Laos

Last year when visiting Central America we got an education in US history that was never mentioned in school. We were saddened to learn of the negative influence that the US foreign policy and military has had on the region over many decades. (We talked about this in a few post from last September to November 2016). But here in Laos, a small country in SE Asia, we've discovered yet another lesson in the never-ending course entitled What We Didn't Learn in 10 Years of US History Class. It's called the Secret War in Laos. The Ho Chi Minh trail runs through Laos and was used by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War as an artery for delivering supplies. It was a major target of the US bombing campaign in Laos as an effort to cut off the Viet Cong's supplies. This intense bombing of Laos makes it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Many of the bombs dropped were tennis ball-sized cluster munitions. About 30% of these 'bombies' did not detonate when they landed over 40 years ago, so they remain on the surface or buried a few inches below waiting for a farmer's hoe or a child to pick them up and play catch with his friends. Since the end of the war in the mid-seventies, these Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) have killed or maimed 20,000 people in Laos and continue to do so today, almost half a century later.

Thankfully, in 2008 an international treaty which bans the use, production of and stockpiling of these cluster munitions was signed by 119 countries. Guess who is not on that list... the USA. If you're infuriated by learning about this (or maybe you already knew), you can help the cause by donating to two organizations that we visited while in the capital city, Vientiane. One is called COPE: they make prosthetic limbs for people that have lost theirs while going about their daily activities, farming their land, cooking for their families or traveling to a neighbor's house. The other organization is called MAG, which works around the world to help communities recover from the scars left behind from war. At both visitor's centers, we were embarrassed to tell people where we're from, and the tenor of the conversation definitely took a turn for the awkward once we revealed our nationality.

Our time spent in Laos was humbling and educational. On our trip we have been constantly reminded of how fortunate we are, simply as a result of our birthplace. On a more positive and touristic note, Laotian people, as well as Hmong and Khmu people, the other two major ethnic groups, are generally very friendly and gracious, and their food is delicious and SPICY.

We spent our first night in Laos at a homestay called the Daauw Home that works with local women (mostly single moms). The place was crawling (literally) with cute kids.

We played Uno with a couple kids at the Daauw Home. The boy in the blue shirt beat us badly.

We opted for a two-day boat trip down the Mekong River instead of a 12 hour bus ride. We're over busses at this point. 

The misty Mekong River.

Mekong.

That is a plate of delicious, grilled chicken... and a foot.

We spent a couple nights in Luang Prabang and volunteered one evening at an awesome non-profit that prints children's books (in Laos and English) and teaches the locals how to speak English. We had tears in our eyes reading about their work: they created a font to be able to to print the Laos alphabet and successfully obtained a printing license in a city that had never before issued a printing license in order to change the cultural attitude toward reading - "Laos people don't read." We sat with some kids for 2 hours just practicing English.

Riding bikes around the World's Most Un-bike-able City: Vientiane. (Tim gave it that designation). They have delicious French bakeries, though. 

We logged over ten hours on Thai Railways traveling from Laos to Cambodia - over 335 miles - for a whopping $3 USD each. (We just arrived today to Siem Reap, Cambodia). Again, we'll do anything to not ride a bus. The train was old-timey with conductors running around the platforms ringing bells, wearing funny costumes, and waving green and red flags. It had all the romance of a turn-of-the-century train ride that you read about in books and see in the movies. We were covered in mysterious grime at the end of each day on the trains.

Myanmar

Myanmar is in the running for favorite country of the trip. The people are really sweet and friendly, which might be due to the fact that the government just opened the country up to tourism in 2011, so the place hasn't be overrun by drunk Australians backpackers. (If any Australians are reading this, I'm just kidding. Sort of.) Burmese people are generally pumped to see us. We've been guest stars in a number of family vacation photos, and people think it's hilarious when we try to give or receive money in the traditional Burmese fashion, with the left hand tucked under the right elbow, right hand extended. The food is also delicious. It is somewhat similar to Indian food, and in Yangon we ate a lot of actual Indian food because the city has significant Hindu Indian and Muslim Indian populations.

