams, by their mothers accompanying them, by the guides who lead them, all shyly asking to take a photograph with you. For many of these people, who have come from remoter parts of Java, their exoticism of a foreigner in skin colour, height, hairiness, and otherwise is just as noteworthy as a penis-sheathed befeatherèd tribesman or bare-duggèd leathery old grandmother of some three feet in height commanding those around her with a long smoking pipe would be to you. You find this experience overwhelming, even enjoyably so, dwarfing the impressiveness of the gloriously carved pyramid temples around you.

You enter, as with Borobudur, through a coterie of guides touting their knowledge, walk endlessly to and around the temples, then follow a hot meandering path to what seems an exit but turns out to be a row of tourist tat booths with the exit to follow. That exit turns out to be a row of tourist tat booths with the exit to follow. That exit turns out to be a row of tourist tat booths with the exit to follow … you think—with the wisdom garnered from numerous visits to Ikea—that there are secret bypasses, for example to the toilets, but soon find out that hairy men and high fencing will force you back onto the path (though you can skip a switchback or two). 

We have had not only wonderful travellers documenting this world such as Munkhaussen, Morris, Manguel and Fermor, but splenetic travellers such as Theroux and Bryson who find fault with everything they meets. Curs! Even Johnson, bred in the splendours of London found solace in the Highlands and Hebrides. For my part, I should hope that all will agree that through me you will see that there is worth in near every place, no matter how mean the citizenry, dishevelled the architecture, or dirty the bedsheets.

Surabaya

Surabaya,” you say, “you’re still a mess, just like the day we met. You have no heart, you’re just a louse: you promised a lot; it was all one big lie. You cheated me blind from the moment we met. 

“You wanted it all; I gave you more. Now I look at my face in the mirror and there’s just an old woman staring back at me. 

“My god,”you say, “I still love you so.”

N.B. Some of the research I have participated in during the Sumatra and Lesser Sunda Island excursions has made its way into the world. May I refer you The Bugle podcast, episode 4134 “Mike Pence Gets Horny,” starting at minute 42:55.

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: The Lesser Sunda Islands

There are only two excusable reasons to travel: exile and trade. All else is vanity.

Denpasar (Bali)

Having landed in Denpasar, your first written welcome to Bali is that it is the “Last paradise on earth.” You may be reminded of what W. C. Fields once said of Mae West, viz. that she was “a plumber’s idea of Cleopatra.” Or perhaps of the smug young woman in high school who knew she would be prom queen.

Trust such reminders. The cozy confines of the I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport give way to a riotous canker-blossom of touts, pitchmen, sharks, frauds, tricksters, quacks, con men, grifters, hustlers, sharpers, bunco artists, would-be gigolos and a profusion of all the worst that resort-land can offer. Among themselves, Indonesians refer to the tourists as “Australian mosquitos.”

That is not to say it is a bad place. You notice immediately that it appears to be a good locale for people to show off their newly inflated or resculpted tits, their hair implant, their herniated lips. It is rumoured that there is some culture on this island and some places of pristine relaxation but you expect that along the well-trod paths it is as honest as the orientalish décor in a Houston spa that specializes in ear candling, anal bleaching, and cupping. The areas where the preening, primping, prancing set do not go may in fact be tremendously serene; the island holds out that promise. But a good merchant can see where there is no room to cut a deal. This island sold itself long ago.

When you choose to leave the island the airport itself turns ugly, assaulting you from every angle, spitting at your back as you leave. Bali is what the world would be like if your mother’s Very Caucasian Book Club ran things. You use Bali merely as a transit point to anywhere else. Anywhere.

From Bali you cross the Wallace line, the point where flora and fauna noticeably switch from Asiatic to Australasian. The discoveries of Homo Floriensis, Tabon man, Homo Luzonensis, south-east of this line demonstrate how ignorant we remain of this part of the world.

Labuan Bajo (Flores Island)

You touch down at Labuan Bajo Komodo Airport surprised by how sere the landscape is. The humps and sculpted ridges look untouched by rain. The dirt tracks that run alongside the airport speak of a city surprised by its sudden popularity. A modern terminal disgorges you into the arms of a car that takes you the fifteen bumpy minutes into town and to your hotel which, like every other building in town is dusty and noisy with construction, expanding for the hordes of tourists expected to come next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. If anything, the city fathers have had no time to consider building anything other than … well … you are reminded of the Steve Martin movie The Jerk, in which his Deep South family, living in their clapboard shack, takes all the money Martin’s character sends home and builds … a bigger clapboard shack. 

The city seems bound and determined to block its waterfront with big hotels that are all partly constructed. Behind that, the city rises up slopes, so some people and smaller hotels will keep their view but others will be hemmed in. Every second building is a dive shop or a ho(s)tel or a hotel/dive shop or a tour organizer or a hotel/dive shop/tour organizer/restaurant/hangout. It is a city with a tremendous number of forward slashes and a city with some great sunsets and a city with an adjunct to the fish market where every evening the road is shut down and some dozens of stalls are selling that day’s catch, grilling it right in front of you and serving it up for you to enjoy with the sunset and a dessert of Es Teler, a particularly Indonesian concoction of some hot red syrup, grass jellies, brown sugar syrup, ice, cocopandan syrup, peanuts, condensed milk, shavings of jackfruit and coconut, salt and … well, anything, really. Es Teler arose from a competition in the year nineteen hundred and eighty two to develop a national drink for Indonesia and the original recipe has given way to whatever seems to be available on the shelf that day. It is something you imagine only an Oompa-Loompa would enjoy. You eye it dubiously but after mixing it a bit with the accompanying spoon and tasting it, you wolf it down and come up for more. It hits every sensory button in terms of taste, smell, and mouth feel. 

This far south, Flores is Christian territory, though the mosque makes its presence known and most of the population here seems to observe Muslim modesty. No fat pink Ganesh, though. It is a laid back territory. Nongkrong, baby, nongkrong.

A day spent lazing in Labuan Bajo is a day of not much of anything. The city is not geared towards those who would pause in the city; it exists solely to push people out into the water, onto the islands, into caves, deeper into Flores to find more remnants of homo floriensis, the so-called Hobbit people discovered a mere decade or so ago. 

Leaving Labuan Bajo, you notice what you did not on the way in: the airport, gleaming under the tropical sun resembles nothing so much as a flattened Swiss roll. 

Pulau Koaba

There is some fine diving and snorkelling not far from Labuan Bajo. Also of note is Pulau Koaba, an island from which at dusk emerge thousands upon thousands of flying foxes—a fruit bat that is among the largest of the bat family and more taxonomically and cutely known as pteropus—that set off over towards Flores island to feast on farmers’ guava or whatever fruit they can find. Set against the glorious oranges and reds of the setting sun, you marvel at the pure, vampiric (sic) shape of the wings, the immensity of the animals, the enormity of their cloud. Wave upon wave of these bats rise from the mangroves of the tiny island and head east into the pink tinged sky that is darkening to black so that they might, under cover of darkness, irritate local farmers who are less susceptible to their pteropotic charms. 

