Recent Silence

Posted on January 14, 2010 by admin

In the past few weeks my blog has taken the back burner, and without any explanations on my part. I don’t pretend to myself at all that there are great numbers of people anxiously awaiting my next entry—but I do want to acknowledge the four of you reading this right now, to thank you for checking in, and give a bit of an update on where I’ve been and where I’m going.

I didn’t make any posts in December because I spent most of the month away from my computer. A wonderful way to spend a month, I must say. After a few days of meetings (the best I’ve ever attended, I should point out), I traveled in Laos for a couple of weeks with a friend. It was one of those memorable trips in life with one experience after another that I will cherish for years to come—Taking a slow boat down the Mekong for two days and arriving by glorious sunset in Luang Prabang on Christmas Eve (see photo above). Having a Buddhist monk ask us on Christmas about the meaning of the day. Hiking in the jungle for three days, staying in an Akha village that doesn’t have electricity or running water, being given the best food our host family had on such short notice. Touring the countryside by motorbike on a sun-soaked afternoon.

I have these memories, along with some that I will think on and laugh about in years to come even though they weren’t exactly funny at the time. Being ripped off by a tour company with false information on visas and hidden hotel fees. Having our guesthouse owner unexpectedly pack up and go on vacation for a week—with my friend’s laptop locked in storage in the room behind her restaurant. Sitting on the roadside in numerous buses with broken gear shifts, flat tires, and other unexplainable ailments. Awaking in the night in the village because an old man pulled back the covers from my face, just to see what the white lady looks like.

I could easily write full blog entries about each of the memories. But time is short, and ideas for writing abound. One day I’ll flesh out these stories into a book, along with others from the past few years of living and traveling in Asia. One day, when I have the time and an advance check from my (imaginary) publisher.

But that won’t be the first book I write. The first one will be about Lydia, and she and I are working on the research for it now. Think the Little House series meets girl growing up in a village in Yunnan.

So, while we focus on this research, the time I can dedicate to writing for my blog will be limited. I don’t want to give it up completely, but I’m trying to be realistic about what is possible in the time I have.

Burmese Days Conclusion: Why I Travel

Posted on October 30, 2009 by admin

When I’m back in my own apartment after a trip like this one through Burma, when I’ve rinsed the dust out of my hair and the laundry is out of my backpack and in piles by the porch, ready to be washed, I begin sorting my thoughts and impressions into piles, too. Those that I will share with others through these stories, through online photo albums, through conversations in the days ahead. And those that I will keep and ponder and mull over on my own, letting them soak into the depths of me and become part of how I view and interact with and face the world.

My understanding of myself becomes much clearer when I’m away from my everyday surroundings. The nature of my job for the past few years has involved projects that require intense focus and discipline for a set period of time—usually in the form of compiling, writing, designing, revising, editing. A girl can only take so much sitting behind a computer before her thoughts begin to carry her away. Better to get away of my own accord than to be carried away. By spending time away from home (wherever home is at that moment) I regain clarity of thinking, refocus, and am refreshed to the very core of who Rebecca is.

In new surroundings I am more able to recognize what it is that I value in life, and I can point a finger more definitely to the places inside me that need to change or mature. Sometimes I can do this in a two hour bike ride out to some nearby villages; other times it takes two weeks of busing across Laos. It was by staring at a glacier for several days in Alaska that I was able to comprehend how truly joyful I am to be in my 30s now, something that had escaped me for the entire previous year in Yunnan. And it was sitting under a palm tree in Vietnam, watching a young boy drive a herd of cows across the beach, that I knew the focus of my job needed to change, to become more village-centered, more language-centered. Though I had fretted for months over making this decision, I left Vietnam and returned to work with a sense of both assurance and determination.

I know God hears my prayers from my own couch just as clearly as He does when I’m traveling along the Mekong or looking out a bus window at flooded rice fields. And He does speak to me in the mundanity of answering e-mails and cooking dinner and paying bills. Yet, in the interlude of being somewhere new, somewhere different, even somewhere difficult and unsettling, I have a deeper grasp of who I am and who God is and how it all works in this life that He gives.

In that way, this trip to Burma was no different from others. I had just finished up one major project and need to hunker down and get a couple more wrapped up in the next few months. Being in a new country, talking to folks along the way, helped me think through some ideas that have been on my mind and in my heart for quite some time, and though I didn’t make any life-changing decisions on this trip, the impressions I’ve brought back will simmer and stew and blend themselves into the rest of me in a way that is just as life-changing.

