Life in the West

I haven't published a Post since returning from Asia, so a lot has happened since then and I will list a few highlights and get back to the present.
Bike trip to Fontainebleau:
I took a ferry to Dieppe in France with Clare and Greg, two friends from Bristol. The three of us spent 4 days biking from Dieppe to Fontainebleau, going through lots of charming french villages and ending up at our final campsite just in time to meet the rest of the climbing crew for a week of great bouldering and excellent fun.

Sam and Mara's visit:
After climbing in France I hitch-hiked home and soon after getting back Sam, a good friend from College, came to visit with his sister Marah. We enjoyed excellent weather and did lots of walking and some climbing and hanging out at my appartment. It was a great way to get home to have people to share the beauty of my little neck of the woods.
I worked at my restaurant job for a month and then John came to visit:

John's visit:
Once again the weather cooperated nicely. I took John, another close college friend, climbing and he got to witness the culmination of my climbing efforts that spring as I managed to climb the most challenging and satisfying climb I have ever accomplished. We also got to go on an excellent hike that involved a little hitchhiking, a long via ferrata up a huge limestone wall, a quick dip (with my cell phone...oops) into an exquisite alpine lake, and a day walking along a very narrow and exposed ridge. We also took advantage of a bad weather day to rappel into a cave that still has glacial ice stuck inside it. All in all a very exciting visit.

LPC Freedom,
After John's visit my grandparents stopped in for an extremely short visit of 2 nights and my parents and I took them to the airport, where I also boarding a plane for the states. I headed for Freedom, NH to be a counselor at a summer camp connected to the Ecole d'Humanite (the international boarding school where I grew up, but unless i'm mistaken about the popularity of this blog everyone who reads this will already know that). I spent 5 weeks in Freedom with an excellent staff and a rowdy and wonderful group of 9-13 year olds. Everything went very smoothly and now, without much warning, i'm done with camp and facing the rest of life.

Life in the West:
After a few more days in the Boston area I plan to head West and find a future. I haven't yet decided where I want to live, which is both exciting and a little difficult to plan around. I look forward to whatever lies ahead and will hopefully keep people updated on what that is.

Hope for Vietnam,

Important bus ride statistics:

Average time between honks of the horn = 6.4 seconds

The distance from my waist to my knees ≥ Distance between the back of my chair and the kidneys of the person sitting in front of me.

 Time it takes a Vietnamese person to fall asleep on a bus = time it takes to close their eyes + about 10 seconds.

Added value of a bus with onboard toilet facilities = $ 0.-, because the bus stops at least every two hours anyway.

The honking of Hanoi is incessant.  It has gotten to the point where the rearview mirror has been replaced by the certainty that everyone will use their horn to inform you of their presence. It has become an epidemic and at times the future of Vietnam’s streets look very bleak indeed. Yet there is hope, i met a few young Vietnamese who believed that, “people here honk more than necessary.” This counterculture of non-honkers is living by example in the hopes that it will catch on. They are also relying on influence from the West, hoping that as the country continues to develop and westernize, maybe they will also adopt the concepts of using rearview mirrors and right of way.

Despite the earsore, I dove into the culture by renting a motorbike of my own, the trusty Honda Wave, and I braved the streets of Hanoi for three full days and emerged unscathed.  My preparation for the streets of Hanoi was five months of travel in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, in that order. Before arriving in Vietnam, I had been made apprehensive by tales of fellow tourists being treated unkindly, ripped off, badgered excessively and overcharged to the point that many had found it to be the least enjoyable to visit in Southeast Asia. I prepared by setting up some contacts through Couchsurfing.org as well as some of Duncan’s study abroad friends. Things continued to work out as I headed from north through the country and I ended up thoroughly enjoying Vietnam. My experience opposed the reports I had received, as I found myself less pestered and more welcome than in any other country I have visited in my short life. Some examples of the hospitality I received:

 In the mountain town of Dalat I was approached by a nun, who was visiting with her nephew and offered me a place to stay at my next destination, Da Nang, where I was taken care of, fed, and driven around by the 22 year old gentleman who spoke very limited English, named Thanh, for two full days. Thanh’s family, none of whom spoke a word of English, refused to let me pay for anything over those two days, even getting the nun (who spoke English) to call me and tell me not to try to pay for anything.

Another example was a bicycling ice cream salesman I approached for a scoop only to realize I was completely out of cash. As he was dismounting his bike I realized my predicament and gestured that I wouldn’t buy the ice cream after all, but the old man calmly made me a cone, drizzled on some condensed milk and handed me the cone with a pat on my shoulder (as high as he could reach), no need to pay this time.

