Return from Paradise

After you've been living out of a guidebook for a while, you start finding its descriptions of places etched in your brain. So the Rough Guide describes Malaysia's Perhentian Islands as "textbook tropical paradises," and that's exactly what they are. Accomodation is basic, and electricity is only available at night, but the sand is blazing white, the water is turquoise, the hills are emerald green and there isn't a single road. The snorkelling is world-class: we followed a giant sea turtle, swam with (smallish) sharks, nosed around various shapes and shades of coral, and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of brightly colored fish.

It's the beginning of the season at Perhentian, with a few lingering tropical downpours as the east-coast monsoon fades. The scene at Long Beach on the small island (Perhentian Kecil) is young, backpackery, and verging on claustrophobic. It's not a party place - the locals are Muslim and there are very few places to get alcohol - but you see everyone by day on the smallish beach, and by night in the one happening bar. We came to the islands with ready-made friends: our co-conspirators in a passenger mutiny against the minibus driver who was tearing along winding mountain roads in the early morning fog at literally double the speed limit until our repeated and increasingly strident complaints got him to ease off a little (just a little, though). We survived the journey from Penang and made it to the islands, and now, back on the mainland in Kota Bharu, we miss the beach already (Kota Bharu, incidently, is known as one of the most Islamic towns in Malaysia, though the atmosphere here is still appealingly laid-back).

Tomorrow we're hopping on the so-called 'jungle railway' for the day-long trip to Jerantut, gateway town to Teman Negara national park. This computer is having no part of Flickr, so any more picture updates are going to have to wait a few more days.

Kumily Pics

Black monkey in a tree outside our restaurant, Kumily. Pic by Rachel

We've finally done it - we've filled up our camera's memory card. We arrived in Penang, Malaysia yesterday, and spent today wandering around the island's capital Georgetown looking at the amazing Chinese and colonial architecture - as well as sampling the street food, including Nasi Goring, the local variation on fried rice, and Hokkien Mee, fried noodles imported from Fujian, China. And we took lots and lots of pictures. Given that we're still in the process of uploading pictures from India, it could be a while before today's photos make it online.

At any rate, the pics from Kumily, India have been on the Flickr page for at least a month now, but we hadn't posted about them yet on the blog, so here are a few. Kumily is an agreeable small town at the gateway to Kerala's Periyar Tiger Reserve. We did two daytime treks into the preserve, and while we didn't see any tigers - just tiger prints and the remains of some monkeys unfortunate enough to have seen the big cats up close - we did see bison, wild boar, giant squirrels (as we've said, more interesting than they sound), black monkeys, gorgeous birds and plants, and, best of all, a herd of wild elephants.

The Periyar/Kumily photos are here. Below are a few highlights.

Entrance to the park.

Wild elephants on the move. Photos by Rachel.

Coral tree

Trekking in Periyar Preserve.

Sen Lek Naam!

As Paul mentions in the description section of this blog, one of our main goals when we set out on this trip was to find a particular bowl of noodles, known as sen lek naam. When we were living in Bangkok back in 2002, the moment when we figured out how to order noodles from the street stands was the point when we began to feel we were regaining some sort of control over our lives. Noodles became a routine. Every night, after a traumatic day in the classroom and a long, sweaty commute home, we would take showers and then walk down to the noodle stand on the corner of our street to order sen lek naam (which literally translates as small (thin) rice noodles with water), then we would eat our noodles sitting on plastic chairs on the sidewalk, still sweating but temporarily content. At 20 baht (50c) a bowl, it helped us stick to our impossibly strict budget and save for our eventual travels. It also gave us a sense of being home, even if we never really settled in to life in Bangkok.

On paper, sen lek naam doesn't sound like anything special. It basically consists of noodles in chicken broth with coriander and a random, and always different, assortment of unidentified lumps of meat. That mostly explains why there's no English translation and you won't find it on the menus in restaurants that cater to Westerners. You never quite know what you're going to get, and depending on which noodle stand you order from your soup could contain pork, fish balls, or some kind of crunchy bready stuff that soaks up the broth and makes the soup taste extra delicious. You could also end up with some gross eel type thing that makes you want to throw up, but the risk is part of the fun. But the best thing about sen lek naam is the DIY element. The soup itself isn't particularly flavorful so you have to add your own flavor from the four little pots on the table containing fish sauce, chillies, red pepper, and sugar. The skill is getting to know exactly how much of each to add so you can make it taste just right without too much trial and error.

