Adrift in Asia: Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia

Sanya
Dispatch from the "ill conceived" corner of the boxing ring in my brain where all the decisions get made:

On the last day in Sanya, I decided to camp on the beach. Actually, there weren't any beds left in the hostel, but they did have a tent. Fall asleep to the lullaby of the waves, I thought. Wake up to the sunrise over the water. Delightful. In what turned out to be an extreme stroke of good luck, I sold my rosy vision to Lydia, who gave up her own bed to join the beach camping adventure. It was especially nice to have her there around 2 a.m., the third time someone unzipped our tent to peer inside. This one turned out to be a one-legged homeless man who wanted to share our tent, or, barring that, to borrow a blanket, or, barring that, to have some money. Also, he wondered, was there just one of us in there? After a huddled consultation, we decamped to the hostel patio for the rest of the night.

And speaking of decisions, here's one that's hopefully less ill-fated: I'm staying for a second year. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Indonesia
From Hainan to Singapore to Jakarta to Jambi
Arrived in the middle-of-nowhere town of Jambi on Sumatra to visit Carolyn. Indonesian is a ridiculous language, clearly concocted by the same geniuses who brought us pig Latin. After five days, I was very nearly as fluent in Bahasa Indonesia as I am in Chinese.

Loved the public transit system, which consists of standing on the side of the road and hollering "ojek!" until a man on a motorcycle swerves to the side and lets you hop on the back. How do you tell an ojek driver from every other random guy with a moto? The ojek drivers usually wear vests, I was told; so that's a nice foolproof system.

Ate roasted corn and fresh squeezed sugar cane juice in the evening on the docks, and tucked my feet up carefully on the bench to avoid contact with the cat-sized rats and rat-sized cockroaches that frolicked and made merry under the tables. Listened for the call-to-prayer that echoed from both banks at sunset, and tried to befriend the local monkeys with no success: somewhat of a theme during these travels.

Thailand

From Jambi to Jakarta to Phuket (by air) to Krabi (by bus) to Railay (by boat)
Crashed the Southeast Asia VIA conference on the ridiculously picturesque Thai island of Railay, where the jutting karst last seen in southern China made a reappearance, but this time surrounded by white sand and waters of an unreal aquamarine hue.

Tried my hand at rockclimbing on the limestone cliffs, which it turns out I am awesome at (insert modest shrug here), and have decided to possibly devote my life to. Efforts at befriending local monkeys, who romped on the railings of the hotel and ducked mockingly under the rock-climbing ropes to scale the same cliffs and taunt us from above, once again rebuffed. Waited until I was firmly on terrafirma to slip and slice open my knee (whereupon fellow vol Katy D calmly announced that she was a certified "wilderness first responder," and had me cleaned up and disinfected in minutes), bringing the number of disfiguring scars acquired since coming to Asia to a new grand total of three.

From Railay to Krabi (boat) to Bangkok (bus)
Celebrated Chinese New Year by raising a Chang beer with my traveling companions when the overnight bus stopped for a quick roadside dinner. I meant to only stop in Bangkok for a few hours on my way to Cambodia, but got waylaid by circumstance.

Emerged briefly from a three-day orgy of air-conditioned corporate consumerism (spent a lot of time in the mall) to attend a press conference at the Bangkok Foreign Correspondent's Club on Amnesty International's report on the state of politics in post-Saffron Revolution Burma (in summary: not good). It was the first time I've ever been to a press conference I'm not covering, and I couldn't kick the habit of taking notes. Amnesty clearly knows the number one internationally accepted rule of journalism: The best way to get reporters to show up to a press conference? Free food.

By this time, I was eating four to five meals a day, in a frenzy to consume all the Western food I've missed out on for the last six months. Starbucks! Sushi! Indian food! Pizza! Chips and guacamole? Good lord, order me seconds. This slightly fetishy obsession with food has, let's just say, left its mark, but I figure I'm just one really good bout of food poisoning away from fitting comfortably in my jeans again.

