Jason Devitt

After a week relaxing amid the rice terraces and hippies of Bali, Summer and I flew to Flores. Unlike Bali, Flores has never been a major tourist destination. I had booked the only hotel in the town of Labuan Bajo that could offer us hot water, and that hotel had eight rooms.

We’ve avoided flying on this trip as much as possible, but it would have taken four days to get to Flores by sea. And flying with the famously unreliable Merpati Airlines (unofficial slogan: "It’s Merpati and we’ll fly if we want to") was not routine jet travel.

As our little Fokker twin-prop banked and groaned and screamed over Lombok, Komodo, Rinca, and dozens of smaller islands, we had our first clear view of the Indonesian archipelago. It was one of those rare cloudless days when the land below looks exactly like it does in an atlas, bright patches of green surrounded by blue. The volcanic hills, lit from the side by the afternoon sun, looked like the little triangles that mapmakers once drew to suggest mountains.

And here be monsters. On Rinca, an hour by boat from Flores, we got to see Komodo dragons in the wild. (They are named for the island of Komodo, further to the west, but they live on Rinca too.) This one was a little over two meters long, old and sluggish. But they are typically three meters long, can run at 20 km/h, and if they bite you their viscous drool contains bacteria that will surely kill you, saving them the effort.

Here were hobbits too, once. The cave where scientists found the remains of homo floriensis is three hours’ drive from Labuan Bajo.

Indonesia probably contains many more wonders like these. Flores itself is remote and wild and unexplored, and half the size of Belgium. In West Papua earlier this year scientists reported finding a ‘lost world‘, an area of forest where it seems likely that no human had ever been before. A few previously unknown species of animals just walked up to them, out of curiosity.

The waters around Indonesia boast the greatest diversity of life on earth - a quarter of the world’s known species of fish live here. We spent several days diving off Flores with Ernest Lewandowski and his wife Kath Mitchinson, who have been running a dive shop there for almost 15 years.

Ernest is a soft-spoken Scot who spent many years as a commercial diver, repairing oil rigs in the North Sea. That meant working in freezing cold water, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, and taking two days to descend and a week to surface. For some reason he prefers living on a tropical island, studying nudibranchs, and teaching people to dive.

I am a Special Needs diver, and he did some remedial work with me. He told me that my kicks were too short and quick, when they should be long and slow.

Actually what he said was: "Lad, lad, ye’ve got to quit yer faerie dancing."

The dive sites we’d visited around Koh Tao were crowded, and the sheer number of people in the water drive the fish away. Cruising around the islands off Flores we could go a whole day without seeing another boat. Bottlenose dolphins swam alongside us, and we saw manta rays and turtles feeding at the surface. Underwater we saw crocodile and scorpion fish; humphead parrotfish; great schools of fusiliers; and in the distance, watching us watching it, a white-tipped reef shark. Candy-striped shrimp reached out to clean our nails, and Ernest’s beloved nudibranchs did whatever nudibranchs do. For me the highlight was sitting on the ocean floor, peeking around a wall of coral, and watching a meter-long puffer fish doing something that I can only describe as chewing the cud.

***

At the little airport on Flores, as we prepared to leave Indonesia, Summer was puzzled by a poster asking for the public’s help in identifying the Bali bombers. She said that the photofit pictures of their faces looked distorted. I realized that they were photos of the bombers’ actual heads. They were decapitated when their backpacks blew up, and their expressions were frozen in pain. Not enough pain. The people of Bali and Flores and all of Indonesia deserve better than this.

Some people, particularly in Australia, speak of Indonesia as the Javanese Empire. This is a loaded term, intended to convey something malevolent and bound to collapse, but it gives a sense of Java’s importance. For most of its colonial and post-colonial history, power in Indonesia has been concentrated in Java, and power in Java has been concentrated in Jakarta.

It shows. Jakarta sprawls endlessly, with no center and no apparent planning. The heat and pollution make it impossible to walk anywhere, and the traffic makes it difficult to drive. The city is spreading across the western end of Java like a fast-moving glacier, and just as glaciers pile up rock and earth at their leading edge, Jakarta piles up slums. Given its size there is remarkably little for a visitor to see. We asked friends who live there. They couldn’t suggest anything. We left.