Burmese Days Part 11: Chaung Tha

Posted on October 30, 2009 by admin

“Relaxing beach getaway” isn’t a phrase generally associated with Burma, but we decided to give the Indian Ocean a try. During our two days at Chaung Tha in the Irrawaddy River Delta, we could count the number of Westerners on the beach on two hands—and there’s a reason for that. Southeast Asia has an abundance of easily accessible beaches and islands, and Chaung Tha is not one of them.

Serene, paradisical, restful after a week on the road (plus all the weeks of work preceding that). But not easily accessible. It took eight hours one way on a wretched excuse for a road, in a bus that should have been put out of its misery when I was in elementary school. Erin said that throughout the bus ride, she kept repeating to herself, “Crab and lobster, crab and lobster,” as a way of remembering that there would be something worthwhile waiting for us at the end of a long, hot, dusty day of travel.

And indeed, the seafood at Chaung Tha was delectable. Local fishermen walked up and down the beach, carrying buckets of still struggling sea creatures for sale. A lady pulled out a huge crab and dangled it before me as I sat on our bungalow porch the first afternoon at the beach—we opted to eat in breezy outdoor restaurants, though, rather than buy straight from the fishermen. Calamari with garlic and lime, crab in a masala curry, massive shrimp with a sweet and spicy Thai sauce. We made each meal on the beach count.

The morning of our second day, we took a small ferry out to an even smaller island that claimed to have whiter sand than the beach where we were staying. As we buzzed along in this tiny and probably overcrowded boat, I thought of all the times you read headlines reporting the number dead in ferries sunk in places like the Indian Ocean and hoped we weren’t about to become one of those headlines. The more I thought about it, however, I decided that while we might be overloaded, we were too small of a ferry to make international headlines if we sank. Then we reached the little island, and I became too busy scouting out a nice stretch of sand to take a nap on my new batik cloth to worry any longer about drowning.

There would appear to be a national ordinance in Burma that one stupa be built per every certain number of square feet of land. You could probably pick this little island up and plop it down inside my parents’ house with room to spare—but they still managed to build a gold stupa smack in the middle of it. Erin and I were the only Westerners on the island that day; the rest were Burmese tourists and families out for a morning in the sun. While some of the local men might wear swim trunks or fold their longyi up into something resembling shorts when they go in the water, the ladies go in dressed as they are, in jeans and t-shirts or in their longyi. Erin and I were the only women wearing swimsuits.

I had a good nap that morning on the island, before going back to our bungalow for lunch and another nap on our not-white-sand beach. I probably needed another three or four days of napping to be completely satisfied, but we had a plane to catch in Yangon. Chaung Tha Beach was a delightful two days of respite, but unless they widen the road and get new buses, look for me in Thailand or Malaysia on my next ocean-side vacation.

Next in the “Burmese Days” series: ”Why I Travel“

Burmese Days Part 4: The Wrong Side of the Road

Posted on October 22, 2009 by admin

In looking at vehicles in Burma you would notice the steering wheels are all on the right side of the car, which would lead you to the logical conclusion that traffic flows on the left side of the road, a logical result of Burma having been a British colony.

But logic would fail you in this case. The steering wheels are on the right, but traffic also drives on the right, causing more than the usual burst of anxiety when trying to pass a slow-moving vehicle on a narrow road. The driver has to venture far into the left lane before he’s able to see if there’s oncoming traffic from his blinded position on the right side of the vehicle. Another good reason to have a man hanging out of the open door on the left side of the bus—he can tell the driver if there’s space for him to pass on the left or not.

Erin and I wondered for several days why the nation has such an inconvenient (and dangerous) traffic law, until an American lady we met in Yangon cleared things up for us. She said that once upon a time, one of the generals in the junta had a dream that he would do something remarkable, something that would drastically change the entire country. Upon waking up and reflecting on just what he could do to transform the whole country, he was told by a psychic advisor that from then on traffic should switch to driving on the right side of the road. Never mind that all of the vehicles were fitted for driving on the left. Why get bogged down in minor details like the line of sight of drivers when changing the entire nation is at stake?

The change in traffic flow was made official in 1970. Almost forty years ago. And still right-side steering wheels rule the roads of Burma.

(Pictured above is a right-side steering wheel bus driving across a one-lane rickety wooden bridge.)

