Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 54 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.  
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​              Bare feet only was the rule in the shrines and pagodas of Burma: so there we were, our second day in Rangoon, skipping across fiery marble floors among the gilded buildings that surrounded the golden Shwedagon Pagoda atop its hill in the center of the city, our toes seeking out any shade they could find.  The stupa, itself, rose like a monster gold-covered Hershey's kiss to a spire topped with lacy filigree and a huge diamond.  A relic from the Buddha supposedly was encased in it.  We'd climbed barefoot up a monumental series of covered stairs, past gigantic gold and white lion-griffin statues, then abruptly emerged, our eyes dazzled by the sun reflecting from the golden surfaces. 
              It was like, Sherrill said, Dorothy opening the door of her gray Kansas house to find herself in a very hot Technicolor Oz.  Some of us, when we adjusted to the glare and heat, joined the line of the faithful buying tiny pieces of gold leaf to have affixed to the stupa's spire.  

​              Just two and a half days before, while we waited with our friend Hala and the others in our little group at the Siem Reap airport for the plane that would bring us from Cambodia to Burma, we had our last chance for more than two weeks to check email or send messages.  In the year 2000, the entire country of Burma was still internet free.  That was one way the generals ruling the country kept control.  All the news filtered through their system.  The three television channels we saw were all patriotic songs, speeches, and exercise classes.
              "I can't decide which channel is the most boring," I told Sherrill.
              "Definitely the speeches," she said.  "At least, we can't understand them."
             We arrived so late that we couldn't see much as we drove into Rangoon—or Yangon, as it was officially called, just as the generals preferred the name Myanmar to Burma.  The country had been closed to the rest of the world for more than thirty years.  "David," the guide who met us at the airport acknowledged this, but added that slowly it was starting to open up—and we were among the first to be welcomed under this new policy.  Soft-spoken and gentle, he wore the traditional Burmese outfit: a short jacket and an ankle-length sarong known as the longhi tied at his narrow waist, with sandals.  Often, he seemed to have a wistful tone when he spoke.  

​              Our first impressions of the country were that it was hot, green, and poor.  We soon realized, though, that the Burmese had been taught to be content with their fate, whatever it was.  Although Burma was still officially socialist under the generals, our little hotel in a restored colonial building was independent, managed by a young German couple.  Two percent of businesses now were private enterprise/joint ventures.  As we explored Rangoon and Burma, we saw that the influence of 124 years under British rule lingered. 
              "The Burmese are not good at living systematically," David explained.  And, of course, the British were great organizers.  Apparently, the Burmese generals ruling the country were pretty good at controlling the population, as well.
              We were there during the 2000 election in the United States.  The weather in Burma that autumn was okay for traveling, but the political climate we'd left behind at home was uncertain.  We had mailed our absentee ballots before leaving, but were kept in suspense about what was happening in the U.S. because of Burma's communication blackout.  

​           Buddhist monks of all ages in their red robes swarmed throughout Rangoon.  We saw, as we visited some of the many temples and pagodas, that religion was an important part of people's lives.  Thousands of temples, large and small, dotted Burma, many of them ancient, some crumbling, some turned into historic sites, but most places of daily worship.  The precepts of Buddha seemed to be integrated into everyday life, creating an atmosphere of unusual serenity—and, it seemed to us, of docility.  We began to wonder if these gentle people were as accepting of their situation as they appeared.  Despite the information blackout, had the outside world begun to influence their thinking?  Gradually, we began to understand that in Burma the interplay of religion, life, and politics was complicated. 
              "The goal of Buddhism is freedom from attachments," David explained.  

           Detachment, the absence of desire, brought peace.  At the same time, the Burmese followed other ancient traditions, as well.  Often, when we asked David to explain various attributes in the temples and pagodas, he simply said, "It's part of our astrology." 

           Also, people worked to collect "merit" so they could enjoy a better next life.  They believed in reincarnation and karma—what you do returns to you.  In one temple, just below a massive Buddha, several women were weaving gold cloth to drape on the statue.  They were earning "merit," but also competing for a prize to be awarded to the woman who wove the most cloth.  

​              We weren't sure, sometimes, what was connected to religious belief and what wasn't.
              "What's the significance of that?" Sherrill asked, indicating the pale tan designs and marks on the faces of many women and children. 
              "Sandalwood paste," David explained.  "For beauty and sun protection."
              And what about the black and red smiles on many people's faces?
            That was from the betel nuts that they liked to chew because it gave them a mild "high."  It also explained the red puddles we saw spattered across the pavement.  
             Down on the waterfront, lean, sinewy men in longhis were bent almost double as they unloaded heavy rice bags from boats and carried them up steep ramps to waiting trucks.  Back and forth they marched, in a machine-like parade.  Behind them, British-era ferry boats crossed the river, sometimes continuing to other delta ports.  Hiking along the narrow streets, dodging pedestrians and carts, past weathered colonial buildings and open markets, we passed unfamiliar vegetables and fruits, hunks of raw meat, and fish of unusual shapes and colors, patient, fatalistic vendors behind the stands.  
              Heading off on my own to look for bookstalls, I took a cab to a different part of town, riding with a middle-aged cabbie who spoke English.  He wanted to talk about the presidential election in the United States.  The generals may have imposed a news blackout in Burma, but the people knew about Al Gore and George Bush and had opinions.  However, when I mentioned the 1990 election held in Burma, when Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San, assassinated founder of the democratic state, won, but wasn't allowed to take office, the cabbie became silent, then started pointing out places of interest that we were passing.  

