Bevan, Bon Rouleur
5 December 2005 | Southeast Asia, Part Three
I have a less serious medical issue to bitch about, but this one will more likely affect you while traveling.
The malaria medication I've been on (Lariam) has been giving me pretty severe insomnia, nightmares, and probably makes me more temperamental. Especially recently I've had a very hard time falling asleep. Sometimes I literally cannot fall asleep, and end up having a completely unproductive and nap-ridden day. The last two weeks I've rarely been able to get to sleep before sunrise, and then I wake frequently and am often just dozing. When I do sleep, I'm prone to intense nightmares. Once I had three bad nightmares on consecutive nights, all of which stuck in my memory. The first in this series was one of the most vivid and terrifying I've ever had, and when I woke up I was afraid to move for several minutes. The second was very emotionally trying, and as soon as I could I emailed the person I'd dreamt about to make sure she was ok. The third was also very disturbing. I rarely remember my dreams and almost never have nightmares so this is very unusual.
Lariam has also made me more irritable. This may be due mostly to my lack of quality sleep. I find myself occasionally irritated at minor things, like poor service or people's refusal to understand my English, even when I speak very loudly and slowly. This may seem like a small problem but it is worrying. I hold it in with a smile, but whenever there is the least legitimate reason to show some discontent, such as when getting ripped off some number of cents or being laughed at, I have a tendency to snap (although usually in a firm yet quiet manner). Displays of anger are frowned upon here much more so than back home. As I mentioned, eczema also plays a role in my shortened fuse.
Being more irritable and/or confrontational may also be a result of traveling alone in non-English-speaking countries. Last year while traveling alone in Eastern Europe and the Balkans (sans Lariam) I noticed I grew less likely to suppress discontent as a self-preservation mechanism. I found I got ripped off a lot, sometimes blatantly. While bribes are part of the culture in many parts of the world, I see it as a responsibility to myself and other travelers to not let myself get ripped off whenever possible. This can mean speaking with conviction, which is not natural for me. Always being "on", perpetually adding up the bill in your head, and talking to everyone with a strong voice will wear on you.
I've snapped at the wrong times. The other day, I took a tuk-tuk (an open-air three-wheeled motorcycle-taxi) to an internet cafe. I didn't negotiate the price beforehand since I knew the local rate. Predictably, I was asked for over ten times the going rate for the short ride, about $3 (the night before, my room cost less). I was particularly incensed since he'd asked me where I was from and made nice comments about my country, which I reciprocated. I refused his demand, but after a prolonged moment of moral indecision I gave him five times the value of the trip and walked away. It was my fault for not arranging a price beforehand and I should have paid what he'd asked, despite my knowing the rates. It wasn't my place to bargain for something I'd already received, despite it being highway robbery. This and other events kicked off a sad, pessimistic week where I was convinced that all "these people" got a money hard-on whenever they saw a white face, and that money was their only incentive to put up with me. Dollar signs rarely flash in the eyes of passers-by, but those few incidents can really mar a trip.
While traveling alone money is often your only lifeline. If you're moving most days you don't have time to make many friends, although you do meet many people. As a result, you are on your own a lot. That sounds obvious, but not knowing people with a non-economic interest in you can really suck. Whereas at home you may be lucky enough to have friends and family to help you out, out here a stack of money is the only reliable contingency plan.
A hundred miles out of Bangkok the sidewall of my rear tire blew out, rendering it un-rideable. I happened to be next to a gas station (just two pumps and a see-through shack), and ended up waiting for two hours in the very hot sun, trying to get a ride from passing cars and trucks to the nearest town. Lots of sympathetic smiles, but no takers despite my progressively insistent pleas. Not even the several empty pickups would give me a ride, never mind my smiles, the long and awkward minutes as their tanks filled, and my apparently effective communication of my desires in Lonely Planet Thai. I eventually whipped out my wad, and, somewhat disillusioned about the kindness of strangers, got a ride from the next car that pulled up. What a nice guy!
Without money you're out on your ass, and that really sucks. That some people don't give a shit unless you have money really wears on you, and the negative moments tend to stick at least as much as the positive ones. Oh, how much better off we'd all be without money!