Next in the “Burmese Days” series: ”Bagan“

Burmese Days Part 3: Buses

Posted on October 22, 2009 by admin

After reading up on travel from town to town within Burma, we decided that the best transportation option for us would be buses. Air travel would be expensive, considering the number of towns we wanted to see. Trains are slow and regularly overbooked, and boats along the Irrawaddy River seemed to have a less reliable schedule. From what we could tell, the buses would be slightly less crowded and slow than trains, so we got bus tickets from Mandalay to Bagan on our second morning in Burma.

The buses were more or less the same as any other local bus I’ve been on in Yunnan or Laos, except that they were a couple of decades more decrepit than in those places. Like so many other things in Burma, the buses are patched up and kept running well past what most people in the West would consider a normal lifespan for a vehicle. Buildings, bicycles, roads are also maintained the same way, giving the entire country a run-down and old feeling. So little in Burma looks new.

Those bus engines are worn out from thirty years of hard driving and tend to move at a crawling pace. The road from Mandalay to Bagan is flat, so aside from having to swerve to dodge huge potholes every ten or twenty yards, that bus could maintain a fairly consistent (albeit poky) speed. On the ride from Yangon to Chaung Tha Beach in the south, however, there is a three hour section with hills where I was tempted to jump off the bus and run alongside it. Or ahead of it. Inching uphill in first gear with the engine straining loudly was torturous, especially as the occasional motorbike whizzed by, wind blowing in the faces of the riders. “Wind. I remember feeling the wind once,” I thought. “Maybe one day when I get off this bus I’ll feel it again.”

The overloading of the buses with extra passengers can’t help the ability of the engines to pull their load. After all of the seats are full, plastic stools are lined up along the aisle for an extra row of seating. These stools are short and don’t have backs, putting the passengers in cramped positions for hours on end. Standing passengers squeeze into the open area around the driver, taking up every extra inch of space. One or two men stand in the open doorway and hang halfway out, and several more men climb up to sit on the luggage rack on top of the bus. The bus moves so slowly, they don’t seem to be too worried about passengers being thrown off the top while going around a curve.

Erin and I made a point to buy our tickets a day ahead of time for each bus trip so that we would get front seats and not have to climb over too many people getting on and off. The drivers on each leg of our journey were helpful in putting our backpacks up for us so we didn’t have to hold them in our laps and in finding the guesthouses we were looking for on arrival. Nonetheless, with all of the stopping and starting to pick up and let off passengers, with the heat and dust and people leaning on us because there was nowhere else to lean, with the plodding pace of our progress along unpaved or barely paved roads, it was tough travel.

I tried to remind myself during my most impatient moments on those buses—I’m riding this way because I’m privileged enough to be able to travel wherever I want in the world, and when this ride is over, I can go back to a more comfortable place if I choose. Everyone else is taking this bus because eight or nine hours of discomfort are better than their only other options: walking or staying home. I have absolutely no room to complain.

Next in the “Burmese Days” series: “The Wrong Side of the Road“

Tiger Leaping Gorge (part 1)

Posted on July 26, 2009 by admin

Sandy left for the States a week earlier than my mother, so we decided to take a trip to the northwest part of the province. Mom had quite a trip to China this time around—she got to see the Thai and the Tibetan areas of Yunnan and a little in between.

A friend of mine took her parents to hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge a few years back, and after grilling her on the details of their trip and asking bunches of questions about the area on an online travel forum, I asked Mom what she thought about trekking for a couple of days. My friend assured us Mom would be able to do the hike—if her mother could, so could mine. I don’t know if my mom took that as a challenge or what, but she told me she was up for it.

Traveling by bus in Yunnan with my mom, I suddenly became aware of how different and how difficult it is to get from place to place. You buy a ticket for one kind of bus, but end up on another. You get on a bus for a three hour ride, but there’s nowhere to stow your bags. You show up in a town you’ve never been to before and just walk around until you find a semi-decent guesthouse. The sheets on the bed are sketchy, and the pipe under the sink is broken, so water just runs on the floor. I’m used to all these things and have developed coping mechanisms through the years—but watching my mom try to figure out how to handle each new inconvenience, I was reminded just how much I’ve changed and adapted through my years of living here.

