Markets

Not The Ubud We Pictured

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Ubud was nothing like I had pictured. Even though it’s community members still adhere to traditional customs and the arts, crafts, music and dances support religious rituals and ceremonies, the village is not the traditional Balinese rural village that I had imagined.

The two main streets are full of traffic…the rice fields forming a bankable backdrop to the restaurants, travel agents, trendy boutiques and internet cafes. In spite of this, my mouth watered at the thoughts of decorating a house with Balinese art, baskets and furniture! We especially enjoyed the warung, or small cafes that sell homemade Balinese food and drink…”good morning”…and “where are you from” coming from smiling Balinese vendors. The best food, of course, was in the food stalls at the night market frequented by the locals; the upscale restaurants seem to have double the price but half the flavor.

Message from Ulaan Bataar

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Greetings-
Have been in Mongolia for the past week–initial few days in a ger bordering on a national park–lazy, relaxing days with hiking and Mongolian pony riding (when on the horse my feet nearly reach the ground). Then had only 2 days for Ulaan Bataar, the capital. Weather was so pleasant and culture such a change of pace following Russia that we decided to stay longer. However train only passes through town once a week, more time here than what we need but that’s ok.

First couple of days we did the home-stay thing but the hostess spoke no English and was a bit shy to interact so moved to a hotel. Lodging too expensive but all else cheaper–can take a taxi from one end of town to the other for less than a buck.

Yesterday went to a huge local market. Guidebooks said to take care re thievery (advice in the realm of one’s mother saying to wear a coat). But while there my packback received a gash and a similar long slash across my pant leg in the general area where someone saw me depositing change. I was aware of the contacts so nothing lost but do have a superficial cut on my thigh. That sort of action leaves an uncomfortable feeling. I was told that the local Mongolians are equally at risk but for some reason I stick out in a crowd (boyish good looks perhaps).

This city (Ulaan Bataar) has a bit of a cowboy feel–most roads not paved and well pot-holed, horse carts compete for space with autos who obey some sense of order only peripherally, older folks still wear their long brightly colored coats (deels) with and an orange sash, everyone under 40 in jeans, black leather jackets and constantly fiddling with their cell phones (same-same at all latitudes and longitudes). Tiz too bad as all interesting ethnic features/diversities will soon be lost–well on our way to a homogenized worldwide culture.

The Mongolians have features that are different than other Asians. They seem to universally dislike the Chinese but respond favorably when asked about Russians–surprising as the country was part of the Soviet Union until 1990. All that I have talked to however are much happier with independence. Too many soviet style buildings remain in the city and many of the people within the city still live in gers (50% by one guide book estimate).

Our next move is to Beijing; then no agenda. Probably will work our way down the east coast of China to Shanghai, then either inland or to Hainan Island in So. China Sea off the coast of Vietnam. Our fixed and booked trans-siberian itinerary ends in Beijing so then the fun begins with winging it again, buying train tickets in Mandarin, etc.-Chinese characters even harder for these poor foreigners than Cyrillic. Many Chinese find it difficult to believe that someone does not speak their language. And therein is the adventure.

Hope all are well. Please send money.
RLG

Hanoi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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September 24 2002
Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay learning to kayak. We are traveling separately until we join a friend in Hong Kong on November 20 when the three of us will spend two months in China before going back to the US after the first of the year. Bob is presently somewhere between Hanoi and Saigon and I will meet him in Saigon on Monday for a flight to Phnom Penh Cambodia.

Flying into Hanoi felt very strange after watching years of television during the “Vietnam” War in the 6.s and 70.s. (The “Vietnam War” is called the “American War” here.) The first night in Hanoi I ate a dinner of pork with pepper sauce and french fries, a wonderful break from the Burmese and Thai food, on the deck of a popular cafe while watching the lights reflect off Hoan Kiem Lake near the Old Quarter.

I stayed at a small charming hotel called the “Classic Street Hotel” in the Old Quarter which is full of narrow winding streets with tunnel or tube houses so called because their small frontages hide very long rooms that were developed in feudal times to avoid taxes based on the width of the frontage onto the street. At the time they were only two stories high but over the years stories have been added so the buildings are now very narrow and very tall.

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My cozy little room had a little veranda where I could stand and watch the busy street scene below.
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I loved my little neighborhood for the five days I was there…early mornings the same ladies in the same clothes and cone hats came to sit on the street below me with their big shallow baskets to sell small silvery fish and vegetables…one morning a young woman at a street stall angrily chewed the heck out of one of the women for some reason and chased her away…every day in the early afternoon I ate a huge bowl of duck noodle soup for about 30 cents at a food stall down the street….sitting on a little plastic stool at a two foot high wooden table with my knees under my chin……the same old man and his wife with kind faces welcoming me like old friends each day.