With that said, I've been saved dozens of times by the friendliness of Malays, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese. When I least expected it, someone would be there to gladly point me in the right direction, invite me to stay at their home, or talk. I've made countless friends here, almost always thanks to their initiative. I believe that people are fundamentally the same all over the world. If this is true, South East Asian cultures seem to foster generosity, warmth, and friendliness more than other places I've traveled.
The focus on money, a near-universal mechanism of self-preservation which has become so evident while traveling alone, has a practical side for the traveler. It's your fool-proof insurance policy against anything, barring death, dismemberment, and loss of sight or sound. Really, it will never let you down*. If anything goes wrong, you have a solution in hand, which is especially convenient if you have a lot of it (which is every western traveler if you come to South East Asia). So far, loneliness and eczema are the only problems I haven't solved with money, and in eczema's case, it may be because I can't afford enough cream (although most prescription medications are available over-the-counter here, I haven't seen eczema cream yet). And I've met a few expats who've claimed they've bought their way out of loneliness, but for the life of me I can't figure out how they managed that.
The dollar's high potential in this poorer area of the world is fueling a large tourism industry. Vientiane, the capitol of Laos, would surely be a lot smaller had the communist government not opened itself to tourism in the seventies; in the large tourist ghetto at the city's nucleus almost every face is white, and nearly all feet are Teva-clad. My hotel alone employed three hundred Lao citizens, all serving international tourists.
The economic disparity creates opportunities for exploitation as well. Laos in particular is extremely poor and underdeveloped; subsistence farming accounts for half of its GDP, and eighty percent of workers are farmers. This is problematic as Laos is the world's most-bombed country. During the Vietnam War, the United States flew close to a half-million bombing missions over Laos, aimed at North Vietnamese soldiers. About a third of those bombs failed to explode. That's a lot of unexploded ordnance lying around, and despite de-mining efforts, farming can be hazardous in some areas. Electricity is only available in the bigger urban centers, and most 80% of people don't have access to potable drinking water (World Factbook definition of potable). Road conditions are poor, and no rail system exists. It's decades behind some of its neighbors.
I met an expat living in Thailand who would cross into Laos illegally with his police friends to "get bonked" for less than 2 USD. Lao people have taken note of the disparity as well, and have moved or sent children to Thailand as prostitutes. The neighboring (for both countries) Burma also sends prostitutes to Thailand because of that country's relative prosperity, and many return with HIV. In one notably tragic example, the governments in one or more Burman states outlawed poppy growth under pressure from China (where, in some areas, opium is more available and cheaper than cigarettes). Nearly every family in that region depended on the lucrative crop, and without it they couldn't make enough to live. The result was a mass migration (as many as half a million people moved), with all the economic and social turmoil that results from such a catastrophe. Many girls were sent to Thailand as prostitutes, or to other areas of Burma. Drug use, trafficking, and the other predictable consequences of such a huge migration resulted, which are not the least of reasons why Burma has one of the highest HIV rates in the area, at 1.2%. There is no easy solution, of course, as drug production and subsequent trafficking also encourages the spread of HIV (something China likely recognized before asking Burma to stop poppy production); it has been shown that strains of HIV follow drug trafficking routes. The intravenous drug-user population has been hit particularly hard: in some areas of Burma, the group has infection rates as high as 70%. I recently read about a plan the government of Afghanistan was considering in which poppy-growing licenses would be granted to farmers, on the condition that the poppies be sold only to licensed pharmaceutical companies. Whereas the prices would be lower than those promised by the black market, the hope is that some farmers would sacrifice the price margin and incur taxes in exchange for legitimacy. This would be an interesting move for South East Asia, as it home to the second- and third-highest producers of heroin in the world, Burma and Laos respectively (Afghanistan being first). With those countries' dependence on poppy growth, it sounds like instituting a program like that could provide much-needed security for farmers.
Like the apparent economic disparity between me and most people here (an omnipresent theme), communication is another obstacle preventing my seamless integration to Asia. I should have picked up some Bahasa (Malaysia), Thai, Isan (northern Thailand), Lao, and Vietnamese before I left, not to mention the languages of regions I have yet to travel through. It's hard to communicate at or beyond a practical level without basic knowledge of said languages in their respective areas of prevalence. Outside of the major urban centers English speakers are rare, as are other travelers: I didn't see a westerner for over five hundred miles along peninsular Malaysia's east coast. This means a lot of gesturing and air-pictionary, and traveling alone means you have nobody to share the embarrassment with. It can be tough.