All right, there’s one place worth seeing. In the National Museum, there is a vast collection of artifacts from Indonesia’s 200-odd ethnic groups, all neatly arranged in tall, austere, Victorian display cabinets, and with almost no labels or commentary of any kind. Bewildered, Summer and I fell in with a group of ten women who were training to be tour guides. As the only man in the group, I was the butt of all jokes about matrilineal tribes and penis gourds.

***

From the comfort of our first-class train seats, we saw the slums of Jakarta roll past; the volcanic spine of Java; our first rice terraces; a dozen cozy-looking small towns; and occasionally, glimpses of life in the cheap trains - freight cars with a bench bolted to each wall and, by way of air-conditioning, no doors.

Our next stop was Bandung, where we spent a few days with Johannes, an old schoolfriend of Summer, who was an excellent host. Bandung is a very fine provincial town, much liked by the Dutch, who planned to move the capital there from Jakarta. War and independence intervened, but the Dutch left behind something that I did not expect to find in Indonesia: one of the largest concentrations of art deco buildings anywhere in the world outside Miami. If you are a fan of this style, and we are, skip Jakarta and go to Bandung.

***

Yogyakarta in Central Java is the gateway town for Java’s most important ancient monuments, Pramnaban and Borobodur, and for the volcano Merapi. But it also home to a Javanese Sultan, and thirty thousand people still live within the outer walls of the Kraton or palace of the Sultan. The photo above was taken at the Water Palace. From this vantage point Sultans in former times could watch their wives frolic in the pool below, and choose one or two to, er, dally with.

Indonesia is one of the most geologically active places on earth. There are active volcanoes all along the archipelago, and Merapi is one of the largest. I took this photo from our hotel room a few weeks ago; it was the end of the rainy season and too overcast to visit Merapi or Bromo or any of the other peaks while we were there. Today Merapi is on the brink of an eruption.

Borobodur is the largest Buddhist building on earth. (Angkor Wat is a Hindu temple.) Hinduism overwhelmed Buddhism in Java before Islam even arrived, and for several hundred years Borobodur lay buried under volcanic ash following a massive eruption of Merapi.

It’s a study guide for Mahayana Buddhism; each level represents a stage in the life of the Buddha, and the progression from ignorance to nirvana to parinirvana.

But Budi, our guide, was more interested in the fact that I am Irish and Summer is American.

"Ah, Westlife is from Ireland, no?"

For the benefit of American readers, Westlife is a boy band from Ireland that has never cracked the US, but is big everywhere else in the world. Three different Indonesian people invoked their name. But only Budi serenaded us, as we slowly climbed the steps of Borobodur.

"More than words / Is all you have to do / To make it real … my daughter loves Westlife you know … "

We passed elaborately carved scenes from the life of the Buddha, and I realized for the first time just how much the Mahayana Buddhists have elaborated on his original teachings - the Theravada school that is followed in Thailand and Cambodia.

"Then you wouldn’t have to say / That you love me / Cause I’d already know … in fact I am teaching her English using the lyrics of Westlife… "

It began to rain. It was one of the last storms of the season. As the wind and rain mounted and the stone became slippery, we climbed further, watching each step.

"What would you do / If my heart was torn in two … and I love America. My dream is to move there and to marry an American angel…"

On the upper terraces, 72 bell-shaped stupas concealed life-sized statues of the Buddha meditating. At the summit, a small chamber represented parinirvana: final nothingness. The storm rose, and we saw lightning. Our clothes were soaking wet.

"More than words to show you feel / That your love for me is real … Our children would be mixed race, and all the Indonesian pop stars are mixed race you see."

Summer and I thanked Budi for his time, and left Borobodur, Yogyakarta, and Java behind us.

Summer and I spent the last month in Indonesia. I haven’t written about it until now because the country is so vast that I wasn’t sure where to begin. From Aceh in the west to Papua in the east is roughly the same distance as from California to New York, and 200 million people spill across the 18,000 islands that make up the archipelago. It has the greatest biodiversity - number of species per hectare of land or sea - of any place on earth. It is the world’s third largest democracy, the largest Moslem country.

But let’s start with whether we should have gone at all.

There are places that Summer and I would not even consider visiting right now, because our sense of self-preservation outweighs our curiosity. I trust no one will be offended when I say that Iraq and Somalia head that list.