After two long bus rides, we started out walking on the trail through the gorge, along the Yangtze River. I had convinced Mom of the necessity of packing light, and we each had one backpack, mine bigger and heavier than hers. The path started out wide and only gently sloping upwards, but within a couple of hours it was too rocky, too steep, and too hot for Mom to continue on. The Naxi people from the nearby villages capitalize on this as part of their income, and we had men with ponies offering us a ride every few hundred feet. Mom soldiered on until I finally insisted that she get on a horse; I was imagining how horrible the phone call home to my dad would be if my exhausted and overheated mom stumbled off the trail and into the gorge.

Next in the “Shangri-La” series: ”Tiger Leaping Gorge (part 2)“

The Best Laid Plans

Posted on July 8, 2009 by admin

The timing was supposed to work out perfectly. Mom and Sandy would arrive on their flight from Beijing at 11am, which gave me plenty of time to take the sleeper bus the night before, arrive in Kunming to eat breakfast, meet their flight, and pick up our tickets to fly back down to Jinghong in the afternoon.

But of course, that’s not what happened.

I slept fitfully, if at all, on my tiny bunk in the bus, until I realized at 4am that the engine was quiet. Broken down in who-knows-where. All the snoring of fellow passengers that is normally drowned out by the engine and air-con was suddenly deafening. For an hour and a half I lay there, wanting to punch the man across the aisle so that he would wake up and breathe more quietly. But I refrained.

The bus rolled into Kunming late, but still with enough time for me to find a place to drink a cup of coffee and brush my teeth before the flight from Beijing arrived. At least that was my plan until I pulled my cell phone out of my bag and realized that ten minutes earlier I had four missed calls from an unknown number with a Beijing area code. My heart sank. Mom and Sandy’s flight was to have taken off over an hour earlier. I knew they weren’t on it. I had no idea where they had called me from, or if they had stuck around the phone, but I redialed the number.

A Chinese girl answer. I greeted her, “Ni hao, I’m a foreigner—someone just called me from this phone.”

“Yes, hold on.” Pause.

“Rebecca!” The beautiful sound of Sandy’s voice. She and Mom had called me from a pay phone, and for lack of anywhere else to go, were still sitting nearby when I redialed the number.

Their flight from Dallas had been delayed, making the LA flight late, too, and it had finally caught up with them in Beijing. They missed that flight, but were rescheduled for noon.

Thus began the series of phone calls to change our afternoon flight to the next day and attempt to make hotel reservations in inexplicably over-booked hotels. Not a pleasant morning, after a sleepless night on a bus. But it was all worth it when the two of them came through baggage claim in Kunming and our next couple of weeks of visit began.

Nujiang (pt 2)

Posted on June 8, 2009 by admin

The house also had no facilities for bathing. The village was located a 20 minute walk from the main public road between Nujiang and the capital, and on the side of the road by the village path was a hot spring where an enterprising local had set up four or five individual stalls for showers. Celia and I walked down to the road and paid about 25 cents to take a shower at the midway point of my week in her village. It was one of the loveliest showers I’ve had in my life.

One of my most bizarre village memories comes from that week. Celia had a little radio that she would use to pick up English language broadcasts of programs from the BBC and Voice of America. For several hours one day, as we sat around the courtyard of the house, she listened to a station that continuously played the song “Rhinestone Cowboy.” I sensed my sanity departing after the first couple of times we listened to it, but at that point in my overseas living experience I was too polite to tell my hostess that I didn’t relish hearing that song even once, much less endlessly.

A couple of days before my departure for Kunming, Celia and I had to go to the main town in Nujiang to buy my bus ticket. From the head of the village path into town was a 45 minute drive on the public road. We caught rides there and back in the trucks and vans of local drivers, my first (though definitely not last) hitchhiking experience in China. I don’t remember much about the town except that we bought my ticket, ate a most undelicious ice cream bar, and visited a tiny bookstore where Celia browsed for Chinese reading material and I searched unsuccessfully for anything in English.

Celia and I remained friends throughout my time at the university in Kunming, eating dinner together regularly and shopping and the like. I had her parents’ number when I left school, but lost it long ago. Few local students used email in 2001, so I’ve had no way to contact her these past several years. I thought of her and her family in Nujiang as our team drove north to get the seedlings, wondering if she’s an English teacher now in the town where we overnighted before visiting the coffee farm. I may never know.

Next in the “A Different Trip” series: ”Adam’s Journey“

Nujiang (pt 1)

Posted on June 7, 2009 by admin

This was not my first trip to the area, named Nujiang after the mighty river flowing south through these towering mountains. I came here in the summer of 2001 on a trip of several firsts. My first ride on a sleeper bus. My first stay in a village for longer than overnight. My first time to eat an entire mango straight off the seed, juice dripping down my arm.