Here are some fun facts: the majority ethnic group in Myanmar are the Bama, but since Brits do that weird thing where they add an "r" sound to words that end in an "a" sound, pronouncing "idea" as "idear," "tuna" as "tuner," or "Madonna," as "Madonner," the British colonialists named it Burma, ignoring the fact that the country already had a name. The military regime that took power in the 60s eventually changed it back to Myanmar. Also as a result of colonialism, all of the vehicles have steering columns on the right side and thus everyone would drive on the lefthand side of the street as in the UK. However, sometime in the 70s one of the military leaders had a dream (or saw a psychic, depending on who is telling the story) that the country should switch to driving on the right side of the street and switched the country to the new program overnight. It took us a while to figure out what seemed strange about riding as a passenger in vehicles, having just come from New Zealand and left-side-driving/righthand steering columns.

We started our trip with four days in Yangon during the Water Festival, Thingyan. Your clothes are literally soaking wet from the moment you step outside the door of your building until the water throwing ends around 6pm. Thingyan is a Buddhist festival, during which everyone has the right to soak passerbys (except monks and old ladies wearing white tops and brown bottoms) with copious amounts of water. The water is supposed to wash away your sins. We are sin-free now. 'Gangs' of teenagers seemed to enjoy it most, riding around in the back of trucks with garbage cans full of water, dipping small buckets and hurling them from their moving vehicle onto strangers passing by. Families also set up stations with drums full of water so their children could easily reload their super soakers and buckets of water. Two stations of kids on our street would become ecstatic when they saw us approaching, so we tried to outrun them once for fun. Ultimately you just have to good-naturedly bow your head and allow them to pour water down your back or spray with a hose at max pressure.

After Yangon, we went to visit the temples of Bagan, an ancient Buddhist site of over 2000 temples. We rented an electric moped and drove around paying homage to the many Buddhas inside each temple (never forgetting to remove our shoes). Bagan is known for it's dramatic sunsets and sunrises, but unfortunately it rained during our stay. We still enjoyed it despite the 24 hour traveler's bug we caught there. (We've really appreciated the bidets in the hotel bathrooms here.)

Next, we went to Inle Lake, which is more of a deep wetland than a lake as you may think of it. We took a boat ride on a motor-powered canoe through its shallow waters, covered with floating gardens, villages built on stilts and men fishing. We were surprised by Inle Lake, thinking it would be a typical tourist lake visit, but it was much more. It was full of bustling markets with authentic handicrafts, men doing metal-working with literal hammer and anvil, cigar-rolling women, women weaving tapestries using the incredible lotus fiber, Buddhist temples and a monastery.

We have both agreed that of the countries we've visited so far, Myanmar would top our list of countries to return to. Tomorrow we are flying to the Myanmar-Thailand border (foreigners are not allowed to take buses through this particular section of the country). Then, through northern Thailand by bus and into Laos to start the next bit of the Asian adventure!

Kids love Thingyan.

People loved to dump water on us.

Yangon

Shwedagon Pagoda (Thingyan eve)

This monk requested a picture with us.

Buddha, Buddha, everywhere!

Floating gardens of Inle Lake. The rows between the crops are wide enough for their typical canoe to navigate so they can tend the crops.

Shwedagon Pagoda (Yangon)

The rare sleeping Buddha (Bagan)

Jenn descends from climbing a pagoda. Yes, it was about that steep.

Boracay Open 2017

I found my second Ultimate tournament on our big trip here in The Philippines. I was able to get connected with a team that needed players, called The Designated Drinkers. We had people from all over the world: Philippines, Russia, Germany, UK, US, Taiwan and France, most of them being ex-pats living somewhere in Australia or Asia. There were teams from many different countries participating from Finland to New Zealand, and even a fake country called Currier Island. (Back in 2004 some frisbee players created a fake country in order to play in the World Beach Ultimate tournament. Their ruse was discovered, but they were still allowed to play and Currier Island still sends a team to the World tournament every year!)

The Designated Drinkers played surprisingly well considering the lack of team unity (many people on the team were meeting for the first time) and of course the name hints that the spirit of the team is more focused on off-the-field pursuits. We won four of our seven games and made it to the semi-finals of the D pool.

Beach Ultimate is huge on this particular island in The Philippines. The perfect stretches of soft, white sand beaches make it a breeding ground for world-class beach Ultimate. The championship games of the tournament in all four pools (A, B, C, and D) were games between two Boracay teams (except the Kiwis made it to the finals of D pool and lost to none other than the Boracay developmental team comprised of a bunch of really athletic, fast 14-year-olds).

We are in Manilla now, biding our time until our night flight to Yangon, Myanmar. Water festival here we come!

The Designated Drinkers

Here's what some of the action looked like. (I did not take this photo. There were some pros shooting the event).

It is a mixed tournament, meaning men and women play together. 3 men, 1 woman on the field for each team.