Komodo Dragonopolis

You know that such a city does not exist, but you roll with it because dragons are big. Big and tough. Hell, they eat buffalos. Big ones. And not daintily. And they eat each other, even their own offspring. Hell, the offspring roll in faeces and sleep in rotting intestines just so their parents will avoid them. And dragons mate violently for about five hours with the male having not one but two penises to bring to bear on the operation. And they are scaly and scarred from constant fighting. At their best, they look at you like they are great big floppy dogs. At worst they don’t look at you because you are halfway down their gullet. 

So Komodo National Park exists and it is ruled by dragons and if they want to call it Komodo Dragonopolis who is going to argue? That pretty much sums it up. You take a boat to get to one of the few islands in the world where the komodo dragon lives. You go to Rinca (or Rintja) where—in a defined area only—the dragons are habituated enough that they won’t attack a human on sight. This is good because the only thing between you and them is a skinny little park ranger with a long, forked stick which he forgets half the time. In truth, the rangers feed the dragons, keeping them full enough that they have no immediate intention of eating a person; but tell that to the divers who were stranded on a beach on Rinca a decade ago and spent two days being stalked/attacked by these beasts. 

The locals know them as ora. The wider world only found out about them in the early twentieth century. Their tail is as long as their body, they have sixty replaceable serrated teeth, long yellow forked tongues, and their skin is unsuitable for leather production as it is covered with armoured scales. For years it was thought dragons have mouths laced with nasty bacteria. Not true. The hypothesis then changed to toxic venom; not really, it’s more like a (toxic) anticoagulant. No, it turns out that when a two-and-a-half metre long, two hundred pound lizard chomps on your leg, thrashes you around like a rag doll, and tosses you a dozen feet you are quite likely to die soon from shock, blood loss, and sheer terror. 

Seriously. This isn’t your pet skink here. Each scale has a small bone in it and the entirety works like chain mail. They are fast and like to eat quickly. Luckily for it, the dragon has a breathing tube under its tongue so it can stuff a wild pig in its mouth and run and butt it up against a tree several times to force it down its gullet. 

After eating, the dragon—like an owl or you cat—regurgitates a gastric “pellet” of horns, hooves, hair and teeth. It also shits white like a big, very big, bird. In general, they don’t like vegetables and avoid intestinal matter for that reason, explaining why juveniles sleep in the stuff. Oh, and during the decade it takes those young ones to reach maturity, they spend a lot of time in trees. 

You can’t help but feel deep atavistic, visceral, brain-wrenching terror at the moment you realize that they are all this and you cannot, for the life of you, see them with your outsider eyes even when—as the park ranger points out—there is one weighing one hundred pounds lying about six metres from your ankle.

Serious, serious cool factor.

On the plus side, there is a peptide in the dragon’s blood that may prove to be a useful antibiotic against drug-resistant infections. 

You cannot help but like Indonesia, Indonesians, and Indonesian culture, particularly with its concept of “nongkrong” which loosely translates to “nothing” but is specifically used when someone asks you want you are doing and you are in parts lazing about, drowsing, thinking, not-thinking, maybe tinkering, maybe not, waiting for something to come up, not particularly hoping something comes up. 

That’s nongkrong, and if you respond with it people will nod and completely understand exactly what you are doing: what Jack Kerouac captured as: It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness--the people--the alley full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was …

That’s a lot of words and it don’t capture but half of nongkrong. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Kalimantan 

Borneo. The name alone, like Congo or Papua, conjures up feelings of curious unease, like you are venturing to the end of the civilized world. Colonial twaddle? Perhaps. 

Kalimantan. Indonesian Borneo. Most of the population lives in coastal cities, although the hinterland has small towns and villages along the rivers. The population consists mainly of Dayak ethnic groups, Malay, Banjar, Orang Ulu, Chinese (descendants of trader immigrants) and Kadazan-Dusun. Since the nineteen hundred and nineties, the Indonesian government has undertaken an intense transmigration program, relocating poor landless families from Java, Madura, and Bali. Transmigrants now make up one-quarter of the population in Central Kalimantan. The indigenous Dayak and Malays have resisted encroachment by these migrants, massacring thousands at the turn of this century. The twenty-first century. Numerous heads were taken and are presumed to be decorating long houses deep in the rainforest. This is aberrant behaviour, largely condemned, but blood must have blood and old customs and traditions become precious signifiers of unique identity.

The Indonesian government wants to move its capital here. 

Pontianak

Pontianuk is, you determine, a city that is just a city. Despairingly so. A pontianak is the undead vampire of a woman who died during childbirth. Appearing as a beautiful woman, the pontianak goes around murdering unwary men, harming pregnant woman and eating babies. If you happen to meet one and have the requisite tools you can control it by plunging a nail into a hole in the back of its neck. 

This area was rife with them. Supposedly they were all scared off by cannon fire some three hundred years ago yet the name remains, perhaps to keep immigration and house prices low, a strategy, you muse, that should be used in your home city for the latter reason. Just to be on the safe side, residents fire off homemade cannons on most festival days. This city is one of the few to lie exactly on the equator. The monument is located just outside of the city centre but, irritatingly, is one hundred metres out of alignment due to the shifting nature of the equator. This equatorial setting has resulted in some peculiar beliefs (see Melangaau below).

Pontianuk is in a state of expansion, the city filling in rice paddies, so blocks are long rectangles of differing lengths as each individual farm morphs. This makes for an interesting flyover. In all respects, Pontianuk is a regional centre with little to distinguish itself. It is decidedly Muslim although there is a wide range of ethnicities represented. The mosques tend to add dollops of colour to what would otherwise be a fairly grey and green place. The fecundity of the locale suggests that were Pontianuk to be abandoned it would be rendered invisible within decades, pulled apart by opportunistic roots and the persistence of water. 

It has a fine airport.

Melangaau

A satellite city of Pontianuk, Melangaau celebrates heartily twice a year when the sun is directly overhead, erasing all shadows. These equinoxes (it is unclear which is vernal and which autumnal because it is unclear whether Melangaau is in the northern or southern hemisphere) take place on the twentieth March and twenty-third September. Post-March, your shadow stretches out to the south of you. The reverse happens in September: shadows fall to the north. Thus far this is background information. All places in the tropics experience a time when one’s shadow switches from north to south but this is the only place where the occurrence is believed to represent a transference of the soul. 

The Uran Igan of this region believe that their essential being always resides to the south; this is key to their festivities and psychology. The believe not that their shadow switches sides at the equinox but that their being and soul shift into the dark, two-dimensional image on the ground and the corporeal three-dimensional body becomes their ‘shadow.’ They don’t view this as a bad thing, merely as a part of life, the same as a seed transforms into a plant then transforms into seeds again. During the shadow season, for example, they arrange lighting at mealtimes to ensure that their shadows are together, their bodies further away.This is not a quaint bit of folkloric idiocy, they truly feel that their senses, their essences, are in what we would consider to be their shadow. Research has shown that the Uran Igan actually experience personality shifts: where they are truly introverted, the March equinox sees them become more aggressive, extroverts recede into themselves. Artists become more technical, the less artistically adroit become more so. Skill sets and cognitive perceptions change. Brain scans show them using different parts of their brain for this half of the year. The shadow effect is mild but it is statistically significant. 

