Darakshan does Asia
My friend has been in the Orient for the past month.
Hello my friends,
Finally making some time to summarize a few images of my adventures here.
I've been in Bali a week now, after four days in Thailand and a week in Cambodia. They've all been so different. All warm and steamy of course, but Thailand was very continental (the part I saw anyway), Cambodia impovershed and not unlike India, Bali poor but vibrant, a peaceful jungle of warm and spiritual people -- though I've been staying in a rather urban area full of shops.
Chiva-Som in Thailand is a world class spa, one of the top five I hear. A little gem of a place tucked into an otherwise so-so neighborhood called Hua Hin, but the maybe 4 acre compound is totally self-contained. Every detail just so -- for instance when you put your face into the hole in the massage table, you see not a floor but colored glass with a scented candle burning under it. At meals there were literally hundreds of dishes out, each always perfectly full no matter who has eaten, each with a little card describing the dish, its local name, its contents, its health qualities, its calories and fat, etc. Probably ten staff for every guest. It was running at capacity with 100 guests, though everywhere else I've been, tourism was down to about 10% of capacity, due to media-fed fears like Asian Bird flu and terrorism. It might seem wasteful, but on the other hand, this is a little industry that takes from the rich and gives jobs to an awful lot of people.
John's place in Sihanoukville Cambodia (named after king Sihanouk) is an up-and-coming little backpacker beach haven, probably like Koh Phanang was twenty years ago. A pretty nice beach with islands and free lodging behind many of the bar shacks, half for locals and half for westerners. Children and cripples go up and down the beach looking for charity or to buy something for just a dollar. People make a couple dollars a day to feed huge families.
I followed John around. By day he spends time setting up schools for these kids, and he says he now has 1,100 kids studying English, Chinese, Cambodian history, and computer skills. He has set up a non-profit (known internationally as a Non-Government Organization or NGO) and has wrangled all kinds of bureaucratic and political issues to get it together. He is also a sophisticated businessman, certainly compared to the Cambodians, and he has got the price down to $35 per kid per class by doing deals with local schools which are all private and struggling. His website www.cambodiakidsedu.org needs some help; I hope to contribute at least a bunch of photos and videos. (While I was there we met a Canadian video team doing a story on trafficking - they interviewed him, visited the homes of some of the kids and the red-light street they walk through to get to school. They'll send us their rough cut which may help in making a promo for his NGO. At night he and his partner Mark run a sometimes hopping bar at the new empty end of the beach. I watched him spend a few hours telling everyone on the beach about the psycho party they were going to have that night, though it maybe works better when he pays cute girls to do the same job.
In Bali, I spent time with about eight people from Nine Gates Mystery School, in a little hotel on busy Monkey Forest road in the heart of Ubud, just down the street from the monkey forest. We visited a number of local temples after learning how to dress appropriately (special hat, two sarongs appropriately tied, etc.) and how to perform the simple and sweet Balinesian temple rituals.
I saw several performances of Balinese dance and monkey chanting. On Friday, I took a few travellers to a Kecak teacher to get instruction in the traditional version of monkey chant, which is rather different in detail from the Burning Man version, though the effect is the same. Today the last of the Nine Gates group left, I started a batik project, had a great $1.00 lunch with Bo and with Newman (Oregon Country Fair mask-maker), and rented a beautiful room with a huge open veranda overlooking the rice paddies, over a studio where they often do yoga retreats. This will set me back $15 a day.
Bo has been living in Bali since Sept 2004, though he says he's spent a lot of time visiting other parts of Indonesia (which has 17,000 islands). He's lost 75 pounds!
I've filled my camera with about 4 gigs of photos and videos -- I don't have that much memory so I've been dumping them onto CDs -- and I have reams of notes and long e-mails of journal entries waiting to be edited. Will I ever get around to it? Who knows...
Anyway, hope you are all well and good; about now many of you should be crashed out from Steve's welcome back party I ready about. I'll be back *next* Saturday.
Love hugs smiles peace,
Darakshan
Hello my friends,
Finally making some time to summarize a few images of my adventures here.
I've been in Bali a week now, after four days in Thailand and a week in Cambodia. They've all been so different. All warm and steamy of course, but Thailand was very continental (the part I saw anyway), Cambodia impovershed and not unlike India, Bali poor but vibrant, a peaceful jungle of warm and spiritual people -- though I've been staying in a rather urban area full of shops.
Chiva-Som in Thailand is a world class spa, one of the top five I hear. A little gem of a place tucked into an otherwise so-so neighborhood called Hua Hin, but the maybe 4 acre compound is totally self-contained. Every detail just so -- for instance when you put your face into the hole in the massage table, you see not a floor but colored glass with a scented candle burning under it. At meals there were literally hundreds of dishes out, each always perfectly full no matter who has eaten, each with a little card describing the dish, its local name, its contents, its health qualities, its calories and fat, etc. Probably ten staff for every guest. It was running at capacity with 100 guests, though everywhere else I've been, tourism was down to about 10% of capacity, due to media-fed fears like Asian Bird flu and terrorism. It might seem wasteful, but on the other hand, this is a little industry that takes from the rich and gives jobs to an awful lot of people.
John's place in Sihanoukville Cambodia (named after king Sihanouk) is an up-and-coming little backpacker beach haven, probably like Koh Phanang was twenty years ago. A pretty nice beach with islands and free lodging behind many of the bar shacks, half for locals and half for westerners. Children and cripples go up and down the beach looking for charity or to buy something for just a dollar. People make a couple dollars a day to feed huge families.
I followed John around. By day he spends time setting up schools for these kids, and he says he now has 1,100 kids studying English, Chinese, Cambodian history, and computer skills. He has set up a non-profit (known internationally as a Non-Government Organization or NGO) and has wrangled all kinds of bureaucratic and political issues to get it together. He is also a sophisticated businessman, certainly compared to the Cambodians, and he has got the price down to $35 per kid per class by doing deals with local schools which are all private and struggling. His website www.cambodiakidsedu.org needs some help; I hope to contribute at least a bunch of photos and videos. (While I was there we met a Canadian video team doing a story on trafficking - they interviewed him, visited the homes of some of the kids and the red-light street they walk through to get to school. They'll send us their rough cut which may help in making a promo for his NGO. At night he and his partner Mark run a sometimes hopping bar at the new empty end of the beach. I watched him spend a few hours telling everyone on the beach about the psycho party they were going to have that night, though it maybe works better when he pays cute girls to do the same job.
In Bali, I spent time with about eight people from Nine Gates Mystery School, in a little hotel on busy Monkey Forest road in the heart of Ubud, just down the street from the monkey forest. We visited a number of local temples after learning how to dress appropriately (special hat, two sarongs appropriately tied, etc.) and how to perform the simple and sweet Balinesian temple rituals.
I saw several performances of Balinese dance and monkey chanting. On Friday, I took a few travellers to a Kecak teacher to get instruction in the traditional version of monkey chant, which is rather different in detail from the Burning Man version, though the effect is the same. Today the last of the Nine Gates group left, I started a batik project, had a great $1.00 lunch with Bo and with Newman (Oregon Country Fair mask-maker), and rented a beautiful room with a huge open veranda overlooking the rice paddies, over a studio where they often do yoga retreats. This will set me back $15 a day.
Bo has been living in Bali since Sept 2004, though he says he's spent a lot of time visiting other parts of Indonesia (which has 17,000 islands). He's lost 75 pounds!
I've filled my camera with about 4 gigs of photos and videos -- I don't have that much memory so I've been dumping them onto CDs -- and I have reams of notes and long e-mails of journal entries waiting to be edited. Will I ever get around to it? Who knows...
Anyway, hope you are all well and good; about now many of you should be crashed out from Steve's welcome back party I ready about. I'll be back *next* Saturday.
Love hugs smiles peace,
Darakshan
posted by Dij at 3:26 PM
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