Amantaní

 

Lucy met us at the boat dock of the island Amantaní, three hours out from the mainland on Lake Titicaca.  She had big smile on a face younger than most of the other women, but she wore the same black skirt, the same white blouse, and the same black shawl over her head.  At the ends of the shawl she had embroidered beautiful flowers in bright blue, red, pink, and green.  Her skirt was tight around her thick waist and fluffed out to her knees.  On her feet she wore rubber tire sandals, no socks.  She took us up to her home, climbing the steep, rocky trail, all the while spinning some white wool on a spindle that dangled around her bare ankles.

We were to be her guests until after breakfast the next morning.  Her home consisted of several mud brick buildings around a courtyard.  She took us up to our room, which had three beds with thick alpaca wool blankets.  We waited there until she called us for lunch.

And what wonderful and simple food she served.  There was quinoa soup with fava beans, potatoes, carrots and onions seasoned with the local mint, muña.  Then we had a main dish of two varieties of potatoes, a slice of grilled, local cheese, and corn on the cob.  The corn in Peru is not like that in the States.  The kernels are huge and a bit starchy and complement the cheese perfectly.  We sat a narrow table on thin planks for benches.  The mud of the walls around us was peeling, like that of the mud home we’d slept in in Thailand.  We talked with Lucy between bites.

Lucy’s first language is Quechua, one of the native languages of Peru.  Spanish is her second language; she learned it in school.  She uses Spanish to communicate with the tourists who come through.  But the tourists don’t visit her often.  Tour boats do come to this island of about 4000 people every day, but the community has realized that tourism could ruin the islanders’ way of life.  So a scheme was devised to share the work, exposure, and wealth of the tourists among all of the islanders.  No family hosts a tourist more than once or twice a month.  Instead the visits rotate through the families and through the town.  Everyone gets the opportunity to host a tourist during the rotation.  Of course, this brings money to the families.  But the main industry is still farming, sheepherding, and handicrafts.  Thus Lucy’s constant spinning of wool.

After lunch we took the opportunity to climb to the top of the island.  The island is comprised of two volcanoes: Pachamama (Earth Mother) and Pachatata (Earth Father).  On top of each of the mountains is a temple.  On Pachamama the temple is round, on Pacatata, square.  The temples themselves are closed except one day a year close to the summer solstice.  This is one of the most important holidays on the island. Like in much of the Peru we visited, the people are ostensibly Christian, but the worship of the mountains and their powers seems to be deeper and more pervasive.  The rituals honoring the spirits of the mountains, the apus, have been practiced long before the Spanish, even long before the Incans.  The temples at the top of the mountain provided a place to continue this worship.  We got to enjoy a beautiful view in the perfect light of sunset as we leaned against the temple’s sun warmed stones.

We sat at the top of Pachatata, over 4000 meters high and watched as the sun set and the stars came out.  There are a lot of stars to see when sitting at over 4000 meters.  Scorpio rose above the horizon to reveal its curly tail.  The milky way split the sky in two.  Right above us was a dark spot in the milky way.  The southern cross fit into that spot like the piece of a puzzle.  We even found the big dipper, but it pointed to the northern star well below the horizon.

After the sun set Lucy led us home to supper.  We tripped on the trail as we tried to keep looking up at the stars instead of at the path where her flashlight shone. We headed back to the kitchen for a meal of potato and corn soup and then potato stew spiced with coriander and a side of rice.  With the setting of the sun the temperature had started to chill and the food warmed and filled our bellies. And now it was time to dance.

The village put on a dance for all of the tourists visiting that evening.  There may have been maybe 30 of us.  All the hosts had all dressed their visitors up in traditional clothing.  Cat and I wore fluffy skirts, thick flannel blouses, and a shawl over our heads.  The outfit was pulled together with a sash tied like a corset around our waists.  Bill and Hank wore ponchos and classic Peruvian hats, pointed at the top with ear flaps hanging down over their ears.  We wore these over our regular clothes including our sweaters.   We were warm.  Lucy wore the outfit that she’d been wearing all day, no extra layers, no socks, no hat, no coat.  She didn’t seemed chilled at all.  It did, of course, help to move around a bit.  And Lucy loved to dance.  The band consisted of a bass drum, a guitar and a mandolin, and, of course, a couple of pan flutes.  As soon as the band started playing Lucy came and grabbed our hands, pulling us onto the dance floor.  We line danced, circle danced and partner danced.  Throughout the dancing, Cat and I struggled with our shawls, trying to keep it on our heads.  We ended up wearing them around our shoulders.  Lucy would just grab hers as it started to slip and swiftly place back on her head, never missing a dance step.  We danced to almost all of the songs.   In what is the usual manner for our family, we were some of the last to leave the party.

The night was cold.  Really, really cold.  Just to remind us how high we were my phone’s weather app said it was to get well below freezing.  I slept fitfully on the lumpy mattress.  But with the thick blankets, my coat, my hat, and Bill lying next to me, I stayed warm.  In the morning, after our pancakes, it was time to leave Amantaní.  Lucy led us to the dock.  Her spinning was done.  She was now making a ball out of the white yarn she had made.  As we loaded onto the boat, Lucy leaned against the handrail, working her yarn.  She and the other women gossiped, dressed in their fluffy black skirts, white blouses, and black shawls over their heads.  Each shawl was decorated by its owner with flowers of bright colors.  They all wore rubber tire sandals.  Only a few wore socks.  Like Lucy most did not.  They smiled and waved as the boat pulled away, still working their wool.

 

Posted in Peru | Leave a comment

Sweet, Sweet Argentina

Dulce de leche.  It’s the sweet caramel concoction of Latin America, and the Argentinians have a love affair with the stuff.  It seems to be everywhere.  It’s made by cooking down milk and sugar, often starting with sweetened condensed milk.   It is creamy and very, very sweet.

I first learned about this sweet concoction from a friend in medical school.  He had married an Argentinian.  She couldn’t cook.  He would tell me stories of her cooking disasters such as making a stir fry in a pressure cooker.  She also tried to make dulce de leche.  She put the can of sweetened condensed milk in a pan of water to boil.  Then she forgot about it.  The can exploded at some point in the night.  Dulce de leche was found on the ceiling.

