Happy New Year!

Today, New Year's Eve, we went to temple, like good pretend Buddhists. Specifically we went to Wat Phra Sing in Chiang Mai, which is having a full-fledged temple festival for the days around the changing of the year. Around the various temple buildings were stalls selling flowers, candles, and other offerings, and alongside the main temple there was a fair with clothes, knickknacks, and a bunch of food stalls.

Inside the main temple building there were many special types of New Year's blessings on offer. We chose a little banana leaf basket filled with spices, flowers, little bags of water and so on, with a little flag on which to write your New Year's wishes. We followed all the others in carefully inscribing our wishes, then bringing the basket up to place in front of the statues of Buddha where we knelt and prayed. Finally, we went to place the basket on one of the large trays holding the offerings. We weren't sure what the significance of the different trays was, so we went for the one that had a picture of an elephant above it. We didn't miss the essential step of posing for a photo while placing the basket! Then we went to the food fair and snacked on sweet sticky rice grilled in bamboo. All Chiang Mai seems to be gearing up for a huge party, even though the Thai New Year is officially celebrated in April with a big waterfight that we are sorry to be missing.

On the other side of the temple was a garden peppered with bilingual sayings on wooden signs. This one seemed especially appropriate for the season.

Happy New Year!

This one's for my sister

Kittehs need to nap in Thailand, too. This one's sleeping between the legs of a large, ominous statue of a gentleman in a frock coat at Wat Pho, Bangkok.

Last ca phe sua da of 2009

The last of many delicious iced coffees in Vietnam - and maybe the best, too. In our host's "secret" favourite cafe in Phu Nhuan district, HCMC.

My Balinese neighbour

Friendly local gecko helps me out with the taboo watermelon accompanying my balcony breakfast.

If only I had had video to show you the titanic head-shaking struggle it went through to break off a piece that filled its little jaw, before the strategic retreat to nom it.

Imperial cuisine

Lotus seed dessert soup in Hue, Vietnam.

Limestone looms

Karst rock formations loom out of the waters of Halong Bay, which we traversed in a sumptuous junk for an afternoon sail.

Fusion Mozaic

Detail of a mozaic depicting the four seasons, from a tomb of an emperor in Hue, Vietnam.

The whole effect was stunning, a large open room with this huge wall to wall mozaic. I especially loved that the rivers were made with bits of smashed blue-and-white Viet crockery.

Strange fruit (vu sua)

One of the many, many delights of exploring Vietnam with Vietnamese people was getting the Fruit Tour of Vietnam. I think I tried ten fruits that were totally new to me, besides luxuriating in some I'd tasted before but never as good as these (though I have to say I think I prefer Hawaiian pineapple.)

Pictured here, vu sua or milk apple (nearly every new fruit I tried in Vietnam was called something apple, except all the ones that grew on some kind of palm).

Everything is edible but the skin and the big black seeds, though the texture changes through the fruit, also depending on ripeness. Some parts were chewy and others soft and jellylike. I found it tasted like a combination of young coconut and lychee, and the opaque milky juice was also delicious.

p.s. Pardon the lack of Viet diacritics - I hate to omit them but it's too complicated to figure out how on a Thai keyboard.

Chalk and cheese

Photo: Banana flower salad, served in a banana flower segment, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

By now in my travels I've visited five South-east Asian nations, and I can certainly see many threads tying the region together, from the ancient monuments to what I saw dubbed "Hindu-Buddhism", to fried rice and fish sauce. But amidst the commonalities, there are many distinctions as well.

A few days after arriving in Thailand, I laugh at my foolish former self that could ever have confused the sound of Thai and Vietnamese. Even though I hardly know any words of Thai, there is this really evident "Thai-ness" to the sound of it that wouldn't let me mistake it for anything else, although I'm not able to pin it down. (I hear Lao is hardly differentiable from Thai so I'll wait to be tested by that).

Likewise, when I had my first bite of an eggplant salad in Bangkok, the flavours cried out "THAI!", but I'd be hard-pressed to say why. The dressing was clearly composed of lime juice, fish sauce, rau ram, dried shrimp, chile, sugar - all of which could just as easily belong in Vietnam. But in the way they were put together, in the proportions and the cooking technique, there was no doubt where the salad came from.

