Fabienne in Asia

i’ve been getting some flack for not posting a thailand entry. i guess i’m just not the conventional blogger, and i’ve never been very good at keeping any semblance of a coherent journal. the blog is actually the closest i’ve ever come to keeping something that doesn’t spiral upside down and backwards across the page, part rage, part list, part love, part poetry. thailand was weeks ago now, and it would be boring for you readers, if there are any of you still out there, to read a ‘then we went to the beach, then we saw the drag show’ recap. there you have it. thailand was a lovely, hilarious family vacation. beaches, seafood, drag queens, snorkelling, great books, a guitarist who catered to dad and i by playing the songs of dad’s youth and thus the lullabies of my childhood.
i have a new found love for scuba diving. perhaps you’re wondering about the sea monsters. i have not conquered my fear of them (a wise uncle informed me that i should get used to it; there are those who are openly afraid and those who deny it) but have realized that they aren’t even relevant when diving as i feel invincible in scuba gear. when this cold clears up and when i make a bit of money as a daffodil-picking dishwasher i’m going to put on a dry-suit and see if the seals by the breakwater want to play.
home is wonderful. of course i miss asia. i’m already looking at possibly hopping on an airplane to somewhere across a large body of water during the month of august, after the planting season ends and before i fully commit myself to once again becoming a student in the fall.
but…home. yes, home. there’s something so cozy and wholesome and comforting about the word. it’s sort of nice to feel a bit more invisible again. judy and i went to a malawi benefit show at a downtown bar a few nights ago. i had only been home for a couple of days – 2, to be exact – and it was a bit of a shocking affair. here’s what i noticed, which i hadn’t really noticed about canada and canadians before: 1. the bob. people here bob to music. aside from judy, who has wild and heartfelt moves, the crowd just sort of bobs. the bob slows a bit and speeds up, depending on the band and the song, but it never really changes shape. i had just caught the black lung and probably shouldn’t have gone out at all, so the dancing shoes weren’t worn that night, making it alot easier to just sit back and watch. and notice things like the undulation of a bob. 2. we actually have quite hilarious accents. i always thought that the stereotypical canadian accent was an exaggeration; it isn’t. watch corner gas. 3. we are a fairly tall nation. i’ve spent the last 4 months around people who are usually substantially shorter than me, and there were many instances during the night when i’d catch myself thinking, ‘that woman is a giant!’ and realize that she was my height. 4. drinks are outrageously expensive. and weak. so weak.
so, there we have it. i’ll post my thailand pictures in the fullness of time, and i’ll probably find myself back on this website every once in a while when i have a story or an anecdote that i’m just dying to write down.
hope you are all happy, wherever you may be.
please read ‘a heartbreaking work of staggering genius’ by dave eggers. it’s necessary. i was in a bookstore the other day and noticed that he just came out with a new book of short stories. i’ll have to start saving my pennies.