We never did find it on the ceiling, but we did find dulce de leche in virtually every corner of Buenos Aires.  It was stuffed into donuts, cakes, crepes, and churros.  At fairs we walked past vendors selling ice cream cones stuffed with the stuff.  The most classic creation was the alfajores, two cookies glued together with dulce de leche.  An Argentinian Oreo.  Some were covered in chocolate, white or dark, but the best were from a small bakery called Smeterling (yes, for you germanophiles, only one t) where they made their alfajores with lemon shortbread, still crispy and not too sweet.  A perfect foil for the sweet richness of the caramel.  We loved the dulce de leche we sampled, but it was a bit overwhelming.  We were happy we didn’t find it in our salad dressing or our steak sauce.  Though I’m sure, in somewhere Argentina, salads and steaks are dressed with that sweet, sweet, rich caramel called dulce de leche.

 

Thanks to Vincent Dixon for the beautiful photos of the Smeterling products.  I left the desserts in his fridge.

 

 

Posted in Argentina | 2 Comments

Things My Mother Would Like

I just turned 50 on May 10th.   And what with the arthritis, the back pain, and the hemorrhoids I’m starting to think I’m old. But I’m not.  Not yet.  My mother will be turning 83 in August. I think of her often during this trip.  When she was younger she had quite an adventurous spirit, and she pulled my dad, brothers, and me along in multiple family adventures. Every summer we took car trip to go camping in Oregon, or the Rockies, or even the upper peninsula of Michigan. She wanted to experience the world. I’m sure this is what made me who I am. But my mom’s travels were mostly limited to the US. We went to Canada a couple of times and visited Mexico just over the border of Arizona in Nogales.  She and my dad once went to Vienna to visit my brother. That was the only time she used a passport. Now she’s old and sometimes has a hard time adventuring to the dining room for dinner. Her body is bent and shrunken with osteoporosis, her memory slips now and again. She’s been married to the same man for over 60 years. Dad’s become ill during the year I’ve been away. He’s living in the nursing home of their retirement complex right now with Parkinson’s and kidney failure. My older brother is in Oakland, watching over them. Even though it hasn’t been a good year for them, no one ever complained about my absence. In fact, my mom seems to be proud of my adventure. Here are some of the things she would have loved to have done herself:

  1. Swimming with the fishes: While snorkeling through the clear tropical waters of Indonesia I had so much to show my mother. She has seen the sea urchins, the sea stars and the sea anemones in the tide pools along the Oregon coast. But she’s never seen a bright blue starfish, only red, orange or yellow of the Pacific. The angel fish and parrot fish nibbling on the coral would delight her, as would the the coral itself waving in the currents on the sandy bottom.  She would stare as I did at the bed of sea anemone tentacles housing the little fish who darted in and out. I wanted to show her the huge Moray eel that hides in the rock, occasionally sticking its head out to look for prey.  I thought of my mom as I examined the algae growing on the back and legs of a sea turtle as I swam a foot away under the water. She would have liked that.  But unfortunately, she never learned to swim. One of her biggest gifts was me was summers full of swimming lessons.
  2. Praying with the orphans: My mother was raised a Methodist.  She raised us without any religion. Yet she instilled in us a serious respect for people’s beliefs.   At the ashram in Haridwar we spent many evenings in aarti singing to Vishnu. The kids of the orphanage ran the ritual. A boy at the altar would fling the holy water overhead to sprinkle it on each of us. He would carry the lamp around the room for everyone to pull the essense of the fire over their heads. One evening we went to the large aarti in Haridwar along the Ganges with thousands of Indians. Instead of one lamp burning there were scores. As the sun set the light of the lamps was reflected in the holy water of the river.  Hundreds of Indians joined the service.  It was a small celebration that night. In Nepal we spun prayer wheels and in Cambodia we watched as the teenage monks collected alms every morning. We’ve been woken by morning calls to prayer in almost every country we’ve visited. In Lamu, we were part of the daily lives of observant Muslims. They told us about their beliefs while we shared their food around the table. There we learned to eat every grain of rice on our plates, as the one not eaten might be the one that would have prayed for you. My mother would have told us that story at the dinner table every time we ate rice had she known it.
  3. Eating delicious, exotic foods: My mother loves food. When I was a kid she cooked food from all over the world, even if it involved some 1970’s interpretation.  She made Chung King stirfry out of a can and Indian curries made with McCormick’s curry powder. No one else I knew in Iowa made corn tortillas by hand, using a tortilla press she had bought in Oregon. This was always my favorite meal just as now it’s Cat’s (although I buy the tortillas fresh from the tortillaria rather than make them myself). This year we’ve savored  parmigiano-reggiano in a little town between Parma and Reggio.  We’ve eaten spicy lentil soup accompanied by the crispy cheese and herb filled pancakes called gözleme in Turkey. With our fingers we ate goat stew with chapatis in Kenya. In India we stuffed ourselves during celebrations eating spicy chickpeas, homemade paneer and aloo tikki.  Over Christmas we stayed in luxury hotels but ate dahl and naan in road side stands.  In SE Asia we started eating raw vegetables again wrapping our spring rolls in lettuce and herbs. The kids learned to make nasi goreng and chicken satay with peanut sauce in Indonesia. In fact, my mother probably would have been even more brave than us in this adventure. We didn’t sample the durian until our last day in Asia.  We couldn’t even finish one piece.  My mother would have sampled it when she first smelled it and would have loved the creamy texture and the strawberry after taste.  She would have also sampled the fried crickets. I just don’t know if she would have chosen the ones with onions or with chilis.
  4. Hiking the trails of the world:  My mother was never an athelete. But we went on many, many hikes during my childhood. Every year we celebrated Easter on a hike looking for wildflowers. It was a tradition started in Oregon, but my mom continued it in Iowa even if that meant looking for wildflowers in the snow.  She would have loved our hike in the Alps on a trail that defined the border of Austria and Italy. We watched as the clouds climbed up the Italian side to engulf us as we ran down the Austrian side in the rain.   She would have enjoyed the view of the Mediterranean from the Via di Amore in Cinque Terre as well as the Italian food at the end of the hike.  The Himalayas were more majestic than anything I’d seen. The mountains shot straight up from the narrow and deep ravines. The rivers of milky glacier water were green and fast.  And the trail was difficult.  As it was at Machu Picchu where the jagged mountains were covered in jungle instead of pines. I could just hear my mother saying it was time to look for four leaf clovers. This was her way of saying it was time to take a break. She almost always found one where ever we stopped. She’d have probably found one in Nepal.
  5. Watching elephants eat dirt: In Kenya we watched as a huge bull elephant only 10 meters from us, scraped mud up with his tusks, picked up the clods of dirt with his trunk, and shoved the mud into his mouth. He was looking for salt. A herd of females and youths joined him briefly in a quiet truce while they, too, ate salty mud in the rain. This is the kind of thing my parents would have spent hours observing. They were both scientists. My mother was trained as a chemist. My dad was a zoologist. They loved the natural world. They always knew the names of the flowers, the trees, and the birds we saw on our hikes. My mom would have spent hours with binoculars in Kenya watching the hornbills, the flamingos, and the storks. It was amazing watching these exotic creatures in their own environment and so close.  On our safari we bought a guidebook and checked off all the animals as we saw them.  I look forward to sitting down with my parents and showing them pictures in the book that we checked off.
  6. Having picnics: In the Alps we purchased a plastic knife/fork/spoon set at a camping store. We have used that set hard, slicing cheese in the mountains of Austria, spooning biryani on the trains of India, and spreading peanut butter on crackers at Angkor Wat. We’ve spread our meals out over lawns and ruins, rocks, and riverbanks. There is something about eating outside that makes my mom very happy. She would often fry up chicken in the evening to pack for a lunch in the park the next day. A picnic meant not just good food but a new environment in which to eat it. She would have been just as happy as my daughter was while watching the ants work with the crumbs from our picnic at the ruins of the Khmer Empire.
  7. Learning arts and crafts: In Ubud, Bali, I found a library that was much like a co-op. For me that was the perfect vibe. Many of the art and music classes we’d found elsewhere have involved high prices and someone trying to sell their wares. This place was more low key. Artists offered classes for a minimal fee. No sales. Just teaching. We took a class in silversmithing and one in batik.   At the ashram the kids took tablas lessons with the orphans.  My kids got to practice woodcarving both in Bali and Lamu. On a break from our bamboo train ride a small Cambodian girl taught Catherine to make a grasshopper by folding a palm leaf in on itself.   My mother loved to work with her hands. We used to make candles for fun: ice candles, sand candles, and drip candles. All of my sweaters were unique, one of a kind, because she knit them all. She sewed all my clothes until I was a teen. She would have loved to create a pendant from a sheet of silver or to fold palm leaves into animals.
  8. Making new friends: This is my mother’s strongest skills. She can make anyone open up and tell her about their lives. Some of her favorite people were those with whom we rode the city bus every morning.  She learned, for example, all about China from a fellow bus rider who had emigrated to Iowa. This year, we have met so many strangers and made so many friends. Bill is the best at befriending them.  He simply asks them questions. He became a dear friend with our driver while we were touring for a week through Rajasthan, India. While the rest of us ate dinner at the restaurants in the hotels, Bill ate dinner in the parking lot with the drivers. With delicious matar paneer and plenty of whiskey Bill made friends of them all. My mother might not have drunk the whiskey, but she would have become a good friend talking about life while eating the paneer.  The new friends we have from this year are the best and most precious of all our souvenirs.