I'm looking forward to many more such distinctive moments....

I think I'm in love

This naughty little water buffalo is eating corn that was meant for humans! And eating them one whole ear at a mouthful, at that.

But how could you be mad at him when he is so cute and happy? And so calm that I could come right next to him without him stirring at all.

Banh mi

The bread in Vietnam is absolutely delicious. French colonialism brought the baguette to the region, and the locals improved upon it to make it their own, adding some rice flour to the wheat, adjusting the recipe to the local climate.

We ate banh mi for breakfast on many of our Saigon mornings, often with op la! (exclamation mark all mine), a name that makes me happy just to hear it. It means fried egg, and is another legacy from the French 'au plat'.

Our amazing host also taught us the secret Vietnamese way to toast banh mi, when it needs a bit of a lift or just when you want it to be extra crisp. Most Viet homes don't have ovens, since grilling and frying are much more pleasant and practical in the heat and humidity. And even if you had a toaster, you can't really fit a baguette into one, especially the fat round Viet variety.

So instead you toast it on the stovetop - in a pot. Sounds crazy, but it made the most delicious crisp crust with a soft, warm inside, as if it had just come out of the oven.

To make it, you put a large pot over medium-high heat, then put the baguette in on a plate, then put on a tight-fitting lid. You're basically steaming it without water. Apparently leaving it there for 10-15 minutes gives the best results, but even 5 minutes made it really tasty. We are anxious to get home and experiment to see what this method does to other kinds of bread!

Lunch in a leaf

Heat, humidity, strong sun. Prawns from the river, vegetables from the alluvial plain, noodles formed into delicate vermicelli from rice grown in paddies. Lunch in My Tho.

Water Hyacinth

Water hyacinth is just one more of the many edible plants that grow rampant across SEA. We were told that no one bothers to cultivate it, since you can just go pick it for free whenever you want.

We sampled a blossom culled from one of the Nine Dragons (Cuu Long) of the Mekong Delta - a mild taste, but pleasant enough, and the real thing much more beautiful than the photo.

More from the floating market

A customer at Cai Rang heads home, where she'll sell the produce she's picked up wholesale.

The fertile Mekong Delta region is famous all over Vietnam for its richness, for its three annual crops of rice, and for its fruit, the best we tasted.

Floating markets

Photo: A market vendor pulls up to our boat to sell us banana sweets at the Cai Rang market, Can Tho, Vietnam.

Ever since I first read about them I've dreamed of the floating markets of South-East Asia, so finally arriving at one of them was an epoch in the trip!

Indeed it was as bright, colourful, and crowded as we expected, though we arrived toward the end of the market. It is mostly for wholesale, and you can tell the product being sold by the fruit or vegetable tied to the masthead!

We didn't get to completely fulfill my dream, which was to eat noodle soup from a boat (our hosts were dubious about the hygiene), but we did get gorgeous sticky-rice packets wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. The filling was a sweet combination of bean and banana, the latter turning pink from the heat and the whole thing a lovely sticky treat. Ngon!

Trappings of a culinary culture

Photo: Rice paper wrappers on a bed of herbs, My Tho, Vietnam.

Once I was sitting around with some friends and we were joking about our cultural heritages. Mostly my French-Jewish friend and I were commiserating with each other that our ethnicities predisposed us to depression. To lighten the mood, our Vietnamese friend piped up with: "You can tell I'm Vietnamese because I like to wrap things in lettuce and dip them in sauce!"

I'm not sure what, if anything, this says about "the Vietnamese psyche", but these delicious roll-your-own options are certainly characteristic of the cuisine. Everywhere we went in southern Vietnam, anyhow, every meal was accompanied by a vast and generous pile of foliage, with just the right combination of herbs and greens for each dish.

Besides lettuce and mustard greens, we often were given these transparent rice wrappers to contain various foods. So thin and delicate they don't need to be dampened, the papers held together noodles, meats, herbs, and sauce without spilling, yet melted into the mouth. Ngon (delicious)!

Longan

While in Vietnam I got the expert fruit tour, and got to try at least 8 new fruits I had never heard of before.

I'd had longan before, but I'd never seen it on the tree, as here in someone's garden in My Tho, in the Mekong Delta.

