mth! backpacking through southeast asia

SAWAT DII KHRAP:travels of a farang in south east asia

Muang Ngoi, Laos
Muang Ngoi is perfect.

You don't think you can describe it. You don't know how. Every day, you walk down the path from your guesthouse, and wade out into the stream to take your bath. To your right is a bamboo-and-stone sluice gate, with a turbine wedged in the current, providing enough power for a few lights at your bungalow, but no more.

All around you are mountains, the stream you bathe in flowing from the hillsides. Kids run naked on the shoreline. Above you is your guesthouse, which just opened. A few nights ago, you came in to find them celebrating their new business. They plied you with fish just plucked from the Nam Ou and Nam Ngoi. They tied bracelets around your wrists, and repeatedly blessed you. The next night, it's the same scene all over again at the bungalow next door, where they throw a party for your friends' departure.

Then you all head off to a wedding in the town center. You're plied with Lao-lao again and again. There's no saying no to Lao-lao, you try, but you can't. It's made from sticky rice, and tastes like pure grain alcohol, with a little pepper thrown in for flavor. You find it surprisingly smooth, and after six or seven shots, you actually begin to like it.

Scratch that. You love it! You love it! You must have more Lao-lao! MORE LAO-LAO! MORE! MORE!

Everyone from town is here. There's Xai, who owns your place, Boon, who owns Happy, the "pants lady," "Fonzie" in his leather jacket, and of course your friends. Nina, a friend from home who you met up with in Pai, someone you never knew you had so much in common with until you started travelling together. Steve, who was already waiting on a boat that you boarded at the border, and you've spent the last 12 days with. Nikki, who showed up at your dinner table one night in Muang Sing, who Steve knew from Ko Lanta in Thailand. Geoff--the stereotypical California surfer, except he's a skier from Canada--who you met in the back of a Songthaeu in Nong Kheaw. And of course there's your beautiful wife, Harper, who you left San Francisco with months ago now.

You all take turns doing Lao-lao shots with the fathers of the bride and groom. You dance and laugh. You wander home in the dark, unafraid, in this one-street town with no cars or motorbikes. That can only be reached by river.

The next day you're too tired to go to the waterfall, like you'd planned, although you're amazed at how good you do feel considering how much Lao-lao you drank. But it affords you the opportunity to hang out on the island between the Nam Ou and Nam Ngoi for another day. And to go bathe in the Nam Ngoi again, which you love to do.

In the mornings you all meet next door at Happy Bungalow. You drink strong Lao Coffee mixed with condensed sweetmilk, and listen to the Voice of America and BBC news over your shortwave. The pending war with Iraq seems another world. You can't possibly relate to it. On your next to the last morning, you all listen to the State of the Union address, and take turns cracking jokes and exchanging knowing glances. You wonder at the ridiculousness of it all. You wonder at the arrogance of power and greed, and the dominance of oil, here, where fossil fuels are still less mighty than muscle power.

Xai tries to take you net fishing, but you politely decline, preferring to hang out on the banks. Three little boys come up to you, and show you their catch, a bucketful of tiny shimmering silver fish. You admire them, you compliment the boys on their catch. One has a mask and speargun--the kind you see a lot of here fashioned out of a piece of wood, sharpened metal spikes, and a thick rubber band--the other has a casting net, the third carries the bucket. They give you the thumbs up symbol. You tell them you're from America, and they laugh.

The laughter is surprising. The town is built with bombs, American bombs, left over from the secret war here. You see bombshells used as fenceposts, stairs, boats, walls, everything. Around the town, illustrated posters warn children not to pick up or play with the UXO. Bombi, the deadly insides of cluster bombs, litter the countryside. There's still tons of it about. Literally. You notice that there don't seem to be any men from the age of about 45-60. Dead? Probably. This is the most heavily bombed nation per capita in the history of man. You stay on the well-worn trails.

At night, you eat at Fonzie's. That's not his name, but that's what you call him, thanks to his cool-daddy leather jacket. You all call him that, although none of you can remember who gave him the nickname. He always has the best fish in town, the Giant Mekong Catfish, which tastes nothing like the catfish you get in the states. You drink Beerlao, and play "Shithead," a card game seemingly every traveller knows, although they all have different rules. The different rules just make it that much better. Fonzie has the best Prik Nam Pa you've ever tried, in addition to fish sauce and diced chillies, he adds thinly sliced garlic. You put it on everything.