The inspiration to do this incredible adventure could only have come from my mother. Her sense of adventure and her need for new experiences have had an incredibly strong influence on me. Thanks, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. I love you.

Posted in Thoughts on Travel | 9 Comments

Little India

The guidebooks recommend two areas of Singapore for cheaper lodging: Chinatown and Little India.  Since we like Indian food so much I booked a room in Little India.  Our friend who is also spending the year traveling with her family questioned our decision.  After all, she reminded me, Chinese food provides fresher vegetables and more variety.  I remembered our longing for a vegetable we could recognize while we were in India.  Everything there had been cooked to mush to kill all the nasty germs.  It was true we got tired of the food there.  But we would only be in Singapore for five days, and we wouldn’t be eating in Little India the entire time.  We’d be out exploring other areas like Chinatown or the Marina.   In the end we ate plenty of Chinese food even within Little India.  We ate sushi and falafel. We even ate at a McDonald’s.  (It was the only place around the science museum, and we wanted to hurry back to the exhibits.  They were cool.)

We knew Indian food would make us happier than Chinese.  To be honest it was a bit of a challenge eating in SE Asia.  I had a stomach ache of one sort or another in each of the countries we visited.  I could only assume it was from the food.  Some days I barely ate.  Also, Catherine is a hard core vegetarian.  There are very few dishes without fish sauce, or meat broth, or shrimp paste. Cat never dipped her spring rolls in the sauce provided in Thailand and Vietnam because of fear of fish sauce.  She stopped eating the peanut sauce in Indonesia when a cooking class revealed it was made with shrimp paste.  She never had soup for breakfast in Vietnam because even if there were no chunks of pork the broth was made with pork.  India, on the other hand, was easy for her.  The default menu was vegetarian.   Foods were always labeled non-veg if there was meat or eggs in them.  There was always choices for her on the menu.  Even most street vendors sold exclusively vegetarian food.  Little India would be an easy place for her to eat where she wouldn’t be looking for the hidden meat inside a dish.

Before we got there we wondered how Singapore could house an India.  The cultures are so different.  India is defined by chaos.  Singapore is defined by order.  A taxi driver in Singapore told us no one likes to drive into Little India because the people are often wandering in the streets.  We laughed remembering the ox carts, bicycles, and pedestrians wandering the streets.  Even more difficult to negotiate were the cows just lying down in the middle of the streets of India.  In contrast Little India was so orderly and clean.  There wasn’t the layer of dirt covering everything, we didn’t fear that the dogs had rabies, and the litter was in the bins, not on the street.  It still had the same smells of India, the incense, the cumin, the coriander, but not the smell of the sewer or of burning trash.  It was kind of like a Disneyland version of India.

When we smelled those spices we were ready to eat.  Our palates for Indian food had been refined in Berkeley at a chaat house called Vik’s.  Here they serve up dosas, uttapam, and puris with wonderful chutneys and sauces.  Sometimes it was hard to find food as good as Vik’s even in India.  The oils used would be rancid, or the spices old or just not well balanced. Some of the sauces were scary as they were made in with the local water.  We were often disappointed.   Except at a small restaurant in Kochi, Kerala, Ananda Bhavan, where for a mere four dollars we had stuffed ourselves on huge plates of those very dosas, uttapam, and puris we loved.  This was the food we were looking for.

It wasn’t at the first restaurant we tried.  It looked like a classic chain restaurant.  The samosas were fine, but the pani puri was thick and tough, not light and crispy as we’d had in Berkeley or India.  The tamarind chutney was too sweet, and the yogurt was like a thick blanket.  It masked the flavor of the potato curry inside.  It was a big disappointment.   It was not food as good as that small restaurant in Kerala.  It was not food like Vik’s.  We had to keep looking.