Three essential Vietnamese skills

Photo: This auntie, already proficient in all three skills and more, hacks away at a segment of a "water coconut" to accompany a sumptuous lunch in My Tho, Vietnam.

1. The peremptory wave that halts the torrential flow of motorbikes long enough to let you cross the street.

2. The right angle to tip your rice bowl to your mouth in order to scoop the last bits of food in with your chopsticks.

And for the old ladies and those who aspire to be them:

3. The friendly, yet firm slap on the shoulder that punctuates any discussion and especially victory in a little debate. Bonus points for making every conversation sound like an argument when really it's a friendly discussion, and for the proper cackle of Ha! Ha! Ha! when you are proven right about something.

Tamarind crab

After a long hard struggle we managed to escape the same-y food of the guided tour long enough for this delicious seafood lunch in the outskirts of Halong City.

The tamarind crab pictured here wasn't the best crab I'd ever had, its flesh a little stringy, but the tamarind sauce is a brilliant invention, sour, chile-hot, pleasantly sticky, and pairing beautifully with the richness of the crab meat.

Ngon!

Sacred monkey forest

It's not easy being a parent of twins, whether you're a human or a monkey. I saw the mommy monkey desperately hanging onto each twin by the tail as they tried to dash in different directions with all their strength. When one escaped, the daddy monkey jumped in to prevent disaster, and the little family snuggled together for awhile, oblivious to the giant tourists standing right next to them.

In the Sacred Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali.

Going to the Mausoleum

Pictured: NOT the mausoleum, but a view of an Angkorian temple.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum was an interesting rock and hard place in our tour of Vietnam.

It wasn't on our itinerary, in fact had been carefully kept off our itinerary, yet the very stubborn tour guide we were landed with in Hanoi was very insistent that we should go. We tried to be diplomatic and eventually pled exhaustion and the need for a late start that morning. And then after all that discussion, he brought us to the site anyhow and made us stand and take pictures while he told us things about the complicated embalming process that keeps the founding father's body intact (against his own express wishes). I am sure you will all be relieved to hear that the technology is being transferred from Russia to Vietnam so that he will no longer have to fly to Moscow for maintenance each year as in the past, but can instead be cared for at home. Embalming is a rather strange thing.

Going to the mausoleum used to have a different connotation though - apparently it used to be a commonly used expression for going to the loo. But one has to be careful about using it that way now, we were told.

As for us, we've evolved our own. Apparently the little kids growing up with my friend's mother used to use a decrepit governor's mansion for a loo while they were busy playing, and the expression stuck. "Going to the governor's mansion" has rather a nicer ring to it than going to see a man about a horse, at least.

An chay

Photo: hu tieu chay at a food stall in Can Tho, Vietnam.

I'm a bit fascinated by what I've seen of Vietnamese attitudes to vegetarianism.

On one hand, Vietnam is a historically Buddhist country with a very strong culinary tradition of vegetarian cooking. On the other hand, it can be really hard to find examples of the vegetarian food, as restaurants tend to be very fishy and meaty.

From what I gather, while monks and some few laypeople are strict vegans (eschewing even onion and garlic - imagine Viet food with no fried onion, let alone nuoc mam!), most Viet Buddhists happily eat all manner of living creatures. But it's quite common to fast (eat vegan) on the 1st and 15th of the lunar calendar, so every homecook knows how to prepare a wealth of traditional vegetarian dishes. Otherwise, your best bet is to find one of the vegetarian eateries - they aren't as common as you'd hope, but once you find one you can eat pretty much anything in the huge Vietnamese repertoire in a tasty vegan version.

I've been lucky enough to be staying in a Saigon home and eating homecooking for nearly half my time in the country, including quite a few veggie dishes. One night recently, an auntie prepared vegetarian bun rieu for us. The original version is a spicy tomato and oniony crab soup with rice vermicelli. Soy replaces the crab, and we got to observe the traditional way it's prepared. First you soak soybeans for a long time until they're soft, then rub their skins off. They're pureed and strained into two grades, creamy and frothy (the whey-like part). The latter is curdled (using tamarind as the curdling agent!) to make this really nice light grainy tofu that elegantly replaces the chewy crab floating at the top of the bowl.

