"Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity." -Graham Greene "The Quiet American"

First, we visited S-21, once a school, once a military prison, now a remembrance museum for approximately 20,000 people tortured and killed under Pol Pot's directive in this facility alone. During his rule, somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5 million people lost their lives.






The floors of S-21 are tiled orange and white, tarnished by dirt and stains that I had to constantly convince myself weren't blood. Pol Pot's "combatants" kept meticulous records, so photographs exist of nearly every person who went into S-21 and never came out - often another picture exists of them after death. These photographs are set in rows on plastic-encased boards in one section of the four-building compound.


































As I passed a tour guide, she was pointing to a photograph of a man splayed out on the floor in a puddle of blood, a floor that had the same tile as the room we were in. She spoke softly, "some were killed in the interrogation rooms, some out in the courtyard, and some in this very room." She pointed at the floor. A girl standing next to me jumped back as though his body might still be there.







The cells were windowless closets - brick or heavy wood - and the walkways were encased with concertina wire to prevent suicides of desperation. They would shackle your feet and tie your hands behind your back. A large pole in the center courtyard, once used by the schoolchildren for physical education, was used to suspend you upside down until you lost consciousness. They would submerge your head in a bucket of filthy water to bring you back, and resume questioning. The interrogation would end when you died.






(THE SECURITY OF REGULATION 1. You must answer accordingly to all my questions - Don't turn them away. 2. Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me. 3. Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution. 4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. 5. Don't tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution. 6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all. 7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders, if there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting. 8. Don't make false pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor. 9. If you don't follow all the above rules, you shall get lashes of electric wire. 10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.)

When the museum was opened for visitors in 1979, a Cambodian woman examining the photographs learned the fate of her brother, missing for years.

If you survived S-21 interrogation, or were believed to have no useful information, you were trucked to a location on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Here you would be murdered, piled in trenches and buried. The killing fields.






("Magic Tree...the tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed.")

Now lush and green, dozens of dips in the landscape indicate excavation sites, where many desiccated bodies were exhumed. Still, when it rains and the land shifts, bits of fabric that were once clothing, along with fragments of bone and teeth, excavate themselves to the muddy surface. We found several teeth and the ground was peppered with scraps of cloth.





















In the center of the fields is a tall stone structure with almost twenty levels of shelves, packed with skulls.






On a wall in the stairwell at S-21, amidst similar sentiment, one person scrawled in bold marker, "Don't let shit like this EVER happen again, Please!" Another wrote, "When this was a prison, nobody learned, when this was a school, nobody died."






Other things happened today, but they do not matter.

Location:Phnom Penh, Cambodia

"Farris took a shovel from Resler and quickly pushed the blade through the snake and firmly into the dirt. Its mouth yawned wide in its death throes. 'Just remember,' said Farris, 'of the thirty-three kinds of snakes over here, thirty-one are poisonous.' 'How do we tell them apart?" asked Resler. 'I think with those ratios, you could afford to come to a prejudicial, sweeping generalization - like, kill them all.'" -Robert Mason "Chickenhawk"

I had gone out for a morning coffee, waking my room mate in the process of stumbling around in the dimness of dawn. After I left, he decided to take a shower and was seeking a place to hang his towel when he noticed some very thick green tubing spiraled around the post that held up the ventilated tin roof of our bathroom, then it breathed.

It was a ten foot viper about four inches thick, bright green with the triangular head that often bespeaks venomousness. The staff of our hostel had already disentangled it, beat it to death and cut off its head when I returned. I didn't even get to see it, much less take a photograph. In honor of the missed opportunity for an awesome snakebite death/a good photograph, I'm not including any photos this time. It's an isolated community and I have no doubt that when you get bit your options are limited to one. Die uncomfortably. Maybe there's anti-venom around, but I don't think so - certainly a child wouldn't have enough time. It makes killing the snake a justifiable brutality, I think.

Simplicity?