​            What, I wondered, might be seething under this silence?  On another day, in a distant part of the city, we hiked down a dirt lane that led to a jungle village hidden within Rangoon, where we found a primitive glass factory under the swaying shadows of twisted tree branches and vines.  The rustic path was lined on both sides with heaps of broken glass.  Barefoot craftsmen in longhi were working with red-hot molten glass in a flaming furnace that had been patched together out of old sheets of corrugated metal leaning against each other like a make-shift teepee.  Nearby, we saw bamboo huts half-hidden among the trees—the homes of these glassblowers and workers.  Had these men, who worked so hard with no protections from injury and probably no insurance, voted for "the lady?"  Did they accept their fate with Buddhist-like stoicism? 
             "This country needs more lawyers," Sherrill commented.  "Or, at least, OSHA."
           We both knew, however, the generals weren't likely to start up an Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Burmese, taught to endure what life handed them, weren't likely to demand it. 

​              That afternoon, we boarded a two-propeller plane at the old Rangoon airport terminal to fly to Heho and Inle Lake.  As I started to climb a rolling staircase onto the plane, two short Burmese women with bulging shopping bags crowded in front of me.  The stouter of the two, plants bursting from her bags, charged up the aisle and flopped on one of the seats.  Two minutes later, a well-dressed young Burmese woman with her boarding card claimed the seat.  The stewardess patiently took the peasant woman to a different seat several rows away.
              When we arrived at the Heho airport, a trio of military VIPs seated at the front of the plane began to follow a tall bodyguard in a longhi to the door at the rear when the stout peasant woman blocked their way with her shopping bags and large plaid-covered backside.  With surprising patience, the VIPs gestured to their bodyguard not to worry and waited while the woman pulled herself together.  

​              Burmese cowboys, cattle, horse carts, and local people carrying bundles slowed our drive across the mountains to the small boats that took us to where we'd stay on the lake.  Soon we were smelling unfamiliar flowers, trees, and spices, the distinctive aromas of this ancient land.  Yellow blossoms on tree-like shrubs rippled like curtains along the narrow road.

​              We were in the Shan state, now, an ancient part of Southeast Asia that still craved independence, but the military government was too strong for them to break away.  By the time we started across the lake, the sun was setting.  The pointed prows of our boats lifted out of the dark water, as if directing our eyes to the stars and half moon above our heads.  Wind and spray beat against us for an hour until we reached a group of bamboo buildings that seemed to float over the lake.  Sherrill and I had one of the cabins standing on wood stilts between the water and the sky. 

​            The next morning, we climbed into one of several waiting long boats, joining a small procession that maneuvered along maze-like channels through continents of water weeds, sometimes passing houses on stilts and floating farms, until we reached a village at which people from different tribes sold fruits and vegetables they'd grown and things they'd made, often directly from their boats.  Sherrill and I worked our way among the vendors and shoppers, sometimes on the shore, sometimes on wooden walkways.
            "Buy me that, daddy," Sherrill teased, pointing to a copper-colored betel nut cutter on one of the tables.  She seemed almost surprised, when I did.  

​              Putt-putting along the twisting waterways of the lake, we slithered among giant lily pads with purple and pink blossoms, water buffalo soaking in the shallows with birds balancing like skinny-legged dancers on their backs, and floating gardens in which the Intha people raised vegetables.  White herons stalked through the reeds, then suddenly rose into the sky, and fat ducks bobbed in the wake of our boats.  For a while, we watched bare-legged men, their longhis twisted up and tucked at the waist like oversized diapers, as they constructed one of the floating gardens, laying what looked like sod over a bamboo framework covered with muck.  Occasionally, we passed fishermen rowing with one hand at the top of their single long oar and a leg around the lower part, freeing the other hand to catch fish.  

​              We stopped at a village known for its weaving where the women, busy spinning yarn and working their looms, ignored us.  Most of the silk and cotton fabric they were weaving would be used for longhis.  In the afternoon, we passed boat-loads of children in regulation white and green outfits paddling home from school, pointed bamboo hats protecting their

​              We stopped at a village known for its weaving where the women, busy spinning yarn and working their looms, ignored us.  Most of the silk and cotton fabric they were weaving would be used for longhis.  In the afternoon, we passed boat-loads of children in regulation white and green outfits paddling home from school, pointed bamboo hats protecting their

​              Gradually, David told us, visitors were becoming accepted, but some Burmese were afraid that this would spoil the country, especially the more remote areas.  Early one morning, we took the long boats back across the lake to get a bus to drive to a village just opened to visitors.  Two months before, this would have been dangerous because of violent rivalry between local tribal groups.  More than a dozen ethnic groups have been fighting the military for decades, and still are.