 This information is essential for you to know in order that you not step on any person’s shadow during the March-to-September season when visiting Melangaau’s richly erotic Hindu cave carvings, its Weimar-inspired City Hall, the tree-house mosque, and the largest powdered cheese factory in the ASEAN countries. The latter, you understand from those who have visited Melangaau, is hardly worth the cost of the taximeter cabriolet that takes you there. 

Kalimantan is not geared for easy visiting. If the government insists on pacifying this resource-rich island by flooding it with one-and-a-half muslim Javanese public servants it is unlikely to be hospitable for a good while to come. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Sarawak

 The voyage from Kalimantan to Kuching is not one frequently taken by any other than locals. The roads are poor, the flights few. Immigration officials stamping you out of Indonesia and those into Malaysia may express surprise at the novelty of your emergence from the Kalimantan lowlands. There is a separatist streak in Sarawak and they have separate immigration controls from all other Malaysian provinces.  

In a nutshell—early nineteenth century—the sultan of Brunei held tenuous sway over Borneo and into the Philippines. Facing a(nother) rebellion, he was relieved to see assistance come in the form of Indian-born-and-raised James Brooke who, in search of his fortune, bought a boat, some cannons, and a crew. He helped the sultan who, in return, made him the White Rajah of Sarawak, based in Kuching. He, and later his nephew—codified laws, managed the voluntary cessation of headhunting, stamped on pirates, and administered reasonably well. They essentially ran a protection racket and whenever the sultan could not pay, the Brookes took payment in land. 

After the Japanese were turfed out in 1945, Brookes’s grand-nephew looked at the cost of rebuilding Sarawak and surrendered it to British control against the wishes of its inhabitants; it eventually became part of the Malaysian op federation. Given their peculiar and proud history they gained concessions in the Constitution that have been subsequently ignored by the federal government.

The White Rajahs are not dismissed here as colonial interlopers. Western historians tut tut and pruriently focus on James Brooke’s ambiguous sexuality; locals save their anti-colonial opprobrium for the Peninsular Malay Islamicist government. 

Kuching

Kuching is a charming city. You enter and immediately feel it. It is attractive, the verges and medians have tidy shrubberies, and the more exotic architecture has fun with itself. The city has a meandering languid indolence, like the rivers that entwine it. There is a certain 1980s British shabbiness to the fixtures, doors, windows, walls of apartments but they seem to be getting over that. It generally feels like a livable, hospitable city. Perhaps this is due to its history. Good administrators, if a tad brutal, the White Rajahs accommodated different legal systems and kept the peace. In your conversations with locals you hear that there is little inter-ethnic rivalry among people who have been there since the mid-nineteenth century: all are Sarawakians; it is the rest of Malaysia they dislike, blaming the central government in Kuala Lumpur for taking too much revenue out of the province. 

Of course, if you scratch the surface you see that under the layers of Intermarriage and cross-pollination there is still the Chinese side of the river and the Malay side of the river; however, the tables along the street hold overtly different friends eating laksa and drinking teh tarek together. Nobody seems proselytorily religious. 

In the past year, there have been at least a dozen demonstrations held in Kuching promoting “Sarexit.” Many of these groups argue that Peninsular Malaysia’s obsession with Malay and Islamic supremacy does not gel with Sarawak’s context. In any other part of Malaysia, the police would crack down on even the slightest hint of secession. It is testament to Sarawak’s history and importance (oil) that the feds are trying political subversion.

All this to say that with its ethnic stewpot, Again, Kuching is a charming city: the streets are walkable, motorcycles do not clog the sidewalks, cars are generally genial to pedestrians, the old waterfront and Chinatown remain vibrant and calm. The genteel old mosque sits prominently on a low hill but has been unjustly superseded by a new gleaming white mosque built on piling in the river. A few high rise buildings stand out as squatters. The state legislature sits beside the old Rajah’s palace and can be reached by a sibilant futuristic walking bridge. From the attractive waterfront you slip sideways past a spice stall and enter a narrow alley full of blind people selling tissues, pencils and the like. go past the entrance to a hidden mosque and you arrive at the Indian market. The old courthouses (common law and indigenous law) are given over to restaurants and the like and are splendid for waiting out monsoon showers. The Anglican cathedral looks onto the Central Park square, as does the attractive old white and blue police station. The natural history museum is a wonderful little display of crowded and moth-eaten taxidermy. You wander back and forth, up and down the same streets, charmed by it all, enjoying excellent food, particularly the barbecued stingray which becomes your new favourite dish.

 While wandering the alleys, looking at the murals, you find yourself manufacturing opportunities to move and live here. Kuching might just be the nicest little city in south-east Asia.

In general, there are six major ethnic groups in Sarawak: Iban (30%), Chinese (24%) Malay (23%), Bidayuh (8%), Orang Ulu (7%) Melanau (5%), Indian and other(3%). 

Formerly reputed to be the most formidable headhunters, the Ibans of today have always been hospitable. The “Sea Dyaks” of old potboilers, their stilted long houses in which one hundred families or more can live are marvels. Yes, they keep some old head trophies around but now young Iban males now earn their tattoos by other means. Their sweet rice whisky (tuak) has been the ruin of many a good man.

The Melanaus, amongst the original settlers of Sarawak, traditionally lived in tall houses. Nowadays, despite their ethnic difference, they have adopted a Malay lifestyle.

Traditionally fishermen, the seafaring Malay people chose to form settlements on the banks of rivers. These kampongs are a cluster of wooden houses on stilts. Malay in Sarawak have a distinct dialect are very proud of their differences from the peninsula. 

Historically, as other tribes were migrating into Sarawak and forming settlements, the Bidayuhs retreated further inland, earning them the name of "Land Dayaks" or "land owners." It was a Bidayuh premier who constructed the current state assembly building, an extremely attractive gold-roofed roundhouse built on the principles of the traditional Bidayuh meeting house. The meeting house was also used for the smoking of skulls after the river fish had nibbled the flesh away. They make the best tuak and, being good Christians, also make a moonshine called arak tonok. 

Orang Ulu means upriver people and is a term used to collectively describe numerous tribes in Sarawak's vast interior. As well as having the most beautiful women in the world, they are artistic people with strong, high longhouses elaborately decorated with murals and woodcarvings. They tend not to talk much and sit comfortably together—though uncomfortably for you—in companionable silence that, luckily is broken by their playing of an (electrified) stringed instrument called a sapeh. 

The Chinese have been present for more than thirteen hundred years, trading, settling, and trading some more. Their shopfronts make up the bulk of the tidy downtown core. 

 The Sikhs were among the earliest Indians here, recruited by the first White Rajah as police. Other Indian ethnic groups were brought in to work in the tea & coffee plantations. 