After a few crocodilian days in Don Det, we left for Cambodia. The islands were a quick drive from the border with a long wait for the bus. After several hours of waiting and several more of driving, one of the wheels exploded and rattled us all awake while the driver slowed to a crawl and limped ten miles to a service station (read: someone's house with a garage attached). We waited three hours while someone drove us a new wheel from who-knows-where. We arrived in Phnom Penh almost seven hours late, at 2am, unhinged and crusty.

There seems to be a policy throughout the region to drop you off the bus in a wildly inconvenient place with a batch of tuk-tuk mafiosos waiting to convey you to your final destination at a steep cost. Since it's often late at night and you're out of your element, they dictate the terms. It gets frustrating but I recommend rejecting first offers. Be firm and amiable and informed. And sober. They call it the tuk-tuk mafia for two reasons - one because they act like they're mafia and two because sometimes they actually are.

Phnom Penh is quite pleasant. Ten years ago, I'm told, you had to switch into a pickup truck at the border and barrel through rural Cambodia, picking up speed through populated areas to avoid getting highjacked or robbed, just to reach the very relative safety of Phnom. This doesn't happen much anymore. Cambodia is a monarchy, but the governing of the place has been influenced dramatically by an array of international NGO's and other interest groups. For example, Childsafe, which offers a phone line you can call if you see a sex predator with a child. Oh humanity. Overall it's something of a success story. It makes for a modernity that feels rough in its newness - brimming with energy, both potential and actualized.

Tomorrow we'll go learn about why international intervention was required. Spoiler: it was Pol Pot, that festering piece of shit.

Ah, I can't resist. Just the one though.

Location:Don Det, PDR Laos > Phnom Penh, Cambodia

"'Well, fella, I wish I could help you. God knows I don't want you to go back without a story and get fired. I know how it is-I'm a journalist myself, you know-but...well...I get The Fear...can you use that? St. Louis Gives Young Men The Fear-not a bad headline, eh?' 'Come on Kemp, you know I can't use that; Rubber Sacks, The Fear?' 'Goddamnit, man, I tell you it's fear of the sack! Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing St. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn't want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the way he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn't give a good shit for St. Louis or his friends or his family or anything else...he just wants to find some place where he can breathe...is that good enough for you?'" -Hunter S. Thompson "The Rum Diary"

Malaria medication dream - I was in a stable-stall with a big chestnut stallion. Not sure why. At first we were calm, everything was fine, but I slipped and startled him. In his shock he began pummeling me with strong kicks, landing all over my face and shoulders. I could feel the shock of cracking bones and laceration. I fell to the ground and wrapped my hands around my head, some feeble protection.

We hopped on the bus and moved south from Tha Khaek, blowing past a lot of amazing things that we won't see this go-round. Time is short, my flight is booked, the days are numbered. We have to get to the killing fields. I had a rousing conversation about the zombie apocalypse last night that really raised my spirits and gave me hope for the future.



Even a nice bus for eight hours make me need a shower and a good rest, but this was pretty heinous, bugs and stink and thirty year old grime caking the seats. Water dripped in from holes in the roof. On occasion, the bus sputtered to a halt and some jerry-rigging got it barely running again. Twenty minutes of restless sleep left me feeling greasy and disoriented and I've tried it before, diazepam only makes it worse. The windows and the accordion door were open and a cool breeze stumbled through them - trees and homes and violent-green fields careened past them.



(Look upon my feet, ye mighty, and despair...)

The bus wound us up in Pakse, the biggest southern city of Laos. Not much for us here but a gateway to the islands.

Of the "4000 islands" three are set up as Falang destinations - Don Kong, Don Kon and Don Det. We took a minivan and a boat from Pakse to get to Don Det and it's sleepy as can be - a line of guest houses and restaurants and not much else. It's where Mekong dolphins hang out - the stupidest of all dolphins. Laotians believe they protect them from crocodiles, so they aren't hunted or eaten.



The dogs are in heat, with all the swollen testosterone-posturing that comes with it. Fresh wounds sprout red and swollen from fights over the pick of the bitches. Our German friend eyed them scampering around and remarked, with a sort of disquieted certainty, "I think it's dog season."