The auntie who made the soup has actually been eating vegan for a few months for religious reasons, but despite turning out plenty of food for the visiting fish-and-chip-ocrite, she is surprisingly ununderstanding about my breed of vegetarianism. She told my friend that I should "practice" eating meat! I found this contrast surprising and amusing, but in the end it makes sense. Vegetarianism in Vietnam is traditionally a matter of religion, not taste, and when times are hard, you have to eat what you can get!

In Vietnam, what you get is liable to be delicious.

Compliment of the day

Said the tout who snagged us for her riverboat tour of the Mekong Delta, of me:

"She has a very gentle smile, just like a Vietnamese girl."

A village on stilts

Houses on stilts in the flood plain around Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia.

Cambodian folk dance

Feet in a Cambodian folk dance.

Cambodian breakfast

Sadly blurry, but a delicious part of the buffet at our fancy hotel in Siem Reap.

Cold rice vermicelli, coconut curry, fresh cucumber, peanuts, banana flower, beansprouts and herbs.

Ricefields of Bali

Rice cultivation in the town of Ubud (Pengosekan). I did yoga at a studio that overlooked these fields.

Congee

More highlights of the breakfast buffet in Siem Reap.

Weaving for the volcano

Handwoven leaf and bamboo decorations honouring Gunung Agung (the large mountain) in Bali.

Balinese dance

How to order a double-double in Singapore

Just ask for coffee, or rather kopi. If you want to get tea or coffee without milk or sugar you have to specify - the default is white and very sweet.

Apparently the national breakfast of Singapore is coffee and kaya toast - hot buttered toast spread with coconut jam. My packed eating schedule didn't allow me to have it for breakfast, but I tasted it as an afternoon snack all the same. Sweet, but delicious.

Tea ceremony

More matcha tea, at Isuzen in the Daitokuji temple complex, Kyoto.

Omu raisu

Omuraisu, or omelet rice, from a mall food court in Kagoshima City, where I ate lunch with what appeared to be the entire teenage population.

Omuraisu is total comfort food, fried rice with a thin egg omelet draped overtop. It's often served with curry, demiglace, or ketchup, but this version unusually has the okonomi toppings of brown sauce, mayo, bonito flakes and shreds of red pickled ginger.

Beside the "white diaspora", the other tourist group catered to in Bali is Japanese, and I was amused to see a sign outside a restaurant advertising "omu nasi"!

Mikan

Tiny mikan from the slopes of Sakurajima, the smallest in Japan.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Photo: Detail of the A-bomb dome in Hiroshima.

Probably an odd reading choice for South-East Asia, but I've always wanted to catch up on the classics I missed in my misspent youth...

After having read about the origins of Buddhism, it was interesting to turn to a book that deals so heavily with the development of Christianity, albeit in a way that was terribly controversial on publication in the 1780s.

The whole thing being a bit massive, this was an abridged version that only came to under 700 pages, but which had most of the first three volumes intact.

If being a tourist here in Bali makes me feel like a member of the idle rich, reading Decline and Fall while sitting on a patio drinking fresh papaya juice and local coffee felt incredibly decadent, as if I were one of those effete youths on Grand Tour so often described in novels about the decline and fall of the British empire.

I'm carrying on the classical theme with Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is a more obvious choice for transformative journeys...

Cooling off after the onsen

This is Daimon-san in the Ibusuki area of Kagoshima prefecture. Just behind the photographer is the onsen where I was buried in hot volcanic sand with the sound of the surf crashing only metres away.

It was an amazing experience, the sand so hot that my hands and feet began instantly to pulse, as if I had four extra hearts. The combination of the heat and the weight were so relaxing I wanted to stay - but you can only remain for 15 minutes and even at that my skin got very slightly burnt.

Afterwards, to remove the yukata and clean off the sand, then soak naked in the onsen waters, before heading outside to drink an iced coffee and gaze happily at the mountain while the sea breeze cools you...bliss.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Photo: samurai armour in Matsuyama castle.

This vast novel by Haruki Murakami was my companion for most of my time in Japan. I was on my third reading when I finally, reluctantly, gave it up in Kyoto in exchange for some new material.

It's fascinating, absorbing - and despite multiple readings I don't understand it enough to say much about it except you should read it too. It's probably bad to make comparisons but the obvious one in my mind is Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, for the sweeping breadth and for the way that political and domestic history are intertwined; and for the surrealism. But this is Japan, not South America, and the comparison only goes so far.