 Many of the present-day Sarawak Indians are from mixed marriages with the Malays, Chinese & other Sarawak native ethnic groups, with many of the younger generation using English, Sarawak Malay or one of the native or Chinese dialects to communicate with everybody else. 

You and your various guides can enjoy comparing genealogies. They are often astonished that you can be Andorran, Dutch, Italian and Latvian as they assume the homogeneity of other countries.

Semenggoh

Enough lollygagging. You travel to the rainforest to catch sight of the Borneo orang-utan and are rewarded with one show-off with his elongated reach and dismissive attitude. The local orang-utans, rescued and released, are mostly off in farmers’ fields poaching fruit; they don’t need the feeding platforms whence they were originally rehabilitated so you feel grateful to see one even though you really cant tell the difference between it and its Sumatran counterpart.

On the way back you whizz past the tomb of the last Bruneian sultan to rule Sarawak. The locals prefer the White Rajah; he, at least, had style. 

Bako

Bako is a fishing village of little descrip. It is, however, the home of your guide and the launching point for a boat to get to Bako National Park. You navigate the estuary and enter the South China Sea, passing by lines of poles with fishing nets tied between. The ride takes forty-five minutes and you wade ashore in the mangroves. 

This backdoor approach to the park brings you encounters with pitcher plants, the proboscis monkey, the silver langur (tufted monkey), cheeky long-tailed macaques, the Borneo bearded pig, plantain squirrels, a prehistoric horseshoe crab, mudskippers—fish that walk on land—and the green pit viper. These lowland rainforests are varied and you can wander through five different zones in the space of an hour. 

Beware the saltwater crocodile. They get big. Six metres and one thousand pounds big. You wonder how it would fare against a Komodo dragon. It would probably win. There is a good reason why there are no beach resorts in this area. Your guide studied these crocodiles for six years as a way to recover from the trauma of watching one of his friends get eaten by one. A taxidermied specimen moulders in the Kuching Natural History Museum; that one also ate someone. 

Good food. Good rice whiskey. Bad hangover. You don’t want to leave Kuching. You don’t want to leave Sarawak: there are immense caves, tribal long houses, remote outposts to visit, rivers to course. Sarawak gets under your skin in a way few if any other places in the world have.  

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Brunei, the Abode of Peace

You do your damndest to enter Brunei drunk. 

Sharia law, no nightclubs, no booze. No public affection. No homo-, pan-, omni-, or polymorphously perverse sexuality. This part of the world seems inordinately concerned about bumchums and politicians keep prosecuting each other for the practice. Brunei is doing its whole holier-than-thou Sharia thing, but it is not a coincidence that many of the countries here with such laws are part of the Commonwealth; it was the British who introduced the sodomy laws here, just as they did in the Caribbean, Africa, and—in a bold attempt to expand the empire—Uranus. All right, delete that joke from the final cut. Once a law is on the books it is a political hot potato to try to remove it, particularly when you throw an overheated religious climate into to the mix. Even just arguing to strike the laws from the books leads now to (religious) pressure to keep or strengthen them. 

Recently the Sultan of Brunei somewhat peevishly said that of course they probably won’t stone homosexuals to death; they just reserve the right to do so. 

Not having a catamite at hand, you do your damndest to enter Brunei stonkingly drunk.

Bandar Seri Begawan

The roads are very good and the drivers courteous. 

Bandar is a city that proves money does not buy happiness. This is a wealthy country, unarguably a ‘developed’ country, clean, polite, courteous but it makes Canadian Mennonite prairie farmers look like New Orleans whores during a Mardi Gras Spanish Fly two-for-one promotion.

You enter into the country—itself not terribly bigger than the city—expecting to find oil dollars busy at work on massive ‘starchitect’ ego projects; instead you find a city that looks like a bloated Cadillac Fairview shopping mall from the early nineteen hundred and nineties. With British construction practices. 

Whatever wealth goes into the nation’s infrastructure it hasn’t gone to make the capital city a futuristic playground. There are a couple of decent modernist buildings, an attractive airport, a good new bridge, but perhaps all the money has gone into gold-plating the domes of the two main mosques, both of which are, admittedly, stunning enough to warrant contemplation. Just don’t think you can easily enter them. 

This box-store/HoJo aesthetic may explain some of the peculiarities of what it means to be a Bruneian, more specifically a Bumiputera. Just like in Malaysia, a Bumiputera is essentially an indigenous person as defined by the government. Here though, it is more rigorously defined—certain tribes are included, others excluded—and patrilinearly inherited. These are the people who receive extended land rights, health care, oil dividend payments and special privileges for employment opportunities. The justification for this is that Bumiputeras face disadvantages due to the success of other groups in society, for example the Chinese. The collapse of the construction industry in Brunei which was a major employer of Bumiputeras forced the government to look at ways of diversifying the economy. Certainly they weren’t great builders if the evidence of your eyes is to be believed. 

You have heard tell that Bumiputera don’t need to work because of their oil dividend cheques but where you expected to see Bugattis and Range Rovers you see Kias and Peugeots and other odd older makes of small car navigating the roads. Shopping malls are full of knockoffs of middle-class tat. So where is the money? Beyond the mosques it appears to go into rainforests preservation and palace construction. The Sultan’s palace has some hundreds of washrooms and is larger than all the shopping malls in town combined. Relatives have palaces in the same suburb but those are often smaller than the sultan’s air-conditioned stables for his polo ponies.

Gold is key here. They plate palace and mosque domes with the stuff. Plate, not leaf. Now you finally and fundamentally understand: after privately and publicly lamenting the looting and stripping of decorations, marble, gold from the pyramids, Coliseum, Angkor, and other historic sites you look at the sultan’s palace and think “were things to go tits up I’d grab a bit of that gold for meself.” This place would turn anyone pirate; it just aches for disruption.

You would like to know more about the ethnicities indigenous to Brunei including the Belait, Brunei Bisaya, Bruneian Malay, Dusun, Kedayan, Lun Bawang, Murut and Tutong peoples but the museum is shut for a few years. The only museums that are reliably open are the Royal Museum of Royal Portraiture, the Royal Museum of Royal Gifts and Regalia, the Royal Museum of Traditional Crafts With Pictures of Royalty On Them, and so on. Most of those museums probably do not actually exist but they could. No, probably not: having so many museums would risk making Bandar more interesting. Any way you look at it, Bandar is boring. Tedious, even. The question you are asked most often is “why have you come to Brunei?” 

Whoever coined the phrase ”deader than heaven on a Saturday night” had never visited Bandar Seri Begawan. There is little civic fun, the general interior aesthetic and morale is nineteen-eighties American hotel lobby while the exterior aesthetic (but sadly not morale) is nineteen-seventies British housing project, and shopkeeps are reserved and diffident to the point of decomposition.

