Nepal - for dad

Hi dad, 

Hope your trip over to Ireland went well and you had a few nice days with Roy. And, hoping that you have better weather in Wexford than in Cornwall!! 

I was trying to think of a way to send you some photos from here and thought I'd write this post on my blog and ask Pat to show it to you. 

So far I'm loving Nepal. My plane flight over was quite bizarre -- it was me and a few other tourists and then about 200 young Nepalese men. And that was all! I couldn't work out why there were so many men of the same age, because they didn't look like they were wealthy overseas students or tourists. After I saw that a couple of them had bandages on their feet and hands I figured they were all migrant workers. Later I found out they were mostly working in Dubai and Qatar etc, and most of them had been away on two or three year contracts.  When the baggage carousel started there was not much luggage coming out but a lot of boxes with flat-screen TVs! 

This is what Kathmandu looked like from the plane.  Very green, because it is monsoon season. And, not much town planning going on, looks like you can build a four story house anywhere you want.

My hotel is the height of luxury -- hot water AND television! The owner is an interesting guy. He is a Gurkha (I'm not sure how you spell it, but they are the famous Gurkhas that the British used to fight for them). He was born fairly poor, and came to Kathmandu to work as a porter, carrying the supplies for mountain climbers. Now he owns three hotels, a trekking company, has a masters in history and is doing second Masters in psychology! He also bought another building to put a museum in. I don't think he sleeps much. I can see why the British used them as soldiers. 

This is the view from the roof of the hotel over Kathmandu - 

Across the road is a school that was hit by the earthquake. Fortunately the quake was on a Saturday so no children were in school. I met a guy yesterday who has three children, they go to two different schools, both of which collapsed in the quake. So he said everyone here is just so thankful that the quake came when it did.  

Here are some photos of the clean-up. All very OH&S compliant...if you zoom in you can see they are standing around a big hole, loading bricks onto the back on one guy, and for some reason the one up the top is sitting on top of a doorway! 

Well, I just came up for breakfast and I have an update to those photos above. They are now on the third story, and check out the guy who is standing on a piller with a straight drop behind him hacking away at the piller underneath him. WITH NO SHOES ON!! 

(And, you can see the way they carry the bricks...in conical shaped baskets they attach around their foreheads.) 

The earthquake damage is pretty obvious. I go to have lunch in a place about 80 metres from my hotel, and yesterday I counted three buildings plus the school that had gone. And, not small buildings either, they were three stories or more and you can see where they have sheared away from the buildings to the side of them. 

This old part of Kathmandu is really fascinating -- narrow streets, no sidewalks (so everyone just walks in the road), really old buildings made of a kind of brick that looks more like mud-brick, and temples everywhere. There aren't that many cars here, and because the roads are so small people don't have normal-sized cars, just those mini cars and trucks (like that car Brigid used to have).

I actually can't believe that more old buildings didn't fall, they all look like they are about to! I was talking to a guy yesterday who said that you couldn't stand up in the quake; he was on the third floor and said it was impossible to run because you couldn't stand.  He said he grabbed onto a cupboard door and hung on for dear life. 

Here are some more photos of this area... This is what the old buildings look like.  

Pathology lab/butcher! 

Nepalese dental clinics certainly look a bit different than the Thai clinic I went to last week ...(I think the dentist and Saddam Hussein shared an interior decorator!!) Mayeb Peter could get some decorating ideas from this...

Cambodia -- a Dental Odyssey

At last I'm feeling better after that crazy month I spent in Phnom Penh going to the dentist. I actually had a good month there, and as well as going to about ten dental appointments and moving hotels seven times in an attempt to find one that was relatively quiet, I  got to do a bit of sightseeing. 

Phnom Penh apartment building

The main tourist attraction in Phnom Penh is a gruesome one. When the Khmer Rouge was in power they used a local school, called S21, as a prison and torture centre, and it has been preserved as a museum. 

It's quite disconcerting, because it looks quite peaceful from the outside and is right in downtown Phnom Penh, so it doesn't look as sinister as it feels once you go inside. They've tried to preserve how the rooms looked when the Vietnamese found them when they invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. There are hundreds of photos of inmates displayed, most of them young men and teenagers. (There were 12,000 inmates and only 9 survived). 

The grounds of S21 (with graves of the last victims). 

I was telling the receptionist at my dentists about my visit and she said that she'd only been for the first time last year, but only because her university was hosting some overseas students and she went with them.  She said that until she saw the centre she really didn't believe that what the Khmer Rouge had done was real.  (There are former members of the Khmer Rouge, including the Prime Minister, who are currently in government, so there are many powerful people in Cambodia who would prefer if people just forgotthe genocide ever happened).  So, I realised that it is really important to keep this evidence of the Khmer Rouge alive (just like they do in places like Auschwitz), so that people can't just brush history under the carpet and pretend it never happened. 