since luang prabang was the place to decide things in life, i ignored the promise i made to myself to always travel by the cheapest means possible (over land), and i walked into a travel agency and bought a plane ticket to phnom penh. perhaps it was the influence of paul and katrina’s decision to fly to chiang mai (yes! i met up with paul and katrina again! it was great, and i think my accent provided endless amusement for paul who loved to mock my desire to go ‘toobing on toosday’.). whatever it was, i had a week to kill before meeting up with my family, and cambodia had captured my heart, so i flew back.
i wonder if i would’ve fallen in love with cambodia regardless of rejean, or if he was the catalyst, or if he is an integral part of why i love the country so much. i didn’t really write about phnom penh the first time i was there. i think it was just too overwhelming, in the most positive sense. it had been the place i most needed to go ever since my mom stepped off the plane with my little brother when i was six, and suddenly i was there, right in the midst of it all, confronted with the mekong, the smiles, the land mine victims, and the history i’d read so much about. i saw rejean everywhere, i spent most of my days walking through and across and up and down the city, just searching and examining and trying to understand (i’m not quite sure what). it was a whirlwind, and i left suddenly because i knew that if i stayed i might never make it to laos. maybe i knew from the start that i’d be back.
i stayed in a guesthouse second time around, right on the top floor/roof, level with the highest of phnom penh’s buildings which don’t exceed 5 storeys. i did the unthinkable and went back to tuol sleng, the genocide museum. i didn’t last much more than about 15 minutes in the buildings, because it was just a bit too much to take, but it was something that i needed to do, whithout a tour guide this time. i just sat there for a while, outside on a bench in the centre of it all, realizing it’s something that probably can’t be understood, no matter how much you read or how many times you return.
canada house – rejean’s orphanage – had been a place i wanted to visit, but it shut down many years ago. i saw a sign in a guest house asking travellers to visit a non-governmental orphanage just outside of town, and to bring donations, if they had a spare afternoon. the kids were mostly from the provinces, and from my understanding, many of them either had parents who were too poor to support them, or were the children of hiv victims. one of the older boys (same age as rejean is now) took my camera for the afternoon and photographed the orphanage. the photos on the yahoo website are all his. he’s the one in the superman shirt.
so, before it begins to slip from my mind, here’s the phnom penh i want to remember and may forget (since we don’t all have the memories of elephants):
1. kramas – a country unified by these endemic checkered scarves – used as towels, head wraps to shield from the heat, waist straps to hold up the baskets of vendors selling books to baguettes to mangos, face masks to protect from the dusty cambodian roads, slings for babies. 2. the charming and incessant ‘hello madame, moto?’ proposition of every moto driver, one finger poised in the air and a quick, broad grin, like it’s all a joke and they already know that you’ll decline.
3. amok fish: fish in coconut milk, served over rice, deliciously, constantly unique.
4. early morning dragon boat practise on the mekong.
5. the owner of boh’r books who i befriended and visited almost daily. he and his family have probably been running the book store for the past decade. a conversation with him can cover ten distinct topics in ten minutes, and somehow flow seamlessly. it seems he has read just about every book in his shop. book stores are the most dangerous places at the worst of times. i never left empty-handed.

sihanoukville
my last days as a solo traveller were spent on the beaches of sihanoukville, a port town on the gulf of thailand. since 2005/age 20 seemed to be the year of reflection (alone in the big open spaces of canadian clear cuts, travelling alone, the space for thought that accompanies big decisions and life changes like taking a year off school and stopping rowing…) it seemed fitting to spend the last few days as a 20 year old alone on the beach with a notebook and ‘the alchemist’, gearing up for 21.
21 is going to be a good year. i think i’d decided this before dad and rejean and i stumbled across a fortune teller at the temple the other day. i’d never been to a fortune teller, dad didn’t want his fortune told, rejean was either disinterested or too superstitiuous, so i went for it. why not indulge this youthful soul-searching, eh? he said that if i go home now i’m going to stay for a while, look around, and leave again. he said that it’s going to be my gypsy year. and since this entry delved was deeper than i originally intended, i’ll just top it off with a quote from the alchemist. “each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.” guess we’ll just see how this whole life thing unfolds. for now, it’s down to the south thailand beaches for a couple of weeks of sand castles, beach soccer, snorkelling, and diving. merry christmas, happy new year! those of you at home: roll in the snow or have a brutal snowball fight or build a giant snowman and take a photo of it for me…please?

sorry, i know it’s been a while. it was a combination of becoming discouraged with blogging, sending heaps of personal emails and not wanting to then repeat what i’d written in them on the blog, and being surrounded by mountains, sunsets, books, and people that were far more enticing than a computer. now i’m in bangkok with my family, in a hotel grand enough to negate all of the backpacking i’ve done during these past months, and the pool and tennis courts aren’t going anywhere. we’ve poked around the city a bit and taken in our share of river ferry rides, night markets, and lavish thai temples. i’m just a tiny bit templed out though. gross understatement. i’ve reached a point where my mind looks something like this when i enter a temple: buddhabuddhabuddha lama buddhabuddha breath! buddhabuddha, all awash in gold leaf and digital flash. night markets widen that hole in my pocket, and i’ve ridden my fair share of boats that pitch and heave across bodies of water far too mighty for their sizes. so it’s time for an update.