It's about a young man abandoned at the bottom of a well, about his marriage and the strange machinations of his wife's family; it's about the atrocities committed by Japan before and during WWII, and the terrible fates that awaited the individuals that carried out the orders from on high, as well. It's about strange connections between strangers and the cost of letting go of reality in order to be able to heal.

I think it's probably a lot about the "soul" of modern Japan, except that I feel too ignorant to really understand; but happily the ignorant can feast on the book anyway. Ah, I am going to read so much once I come back to settle somewhere with a bookshelf and a library card again...

Believe!

Boddhisattvas are all loving-kindness, but there are more forceful deities to help convert the masses. These fearsome statues are often placed at the entrance to temples to help instill a sense of urgency in the not-yet-devout.

The kawaii never stops

Instructions for how to purify yourself before entering the grounds of a temple or shrine in Japan.

Siddhatta vs. Siddhartha

Photo: Jizo at a Shinto shrine in downtown Kyoto.

Before I left on my trip, one of my preparations was to stop at a used book store to let serendipity help me choose what to read at the beginning of my trip. Pulp Fiction on W. Broadway happened to have a good Asia non-fiction section, and the first of the books I ended up reading was Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha (titled: Buddha).

I had already read her very interesting A History of Myth and listened to her TED talk on compassion, so I was looking forward to it. I ended up reading the whole thing in the first few jetlagged days, so that it was caught up in the early fog of arrival. Then I read it again more slowly midway through the trip (I read each book I bought at least twice before finally getting some new ones in Kyoto!).

I don't really know much about Buddhism, so rather than trying to offer a critique of the book I can just say that it really awakened my interest, making me want to read more fully about the history of Buddhism as it developed as a religion. It also made me want to explore more fully the gaps that lie between the official history and theology of a religion and the understanding that believers have; and the distance between how it's practiced by monks and by laypeople. Despite also not knowing much about Hinduism, I'd had the same feeling when I had the chance to take a religious studies class about it at university. The teacher strongly believed in the importance of studying practical Hinduism with equal weight, rather than sticking solely to the textual tradition, and I really absorbed that attitude. The little that I know from listening to people who practice Buddhism gives me a really different idea than what I took from Armstrong's version of Buddha's teachings.

Japan is the only Buddhist country I've visited so far, and it's a fascinating and unique one, given the deep and longlasting syncretism with native Shinto practice. That's a whole post (or lifetime of study) in itself, and even looking just at Buddhism in Japan shows such a huge variety of sects and beliefs in monastic practice, let alone about how most Japanese feel about or understand Buddhism. I am excited to travel soon to Vietnam and to see Buddhism in a totally different context (not without syncretism of its own, of course).

Something else that I found myself thinking of as I read this book, was another book I studied at university in a German lit class - Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. (Armstrong's book is mostly based on the Pali canon and so she uses Pali spelling rather than Sanskrit, so I am making a distinction between Hesse's Siddhartha and Armstrong's Siddhatta). Leaving aside the whole problem of cultural imperialism and Hesse's appropriation of Indian tradition (and noting that Armstrong too is a Western interpreter of Eastern tradition), I remembered my visceral reaction to the book when I read it at 19. I HATED it. The contrast of noble Siddhartha with fleshy Kamala made my skin crawl. The whole thing just seemed like typical male self-indulgence - sure, subsist on the food that the women prepare and donate to you, and adopt their sons into your sanghas, but be sure to point out to them their inferiority, their hopeless trappedness in samsara BECAUSE YOUR CULTURAL LAWS WON'T ALLOW THEM TO ESCAPE IT.

While Armstrong's depiction of Buddha isn't quite as creepy as I remember Hesse's being, she does point out the misogyny in the Buddhist tradition, wherever it originally crept in. Women could only be admitted as nuns subservient to the monks and following an additional set of rules; and in a whole large branch of Buddhism today there are no nuns because it is now viewed as impossible to fulfill those conditions.

In her broader discussion of the Axial age in which both Hinduism and Buddhism developed, she points out that along with the new spirituality came a new and more crippling misogyny, which is something that tends to keep me from identifying with any religion I've ever heard of, however impressive some of it other aspects are. The question of why those two strands developed together near-simultaneously in discrete parts of the world is a fascinating one. I do find it hard to get past what seems to me like clear hypocrisy antithetical to a true state of enlightenment. But of course that's just my lesser feminine self speaking!