So here we are, halfway between wet and dry, monsoon and heat of noon, the rainy months and a blue lagoon - dog season. And we're in it like rats in a flood.

Location:Don Det Island, PDR Laos

"The beautiful people//The beautiful people//It's all relative to the size of your steeple//You can't see the forest for the trees//You can't smell your own shit on your knees." -Marilyn Manson

We left Vientiane after a day and night. Shifting 7 hours by bus to reach Tha Khaek, a town that our outdated guidebook described as "quaint." Five years along the taybalo trail can change a lot. Namely, the reason I can post this from my hostel's restaurant.



When we got in from the bus station, then first thing we saw was a near-fatal accident involving a pick-up truck and a scooter. The guy didn't move for a while. He seemed ok by the time we left.

We walked up and down the town center seeking an affordable room and discovered that we are not exactly in a backpacker town, more of a Chinese tourist destination. One hotel that looked quiet just turned us away. We were not welcome. Another said they were full. Alfie said, "you're full?" And she said "I don't know, yes." I guess if Chinese tourists saw gweilo staying in their hotel they'd go somewhere else. Another was 78$ a night. Finally we found a room with three beds for about three dollars a piece at what - we learned later - is considered a bit of a "red-light" joint. We got what we paid for.







By far our dingiest room yet. Scary plastic wrapped beds and a whole colony of ants living just inside the door, yellowing newspaper plastered over the windows as makeshift blinds and every ten minutes a squawking that must be a gecko but sounds like a parrot. Utterly survivable.

We went and had dinner and wandered around to get acclimated. Not wanting to karaoke, we wound up heading back toward our hotel early, around 10pm. Before we got back to our street, we were called over to hang with some locals drinking beer on the stoop.

One was a soldier who spoke pretty good English, the one who had shouted to us from across the street. The other was a cop with a strange laugh who found us pretty amusing, offering us ample opportunity to appreciate his cackle. The third was a wheelchair-bound electric repairman - televisions, computers, refrigerators. We'd already heard that the Laos people were famed tinkerers, many can disassemble and reassemble very complex things, often machining spare parts by hand with limited equipment. Serious talent.

They were nice guys. We played the Asian courtesy game, pouring each other small glasses of beer back and forth and teaching tidbits of our respective languages. The soldier wanted to know where we were from, what we though of Laos, what we did for a living, and if we wanted him to arrange a tour or possibly a young Laotian prostitute for us. The electrician guffawed and the cop cackled. We politely declined and gracefully extricated ourselves with lots of handshaking and kob-jai-li-li's (thank you very muches).



We've been chucking a saying around jokingly, it goes, "these people are so beautiful, they really know how to live." Someone said this to us in full seriousness, without a glimmer of recognition of their cliche, of the complex story they were truncating.

It's bullshit. These people are people. I've met people. They're capable of anything, acts of sincere beauty and acts of ragged and unflinching ugliness. If you believe they "know how to live," I think they'd happily trade. I agree there is something infinitely compelling about the "simplicity" of life - but if I've learned anything, it's that one form of simplicity breeds another form of complexity. Denying this denies everything interesting about humanity.

Location:Tha Khaek, PDR Laos

"This is a place where time reverses//Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses//Instruments shine on a silver tray//Don't let me be carried away" -Elliott Smith

I've made it to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, but it's just a pass-through and I don't have anything to say yet - so I'm going to talk about the lost children of Vang Vieng.

If I haven't explained it proper, V.V. is an intractable cyclone of hedonism and sin, of alcohol and promiscuity, of mushroom tea and squandered wealth. Our three days felt like a month, and the people we met who had been there for real months had a far-offness to their eyes that spoke extensively of their experience.

It's a bit like Peter Pan if he'd had a nasty toad-licking habit. "I don't wanna grow up..."



For every night in Vang Vieng that you don't pass out drunk, they allocate you a strip of colorful fabric to wear around your wrist. The long-timers have armfuls of them, though most have many fewer than the days they've spent. You get another wristband if you injure yourself substantially. Lots of those. Drunken tubing accidents and other missteps in a place full of opportunities for accidental self-harm.