But the daytime is all about the river. Sitting by it. Watching it. Wading in it. The town itself is about the river. It's the lifeline and source of all livelihood. Although tourism is big enough here that there are several guesthouses and decent food, most of the families here still make their living from the river. The travellers don't dominate the town. Village life goes on around you.

You think about all this as you bask in the sunlight. To your left, Harper drops into the water, kicking against the current and rinsing out her hair. You soap up, and plunge into the cold, swift current, and think you can't possibly describe it here. It's the best place you've ever been.

Muang Ngoi is perfect.

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Muang Sing, LAOS --
What are we here for, in this dusty town bereft of hot water and, for 21 hours out of each day, electricity?

We sit in the cafes, drinking too much coffee and fending off opium sellers, talking to other travellers about Dehli, about Auckland, about Kuwait City, about the road to Oudomxai and the weather in Luang Phrabang. The sun sets and we sit on the balcony, sipping warm BeerLao. We buy bracelets from Akha women in technicolor headdress, and chew on sugarcane, spitting the pulp into the street. We listen to the Lao sing ancient melodies at night in the candlelight, and discuss the pros and cons of malaria medicine.

For this we endure backbreaking boat trips and potholed roads in the back of pickup trucks. We choke down sticky rice and dried fish. We shit in holes in the ground and wipe our asses with our hands. We shiver in the cold, and bump our heads on low doorways in the night.

Why?

Travelling is no vacation. Sure, some of it is. But it's hardship endured for the sake of something foreign. Why do we seek out the unfamiliar? What do we hope to learn from it? Something of ourselves, certainly, and something of others, too.

But surely that can't explain it all, this drive to torture yourself in order to arrive at a dusty backwater.

The Akha women approach whispering "ganja, ganja, ganja, opium," through betel-stained teeth, alien and old. Ageless. They could be 30 or 60, the year 1820 or 2003. Pigs root through refuse in Typhus infested markets, and Harper hands an old Akha an orange. At dinner, beggars huddle outside, and then eat the scraps I've leftover, sucking on fishbones and garlic skins. Draped in rags, faces scarred.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world.

We're roused in the morning by the violent cries of a thousand roosters, and then we brush our teeth in dirty water, and dress. Chinese tractors rumble by, and we tell each other stories about the future.

Yesterday six of us hiked through the hills around Muang Sing with two local guides. We climbed to the top of a neighboring mountain, and visited five different hill tribe villages along the way. The scenery was amazing, as were the people. In Vietnam, while on a tour of the former DMZ, our bus rumbled up to a hill tribe village, which was little more than a human zoo. People handed out candy, and kids ran up with their hands out. Women begged for money. Harper and I were uncomfortable with it, and didn't enter. As we stood by the entrance to the village, another tourist bus pulled up, and by now there were far more tourists than locals wandering about.

It was awful, reprehensible, and we all but decided we were not going to visit any more hill tribes.

But yesterday was another story entirely. The trekking organization was a joint operation between the Laos government and UNESCO, tres culturally sensitive. For example, in the second village, our guide told us we couldn't take any pictures (which I was dying to do, especially of the opium field, the only one we saw), , and forbade us to do so even when there were no locals around. The villages are only visited once a week, and then only by groups of no more than six people.

This was spectacular. Truly great. It was a fantastic hike up a steep mountain (or glorified hill), at the top of which we could look out and see China. And the villages were just... I don't know. Unreal. The Akha stared at us as much as we at them. We had lunch in the headman's house in one of the villages, he was out building a new house, with the rest of the men from the village, but his wife and umpteen kids were there.

The kids were positively mesmerized by my digital camera. They kept running up, pointing at themselves, and then making camera motions, wanting their picture taken. I imagine it was the first time some of them had ever seen themselves. One kid kept peering right into the lens, putting his eye up to it, trying to figure out how it worked. The whole village was something out of the iron age.

On the way down, we passed a group of five Akha men, hiking from the market in Muang Sing (which was at one time the largest opium market in the Golden Triangle) to their village on the Burmese border. We hiked 15K yesterday throught he mountains, and it was exhausting. They were going 70. We stopped along the trail and they chatted with one of our guides, who spoke Akha, for a few minutes, Nikki gave them all cigarettes, and they elaborately shook hands.

It doesn't sound like much when I see it written down, but it was one of my best days in Asia (every day in Laos has been, for that matter).

When we were in Vietnam, on the boat in Hualong Bay, Dave was describing "those days." He said you work and you work and you suffer and push it and it's just awful and you wonder why. And then you have one of "those days," and it all pays off, it all becomes worthwhile. You remember what you're doing it for, and you keep on pushing, trying for another one. Yesterday was one of those days.