To complement the history, I also picked up a book on Buddhist practice by the Dalai Lama. Even though I'm not going to Tibet I thought it might help provide more context for mostly Buddhist South-East Asia. I can't say that I feel any closer to enlightenment, but it was certainly an interesting text to read and ponder.

All of it a bit moot of course, in Hindu Bali.

Goma

Toasted crushed sesame seeds ready to be added to fresh udon at O-men.

Kouyou

Looking down at the red leaves near Fukushima City, Fukushima, on the way to the summit of Azuma-san.

Azuma Ko-Fuji

View from the top of the crater near Fukushima City, Fukushima.

Mochi

Though I'm far from Japan now, there are still lots of photos to catch up on. One of the many things I miss about Japan is the delicious mochi, which I tried to eat every day (and mostly succeeded).

Mochi is both the Japanese sticky rice, and the sweets that are made from it. Mochi is usually made by cooking the rice, then pounding it into a paste and shaping it into cakes of various shapes and forms, but you can also have sweets that use the whole grains of rice. Mochi isn't necessarily sweet either. My first night on the farm in Fukushima, we had nabe or hotpot, and one of the ingredients was sliced pieces of plain mochi, chewy and delicious.

Pictured first is the kind of mochi most available in North America - daifuku. Unfortunately the packaged kinds do not compare to the fresh version, which you can often buy at temples. This one is from Ninna-ji in Kyoto. It's chestnut-flavoured mochi around an unusually smooth, pale red bean filling, and it was incredibly delicious. The mochi is chewy and soft, the filling firm, dry, and a little grainy, and the richer sweetness complements the plainer taste of the rice.

Sadly less available outside of Japan are the many varieties of plain grilled mochi. The other two pictures are from Matsuyama, where my newfound friend and I had dessert sets after our lunch of traditional udon.

Abekawa mochi is plain rice cake coated in kinako, toasted soybean flour. It has a vaguely peanutbuttery flavour that goes beautifully with the mochi. I really love this sweet.

Iso mochi is brushed with shoyu (soy sauce) and eaten with nori, which might not be your idea of dessert, but it's equally yummy.

There are many many more kinds of mochi, and I tried to eat all the ones that came my way, but I know there are still more left untried...oh well. There's always a reason for another trip!

Jizo

Local god or boddhisattva with someone's gifted prayer beads.

Noh

My favourite from an exhibit of Noh masks that I saw in Kyoto. The way that I found out about the exhibit - I was browsing in a paper shop and an elderly woman approached me. In excellent English, she asked me if I was interested in Japanese culture, and when I said yes, offered to conduct me to an exhibit.

So she walked me there, apologising for not walking fast enough (while moving at a good clip assisted by a cane, no less!), delivered me into the care of her friend who was working at the exhibit, and melted away almost before I could say thank you!

The masks were lovely as was the chance to wander peacefully through the small rooms, attended by various elderly people who hovered affectionately but nervously, too shy to try to talk to me even in Japanese but clearly wanting me to be taken care of!

It turned out that the docents had made some of the masks themselves, and that the sensei himself was present! So, not entirely sure what etiquette required of me, I bowed to him, and he waved me off tolerantly and disinterestedly. I left again to go on with my planned day, though not before I was offered tea, and sent on my way with a packet of postcards of the masks and an embroidered handkerchief, courtesy of the temple that offered the exhibition. More Japanese generosity, and a sense of the wealth of the ages being handed down, on and on and on.

Authenticity

One of the little things that amused me while in Japan was watching the look of intense irritation that would sometimes waft across the face of another white person when they caught sight of me. Here I was, having a perfect Japanese moment, the look seemed to say; and then along came this lone other foreigner and RUINED it. Since so often you are clearly the only outsider around, it is noticeable when you pass another of your kind, the dreaded foreign tourist.

This is especially funny in Japan because no matter how many gaikokujin pass through the country, it is hard to imagine there ever being enough to even slightly dilute its essential Japaneseness. Plus, what did you think, other traveller, all these signs in English everywhere were erected for your personal benefit?