luang prabang: the perfect city
the perfect mix of traditional laos and french colonial architecture, right at the junction of two rivers, under green and gnarled dr. seuss mountains. like alisa said, it’s the place to go to decide things in life. the place to sit right down in the dirt on the banks of a river and contemplate, anyway, while a group of laos boys across the water try to outdo one another’s back flips off the stern of their fishing boat, for your benefit. or the place to happen upon a collection of alice munro’s short stories and decide that it may not be so nuts to want to be a writer, after all. or to accept just how crazy a notion it is and decide to plunge.

vang vieng
this place is drug tourism. every restaurant along the main strip advertizes for happy shakes, happy scrambled eggs, happy pizza, and if you walk inside, sit down, and really examine the walls, it’s not too hard to find a small, hand-written sign for mr. ‘o’ tea. someone introduced the idea to vang vieng locals that tourists love ‘friends’, so now just about every one of these ‘happy’ locations is equipped with a few televisions, comfy cushions, and every episode of ‘friends’ since the beginning of time, on repeat, all day.
people who visit vang vieng seem to come away with a pretty strong opinion about the place. there’s the ‘vang vieng is awesome! you can just drink and tube all day, and the opium’s so cheap!’ crowd, and there’s the ‘all of those drug tourists give foreigners a bad name. i don’t understand how foreigners can justify and condone this sort of impact on laos society.’ crowd. i guess i fall a little in the middle.
i’ll try just about anything once. the perfect mix of thrill and relaxation is a day of tubing down a cool mountain river, stopping off for the occasional beer or leap from a flying fox, then hopping back on the tube to navigate the best route around the rapids, bums up.
i met up with the most wonderful group of girls – mostly med students from brisbane (of course, because who else do i travel with but australians?) – and we decided to spend a day white water kayaking and spelunking. spelunking! i had to use that word at least once on this trip. we spelunked on inner tubes into the deep dark depths of a water cave, left our tubes on a gravel bar, adjusted our headlamps, then crawled under stalactites and overhangs until we reach a hidden pool, great for swimming and as cool as a dip in stuart lake in july. also a prime location for sea monsters and anacondas.
i wonder if i’ll ever conquer my fear of water monsters. i mean, i’m 21, it’s a bit ridiculous. i’ll always swim, anywhere and everywhere, and for great distances, across massive bodies of water, but there’s always the lurking idea as i’m out alone in the middle of a lake that the swim i’m on will be my last because i’ll be swallowed by a monster that has risen from the plankton bottom after centuries of laying dormant. i’m getting my padi certification in a week. maybe surviving a few dives with sharks and sting rays will suppress the fear of monsters. i’ll let you know.
back to vang vieng. i don’t think i could last more than 3 days without the cynical side prevailing. a couple of girls i was with rescued a man from the water who was so drunk that he had lost his tube and had practically passed out in the rapids. kids ask you if you want to buy opium and probably press ‘start’ on the blender for 50 happy shakes a day. they must think that we’re all lazy, ‘friends’-loving, bob marley fanatics. i can’t help but wonder what pre-tourism vang vieng must’ve been like, when it was just a quiet little laos town in the mountains.

when my dad decides that he has read enough on silk road mummies for a while, i might just strategically set a book about the plain of jars in that beijing living room for the ‘unsolved mysteries’ buff. the jars are as baffling as stonehenge. some are big enough to fit a few people inside, some are nearly twice the height of me, some are fat and squat. they dot thousands of miles of plateau, and no one has figured them out. the locals, who take great pride in their lao lao whisky, love the hypothesis that these jars were made to brew ancient rice wine for celebratory armies. talk about a victory bash. some believe that the jars were used as urns, making the clusters of them more like ancient burial sites. my favourite theory: they were just plain old jars left in laos by a race of giants. or ben’s idea: a dual purpose. maybe the soldiers drank themselves silly on rice wine, collapsed in the jars, and drowned in sweet lao whisky.

at any rate, it was a fun weekend with the mcc laos crew, following a relaxing few days with ben and alisa in their little community. ben and alisa: thanks for introducing me to true laos life. there was a lot of papaya salad, fried river fish, a few rounds of lao lao with the workers at alisa’s clinic, my first sin (traditonal lao skirt), and a refreshing dip in the river with alisa and the water buffalo. the highlight was the morning with alisa at her clinic, sitting with village health workers and local women, all of us chopping taro or pounding sticky rice into a paste for a nutritious lunch congee. it was delightful.