Recent international news stories said that Brunei has outlawed Christmas. Rot. It is just forbidden in public places. Christians are totally free to celebrate and decorate behind drawn curtains. There is also a discrete pork market—despite the country-wide proscription on non-Halal foods—that caters to the Chinese and expat populations. People walk the streets in clothing that is only moderately more conservative than elsewhere in Southeast Asia and less so than in the more Muslim areas of Indonesia. The fun, you suppose, is supposed to happen in people’s houses. Whee. Party with your parents. Small wonder three-quarters of adolescents are obese. This is the fattest country you have seen in south-east Asia. Not profusely so, but it is noticeable. Interestingly, it is also one of the whitest countries. Has been at least since the sixteenth century. Emotionally, socially, rhythmically, these are the whitest people in all of Creation.

Of more interest is the “Venice of the South”—one of the contenders for that title, anyway—Kampong Ayer, which is a Malay village within Bandar but built in the river. It has been around for a thousand years or more, moving, morphing with the vagaries of river geography. You are vaguely charmed by its mix of decrepit wooden stilts and walkways, concrete stilts and walkways, and general ennui. There are substantial houses here along with rotting houses, two mosques, a few erstwhile shops, schools and old ladies who toss their rubbish bags in the river. 

Quite possibly the best thing about Brunei is its national dress. 

The last thing you stumble across before leaving Bandar is a broken set of tombstones in a prominent cage. This turns out to be the grave site of two royals who did something unspecifiedly un-Islamic (probably incest). The sultan of the time put them in an underground house with some food and a chimney for ventilation and waited for them to die. The celebratory inscriptions re: their deaths remind us all how devout Brunei is and how it is important to punish those who would flout God’s laws. 

As you leave you are torn whether to continue this healthy enforced Al-Anon lifestyle or drink the first bottle of cheap rice whisky you see in Sabah. You are overwhelmed by the perversity of all law stemming from the whims and commentaries of bitter old men with decomposing food in their beards. You would gladly elect to play strip poker and Twister with sodomites, bottomites, scissorites, digitites, and onanites every night of the week in preference to sipping tea in a gilded palace with this bunch of god-ridden pansies. 

Brunei, the Abode of Peace with its stern legal code and well-behaved traffic is the apotheosis of the “law, order, family and religious values” ignorantly sought by suburban conservative politicians the world over. May they choke on it. 

Selah.

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Sabah

After so long on the road you wake every morning confused, thinking you are back home and it takes a few moments to cycle through all the places you could be before you come to grips with where you are.

Nabalu Noka

‘Oh,’ you might have said, waking up, ‘oh. My mouth tastes like the floor of a live bait shop.’ You might have said that had your mouth not been cemented around a dry swollen tongue. That is what happens when you befriend a group of locals with an endless supply of the local hooch, an arak called Montoku. Fermented tuak boiled up. An indigenous concoction much in need of colonial suppression. 

You are in the shade of Mount Kinabalu. Desperate for some excitement after the cerebral claustrophobia of Brunei, the Abode of Peace, you ended up here at the invite of a restauranteur —“call me Captain Jack Sparrow”—you met at the otherwise frustrating state mosque of Sabah which was staffed with officious money-grubbing twats. His local bistro specializes in traditional foods. He invited you to his home village where he gathers his rarer produce. He pointed out various orchids, rare ferns, and the fact that the bamboo bridge you inched over had dangling from it a skull to placate the river spirit. You were fêted by his wee relatives in their blue jeans and “versace” t-shirts—no traditional headdresses here—and now you awake and you are lost in the gloom because in the village of Nabalu Noka the tradition is to weave great overhangs out of tree bark, perpetually shading the village where the rainforest does not already accomplish the purpose. This keeps the village cool but musty, helps direct rainwater into deep cisterns and into intricate bamboo irrigation systems, and the dryness keeps the insect population under control. A longhouse is therefore built lower to the ground, which is useful when drinking heavily. Eighty families live strung out along the hillside in three long houses connected by v-shaped wood-and-woody-vine bridges. The longhouse verandas serve as a front street or gathering place. Each family has a door off of the veranda. Women and girls live on the upper floors while the men sleep on the main floor and the boys sleep on the veranda. 

There may be some philosophical reason for living in darkness but language barriers intrude. The Nabalu Noka have many odd laws. Some of them worship the sun, some the moon, some fire, some trees, some serpents, or some the first thing that they meet in the morning. They worship simulacra, not idols—this distinction is very important to them, being good Christians—and these statues of people, of animals, of celestial objects sit at meals with them, between family groups, and are offered the choicest tidbits. Such it is with your dinner. Christmas is taken very seriously here, lasting four days and seven drunken nights.

The feast: at one side of the chief’s table sit the elders who have knowledge of geomancy, necromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, and augury. With them they have their respective tools, the brittle brain pan of a dead man, some dishes full of gravel, sand, and hot coals, water, wine and oil, and some old clocks. They all have appointed times and places to prophesy and without their concurrence there can be no celebration. At the other side sit the musicians with their divers instruments and melodies: the bamboo flute, sompoton, toe-goon-gak, and gong (spelling of these may be of varied accuracy), When they play they each do a song and then, as accompaniment, they bring in beautiful and beautifully arrayed young dancers of both sexes.The youngest dancers are very fair-skinned as they rarely leave the twilight gloom of the village. They rival the indigenous Bruneians in their paleness.

The hunters bring out their blowpipes and show their skill, sending darts flying just above your head. You attempt it, squatting ninety degrees to the target and holding the long pipe sideways to your torso, head turned. It takes a strong fast puff but you can see your first dart arc short, your second goes high, your third goes over the railing and children run squealing to find it in the dirt.

This demonstration of the hunters’ acumen signals the feast: cups with cow, sheep, horse, and pig’s milk are shared first. Then banana-leaf-covered platters of the local venison: weasel, deer, pig, and mice (squirrel? shrew?). These are accompanied by the pith of sago palms, the fat sago maggots that live in it, giant red leeches and young ferns. Then alcohol in abundance. Then archery along the length of the longhouse verandah accompanied by more alcohol. Then juggling and clowning in abundance. And then just a general debauch, with toasts to the Christ child, to Mount Kinabalu, to Sabah, to family, to prosperity, to your journey, to alcohol, to the sound of bamboo poles cracking painfully against your ankles as you fail to dance your way between them, to the beauty of the ladies, girls and boys, to the prowess of the men, to the tattoos of the chief, to to to to to. To bed.

And so the morning. Some people are up and about, most ignore you; you might as well not exist. The way out involves the generosity of the local soccer team, off in a truck to play some rivals. From the main road it is easy to flag a local bus back to Kota Kinabalu. Of Captain Jack you hear no more before it is time to leave. No matter, you know where his restaurant is.  

Some of the best moments in life are indistinguishable from dreams just as some of the best dreams are indistinguishable from life. Emerging from the cave-like village of Nabalu Noka you had to shield your eyes from the sun: the bright light of day was paralyzingly real and everything seemed listless in its rays. Or maybe that was just the effect of ethanol poisoning. Luckily the mountain brings cloud cover to help you.