We found it, though.  The restaurant, Komalas Vilas, was packed.  We waited for a place at a scratched stained vinyl table.  Once seated we each ordered a masala dosa, a thin, crispy pancake made from lentil and rice flours and filled with curried potatoes.   They were served in the traditional manner on a thali with sambar, a thin lentil soup, in the middle section, and two coconut chutneys, one mild, one spicy on either side of the sambar.  With our fingers (we tried to use just our right hands) we pulled off a chunk of the dosa and dipped it into the sambar and/or the chutney.  The spices were a perfect blend, and the crunch of the pancake melted into the softness of the potatoes.  We had found the dosas, as good if not better even than any we had eaten in Berkeley or in India.  They were accompanied by sweet, sweet chai and the most fruity mango lassis we’d ever had.  Granted the meal was about $20 instead of $4.  This was Singapore, not Kerala.

The next several mornings we returned to the same restaurant.  We added vadai to our breakfast, spicy lentil flour donuts, crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, broken into pieces with our right hands and again dipped in the sambar and coconut chutney.  I ordered pongal one morning, rice and dal porridge with spices and cashews, again dipped with our fingers in sambar and coconut chutney.  The rice and dal combination was reminiscent of masa, transporting us to Mexico.  I tried a dosa made with semolina flour instead of lentil, a rawa dosa.  It was more spiced than the regular dosa, still crispy, but the next morning I needed to go back to the original lentil and rice dosa.  Cat experimented and ordered a puri plate, puffed, fried rounds of dough that were served with a chickpea masala and potato curry.  We all tore off pieces of her puris, with our right hands, to dip into the yummy, spicy chenna masala.  It was a hit and became a regular at the rest of our breakfasts in Singapore.

The last morning was Bill’s birthday.  We had to celebrate in a place we knew he would enjoy.   We went back to Komala Vilas.  This time we ordered two plates of puris and two of masala onion dosas and shared around the table.  Chai and mango lassis accompanied the food.  It was a delicious breakfast.  But it was a bit bittersweet because we were leaving Singapore.  That meant leaving the last of the really delicious Indian food we’ll eat during our trip.   Hopefully, at home when we visit Vik’s again, it will be as we remember it.  We’ll stuff our bellies with dosas, puris, and chai and think back not just to India but to Little India, Singapore.

Posted in Singapore | 1 Comment

Wet

Munduk is a relatively untouristed village on the island of Bali.  Compared to Kuta, the surf/party capitol of Bali, or Ubud, the culture/arts capitol of the island, Munduk really has little to offer the tourist.  It’s perched on the side of the second highest volcano on Bali.  The bigger volcano, Mt Agung, sees more visitors just because it’s there.  Mt Agung offers adventure in the form of an early morning climb up to 3031 meters to watch the sunrise over the horizon while looking down into a volcano’s crater.  On the other hand, Mt Batur where Munduk lies is only 1717 meters.  And Munduk is on the north side of the volcano, further from the tourist areas of Kuta and Ubud.  So no one should really be visiting the town.  Except that it’s been written up in the Lonely Planet guidebook.  And that’s how we got there.

Bill was a little hesitant about the mountains.  He had been watching them from Kuta.  They were often covered by clouds.  Clouds that looked thick with rain.  But the guidebook offered waterfalls and temples and gracious people.  A traveler writing on the a travel forum described a small homestay, Taman Ayu, as a wonderful, comfortable inn.  I called the innkeeper to ask about the rooms.  He said, yes they were available and they were 150 a piece.  Somehow I took this to be $150.  When he heard me so aghast he changed it 120.  It took quite a discussion to finally realize he was talking about 120,000 rupiah.  Without knowing it, I had talked him down from $16.50 to $13.  I told him we would come up and stay with him.

We should have known what the next several days would be like when we smelled the kids’ room.  The unmistakable odor of mildew permeated the beds and the walls telling us that things are damp in this part of Bali.  Cat said, “It’ll be like camping.  It won’t be so bad.”  Our room smelled okay at this point.  So instead of moving on to different lodging, we thought of ways to mask the odor.  We bought some incense at a small store down the street.

Down is the operative word in Munduk.  The little highway that cuts through the town is built on a ridge.  Almost everything goes down from there.  To reach our inn, we had to pick our way down a steep, slippery, moss covered driveway.  It’s Bali, after all, and if there’s a wet surface something slippery will grow on it.  When we went exploring we took a side street no wider than a meter.  Much like in San Francisco the street included stairs for those who were walking.  The pavement, however, quickly disappeared and turned into a wet mud path with stairs cut into the dirt.  A fluffy, white puppy was in a yard below us, so we had to walk down.  The dog was calling Cat’s name.  It was a nice scene.  The puppy was soft, the hillside was green, and the sun peaked out around the edges of the ridges.  We were warm that afternoon.  We liked Munduk.

The next day, with the sun shining, we decided to go see Munduk’s waterfalls.  The jungle around Munduk was gorgeous.  We recognized many of the plants as ones we keep as houseplants back home.  Only here they were growing to gargantuan sizes.  Leaves larger than toddlers lined the path.  Ferns towered over our heads.  And there were exotic plants: cocoa trees, guava trees, banana trees and coffee bushes. And the jungle was dense with vegetation.  No surface was left bare.  Even the path had a blanket of green except for the most heavily trafficked parts.

The path was mostly flat in the beginning, then descended down toward the river.  We started to hear the roar of the waterfall as we approached.  About this time the white, fluffy clouds that had previously floated by started to collect into bigger, darker clouds.  I was grateful for the break from the sun.  We crossed over the river and walked upstream to where the waterfall poured over the edge 10 meters above us.  The sky was completely cloud covered now, but there was no rain.  We were getting wet from the huge spray from the waterfall.   We couldn’t even get to the edge of the pool below the falls without soaking our clothes. Even Cat, my lover of all things watery, gave up on the approach to the pool through the spray.

The climb out from the pool was just that, a climb.  We climbed up a staircase.  It seemed that each step was half a meter high.  Bill paused to catch his breath.  Cat paused to ease the pain in her thighs.  Hank paused to eat a snack.  While we were resting it started to sprinkle.  It was a lovely way to cool down.  Soon we continued our hike up as the sprinkling got a little thicker.  Not full on rain, but we were getting damp.  We found a cafe at the junction with the path back toward Munduk.  We decided to take a break and wait out the rain.

The cafe was small and when we got there, manned only by two small children.  One of the kids quickly ran to get his mother.  On the way to our table we passed a basket filled with scat made of coffee beans: kopi luwak.  Kopi luwak is a coffee made with the beans that have passed through an Asian palm civet’s digestive tract.  Coffee beans pressed together into turds.  We turned to the left and found a weasel like creature living in a cage, the coffee processing factory for the family’s cafe.  Of course, we had to order a cup of kopi luwak as well as a cup of kopi balinese.  Both were tasty and hot.  Actually the most delicious dish at the cafe was the hot chocolate.  It was the perfect food as a chill started to set in from the damp.  The kids sipped that as the rain died down.

With the rain stopping it was time to start back down toward Munduk.  But before we left I had to visit the loo.  I have never seen such a beautiful water closet.  If only I had taken a photo.  The bathroom was placed up against a hill, the back wall dug into the dark brown dirt.  The walls were made of bamboo stalks lashed together, the door as well.  Only the top of the back wall was lined with bamboo, however.  The bottom half revealed the mud of the hill behind it.  On this dirt wall tiny plants were growing: ferns, broad leafed volunteers, and moss.  Because in Bali if there’s dirt, it’s always wet and something will grow on it.  So imagine the light brown-grey color of the bamboo walls, the dark brown color of the mud wall, and the bright green of the tiny plants pushing themselves out of the mud wall. Now place a turquoise colored porcelain squat toilet into that mix of colors.  The blue of the toilet popped through the colors of the closet in the special light of an overcast sky.  I made Cat visit the toilet just to admire the colors

But there was no time to linger in the toilet.  It was beginning to drizzle again.  As we walked the drizzle turned to rain.  Bill picked a banana leaf for an umbrella.  Cat picked a particularly large heart shaped leaf for hers.  She enhanced it with a thin bamboo stalk pushing the stick into the stem of the leaf to make a sturdy handle.  The umbrellas helped, but the rain kept coming.  We had always understood tropical storms to last 20-30 minutes.  So with that as our hope we kept hiking down the trail.

But the rain didn’t stop.  It kept coming and coming.  A drenching rain.  A cold, heavy, unrelenting rain.  Bill gave up his leaf umbrella when he found a rectangle of corrugated steel to hold over his head.  The sound of the rain on the steel added a rhythm section to our walk.  I still held out hope the rain would stop as we  found sanctuary under the eaves of a hotel.  Someone looked out at us from a second story window then pulled the drapes.  It was a scene right out of a Hitchcock movie.  We waited there for five minutes, then 10, then 15.  When will it stop? we wondered.   The downpour continued.  Finally, guests came to occupy the room who’s eaves we were using for shelter.  The staff told us Munduk was “that way”.  We followed their directions only to end up at the road.  There was no way we were going to walk down the road.  It was narrow and winding.  With so much rain, no driver would have seen a pedestrian on the roadway.  So we stood under a shelter in the parking lot.  Still wet.  Still cold wondering what the next step should be.  After some 15 minutes a nicely dressed Indonesian guy offered four really wet Americans a ride in his fancy new car.  It took us less than two minutes to reach Munduk in the car.

Back in our rooms we hung our clothes up to dry.  We went up to the cafe to drink ginger tea and watch as the storm continued.  The clothes couldn’t dry that afternoon.  The next morning they were still wet.  But the sun was shining.  We left our clothes to dry in the sunshine as we started a new hike.  We started out earlier on this day.  Only when we were headed home did the clouds take over the sky.  We were already back when the rain started.  We warmed up in the  the traditional kitchen with woks placed over an open fire.  The kids cooked lunch learning to make chicken satay, nasi goreng (fried rice) and pisang goreng (friend bananas).  The kitchen’s corrugated fiberglass roof offered protection in the beginning of the storm, but after an hour of drenching rain it could no longer withstand the deluge.  It started to leak.  After lunch we escaped to our rooms to try to dry out.

Despite the sunshine of the morning our clothes did not dry that day.  In fact the spray from the rain dampened them further.  They didn’t dry over the cloudless night either.  In the morning when we were packing to leave, the wet clothes went into their own plastic bag.  Even clothes that were never worn but were out of the backpacks were damp.  They, too, went into the bag.  When we got to our hotel off the mountain, all the clothes in that bag went to the laundress.  We weren’t going to attempt to wash these clothes by hand.  They needed a professional.  The clothes came back from the laundry dry.  But mildewed.  Every single piece was stinky.  After all our clothes had been wet for days.  There hadn’t been a chance for them to dry, and as it’s Bali, something ended up growing on them.  Not pretty ferns, not green, green moss, not small versions of houseplants, but mildew.  We threw away the really stinky ones.

Posted in Indonesia | 2 Comments

Trapped in Tourist Hell

Cat really wanted to learn to surf.  She wanted to get on a board and ride through the tube of a giant wave.  While we were in Cambodia she surfed the web.  She worked hard researching where we could find the best surf spots for learning.  She kept coming up with Bali and in particular the town of Kuta.  Kuta was said to have consistent waves and, more importantly, sandy beaches.  Falling off the surfboard onto a rocky reef really wasn’t an option for my beginning surfer.  Thus she wanted to be in Kuta for her birthday.  So on a Wednesday evening we bought tickets flying out of Ho Chi Minh City arriving in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia in the evening on Thursday.

I had made reservations at a large, overpriced hotel just south of Kuta for only three days.  Just enough time to learn the basics of surfing.  We planned that right after we had taken our surfing lessons we would quickly head out of Kuta to a less touristed, more pristine area of Bali.  Little did we know that Friday, our first full day on Bali, was the holiday Nyepi.  I know of no similar holiday anywhere else.  Nyepi is the Balinese day of silence.  And I mean silence.  No is allowed on the streets except the “Nyepi police” who ride around on bicycles patrolling for rogue celebrants.  The streets are shut down.  The electricity plants are shut down.  There are no lights in town at night.  The ports are shut down, including the airport.  There are no flights in or out of Bali on Nyepi.  We found out when we checked into our hotel on Thursday that we would not be allowed out of the hotel on Friday.  There was already black plastic on the window to keep any of our light from seeping out onto the street.  We were told that a large, plastic sheet would be covering the entrance to the hotel in the morning.  We wouldn’t be able to leave.  One full day trapped in the hotel.  In Kuta.

Having been told about Nyepi and the Day of Silence coming up, we rushed out to get a flavor of Bali before being locked in.  We wanted to watch the parade of Ogoh-Ogoh.  Several larger than life effigies of the monster were carried down the main street of town in an effort to drive out the evil before the holy day of Nyepi.  It was akin to Halloween before All Saints’ Day or  Mardi Gras before Lent.  We tried to see as much as we could in the little time we had before Nyepi began.  In addition to the parade and Ogoh-Ogoh we walked to the beach just to see hear the waves in the moonless night.  After all we in Kuta to be near the beach and the waves. We wanted a taste of the sea before being trapped in the hotel for a day.

But at least the hotel had a generator.  They did try to keep us busy with a Bahasa language class.  We were the only ones to attend.  We had a great time with the staff trying to learn the language of Indonesia, drilling them on the phrase we’ve needed everywhere, “My daughter eats no meat, chicken, fish, or fish sauce.  She eats tofu, vegetables, rice and fruit.”  The swimming pool was open, and the hotel provided a yoga class in the late afternoon.  At sunset we went up to the roof to look over a completely dark island and up at a beautiful night sky with the Milky Way and the Southern Cross.  All was well in Bali.  It had been a pleasant way to spend our forced confinement.  We knew it was only for one day.

The next day, however, it rained.  The skies opened up and wouldn’t let up.  It poured all day.  Just stepping outside, we got soaked.  We were once again forced inside.  We made it a school day instead of a surf day.  Besides we hadn’t had a chance to call to arrange any surf lessons.  There were no phone calls on Nyepi, the day of silence.

Finally on our third day in Kuta, we got out to see the town.  Kuta is not pretty.  The streets are congested.  The shops and restaurants are overpriced.  The touts are aggressive, and the beach is covered in trash.  The town has a bad reputation as an overrun, tourist haven designed mostly for Australians to party and drink.  After all, Australia is so close.  Most Americans just head south to Mexico to be the ugly tourist.  Al Qaeda bombed a nightclub here in 2002.  The bombings were so devastating because so many people pack into the center of town to dance, drink and party.  Although the site of that nightclub is currently a memorial, there are still plenty of clubs crowding the streets with plenty of drunk tourist crowding the clubs.  It’s just plain gross.

But we were there to learn to surf, so all four of us headed out into that not-quite pristine water.  We got blisters and rashes from the gigantic surf boards they put us on, but we all were able to stand up and ride the waves.  We had fun.  Except for  Bill.  He developed back pain.  Pain that radiated into his butt and down his leg.  Yep, you guessed it.  He slipped a disc while surfing.

So now Cat had done her surfing and our three-day reservation at the hotel was up.  But Bill was unable to travel.  And Cat’s birthday was only three days away.  Plus she wanted to go to the waterpark in Kuta for her birthday.  “Waterbom” as it’s called was closed for maintenance when we got to Kuta, but a sign promised that it would be reopened by her birthday.  So we extended our reservations for three more days.  The kids and I spent that first day taking more surf lessons.  The day after that the kids took another lesson.  They were improving, riding smaller boards and going out past the breakers.  It was a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day was Cat’s birthday.  She was anticipating a glorious, fun-filled day at the waterpark.  Waterbom was also something she had researched before we came to Bali.  She was so excited to try out all the various slides and pools and boats in the park.  But the night before her birthday, Bill saw a new sign in front. The park was not going to open until the 29th, two days after Cat’s all important day.  Disappointed, Cat accepted the offer of more surf lessons.

Hank joined Cat early on her birthday morning riding the waves.  They had a good time.  When they came back out of the water, Hank was exhausted.  Cat, however, was so pumped she wanted to go out again that afternoon.  I convinced Hank to join her.  It would be a birthday gift.  On his last ride, coming in from the day, he lost control of the board.  It hit him in the head and created a one inch gash on his forehead right below the hairline.   The surf school drove us to the hospital for stitches.

It was not pretty.  The birthday girl was tired, hungry and sorely disappointed that her birthday was ending in an ER instead of at the restaurant of her choice.  All because of her brother.  Who was getting all the attention.  In the waiting room Cat cried.  A lot.  Bill went to the hospital cafeteria to find something to raise her blood sugar.  The choices were slim, but the snack helped, at least for a little while.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was also a problem for Hank and me in the procedure room.  I found it incredibly hard to watch my son get stitched up in a foreign country.  I watched as they shaved the hair around the top of the wound.  I didn’t say anything.  I watched as the doctor dabbed hydrogen peroxyde and iodine on the wound to clean it.  I so wanted to take over at this point.  I just wanted to get a syringe and squirt that laceration with gallons of saline.  After all, he had been swimming in the trash filled waters of Kuta.  I said nothing.  Then I watched as she slammed the lidocaine into the wound.  Hank winced in pain.  It was almost comical how she put all the lidocaine into one side of the wound.  I laughed inside as she tested the anesthesia by pinching the other side.  Of course it hurt.  But like a good doctor, she questioned Hank when he said it was a sharp pain.  I asked Hank if he wanted more lidocaine, but he chose to suffer the sensation of the stitch rather than more  burning with the lidocaine.  With all the pain Hank endured my hand was becoming numb.  He was squeezing so hard.

But the doctor had yet to start the stitching.  When the needle did go in, it started on the side without any anesthesia.  Hank squeezed my hand again.  She started to tie the knot when I noticed how thick the suture was.  I asked.  It was a 3-0.  I asked for something smaller.  She said that it was in the scalp, not the face.  It did not need anything smaller.  I said the laceration was mostly below the hairline.  After a bit of back and forth she finally agreed to take out that stitch.  Redo it with a smaller suture.  With poor anesthesia.  Hank suffered through.  In the end Hank only needed four stitches (plus that extra one I had her take out) to hold his laceration together.  He looked almost comical with the dressing wrapped around his head like the fifer in that famous painting from the Revolutionary War.

We went back to the hotel to eat dinner at our restaurant.  The sweet, sweet staff brought out a cake decorated for Cat’s birthday while singing the birthday song.  She brightened a bit at this point.

The next day, Hank was a bit shaken by the head bonk and the stitches, Bill’s back still hurt, and my eyes were red and apparently infected.  What could we do but stay one more day in Kuta.  We ended up being there for seven nights total.  The hotel was almost twice our budget, the stay ate up a quarter of the time on our visa, and the town was not a place we would normally choose.  But my daughter had researched the place.  She researched where to learn to surf, and it turned out well.  She learned to surf.  In fact, she fell in love with surfing.  And except for the evening of her birthday, she was happy.  Very happy.

 

Posted in Indonesia | 2 Comments

Lessons from Vietnam

We spent two weeks in Vietnam. Hank and I spent the first week on a medical mission in the Mekong delta. We met up with Bill and Cat in Ho Chi Minh City for the second week. It wasn’t a lot of time in one country, but there was a lot to learn.

1. Countries work hard at molding their youth:  Phuong was my interpreter for most of the time is was doing medical mission work in Vietnam.  She left Vietnam when she was 13.  Now she has graduated from nursing school in California, and she joined us on our medical mission.  One afternoon we were sitting together in one of the schools where we had set up our clinic.  She pointed at Ho Chi Minh’s portrait above the chalkboard.  She described the confusion she felt when she moved to the States.  In Vietnam she had been taught to revere Ho Chi Minh.  She had called him Uncle Ho as a child.  When she moved to the States, all the Vietnamese she met reviled the man.  She described to me how confused she was.  How could Uncle Ho be evil?  At the same time when I looked at Ho Chi Minh’s portrait it still felt that he was the enemy. I don’t know why.  I grew up in a college town. The people who came to my home were college professors and graduate students. Everyone hated Nixon. No one supported the war. Everyone thought that the Vietnamese should have the right to self determination. Ho Chi Minh was even lauded by some as a leader who had the simple goal of freedom for his people. Yet on this trip when I saw a picture of Ho Chi Minh on a poster, or a hammer and sickle in a display, or a yellow star on a policeman’s hat, it just felt wrong. It felt creepy even.  Like I was sleeping with the enemy. The government of the 60’s and 70’s must have worked pretty hard to indoctrinate me.  It seems that it worked.

2.  The American presence during the war was brutal: I already knew that intellectually. I grew up with the gruesome war photos of the 60’s and 70’s. It was in a era before the government censored the pictures of war. But in the War Remnants Museum the pictures were displayed ad nauseum. There was no break from the horror. The first room was an homage to the war photographers who had died as collateral to the battles. Not just those covering the South Vietnamese and Americans but also those embedded with the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. The photos show horror after horror of American brutality, from the burning of villages to the My Lai massacre to the effects of Agent Orange generations after the war. It was overwhelming. I finally had to stop looking at every single picture.  I was exhausted by the horror.

4.  The war was a tragedy for the American soldiers:   Of course, I knew this one, too, but  I felt it when we went to visit the Cu Chi tunnels.  The tunnels have been incorporated into a park used to educate Vietnamese about the war. The Viet Cong built over 200 km of tunnels near Saigon as a conduit for supplies and protection from the war. The park is set up to show how the Viet Cong battled to obtain their freedom from the American aggressors.  We began our visit by watching a movie.  When the narrator talked about the rebels who won medals of commendation as “American Killers” my stomach turned.   As we walked down the paths through the jungle we passed a line of booby traps. I could sense the fear a soldier would feel in the jungle watching for a Viet Cong ambush. We came to an American tank that had been destroyed by a bomb.  Looking at the shell of the tank I felt the ghosts of the young, American soldiers in the jungle around me. Ghosts of men, no boys, not much older than Hank. It was such an incredibly sad feeling.

5.  It’s hard to enjoy a country when you’re afraid of a scam:  Everyone talks about the likelihood of being scammed in Vietnam.  Even the Vietnamese-Americans say they get charged higher prices than the Vietnamese, just not as high as non-Vietnamese speaking tourists.  We had to bargain for bus, bicycle rickshaw and motobike rides.  We had to give up our money for laundry, toys, and a pair of scissors.  I wanted to relax knowing that this was going to be part of the cost of traveling without speaking the language.  Instead I was always on guard even losing it at one point (totally inappropriately, of course).

6.  The food is so much better if you speak the language: Hank and I followed some friends to a market one evening. We had incredible sandwiches of grilled, spiced pork and Vietnamese pickles. On another evening our colleagues took us out for a banquet that included banh xeo, a crepe made with eggs and rice flour filled with pork and shrimp. Pieces are pulled off and wrapped in various leaves and herbs then dipped in sweet and sour fish sauce. It was so delicious we ordered extra banh xeo. In Ho Chi Minh City friends walked us miles to a restaurant we never would have found by ourselves. Even if we had found it on our own we would not have been able to read the menu. With friends guiding us we stuffed ourselves silly with sandwiches and fresh fruit juices and stirfries and jellied desserts.

7.  A family that plays together stays together, especially if joined by strangers: Everyone in Ho Chi Minh City plays foot shuttlecock. For 50 cents we bought a birdie and started to play. We were bad. Most of the time our feet did not make contact with the birdie. That didn’t stop Vietnamese from joining our game. In fact, they seemed to enjoy our failures. We sweated, we laughed, we made friends.

8.  My son is becoming a really cool person: I was invited to participate in the medical mission some time in February. Bill did not want to do it. Neither did Cat. It was expensive. I really couldn’t imagine a way to make it work. Except Hank wanted to go. So he and I went to the Mekong delta while Cat and Bill went to a tropical island. I got to spend a week alone with my son, and I was surprised at just how much he’s grown this year. He woke early each morning pushing to ensure we were on time. He worked hard, sweating in the heat. I heard from almost every volunteer about how hard he worked and what a good attitude he had and just how funny he was. He made many friends among the young volunteers and even attracted the attention of some 14 year old locals. The best part, though: he said he wants to be a doctor. Now that is cool.

9.   The cheapest haircuts might just be the best: We spent $2 each for Hank and Bill, $2.50 for Cat.  Bill got the best treatment.  No, I don’t yet need a haircut.

