David at Sea: Circumnavigating the Planet

Ho Chi Minh City

Wow, we’re really cruising along now. At the beginning of this voyage, we had up to eight days between ports. Now, we barely have two.

No sooner had we left Myanmar that we were arriving in Vietnam, traveling up the narrow Saigon River to our embarkation point in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

We arrived on a Saturday and I went straight into town with Jason and Byron in order to shoot a few webumentaries.

The first thing that struck me was the relentless flow of motorcycles, scooters, cars and buses…it’s literally a river of traffic and the only way to cross the street is to move forward confidently as people drive around you. It’s a little disconcerting at first as you stand in the middle of traffic with buses heading straight at you. In the end, you get used to it and learn to NOT stop (you have to keep moving so that people can predict where your body and empty spaces will be).

Beyond the seemingly chaotic flow of traffic, Ho Chi Minh City is very laid back. It reminds me in some ways of cities like Paris, where I grew up, because of the quality of life people enjoy here. Life is slower here and there’s a café culture – with people sipping their lattes watching people go by - that’s hard to find anywhere else in Asia. Restaurants are great and delicious Vietnamese noodle soups (Pho) can be found on just about every street corner. Young lovers make out in parks in the evenings and take strolls on their scooters. Entire families also go on strolls at night, and I saw up to 5 people (a man and woman and their three kids) sitting on these small scooters, just driving around.

I expected a communist-style city, and instead found it to be a rapidly developing hub for international businesses, where street stalls selling knockoff Gucci bags competed with stores selling the real deal, and where qualoty of life is - at least in appearance - very high.

If there’s one place I could see myself living, it would be here.

Slow Ride to Hpa An

I went down to the river bank and purchased a ticket for Hpa An. Luckily for me, very few people still used this ferry anymore because roads had improved so much, and the trip to Hpa An by bus could be made in a fraction of the time it took to get there by boat. The only people who did use this ferry still were generally from fishing villages without road access along the way.

The ferry itself was very old and rickety. It had been captured from the Japanese about 50 years ago. There were decks on two levels and I went to the top one, where I was greeted by a gentleman with “how are you today!” He was clearly drunk, or coming off a long night of boozing, and I initially tried to ignore him as he blabbed away. But I let my guard down after a while, and he ended up being a fascinating character. He was a free spirit, who as an orphan had seen everything there is to see in Myanmar. He had briefly fled to a refugee camp in Thailand when things had been rough, and with only a dollar or two in his pocket, had found his way to Bangkok where he managed to survive for a few years. He was 65 he said, and was in good shape. He was an alcoholic, and said he drank two bottles of rice whiskey every morning and every evening: “to forget my troubles.” He was the only one aboard the ferry that spoke a word of English, and so he acted as my interpreter for the rest of the 6-hour trip.

There were a bunch of lawn chairs upstairs looking out over the water and I settled into one while the character in front of me, along the railing, kept talking (he would not stop). To my left, half a dozen women sat on their provision bags and chatted. They were of the Mon people, one of many minority groups in Myanmar, and spoke a language my interpreter did not understand (he spoke Burmese, the national language). This is one of the things that blew me away in Myanmar: that you can literally walk out of a village where there speak one language, and walk to another village where they speak another. In contrast to the US where people are “Americans first” before being of Indian, Polish, British (etc…) descent, people here are Mon, Kayin…before being Burmese.

The women switched into Burmese and expressed their amazement at seeing a foreigner traveling alone on this ferry with them. They said I looked like a movie star, like Brad Pitt, probably because they hadn’t seen many white people in their lives. They gave me a big bag of oranges to snack on as the ferry started its slow journey up the river.

I think the one thing I like the most when traveling is the actual traveling part. This is when you meet the most people and see the most things. Being on a slow-moving ferry, I had all the time in the world to see things go by…fishing villages where people relied on driftwood from the river to cook, limestone mountains literally rising up from nowhere, small islands in the river, midget cows helping farmers toil the earth, small delicious watermelons, and pagodas everywhere. I lazily witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen while drowsing in my lawn chair, my feet resting on the railing…

By the time we arrived in Hpa An, there were only a handful of passengers left. We got off the ship on a very fragile and wobbly board, and my companion took me to one of the two hostels in the town.

Mawlamyine

Getting off the bus in Mawlamyine at 7 am, I really had no idea what to do or where to go. So I took a seat at a crummy restaurant and ordered food and tea while I planned and woke up.