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Across the street was the A to Z Queen Cafe which was a kick-back comfortable budget backpacker hotel with dorm beds for $2.50 a night and free internet if you bought something at the bar…otherwise you donated a few dong via honor code in the little plastic boxes sitting on top of each terminal. Every night the guest house showed a war movie to the mostly young males from around the world, many of whom are Israeli by the way. An Israeli guy told me that every young man has to spend three years in the military…and then they take off to travel to clear their heads.

Nearby was a street market where the women did all the selling and the men sat on the sidewalks drinking whisky and playing board games. As I walked by, the women laughed when I gestured and said to them…look…you work…they play…

Down the narrow street and around the corner the local street kids pestered you to buy postcards…just buy from me today…I am lucky you are my first sale today so I can buy some food…old ladies glided along in slippered feet carrying two fruit-filled baskets one on each side of them that was balanced like a pair of scales across their backs with a long flexible blade of bamboo who wanted to sell you exotic fruit…pumalos that have to be picked a few days before it is eaten so it has time to “forget the tree,” custard apples, durian so stinky it is forbidden in the hotels, green dragon fruit, guavas, jackfruit, longan, lychees, mango-steen, rambutan, starfruit and juicy persimmons.

Then you could escape all this by ducking into the Tamarind Cafe & Fruit Juice Bar where the Handspan Adventure Travel Company sold tickets to Halong Bay and Sapa in the back. Bob took a three day excursion to incredible Halong Bay and claims it is one of the very best experiences of all time. Here you were sure to find fellow foreign travelers to trade stories with…not just a few of whom…to my amazement…or maybe just never noticed before…were women traveling alone. In happy solidarity I invariably urged them on…

Taunggyi…Last Frontier of Burma

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Taunggyi is the official end of the line for east-bound foreigners in Burma–at least if you are travelling by road. Beyond Taunggyi lies a world of black-marketeers, ruby miners, insurgent armies and opium and methamphetamine warlords. Because it functions as a conduit for smuggled goods from Thailand, China and India, this is one of Burma’s most colorful towns. Long-haired smugglers in army fatigues down the street alongside turbaned hill tribe people and sleek-suited Chinese businesspeople. An abundance of black-market consumer goods is displayed in the Taunggyi market.

In the market we see two Buddhist nuns asking for donations from the vegetable vendors followed by a young girl in a white T-shirt with Jesus (Heart) You on the front. I particularly liked the military green combat hat with a pirated Nike label which was very popular. An Indian in a military hard hat explained to us that we could get “free” pastry at the tea shop. Guys with camoflage jackets and military green Chinese issue tennis shoes are everywhere. On a second floor alley I was carrying some chicken and rice in a sack when two small raggedy boys came up to me so I gave them my chicken. They ran off tickled to death. A few minutes later they appeared again and handed me my 1000 kyat bill that I had forgotten that I had dropped into the bag. So we took the bill and gave them back 500 kyat (about 40 cents) and you would have thought they were just handed a fortune.

On our way out an old man came up to me and spoke in excellent English. He used to be a teacher he said and just wanted to talk. San Francisco, San Francisco he laughed. (People always seem to mention San Francisco for some reason when we tell them we are from America.) Good city! Then he cautioned me against buying any of the rubies two traders were trying to offer me. “Glass,” he said, “glass!”

Mothers make a big deal out of having their babies see us. They beam if we pay any attention at all to the small ones or take their pictures-almost like it is good luck for the child. We are a symbol offreedom-freedom they long for and hope to have sometime in their lifetime.

On the way back to our Chinese owned hotel called New Paradise that night we stopped at the Coca Cola Restaurant with pigs ears and pig brains on the menu and spent 20 minutes trying to get the waiter togive us some sugar for Bob’s ice tea. Think about it. How do you explain “sugar” to someone who doesn’t understand a word of your language nor you theirs?

Continuing along the street that evening, I asked a young guy at a betelnut cart to make me some betel chews that are made with small chunks of dried areca nut wrapped in a betel leaf smeared with lime paste. Some may contain flavoured tobacco (Indian snuff) peppermint and other spices. Experienced chewers can hold betel cud in their mouths for hours without spitting. An alkaloid in the nut produces mild stimulation and a sense of well being. The chewed nut stains the teeth dark red and leaves the streets everywhere running with blood-red spit.