​              When we pushed off in the boats, the morning mist had evaporated, letting the sunlight shimmer across the rippling green water.  We docked at a little port town, where a small bus waited.  The round-faced local guide who greeted us wore the dark clothes traditional in her tribe, an orange towel wrapped in an elaborate headdress over her hair.  We were late, she said, herding us onto the bus.  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we stopped at a teak monastery raised on teak logs above a grassy field, several tiers of red corrugated tin roof bright against the blue sky.  Young red-robed monks stared at us from open windows.  
              On a large stucco gate to a side road we saw a sign in both Burmese and English announcing a combination golf course, resort, and amusement park.
              "Who will go to that?" I asked. 
              "Chinese Shan," the local guide told us, "rich from the opium trade."
             We were in the Golden Triangle that grew opium poppies for the Thais and Chinese.  Ultimately, heroin was made from the opium and shipped to other countries, including the United States, so we weren't too surprised when we saw armed soldiers and warning signs in both Burmese and English. 
              "And they let us get this close?" asked Sherrill.   
              I shrugged.  "Just don't try any funny business."  
To be continued....  

If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
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​              A small, middle-aged women with broad, handsome, Khymer features and a brisk, serious manner met us at Phnom Penh.  She started talking on the way from the airport to our hotel and, it seemed, hardly ever stopped. 
              "The city has a population now of about one million," she told us, "but under the Khymer Rouge it was empty.  Everyone was sent to the country to work—unless they ran away or were murdered.  Intellectuals, professionals, most educated people, were killed or driven out of the country and young, ignorant people from the country were recruited and brainwashed." 
              Phalla seemed determined to make sure that we understood the horror her country had endured.  Despite the elegant Cambodian silk scarf around her shoulders, Sherrill told me later, Phalla reminded her of a nun teacher she'd had in grammar school.
              "She always looked like she was badly disappointed with us.  She liked swatting kids with her ruler—but never me."
              From 1979 through 1989, the population of Cambodia dropped from seven million to four million.  When Sherrill and I were there in 2000, it was about 11 million, half under fifteen.  

​              Driving into the city, we were impressed by all the construction.  Many new hotels and businesses were joint ventures with businesses in Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, and other countries.  Now, there were at least a hundred garment factories in Phnom Penh.  The money came from abroad, while Cambodia provided the land and workers.
              "I was from a province near Siem Reap," Phalla said, balancing at the front of the bus as it careened over the uneven roads, "but my mother sent me to Phnom Phen because of war danger.  Later, I returned and married, but when the Khymer Rouge took over the country, my husband and I were sent to a village far in the north.  My son died because there were no medicines and two of my brothers were killed by the Khymer Rouge.  Those were bad times." 
              "Look at that!" Sherrill pointed out the window.
              In the center of a traffic roundabout we were circling, a giant revolver balanced on its hilt, barrel pointed skyward—twisted into a knot.  It symbolized peace, but peace came too late for these people.  All across Phnom Phen, we saw maimed and mutilated men and women and sometimes children, most of them war victims, often maimed by land mines.  When we were on foot, they pursued us, displaying their wounds and stumps. 

​              When the Khymer Rouge finally was overthrown, Phalla told us, she returned to Phnom Penh.  "My husband had disappeared and I'd lost many years, but I refused to let myself drown in the dark waters of the past.  When your life has been hell, you think only of the future.  And revenge." 
              Later, we stopped at the park from which Phnom Phen Hill rises, a stupa and temple at the top, and climbed the stairway up, past giant statues of seven-headed nagas, sacred guardian snakes, to shrines not only to Buddha but also to Vishnu and other holy figures. 
              "People here," I said, "seem to be open to all possibilities."
              "Or are hedging their bets," Sherrill countered.  "And the way they drive around here, they need to!"

​              We were amazed by how wild and erratic the traffic was: bicycles, motor scooters, small cars and trucks, cyclo pedicabs, wove in and out of lanes, darted around each other, several people, even whole families, often balanced on one scooter.  Small children nonchalantly straddled the scooters behind their parents—usually none of them wore a helmet, but if anyone did it was the man.  If the scooters, bikes and pedicabs weren't carrying families, they were hauling mountains of food, kitchen wares, baskets, or bulging bags of rice.  The king's benign and saccharine features hovered like the Wizard of Oz all over the city. 
              During the Khymer Rouge period, we learned, the National Museum lost many important pieces, but we did see a few surviving sculptures that gave us an idea of Cambodia's artistic history.  Later, we stopped at some workshops in which new Buddha statues were being made.  Apparently, so many religious images were destroyed when Pol Pot ruled that now there was a boom in producing new ones—although most of the new statues we saw were crudely made.  When they were finished, they were tarted up with scarlet lips and fingernails. 

​              That evening, our friend Hala arranged for us to set out on cyclo pedicabs, one of us per cyclo, for a circuit of Phnom Penh, our drivers perched behind us.  They propelled us first along waterfront boulevards, then turned into busy downtown areas.  Then, to everyone's surprise, it began to rain, lightly at first, then harder—and harder.
              The cyclo drivers stopped to tug worn awnings over us, but they gave little protection from the wind-driven rain.  We cycled along historic streets and new parts of the city, some people on bikes and scooters around us now holding umbrellas, but most were stoically becoming drenched.  Finally, our little procession stopped in front of the Hotel de Royale, an old colonial place recently refurbished by the Raffles Group.  Abandoning our cyclos, we squished up the driveway and into the luxurious hotel.
              Dripping through the elegant lobby, we maneuvered around expensive wicker furniture, to a central courtyard.  Hala told us that when she came to Phnom Penh nine years before she tried to stay at the hotel but it was so run down, with rats running through the halls, that she moved after one night.  Now, it was the finest hotel in the city.  The rain refused to stop, so we returned to our cyclos.  Around us, traffic struggled in what turned out to be the last monsoon storm of the season.  Peering from under my shredded awning, I saw a sad little elephant being led through the gray, slanting rain.  