For most countries it’s not so obvious. General reading leads me to think that Chile and Argentina are safer choices than Colombia and Venezuela, but what is the most reliable source of up-to-date information?

You can ask people who’ve recently travelled there, or look at sites like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum. But no one can claim to be an expert on a country after spending a few weeks there, and no one should be surprised that  all the people working in the tourist industry were ‘friendly and welcoming.’

If you have friends in the country, as we did in Indonesia, you can ask them. That’s very helpful if you have concerns about crime or the threat of disease. But without direct access to the police or the terrorists, what can anyone say about the threat of a terrorist attack in their own country, apart from what they’ve seen on TV or read online? In New York we’ve been on Orange alert since September 11th. What use is that?

Most Americans have a simple solution to the problem of foreign travel: never leave America. 77% of them do not have a passport. The rest of us look to the advice of our governments. And the U.S. Department of State, the FCO, and the Australian and Irish Departments of Foreign Affairs all say Don’t Go To Indonesia. In fact all four rate Iran - stealth-missile-testing, uranium-enriching, axis-of-evil Iran - as a better choice for your family vacation this year.

As the overwhelming majority of Indonesians are peace-loving, moderate Moslems who are not interested in clashing with anybody’s civilization, and the people of Bali are Hindus who haven’t even been invited to the clash, they are not happy about this at all, particularly since none of these four countries has suggested that you avoid New York, Madrid, or London. True, Bali was bombed in 2002 and again in October last year. But London was bombed far more regularly at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and foreign visitors were just advised to be cautious.

There was a magnetometer at the Borobodur hotel in Jakarta. At the Bandung SuperMall a security guard checked the underside of our car with a mirror. At our hotel in Yogyakarta, the trunk of every car was inspected. In Bali we had to open our backpacks once or twice. But precautions like these were commonplace in London in the eighties and nineties and in New York now.

Whether people are following the advice of their governments or just reacting to the latest bombing, foreign tourism in Indonesia is suffering badly. One travel agent in Bali told me that her income dropped from $60 a month to $30 after the second bomb. We were her only customers that day. She offered me a ride on the back of her motorbike to a place near the site of the 2002 attacks, a place some people just call ‘the bomb.’ We puttered through a maze of side streets filled with guest houses, cafes, and stores selling surfboards and souvenirs. Most were empty. Some hadn’t bothered opening. It was still the low season, but business was slow even by that standard. The bad guys are winning.

So who writes the ‘advisories’? I asked three people I know who are diplomats, representing three different countries. Typically the advice is written by consular officials, based on conversations with the police, intelligence reports, local media reports, and … what the other embassies say. The most cynical of the three said that they are written by people who never leave Jakarta, people who see a small protest outside their own embassy and assume that the whole country is on the point of collapse. That’s probably unfair, but the advice is compromised in many ways. They don’t want to offend the host nation, jeopardize trade, or be seen to give in to the bad guys. But they don’t want their citizens to get killed on their watch. A public inquiry in Australia after the first Bali bombing criticized the Department of Foreign Affairs for not publishing a warning, given that they knew there was some risk of an attack. This suggests that from now on, unless the Australian officials believe that the risk is zero, they will advise their citizens not to go to Indonesia.

Still. In the calculus of risk, one thing makes Indonesia different. Terrorists in New York, Madrid, and London, whether foreign or domestic, do not usually target foreign visitors. (The IRA relied on foreign donors. Blowing up Americans was bad for business.) In a given attack, tourists may be more or less at risk than locals; more if the terrorists bomb a famous landmark at noon, less if they bomb the subways at 9 am. In figuring your odds, you can divide by the whole population.

In Indonesia, you count all the other western tourists and divide by that. If you had been travelling around with us for the last month you would have counted to ten in Jakarta; five in Bandung; maybe fifty in Yogyakarta; twenty in Flores. Only in Bali would you have lost count.

Here is what we decided:

Stay away from places where there are a lot of people who are unhappy with the West: embassies in Jakarta and devoutly Moslem places like Aceh and Solo.
Stay away from fights that don’t concern us: long-running ethnic conflicts in Maluku, Sulawesi, and Papua Barat.
Stay away from crowds in Bali.