I was staying outside the tourist district and had my normal problems finding food to eat. I eventually came across a place with an English menu and then wished I hadn't.  I'm was praying I hadn't already eaten "Fried cow's dict with ants". 

Pig shopping for Chinese New Year

I took this photo in the meat section of a market. All the meat here seems to be sold like this -- it hangs out in the sun for hours (and it is really hot here) with flies all over it. In the photo you can see that the sun is directly on the meat. What I can't understand is how no-one gets sick.  Maybe the heat cooks it?!

I left Phnom Penh and headed 3 hours south to a coastal town called Kep. It used to be a tourist resort for wealthy locals French colonialists and they built a housing development of modernist, concrete, 1960's houses.  When the Khmer Rouge arrived they just torched them all. The town today is just guesthouses, a market, and the burnt out shells of houses. It's quite eerie. 

Burnt-out house in Kep

They have a big crab market at Kep where you can buy crab and have it cooked on-the-spot over an open fire. I took some photos of the women who spend all day in this incredible heat, stoking fires and cooking crab. The whole scene looked like something out of Dickensian England.

The day before yesterday I finally started feeling a bit better so, to celebrate, I rented a motorbike and went about 10 kms out into the countyside and stayed by the river for a night.  Here are a few photos I took on the way.  (I love Cambodian kids because they are the only people who talk to me! They can only say "hello!!!" but it's a lot more than the taciturn adults will say).  

Typical countryside, flat and scrubby. 

This is where I stayed... very peaceful! 

Travelling knife salesmen...I imagine he gets a wide berth on the roads.

Bar or petrol station?? 

Playing Food Lotto in Phnom Penh

Hi all,

I landed in Phnom Penh and had organised a pickup from the house I was going to stay at. I was envisioning being one of those business travelers who arrive at Tullamarine ans get whisked away to their limosine. Here was my limo: 

This looks like something Tone and Aidan created using stolen work-supplies and  rope. 

A few minutes later this family passed us. Four people on a motorbike is no bigy, but the mum is holding a saline drip attached to a wooden pole which is going down into her daughter's arm!  The next time I hear some talkback caller complaining to Jon Faine about Australia's third-world standards of health-care I will email in this photo. 

I stayed for a week in a house completely outside the tourist area. No-one spoke English, it was chaotic and dusty, and I played food lotto all week because I had no idea how to order food or what the dishes were. I do know that they eat an an awful lot of offal here -- as depicted here in this delicious intestine and cubed congelated blood curry. 

To make things just a tiny bit more difficult, they use two currencies here, the US$ and the Cambodian riel. How it works it that you pay in dollars and get riel back. But, you don't just pay, for example $2 and get 1 riel back... You pay $2 and get 12,000 riel back. Siobhan and Brett probably would have worked out a way to make money from this exchange, but I think I ended up paying $10 for a deep-fried banana.

Ate these every night and have no idea what they are.

As well as losing about a million riel in fried-banana and intestine curry  transactions, I went to the dentist three times in a week. For some reason, they have a lot of good dentists here, and Cambodia is starting to build up an international reputation for dental tourism. I absolutely earnt back my airfare just through the one filling I had (compared to what it would have cost in Australia). 

One thing I noticed straight away in Cambodia is how young the population is. The Khmer Rouge came into power about 40 years ago and killed anyone who was a professional, educated, artistic, or even wore glasses. Essentially, anyone who had skills beyond farming was lucky to survive. So you see a lot of people under 35 here, but not so many people over the age of 50. 

  

The dentist I went to was in his 30's and his father, who is a doctor, survived the Khmer Rouge. He talked to me a bit about it and said that though it was 40 years ago, you can still see the impact of those five years the Khmer Rouge was in power. They basically cut the country off at the knees, because they killed people with a whole range of skills in a very short time, and then left the country with hardly any teachers, artists or university professors who could pass on their skills to the next generation. 

Now I am off down south, to the coast. Hopefully it will be little less dusty! 

Bye-bye Phnom Penh!

The Flying Men of Mexico

Hello Henry, Callum and Aidan!! 

I saw something very cool a few days ago and thought I would send you some photos. There were some men who climbed up a VERY tall and skinny pole. 

Can you see the yellow rope around the pole? They wound it up and wrapped it around the pole. Then...they tied the rope around their waists and jumped off! 

They spun round and round and their friend stayed on the top playing the flute. As they spun around the roap got longer, and they got closer to the ground. 

