Wyoming Treats Em Well On Her Birthday

This is Meg checking into the blog world again after a long absence. We already have so many good stories from living in Wyoming that we've decided to keep this blog going for our friends who would like to hear about it all. I'm even working on getting some photos on this. ;-)

Monday was Emily's birthday. We took the day off from settling in and wor

k and just enjoyed being here. We had a breakfast on the porch in the sun where my Dad and I gave Em her birthday present: new cowboy bo

ots. Our friend Kathryn had the most appropriate reply to this news from Em: "Oh hell, we've lost you for good." They are that good looking!

Then I took Em hiking into the Snowy Range Mountains (the range to the west of us), but down low where the snow has already melted. We hiked in along a mountain creek and then headed up for a view. We wandered around on game trails for 6 hours and never saw another human. We did see many wildflowers, expansive views, antelope, deer, a beaver busily building his home and found a huge mule deer antler.

When we got back to the truck we rinsed off in the fresh, cold creek and changed i

nto our dinner clothes. After 45 min drive we were back in Laramie at the sushi restaurant where we met my dad and two long time family friends who Emily knows and enjoys. (Yes, now with 'flash freeze' capability, sushi is tasty this far from the ocean!) At dinner our friends recounted stories of being in protests of the 60s in Wyoming and D.C. After just being in Vietnam and thinking a lotabout this time in history, it was really amazing to hear first hand accounts about this time. My dad was in the army but was stationed in Germany during the war. But then he and my mom were in grad school in Chicago during the famous trail where Bobby Seale was tied and gagged in a federal courtroom. Dave was in the army and was in Vietnam and then was in grad school in Maryland when the Berrigan priests andco. burned the draft cards. Jenny lived here but was in D.C. for a League of Women Voters meeting and they stayed another day for the first half-million march. She learned at a lunch with congressmen in D.C. "not to worry, that everything was under control at the University of Wyoming protests. The National Guard was on its way." Meanwhile, she knew her husband Mike would be at those protests when he wasn't teaching a class.

This history hits home in ways in never did when we learned about it in school. I assume this has to do with being in Vietnam this year and just being older and seeing how the world works from personal experience instead of out of a book. I have a great deal more appreciation for the protest movements of the 60s and 70s these days. We go through life and forget that everyday people have gotten together and done the most amazing things in this world. Powerto the People. I suppose that is where that saying came from.

So all and all, it was a good Wyoming birthday, or so I am told. We ended the day with a soak in the hot tub on the porch. Life is good. And this was the first day that it really hit me why we moved here. ;-)

last day

It is the last day of the trip, and we are back in Hanoi. Fittingly, on the last day, I managed a whole interaction at lunch in Vietnamese. We are wrapping up strong, after taking in so much over so long and weathering the major ups and downs of travel. Yesterday's stop was maybe our favorite of all, visiting the root temple of Thich Naht Hahn in Hue, Vietnam. We had a chance to hear the monks chanting, and talk with one of the brother's who spoke very good English. He knows Thay and several of the monastics at Blue Cliff Monstery in New York, it was really fun to play "do you know..." with a monk all the way across the globe. After the hectic environment of travel and motorbikes and tourism and the grinding poverty and desperation, juxtaposed with scrappy 24/7 industriousness we have seen, it was so wonderful to see the nuns and monks smiling and laughing, working in the garden, doing landscaping, and visiting with lay-friends. We've rested in some nice hotels, are clear of stomach bugs (for the moment) and even have a couple items of clean clothes for the plane. We are ready to come home and start the next major adventure of life, heading out to Wyoming with the truck and the cats, leaving NYC on May 10.