paul, katrina, and natalie have been my traveling companions for the past week. we met up in ban lung, bonded on our near-death boat ride up the mekong, and spent a week together relaxing on don deth island in southern laos, literally a stone’s throw – or a kayak ride – from cambodia.

if we each lost a life on the mekong fast boat, we gained ten on don deth island. sophie slesor, the 6 year old daughter of family friends that i stayed with in phnom penh, informed me a couple of weeks ago that i grew up in the olden days. well i’m not quite 21 but it’s all relative, i guess. anyway, i experienced on don deth what little miss sophie must imagine of my childhood. dirt paths wide enough for bicycles, perfect for morning jogs. no cars (okay, maybe the occassional motorbike, but it’s a rare site). bamboo huts. no electricity, aside from the generators that run from 6-9 pm to provide a bit of dinner lighting but mainly to power the blenders for pina ko lao laos. everyone goes to bed with the sun and wakes up with the roosters. piglets chase ducklings, chickens cross roads, water buffalo languish in roadside mud and paddie fields.

after a daily morning run down to the other end of the island, the week involved a lot of hammock time, a lot of pondering, some writing, and some great books. we decided to take on the mekong in a less shocking fashion. one day we rented bikes and cycled to a swimming hole, the next we moved from the hammocks on our hut porches to inner tubes on a tamer section of the mekong. we really outdid ourselves yesterday; a full day of kayaking down grade 1-2+ rapids.

the biggest dilemma of the week was how to get the hammock to its most comfortable hanging position. it was a welcome break after the emotional slog of cambodia. don’t get me wrong; if it’s possible to be in love with a country, then i’m in love with cambodia. i want to live in cambodia, i want to explore every corner of it, and i’m already thinking of going back having only been out of the country for a week. but its history really hit me. i cried a few times. i want to read everything about cambodia that i can get my hands on, but the problem with reading these books is that i’m afraid i’ll lash out at the first unassuming american i see. you can’t shoot the messenger, or the informed, concerned, intelligent american toursit, but shit. it seems as if that country prompted or caused nearly every conflict in this part of the world. they bombed the hell out of cambodia, laos, and vietnam. they supported corrupt officials in order to suppress their obsessive fear of rising communism. due to land mines and unexploded ordinance, many dropped or planted by the u.s., cambodia has the highest proportion of amputees of any country in the world. now george bush is saying that they will only sign on to the ottawa convention to ban land mines if an alternative method of national defense is established. maybe things have changed since i left north america, but this was the last i heard on the issue. please drop me a line if there’s been any sort of improvement. anyway, it makes me writhe. yes, the united states is a huge aid donor in cambodia (they have the means), but what sort of message is the country sending if they will not acknowledge the totally debilitating impact of land mines and agree to ban the production and use of them? especially after having played such a predominant role in propelling the cambodian genocide? that was rhetorical. it makes my blood boil.

p.s. on another note: i have to admit, i’ve been contemplating the post-asia adventure. not tomorrow, or next month, but maybe a year and a half down the road, maybe summer 2007. i picked up a rough guide to australia a little while ago and peaked through it. i’ve been meeting so many extremely cool aussies that i might just have to explore that part of the world in the not-so-distant future. check out the pics.

p.p.s. i’ve settled into traveling. i know this sounds ludicrous, but when it’s a long term thing, i think it’s something that you really need to settle into. i’m not stressed out about accomplishing great things or saving the world anymore. traveling is self-indulgent, and if you give yourself the time and the space to indulge a bit and be okay with it, then it’s fabulous.

never take a fast boat up the mekong. ever. i like to think of myself as a fairly daring person – sometimes stupidly so -and i usually come out the other side of extreme situations pumped up and thrilled, no regrets, ready to recommend the experience or tackle the adventure all over again. not this time. give me white water, dense jungle, a rock face, a mountain top, a clear cut swarming with blackflies; I’ll take it on with gusto. you have to have a death wish – a gruesome, guts-splaying, blood-spouting death wish – to ever take a fast boat up the mekong river.