And support the introduction of terrorist prediction markets.

The Singapore St Patrick’s Day Parade. Spot the shamrocks in the photo on the right.

We had heard that Singapore was almost freakishly clean and tidy, but when we arrived the train station seemed a little run-down. Summer even noticed some litter. Funny how these little myths build up around a place, I thought.

Outside the train station, Singapore was freakishly clean and tidy.

Our taxi driver explained: "The station belongs to Malaysia. Nobody cares what you do in the station." Indeed. When Singapore and Malaysia divorced in 1965, Malaysia kept the train station.

For no apparent reason, he adds: "Singapore is incorruptible. Don’t ever try to bribe the police. It will make it much worse."

Singapore is rich and highly developed. It’s the only one of the four original Tigers that we are visiting on this trip. The food is wonderful. The shopping is great, particularly for antiques. Parts of the old town and the waterfront are very pretty. The Asian Civilization Museum is the best we’ve seen in the region. Summer and I think that the night safari (a zoo that doesn’t open until 7 pm, where you can - although of course you shouldn’t - reach out and touch flying squirrels and fruit bats and tapirs and other animals that are most active after dark) is one of the best zoos in the world. With GPS in every taxi, immaculate, multi-storey, sealed subway platforms, and video mobile phones, this is one of the few cities in the world that can make New York seem backward. It’s safe for you and the kids. And it’s freakishly clean. It’s kind of like San Diego, except it’s not bankrupt and the houses are cheap.

On the other hand, this is the place that restricts both chewing gum and dissent. One notice threatened a $1000 fine for riding your bike through a pedestrian tunnel. When I stepped into the street to hail a cab, drivers rolled down their windows and shouted "no, no, that’s illegal." When I stepped across an invisible line in a Chinatown restaurant I was told "the government says you cannot go there unless you have been vaccinated against typhoid." (I have been, but why quibble?) I had to produce my passport to buy some antibiotics. Over-zealous zoning means that in some areas you can’t find a corner store and in some places you can’t find anything else. The media is state-controlled. They hang people for dealing marijuana. And don’t ever try to bribe the police. It will make it much worse.

Singapore is a parliamentary democracy. While we were there, an opposition politician who had criticized government officials (during an election, if you can imagine that), been sued for defamation, lost, failed to pay the fine, gone bankrupt, and then dared to suggest that the Singaporean judiciary lack independence, was jailed for refusing to apologize.

It may seem surprising to western-educated liberals that people put up with this. But as a friend in Singapore explained, most of these restrictions have very little effect on the average citizen. Socially conservative laws including the harsh penalties for drug crimes are very popular. And most importantly, government policies have made people here very rich, very fast. Forty years ago, the sewerage system in parts of Singapore consisted of a team of men going door to door collecting buckets. Today the place is so clean that they restrict the sale of chewing gum just to avoid staining the sidewalks. Karl Rove would understand the argument: rich, happy people don’t throw out the incumbent.

No management team can keep delivering year after year. Singapore is now too rich - too rich to compete with China and India as a center of low-cost manufacturing. Instead, like the US and Western Europe, they have to move up the value chain, into media, software, and biotech. And they are struggling to attract from abroad and to develop at home the kind of creative people, both artists and entrepreneurs, necessary to make the transition. The best known example is the gay bait and switch: Singapore is going for the pink dollar, even though homosexual acts are still punishable by up to ten years in jail. But our favorite example was the sign outside the Supreme Court advertising - of all things - a grafitti workshop. 

I saw the billboard-sized image above at a mall in Kuala Lumpur. It was a temporary front wall for a store that hadn’t opened yet.

Images like this are very common in the West. They mean many things to many people: playful; erotic; pornographic. An impossible standard of beauty that leaves women feeling inadequate, or a commercial image that would be pulled from the market if it didn’t appeal to women. The confident pose of a woman empowered by her own sexuality, or the naive treachery of a girl exploited by a male-dominated fashion industry that seeks to objectify women, et cetera. The consensus is that these images are acceptable, at least in New York or London, and I have nothing to add to that debate.

But travelling through South-East Asia for the last few months, images like this have taken on a second layer of meaning that I find a lot more troubling. While this picture is more overtly sexual than most, the images used to promote fashion and cosmetics in this part of the world are very often the same images that you see in America - images of white women.

As well as all the issues above, which still apply, in South-East Asia these images say - unambiguously - that to be white is to be beautiful. As well as being advertisements for lingerie or perfume, they are advertisements for whiteness. When you do see images of Thai or Cambodian pop-stars, actors, or models in their own countries, you can’t help noticing that most of them are preternaturally white.

I have an especially white wife. Summer is very pale, doesn’t tan, and wears factor 50 sunblock. All over South-East Asia, women come up to her in the street and tell her how beautiful her skin is. Sometimes they ask to have their photos taken standing next to her.

In one of my first posts I poked fun at a skin-whitening treatment for men on sale in Bangkok. Since then I have learned that people throughout the developing world spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on skin-whitening products, and it doesn’t seem as funny.

Of course this goes much deeper than Calvin Klein ads. The Thais for example have long seen white skin as a mark of aristocratic breeding. Some Cambodians mutter about the ignorant ways of the ‘dark Khmer.’ There is a latent racial bias here, but Western companies seem to be exploiting it and sustaining it.

Consciously or unconsciously? Surely most Western brands spent a lot of money finding out exactly how their advertising images are perceived in every market they enter? It’s clear that they are not using exactly the same images that you see in America, because there are almost no black women. No pictures of Naomi Campbell. No Tyra Banks. That makes sense - there aren’t many black consumers livng here. But then there aren’t many white ones either.

When Summer and I arrived in Malaysia, the first Moslem country on our trip, these images suddenly took on a third layer of meaning. As well as the familiar conflicting messages about female sexuality, and the racist overtones that we first noticed in Thailand, images like the one above seen in the context of a moderate Moslem society, where many women choose to observe hijab, call out that Western women are sluts.

If that seems harsh, bear in mind that these and Hollywood movies are pretty much the only images of Western women in Asia; there are no examples of Western female executives or politicians or teachers or priests or soldiers or workers to counterbalance them, just a few ex-pats and travellers like my wife.

Pandering to local prejudices at the expense of Thai and Lao and Khmer women with dark skin is pretty unpleasant. But is it really a good idea for Western companies to portray Western women this way in Moslem countries?

For Summer and me, the border between Thailand and Malaysia was marked by a drastic change of clothing. In the train compartment next to us, a Thai girl wore kitten heels and short, short, shorts. She got off at the Thai border. At the next stop, her place was taken by six giggling Malaysian girls, in jeans and sweaters and full hijab - scarves completely covering their hair.

I had several thoughts at once: surprise at the sudden shift, after months of travelling through Buddhist countries; liberal disapproval (I wouldn’t want my daughter to dress like that); a memory of a discussion with Summer about whether the hajib, when not obligatory, is or is not oppressive; and underneath it all, a feeling of discomfort. Images of Islam in western media are so bound up with bad news that for a moment I was wary of a group of laughing teenage girls.

***

One night in Istanbul, a man sitting next to me at dinner said: "This city is so cosmopolitan! You can walk down the street and see Turks, Slavs, Serbs, Croatians, Chechens, Caucasians." I stared at him blankly. I wanted to say "Sorry, all you white people look the same to me." But that would have been rude.

Kuala Lumpur on the other hand is the most racially diverse city that we’ve seen so far on this trip. Nationally, sixty-five percent of the population are Malay (almost all Moslem). Twenty-five percent are of Chinese descent, and most of the rest are Tamil Indian. The capital skews Chinese and Indian, with a large dollop of European ex-pats and tourists. Many Moslem women do not wear the hijab. As a model of racial harmony it rivals the bridge of the Enterprise. The government, a coalition of several groups bound together for almost fifty years by their mutual dislike of the minority Islamic fundamentalist opposition, is dominated by Malays but committed to a multicultural society. Summer and I found it very easy to relax there. Malaysia ought to be an ideal tourist destination for mainstream Americans: exotic, beautiful, rich, modern, great shopping, English-speaking, a little conservative, religious. If only they were Southern Baptists.

***

When I was in school, we learned that the history of the world came to a halt with the fall of the Roman Empire, and apart from the scribbling of Irish monks and Magna Carta, it was all nasty, brutish, and short until the 15th Century and the modestly-entitled Renaissance.