We love you all and more from the next chapter!
Em and Meg

totally negligent

well, we've totally neglected to keep up the blog because our good friend Jill Krauss flew over here and we've been running around between the Halong Bay, Sapa, Hoi An and the toilet. Yup, we all fell ill to some bug, whether food or water or beer or whatnot, we were quite a crew. The Halong Bay turned out the best of it's weather for us...the cool spooky mist that it is famous for, and then sparkling sun for swimming and kayaking and gazing at the incredible seascape. The Halong Bay is still home to many people living on floating villages, making a living off fishing and selling drinks and snacks to tourists. We were saddened by the pollution, as we have been in many many of the worlds great wondrous places...from the tour boats, from careless tourists, and from the fishing villages themselves...I've thought a lot on this trip about how poverty and repeated war and colonization leave legacies...in governments that are too corrupt to create adequate waste disposal, people that are too busy living hand to mouth to create a system to preserve their surroundings, and the demoralizing effect of having wealthy tourists bargain for a bottle of water from someone on a fishing boat. Yikes...it's been a heavy trip, and we were greatly relieved to realize we don't have to be having "fun" all the time...we are just here to learn about the world and be out in it a bit. We also toured a valley on an island in the Halong Bay that saw a lot of fighting during the "American War" to secure arms imports, and a cave that was used by the Vietnamese army as a hospital. The guide spoke good english and made both Meg and I cry when he talked about influence of the American public's demonstrations in ending the war, and the knowledge that the people of a country are different from the governments of the country. We also looked around at the dense and hilly jungle and thought about Kids younger than us fighting to survive in a place so foreign we are even homesick sitting by the pool. Sigh...it's been an intense time here in Vietnam.
However, we saw a magical sunset, experienced the MOST intense thunderstorm as we slept on the boat (I was terrified the mast would be struck by lightening but Jill and Meg thought it was absolutely amazing.) Halong Bay means "Descending Dragon" and the Dragon descended indeed that night. The next evening we Kayaked though the karst formations, ate vietnamese barbecue, and the moon rose that night full and orange and heavy as we played cards on the porch of our bungalow.

Next we shipped off (yup still thinking about the war) on the overnight sleeper train to the mountains on the border of China, to Sapa...where we had a mixed experience. The absolute top highlight of this segment was the guide we had to take us hiking, she is a Hmong woman a bit younger than us, whose name we pronounced Mo. Surely there was a better pronunciation but this was the best we could do. She doesn't know how old she is, but agreed when being registered as a guide to the approximate age of 27. She is married and has two kids and doesn't read or write, but is one of the smartest and most astute and intuitive people we ever met. We chose not to sign up for a homestay in a village, which is what most people do, because some of the "homestay" situations we saw in other countries were sort of grotesque, treating the native populations as a zoo, where you can stay over and "see how they really live " but you stay in a in a room with other tourists. Mo of course said she wished we had more time because she would take us to her village, it broke all of our hearts a bit that we did not allow more time up there. Sapa itself turned out to be a bit of a "meet the natives" gauntlet with young children pleading with tourists to "buy something from me." Our two day hikes were to close villages that felt overrun by tourist shops, with odd paradoxes of people overspending on trinkets and children who clearly did not have enough to eat and were not being looked after. The scenery, however, was stunning, and getting to spend the day asking Mo personal and cultural questions was tireless. The weather, again, was a miracle and revealed at turns misty peaks, shimmering rice terraces, and stunning panoramas.

We returned to Hanoi again on the overnight train and after breakfast went to the airport to fly down to Hoi An, the aincient town. This is where the wheels started comiong off the wagon...Jill, finally recovered from her Jetlag, caught a head and chest cold. The first night in Hoi An, I woke up with a stomach ache, and threw up three times in the night. Jill and Meg went off to check out the town and I lay about, recovering in the evening just in time to see Meg through the sickest night I have ever seen...sparing you the details but she hardly had a chance to lie down between being sick. In the meantime, Jill encountered GI distress and a worsening head cold. Our plans to see the town and order clothes from the countless tailor shops in the morning, and head to the beach for the rest of the day, were thwarted. We did all manage to buy some great clothes and lounge by the gorgeous pool some, but Jill only made it to the beach one morning before she hopped back on the plane to go home and start Jet lag recovery all over again.

Meg and I have one more full day here, and have no sightseeing ambitions. we want to rest up, enjoy the pool and read, and come home in one piece so we are fresh to see you all and hit the road for part II.