Cambodia
From Bangkok to border (bus and tuktuk) to Battambang (at one point, the back of a pickup truck)
Overland border crossings are shady business. The tuktuk driver at the Thai-Cambodian border blithely tried to deliver us to a hut with a desk next to a building with a clearly made-up "Cambodian Embassy" sign where they could "help us with our visas." Oh please, we sighed; he gave a can't-blame-a-guy-for-trying shrug and took us to the real border crossing, which you have to walk across on foot. Outside the visa kiosk, another man tried to extort money from Katie while the real visa officials watched with a smile, waiting to see whether we'd fall for it. Once across, we flagged down a shared taxi, which then tried to load us into a small car already carrying seven passengers.

But Battambang! Sure, it's automatically cool for being the place where Angelina Jolie scored the first child in her multi-ethnic menagerie. But it's also got heavy helpings of French colonialism, a glut of expat cafes straight out of an old movie, with big wicker chairs and lazy ceiling fans overhead - and best of all the Battambang Circus! Started in a refugee camp, the circus NGO trains underprivileged kids in all kinds of Cirque de Soleil-ish feats, from acrobatics to fire jump roping.

From Battambang to Siem Reap (boat)
It seemed like such a good idea. I believe the phrase Lonely Planet uses to describe the boat ride from Battambang to Siem Reap is "seriously picturesque." During the wet season, it's a three-hour jaunt in a big comfortable boat, past the floating villages and through the Cambodian countryside.

This, however, is the dry season.

So then: Seven hours with more than a dozen strangers in a glorified rowboat that still managed to beach itself on every shoal and river bend that presented itself. In retrospect? Worth it. At the time, I had to fight the urge to swim for shore.

Siem Reap, home of the extremely important for various historical and religious reasons that I can't quite recall temple complex Angkor Wat, turned out to be another haven of Western comforts. It's not that the temples weren't breathtaking monuments to ancient artistry andingenuity, and my memories of clambering over the ruins are fond (even the one where Charlsea rousted me out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to see a nonexistent sunrise over the temples). It's just that the feta focaccia sandwich and cinnamon speculos gelato holds an equally special place in my heart.

From Siem Reap to Phnom Penh (bus)
Last night on the outside: Wine and cheese and Johnny Cash on the roof with Charlsea and Molly. And then ... back to the plateau, where there is no wine, no cheese, no cinnamon speculos gelato, no monkeys, and definitely no Molly and Charlsea.

Sigh.

From surreal to sweltering: Dutch farmhouses and Russian beaches

There's been a real thaw in Sino-American relations of late ... In that, I'm American, and I've been feeling considerably less hostile toward China recently. Turns out, there is a whole vast country outside the ethnic tensions and insular society of the plateau.




Went from just about perishing from hypothermia on a raft trip down the River Li in Yangshuo one day to baking lobster style on the beaches of Sanya the next.

After Chengdu, I met up with Beth and her friend Morgan in Guilin, famous for its karst -- lump-like rocky hills that look like something out of Lord of the Rings. (I've seen the karst once before, in Cuba. They're very dreamscape-y.) We spent several freezing, rainy days staying in a Dutch farmhouse in Yangshuo, wiling away happy hours eating copious amounts of food in front of a fire with an extremely jolly group of Dutch travelers. (Tried dog, a Guilin specialty. Did not enjoy.)

Then on to the VIA conference on the island of Hainan, an utterly bizarre tropical resort-ish place that has absolutely no business belonging to China and suffers from a severe split personality as it struggles to decide whether to cater more closely to Chinese tourists (who every single one dress cult-like in absolutely matching head-to-toe Hawaiian prints) and Russian tourists (who I assume account for the otherwise inexplicable prevalence of fur coat shops on this, once again, tropical island).

It's the first (and probably last) time that all 11 China volunteers have seen each other since we left the Nanjing training six months ago, and there's an odd comrades-in-arms feeling to the reunion.

For those of you just dying to know more about my fellow vols and what we've been up to this year, our program director filmed this video of each of us when she toured our posts in the fall.

VIA China Director's Tour of Post from Anjali Mutucumarana on Vimeo.