Photo: Young monk with begging bowl, taking part in the sticky rice ceremony of alms-giving at sunrise, Luang Prabang.It's cur
ious to go from very touristed places to very undertouristed ones, as your presence means such different things.
In a city like Luang Prabang, which in the past years has seen a huge surge in tourism, which as a small city is awash in the visiting, mostly European foreigners, you are one of a lucrative herd. People aren't surprised to see you. They might be enterprising, they might be weary, they might be genuinely friendly, but they've seen your type before.
When you get further out, even just to the outskirts and sidestreets of the same tourist town, is when you get more of a reaction. People look twice. Sometimes they even look shocked, frightened, as if you've intruded somewhere they thought they were safe - this is a terrible feeling. More often though, people stare openly and with interest, and usually with a generous smile.
It's a whole other feeling entirely in Mae Sot, a smallish town just east of the Thai-Burma border. It's not that foreigners are particularly rare, but most of them are longer-term visitors: volunteers and NGO workers. People's friendliness is stepped up a bit. You're a neighbour, probably even a good neighbour, since you're here for altruistic reasons. So many people say hi, especially kids, and your cheeks ache from smiling back.
The impact that your gaze has is very different too, from Luang Prabang to Mae Sot. Even though I love this photo, I have misgivings about having taken it at all. One of the most popular tourist sights in LP is the early morning alms-giving ceremony. Women get up in the dark to cook sticky rice, make meals, and then dress in their best sihn and blouse, with a temple scarf draped over their shoulders. They kneel in the early morning damp, mist, and chill with woven bamboo baskets in front of them. They wait patiently for the slow approach of the orange-robed monks in single file. The monks will come holding out their begging bowls, and each woman will offer a small ball (which she has pre-rolled) of rice to each monk, each offering a blessing. While the women wait, some chat, while others sit quietly with their faces closed in private meditation. When the monks approach, all the women become still, faces relaxed as they hand out the rice with a prayer, until all the wats have had their turn, and the women can return to their daily work.
It sounds beautiful, and it is. What the photo doesn't show, though, is what a miracle it is that there are no tourists obtruding into the still moment. Even though all over town there are stern documents instructing tourists on how not to ABSOLUTELY DESTROY the alms-giving ceremony, foreigners stand with their enormous cameras right up against the waiting women. The clicks and flashes (because it is still quite dark) rob the moment of its proper solemnity. Though their faces are controlled, it's not hard to imagine how irritating it is to drag yourself out of bed at 4am as a religious duty, a gift, only to have the meaning leached out by the presence of gawky pale people in quick-dry microfibre and fleece. Of course I still went, and I still took pictures, so I am just as guilty (though at a slightly greater distance).
It's the opposite in Mae Sot. There are so many pictures I haven't taken with my camera - but everywhere my eye falls I try to fix the image in my head - faces, artefacts, detention cells. Since being here (where I tend to forget I'm still in Thailand, so Burmese a town it is) I have learned so much more about the situation in Burma, culture and history as well as current deprivation and atrocities. I have met so many open, incredibly generous people, who are so willing to give of themselves, to sit down with me and teach me, even to house and feed me, so that I'll understand.
And on a trip that is largely on the other side, the tourist side of the equation, it's good to be reminded of the impact of witnessing. There is a sense of importance just in knowing, in being able to share stories when across an imaginary line, a border, there is so much armed force commiting crimes of silence, of lies and purges and misinformation. There is a value in seeing, listening, and bringing reality to what was previously abstract.
And there's more of a value when those stories are shared again and again - which I look forward to when I am home.
Making offerings at temple in Mae Sot, Thailand. Apparently even though the Burmese New Year is in April like the Thai, Lao, and Cambodian ones, it's popular for many nearby Burmese to come across the border and pray here on Chinese New Year's day.
Burmese pickled tea leaf salad, mixed with fried dried beans and peanuts, cabbage and tomato, sour salty hot and addictive.
Sadly I'm missing the acrobatic dragon dancing scheduled to take place over several floors of my local KL mall tomorrow -- I'm leaving disgustingly early for Java instead. So here's a more humble, laid-back dragon going from restaurant to restaurant in the alleys of Bangkok Chinatown in Feb 14. The city was very very red because besides the Chinese New Year decorations, Thais also go in for Valentine's Day...