Mount Kinabalu 

The highest mountain between the Himalayas and New Guinea impinges on your consciousness. Although you did not climb it, you could not fail to be anything but impressed with this mountain that features on the Sabah flag. You remember Mount Kinabalu from the year fifteen, when a group of Canadian, German, Dutch, and Brit hikers got naked and urinated at the mountain summit despite the protests of their guides. They obviously had not read their Mandeville:

And they have great conscience and hold it for a great sin to cast a knife in the fire … or for to take and slay little children. And the most sin that any man may do is to piss in their houses that they dwell in, and whoso that may be found with that sin sikerly they slay him. And of everych of these sins it behoveth them to be shriven of their priests, and to pay great sum of silver for their penance. 

Six days later a massive earthquake and landslides killed eighteen other hikers. You resolve once again to consider local tabus your own. It does not pay to condescend to history. 

Tremendously aggravating is the ravaging of the rainforest. The vanishing habitat for orang-utans and the huge demand for the shaggy-haired primates as pets are well known. Significantly less media coverage has focused on other animals, such as sun bears, clouded leopards, gibbons and proboscis monkeys. “Greenwashing”and a lack of transparency have hindered real change here and the goal of “zero-deforestation” for the palm oil industry has become a meaningless corporate mantra given that traceability of each batch of oil is near impossible, regulatory compliance is minimal and law enforcement weak. The spirits do not always act out their revenge promptly. 

Kota Kinabalu

Sabah wears its hair shirt of grievances more tightly than Sarawak. They both were supposed to be co-equal with Malaya but ended up being subordinated like each of the Malayan states.The very first chief minister and his closest allies died in an airplane accident right after meeting and agreeing with the state oil company Petronas on a royalty scheme that conspiracy buffs say was for 20%. Some five days later his dubious successor agreed to 5%. Then the federal government unilaterally took away the rights of the states to their own oil reserves; then unilaterally changed state territorial waters from twelve miles to three miles, which prevented states exploiting offshore oil resources, and has connived with particular political parties to Islamize Sabah into a voting bloc more like Malaya.  

There are an estimated 42 ethnic groups with over 200 sub-ethnic groups with separate own languages, cultures and belief systems. The three largest indigenous groups in Sabah are the Kadazan-Dusun, Sam-Bajau and the Murut. The majority of the Kadazan-dusuns are Christians but before the missionaries came, their predominant religion was momolianism, two-way communication between the unseen spirit world and the material world facilitated by the services of a priestess. They mostly talked about rice.

Sama-Bajau are water-based nomads. They are noted for their exceptional abilities in free-diving. Some intentionally rupture their eardrums at an early age to facilitate diving and hunting at sea. More than a thousand years of subsistence freediving appear to have endowed the Bajau with spleens that are about half again as large as their neighbours, facilitating breath-holding. They are traditionally highly individualistic and the largest political unit is the clan cluster around mooring points. When the relationship with land-based peoples sour, the Sama-Bajau prefer to simply move on elsewhere. 

The Murut was the last of Sabah's ethnic groups to renounce headhunting. As with the Iban of Sarawak, collecting heads of enemies traditionally served a very important role in Murut spiritual beliefs. The Murut were nomadic cultivators of tapioca and other bland foodstuffs, supplementing their diet with blowpipe hunting and with some fishing. They live in communal longhouses, using the rivers as their highways. 

Like Sarawak, Sabah has the right to control its immigration policies but, unlike Sarawak, it has deferred to the mainland, including a federal project which has ensured that Muslims have gone from being a minority to a majority group. Native groups which once dominated Sabah politics have become a minority. Initially this was done through the resettlement of impoverished refugee Muslims from the Moros (Philippines) and Sulawesi (Indonesia). The new plan to give temporary documents to six hundred thousand illegal (Muslim Filipino non-refugee) immigrants is, you hear, the maraschino cherry on top of the theft of an entire country from its people. 

The Philippines under Marcos tried to destabilize Sabah and the state is still facing piratical attacks from Mindanao. Indonesia launched a quiet war in the nineteen hundred and sixties to get Sabah for its “Greater Indonesia” project. Everyone wants a piece of the place, it seems.

Kota Kinabalu is a city you forgive. You must. It can’t help itself. It cannot help the fact that it was bombed down to one clock tower and the post office at the end of the second world war. It can’t help that its civic planners have been turds. You forgive it because it has two things going for it: it has a relaxed vibe and it resembles Tapiocapolis, General Alcazar’s capital city in Tintin and the Picaros. 

In some ways, of all the cities you have visited, this might be the easiest one to live in, if need be. It has some long beaches, some fine examples of modernist equatorial box architecture, some lovely islands—although the southernmost part of nearby Gaya Island should be avoided because some six thousand illegal migrants now live there in illegal stilt houses with no waste disposal facilities. 

Sabah does not have the esprit de corps of Sarawak, partly because it has been too massively settled too recently but also because it does not have a history that people can easily fetishize. Sarawak had the White Rajahs, the various tribes uniting, the slow growth and melding of a community in Kuching. Sabah has been either primarily ignored or ruled by a succession of multinational corporations: from the Sultanate of Brunei to the East India Company, to the American Trading Company of Borneo, to a German diplomat who tried to peddle it but could find no buyers, to the North Borneo Provisional Association, to the North Borneo Chartered Company. It is hard to paint a glorious history around general managers and factotums, regardless of the education, health and transport services they brought. And that last company ruled until the second world war, after which Sabah became a British colony for two decades until the people opted into the Malaysian Federation.

Kota Kinabalu displays these tensions. Having been razed in the second world war it is easy for people to pretend that the Muslim Malay sway is, was, and will be. But ignore that. It serves as a gateway to ancient rainforest remnants where ginger orang-utans swing through the tree tops and the diving was described by Jacques Cousteau as an untouched piece of art. Do keep your wits about you. Last March, a man dangling his hand in the water on a river cruise was killed by a crocodile that jumped out of the water and grabbed him by his right shoulder. His body was found a day later minus a leg and a hand. What a waste.

From Kota Kinabalu, the North Borneo railway wends its way south, either as a proper working train or as a heritage Vulcan wood-burning steam train, a neat two-six-two tender locomotive weighing eighty-five tons and stretching out to fifty-eight feet in length . The latter service runs from Kota Kinabalu to the agricultural town of Papar and back. Refurbished colonial-style carriages provide a blast from the colonial past. The train clickety-clacks along tracks built in 1896, hugging the coast before turning inland beside paddy fields, mangrove jungles, brick factories and palm oil plantations, stopping at sleepy villages and coastal towns.

 Kinarut

You alight from the North Borneo railway carriage at this whistle stop trading village to stretch your legs. Fronting the bleakly concrete station is a row of colonial Chinese shopfronts, all wooden shutters and awnings. You wander around the block then cross the tracks to the Tien Nam Shi Buddhist Temple which seems remarkably out of scale for this small place. You see no sign of the Buddha but many amusing golden statues of fat or fierce monks litter the place.

Papar

A nice half-kilometre tunnel and ordinary steel river trestle take you and the train to Papar, a town with an insouciance that borders on the offensive. It is a market town, has a few streets of other shops for provisioning, but otherwise merits no mention, bless it. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: Singapore

Singapore

G.K.Chesterton put it like this: the traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Too glib, too Edwardian, too passive. Tourists are more likely to be shocked out of complacency when things go awry. Travellers are simply more cynical about things. There should be a third category: the travelist? A travelist sees herself in what she sees. Like sympathetic magic, this can heal her wounds or create new ones. Who but a wounded person needs to keep moving? 