I eat at restaurants or food stalls for nearly every meal, usually for less than one dollar. The cooks and waitresses rarely speak English, so I end up pointing at what I want, or attempting to decipher the all-important intonations on the Bahasan equivalent for "chicken fried rice" in the lexicon in the back of my Lonely Planet. This combination of pointing and butchering their language works (except in Thailand, in which section the LP authors left out food translations), but it gets tiresome. Sometimes my communication skills prove inadequate and they have no idea what I'm trying to say. The entire charade draws unwanted attention to me, the dumb foreigner. Meal after meal, all this pointing, nodding, gesturing, and mispronunciation (all of which tends to prompt laughter) makes home sound really good. This humiliation isn't restricted to meal-time, however; I'm the dumb foreigner whenever I interact with non-English speakers. I see a hundred times more people per day than during the crossing of Australia's Nullarbor, yet can be much more alone here.
My project for the HIV/AIDS cause in Asia has been a lot more difficult than I imagined, mostly because of the language barrier. In Kota Bharu, Malaysia, I stopped in at a small clinic that I'd been directed to by a hotel receptionist, in order to talk to someone about the extent of HIV/AIDS in that area and what was being done about it. Although two women did speak English, they were obviously flustered by my questions, and probably by my very presence. The whole experience was very awkward as there had been no prior introduction, and I soon found out I wouldn't be able to get any meaningful questions across. In southern Thailand, I talked with a nurse working in one of the good private hospitals in Hat Yai, and she was very happy to hear my questions. We had trouble communicating, but I learned that many people are still largely ignorant about HIV. I was a bit surprised to hear that Thailand, which, unlike some sub-Saharan countries reacted strongly against the pandemic in the early nineties, still seemed to have a largely ignorant population in its deep south. I didn't get an answer as to why this is, but their current civil war and its large conservative Muslim population (unique to southern Thailand) seem likely reasons.
Much further north in Thailand, I had the fortune of meeting a 17-year-old who spoke perfect American English and whose mother had worked for an HIV clinic in a very rural part of northern Thailand. She was apparently part of the early response against the virus, and worked with the oft-stigmatized HIV community to gain acceptance in society. While I didn't get to speak with her, her son commented that many males still refuse to use condoms. I was told there is no HIV curriculum in Thai schools, but supposedly people do know about the virus through other venues. I had a hard time learning specifically where people learn about HIV in Thailand. It was somewhat frustrating to not hear a concrete answer like "billboards," "school," or "TV," but I realized that I couldn't specifically identify where people in the US learn about HIV. People at home just seem to know, it seemed. I think my earliest recollection of being aware of HIV was when I was five or six, at my grandmother's house, watching a black and white TV ad with people saying "I didn't think it could happen to me". I also remember my Chinese grandmother warning me against making friends with drug users. Like me, my Thai friend was unable to identify a specific source of HIV information, and expressed that people, for the most part, just tend to know. That seems encouraging, but Thailand is relatively well-off compared to its neighboring Cambodia and Burma, where the situation is dire.
When I talk with people about HIV/AIDS for more than a few minutes, the topic of homosexuality usually comes up. Most males are visibly shy when it does, and a few times I've been asked whether I like or dislike homosexuals. That question was a bit surprising at first. Although I haven't met anyone who seems to have prejudices against homosexuals, I've gotten the impression that homosexuality is taboo in some areas. In Thailand, although generally a very welcoming place for homosexuals, "sexual deviants" as they're officially tagged cannot be teachers or join the military. Research revealed that homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and caning in Malaysia, and major political parties regularly denounce homosexual acts. Caning? In much-less-developed Laos by contrast, homosexuality is virtually a non-issue in terms of its near-universal acceptance, much like in Vietnam. Despite this, the homosexual community still has to be actively targeted for HIV-education. Countries that have not specifically targeted the community have seen elevated rates of infection amongst that group. This is obviously an issue for countries that don't recognize its homosexual community (such as some Islamic countries). However, it's likely that said nations have more immediate concerns to deal with in insuring the wellbeing of their people.
(Continue to Part Four)
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