We re-met a girl we'd already spent time with in Luang Prabang. She'd arrived four days before us, spent all her money and gotten a job at a bar slinging drinks for free room and board (and drinks). We met another guy who had the same story, but had been there three months. In Vang Vieng, it's easy to float and hard to save up. He couldn't afford the flight home or else he didn't want it.

Almost every long-term party person you meet (almost everywhere) has a happy-go-lucky attitude that reflexively blankets a sort of bleak darkness. Sometimes it creeps out. Young people who haven't gone through shit, but have still seen a lot. Shock without the shells. War without the war.



When you sleep with a girl three times in V.V., but don't officially date her, your compadres will sneak a shot of piss into your night of drunkeness. To be fair, you shoulda known better. People sport affairs for an hour or a minute, drifting through the room casual as grocery shoppers. They eat little and drink too much. The days slide together like tectonic plates. They party hard enough for everyone in the world to take it a little easy every once in a while - they've got it well covered.

In Vang Vieng the local Laos whiskey, Tiger, is free. At most bars. Whiskey is free. As in, you don't pay to drink it. They hand it to you - then you drink it. Not sure how the subtle economics of this works, but I guess dependancy instills brand allegiance. Like dollar-cheeseburger day. What a tumultuous and exciting place. How sultry. How ensnaring.

It's not the only place we've met wayward sons and daughters, lost amidst an ocean of cheap booze and party paint (I didn't know what it was either), but Vang Vieng appears to be the internationally agreed upon epicenter. Brits and French, Americans and Canadians and Irish and Finnish and Norwegian and goddamnit everyone comes together to pray at the altar of the shitfaced gods - to pledge allegiance to the flag of the burgeoning-alcoholic. The Israelis are here too, but they've mostly just finished their two years of military service. They have a different demeanor. One Israeli girl said to me, "I think America is like a movie. Like nothing is real." I asked if it was at least a good movie and she shook her head no. I asked if it was the shitty kind you go see just to eat popcorn in the dark and she shook her head again, smiling.



Vientiane - rain today and ligaments of altar-incense smoke floating and melting into the haze. Gongs again in the distance. Flies escaping the rain with me, landing tentatively on my toes and ankles. I met some east coasters, a Laotian sweet-talker, a Korean government man and some southern Chinese folks that were keen on white girls. Ha, who isn't? I saw some nice temples, heard some shit music, ate some decent food and walked around a bit. South, south, south. Tha Khaek, Savvanaket, the islands and Cambodia beyond them. Couldn't boat the Mekong. Gonna expend our water travel getting from Phnom Penh to Siam Reap.

Spirits in the mist. I'm feeling cynical. "Dispatches" isn't helping.

Location:Vientiane, PDR Laos

"Saigon cafarde, a bitch, nothing for it but some smoke and a little lie-down, waking in the late afternoon on damp pillows, feeling the emptiness of the bed behind you as you walked to the windows looking down at Tu Do. Or just lying there tracking the rotations of the ceiling fan, reaching for the fat roach that sat on my Zippo in a yellow disk of grass tar. There were mornings when I'd do it before my feet even hit the floor. Dear Mom, stoned again." -Michael Herr "Dispatches"

It's against the law for a person from Laos to sleep with a Falang until they are married. I mean, they can sleep with each other, but no jiggy-jig. It's plenty frowned upon elsewhere, but this is the only place I've encountered with a law on the books. I wonder where else is like this - I wonder if it works.

Something tells me it happens anyways. Laws, like windows, are made to be broken. Especially laws about fucking.

I'm drinking coffee with sweet milk and recovering from an intense night. The power is out because it rained for eight hours yesterday and the river rose four feet. Four feet puts little at risk. It happens often enough that most structures are safely out of the way, or at least outfitted to handle the rise.