I think Paul and I began to fetishize sen lek naam precisely because it was the only kind of Thai food that was impossible to find in New York. After searching in vain for years, we discovered one restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, that had sen lek naam on the menu, so we began making the hour long pilgrimage to Queens at least once a month to get our noodles and nostalgia fix.

So of course, the first thing we did when we arrived back in Bangkok was to seek out sen lek naam. We took the boat along the Chao Praya river to Chinatown and walked up from there to Wongwien Yee Sip Song ("traffic circle 22," which is how we eventually learned to identify the random neighborhood where we lived), and were ridiculously excited to discover our old noodle stand, exactly where we remembered it on the corner just down the road from our apartment, still serving exactly the same noodles with only a 10 baht price increase. Our sen lek naam was as good as we remembered, and coupled with the nostalgic thrill of exploring our old neighborhood and retracing our old bus commutes to work, we were giddy for the rest of the day.

We managed to eat sen lek naam--through not from that same noodle stand--every day for lunch and sometimes for dinner too during our week in Bangkok, but now that we're at the beach there are nothing but tourist restaurants so we may have to wait until we get back to Queens to taste our favorite noodles again.

Misguided

Travelers love to bitch about their guidebooks, despite the fact that most of us would be lost without them. That said, I can't resist commenting on a couple of things that have really bothered me in both the guidebooks we've used so far.

In the Lonely Planet guide to India, readers are well warned about the "hassle" that traveling in India inevitably entails (in a country with so much desperate poverty it's hardly surprising that a lot of people make their living hustling the comparatively rich tourists) but it's not until the patronizing section on "Women Travelers" at the back of the book that the writers even touch on the elevated levels of "hassle" - aka harassment - that women can expect to face. Even then, they start out with this incendiary sentence: "India is a largely conservative country, and the skimpy clothing and culturally inappropriate behavior of a minority of foreign women seems to have had a ripple effect on the perception of foreign women in general."

Having traveled in India for all of seven weeks I'm not claiming to be any kind of an expert on gender relations in the country, but I can say that when being spat on in the street my instinct is not to blame some anonymous foreign woman who once dared to bear her shoulders in a tank top. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that the sentence "Just be thick skinned and don't let it get to you" was not written by a woman, or at least not one who had spent much time in India. It seems to me that Lonely Planet needs to hire some writers who are willing to take into account gender issues as well as the cultural, religious, and colonial histories that inform social interactions in India instead of casually laying all the blame on foreign women, especially since harassment is clearly not something that only happens to foreigners.

My second issue is with the Rough Guide to South East Asia's stuck up attitude towards the sex industry in Thailand, which seems to be based on the assumption that nobody capable of reading a guidebook could possibly have any interest in hiring a sex worker.

In the section on Bangkok nightlife, the writers display a thinly veiled attitude of disdain, referring to sex businesses as "seedy" and sex shows as "degradations." They then go on to reassure the demure reader that "fortunately Bangkok's nightlife has become more sophisticated and stylish in the last few years." Way to backstab a group of workers whose international reputation brings more tourists into the country than anyone else! Sex workers should be given the credit they deserve for their vital role in Thailand's booming tourist industry, not patronized and insulted by a bunch of snooty travel writers who are supposed to be experts on said industry. Considering the disproportionate number of single men hanging out in the city's backpacker district, I somehow doubt that the distinction between "sex tourist" and plain old tourist is as black and white as the Rough Guide would have you believe.

For an excellent analysis of many otherwise-liberal Westerners' prejudices against Asian sex workers and their farang clients and boyfriends, this article is well worth a read. (Yes, it's also a shameless $pread plug!)

Aerobics at Banglampu

One of my favorite things about Bangkok is the free aerobics class that take place every night in Banglampu Park. In this video, look out for the two cute little girls--one in red and white and one in an orange dress--joining in at the back, as well as the four guys at the back who seem to be coordinating their football practice in time with the music!

At 6pm, right before the class starts, the Thai National Anthem plays on loud speakers and everyone stops what they're doing and stands up. I wasn't sure how I would feel coming back to Bangkok after seven years but I have to admit the nostalgia really kicked in and I almost cried when I heard the familiar tune again! (I know, I'm ridiculous.) More than anything it just felt amazing to see women in public spaces again, after being in India where it often feels like 90% of the population is male.

Here's a photo Paul took of me participating in the aerobics class on our first night in Bangkok. Luckily it's not a video so you can't see how badly I was screwing up the insanely complicated steps!