And finally they reached the ground again! They are called the "Flying Men of Mexico" (because "Mexico" is the name of the country I am in).

They really love magic and spells and ghosts in Mexico. You can buy special magic spray-cans which you spray around your house and it will bring you money or whatever you want!

Here is a photo of a man in his magic store. He is selling lots of herbs that you can use to put a spell on someone, and behind him you can see the magic spray-cans. 

Here is me with my New Mexican friend. I think she might be a skeletont! Should I be scared?? 

Would you like me to bring back something magic for you? I will see you all again in about a month. I am so excited! 

I will say goodbye with some more scary stuff...skulls! 

Xoxo em

Breaking Bad: Mexico

Hi all! 

A few photos from my last few months in Mexico. 

I started off in Mexico City, which has about 20 million inhabitants (so, almost the same as the population as Australia). It's a cool place (in both senses of the word). I think it's the world's highest capital city, around 2000 metres, and it's often called the "City of the Eternal Spring," which I think is a bit generous. I was there in the hottest month of the year and the sun came out for about an hour a day, so I'd call it the "City of the Eternal Extremely-Early-Spring (Practically still Winter)" 

Cathedral in the Centre of the City

I stayed in an apartment in an area which reminded me a bit of North Fitzroy: crumbling 1920's mini-mansions covered in vine, trendy cafés selling tofu-stuffed tacos and - of course - yoga and meditation studios galore. 

Easter Sunday in Mexico City

Then I flew to the coast to a city called Puerto Vallarta and stepped onto the set of 'Breaking Bad: the Burrito Edition´. Breaking Bad is a big US show about a chemistry teacher who became a meth dealer to fund his cancer treatment, but in my version of the show we had a guesthouse owner who was trying to become a pill dealer in order to fund the creation of a rehab clinic (or perhaps a ´healing centre´).  Yes, it was that insane. 

I spent a whole month listening to the other members of the house sit at a table outside my room while they talked  about their  various addictions, compared rehabs, spun conspiracy theories  and generally mastered the art of giving opinions without fact. 

View over Puerto Vallarta at Sunrise

This is the sales-pitch that the owner would give to try to sell his pills: "So guys, do you know anyone who's in chronic pain? A buddy of mine, who got shot in the face when he was four, sold me some of his extra OxyContins...so I can sell them to you for fifty pesos each. They're great for pain!"

Yeah...they are great for pain, because they're morphine.  They're highly addictive and the US has a huge problem with them at the moment because people get hooked on them really quickly and then can't get off them. So, this guy was importing Oxys into Mexico to sell to any random person who wanted to try them...as if Mexico doesn't have enough drugs!

 The whole month was totally depressing and I couldn't wait to get out of there. On the upside, the place had a nice pool, which the owner was planning to drain and fill with flesh-eating fish that he would then sell to beauty parlours in Mexico  --  who would use them to nibble the dried flesh off customer´s feet during pedicures. (Did I already say I couldn´t wait to get out of there?)

The pool, which has probably been drained and filled with pirahnas by now. 

Then I moved two hours up the coast to a little town called Chacala which was right on the beach. I stayed at a beautiful B&B where I got a lovely room at a bargain price, because it is summer here and for some reason no-one wants to come to the beach in Mexico in summer. 

Chacala Beach

So, for $440 a month I got to experience B&B life and discovered you meet a whole different type of traveler in B&Bs (basically, people with proper jobs). I met a psychotherapist from the US, a Dutch couple who run a fair-trade business in Mexico, a couple running a rehab centre, and a woman who works with migrants and refugees across Mexico. Lots of stimulating conversations! 

The view from my room at sunset. 

The woman running the B&B is originally  from the Ukraine and is currently setting up an online business selling fair-trade clothing -- so she was really interesting to talk to and we had a great month hanging out together. 

Jenia, the woman who was running the B&B

Last week I took a four hour bus-ride inland to Guadalajara, Mexico's second biggest city. Wet season has just started here and here are some photos from the bus -- it looks more like Ireland than Central America! 

I think I'm going to stay in Guadalajara for the next few months, because I really like it here. The people are really out-going and even though it's a big city they are still really friendly.

I haven't got a TV so I've just been watching World Cup matches on the TV's that are set up in the local markets and stores, which has been a great way to get a taste of the World Cup fever. They all give me a pitying look when I say I'm from Australia and say, "Ya se fue!" (They've already gone home.) 

So then I have to explain that soccer isn't that popular in Australia and we are pretty happy just to get to the World Cup. Anyway, Mexico has "ya se fue" by now as well, so people aren't feeling so sorry for me anymore. 

And, I can´t finish without my latest embroidery!