she’s a mighty river, the mekong. she boils and swirls unexpectedly, drops ten feet on a whim, and is home to tree tops, dead heads, and random bushes that probably pick up and relocate as inconspicuously as ents. these fast boat drivers have nothing in mind but the profit they’ll make on their boat trips, and the faster they get you to point ‘b’, the faster they can jet back to point ‘a’ for another load of tourists. the boat sits about 5 inches above the water at top speed, maybe 2 on a lower setting. it swerves last-minute around whirlpools, and clips little green islets that pop up out of nowhere. no helmets, no life jackets. at least with white water, in a raft or a kayak, you have control over yourself and your boat, you’re moving at a relatively manageable speed, you’re wearing protective gear, and you can really only kick yourself if something goes terribly wrong. we all had our own ways of coping. i quickly decided that my backpack meant nothing next to my life, and that if i were to die, and least i would die having set off to see the world, loving life, missing great friends, anticipating new ones…adventuring and learning and happy. then i just started singing leonard cohen songs to myself, every single leonard cohen song i knew, from ‘bird on a wire’ which reminds me so much of my dad, to all of the memories surrounding ‘chelsea hotel’, to thoughts of sitting in the house in ottawa, jess and rejean close by, snow outside, doing high school homework to ‘famous blue raincoat’.

natalie got out her lonley planet once we arrived in laos and read the page about fast boats on the mekong. the book says not to take one unless you have absolutely no other option. 2 a week usually go down, often full of tourists because the locals know not to take the boats, and if people don’t die, they lose all of their backpacking possessions to the currents of the mekong.

back in ban lung, the quiet, dusty hub of ratanakiri province, after 3 days of trekking in virachey national park with damien and pierre, a couple of french guys that i met at the guesthouse where i’ve been staying, and sovang and tuem, our local guides. sovang is a trained ecotourism guide; tuem has been walking the jungles of northern cambodia in flip flops since he was born.

i couldn’t have anticipated such extreme wilderness. when they weren’t leading us along riverbeds, up to our knees in leech infested water, sovang and tuem took turns hacking a trail through the dense bush with a machete. we crossed a river on a bamboo raft, waded through another with our packs balanced on our heads, the river up to our armpits. evenings were spent next to water fit for swimming in. i made sovang swear up and down that i wouldn’t be eaten by crocodiles. bedtime was at sundown, around 6:30, and we slept in camo bug net hammocks supplied by the u.s. army. oh, the irony.

i have a new love of sardines in tomato sauce, only over an open fire.

on our first day in the park, damien noticed something on sovang’s hat and warned him of it, so sovang brushed it to the ground with his machete. he examined it for a moment, then said, ‘”oohhh! thank you! that spider have poison of a scorpion!” and we kept trekking, damien muttering something about having saved sovang’s life.

it was a three day thrill, one of those ‘i’ve got better things to do than survive’ moments in life. exactly the kind of adventure i’d been craving. pics soon. off to laos in the morning. the hickey marks on my legs, left by the leeches, will be with me for a while. i think i’ll probably end up loving them like all other favourite scars.

i understand why people say that cambodia is the most beautiful place on earth. it’s even beautiful, and clean somehow, in its poverty. the khmer are possibly the most tender, kind, jovial, and resilient group of people i’ve ever encountered. the pace is slower here, for me, anyway, because i can’t help but stop to talk more than a few times a day.

rented a bike and spent 2 days cycling around the angkor area. it’s 160 km2, and it would probably take the better part of a year to really discover all of angkor. built nearly 1000 years ago, it is thought to be the largest religious monument in the world. some temples have been restored, others left for the jungle to love as much as the visitors do. i strayed about 4km off track one afternoon and a guy came up behind me on his motorbike and offered me a lift back to my bicycle,. i declined, thinking he’d want money, but he said, ‘no no, no charge. i’m going that way.’ so i hopped on. this is so typical of cambodia. so refreshing.

hitched a ride on a motorbike out to angkor wat to watch the sunrise one morning. as i wrote in an email to a friend: it left me cheesily, utterly breathless. it’s the first time that architecture has ever had that sort of impact on me.