I mock, but alas I too am one of those travellers who dislikes thinking of herself as a tourist (though that is what she is). This search for authenticity (and getting to be an invisible observer) is the kind of concept Stuff White People Like was invented to make fun of, but in a way it's an almost necessary part of the desire to travel. We make the effort because we're captivated by some idea of the exotic Other Place, even if the ideal is just a white sandy beach. Then when you get there you have to deal with the fact that the beach is crowded with other holidaymakers, you get sunburnt, there are no bathrooms, and all the other little details that weren't covered in the brochure.

This fond delusion that I admit to cherishing, that as a traveller you can slip quietly into the background of a scene and be part of it without transforming it is of course an illusion for the most part. But one of the many delights of travelling in Japan is that no matter how touristy and built-up the site is, the number of domestic tourists by far outweighs the number of foreign ones. So even if you are having a dreadfully tacky tourist time, it's AUTHENTICALLY tacky. (Plus it's Japan so it's still aesthetically pleasing.)

If Japan let me nourish my delusions in peace, my first few days in South-East Asia were a shock to the system. The presence everywhere in Ubud of posters advertising "the "real" Bali!" were a bit of a hint that this authenticity was no more. If it's made it into scarequotes and onto tour descriptions, it might not be quite what it used to be.

Of course there is still "real" Bali, but it has to hide a little harder from the tourists to maintain itself. Plus, when you're aware that the presence of so many other tourists has already pushed it underground, how hard do you want to try to find it, and make it more vulnerable still?

So then what does the determined non-tourist do? Slip from travel mode into vacation mode and just enjoy the surface pleasures (in Bali there are many, many pleasures to be enjoyed, "real" or not)? Or try to find some non-toxic way to travel? I prefer the following, but short of living somewhere and properly learning about it, I'm not sure what it is. But I have a few months left to try and find out.

Photo: the author, inauthentically pretending to be Japanese at a ryokan in Fukuoka, Kyuushu.

Slurping, sniffing, and smoking

Japan has a deserved reputation for being a very polite country, with lots of rules to follow. But then Canada is supposed to be a nation of fairly polite people too, and a lot of the same rules apply. We tend to take off our shoes when visiting people's houses, even if the location isn't demarcated by a handy step (and we don't provide separate slippers for the bathroom). But anyhow basic polite behaviour is fairly similar.

There are customs that are more idiosyncratic though. People who have eaten a lot of meals with me know that one of my more annoying qualities is severe sensitivity to sound (well, just severe sensitivity really!). Slurping noises can ruin a whole meal for me if I'm in the wrong mood.

Asia is an excellent place to come to break myself of this overreaction. In Japan, not only is it perfectly ok to slurp, but actually when you're eating udon it's rude NOT to slurp. When a friend took us to a traditional udon shop on my trip to Japan in 2008, the owner was perfectly welcoming to the two gaikokujin, but made sure to impress on us that we had to slurp when we were served the noodles! Such is Japanese politeness though, that a friend once told me when he eats ramen in NYC, he looks around at the people around him. If they are mostly Japanese, he slurps, and if they are mostly not, he doesn't!

In fact my month in Japan was enough to win me over to slurping - when you're eating noodles in hot soup in a hurry it's completely functional, cooling each bite as you eat (and also keeping your shirt clear of broth splashes). Sniffing I wasn't really won over to. Apparently you are not supposed to blow your nose in public in Japan, as it draws too much attention to yourself, so instead you are stuck sniffing and sniffing until you are safely in a private place...

And smoking mores are different too. Tokyo has reminder signs everywhere about polite smoking behaviour - don't waft the smoke in people's faces, don't smoke right beside a non-smoking area etc. In most public places in the city it's forbidden to smoke outside. But it's still ok to smoke in restaurants and bars, and the chain cafes that offer both smoking and nonsmoking areas usually have a purely psychological barrier between the two - not too effective as a smoke barrier it turns out.

These are just some random examples but it makes me wonder what behaviours I accept as perfectly normal seem terrifically rude to others. The classic Foreigner-in-Japan example is probably wearing the bathroom slippers out of the bathroom - a solecism I thankfully avoided! I have enough Japanese friends that I felt pretty safe there. Now in South-East Asia, I'm on less certain ground, and I keep wondering what thing I unthinkingly do is someone else's sniffing noise...