Typical Boracay sunset.

Sand-sculpting artists take to the beach every night to create these masterpieces.

Sunset catamaran boat cruise.

We got one of those cheesy drawings done. Pretty disappointed at how it turned out; not really looking like either of us.

Is this up to code????

Happy House Farm and Siargao Island - Philippines

Tim and I are on week three of our time in the Philippines, a last minute travel decision made when Tim found a team to pick up with for the "best beach ultimate frisbee tournament in the world." We didn't know much about the Philippines before we got here other than about Imelda Marcos' shoe collection and that they speak Tagalog, but a fellow traveler we met in Colombia (Steve Martin, no, not that one, the one who also stayed at the Bubble in El Salvador and knows Mario) raved about the country and the people. 

He was right - the people are super friendly and lovely, and the beaches are beautiful. It has a very Central American feel in that everyone is at least a foot shorter than Tim, there are stray dogs and chickens everywhere (have we told you about the barking dogs and incessant cockadoodledoing yet? We had a nice break in New Zealand...), food and beer are ridiculously inexpensive, and, wait for it, the United States got all up in their political affairs for a number of years. People are definitely friendlier and seem less suspicious of us than in Central America, though; probably because we didn't cause or contribute to a civil war here. Anyway, some other differences are that goats compete with the chickens and dogs for real estate on the side of the road, way more people speak English, and instead of mototaxis there are "trics" (tricycles, a motorcycle with a side car) and "jeepneys," a short, long piece of scrap metal on wheels that is exuberantly decorated and costs about ten cents to ride.

Here are some other fun facts: the country is comprised of over 7,000 islands, and there are over a hundred local languages in the Philippines. Our first week we spent at the Happy House, a permaculture farm and hostel six hours north of Manila in a region where most people speak Ilokano. The locals could understand the five words of Tagalog we managed to learn on the flight over, but Ilokano is totally different, so we didn't do much communicating in either language when hand gestures and pidgin English would do. Side note: Filipino languages have a lot of "ang" sounds in them, and Bing and Bong are actual names. I'm also reading a novel by a Filipino-American that won the Man Asian Literary prize with a character by the name of Ding-Dong. I have yet to confirm if any Filipino living or deceased has ever actually had this name.

The Happy House was pretty remote, so we had a lot of nice down time to read, play guitar, and walk up and down the main road and give out high fives to little kids. It was also common for people to get really excited to see us amble by their front yards and yell, "Hello! Where are you going?!" We didn't know if this was a direct translation for Ilokano and meant more like, "How's it going?" but we responded that we were going "that way" every time, and they seemed content with that answer. 

Next we spent five days in Siargao (Shar-gow), an island known by surfers for its famous Cloud 9 break. We couldn't even get close to it on our boards because the current was so strong, but we did some other surfing at the not-so-Secret Spot. I stood up a total of three times, a new personal record. Tim is of course crushing surfing, like all sports, so I remain engaged in an one-person competition to be better than him at something already, jeez. Ahem. We also rented a moped for transportation and cruised around like the locals sans helmets and through foot-deep puddles. As Tim would no doubt say were he authoring this post, the drainage on the roads was terrible. We got one flat tire and got it repaired for ONE DOLLAR. 

Our accommodations were at a hostel run by an extremely garrulous Filipina woman who wanted to plan every minute of our stay on Siargao, so we spent a considerable amount of time trying to sneak out of the hostel unnoticed. One of the days we escaped to take a day trip to a lagoon where we did stand-up paddle boarding, snorkeled and hung out with some Filipino priests-in-training who were on a "bach trip" and hitting the sacramental rum pretty hard. We didn't always know what they were saying, but they seemed to be having a good time.

Now we're in Cebu for a day to try their famous "lechón," roasted pig, before we fly to Boracay for the big frisbee tourney. Sa susunod na pagkikita!

You have to read the text starting at "Cutting-edge technology..."

Playing a sandal-throwing street game with some local 11-year-olds near the Happy House farm.

Terraced farming near our farm-stay at the Happy House.

Night sky at the Happy House farm. Dragon Fruit trees (more like cacti) in the foreground.

Crocodile ridge near the Happy House.

Typical Filipino Banka (boat with outriggers for stability). Looks like a scene from Star Wars when these things are whizzing across the water. (Siargao Island)

Jenn leading a team of wild dogs. (Siargao Island)

Jenn loves to dorkel! (Siargao Island)

Subga Lagoon diving board. (Siargao Island)