because i’ll forever wake up just after the crack of dawn even if i never step in a rowing shell again, i ate breakfast every morning with all of the guys who worked at rithy vin guesthouse where i was staying. 2.50 US a night for a great room with a double bed, shower, fan that would blow your skin off on the highest setting, and breakfast included. they kept asking me to play pool with them in the evenings. i decided to go for it on the last night there. because the other guys were all ón duty’, chinh (my best guest house friend) took me on his motorbike to a local pool hall. he kicked my ass at snooker, i came close to challenging him at a few subsequent games of pool. it was great, and i was the only foreigner in the room. i tell everyone about rejean.

a road to rival the back woods of fort nelson

bought a cheap bus ticket at a dodgy but friendly agency on khao san road, bangkok. erin, it’s pronounced exactly the way it’s written. there’s your little daily dose of humour, my dear. the bus took us to the thailand-cambodia border. the bus waiting for us on the other side wasn’t a bus at all, but a pick-up truck. we – the 20 of us from the air-conditioned thailand bus – asked when the bus would be arriving to take us from poipet to siem reap, and batman (í’m sure it isn’t written as phonetically as it sounds),our dear friend/siem reap guesthouse rep who was sent to whisk us all off to his lovely lodgings, just laughed and pointed to the truck.

we drove through the night, ten hours (200km) down the most pot-holed road i’ve ever encountered, from poipet, the last khmer rouge stronghold, to siem reap. 20 foreigners in the back, a khmer guy on the roof, another on the bumper, and a third driving. it was unbelievable. the swede who sat beside me had never seen stars without light pollution hazing the view. i’d never seen miles and miles of moonlit rice fields, or random clusters of teenagers midnight-dancing to khmer pop tunes on the roadside. aside from the occasional oncoming motorbike or pickup, the only light came from bobbing flashlights in rice fields, held by farmers hunting cockroaches for breakfast.

our truck broke down, a few bridges were nearly stripped of their planks, one bridge was so bare that it required the skill of a drunken ryan boyle on a quad to cross it, the words ‘highway robbery’ played across my mind a few times. it all amounted to the kind of thrill i’d been craving for months. i may have been the only one in that pick-up who was totally delighted that the air-conditioned bus never arrived. same same, i guess, but so wonderfully different.

And it begins with tales from northwestern China. Actually, this will be the first and probably only China entry for a few months. I’ve decided to head down to southeast Asia for the unforeseeable future, leaving next Friday and arriving in Bangkok at midnight. So, China stories…

Xiahe: A Taste of Tibet
A small village at the end of a bumpy ride through mountains and terraced hills, some so vertical that the grazing goats, sheep, and yaks must come uniquely crafted with spidey sense.
What struck me most were the people. The women all wear big jewelry — thick silver necklaces studded with turquoise, and earrings so heavy that they dangle them with string, like a glasses strap, around their heads and over their ears. Forcing the weight of these through piercings would probably cause the lobes to pull right off. The men – the Tibetan men who aren’t monks – are cowboys. They wear full length winter robes over their daily clothes (sometimes jeans) and when the weather is warm enough one might free an arm or two from the sleeves for easier dealings with money and motobikes. If this is the case, the robe, half-on, is held up around the waist with a wide leather belt. The belt doubles as a great holster for a dagger or a cell phone. They drink tall bottles of Chinese beer, wear Tibetan cowyboy boots, and although this is probably completely fictionalized, I like to think that most of them ride wild horses across the grasslands and into every sunset. Let me have that one.
I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a blend of modernity and tradition. The men – and women, since they’re the ones who actually wear the cowboy hats (over the blackest, richest, most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen) – who aren’t cowboys are monks. Seeing as the town exists for the monastery, the monks are everywhere.
For Tibetans of the Yellow Hat Sect, aptly named because the monks wear banana-shaped, mustard-coloured hats, Xiahe is the most important location outside of Tibet. Many buddhists make pilgrimages to Xiahe from all corners of China, portstrating themselves the entire way. Tibetan buddhism is also much more freely practised in Xiahe than it is in Tibet. So, like I said, monks are everywhere. The streets are bright with monks in maroon robes and fuschia shawls, walking to and from the monastery, or riding past on motorbikes, or chatting on cell phones, or fixing telephone wires.
There was a lot more to the Xiahe trip: cycling out to the grasslands through herds of sheep and their ambling sheperds; riding horses in the grasslands; drinking yak butter tea; the miles of prayer wheels; the ancient city of Bajiao which hasn’t really changed in 2000years; the mountains. But mostly it was the people. The image of one lone monk in bright robes, twenty feet above the ground, fixing telephone wires, is one that will be with me for a long time.