He Ho & Inle Lake

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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August 26 2002
It is possible to take a ferry up the Irrawady to Mandalay but we chose not to do this because we heard the ferry was government-run and we tried very hard not to support government-run operations and second because we heard that Mandalay is a big, noisy, tout-filled beggar-filled city that we have had enough of over the course of this journey. So we took the one hour flight from Bagan east to HeHo and from there a taxi through Shwenyaung to Inle Lake.

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Inle Lake is 22 km long and 11 km wide and outrageously beautiful.
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After exploring the town of Inle and it�s markets for a couple days we took an all day boat trip around the shallow lake. Our Intha boat paddler stood in his longyi (length of cotton loom-woven cloth wrapped around and tucked in at the waist) on the stern of the flat-bottomed boat onone leg and wrapping the other leg around the oar slowly plied the calm black water dotted with floating islands and water hyacinth.

Hills rim the lake on all sides; the lakeshore and lake islands harbor nearly 20 villages on stilts mostly by the Intha people that are culturally and linguistically separate from their neighbors in the rest of the Shan state around them. The people use the same long flat boats to navigate to and from their homes and small lakeside businesses. Our paddler predictably stopped at a silk weaving factory and an umbrella cottage business. I bought a piece of silk the design of which was developed by the grandmother of the owner so it felt very special.
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I bought a piece of plastic to cover myself for 50 kyats (pronounced chat; there are about 980 kyats to the US dollar which everyone trades on the black market-about 10 times the official rate at the bank).

Burma�s incredible ethnic diversity means a wide range of handicrafts and we came away with several beautiful Shan shoulder bags, some pictures of the beautiful Pa-O and Palaung ethnic people in their colorful clothes. and some wonderful Shan food in our bellies. The Pa-O�s wear black with red trim and colored towel swrapped around their heads.
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Nyaung U

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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The largest village in the area is Nyaung U about 5 km up the Irriwaddy River from the Pagan Archeological Site and you can visit the market and food stalls there by taking a horsecart, a pickup or by renting a bike.

We took a horsecart with a friendly driver.

Talad Nam Lam-Paya Floating Market

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Our friend, Jiraporn, who lived in the U.S. ten years and has a doctorate from Oregon State University in Fisheries and is now a lecurer in the Department of Fishery Management of Kasetsart University, generously drove us to the weekend Talad Nam Lam-Paya Floating Market about an hour north of Bangkok. No tourist would ever find this market unless they knew exactly where to make the various turns and even Jiraporn got off the track a couple times. Only the locals go to this market that sells food and useful household items.

After choosing more food than we could eat in two meals, we feasted on a cruising ferry while it meandered down a river to a Buddhist temple. Then Jiraporn and I had a Thai massage in an open air pavilion…this day…one of the most pleasurable I have spent in Thailand.

Bhuleshwar Bazaars

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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You would love this area if you don’t mind being scared out of your wits by long lines of honking taxis and motorcycles behind you and worker after worker coming at you from the front with loads of goods on their narrow long handcarts. Then make way for the cows that seem to know where they are going without anyone leading the way but with an absentee owner and maybe a woman with a bucket of food or water nearby. And don’t forget to look down so you don’t step in a hole or into greywater or even urine and spital caused by the use of paan (betelnut, tobacco and other ingredients).

Workers stared at Bob and his camcorder-many didn’t know what to think-others were delighted to see themselves on the digital screen-thanking Bob and shaking his hand. But not the Muslim women.

Pink And Tent-like Marrakech

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Founded in 1070–72 by the Almoravids, the Medina of Marrakesh remained a political, economic and cultural centre for a long period. Its influence was felt throughout the western Muslim world, from North Africa to Andalusia. It has several impressive monuments dating from that period: the Koutoubiya Mosque, the Kasbah, the battlements, monumental doors, gardens, etc. Later architectural jewels include the Bandiâ Palace, the Ben Youssef Madrasa, the Saadian Tombs, several great residences and Place Jamaâ El Fna, a veritable open-air theatre. The area is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There is no chance of an American avoiding his/her cultural filters in a country like Morocco-just as I suspected! “Lets Go” travel guide describes Marrakech as a city of immense beauty, low, pink and tent-like before a great shaft of mountains and the book is right on. Its an immediately exciting place especially around the central square, Djemaa el Fna, the stage for shifting circles of onlookers who gather around groups of acrobats, drummers, pipe musicians, dancers, story-tellers, snake charmers and comedians.
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