I had also just completed my first full semester of Chinese study in the provincial capital, and a friend from the English department invited me to her village during the summer break. Looking back, I’m surprised I went. Really, I’m sure I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Starting with the 17 hour sleeper bus from Kunming out to Nujiang. Ahh, the sleeper bus. Imagine the sleeping compartment of a train, and then shorten the bed by at least a foot. And back in those days (did I really just say that?) the beds were arranged differently. Now, there are three beds across the width of the bus, with a tiny aisle in between, four or five rows to the back of the bus. But in 2001, they were configured in only two beds across, with two people per bed. If you knew (and liked) the person you were traveling with, great for you. If not, it would be a long trip in that little bed.

On the way out to my friend Celia’s village, she and I shared the very back section of the bus with three other girls. One big bed across the back of the bus, five girls, a 17 hour mobile slumber party. What Celia didn’t tell me before I got on that bus was that she wasn’t coming back with me to the capital in a week like I had expected. I found out a couple of days later that she was planning to stay longer, and I would be making the return trip alone. Well, me and the stranger (a lady, thank goodness) I shared a bed with.

I spent the week visiting with her family and friends in the village, sitting on their porch, watching the clouds and sunlight change throughout the day on the surrounding mountains, basking in the serenity of a week away from the city. I walked in the nearby forest with Celia and her younger brothers and sister, using banana leaves as umbrellas when it started raining. One afternoon we walked two hours one way to see a waterfall, the banana leaves no help in keeping us from getting soaked on the way home.

The bathroom situation left much to be desired and was a bit of trial by fire for me in getting used to village stays. There was no toilet, only a small shack over a pit right outside the courtyard of Celia’s parents’ house, two planks to squat on, with a space in between. Think Slumdog Millionaire. I did a lot of praying that week that I wouldn’t trip and that the planks would hold.

Next in the “A Different Trip” series: ”Nujiang (part 2)“

Part 14 (the end!)

Posted on October 2, 2008 by admin

It took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings on the bus and figure out where the best place would be for me to stand. I knew the trip ahead of me was two or three hours long, depending on road conditions, and I needed to find a place where I could set my backpack down on the floor within my eyesight and stand within reach of a seat, window, or the overhead rack so I would have something to hold on to as we wound our way down the mountain and around the curves of the road. There was nothing to hold on to in my place near the door, so I decided to move further back to a position in the aisle, where I could lean on a seat and grasp the overhead rack. People took up every inch of space at the front of the bus and along the aisle, and it was impossible to move without falling over on top of people as the bus turned corners. I picked up my backpack and used it to push my way through the crowd to a more open spot about three rows back in the middle of the aisle. At every row of bus seats, there were two people standing in the aisle, so that it was six people across from window to window. I planted my backpack on the ground between my feet and braced myself for the next two hours.

The road was as bad as I’d remembered it from the trip up, only the bus seemed to slide a lot more than our 4-wheel-drive truck did. I’m not sure which parts worried me more: the times when we were on relatively smooth roads going downhill, flying around blind curves on two wheels, the lady standing next to me holding on to my arms or waist to keep herself from falling over, or the part where we went at a snail’s pace for about an hour through a muddy pit of deep ruts, the back of the bus sliding in the opposite direction from the front, the bus rocking back and forth in ruts to the point that I feared we might tip over. The children on the bus were cheering as we rocked, and the adults kept talking to each other in normal conversation, seemingly unaware that we were in a dangerous situation. I tried to make small talk in B language with the lady hanging on to my arm in an effort to keep my mind from imagining the various ways the bus could crash.

We didn’t crash, and we only had to stop once on the main highway for the driver to repair the bus. We made it to MH in good time. The driver pulled over a couple of blocks from the bus station and made all the standing passengers, including me, get off. It’s illegal for buses to have more passengers than seats, but drivers will break the rules to collect more fares. The drivers will kick the illegal passengers off at the edge of town so that when they pull into the station, they’re not carrying too many people. I picked my backpack up off the muddy bus floor, handed the driver my fare on the way out, and walked the rest of the way to the station to catch the next bus to JH.

Back in my apartment, I looked through the prayers I had written in my journal the morning I left and was thankful for how each one had been lovingly answered.

Rebecca Henderson

writing, reading, living

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