"Hanoi makes NYC seem bucholic"

Meg is rolling out some memorable quotes these days. Hanoi is stunning, full of surprises and not surprisingly, reveles layers and layers every day. Life in Hanoi takes place on the street, compared to other places where all the locals disapear to eat at home with their families, the Vietnamese in Hanoi pull up tiny plastic chairs to tiny plastic tables and order food from stalls that make only one thing. This makes it easy to order of course, and people are thrilled when we try their food and try repeatedly to say "delicious," the word for which is Ngon, but seems unpronounceable to western toungs. Ours, anyway. We learned another word, for "good," "tot" which, when we use the two together we can make ourselves understood. This is handy, because we are seriously eating everything in sight, well...almost, I have not yet braved the organ meats soups. Vietnamese is a tonal language, so and up or down or even or low or high tilt changes the meaning of the word completely. Despite this, we've mastered please, thank you, the numbers 1-7, "how much does it cost" (though I have a really hard time understanding the answer and have resorted to the technique of fanning out my money and letting the person choose the appropriate bills. Not the best technique. All manner of things are traded in the street; sweets, shoes, car parts, animal parts, pirated DVD's, snake wine...(?!) and clothes. We took a brief side trip, we were going to spend a few days in the outlying area, but we liked Hanoi and were eager for something to be familiar for a few days, so we hightailed it back and have two more days here before Jill Krauss joins us and we head off to the famed Halong Bay. On our way back to town we met an older australian couple and a young woman from Montreal, and spent the day with all of them today. It was refreshing to swap stories and trade tips and share a lot of laughs. Meg laughs particularily hard when she gets to tell the story of me somehow dialing an outside line when I was trying to reach the front desk of our hotel (I swear I only pushed 0 and #!) and asking repeatedly, about 10 different ways, if we could flush the toilet paper or if it needed to go in the trash bin, before the patient woman on the other end made it clear that I had dialed a household. "I don't know why you ask me this" she was trying to explain. She laughed very hard when we figured it all out.

Hanoi!

chao ban, hello from Hanoi! We've made it. Much of this whole trip was planned out of a desire to get to Vietnam, and we are here, we have a little over three weeks. It feels oddly familiar and "homey" to be here, maybe because of the time we've spent with the Vietnamese monastics at Blue Cliff, but we both slept about 10 hours last night after downing a bowl of pho and wandering circles around our hotel eating treats on the street and not getting killed by motorbikes, which takes a lot of effort. We have a week before Jill joins us for 2 weeks, and we are going to go on the slow program, taking it all in and not rushing to try to see everything and go everywhere.

Too Many Temples When.....

In a previous post Emily misquoted me a bit. Since we keep laughing about the quote, I thought I would share. We were looking at yet another gorgeous old temple, and in my slightly delirious tourist mode (meaning I've seen too much to take in), I pointed out some old carving to her and apparently I said "Hey Em look, these are some really old somethinurothers."
That about sums it up.