​              The next morning, we were up early to drive to the airport.  At least, the day was clear.  Our flight to Siem Reap, gateway to the recently reopened Angkor monuments, carried us over the vast Tonle Sap lake and its flooded marshlands and farms.  Back then, before the crowds of later years began to come, Siem Reap was still small and old fashioned, with just a few guest houses and little hotels—except one new French-built hotel on the edge of town. 
              Phem Lorm, our temporary guide there, a portly middle-aged fellow dressed in the loose brown shirt and pants of the Cambodian professional, spoke surprisingly formal English.  As we bounced over massive potholes in the road, someone commented that it was like a battle zone.  He turned to her with a fierce expression.   
              "Madam, this was a battle zone."  Just as in Phnom Penh, he explained, the local population was sent out of Siem Reap—to the mountains.  "Many of my relatives and friends died. Some were shot, others from diseases.  But I survived, ladies and gentlemen.  I was lucky.  I didn't speak English for four years—afraid they would think I worked for the CIA." 

​              In 1979, Hanoi sent Vietnamese troops to fight the Khymer Rouge, beginning a ten year civil war.  A million landmines were set throughout the country, especially around Siem Reap and Angkor.  Some landmines responded only to heavy weight, others to a human step.  Sometimes, they were planted together, a stick under the smaller mine leading to the bigger one.  A perfect example of "over kill." 
              "These villages look poor to you," Phem Lorm said, "but now people have food.  Under Pol Pot, even animals died of starvation.  At least, now, individual citizens can own land, animals, private property.  It is okay to be educated.  But much of the area still needs to be cleaned of land mines." 
              It was hard to believe that this countryside of sun-dappled fish ponds, palm trees, rice fields, and bamboo houses standing like storks on stilt-like legs had been the site of fierce fighting.   We bumped and jolted to the Rolous group of temples.  Climbing past guardian lions, we reached the first ninth century stone temple.  Deeply cut bas reliefs caught the morning sun, creating bold patterns of light and dark.  The foliage sprouting on the temple's tapering crown suggested fuzzy green hair. 

​              After lunch, we headed to Angkor Wat, joined now by Kwon, our principle guide for the region.  Twenty-eight years old, he was a small boy during the Pol Pot years.  His name, he said, meant "survivor."  Later, we learned what he meant. 
              Although recently the stone mountain of Angkor Wat was smothered by rain forest, now it was open to the sky again, with a huge moat representing the ocean.  Kwon told us about the fighting here during the civil war.  The Khymer Rouge soldiers were illiterate peasants who thought nothing of stealing sculptures from the temples to sell to the highest bidders. 
              "People died here," Kwon told us, "defending the temple."
              Bullet holes, we saw, as we hiked across the causeway to the temple, still pockmarked the paving stones.  The bullets hit at an angle, leaving troughs in the sandstone, as if mineral-eating worms had infested the causeway.  We gazed up at the towers, impressed by their strange beauty and what they'd endured over the years.  
              "Our empire," Kwon told us, his features taut with pride, "stretched from China to central Vietnam and the South China Sea."

​              Streaked by time and nature, the broad galleries and exuberant sandstone towers rose like a fleet of ocean liners from waves of terraces and steps.  The afternoon sun etched creamy pink shapes across the stone, especially on the carved faces peering from among the shadows.  The saffron robes of Buddhist monks flitted through the galleries, abstract yellow shapes among the red-brown stones.  As evening smudged the terraces, we returned across the causeway, past young boys jumping into the moat's murky water, shouting and splashing as if at a swimming hole, streams of water rolling off shining heads and down sleek brown backs.  

​               The next day, on our way to the Angkor Thom temples, we passed people on their way to work, most on bicycles, some walking, a few on motor scooters or in the backs of trucks.  The outlying villages, Kwon told us, still had no electricity.  The ancient fortified city of Angkor Thom surprised us by its size.  Unlike Angkor Wat, which was a ceremonial site, this was a city in which people lived, perhaps as many as a million.  Although the wooden structures in which people had lived were gone, what remained impressed us.  The causeways were flanked by rows of stone gods and demons, broken and worn, but indomitable.  Enormous faces glared at each other across terraces.  Others surveyed the forest and distant mountains, as if watching for enemies. 
              "They look like Kwon," Sherrill whispered to me. 
              She was right: the same broad cheekbones, wide mouth, and high forehead above shadowed eyes—the same proud dignity.  

​              "I was three when my father disappeared," he told us, one day.  "We were force-marched night after night, sleeping under village houses.  Any light, even the smallest, was forbidden because of American bombers, but if we strayed off the forest track we were beaten.  Once, my mother had a good life, but now she had to pretend to be a peasant by building her own bamboo hut.  My uncle crept over at night to build it for her or she would have been killed.  She left me to go irrigate rice, but came back when she could to feed me leaves and roots and fruit and rice that she stole."   

​              The temples of Ta Prohm, the next group we visited, still were held in the powerful embrace of gigantic ficus trees, banyan roots, and strangler figs, stones even being pried apart by the muscular roots.  Lizards crawled along the walls and parrots darted among the leaves overhead.    

​              After a long drive the next morning, we came to Banteay Srei, a temple only just opened to tourists because it had been heavily land-mined.  We were warned not to wander away from the cleaned area, but these were the most graceful carvings we'd seen, complex, but startlingly sharp and vivid.  Leafy, coiling vines flowed around human and non-human forms, slender-waisted dancers, and hideous demons.  Walking back to the road, Sherrill and I were attracted by the sounds of a makeshift percussion and string band, with several children singing and dancing and asking for contributions. 
              As we hiked across the dark dirt, we saw that all of them were missing body parts.  Feet, hands, legs had been replaced by stumps and scars.  Looking up at us hopefully, they played their makeshift instruments with increased vigor.  What could we do, but tuck tattered riels and dollar bills into their belts and pockets and drop coins into the tin cans waiting on the hard earth?  

​The next day, some of us visited a school in which people disabled by the war could learn handicrafts such as woodworking.  However, since the government still had limited resources to help these victims of the civil war, most of them had to find their own methods of survival.  

To be continued....​

If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels. 
                             Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 52 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.   

          After 32 hours on four planes, our eyes felt as if we'd abused them with sandpaper and our feet and ankles were swollen, but we'd reached Vientiane, capitol of Laos, the first of three countries of Southeast Asia that we'd explore with our friend Hala.  The challenge ahead wasn't only that these countries were still building an infrastructure for visitors, but also that they were—in varying ways—ruled by repressive governments.  Plus, there was the weather: rain had been beating down, with lightning and thunder, but now it had stopped, although both the temperature and humidity were stuck at ninety. 
        "We paid money for this," Sherrill whispered, wiping sweat from my face.

​              On the tiny plane from Bangkok we were surrounded by young Asian businessmen, very jolly with each other, briefcases on their laps.  Our Lao guide, a slim brown-skinned young man with sharp cheekbones and a big smile, met us at Arrivals.  He'd been a Buddhist monk for twelve years, beginning at the age of eight.  Maybe that was why he was so patient, whatever problem he encountered. 
              Vientiane, we saw driving from the airport, was still a city free of high-rises and heavy traffic.  Buildings from the French colonial era, most of them with wide eaves like sleepy eyebrows over weathered faces, broad verandahs, and shuttered windows, peaked out from among newer two and three story buildings.  Circling around a massive Victory Arch built in the 1960s to celebrate independence from "foreign control," we drove to our hotel, where we passed out until the next day. 

​              Several of us walked to a Morning Market, on the way meeting stragglers from an early morning "Friendship Marathon" that began in Thailand at 5 a.m. and ended at the Arch.  Colorful three-wheeled motorbike taxis, tuk-tuks, and their eager drivers were ready to carry us anyplace we wanted, but we had other plans, starting with changing money.  In a ditch beside  the street, Sherrill and I saw a woman and three small children collecting dandelions into plastic bags.

​              Laos was proving to be a country of trees, flowers, motorbikes, slender women moving with small, graceful steps in longhi wrap-around skirts, and young men in the robes of Buddhist monks.  Passing monastery after monastery in Vientiane, we could believe that nearly every Lao male spent several years as a Buddhist monk.  Recently washed saffron robes were hung out to dry and boyish monks peered at us from open windows and from behind teak shutters. 

​              Strolling along the Mekong as the sun set, we passed tea shops and cafes and vegetable gardens belonging to individual families on a broad dyke that ran along the river's edge. 
              "Look at the kids with those blades," I told Sherrill, as we passed boys cutting down clusters of bananas with machetes big enough to remove a leg.
              "Don't fret.  They've probably been doing it since they were babies." 

​              We drove across town to a restored colonial mansion in which an American, Carol Cassidy, ran her weaving company.  Twelve years before, she began helping local women relearn the old Lao craft and art of weaving traditional Lao designs.  She also adapted the designs to create her own fabrics.  Some of the mansion's high-ceilinged rooms also had been turned into showrooms for the beautiful wares created in her workshops.  

​              Later, we drove to the outskirts of Vientiane to see other handicraft shops where women also wove fabric from silk and cotton, coloring it with natural plant dyes.  Barefoot women worked with precariously balanced pots of boiling dye and small children wandered among the looms, sewing machines, and steaming kettles. We pictured women and children being maimed and killed, but were told that these were the best jobs these women could get and they were glad to have them. 

​              We flew to Luang Prabang from Vientiane because, we were told, the road wasn't safe for tourists.  Our guide nearly had been killed when traveling in a car with members of his agency.  Bandits murdered the others, but he survived by pretending to be dead.  Our double engine propeller plane had two rows of two seats that folded like camp chairs.  Luang Prabang sprawled beside the Mekong surrounded by low green mountains lush with blossoming trees and ripening fruit.  Despite a few tiny creatures with many legs, our room facing a garden patio was pleasant, but when I told the receptionist that our tub leaked he smiled.
              "Oh!  You're in room seventeen!  Didn't anyone tell you not to use the tub?"

​              The town of Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was famous for its wats (monastery-temples), most of them low buildings with wide eaves sloping from a peaked roof and simple, graceful ornamentation.  Often we encountered people burning incense, kneeling at prayers, and arranging offerings in front of statues of Buddha.  Traditionally, most ordinary homes were two stories, the lower level open for storage and animals. 
              At six the next morning, we walked out to where monks in their saffron-orange robes shuffled barefoot with their begging bowls past local people with bowls of sticky rice or other food.  As each monk hesitated, each person dropped a wad of rice into the bowl, gaining "merit" toward the next phase of earthly existence. 
              "When a boy goes into a monastery," we were told, "it's one less mouth for his family to feed."  

​              A boat up the heavily silted Mekong past forests, farms, and fishermen took us to the Pak Ou Buddhist caves.  Naked children at the edge splashed in shallow water the same color as their skin.  On the way, we stopped at a primitive port where we scrambled up a steep, muddy bank to a village where we found rows of large clay jars in which, we learned, rice whiskey was made.  A couple of us bought small bottles of it, despite the warnings of the rest of the group.  Later, at our hotel, we blended it with fresh juice.  None of us died.

​              Walking through the village, we reached a central area where a festival was celebrating the gifts of a water pump and shrine by a local man who had emigrated to Tennessee—and now had returned with his family for the gala day.  Music drifted through the trees, people ate and laughed and were happy.  A small stand selling religious objects and marigold-decorated offerings had used an eight-foot bomb shell standing on its white-finned tail to support one corner, a reminder that Laos is the most bombed country in history.
              During the Vietnam War, American planes flew over Laos to Vietnam, but had to return with empty bomb bays.  If they still carried bombs in their guts when flying back, they dropped them onto Laos, which had the misfortune to be on the route to home base. 

​              From the whiskey village, we chugged up the Mekong until the Pak Ou Buddhist caves rose ahead of us like great inkblots on the sides of steep variegated cliffs.  Eventually, we began to see a chaos of Buddhas, tiny statues around larger ones, in their dark openings.  Climbing many levels of steep stairs, we maneuvered through the caves, among thousands of Buddhas, some hundreds of years old.  Shining our lights up, we discovered hundreds of small bats clinging upside down to the uneven ceiling.  

​              As the days went by, we visited many villages in which people still lived in traditional thatch-roofed houses on stilts, looms often set up underneath, naked children and animals playing in the dust.  In one village, little boys clomped beside the road on coconut shell halves turned upside like horse's hooves.  In a narrow lane, a man was hollowing a log, making a canoe.  Deeper in a forest, we found several tin-roofed houses where people were making paper the old way, by hand, using a bush similar to the mulberry.  Young men and women smoothed the pulpy substance in water-filled flats, then set the flats out to dry.  

​              Exploring a higher, more remote area, we visited a Hmong village where thickly thatched houses were built directly on the ground.  Our guide persuaded a Hmong woman to let us look inside her house, one room divided into sections.  An open fire on the hard-packed dirt floor sent its smoke up through holes in the thatch.  The original religion there, now coexisting with Buddhism, was a type of animism or nature worship.  Driving further over one-lane bridges and narrow roads past rice fields and dense forests, we came to a still more remote Kanu village with houses elevated on stilts again.  The few women that we saw turned away or darted back into their houses.  The men must have been off working in the fields.  The place seemed populated primarily by small children.  

​              One humid evening, several of us climbed a steep hill above the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang to visit some Buddhist shrines, including one in which Buddha's oversized footprint reputedly had left its mark in a large rock.  In other shrines, bronze Buddhas meditated behind offerings of flowers, incense, fruit, and small dishes of food.  Then we drove to a restaurant with a dining room open to small gardens on three sides, geckos darting silently above our heads.  After a meal of spicy meat dishes, vegetables, and stuffed eggs, the lights dimmed and, to our surprise, a birthday cake, lighted candles glowing, was brought out and set in front of Sherrill, alarming the geckos, which scurried away or dropped to the floor. 
              "Happy birthday!" everyone sang.
              "Where did that come from?" Sherrill asked. 
              Our friend Hala had ordered the cake by long-distance, even giving the recipe and decorating instructions.  

              Our visit to Laos ended back in Vientiane with dinner on an old river boat that had been reconditioned by a French entrepreneur living there.  We maneuvered over a plank bridge onto the boat, a woven rattan roof stretched over our heads, the sides open to breezes from the Mekong.  The owner introduced us to a French doctor who had been coming to Laos since 1990 as one of the "Doctors Without Frontiers."  A tall, handsome, middle-aged man, the doctor told us that he had seen many changes during the past decade. 
              "There were no cars in Vientiane," he said.  "No modern amenities of any kind until recently, and the only medical treatment available was 'traditional.'"
              Because of the relentless bombing of the country during the Vietnam War, he added, the need for humanitarian and medical aid still was enormous.  Each year, he returned to Paris, but then came back to Laos to do what he could to help.  The boat put-putted toward the center of the river, then as it slowly moved through the muddy water we talked and ate, the sun set, and lights started to glow on the two sides of the river, in Laos and Thailand.  
To be continued.... 
​

​If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.
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​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 51 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series.   

    Flying into Helsinki on our Finnair plane, over hundreds of islands scattered in blue water and above dense forests up to the edge of the runway, was more dramatic than Sherrill and I had expected.  After a short wait, we boarded a prop jet to bounce over the Gulf of Finland to Tallinn.  The other passengers all seemed to be locals from the Baltic states.
       Maaria, our Estonian guide, was small, with big brown eyes, didn't look older than twenty, though she probably was, and spoke good enough English to launch into a tirade against the Soviets and their brutal impact on Estonia as she drove us past deserted Stalin-era factories and ugly apartment blocks until we reached Tallinn's Old Town, somehow spared from both bombs and Russian mutilation. 
     Sherrill and I exchanged looks, but didn't respond much. 

            "Our economy was run from Moscow—like all the countries they swallowed.  We had to specialize in certain industries, use the materials they sent, and then sell the products back to them." 
            So young and so angry, Sherrill and I agreed later. 
            Estonia was the first of the former Soviet satellite countries along the Baltic that we were visiting.  It was exciting to be there, while they were feeling their way into the challenging world of personal choice and free markets.  For the young people, the symbol of this brave new world seemed to be the mobile phone, which we saw flourished everywhere like a sword slaying the dragon the of dictatorship.  Maaria had told us that Estonia hoped to join the European Economic Union very soon. 
         From our hotel window we could see the towers and red roofs of the Old Town and passing trams brightly painted with ads.       
         "This is my idea of breakfast," Sherrill said at the buffet the next morning, as we filled our plates with herring, trout,  cheese, and dark breads. 

      Exploring Tallinn with Maaria, we passed through historic neighborhoods of 18th and 19th century wooden houses heavy with ornate carving around the eaves, windows, and doors.
     "They're going to be torn down," Maaria told us.  "To make room for development."
      We couldn't tell if she approved or disapproved.  She took us to a yachting harbor built by the Soviets when they were hosting the Olympic Games.
        "It looks nice, but it's falling apart, like everything else they built."
      Nearby, at a hillside Folk Music Stadium, costumed performers were getting ready for a singing competition between Estonia and Finland.  That evening, some of the Estonian team crowded into our hotel, men wearing oak leaf garlands, women carrying bouquets of roses, celebrating their victory.  Folk songs, Maaria told us, helped preserve Estonian culture when they were occupied by other countries.  The next morning, when I went for a walk I saw large posters advertising Tina Turner's coming appearance.  Was this the beginning of a new cultural invasion?  

          As Maaria was driving us to what she called an outdoor museum she asked us about job opportunities in the U.S. 
         "I have to make a decision," she told us.  "Whether to be a teacher or do something else with my English skills."
          We told her a little of what we knew, but didn't want to urge her in any specific direction.
        The outdoor museum was a collection of thatch-roofed farmhouses and barns moved from across Estonia. Although the museum was to show a traditional way of life, one old farmhouse also commemorated the deportations of thousands of Estonians to the Russian Gulag after World War Two.  It was left as it was the night Russians came to take away the occupants, with photographs of the family and other Estonian victims. 

    Soon after breakfast a few days later, our Latvian guide, Rita, came to take us south to Latvia and its capital, Riga.  She was older than Maaria, tall and thin, different in appearance, but we soon discovered almost as outspoken.  We drove along the Via Baltica, the road that extends all the way to Warsaw in Poland. 
      "On this road," Rita told us, "in 1989, a  human chain of a million people from the three Baltic countries stretched from Tallin in the north down to Vilnius in Lithuania, swearing that we'd all be independent again."   
     Sherrill commented about how beautiful the countryside was. 
     "The Russians didn't bother to destroy it—except where they built factories to make things to go back to Russia."
         Sherrill nudged me.
       "Look," she said, pointing out the window to a high-shouldered, long-legged stork hiking through a field.

         As we drove on, we saw more storks, including several in nests atop barns and houses, frequently on chimneys, a couple of times clacking their bills at us or each other.
        The midsummer festival was coming soon, Rita told us, on June 23, the eve of St. John's Day, or the "Festival of Johns" for all men named John, rather than on the summer solstice. 
         "On midsummer night," she explained, "everyone is supposed to stay awake all night and bathe naked in a river or lake or in the dew of a meadow to ensure good harvests."  She laughed: "Of course, there's much celebration and eating and drinking!  We have a long history of worshipping nature, giving god-like powers to trees and rocks and lakes."  She smiled.  "The Baltic states were the last in Europe to be Christianized."
        The pre-Christian gods and goddesses weren't shown as figures or statues, but in symbols or shapes that could be drawn or woven in fabric.  Rita had brought her fifteen year-old daughter—named Mara, after the earth goddess—along for the bus ride.  
         "Why," Mara asked us, "are so many school children killed in America?"
         "Because of guns," Sherrill answered. 
          This conversation happened almost twenty years ago, not last week.

        As we continued driving south next to white sand beaches and past forests of slender green trees, an elderly Czech-born woman in our group asked Rita why so many Latvians were in the Nazi SS during World War II.  Rita replied that they were conscripted by the Germans, but the woman shook her head, her sharp nose aimed like an accusation at the guide. 
     "The SS was a voluntary corps and I know that thousands of Latvians were SS guards in the concentration camps."  
        During the trip, Sherrill and I became friends with the woman, Vera, and her husband, and learned that she'd spent time in Auschwitz and two other Nazi camps.  