In a back alley off Yaowarat Road, Bangkok Chinatown. Hot panfried oysters on a bed of egg mixed with rice flour cake (noodle texture, but all one piece), with green onion and coriander.
Murals depicting the Chinese astrological signs in the same Chinese temple in Mae Sot, Thailand.
The thing about being in a volatile place like Mae Sot and having read a little too much about drive-by assassinations, is that when you hear what sounds like machine gun-fire in the middle of the night, well, it really could be.
From China to Malaysia, Vietnam to Burma, these sticks of fried dough are sold for breakfast.
I just can't get enough river weed. These fresh bundles are being sold at the outdoor morning market in Luang Prabang.
I like knitting. In Burmese.
Winter and the dry season and the dead rice in the mountaintop fields.
Photo: Thatched bamboo house with rice straw roof in a Khmu village, Luang Prabang province, Laos.
Photo: Mekong river weed (khai pen) drying in the sunset on a plastic rice sack, Ban Xangthong, Laos.
The national breakfast of Singapore, minus the sweet milky coffee. Kaya toast is soft white bread toasted, then split right down the middle of the slice. Each bread half is spread thickly with butter and coconut jam (kaya) before being clapped back together. It no doubt gives Singporeans all the energy they need for a busy day of working, shopping, and more eating!
The essentials of life.
I spent about four hours uploading photos today, over a slow connection. So my reward is going to be posting a photo of what I had for lunch!
Sticky rice steams over a charcoal fire in a clay pot. Outside a cafe along the Nam Khan river, Luang Prabang.
I love the knowing look in this chick's eye. Photographed in a Hmong village near Luang Prabang, Laos.
Please forgive the obscure pun, which I could not resist. Sihn are Lao-style skirts, the local sarong equivalent. They are basically a large tube of fabric with two sets of hooks, attached on the inside at one hip, and on the outside at the other. They are incredibly practical to wear, given that they are loose enough to give total freedom of movement, but keep you covered as wraparound skirts sometimes fail to do. (Apparently lots of styles of sarong are like this too, though I have mostly seen the kind that you just tie around yourself.) And women in Laos - at least the women I saw in Luang Prabang - wear sihn daily. They are the girls' school uniform, and they are worn by market women and women working in travel agencies and cafes and even in the fields and rivers.
I read that statues of the reclining Buddha depict him at the moment of his enlightenment. This, the famous reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, is possibly the most beautiful Buddha in all of Thailand - and that is saying something.
Buddha is subduing Mara, temptation, illusion, in the old Thai city of Sukhothai.
Calls for ice cream!
This helpful photo taken inside the "five-star" toilet in the Angkor Thom temple complex, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
They come in lots of shapes, sizes, and seasonings, but banana fritters are a South-East Asian constant. Here, at the lovely market in Vinh Long, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.
Temples in Thailand have tripartite roofs to represent the threefold refuge of the Buddha, the Dharma (teaching) and the Sangha (community of monks).
Here photographed in Cambodia, and everywhere else I've been in South-East Asia.
Thai temples are full of life in so many ways. Not only are they full of worshippers at any time of day (especially around New Year's), but the walls are full of paintings, the paintings full of people dancing, walking, eating, gossiping, fighting, meditating.
More homecooking in Saigon - fresh heart of palm, with water spinach and rice.
The head temple of the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam. They favour eyes, lotuses, and revere Victor Hugo as one of the three great spirits bringing us messages from the world beyond. In Tay Ninh province, Vietnam.
Just one of 12 different herbs served to us in a heaping pile with our banh canh breakfast in Tay Ninh province, the western edge of Vietnam. Sitting on an unusual, delicious opaque rice paper wrapper.
An impromptu position as simultaneous interpreter of silent-film title cards, from French to English. The subject, a decades-old 8mm film of Laurel and Hardy, projected onto the wall in the front room.
One of our last homecooked meals in Saigon was this delicious vegetarian version of hu tieu, the pho of the South.
Standing still on Saigon's busy streets, everything blurs past you, from yoke-bearing street vendors to the many many motorbikes.
Grilled squidlet dips a languid tentacle in the nuoc mam, contemplates making a break for it from its bed of crisp rice cracker and lettuce, at our favourite banh xeo place, tucked in a little alley of Hai Ba Trung, Quan 1, HCMC.
Happy New Year from Thailand!!