Several motorcycle taxi drivers offered me their services, and I started up a conversation with one of them, who I invited to join me for tea. Shortly after that, we were off on this tiny scooter/motorcycle on the bumpy roads on the outskirts of town, with me and my backpack hanging on for dear life on the back seat.

We first drove to a university campus outside of town and met this man’s brother there. He spoke English well and suggested I stay a while at a local monastery. They would let me stay for a few days for free if I wanted, he said, but I would have to meditate with them…that sounded like a great way for me to clear my head, so we put-put-putted our way the monastery compound. To get there, you had to drive on a dirt road lined with rubber tree plantations and rice fields. The monastery looked out from a hill covered in green vegetation….

After asking for directions from a few monks, we finally came to the main “administration” building where I would have the opportunity to pay my respects to the senior monk and ask him for permission to stay.

We took off our shoes and entered the main room. The head monk was sitting on the floor there with his legs crossed in front of him, looking calm and inviting. His “assistant”, who spoke English well, sat next to him with both legs on one side.

My driver immediately put his palms together in a respectful greeting, went down to his knees and bowed all the way to the floor. I tried to copy him, but it wasn’t as convincing.

The assistant invited us to sit, and that’s when I made my first big cultural faux pas in Myanmar: I crossed my legs in front of me and as soon as I had done that both the assistant and my driver opened up their eyes wide and reached out towards me like a parent in a Museum reaching out for their child as she pokes holes into a Monet with a pencil: “no, no, no…you cannot sit like that!” I quickly changed seating positions and sat on my legs. Oops….great first impression I made.

They invited me for lunch and I asked whether it would be possible to stay for a night or two. They said yes (not a very enthusiastic YES, and I don’t blame them after the sitting incident), but that I would have to stick to a meditation schedule that started at 5 am. And ended late into the evening. So I said, OK thanks, I think I’ll just stay for lunch….!

That afternoon I spent driving around the town, passing pagodas, decrepit mosques…I also roamed the local market, where they sold everything from shirts to mounds of dried fish. Children would occasionally shout “ey, ey!” when they saw me.

I stayed a night in a hostel looking out over the river and planned on catching a ferry to the small town of Hpa An the next morning.

The bus to Mawlamyine

The bus to Mawlamyine left at 7 pm and was supposed to arrive at one point early the following morning.

I took a pickup truck to the bus station (a 45 minute drive from the center of Yangon) and began preparing for the long trip. I bought water and chips.

Generally, I prefer to avoid sketchy meals before a long bus ride, but I was very hungry. I saw an old lady selling stew and noodles out of a big pot on the ground, so I joined the two or three people sitting and eating on small plastic chairs and ordered a bowl. For 15 cents, you really can’t do better for a meal.

I met an army vet there. A man sitting next to him quickly pointed out that his friend had been decorated three times. The military guy didn’t really say anything; he just smiled. I couldn’t help but wonder what years of military service in the Burmese army had done to shape his opinion of the US. There’s a strict embargo on Myanmar, similar to the one that was in place in Iraq between 1991 and this last war. I wondered what language officials used when speaking of the US. Were we the enemy?

[I expected the military officials to be complete assholes, but most of the ones I met turned out to be nicer than in any country I’d ever been to. One official checking my passport actually said to me, in English, “Please enjoy your stay in Myanmar.” So much for preconceived ideas…. Oh yeah, I forgot to say this: Myanmar is a military dictatorship, with so many human rights abuses that people have stopped counting and just sealed off the country (hence my surprise at meeting very friendly soldiers). The casual traveler will quickly be reminded of this soon after boarding a bus. In the twelve hours that it took to get to my destination, my passport was verified at military checkpoint 4 times!]

With my belly full of noodles and stew, I took my seat on the bus and we headed to Mawlamyine, a trip that was supposed to take 9 hours but in the end took more than 12.

I quickly befriended a passenger right behind me, a 25 year old woman who spoke English fairly well. She acted as my translator throughout the journey and at every stop would let me know whether we were at a military checkpoint (“show you passport”) or simply having a tea & pee stop (“we stop, get out”).

At one point we stopped for about 30 minutes and had the chance to sit down and chat a bit.

A kid was selling these huge deep-fried grasshoppers and she encouraged me to try one. I was a bit hesitant. I’d had fried grasshoppers in Mexico, but those had been tiny. These things were the size of shrimp! Plus, looking at them reminded me of those giant cockroaches that occasionally fly in through the window in my apartment in Brooklyn in the summer. “You’ll see, they good,” my translator said. How could I chicken out now?