9. Spiders can dance.

10.  Buddah likes Choco-Pies and cigarettes.

Posted in Vietnam | 3 Comments

Three-Quarters Done

Our family has now been through:

  • 9 months of travel
  • 19 airplane rides
  • 13 countries visited
  • 21 SIM cards
  • 5 long distance train rides
  • 32 boat trips (including one paddleboat)
  • 1 hot air balloon ride
  • 1 paraglide trip
  • 2 donkey rides
  • 4 bicycle rickshaw rides
  • numerous vikram rides
  • numerous tuktuk rides
  • lots and lots of car rides
  • too many to count near-miss car crashes
  • 3 doctor visits
  • 6 rounds of Cipro
  • 1 slipped disc
  • 4 stitches
  • Lots of ibuprofen
  • 1 pair prescription glasses
  • 2 pairs sunglasses
  • 9 beaches
  • 1 waterspout
  • 2 safaris
  • 33 lions
  • 0 tigers
  • 20 bullets shot with an AK 47 (not at the animals)
  • 2 Kindles
  • 1 iPhone
  • 2 pairs of scissors (taken at security)
  • two baseball hats
  • 10 pairs of flipflops
  • 1 pair sneakers
  • 6 swimming suits
  • 2 dive certificates
  • 8 angry phone calls to AT&T (still ended up with $600 bill)
  • Every phone store between Nairobi and Ho Chi Minh City
  • 4 Turkish rug sellers
  • 1 Indian rug seller
  • 11 hours with rug sellers
  • 1 sales pitch (they all say the same damn thing)
  • 0 rugs purchased
  • 5 boxes home
  • 1 offer to “make you a man” (Bangkok)
  • how many beers

Three more months to go.  I just wonder if I’ll remember to put the toilet paper in the toilet and not the trash when we get back.

Posted in Thoughts on Travel | 5 Comments

Nine Nice Little Things in Siem Reap: a List

1. The bats in Siem Reap: In the Royal Gardens across from the Royal Residence live a colony of flying foxes.  They’re huge.  When they’re sleeping during the day they look like hanging fruit.  We went one evening to watch them leave their roost to go hunting.  They stretched their wings to their full three to four feet and took off.  They glided from the tree tops in groups of three or four.  Out over us in the moon light.

2. Breakfast with the butterflies: A 30 minute tuktuk ride outside of Siem Reap is the Angkor Butterfly Center.  They keep several species of butterflies native to Cambodia. The guides are incredibly knowledgeable and want to share all they can about butterflies.  Not just about the beautiful, fluttering adult butterfly, but also the caterpillar and the chrysalis.  There were caterpillars who used the mercury in their food to create shiny, silver chrysalides or golden flecked chrysalides.  There were chrysalides that would shake when touched to ward off evil predators.  Cat and I went one cool morning.  We ate croissants and read in swinging wicker chairs while butterflies flitted around us.

3.  Angkor Wat at sunset:  The ticket takers leave at 5:30.  If you time it right you can go into the temple for free while the sun is setting.  At Cat’s suggestion we went took a path that headed west away from the main ruins. The sounds of the jungle around us were deafening.  The cicadas in particular, were loud, but also frogs and birds were sounding off as the evening cooled.  Geckos were barking out their funny little call.  We walked though a small set of ruins as the setting sun was reflected in the water of the moat.  We went out the exit when it was almost too dark to see, the guards setting up at the gate to prevent others from coming in.

4. Visiting a floating village:  I got to do this twice.  Once as tourists we headed out with friends, paying for a boat to take us past a village built on the river.  It was not just homes floating on the water.  There were stores, schools, and, yes, pig pens.  The second time, Hank and I went to work in a clinic in a floating village across the Tonle Sap Lake from Siem Reap.  The hospital sends out a team to the village once every two months.  Kids came, some because of an illness, some just to be seen.  Hank started out weighing and measuring the kids.  By the end he was playing and laughing with the kids.  As our boat headed back we watched as families rested on hammock, gathered fish from their nets, or splashed in the water.

 

5.  Palm sugar candy:  Cambodians’ sugar comes from the sugar palm. Juice is squeezed from the flower of the palm and then boiled down to a thick paste.  Cat and I were given a strip of bamboo to dip into the cooking liquid.  We dipped, licked, and smiled.  After it’s boiled the syrup is poured into round molds made from palm leaves and formed into patties about 2cm across.  When cool the taste is divine.  It is similar to brown sugar but more mild, full of molasses and caramel notes.  The crystals are fine and melt quickly in your mouth.  The palm fruit is also tasty.  It has three distinct little fruits with a jelly like fruit filled with a clear sweet fluid.  The first time you bite into the fruit, the liquid pours out over your hands.  We became friends with the owner of a little stand across from the butterfly center.  We must have visited her three times in our month there.  We ate a lot of palm sugar.

6.  Bamboo sticky rice: There are bamboo sticky rice stalls lining the road between Siem Reap where we lived and Damdek where I worked.  The sticky rice is cooked with coconut milk  in a piece of bamboo leaning over a fire.  The bamboo must be turned frequently to keep the rice from burning.  To eat the rice you must first pull out the coconut husk plug then peel back the bamboo to reveal a rod of rice.  On the outside the rice has a slight crust from the bamboo and the fire.  Inside it’s sticky and sweet with a few black beans mixed in for a bit of a bite.  Yum.

7.  The Puppet Parade:  Every year there is a parade of giant, glowing, articulated puppets through the streets of Siem Reap.  It took place this year while we were living there.  The parade route went right by our apartment.  We went to a fundraiser the week before and met some of the people who organize the event.  They work with children to build these giant works of art.  Their enthusiasm for their project and children is huge, overflowing on the night of the event.

8. Our view of the Siem Reap River:  The balcony from our apartment looked out over the river.  Early in the morning school kids would whiz by on their bikes up and over the bridge.  There was often at least one boat on the river.  Two people in the boat would cast out a net back and forth from one bank to another creating a zigzag pattern up the river.  It was always such a quiet and peaceful way to start the day, drinking tea and watching Siem Reap wake up.

9.  Our swimming pool:  It was on the roof top of a four story building. Our apartment was on the second floor.  Almost every day we made the trek upstairs to jump into the water.  It was about 1.5 meters deep.  I had to stand on the very tips of my toes to keep my face out of the water.  I bought five balls over the course of the month.  By the end of our month in Siem Reap, all of them had gone over the edge.

 

Posted in Cambodia | 2 Comments

Medical Miracle

I’d never seen anything like it.  A two to three month baby came into the ER dying.  He was limp, struggling to breath, gasping for air.  His liver was enlarged, his heart was beating fast, he was pale and mottled.  He was in florid heart failure.  The Cambodian doctors has seen it many times before.  They gave him a shot.  Within one hour, his breathing was easy, his color had returned, his heart rate was normal, and his liver size was almost normal.  The shot was thiamine, vitamin B1.  The child had beri beri.  He almost died.  The cure was simple and incredibly fast.  I have never seen a child go from critically ill, at death’s door, to almost well within an hour.  It was like magic.  The closest thing to a magic wand I’ve ever seen in medicine.

 

Posted in Cambodia | 7 Comments