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Wow, Laos
Yesterday (two days ago? two weeks? two months? I don't know, time has sort of run together and fallen apart) we crossed the border from Thailand into Laos, Nina, Harper and I. One and a half minutes in a longtail across the Mighty Mekong and it's goodbye Chiang Kong, hello Hoayxai. Though not for long.

We stayed in Hoayxai just long enough to get our passports stamped, grab some fried rice, and change some Bhat into Kip. (There are 10,000 Kip to the US dollar. Dave, I kept thinking of you when we all first got Dong in Vietnam. It feels top-notch to be a millionaire again.) Almost as soon as we arrived, we left, chartering a boat to take us up to Luang Namtha, in the far north of Laos. There were nine of us, another American, an Englishman, two French women, and two boatmen, all in an open wooden boat with an inboard/outboard engine. We set off down the Mekong, and after about an hour, turned upriver onto a tributary, the Nam Tha.

This is not the beaten track (if anything in Laos is). Most folks entering at Hoayxai take the Mekong all the way to Luang Prabang, which was what we intended to do until we found out we could go directly to Luang Namtha and save ourselves some backtracking later on. This is rural Asia--bamboo villages and no electricity whatsoever. Water buffalos in the rivers, naked children waving from the shore, all that.

We rode for seven (eight?) hours upriver, getting wet and cold, but passing some amazing jungle scenery along the way. Just when I thought I couldn't sit on a hard, wet, cold, wooden floor anymore... no, wait... that had happened four hours earlier. Anyway, many hours after we left, we arrived at a little riverside village carved out of a muddy hillside. The captain's kid, Looks, who was all of eight or so, met us at the, er, dock(?) and offered to carry our bags for us--each of which easily outweighed him.

But he grabbed Steve's (from Engand) daypack and Harper's hated conical Vietnam hat, so we set off after him in a little Farang procession up the hill into this village of 40-50 huts.

This was totally crazy. The wildest half-kilometer I've ever walked in my life. I was instantly mobbed by smiling little kids, tugging at my pants and shirt, calling out "Sabai Di! Sabai Di!," the Laos greeting. All along the way we're kicking up pigs and chickens. Endless mud. And the whole time we an hear this music. This crazy music, men singing or chanting and stomping in time, pinging on glass and metal on the downbeat. Positively tribal. This is a place that's not even on the guidebook maps. It's just a big blank space. Conradian. I found out from the boatman that it was called Ban Can Com. I think. In any case, it was small and rustic and quite muddy.

We wound our way through the village to the boatman's house, where he and his family laid rice mats, cushions, blankets and mosquito nets out for us, and cooked us a meal of sticky rice and eggs. We went out to wander the village before bedtime.

The whole scene was surreal. Inside the temple, men laid on the floor. Open fires and fish. A fight broke out in the "bar" (just someone's home where all the men had gathered drinking and singing) and spilled out into the pathway below. At some point, they quit singing, and put on electronic dance music. (How I dunno. There was no electricity here, it was al candles and open flames. Batteries, I guess). Who knew they had The Beat in rural Laos.

The next morning (today? Good Lord...) we got up and after the boatman chiseled some more money off of us, we headed out again. Not too far upriver, we pawned us off on another boat, explaining that he wanted to get back to Hoayxai so he could "eat-eat, drink beerlao, sing-sing," he says this the whole time making dancing motions. I guess all that Green (or Blue as the case may be) was burning a hole in his pocket. He was a nice enough guy, though.

And then, after our new captain nailed a few boards to the sides of his boat, we were off again. The next section of the river, however, was one of the craziest rides I've ever had in my life. As we made our way upriver, the river got progressivly lower. The shallow river beat at the boat on all sides. Except the top. Obviously. We scraped rocks, and plunged up rapids. You'd never find this in Ameri-okay. I'd be challenged to float down this river in an inflatable raft, nevermind kayak. And here we were, fighting up it in, essentially, a motorized canoe.

This was adventure.

But it was the really good kind. The river, where it was rapid, tended to be shallow. We weren't going to drown. I was never worried for life or limb, just our stuff. Oh. And getting stranded soaking wet in the middle of nowhere and having to flag down some passing boat (of which there were VERY few) to take us back down to Hoayxai.

Our boat took hit after hit, and the boatmen (there were three on this one) had to pole it upriver in sections. I think flabbergasted is the word I'm looking for to describe how I felt every time we made it past some class 3 churnfactory in this cobbled together boat. Water streams through the seams. Perpetual bailing. Wet asses, all around. Me praying like crazy. Staring into Harper's eyes to calm my nerves. And worrying about my new camera. (The only piece of gear I really was concerned with. I was determined that, no matter what, if I went in that camera was staying aloft.)

And then, at 3:38, just like that, we made it over the last rapid and hit smooth water. The captain (I was sitting in the way back next to him) looked at my watch and proudly exclaimed "Namtha, See Mon," as a couple of hours earlier when we stopped and they shared their lucnh with us (sticky rice, dried fish) he had said he'd have us in Luang Namthat (aka namtha) by 4 O' Clock. (aka see mon). It was a smooth ride all the way up to Namtha, where we arrived at 4:06.

I LOVE YOU NEW BOAT CAPTAIN MAN, I LOVE YOU!!!!!

I tipped our captain 20,000 Kip, which is not nearly as much as it sounds like, and that was that. Four and a half hours later, I can still feel the boat moving. Sixteen hours in a little boat will do that, I guess.

This was, thankfully, our last upriver trip. It's all downstream from here. You can only run up the Nam Tha from the reainy season until January, and I heard when we got into town today that they thought the arrivals yesterday would be the last of the season. Tonight, Harper, Nina and I sat around eating our first real meal in two days and having a beer, just trying to absorb it all.

Between the boat ride and the village, this has been by far the most dramatic, mind-boggling 48 hours of the whole 3 months. It was incredibly. Absolutely amazing. Something I'll always remember so fondly, something that I think Harper and I will talk about forever. Somthing I'm sure that every time I see Nina from now on I'll think of.

It was great. This is what I came for. I wouldn't do it again for all the Kip in Laos.

Tomorrow we head off to Muang Sing in a songthaeu. I've had enough of boats for a few days. There is, from what I understand, no Internet there an we plan to lounge for a few days, so this will be my last update for a while. (Even here in Luang Namtha, which is a big city by Northern Laos standards) there are only a handful of computers in a--get this--solar powered Internet cafe.

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Enter Krieger (Mon), Exit Camera.
It's been a weird week.

We arrived in Pai, Thailand, a week ago, and have been kicking ourselves ever since for not coming here sooner. Pai's a gorgeous village on the banks of the Pai river, hidden in a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. It's foggy and cool in the mornings, hot and sunny during the daytime, and cold and clear at night. It's a billion star sky here. Pai reminds me of a cross between Mendocino, California and Silverthorne, Colorado.

Pai has lots of hippie-Farang favorites: massage, saunas, hot springs, a waterfall, cooking classes, yoga, meditation, and is awash in clothing made by the neighboring mountain people. We've taken a few bike rides through the hills (cycle, not motor), the best of which was to the hot springs and the close by Cafe Del Doy. It was a gorgeous ride, although it revealed just how terribly out-of-shape I've become in the last three months. Skinny, yes. Fit, no. There was one hill, in particular, that was a real barf machine. Really long and with an impossibly steep grade, even by Bay Area standards. But another great thing about Pai is that it's the first place I've been that's actually got decent bikes to rent. Shimano components, new rides, deraileurs that actually function (though they still tend to throw chains). I've even seen a few Gary Fischers being ridden around town, though I haven't rented one myself yet. In any case, it's a real gas to actually be able to change gears again.

Our guesthouse, Ban Tawan, is right on the Pai river. We've got the closest room t the river, and it lulls us to sleep every night. There's also a platform built out over the stream there--complete wit hammock and the triangular pillows--which is a great place to chill out, read books, write in your journal, and cry away the no-camera blues.

Speaking of which, there's even a great blues bar here called Be-Bop. It's genuinely one of the coolest bars I've ever ben to in al of my life. Talk about a scene. It's the kind of place that you hear about on four continents from other travellers. "Did you go to Be-Bop in Pai?" "Yeah, we peeped it." "Brilliant, innit?" "Yeah, it was allgood, yo. Killer blues band. Hellatight." "That lot can play the blues, but." "Word."

It's also close to the Burmese refugee camps, and there's a tremendous "don't visit Myanmar" movement here. It's been seriosly making us reconsider whether or not we're going. But I don't know. I want to see Myanmar. I want to judge for myself. I'm going. I think.

And then there was Krieger
This week we also met up with our (newly-dreadlocked) friend Nina from San Francisco. She left SF around the same time as us, and has been travelling in Australia and Brunei before hitting the Land of Smiles. She showed up in Pai a day after we did, and we've been hanging out ever since. The three of us are going to Laos together on the 15th. We've bumped into a few other San Franciscans here as well. It's been nice seeing someone else from home, someone with whom you have some history. Since we've been in Thailand a bit longer, it's also a refreshing change to be the "old hand," rather than the clueless guy.

But it hasn't all been pleasant. I kicked off the week with the news that the technology page in the newspaper I write regularly for is going to be merged with the business coverage. Which means no more column for Mat. The money was never that spectacular, but it was a really nice gig to have, I liked my editor, it was a steady paycheck, and (most importantly) I got to write about things that interested me professionally on a regular basis. Plus it was something to come back to. Something that I could point at and say, "well, there's this, you see. I gotta do this."

Oh well.

And about that camera...
My Nikon has been my third eyeball since September 2001. I've taken tens of thousands of pictures with it. Thousands here in Asia alone. It's been published online and in print, and although I've used digital cameras before, this was my conversion experience.

It fit in my pocket, it had amazing color accuracy for a digital, prints looked as good as 35mm, and I knew the settings so well I could adjust it in the pitch black so as not to alert my quarry that I was about to snap.

It was pretty much my favorite possession in the world. That and my bicycle. It was almost an appendage. I've taken it everywhere I've gone, and I've not ever been sorry. I've taken pictures while cycling, rafting, skateboarding, and all sorts of other extreme situations. I've even taken pictures while crossing the street in Vietnam. I'm not afraid. But now the Nikon's no more. At least, not for now.

Last night, I set it up on the small ledge up near the ceiling, where I've been keeping it at night for the past week. Only this time, when I let go of it, it tumbled down and hit the floor. For good measure, it bounced. Now, when you watch your electronics drop onto a concrete floor covered with linoleum, that's one thing. There's hope. There's always hope. Yeah, there's fear, but there's hope too.

When you watch your electronics bounce on the concrete floor, hope kinda ducks out the door and mumbles something about "maybe showing up at Be-Bop later on after you've had a few large Beer Changs and, hey, catch you later G, I gotta cruise, I'm due at a 49ers game (although to be honest with you, buddy, I really got no business being there), but, hey, Be-Bop, you and me, pal, okay?"

Yeah. So. There's that. I picked up the camera, which had split open at the seam. Although I was able to get it closed again, it won't turn on, and theres really no getting it repaired here in Pai, nor will there be time to do so before I head off to Laos. That is, of course, assuming it can be repaired at all.

So now I've got a dilemma. Having just spent a small fortune on a 30 day Laos visa, and an even larger one in Chiang Mai during the holidays, what's the good budget traveller to do?

Well, if ever there was a MasterCard ^(TM) moment for me, this is it. The good budget traveller goes back to Chiang Mai on the 12th, rather than the 13th, heads to the same mall where he saw The Two Towers, finds and electronics store, hopes like hell they have Nikon digital cameras, and hopes even more that they take MasterCard, because I'm damn sure not going to be mastering the possibilities in Laos.

Watching your camera tumble to the floor and smash? Priceless, yo.

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Whither, Jason Knight?
"I'm tired of always apologizing for being from America. I'm tired of always explaining that we're from California and it's different."

"Don't. From now on tell them we're from Wyoming and we have lots of guns."

Happy New Year!

We rung in the New Year in Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand, the second largest city in Thailand. We've been here since the 22nd, and though there's loads to do here, we've been lounging for the most part. Which has been great. We've visited some Wats, and gone down the "Handicraft Highway" and gone shopping. Harper even took a Thai cooking class, and I continue to work on my Thai. But it's been the lying around that I've loved. If I do have a forte, it's laziness. And Chaing Mai is my place to shine.

It is however, a beautiful city. The old city is surrounded by a centuries-old wall and moat, and there's a Wat (Buddhist temple) every two feet or so. The traffic and pollution is still a bit much (as it is everywhere we've been in Asia), but I'm supremely accustomed to it at this point. After crossing the streets in Vietnam, the whizzing Tuk Tuks and automobiles, this seems like chumpsville to me.

Chiang Mai is also botique city. Tailors and silk shops and hill-tribe fabrics are everywhere. IF you want to come to Thailand to do some shopping (for something other than electronics, which are dirt cheap in Bangkok), this is the place to be. We've finally taken advantage of this (somewhat) and are mailing a bunch of stufff home from the Post Office tomorrow before we set off for Pai.

This is also a big healing industry town. The streets are littered with flyers for Yoga studios, massage places, tai chi seminars, and the like. Harp took a Yoga class here that was, she said, different from any she'd had before. I was going to take one too, but, you know, see the aforementioned laziness.

As you might expect, there are lots of expats and farang tourists here too.

It's all around a great city. Which is why we expected that the party we went to for New Year's Eve was going to be a blast. Well, that and because the the guy promoting it who told us about it said it was going to be great. Did I mention I'm gullable too?

The venue was fantastic. Right on the river, with a spectacular view of all the fireworks (and what fireworks! huge ones, from three different locations around the city). There were also thousands of Kratongs going up in the sky in lazy lines. These are baskets, of sorts, filled with sparkling fireworks. The heat (I assume) from the sparklets carries the baskets slowly up into the sky. It's beautiful (although we were alarmed at first sight, convinced that the alien invasion had indeed begun). I wish I could have gotten a decent photo.

Anyway.

San Francisco has spoiled me for DJs. Now, I'm not crazy about House music. I don't typically listen to it on the stereo unless I'm sitting at the computer. But I love seeing a good DJ spin, be it house, drum and bass, hip-hop, whatever.

Watching someone good work a crowd (and being worked yourself) is remarkable. But I take it completely for granted. I just assume that, when I go to a club or a house party, the DJ is going to be able to, you know, match beats and stuff.

That he isn't going to switch from a jungle track into an Aretha Franklin song. Or that if he does, it's going to work and be mind-blowing and I'm going be all "No way! That's Aretha Franklin! Crazy! I can't believe he just mixed in an Aretha Franklin track! Where's my bubble? I gotta call Jeffe, yo."

Such was not the case last night. The DJ literally couldn't even match the beats. Seriously. He couldn't. No, I'm not kidding. And it'd be Trance, Drum and Bass, Soul, Progressive House, Hip Hop, but not in any sort of way that made sense or kept the energy of the crowd going.

And then all the sudden the music would stop and some schmoe would say "Allright, party people, let's hear you make some noise, I want everyone to cheer for their favorite dancer." I kept on expecting wet T-shirts and weird blue shots in test tubes. It was like nickel beer night at The Holy Cow. Vallejo drinks free with picture ID.

We couldn't help thinking of San Francisco, and the email we'd gotten about the NYE Radience party where Jason Knight was spinning, and where doubtless lots of our friends would be. And then the DJ would follow "Think" up with a Chemical Brothers song and everyone on the floor would kind of stumble for a second and look around and try to find the beat.

We bailed.

We hopped in a Tuk Tuk at around one in the morning, going back to a bar we'd hung out at a few nights before. The music was better here, it was still DJ stuff, but without the bad DJ to screw it up. This was the same place, incidentally, where I walked in a few nights earlier to hear Mission of Burma playing. Hell yeah.

We met a couple of cool folks. A Britt named Paul who cleared landmines for a living. Something he got into in the Army and now does for the greater good in Laos and in various countries all over the world. We also met a Finn named Sammy who had been travelling for ten years. Sammy was sweet and nice, but a total brain fry. A walking advertisement for staying clean and sober. But he was nice and funny, if a little sad. All in all, we were having a blast.

And then, enter the Austrians...

This Austrian trio--stinking of body odor--sitting next to us decided that, since we were Americans, we must want to hear a lecture on how we were screwing up the world. Happy New Year to you too, pal.

Why is it everyone's job to tell me how screwed up The States is? Look. I'm a journalist. I'm a liberal. I'm a history major, dammit, and my focus was on European Colonialism. I hate Whitey and I don't wear Nike. I vote Green and bike everywhere and don't even own a car and I don't need some fuckwit who doesn't even read the newspaper, doesn't understand opinion polls, and has no sense of world affiars aside from what's politically fashionable, telling me how America is screwing up the whole world. I'm sick of it. Enough.

Hey, I know the USA has done a lot of fucked up bullshit in the latter half of the 20th century.

But it wasn't me, yo.

And when you judge an entire people--for any reason--that's the fascism of your fathers all over again.

But I don't play into it. I'm not rude back. I don't lose it. I don't give them the history lesson they badly need. I don't talk about colonialism or the Holocost or right wing parties and racism in today's Europe. Instead, I smile, and shrug and say "hey, I didn't vote for him. Most people didn't, in fact."

And what can you do? All of the good friends we've made on this trip have been from England and Germany and Australia and Belgium and Holland. I've really dug getting to know people from other countries. I wish people from other countries felt the same way about me.

Happy New Year.

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