The boy selling mounds of this stuff cracked one of these bad boys open, ripped off its shell (just like shrimp!), and handed me the plump, glistening creature…

I stuck it in my mouth and bit. And you know what? It was g-… not bad. Ok, it left a strong aftertaste, but that could have been the cooking oil.

We sat down and I ordered tea, she coffee. She explained that she’d recently returned to Myanmar from Thailand, where she’d worked for the past four years in Bangkok, “oh, selling things, doing jobs…”

She had a real bad cough and you could tell she had a light fever. I asked her how long she’d had this cold and she answered, Two weeks. Did she feel better? No.

Her Aunt had freaked her out by saying it might be Tuberculosis, but a doctor had confirmed that it was only a cold. With everything that we’d seen and the people we’d talked to during CURRENTS, I couldn’t help but imagine a big red neon sign with “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” flashing on and off.

There’s an exploding AIDS problem in Myanmar, and a quarter of sex workers are infected. Of course, it’s all kept strictly under wraps by the government (remember, we weren’t able to get the required authorizations to work here).

I hope it turned out to be nothing but a cold.

We hopped back on the bus and I tried to get some sleep. My companion got off an hour or two later.

Shortly before arriving at our destination, we stopped at another checkpoint and all unloaded from the bus. An official told me to wait outside while he went inside with my passport. I thought: “Great, they’ve probably just made this region off-limits to foreigners and I’m going to have to take another bus back to Yangon. I’ve just spent the last 12 hours in a bus with water dripping on my head from the ceiling and no sleep. Please don’t make me go back or I’ll cry!” But just as soon as I was ready to scratch this part of my plan, the man came back outside and handed me my passport.

Hurray!

Myanmar

I worked until about 4 am the night before we arrived in Myanmar and didn’t have the courage to get up in time to see us make our way up the river to the port of Yangon (formerly Rangoon). People told me it was spectacular. Green fields, small fishing villages and pagodas lined the shore.

When I finally did go out on deck, at about 9 am, it hit me that we were like alien invaders aboard this huge 7-story vessel, where everything else is small. The river was wide - maybe 3-400 yards. Our “port” was nothing more than a concrete slab. There were no buildings in sight, just cow pastures. Except for 1 or 2 ships loading up with logs of teak, there was no activity. The air was soothingly warm, humid and thick. What a contrast from the busy ports we’d been to: Chennai, Salvador, Cape Town…

Because of the political situation here – it’s a military dictatorship - we would not be working in Myanmar. Never mind the fact that we’d have trouble with all the video equipment bringing we brought with us, the fact that CURRENTS revolves around the discussion of HIV and AIDS made it a total no-no…too bad considering HIV infections in Myanmar are apparently spreading out of control.

I didn’t make it off the ship that day. Instead, I caught up on work and planned to take the rest of the week off to see the country a bit.

Wednesday

There are several Burmese destinations on the tourist map: Bagan, a dry plain with thousands of abandoned pagodas, and Inle Lake. I’d seen the pictures, and both these sites looked beautiful.

However, hundreds of people from the voyage would be there, and given the lack of privacy we have on the ship, I wasn’t crazy about those prospects. So I decided to go to a place where there were no popular attractions. I chose the southeast Mon state, to see country life in Myanmar…

The Lonely Planet guidebook I’d purchased on the ship described the area in very broad and intriguingly vague terms: “unmapped territory”, “fascinating spit of land”, “green Mon hills”, “nomadic Moken sea gypsies”.

Wow, nomadic sea gypsies? I didn’t think I’d make it as far as the sea gypsies, but I wanted to see how far I could go.

So I picked a town (Mawlamyine) randomly, purchased a ticket in Yangon, and headed towards the bus station.

India in a whirlwind

Whew. I feel like I wrote that last blog entry just yesterday. It’s been almost a week!

As I thought it would be, the Indian segment of our program was very fast-paced.

We arrived in the morning and felt the full power of India as soon as we disembarked.

Once you make it past the customs gates (where, invariably, 3 officials take turns peering at your forms, deliberating whether to let you in or not – this turned into a daily dance), you have to cross a pair of train tracks – look both ways! You’re then thrown into the heart of it: the chaotic world of Chennai, where rickshaw drivers, peddlers, and policemen waving sticks at street kids, await.

From the very beginning, we were in a mad rush. We had to meet our Indian students about an hour away and were already late, so we haggled over the price of the rickshaws (400 rupees? No, 200…ok, let’s go) hopped into our respective rides, and went on our way. I am happy to report that we did not hit any woman, man, child, monkey, dog or cow that day, but that we came pretty darn close about a dozen times. Webumentary of that coming soon!

The medical students we met at the Sri Ramachandra college were great and very enthusiastic. We were filming everything for an MTVu segment, and they were excited to show us around.

HIV/AIDS, the overarching topic of the CURRENTS program, is a very sensitive subject in India. People don’t talk openly about sex, let alone AIDS. To exemplify this, just ten years ago, movies didn’t show kissing on screen…kisses would be suggested but the actual act would be hid with a can or something…I was surprised at how the kids opened up to us though, and how much insight into their culture they were able to give us despite these taboos.

The next day they met 5 students from the ship and took us all around town. We started with a huggggge lunch and thus began my long eating experience in India. Seriously, I think I spent more time eating in India then anything else…

The next day we brought them on board the ship. They were so excited to finally see this massive (and oh so clean!) hunk of steel…I think they had a great time.

That evening we conducted a video conference with college students from the University of Maryland. It was very interesting, and once again the Indian students let us in on the particularities of Indian culture with respects to sexuality, marriage and social taboos associated with being HIV positive.

Here’s something interesting. At one point I asked US students to raise their hands if they’d ever been tested. Almost everyone in the room raised their hands.

I then asked the same question to Indian students and only one – Raghu - raised his hands.

The truth is that most people in India don’t get tested because having the disease is considered shameful and immoral. With such high stigmas attached to being HIV positive, people prefer not to know. It’s usually when they get sick that they found out…

The only reason that Raghu got tested is because his sister is a gynecologist and she pushed him to do it.

Back to India

In just two days, we’ll be docking into the port of Chennai (India), and I have to be honest with you. I’m a little nervous.

Excited, but nervous…

The last time I was in India was about 7-8 years ago. I spent a little over a month there living in a Tibetan refugee camp near Darjeeling, photographing people’s daily lives during the monsoon. I also got to visit several cities like Varanasi, Calcutta and Delhi. Over all, it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

So why am I nervous?

Experiencing India as a whole is like getting violently slapped in the face by an angry clown…there are so many things going on at once in this place that it’s sometimes overwhelming. You may occasionally find yourself in the uncomfortable position of not knowing if you’re enjoying the situation you’re in…or dreading it. Sometimes you don’t know for sure until you’ve left and had time to process the experience.

I once walked into New Delhi’s business district, where men in suits walked briskly and purposefully down the street. I remember thinking that this could be the business center of any modern city I had ever been to…when suddenly a Tantric yogi seemingly THREW himself into the middle of incoming traffic and began running in-between cars. He was completely naked and his dreadlocks swept the floor behind him. I have NO idea what he was doing.

No one seemed to notice him, or care. They just kept marching down the street.

Another time, I was coming down a mountain in the back of a jeep. We stopped to pick up a bunch of crazy-looking guys dressed in orange. They were all quite jovial (at this point there must have been a dozen of us leaning out of the jeep), and I learned that these men were followers of a specific Hindu god (whose name I forget). They joked a lot, kept slapping me- and each other - on the knees and smoked joint after joint…after joint. When we dropped them off, they began walking single file, chanting and ringing their bells… Again, this impressed no one but me.

Obviously, I knew very little about India or Hinduism at the time. But by the time I left, it’s as if I knew even less! There is so much variety, so many colors, so many smells, so many unpronounceable words, so much traffic, so many people, so many spices, so many temples, so many colorful buses, so many Hindu cults, so many gods, so many movies and so much LOUD music (often at the same time), in India that it’s hard to take it all in at once.

It takes many days to acclimate to India, and we’ll have exactly 5 days to get our work done. We will not have the luxury of “adapting”. Once we’re off the ship, we’ll have to hit the ground running.

But I know what you’re about to say and I wholeheartedly agree with you, dearest reader: “But this is GNG we’re talking about! If anyone can do it, it’s the Nomads…”

Right you are, my friend. G-G-G-G-G-G G Unit!

Ah. We’ll do fine!

Olympics at Sea

They held the Semester at Sea Olympics yesterday.

As part of the “Staff” I was paired up with other non-students - mostly professors and adult passengers & their children. We were swift, we were strong, we were frail, we were smart, we were tall, we were short, we were young (10), and we were old (80).

We were the “Vitamin Sea” team. Our color was purple. Our mascot was a purple dragon.

Our Team certainly had a lot of spirit and brainpower. For some reason, though, we only tied in 7th position (out of 8).

Our Spelling and Geography Bee team was composed of some seriously smart people. (No, I was not on that team, but I thank you anyway).

How did we let those students win? The question still baffles me, but I suspect they just had more youthful energy to lift the cards to indicate that they had the answers…

I competed in the pushup/pull-up competition with Rico the AV coordinator, a former gymnast. As old-er guys (well, he’s only 25), we certainly held our ground against those bulky weightlifting “youngsters”.

I did 54 pushups and 15 pull-ups, and Rico did 74 and 29. Not a bad combined score and probably among the top 3. Ok, ok, among the top 5.

I would have also participated in something else but they only had room for Lemonade Pong and, hey, let’s face it – I’d be up against some serious “Class A” competitors on this ship.

The previous evening, teams put on a talent show. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much – or been so impressed by the students – so far on this trip. They had an opera singer (I could have sworn it was a CD), stand-up comedians, dance routines, and videos (Rico put something together for our team).

Great time.

No Kenya, but Rest Stop in Mauritius

I don’t think I ever mentioned the fact that we had to cancel our program in Kenya because of security reasons. We were to arrive last week but the folks at Semester at Sea decided to bypass the country altogether after their insurance company warned them not to go. It’s a shame for the students that were supposed to take part in this program, but life goes on…it also gave us the opportunity to get a much-needed break in Mauritius, where we stopped for 3 days.

What can I report about the last three days? Absolutely nothing. Almost. I finished Black Star Safari, a really great book from Paul Theroux (the guy who wrote Mosquito Coast), took naps in the room I rented, and hung out on the beach.

Mauritius is a very interesting island smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s been colonized by the French, the Brits, and populated by dozens of nationalities. Most of its population is of Indian descent, but also from Madagascar and the East coast of Africa – a good, interesting mix. They speak 4 languages here, but French and Creole seem to be the most widely spoken. As someone who has lived in France most of his life though, I can tell you that the French left an indelible mark on Mauritius and its people. How so?

Well, for one thing, people don’t like to work more than they have to here. Everything is closed on Sundays, and post offices and other similar kinds of government establishments close on time….at 4 pm, mang!

Other thing: the food is (for the most part) good. Hey, no offense to the English, but when’s the last time you went to a place where culinary flavors were heavily influenced by British food?

I had some great street food that was a mix between Indian roti and a Parisian crepe. I also had a great crab curry. Oh yeah, that was good…hmmm…

So now we’re off to our next destination: Chennai, India. We have lots of work to accomplish before we arrive and things will start getting hectic after this leg of the voyage because we’ll only have a few days between ports.

This is going to be interesting.

Last Days in South Africa

The students we worked with in South Africa were really amazing. One group came from a high school in Cape Town’s middle class suburb of Pinelands.

Students enrolled here come from all over the city, from the wealthy neighborhoods, to the poorest Township. During Apartheid it was an all white school, and now it’s mostly black. Ms Baron, our contact at Pinelands, explained that after Apartheid many “white” schools increased their enrollment costs to essentially exclude blacks from entering. Pinelands did just the opposite and adopted a strong policy of integration. Everyone (white, black, or “colored”) seemed to get along just fine while we were there. It’s difficult to fathom that the mingling we saw here would have been unthinkable, perhaps even illegal, just 15 years ago.

The Pinelands students gave us a good sense of what it’s like to live in South Africa today, and they were so excited to be able to share their stories with their American peers. The also shed a lot of light on some problems relating to HIV/AIDS in South Africa. For example, while many people are aware of the modes of transmission of the virus, some myths still endure in poorer or rural areas. A disturbing myth says that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS. In many townships, where a third of the women there will be raped in their lifetime, this is a major issue…

We also worked with young volunteers at a youth clinic in the black township of Khayelitsha (Townships are settlements divided by “race” that were built during Apartheid to separate different racial groups). Two girls were our guides during our stay in Khayelitsha: they showed us around the clinic, where young people can get tested for HIV and get counseling (in Khayelitsha, one in 4 people is HIV positive, hence the need for this type of center). They also took us around to many different places, including a traditional herbalist (or witch doctor), where I was given a special cream to put on my face for good luck, and Chris purchased herbs against evil spirits. Webumentary on this coming soon!

After our last broadcast the students at Pinelands invited us to a Sunday Braai, which is the South African version of a BBQ, and something people here seem to do quite often!

My, what a feast we had: lamb chops, Boewors (a typical South African coiled sausage that would beat hot dogs ANY day), chicken, salad, and much more…a great way to end our program in South Africa.

We were all really touched by the students’ warmth and hospitality. I hope to make it back to South Africa one day!