       Passport control at the Estonia-Latvia border took almost an hour.  Sherrill pointed through a window into the office.  Two guards were playing solitaire on a computer.  
      Passing the now familiar Soviet-era apartment blocks and deserted factories, we drove into Riga's city center, block after block in the Art Nouveau style, with fanciful leafy decorations, sculptures of gargoyles and human faces and figures. 
       Our hotel was near the "Monument to Liberty" that dates from the 1930s, with a tall figure of a woman holding three stars above her head. 
​      "During the resistance to Soviet rule," Rita told us, "she had great symbolic importance.  People still leave flowers at her base."  

    We ate dinner in the medieval part of town, a labyrinth of cobblestone streets, at a basement restaurant under low brick arches, where a young gypsy couple sang in Latvian, Russian, and Romanian as he played a guitar.  His playing and the songs filled the dimly lit room with wave after wave of romance and heartbreak.  Walking back to the hotel, we passed a lively beer garden, more restaurants, and at least one Internet cafe.  
       The next afternoon, Sherrill and I found a bookstore where she bought a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Latvian for her collection.  A young man near Town Hall Square was selling matrioshka nesting dolls, with first Bill Clinton, then Monica Lewinsky, followed by a smaller, angry Hilary.  

​    As spectacular as Riga's red brick eighteenth-century Rundale Palace was, what we most remembered of it later were the storks who made its chimneys their home, especially a nest with a mother stork and babies. 
        A new guide, Darja, took us from Latvia to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.  Although, as one of the company managers, she didn't usually conduct tours and was filling in for someone,  she told us with some annoyance, "I still have to do all of the usual female jobs at home."  She looked at Sherrill.  "I have to give my husband fancy meals—you know, take care of 'his majesty.'  That's the way it is here.  At Christmas, I have to fix a dozen or more kinds of sweets—it's the tradition.  If I don't, I'm a bad housewife." 

          All of our guides in the Baltic states were outspoken, but Lara may have been the most blunt. 
      "Now, we have the freedom we wanted, but we still have corruption in government, economic inequality, food shortages.  Old people lost their savings when the banks failed....."  

     Vilnius, like other old cities here, was surrounded by Soviet-era apartment blocks, but the restored Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The city's old Communist statues were banished to an Open Air Museum in the southern part of the country. 
   Darja showed us where the city's two Jewish ghettos were and told us  about the extermination of thousands of Lithuanian Jews.  A small monument to the victims stood on the site of the largest synagogue in Vilnius.  The Germans damaged the synagogue, but after the war the Russians blasted it to nothing.  Later, we drove past the forest outside of Vilnius and the mass graves of 100,000 people shot by the Nazis: 70,000 Jews, 30,000 gypsies, plus Polish intelligentsia, Lithuanians, war prisoners, and resisters.  

       Two days later, Sherrill and I stayed in Vilius while the rest of the group went to Minsk, which we visited 11 years before and had no desire to see again.  We took a taxi to the Jewish Museum, where we were the only visitors.  Middle-aged women in shapeless dresses scurried ahead of us, unlocking doors on different floors and turning on lights.  We were about to leave when a voice called out from behind a curtain.  With gentle, eager courtesy, this little bespectacled man escorted us around a museum-within-the-museum, chiefly dedicated to bookplates and pictures of famous Jews. 

         It seemed appropriate that we visit the Museum of the Soviet KGB next, even the basement rea used for the processing, interrogation, torture, and imprisonment of suspects and prisoners.  Explanatory signs in English and photographs of victims were mounted in the rooms and corridor.  There, in that cold hallway, in those square little rooms, behind those heavy doors, behind those sliding steel windows, on that stained concrete, human beings suffered and died and the Lithuanians wanted the world to know.  

      A few days later, we drove south to a spit that runs along the edge of the Baltic.  We could see the Baltic on one side and the lagoon on the other.  A short stop at the Witches Hill Sculpture Park reminded us how people in that part of Europe enjoy grotesque fantasy figures, witches, and monsters.  We visited Thomas Mann's summer house, built with money he got for the Nobel Prize in 1929.  He worked on Joseph and His Brothers in this blue-trimmed two-story wood house with thatched roof and view of the sea until the Nazis drove him out of Europe.  

       The evening we reached the seaport of Gdansk in Poland the narrow old streets were crowded with midsummer festivities.  Some streets were closed, filled with tents and crowds of people.  A sense of hilarity filled the night air.  As four of us walked along the river, fireworks shot up from the opposite bank, exploding in sparkling cartwheels over our heads.  

        An important port, Gdansk was devastated during World War II.  Wandering around the Old Town the next day, Sherrill and I could tell that behind the narrow facades of the restored houses were modern buildings.  We'd seen the same thing in Warsaw in 1989.  After breakfast, we drove to the Gdansk Shipyards to see the Solidarity monument near the place where the freedom movement started and then past the walled, heavily guarded, home of Lech Walesa, founder of the movement and later president of Poland.  

​To be continued....    
 
If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.