Dunhuang: Silk Road Sand and Other Events
To orient you all: 14 hours by train from Xiahe, in northwestern China, right on the edge of the Gobi Desert, so much on the edge that I woke up more than one morning with a bed full of sand and something gritty in my teeth.
Dunhuang is known in the guide books for its proximity to the Mogao Caves, a series of buddhist grottoes that were built over the span of 1000+ years, beginning in 366 AD. They were saved from destruction during the Cultural Revolution on strict orders from premier Zhou Enlai, so the story goes. Apparently he liked them, but some also say that they were preserved for so long because they’re so damn remote, being at the edge of the Gobi Desert, as they are. The caves were used as a barracks by the White Russians in the 1920s who lobbed off a few noses froma couple of Buddha statues and left their names scrawled on the walls but didn’t do much more damage. It’s remarkable how well the art and craftsmandship witnessed in the caves has withstood time.
The caves were astounding in a way that I probably won’t ever be able to fully appreciate or understand. It’s like the Great Wall – who can really wrap their mind around thousands of years of labour and art and detail? If you are a history buff who is ever considering a trip to China, this place should be on your list. If you don’t fall into that category, visit Dunhuang anyway, just to play in the dunes.
The dunes rise up at the end of town and appear to continue forever. Since they’re profitable for the Chinese, a gate was constructed in front of the dunes, complete with a ticket booth, officials with walkie talkies, and an 80 RMB fee. 80 RMB is only 13 CDN dollars, but when put into perspective it’s an outrageous amount of money, especially since the desert has been where it has been for thousands of years, and it’s only expanding. We evaded costs the first time by sneaking through a hole in the fence about 1/2 a km from the gate. There was some barbed wire involved and a cardboard box full of dead mice, but we made it onto the sand without a detour to a Chinese prison. We took our shoes off, tobogganed down the dunes (I took care of the necessary wipe out), and went paragliding. Our teacher was a charming young man whose only words of English were, ‘Runrunrunrun…fly. No jump!’ Those were his strict instructions for the take-off, anyway. He didn’t cover the landed process. So I did, or it covered me. You can view my pictures for the result of that little undertaking. In the words of Terry Mckall, “Some things never change, no matter how far away you go.”
While Julie enjoyed the sun and the passing camels, I climbed the dunes for a better view, and for the sand on my feet, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, for the tiny sand lizards I met along the way.
Of course we stayed for the sunset.
Other Dunhuang events: a sandstorm; an Australian we kidnapped and dragged around with us for the length of our stay (he actually partook quite willingly , especially in the sandstorm and the Chinese beer); some Chinese officials who caught us sneaking in the second time, during the sandstorm, and who threw us out, despite Julie’s fantastic explanation, in charades, of how the storm carried our tickets of in the wind and into the vast desert beyond; another sunset; a bike ride into the desert; a decision to leave China for Cambodia.
Cambodia feels like the place that I’ve always needed to go, ever since my Mom came home with my brother when I was six years old. I’ve promised him to take many pictures ‘of interesting things’. ‘No boring pictures’, his orders. I’ll see if I can hold a 15-year-old boy’s interest. I think I’ll probably spend the time between now and Christmas in Cambodia and Laos, possibly doing some volunteer work, definitely exploring, heading off on my own. It’s just something that I have to do. There’ll be some riding in their too. And I’d like to spend at least a few days underwater with an oxygen tank and great goggles.
I hope you are all happy and breaking out in a few random fits of laughter a week.

-Fab . Oh, and check out my pictures: