scottyallen.com

A quick note about how I do this blog (short for weblog):

It’s based on my personal diary, which I type in and edit the personal bits out of. As I often have limited access to email, I often “backdate” the vast majority of the entries. Which means I change the date, so that it reflects when I wrote it in my journal, not when I posted it on the website.

Also, the front page only shows the last 10 days worth of entries. So if you’re trying to read all my entries, you might need to use the archive links to the right (the calendar and monthly archives) to see everything, if it’s been more than 10 dyas since I’ve updated it or you’ve check it, particularlly if you’re printing everything out. I’m going to try and figure out a better way to arrange all of this when I get to cheaper internet.

Oh, and you can make comments to an entry by clicking the “Comments” link at the bottom of any entry, which posts your comment for the world to see (in addition to emailing me a copy)

I don’t have time ( or energy or money for that matter) for a real update, but I thought I’d do a quicky while I’m online checking emails.

I’m in Ban Lung, in Cambodia, having gotten here with only minor disasters, though plenty of them.

Among them:

• Having to take a boat from the Laos border to Steung Treng due to warnings of bandits on the road.
• Being scared out of my brain trying to find a campsite that lacked landmines and other things that go boom my first night out of Steung Treng towards Ban Lung
• Discovering my seat post was broken nearly clean in two after about a half hour on the road the second day out of Steung Treng
• Ripping one of my panniers due to poor packing on the part of the pickup driver of the dangerously overloaded passenger pickup I got a ride on the rest of the way to Ban Lung
• Falling ill after riding five kms to the lake in Ban Lung, and testing positive for typhoid fever(but turns out to be false, see below)
• Finding out that the road I was planning to take to Sen Monorom is downright treacherous - deep sand for kilometers at a time, few villages, long distances, no road traffic, and confusing road directions necessitating a compass and map (the map I have is useless)

Good things that have happend:

• I helped out the Hong Ny at the internet cafe in Steung treng to get more than one of his computers online at the same time, which turned into an epic all day project, and getting invited by him to spend the night and eat several meals with his family.
• I met a team of US Army guys out here to try and recover remains from Vietnam war crash sites
• I felt much better this morning, after yesterdays sudden illness
• I saw a German doctor in town today who eased my fears of typhoid, said the test I had done was outdated, and told me to hang out for a few days and see if I get better

More detailed entries later, when I get cheaper access to email.

I had a very interesting discussion with four girls in Steung Treng over dinner. They had just finished 2.5 years of nursing in Saudi Arabia, and had some quite amazing stories to tell. About religious police chasing them into underwear shops in malls telling them to cover their heads. About nursing 90-year-old women asking them to turn their bed towards Mecca so they could pray, even when they were only 1 hour postop. About the American embassy being the only place to get pork and alchohol, and thus throwing big parties. We talked for hours and it gave me a totally different view of Saudi Arabi, and an enormous respect for these four girls.

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I finally found who(see Miguel Cruz) got the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program job I was shooting for. He has a masters in international relations, and 15 years experience. Go figure.

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I can now identify any myriad of problems with my bike, purely based on the noise. Not only is there the noise itself to help identify, but the frequency with which it occurs, and what motions/events it is synchronized with. Some of the noises I regularly identify:

• Constant squeaking/grinding noise - the chain needs oil
• Constant clattering noise - the front derailer is touching the chain; shift slightly
• Rythmic squeaking when I pedal - my she is too close to the crankshaft and is rubbing
• Rythmic whacking when I pedal - either my shoelace is hitting my water bottle, or my shoe is too far back on the pedal, causing my heal to hit the pannier.
• And the list goes on and on…

I’m in Ban Lung, and feeling a bit lethargic from nearly a month of hard biking. I discovered my seat post had nearly snapped in two yesterday, about half way between Ban Lung and Steung Treng. I lowered it a couple inches and continued on. A half hour later a passenger pickup truck passed by, with a few foreigners and a bunch of locals in the back, plus a huge mound of stuff lashed to the back. With the insistance of the foreigners on board, they stopped, and lashed my bike to the back of the mound of luggage and found me a spot perched percariously on top, holding on to the lashings for dear life.

I found the ride from Steung Treng towars Banlung very different from anywhere I’d ridden in Laos, and found I wasn’t completely prepared for it. For one, there were few villages along the way, making acquiring food and water on a regular basis hard. Add to that a relative lack of traffic on the road, and I felt very on my own.

And then there were the landmines. For so long I’d heard so much about the landmines and bandits. Not leaving the road was easy, until it came time to find a place to sleep for the night. I wanted to be off the road and out of sight, to prevent potential problems with passerbys seeing an easy traget, but I also kept thinking of all the warnings to never step off the road if you didn’t want to risk losing a limb. The whole way, along the road I’d seen many holes that looked suspicously like craters, and many signs on trees that looked like:

*#!@& (khmer I couldn’t read)
100m 100m

I imagined they were warnings of mined areas, but they could have been logging ownership signs for all I know.

I started thinking to myself, if I step on a landmine, will I hear a click, like in the movies? Will I even know I’ve stepped on one, or will it all be instantaneous? All I could do was hope I didn’t step on one, and that if I did, I’d die instantaneously, and never hear the click.

Just as it was getting dark, I found a spot behind what could have been a huge crater, but probably was only a small clearing made by a bulldozer. AT the back of it was a large pile of brush, perfect for setting up a discreet camp behind.

I cautiously found a path through the brush and setup camp, trying to walk around as little as possible. The night passed without event, save for some terrifying moments of hearing motorbikes on the road in the wee hours of the morning, praying they would pass without seeing me. They did.

An overwhelming past several days. I’m in Steung Treng, despite having to take a boat down from the Laos Border after hearing a warning from a foreigner living in the next province over about the significant possibility of bandits on that road. As she put it, “They shoot you then rob you. It’s not something to mess around with.”But she also admitted she didn’t have specific knowledge of that road, only other roads in the area.

I hemmed and hawed for a bit, then decided I wasn’t exactly in a position to make an informed decision about it, and that getting shot was not a good experience for my first day in a country.

Today I’m headed to Banlung, for which the road is supposed to be very well travelled and quite safe (part of the reason the road from the Laos border to here is so dangerous is that hte only people on it are illegal loggers and wildlife poachers - or so I was told). Once I get to Banlung, I have to ask around and decide if it’s safe to go down to Sen Monorom, or whether I should go back to Steung Treng, and then down to Kratchie.

Two days ago was filled with frustrations or encountering serious bribery and corruption for the first time, trying to cross the border. I had heard the border guards asked for bribes in the form of “stamp fees,” and that it was very possible to wait them out to bring the price down.

It’s very odd to bargin a bribe, but that’s pretty much what we did. We got it down to $3 for the Laos exit stamp and $1 for the Cambodian entry stamp.

Then was the boat. We started at $50 for 3 people for a 1.5 hour ride on a speedboat, which is ridiculous (I paid $5 for a 2.5 hour ride per per person up to Phongsali in Laos). I spent several hours bargining with the boat men, who were price fixing with each other. They picked the most arrogant, rude, unwilling to bargin boatman to bargin with us, by saying his was the only boat running. We sat around eating soup and then tamrind, occasionally going through the routine of “40 dollars.” “No, 30 dollars, we go.”

I eventually got them down to $30, but by then they had some other passengers, which meant they were still making a huge profit off us (locals pay around $5 or possibly less, I found out afterwards). I told them $30 for the boat, which is the terms we’d been bargining on for so long. This really pissed them off, and I almost lost us our ride altogether. We finally paid $35 for 3 people.

At one point I went down to the river to ask a boatman just arriving if he’d take us for $30, and he ended up having a huge arguement with the boatman we were barginning with. When I was talking with him, I could seein his eyes he really wanted to take us for the price I offered, but he was also very afraid. I thought perhpas the two men were arguing because the man we were bargining with before was now demanding a cut.

We ended up going with the second boatman, though we had to pay him $35 for pissing him off for refusing $10 a person. When we got to Steung Treng, we were talking with him (the previous bargining was long since water under the bridge), and it sounded like he has to pay more 10 dollars or more per boat of foreigners to the border guards in Cambodia.

Yesterday I went to go briefly check my email, and got to talking with the internet cafe owner, as the one computer with an internet connection was in use. He said he wanted to setup connection sharing so both computers could share one line, but he didn’t know how. I told him I’d help him set it up if he let me use the internet for free in exchange, and a deal was quickly struck.

What started as a half hour task, turned ithe way of all things Microsoft, and became a full day and most of the night project, culminating in a complete reinstall of the operating system on one of his computers. I bit off more than I bargined for, but I made a committment.

It ended up being fun, though technically frustrating. Ny invited me to eat lunch and dinner and breakfast with his family, and I slept upstairs with one of his cousins. A very good introduction to Cambodian culture, for which I’m very grateful.

Yesterday, I also met Drew, from the US Army. He’s here with a group of Americans on a project to recover the remains of Americans from crash sites during the war. A very interesting person to talk with, as were the other people I met from his team. Definitely a different walk of life to my own, in so many ways.

Tneh were all pretty interested in my trip, and said I was pretty brave, which I take as a high compliment, coming from someone in the military, the stereotypical epitomy of machoness and bravery. They invited me to dinner, which would have been a blast, but I ended up having to stand them up as the computers dragged on. They leave today by helicopter to the crash site, where they’ll spent the next 30 to 50 days doing excavating and surveying.

It all struck me as a lot of effort, time, and money to go to 30 years after the fact, and it made me wonder if there isn’t a point of diminishing returns. I spoke with a guy named Raz, an American immigrant from somewhere in Africa (I forget where). He served in the Vietnamese war, and used his education money afterwards to study farming and become an organic farmer. He was 63, and headed to the disco that night, a true hippy at heart. His theory on the whole thing was that by converting men listed as “missing in action” to “killed in action”, the government would no longer have to pay as much compensation to their families. Makes sense in a twisted way, though I’m hesitant to believe it.