It sparked a story from a new Laotian friend, of when the river rose fifteen feet in July of this year, covering the first floor of her house in six feet of water on the wrong side of the river to get help or supplies, stuck on the top floor and unable to swim. For two days. I trucked across the bridge with her to unplug electronics and move anything ruinable off the floor. When I crossed the bridge, the stone footpath on the other side, normally dry, was river-water past my ankles. After, we headed back to the other side, which has a large embankment and most of the stores and businesses, making it the safer side. We played eight ball with a dark and drunken Brit until the rain stopped and the waters receded early this morning. It could have gone either way.

We asked why we couldn't tube the river yesterday and the Australian who owns one of the local drunk shacks said, "just a little rough today, don't want anyone dying this year, bad publicity, that."

Dead power lines and dead business and dead tourists, god bless. Too much water here, not enough there. Garbages filled with edible matter and starvation prevails. Intelligent design. This is monsoon season and that's why I cant have a damn fruit shake this morning. Stupid electric blenders. I bet the grapes would have been fucking sour anyways. I joke because it stopped raining.

The storm sweeps in from the mountains like a tantrum - a patter then an uproar. It makes rivers of the streets, waterfalls of the roofs and muddy death of the river. My pool game was off all night.

Location:Vang Vieng, PDR Laos

"A crazy dream//you done me wrong//you left me long//I couldn’t stand a chance without you//You said that love was dead//and in my head//I just couldn’t believe it." -Daniel Johnston

I had a dream I was hosting a party and I fell asleep early. Someone did some nefarious shit, so I kicked everybody out. Wandering around trying to find the stragglers, the house appeared to me as a maze containing every place I've ever lived. It was Astor, Castro, Covert, Page and Morning Dew. The kitten from the eco-lodge was there. As were my brothers and my sister and my whole family and others I recognized. But they all had to go.

A girl approached me and took me by surprise. She told me her name was Fifteen and she appeared to me as a conglomeration - unsubtle haunts of every girl I've ever known. I told her she could stay.

We were estranged so we caught up. She was dark and sharp and funny. We kissed and made love and then she left too.

I recall the curve and warmth of skin under my fingers, I recall the leaving, I recall the enticing white of understanding smiles.

Vang Vieng is the Laotian center of narco-tourism and river tubing, but otherwise a pretty sleepy place. A treacherous combination. Several tourists die every year when they are swept away in the river while trying to tube down it. Usually it is very late at night. Usually they are quite drunk. The river rushes through the town at a humbling speed, particularly this time of year at the end of monsoon season. It's a rich muddy brown from the collection of mountain soil.






Across the river from the main tourist drag, late night bars offer regular drink menus, but when flipped they reveal a "happy" or "funny" menu. The place we went had a "happy and funny for you" menu. Mushy shakes, ganja garlic bread, and mister "o" tea. That would be psilocybin mushroom smoothies, marijuana garlic bread, and poppy-pod tea, if you're not privy. Pretty much government sanctioned, or so it seems. An odd place.

The drive down here from Luang Prabang offered some of the most ego-shattering views I've ever seen. It reminded me of a conversation I had with an Israeli architecture student while observing the immense church in Hanoi, St. Joseph's Cathedral, opened at the onset of French colonial control of Vietnam. She observed that religious structures are built to make you feel minuscule in relation to the presence of god, communist structures to make you feel minuscule in relation to the state, and wealthy folk's houses to make you feel minuscule in relation to their wealth. The natural wonders of the world aren't constructed at all, but in relation to them, our human works are trite and insignificant - as are we.



























But how we try, how we try.

We're heading out from here in a few days. South and south and south to Cambodia. I've said this before and been proven wrong, but I anticipate a vacuum of connectivity. If I'm not posting, I'm still writing and I'm still shooting. I hope you miss me.

With love,
-isaac

Location:Vang Vieng, PDR Laos

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home//walking a road many men have gone down//I'm seeing your world of people and things//your paupers//and peasants//and princes and kings." -Bob Dylan

We flew in on Laos Airlines and had a pleasant and uneventful flight. I'd heard it was a dangerous airline so I was frankly a little disappointed that nothing caught on fire even a little bit. The plane made funny noises and the in-flight meal was a little underwhelming - but I was expecting a Wright brothers bi-plane that you had to pedal like a bicycle, I was expecting jet-fuel explosions. If you ask me, that would be the way to go. Fast. Exciting. Nothing left but a few charred bones and a bit of ragged flesh. Let the monsoon rains bury me in Luang Prabang.



This town in the north of Laos is incredibly beautiful - nestled into the mountains that surround the Mekong River, hills speckled with temples and the streets full of monks and Chinese tourists. At four in the morning you can hear bells toll and chantings curl and moan like smoke.








There were some "frequently asked questions" on the back of one restaurant's menu. My favorite was, "Where are all the monks going?"



(The answer was, basically, "Doing people stuff, you stupid falang.")

Of an evening, a night market sprawls on either side and down the middle of the main street for almost a mile, people set up and sell crafts and weavings. I bought a big "fuck off" knife for ten dollars. Down one alley there are food vendors with fresh spring rolls, grilled meat and fish, and dollar-a-plate buffet with noodles and vegetables that I will sorely miss.

The city is vibrant and substantially under-construction.












There is a curfew here, same as Vietnam. Loosely enforced for people, but strongly monitored for businesses. After midnight everything closes down excepting the bowling alley I mentioned last time. They have some arrangement that let's them keep it open until four in the morning.

So we went to the goddamn bowling alley. I kept screaming, "over the line!" when someone's toe would slip, and there was a lot of talk about how Walter wasn't wrong, but that he was undeniably an asshole. Afterwards, we shared a tuk-tuk home with some nice fellow bowlers. I had some strange light in me and set off preaching the word of Christ in a bellowing voice. Just your humblest servant, Reverend Blood, traveling and spreading light with my associate Father Phlegm, and our dear horsekicked cousin, Brother Bile. We also do hip-hop themed christenings. It was really inspiring. Even Alfie thought so. After the ride, the driver looked at me and said, "Fuck you." Insisting we had ripped him off before we had paid him. Bowling by default. What a world. What a world. I don't think he liked my sermon.



(Cat in a hat - if I'd had gloves it could have been kitten in a mitten.)

Luang Prabang is the second most populated city in Laos and it's still pretty damn small. A simple Falang Reverend, for example, couldn't get away with, say, murdering a tuk-tuk driver over a five dollar grift and driving his rig to Cambodia. Still tempting.

We met an English ex-pat that runs a little eco-lodge we're switching to from our hostel. He's an odd duck, but I like his style. Very laid back. Likes to tell stories. He told us about the carpet bombing in Laos. The Ho Chi Minh Trail zagged between Vietnam and Laos when it was active, and we dropped bombs here every 8 minutes for several years. You can visit the caves where the Laos people hid. Half the bombs didn't blow when they hit the ground and to this day there are parts of Laos that you aren't allowed to walk through. Too risky. Too much unexploded ordinance.

To get to our new digs, you have to cross an old bridge with a footpath on either side for pedestrians. It drops a hundred feet down to the Mekong.








People are friendly here, but again, we are constrained to a particular chunk of town. Laos shares a lot with Thailand and our nickname has jumped the border. As we passed a mother and her baby, the mother smiled wide and grabbed her kid's arm, shaking it in a wave to us while saying, "Hello Falang!"

Oh my, the waterfall.











We stopped at a Mung village after visiting the waterfall - we swam, swung, ate fried rice and then went to the single poorest place I've ever been. There were a dozen kids or so, asking for 100 Kip. A little over a penny. We were brought there as though they were an attraction. A stop on the tour.

Apparently, there's a name for it, for poverty tours - poorism. Fuck me.

Brawn had some cookies to offer up, and the kids practically came to blows over them. I didn't take photos and I don't have any commentary.

Tomorrow, Vang Vieng, then keep pushing south. We'll see the rest of Laos, enter Cambodia to see Phnom Penh and Angkor Watt and then head back to Bangkok. By then I'll be seeking a suitable conclusion for the Asia leg of this journey.

Goodnight Laos. I'll keep you with me forever.

Location:Luang Prabang, PDR Laos