The final example I will give happened in Hanoi in a very touristy spot. I sat down to read my book on the grounds of a small pagoda and a woman came over and gestured for me to join her for lunch. She sat of the ground and unpacked a small feast of rice, steamed veggies, fish, soup, with lots of chunks of meat swimming in it, some meat jell-o and even some rice wine. Her friends joined and five of us sat there eating and trying to communicate. By the time I left I had also been given two passion fruits to eat and a coconut to drink and had a tentative date set up with one of the man’s daughters (that didn’t end up happening). Those were just the random acts of kindness that came completely un-looked for and unexpected. The people I met through couchsurfing were just as generous with their time, just as eager to meet and get to know people from around the world.

 The most uninteresting and unpleasant experiences I had were also the most expensive, namely the two tours I booked, one to see the Mekong Delta area, and the other to visit Ha Long Bay. The tours are westernized in a way that detracts from the experience. Everything must be idiot proof and accessible for 60+ year olds (no offense), everything is planned out, leaving no room for uncertainty and spontaneity, the food is bland and the people you meet are unexcited because all they do every day is deal with tourists. Also, you are surrounded by other tourists who were as uninspired as I was when I decided to sign up for a package tour. So basically, the tours go against many of my fundamental travel principles and thus are not my cup of tea (which was not very good either).

The opportunities

While I have been travelling I have had lots of time to read and think and putter around online. I have been feeling especially inspired recently by some alternative technologies I have been reading about, seeing, and taking part in. I would like to share some of the sources that I have found inspiring.

1. the book: Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World

This book is about a village in Colombia, South America, that is a model for sustainable living. They have built a ground up community that supplies it's energy from the sun, it's income from the rainforest while growing more trees at the same time. They are true pioneers, really forward thinking people. The book is great, a pleasure and inspiration to read.

2. Natural building:

Get on board, there are so many natural techniques that have been used forever such as adobe and cob building. An earthen home is cheap to build, doesn't require too much expertise, is beautiful, healthy and comfortable to live in and doesn't use nearly as many resources, unless you count dirt, which is an unlimited resource. Look into it, start with a homemade pizza oven: http://blog.sustainablog.org/how-to-build-your-own-cheap-outdoor-pizza-oven/ 

Here are some sites to get you excited:

3. Solar Cooling:

A college student figured out how to make a fridge that uses some very simple materials. The idea is so painfully simple it shouldn't work and yet it does.

Also, there are people designs for solar air conditioners that turn into solar heaters in winter.

The same principle has been used to make low tech solar freezers that can produce large quantities of ice. Check out this article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=solar-refrigeration

4. EM

It stands for Effective Microorganisms and is apparently the savior of our planet. A combination of a few different types of microorganisms (lactic acid bacteria, yeast, photosynthetic bacteria) can be cultivated to make this miracle substance. EM supposedly can be used diluted in water to help plants grow faster and stronger. It can keep compost piles, sewage systems, fish tanks , well basically anything from getting stinky and gross. It can be fed to animals to improve their health and yield (milk for example). It has been used to clean up after natural disasters such as Katrina. There are even EM recipes that people drink to improve their own health. EM is commerically available, it's quite expensive, but a little goes a long way, as you can dilute it quite heavily. There are also some recipes floating around online, but I can't vouch for any of them yet. 

How can you not get excited when you think about these things. I am starting to realize that despite the immense complexity of life, it is all so simple. The sun and dirt can take care of most of our needs. Let me know if you're inspired by something.
love to all,
Robo

Between the end of the banana season and the beginning of the coconut season

I love Vietnam. The people are friendly as can be and the places I’ve been are great. I will present some highlights of my time in Vietnam so far.

The ice cream buffet. Need I say more? Yes. It was a couchsurfing meeting in Saigon, so I thought it could be perfect. Meet other couchsurfers and enjoy an amazing buffet, all you can eat ice cream and whipped cream, real chocolate sauce, sorbet, fruit salad, passionfruit juice, oreos and sprinkles galore. I think I had about 10 mini Sundays and then some other stuff on the side.

Khan’s birthday party. I was couchsurfing in a 4 person apartment on floor 12A (meaning floor 13) of what must be one of the biggest apartment buildings in Ho Chi Min City. It was one of my hosts birthdays and we celebrated with a homemade feast and some drinks followed by a trip to a Karaoke lounge.

Visiting a farmer with a biogas digester. Duncan had worked to install a few biogas digesters in the Mekong Delta during his semester in Vietnam,  so I went to check out what they were all about. One of Duncan’s friends took me out to visit a farmer and translated for me the whole time as the farmer showed me around his fish ponds and pig stalls and then introduced me to his low budget biogas digester. Once he realized that I was truly interested in understanding the details, he drew it all out for me, pointing out some of the improvements he had made to the original system.