You can’t help but be efficiently whisked into Singapore. Some people love this city and some hate it. In the twenty-one years since the first ODD-yssey, what has changed is that they appear to have hired set designers from Star Trek: The Next Generation to remake the cityscape. The whole place looks like what the nineteen hundred and nineties thought the future would be like. You just don’t see much point in staying around for very long. Dark thinking, but Singapore reminds you of the Amanda Knox trial in Italy: conform to our expectations of how you should live or else. 

Singapore is what the you suspect the Green Party imagines the world can be if everyone becomes “woke.” It is clean, verdant, safe and efficient. There is grand spectacle in this first of first world cities: massive metal trees filling up with greenery and solar panels; architecture that flops over and then rights itself in defiance of gravity. Manicured lawns, parks, verges. Clean water right from the tap. The massive Ayn Rand-meets-Albert Speer-via-Baz-Luhrmann Atlas Bar with its homoerotic totalitarian statuary. Pick the latest fantasy, be big or don’t play, that’s the Singapore way.

Except, except. The whole system requires massive quantities of electricity. And there are already too many people in the world, eating all the endangered animals. But if you cut the birth rate to decrease the population how do you achieve unlimited economic growth? Singapore is twelve feet deep in fat people and it needs more. This is not the model progressives should be looking to.  

People love to hate on Singapore prices—$USD 18 for a pint of beer? A few cents to ride the bus and $25 for a gin and tonic?—but this is what things would cost if the world were fair and everyone could live like this from Mombasa to Molokai’i. Massive inflation. Your double gin and tonic with hand-picked Peruvian botanicals and Icelandic gin should rightly cost you a day’s wages. If everyone in the world patronized their local hip alternative to Starbucks the idea of purchasing a cup of coffee would need to be offset against the idea of procreating. 

You meet, eat, and walk with a woman who you are surprised does not wear a tinfoil hat. It is unclear what job she holds or held in the military. All you know is that she walks everywhere, pays cash, and engages in guerrilla yarn bombing. She flies under the radar as much as possible. Why? What does she know or hope to gain? Perhaps that which gives meaning to her life is to be unseen, to live simply, to die as anonymously as one can in a controlled society. Everything requires a permit here. Even speaker’s corner. What does it say when celebrity and anonymity are the two best options?

What Singapore gets right is that it recognizes its climate and lives within it. It rains a lot in Singapore so certain streets have attractive enormous covers over them: arty fake trees, flowers, square shapes, it doesn’t matter: Singaporeans live despite the rain instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist and getting pissy about it.

Instead of queuing for thirty minutes to drink a Singapore Sling whilst standing on peanut husks in the Raffles Hotel’s Long Bar you think you will be clever and literary and instead have a drink in the Library Bar where Hemingway and Maugham and other drunks drank. Silly you. The library bar, which was once a small spot off the main lobby, is now a richly appointed antiqued-book-bedecked mahogany bar located in the Raffles Residences, second floor. Yet this makes sense because: who cares? Nowadays, when the novel is as relevant as operetta and publishers peddle pseudo-empathetic epiphany porn? Take a selfie in a cozy architectural wrapping for intellectual-themed cocktails. Singapore will provide those cocktails. For a price. Rain-proof the old be-fripperied colonial streets and sell variations on Hygge, Marie Condo, and Hello Kitty; give the rubes a dry chance to see temples and spend money: that has been the formula since the Sphinx was in short pants. That is authentic Singapore to the core.

Where you stay affects how you see a place. Insects, leaking faucets, broken fans, brown-water showers, mildewed ceilings put a person in a certain mood. So too do polished marble, clean cutlery, air-conditioning and plush bedding. Likewise how you get around: private car, motorbike, hitch-hiking. How you let these (dis)comforts affect you is what determines whether you are a tourist, a traveller, a travelist, or something other and wholly new. But does it matter? Either you see what you have come to see or you come to see what you have seen. 

La città risibile: an ASEAN odd-yssey: The Philippines

It is received wisdom that in travel you feel the carefree invulnerability you are assured you felt as a child (regardless how you actually felt at the time). In fact, most of the time travel is akin to you reaching up and grabbing a hand before realizing that it belongs to a stranger and you blindly panic that you have lost your parents. 

With seven thousand islands, the Philippines has the potential to freak the hell out of you. Cities here are hazards best avoided. However, with verdant mountains, waterfalls, and thousands of kilometres of beautiful beaches it can amuse you for years. If you like that sort of thing.

What key learning do you take from the Philippines? That it is important to know how to ride a scooter or a motorcycle. There is no better way to see these islands than on your own and bikes are cheap to rent.

And the people? Filipino(a)s are a proud, take-no-nonsense blend of Indio, mestizo, creole, Spanish, and American chutzpah: Your first experience is with an unpleasingly plumb Filipina bowling you over in an airplane aisle. Your second experience is with a security guard in Immigration who insists you enter the Diplomat/ASEAN line. Your third experience is with an immigration officer who tells you that you are not a diplomat and need to go into the regular line. Your fourth experience is with the security guard who ushered you into the diplomatic line and now insists that you never should have gone there. Your fifth experience is when, after waiting in the regular line, you get to the front and are sent to the diplomatic line where—your sixth experience—the same immigration officer stamps you into the country and dismisses you with an eye-rolling wave of the hand.

Your seventh experience is with the insistent nighttime knocker on your door who inexplicably hands you a cooking pot and leaves.Your eighth experience is waking up some few hours later to two Filipina cleaners who have unlocked your door and are trying to sneak in without waking you to retrieve said pot which, they insist, was given to you inappropriately by the first cleaner.

To the extent you can generalize—and you do— about a country made up of massive islands with disparate peoples, the Philippines impresses upon you its mixture of American urban planning, Spanish efficiency, and Filipino/a egotism. You have reentered a world of sidewalk hustlers, irregularly administered bureaucracy, two stars masquerading as four, and a torrent of decaying Jeepneys. A jeepney is sort of a low-rise school bus slash pickup-up truck with a few steps hanging off the back. Early versions are a cross between an army Jeep and an old woody station wagon with its windows cut out. They run from shabby to more modern chrome-and-blacklight glory. The most amusing ones are to a pickup truck what a vajazzled chihuahua or a prancingly effete three-legged whippet is to a Golden Retriever. You have to mellow back into continental indifference: The Philippines is more like Vietnam than it is Malaysia or Indonesia.

Unlike Vietnam, however, the national egomania makes crossing streets dangerous: Vietnam drivers anticipate movement all around them and in this shared calculus of impending danger they flow. Filipinos doggedly, insistently, violently assert their personal right of way whether as driver or pedestrian. This makes traffic less fluid, more whiplash-inducing, more like someone tipping over a jar of marbles. They trust in their horns and their god: by law tricycles (motorcycles or bicycles with sheet metal sidecars) must have a Bible verse clearly printed on the back of their cab.