Lost in Laos

Meg reporting in:
Lovely, sleepy, smoggy Laos bends around my mind, creating a general lost feeling I have had since we arrived. Not that we are actually lost, but the far-awayness of this Indochine landscape lends itself to a sense of being hidden in a perpetual Opium cloud. I dont particularly want to be lost here either, but I see how it sucks some people in, especially if one wants to be lost. We are not doing drugs, nor have we seen opiates or their clouds, but still I can't escape the general description of hazy other-worldness that I feel here. Its' mythic image fits, for now.
Adding to that general cloudy feel is the fact that we landed here in the peak of the dry season
which, unbeknownst to us before hand (who needs to read guidebooks?), is the time of the year when the farmers burn the fields (hillsides) to prepare for next years crops (rice, banannas and I'm not sure what else). The smoke has progressively gotten thicker and thicker as our week goes on. Today is our first full day in Luang Prabang, Laos' famed World Heritage city on the Mekong, and eventhough it is 3pm outside it looks like a hazy golden hour of sunset.
The only other time I have witnessed skys like this is the summer of 2000 in Montana when we had those terrible raging forest fires. I was working on the E bar L ranch up the Blackfoot river, and I distinctly recall a vivid day when even at high noon we could not make out the mountains, and barely the sun for all the smoke in the sky. At the time it was one of the spookiest days I ever experienced. But that was also because we were in the mountains and not being able to see them for all the smoke made it particularly unnerving in case a fire was nearby and headed our way. Apparently this is normal for here this time of year.
Yesterday we took a shuttle bus over and through the mountains from the south to Luang Prabang. We were trying to get on a full sized bus, but they were full, so they put us in a van. The van seats 9 comfortably, but could hold 12, so of course we had 12 in it. We had heard this drive is very windy and beautiful. It is both, but in the heart of the burn season it is also a bit depressing and oppressive. We could make out amazing mountain (or limestone shists) peaks through the haze, but sometimes even the close distant view was too hazy to see across. And hillside after hillside was in a slow burn. The only possible original forests we have seen are clinging to the steep cliffs, where people can't go. But even those seem to be missing large diameter timber trees. (I'm out of my knowledge base here.. soo more research is needed before I say anything else). Also we have only been on the one main route North-South in Laos. I hear, and hope, there are protected areas off the main drags.
I'm sincere when I say that was the most intense mountain road I have ever been on. I thought "sure it's windy, but I've lived in the mountains and been over many passes before. It can't be that bad." Well let me tell you, it is! Imagine Teton pass for 6 hours. The drive actually took close to 7 hours. But after the first hour, the remaining 6 hours were constant 'hold on to your seat' type switchbacks.' Up and down, around, up and down-- it seriously never ended. The van barely could chug up some of the passes. I don't think the grade was as steep as Teton pass the whole way, but the tight turns were relentless. There was a little air conditioning, which seemed to stop working uphill, so we resorted to opening the windows. This did create a breeze, but it also meant inhaling hot summer fire smoke for the whole ride.
At one point I dozed off (while still holding the seatback in front of me at all times to keep from crushing the people on either side of me) and in my inbetween dream-world state I was flooded with a happy warm feeling and I realized I was having a sense memory of living in Montana during the fire season when it smelled like smoke constantly for months. And since I have been very homesick for the Rockies and the states on this trip, even the smell of burning Montana made me happy in my dream state.
Our driver did a great job. I did find myself closing my eyes tight on some turns we went into with a lot of speed, like I do on carnival rides that scare me. But he obviously had made that trip many times and knew the speeds it could take. And even though I am getting a little carsick just thinking about it, I have to say that the only thing that could make that trip worse would be to drag it out for another few hours, which is how it would go if our driver did go any slower. We also passed 3 other vans and one truck that were broken down. I say we were glad as ever to make it to Luang Prabang when we did.
I dont claim to know the ins and outs of culture, economics, politics, or the environment here, but I can't help but be disturbed by all the burning. It is so intense. And I know it is a complicated issue that has to do with governments and class and food supply, but seriously I can't see how this is sustainable. I dont think anyone claims it is, but it just really makes certain issues sink in more in me. Before I ramble more about this I need to research. But in short I can say it makes me think a lot about home: how grateful I am to have fresh air much of the time and how it can also change with a drought and fires at any time. Mostly I am so much more grateful to live in a country where at least we have the resources and freedom to address environmental issues and try to create sustainable systems. I dont think we are better people or anything, it just ties in with having enough economic stability to at least look at alternatives. And I know that the U.S. is also a culprit in all of this in more ways than one, even all the way over here. In fact, especially all the way over here. But alas that is too long of an entry already. More soon as we are resting in a place where we have regular computer access. It has been brought to my attention that Emily's blogs tend to hit the high notes, and since I'm not blogging much, we tend not to mention the low points. But soon enough I'll write more about the unglamorous side of world travel.
And, by the way, Luang Prabang is lovely. So far it does seem to be all it is cracked up to be.