Dalat! The main destination for Vietnamese tourists to make a romantic getaway. Dalat is a small city in the mountains, surrounded by greenhouses growing strawberries and avocadoes, as well as more farmland, forests and lots of waterfalls. One waterfall had a rollercoaster that puts you in charge of the brakes winding down the hill through the jungle from the road to the waterfall. The other Dalat highlight was today. When I got here I met up with a French couchsurfer named Nans who had been hoping to raft down a river around here. We decided to buy some car innertubes and float down a river today. Getting there was the fun part. We drove my rental motorbike out of town and down into a flatter valley where we found a place to get our inner tubes inflated (a strange request for them in a town where we saw no other tourists all day) and then headed for the river. The river was beautiful, surrounded by rice patties and banana trees with basalt boulders strewn thoughout the river. The float itself wasn’t that successful as there wasn’t quite enough flow and the sun disappeared as soon as we got into the water, leaving us to slowly chill to the point where it was quite possible to forget that we were still in a tropical country.

Tip of the trip: Avocado smoothie, soooooooooo good!!! Just blend avocado and condensed milk, something like that, and you have a completely new way of experiencing avocadoes.

oh, and the title. It was something a Vietnamese said about when he would get married. Since coconuts and bananas grow all year round in southern Vietnam, it is a great way of not answering the question, i thought it was a good way of thinking about time in general.

rural to urban

My final day in Cambodia involved another trip into the countryside. This time I went with my agriculture partner, Kimsang. We took turns driving the motorbike to the village and then stood on the farmers plot wondering why his watermelons weren't growing.

 I was more intrigued by the fact that the cucumbers were growing on the same plot of rock hard dirt with no organic matter or water at all in the soil. The farmer was a friendly old man who also did some blacksmithing to make some farm tools that he presumably sold at the closest market. We asked some questions, took some pictures and gave him some seeds. Then along came his drunk wife, who fell in love with me. She cooed and pet me and then after a while she dragged me through some yards to the store, which was the village hang out and there someone produced a boom box so that she could dance with me.

 I was very embarassed, but didn't really see a way out, so I dance with her as about 20 people stood by laughing. I managed to pry myself out of that situation after Kimsang finally said we had to go, then we visited another farmer, who was too drunk to talk to. His plot of land reflected his drinking habit and there wasn't much use in analyzing the soil since he wasn't making much use of it. After that very rural experience I boarded the bus for Ho Chi Min and (after 14 hours) entered the bustle of motorbikes that everyone had warned me about. "You think this is a lot of motorbikes, wait until you get to Vietnam" is a common travelers comment. What first impressed me was the narrow buildings. Apparently at one point the government taxed businesses based on the width of the storefront, so now many of the buildings are only 4 meters wide, but very long and tall to make up for it. The war remnants museum was my first tourist destination and it was well done, making me wonder again how humans can be so inhumane. I was deeply impressed by the photography and at one point I had to step out of the exhibition on torture as it made me increasingly nauseous. I'm meeting up with Hieu, a friend of Duncan's from his time here. Tomorrow night i'm very excited to attend an icecream buffet for dinner. All the ice cream you can eat for just $5.- and as everyone knows I can eat a lot of ice cream.
Love to all.

When it rains it pours

Today was a memorable day for me. It was a day that I imagined, hoped for and feared when I thought of travelling to Asia. I was invited to join the Trailblazer well drilling team for a trip to finish work on some wells. I sat in the bed of a pickup truck for 2 hours as we drove to a small village North of Siem Reap. One perk of the butt numbing and extremely dusty ride was that we passed through the Angkor compound without paying, a rare exception for westerners (Cambodians can visit the temples of Angkor for free anytime). We were a team of five, heading out to build two cement bases for the PVC pull pumps drilled last week. The base I was helping to build was for a single mother who lived with 5 girls, some her younger sisters and some her children. She was pregnant and earned under 25 cents a day. The pump was the fanciest piece of equipment on her property, which consisted of a dirt lot with some scrawny dogs and a tiny wood house on stilts with no door and nothing inside it except for a few spare clothes hanging from a beam. She cooked outside with her 3 pots and a small wood fire. Lighting at night was provided by a tin can lantern.

The work was gratifying and physical, performed in a sticky 37 degrees C. After we finished the woman served us a simple lunch of fish soup and rice. I might well have been the first Barang (foreigner) to eat in her house. The floor boards had spacious gaps between them so I could drop my fishbones though to the dog on the ground. On the way home I was talking to Scott, the director of the Trailblazer foundation, about the work and the area. He pointed out a dozen signs that warned of landmines, saying that each sign was specific to an area where a recent accident had occurred. As we drove by,  kids biking home from school waved cheerfully, some even boasting an English “hello!”