Manila (Luzon Island)

Manila doesn’t even really exist. It is a Frankenstein’s monster of a Metro area with old cities rubbing up against each other. The historic center—Intramuros—has some charms that stem from its five hundred year old superiority complex. No one who was not at least a half blood or a servant could enter the walled city. The moat is now a golf course and the cannons are spiked and the Second World War reduced the place to rubble but the rebuilt area still stands aloof. 

Other old towns that make up Metro Manila have their own personalities. Getting across them and between them is a riot of traffic terror. At one point on a slow moving freeway you are driving—at various times—behind, in front of, and beside a six or seven year old boy pedalling his pink plastic four-wheeler in traffic. He slips between lanes, passes, gets passed and goes god knows where.

Mactan (Mactan Island)

Magellan died here. Now it houses the airport for Cebu City, a number of high priced resorts, the city work force and not much else.

Cebu City (Cebu Island)

This is a boom town and boom towns are messy places. This one likes to party. With explosives. New Year’s Eve is a busy time in the emergency wards. Damn good barbecue in this town, too. Cebu pork lechon is renowned. 

Cebu has been a trading centre since time immemorial. The city rulers call it the “Queen City of the South” and proudly publish the number of daily visitors to its main shopping mall. But it is one of those cities in which you always feel the grime adhering to your skin. Shabu— crystal meth— has a lot of people decaying into street dirt although (though the number has decreased since the president encouraged citizens and police to kill them). Massive tangles of electrical wires dangle overhead. In between guarded condominium complexes, shops and shelters built from scavenged materials make the city seem as if it has just emerged from a civil war. Terrorism is a problem here and gets worse the further south you go but that is not the cause of this: this is the epitome of healthy economics. 

Cebu City is famous for housing the cross Magellan planted in fifteen hundred whatnot, though it may be a seventeenth century counterfeit made to save the original from invaders. No matter, because it is supposedly encased in a nineteenth century wooden cross to stop the faithful from shaving off souvenirs. Near to the cross is the Basilica housing the image of the Santo Niño de Cebu, a statuette of the Child Jesus presented by Ferdinand Magellan to the local Rajah’s chief consort upon the royal couple's christening in fifteen hundred twenty-one. In typical fashion, the Basilica was founded some forty years later after the Spaniards razed a local village and “rediscovered” the doll in the ruins. The tiny statuette or, rather, the Holy Child of Cebu is credited with many miracles such as ensuring a local merchant in the eighteenth century made it to his ship on time.

On the hillsides overlooking the city a local motel mogul built a seven-storey temple shrine to his late wife in supposedly classical Roman style (the Temple of Leah, complete with library, museum, and bar). It is strewn all over with life-sized statues of Roman gladiators, lions and angels. A brass 10-foot statue of Leah, seated and bracketed by trumpeting angels, all backlit by stained glass is subtitled:

Beloved Wife and Mother: Leah V. Albino-Adarna was chosen Matron Queen of her Alma Mater the University of Southern Philippines. This bronze statue portrays her composure and regal bearing when she was crowned. May the beholder discern her innate beauty, poise and gentleness.

Cebu City, you realize, is a city that can absorb a lot of madness.

Dumaguete (Negros Island)

Damaguete has intersections with no lights and no stop signs. How does that work? The city designates most streets one-way during daylight hours and then cohorts of vehicles wait until they have accumulated enough mass to intimidate the flow of traffic ninety degrees away. After dark it is a free-for-all.

The university houses a small zoo on its grounds that might too cramped for the animals, but one of the two caretakers takes you around. They are trying to keep these endangered animals from being eaten into extinction: golden flying foxes as well as the regular ones, bleeding heart doves who are fabulously crimson on their breasts, a civet, a leopard cat, two hornbills, four varieties of wild pig—one of which is hunted for its tasty red meat—and spotted deer. Some foreign universities provide some aid but the human population just keeps growing and eating these animals and then having more babies to fulfil its irrational, selfish procreative impulse.

A city that has forbidden smoking in its entirety, basically Dumaguete is the small middle-of-the-road capital of Negros Occidentales. It has a relaxed vibe and a pleasant waterfront promenade. It has a middle-class university, middle-class food—think Tex-Mex with salad cream—middle-class shopping, middle-class affectations. There is an expatriate community: picture a stubbly, mohawk-sporting sixty-something Brit wearing an old “I’m a lesbian in a man’s body’ muscle shirt. Daytime drinking is a thing for them. They generally look like their dreams failed high school. 

 Balicasag Island

You pass by and it is a green disc that seems to float on a yellow gold cloud of sand. There are dozens and dozens of these islets dotting the region, each uninhabitable, each looking remarkably romantic and perfect.

Boracay Island

“The new Bali” is white beaches and endless construction. The outskirts of town are the more peaceful places to stay but you are therefore not on the prime white beach. You are also not with the touts and music and trashy people who cackle into social media at the idea of ordering a “sex on the beach.”

This will all change as Boracay spruces itself up. The island is getting repaved, all vehicles are going electric, people are employed to sieve the sand of detritus from the holidaymakers, and you can bet that the mishmash of shops and wee hotels squeezed into the centremost part of the island will transform into higher-end resorts. At that point the vulgar hordes will be more contained in their paradisiacal gulags with colour-coded wristbands.

Until then it is a lovely place to indulge in low-thirties weather, fine sand beaches, and economical luxuries.

Interstices

In Interstices you find your final city: a city made up of the spaces between cities. Here are the grazing lands, the fallow lands, the goat paths, the B-roads, the highways and motorways, the green fields, the deforested slopes, the rich brown earth and the scrubby lizard mudflats, the endless seas and the shallow creek, the bumpy detour and the impassable landslide. The people here are the people who get frightened at street corners.

It is a good place for rest, the only place you can actually feel at peace because it is a city that expects nothing of you. It is a waiting room. A buzzy tannoy periodically calls out the indecipherable names of other cities that happen to be passing by the station on the outskirts of town. Beside it rusts a wheel-less moss-eaten 1939 International Harvester school bus, its destination sign stating simply “Further.”

And so it ends where it began. It always does. Travel is not a prescription for health. Sometimes in life you find that you have stripped your gears by running counterclockwise to your idea of yourself. You cannot fix those gears by traveling on them and you definitely do not want to face a downhill trajectory relying on them to hold you back. Sanity is like virginity: you don’t get it back by throwing yourself at situations where you are likely to get fucked.

Of course you the reader do not necessarily believe everything I write when I describe the cities visited on these expeditions. But. But. The places we dream about going are more real than the places we end up. In traveling, differences are lost, each city takes to resembling all cities; places exchange their form, substances, stories. The best stories get better, the worst get worse, and somewhere in between little embellishments take life and become cities in their own right. All cities are frauds, all are merely composites of the tales we tell about them at cocktail party after cocktail party.

Real life is overrated and all cities are laughable. Of course you the reader do not necessarily believe everything I write when I describe the cities visited on these expeditions. But that is OK. It is better this way.