Yes, transport?

I've spent not quite 24 hours in South-East Asia now, and my head is full of a blur of images moving about unpredictably like the motorbikes, and the heat.

I'm in Kuta, Bali, which is just as grotesquely geared to western tourists as my little sister warned me it was. Since I was forewarned, I have luckily been able to take it in stride and just enjoy the pageant of it all, as I am heading to Ubud tomorrow, about which I have much higher expectations.

One thing that surprises me so far is the ubiquity of the Hindu temples, which are tucked away everywhere in unexpected places (much as shrines and temples are in Japan, except that nowhere I went in Japan was so full of shops clearly marketed at outsiders only, so that the contrast here is more jarring). And especially I am touched by the small offerings that are set out and left on the ground, everywhere, little folded leaf baskets holding flowers, incense, little cookies for the gods.

I'm staying in what feels palatial after the cramped quarters in Tokyo - the ensuite bathroom is literally bigger than the room I was sleeping in there, and the large room also has a balcony which overlooks a shrine in the hotel courtyard, and coconut palms, all for less than $20 a night. The luxury feels especially strange when contrasted with the crowded streets full of hawkers.

You can't walk down the street without being constantly questioned, offered massages, hair and nail treatments, daytrips, and especially rides on the back of motorbikes. "Yes? Transport?" is ringing in my ears. It's quite something to casually peek into a foodcourt area and galvanise about 40 restaurant workers to leap to their feet and thrust menus at you - miss? are you hungry? (Of course I was just in Japan, where peeking into a business also causes all the workers to yell "Irrasshaimase!" at you, but it feels different somehow).

I'm finding the hawkers hard to deal with, not because they are terribly persistent. Just smiling, saying no thanks, and moving on works fine. It's more that I find it hard to deal with the reality that we live in a global system that requires some people to spend all day smiling ingratiatingly (or much worse) at often-rude foreigners in hopes of getting by, while other people like me can wander from luxury to luxury. I would really hate having to hawk my wares like that and so being on the receiving end makes me vicariously cringe.

Of course, global inequality is there whether or not I am walking down a street in Bali. But I don't have to like it.

As for the vicarious cringing, I will probably get used to the sales techniques pretty quickly (I did notice that Indonesians wandering into the food court get the same treatment). There will be a lot more of it as I travel around. But hopefully not inured to the real issues...

Tomorrow, north to Ubud and a completely different Bali experience.

Mata ne!

And so, after a fabulous month-and-a-bit in Japan, it was time to depart. Most reluctantly. I was fighting a bitter inner war with myself about whether I should live in Kyoto or Tokyo when I come back to Japan (or go apprentice myself as a farmer in Fukushima, of course) and it seemed inappropriate to decamp without fighting the decisive battle! However, I will be back in about five months, so it's "mata ne" instead of "sayonara"!

I had a few last days in Tokyo to spend time on important issues like catching up on neglected soba-eating, as well as day trips to Nikko and Kamakura. I also found time to return to the excellent cafe operated out of this tiny van parked just off Omotesando, one of Tokyo's ritziest shopping streets. (Photo taken on my visit in early October. Please note the plants set out around the van. For anyone in Tokyo, to find the cafe head down Omotesando away from Meiji-jingu for a few blocks, and it will be in an alley on your left, just past that really fancy odd-shaped department store, tucked away behind Morgan de moi, and its hours are 10 to 6 I think).

Those who know how I love to be a regular will understand how much the following meant to me. When I went to get my latte, the owner (or at least the same woman who I've always seen working there) handed me a stamp card. Then she took it back and added a stamp saying, "for last time". Last time was a whole month ago, but she remembered me! I felt sad to not be able to fill out the stamp card until March - but it was a nice send-off from my all-too-brief stay in Japan. The littlest things can make me happy...

And on to South-East Asia - first stop, Bali!

Fushimi Inari

An endless flow of red torii gates at Fushimi Inari shrine.

This is the head shrine for about 40,000 others across Japan. If you see little fox statues just past the entrance torii, you know it's an inari shrine.

At Fushimi, just south of Kyoto, you can follow the gate-path all the way to the top of the mountain, with views out over the city and toward Osaka. I contemplated them with a kinako (toasted-soybean flour) ice cream in my hand.