Getting Bangkok

Like night and day: Rama VIII Bridge, Bangkok

One afternoon in January 2002, Rachel and I arrived at Bangkok's Hualampong train station, en route from Don Muang airport and ready to begin a five-month stint as hilariously unqualified ESL teachers in the city. In the first of what would be a series of failures to understand the realities of Bangkok, we set out, laden with all our luggage, to walk from the station to the backpackers' district of Banglampu, halfway across town. It had looked like a walkable distance on our maps, but we hadn't factored in the steamy and sweltering climate, the suffocating pollution, the roaring traffic, and the madly congested sidewalks. Nor had we read the map correctly.

We arrived in Banglampu that evening in a state of total exhaustion, only to find that every single room in the neighborhood was already occupied. We finally found a squalid little cell at the Apple Guesthouse, a downmarket hostel lurking at the end of an alleyway beside a canal. The room was so bad that it drove us to find an apartment the very next day, before we had found jobs - and, thus, before we knew what part of the city would make a sensible place for us to live.

We carried on in this fashion for what must have been a couple of months, beating our heads against the proverbial wall as we refused to change our expectations of what Bangkok should be - a city organized along familiar lines. We made ourselves miserable trying to live this way, as the city failed to meet our unrealistic expectations at every turn. We wanted to go for walks, but walking more than a couple of blocks was impossible. We wanted to sit in parks, but the parks were exposed to the heat and, for some reason, often featured irritating music blasted over loudspeakers. We wanted packaged sandwiches without weird sugary spreads, bottled water that was easy to open, and daily commutes that weren't consumingly difficult. We wanted New York in Southeast Asia, even as we snobbishly insisted that the easier, more "western" parts of the city were inauthentic and best avoided.

Eventually we learned to roll with the place - how to order noodles from street vendors, (far better than packaged sandwiches anyway), how to read the bus maps and how to catch the express boats, how to spend a pleasant Sunday evening at the movies and in our favorite bar, where to find yoga classes and free aerobics lessons and English-language newspapers, and how to dip occasionally into the backpacker scene for a change of pace. Bangkok became a city again: still maddening and contradictory, as all cities are, but coherent and functional according to its own logic. It was like the Zen koan:

At first mountain is mountain, river is river. And then, when we go into deep zazen, mountain is not mountain, river is not river. And then, returning, we can say, "Ah! From the beginning, mountain is mountain, river is river."

Happily, coming from India, it's clearer to us than ever that Bangkok is Bangkok, and that's a good thing. It seems cleaner, more orderly, and less polluted than we remember it - maybe it has improved on those counts, or maybe we're noticing the contrast from Indian cities - and, in comparison to many of the places we've been lately, it also seems noticeably friendly and progressive. And the food is as good as ever. Alas, the Dallas Pub is gone, but so it goes.

So it's kind of funny to feel so happy about being in Bangkok. Since we left in 2002, we've remembered the city as a challenge we had to overcome - now we have the pleasure of experiencing it in a different way.

It's not all a matter of context. The Bangkok I remember in 2002 was scattered with the concrete skeletons of skyscrapers begun before the 1997 financial crisis and abandoned in its wake. The Bangkok of 2009 seems to be weathering the current crisis, and on the skyline, cranes have replaced the empty shells and new towers are rising again. Times are hard in America, but Bangkok seems to be flourishing. Of course, it was always flourishing in ways we found it very difficult to see back when we expected it to be something other than what it is.

Chai: An Appreciation

One of the things we'll miss about India is chai. Even ordinary tea in India tends to be very good, but the best is masala chai - more or less what American coffee shops call "chai lattes" - black tea made with milk, sugar, and spices including cardamom, cinnamon, and cloves. Waking up on a train for an early-morning arrival, you're greeted by the chai wallahs, who will give you a small cup of perfect masala chai for five rupees - just what you need to get going.

While we were in Kumily, we had a chance to visit a tea plantation and factory. Rachel took some good photos.


The trees are used for firewood in the factory. The factory process was explained to us, but it was a little hard to understand what our guide was saying. Luckily, Lonely Planet also explains it:

After picking, the leaves are placed in a "withering trough," where high-speed fans reduce the moisture content to around 30%, before they're crushed with heavy rollers to force the remaining water to the surface. The rolled leaves are then fermented in a high-humidity chamber to produce their distinctive flavor... Fermentation is stopped by passing the leaves through a dry air chamber, which reduces the moisture to just 3%. With all this hot air flowing around, the smell of tea permeates every corner of the tea factory [it smells fantastic].