Scott revealed to me how much money gets wasted in many aid projects. He says that big NGOs often have a poor understanding of what the local issues really are and since they are not in touch with local communities, a lot of their projects never happen in the places that really need help, basically they get stuck in bureaucracy. He pointed out several wells that were broken  and out of use, explaining that the organization who built them was charging double what Trailblazer charges and making poor quality wells. Scott and Chris live simple lives, and employ an all Cambodian staff. They have also raised several foster children. If you have any money to spare or know anyone who does I strongly believe In the Trailblazer Foundation. Not only are they helping the people who are really in the most need, but they are economically efficient about it, turning a higher percentage of donor money into direct action than the other NGOs in Cambodia.

Well, that’s why I’m glad to have found Trailblazer. Check out their website at http://www.thetrailblazerfoundation.org. I’m both inspired by the work I’m involved with and humbled by the

This evening it rained, making the day even more memorable. It is the first real rain I’ve seen since early December, and it rained hard, accompanied by some mighty lightning and thunder. I can only imagine how welcome this premature rain is for those who cannot irrigate.

Crossing the Street

How to Cross the Street,

Reporting from Siem Reap, Cambodia. After a week here I am getting used to the difference between Cambodia and Thailand. Getting here was the start. To get from Bangkok to Siem Reap I took train, taxi, bus, tuk tuk, bus, taxi, and finally another tuk tuk. I joined forces with two other Americans at the border and ended up spending several days with them. We shared a room and visited the temples of Angkor together and then they moved, while I stayed to volunteer for a bit with the Trailblazer Foundation, which I will get to shortly.

Cambodia is noticeably poorer than Thailand, with many more people desperately vying for your dollars. Offerings for tuk tuk rides, useless trinkets, books, food, tours and massages engulf you in downtown Siem Reap and at the entrance to any temple. Traffic is even a little crazier than Thailand and it is common to see bikes and scooters going on the wrong side of the road. The most effective way to make a left turn onto a busy street while riding a bicycle is to cross to the left side before you get to the main road and then sneak onto the far left side of the road, going against traffic until the oncoming traffic clears and one can cross back to the right side of the road. It seems to be the common procedure and people look at you funny if you wait for traffic to clear as one would in first world countries. Following local traffic customs, we (one of the Portland, OR guys and myself, his friend’s stomach lost that battle against the previous night’s streetfood) biked out to Angkor for a beautiful sunrise over Angkor Wat. We then walked around there a bit and then headed to a quieter temple with trees growing on the crumbling walls. The next day we were full force again, and although we didn’t rise with the sun there was still plenty of time to take in the ancient sights. Our collective favorite was Bayon, a strange temple palace with over 30 towers all carved with a face on each of 4 sides. It was a maze of passageways, stairs, small rooms and courtyards. In the afternoon we sought out the shadier site of Ta Prom, which was intentionally not restored by the original French restoration team (now there is extensive restoration and conservation work to maintain the site in its “unrestored” state. The forest has filled in, creating the famous images of tree roots strangling carved walls and framing doorways. After drinking a coconut at one of the many food stalls outside Ta Prom, we were invited to see the home of our vendor; we had been joking around with her for a while. I took her younger cousin with us on the back of my bike and we headed for her village, just behind the temple grounds. It was so sweet to bike through a village and smiling faces, no one offered to sell us anything, they were now in full hospitality mode and were very sweet. The family chatted with us and showed off their fruit trees and well. The home was modest, but appeared to be quite sufficient and I suspect that many villages are in much worse condition. The tourism is definitely huge for the local economy and I suspect many of the villages around Angkor have developed due to the draw of western money.

Speaking of western money, here is the one of the local schemes. A young boy comes up to your dinner table, tries to sell you a book you don’t want. You decline and after a while of begging he tells you that he needs the money for his baby sister who he is trying to support. His mother died and he needs to buy her formula, powdered milk he calls it. If he goes a day without food it’s okay, but his sister needs powdered milk today. So you feel sorry and you also feel better about buying him something that he really needs instead of buying his stupid book that you’re just going to throw away. So he takes you to the store and points at a jug of formula. You ask the storeowner how much it costs and he says $12.-, so you keep asking until you find the cheapest formula they have for $5.-. He takes it and thanks you kindly and then returns it to the store as soon as you leave to get the money back. This happened to someone I met and then yesterday I saw it happen again to someone else.

After visiting the Temples I turned to the volunteering opportunity that another traveler I met in Chiang Mai told me about. The Trailblazer Foundation works with rural villages improve public health and education. They install wells and supply water filters and have built a few schools, and donated many mosquito nets and flip flops. They also have an agriculture department to test seeds, EM, and mushroom growing and promote organic farming and gardening methods. I have been helping to fill plastic bags with a sawdust mixture, steaming them and then adding spores. The bags are placed in the mushroom hut and eventually start producing impressive amounts of mushrooms. I am working primarily with a Khmer woman named Voleak, but the heads of the foundation are American. I have been really enjoying It so far, just based on the relaxed yet productive approach. I hope to stay here for at least another week, we’ll see what actually happens.