In the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia, which I recommend for its exhibit on Islamic architecture, history begins in 622 AD, reaches its apex in the 15th century, and peters out with the decline of the Ottoman and Moghul Empires. Following the conquest of Spain, Cordoba apparently became the ‘intellectual center of Europe.’ This was during what we call the Dark Ages, so we can’t really argue with that. In a discussion of the achievements of Saladin, it is mentioned in passing that he ‘came to Egypt to repel foreign invaders.’ This is the only reference to what we call the Crusades.

While all kids should study the history of their own country in some detail, the world would be a better place if they had to have at least a superficial knowledge of everyone else’s.

***

Wahab walks up to me and introduces himself. He is wearing the white skullcap of the Haji, and he says that he is from Kelantan. This is the one province governed by the PAS, the Islamic fundamentalist party. The PAS recently banned Kelantan’s traditional dance, the Mak Yong, ostensibly because of its Hindu influences, but mainly because it is … a dance. The Ministry of Tourism is not impressed. It would be like Florida banning Disney, or old people. This week the PAS introduced a bill in the national parliament that would make it a crime to leave the Moslem faith. (I bet the Baptists would love that.) It has no chance of passing.

I tell Wahab that I am from New York, and he welcomes me to his country. His son studied engineering in the US. We talk about the museum briefly, and he points out that there is no discussion of the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia, the ultimate cause of the civil conflict now brewing in Iraq. I say that Malaysia seems to have done a great job of managing ethnic differences. He agrees, and explains that if he spoke out against the Chinese or Indian community the ISA - Internal Security Agency - would detain him indefinitely without trial. He says that is what Iraq needs: a strong government.

We may or may not agree with Wahab. So long as the US government is ‘renditioning’ suspects to unsavory allies and locking people up indefinitely without trial at Guantanamo, we are in no place to criticize Malaysia.

The ‘giant stride’ technique for leaving a dive boat.

This week Summer and I learned to scuba dive off the island of Koh Tao, Thailand. This would be worth celebrating under any circumstances, but it’s particularly special for me since nine months ago I did not know how to swim.

Americans are always surprised to meet someone who can’t swim. Australians are shocked. But most Americans have plenty of opportunities to swim when they’re growing up, because the climate is so good. Australians get chucked into a pool at two months, just after they are dangled in front of a crocodile, and just before their first beer.

Though still rare, non-swimmers are more common in Europe, where north of a line drawn from Marseilles to Athens no-one swims in the sea or in rivers without a wetsuit or a psychological problem. Europeans learn to swim in indoor pools at their local school or state-run ‘recreation center.’ The very name suggests that such recreation is forbidden elsewhere.

For various reasons, I still hadn’t learned to swim at ten years old when my family went on a vacation to the Canary Islands. But I was quite happy in the hotel pool, bobbing around in an inflatable life ring. One afternoon I was standing by the edge of the pool wondering how to get back my ring, which had drifted to the middle, when another kid ran up and pushed me in.

I remember the feeling of water rushing into my mouth; I remember the feeling of falling towards the bottom of the pool; and then I remember my dad’s arms around me, pulling me out.

For 25 years after that, every time I felt water in my mouth, I could remember nothing else. I couldn’t remember what the instructor had told me, I couldn’t remember that I was in waist-deep water, or that there was a lifeguard standing next to me. I just had to get out.

The odd thing was, I loved being in the water. A lot of people dislike opening their eyes underwater; I never had a problem with that. But water in my mouth triggered a panic attack.

I worked with multiple trainers, in Dublin, London, and New York. Two of the women I dated were lifeguards. Nothing worked. Either I gave up or they did. Several people suggested therapy. But while I may have an irrational fear of water, I have a perfectly rational dislike of shrinks.

The man who finally got me past my fears was Adrian Ginju, a former member of the Romanian Olympic swimming team and now a private coach in New York. No one had more tricks than Adrian. He kept throwing new exercises at me, new strokes, new challenges: now jump into the deep end, now do a somersault underwater, now pick up your goggles from the bottom of the pool. One day I swam a single stroke, took a breath, and swam another. I was so surprised that I nearly drowned.

After that I tried to swim every day until we left for our trip. It was summer in New York, the outdoor pools were open, and I went to the Asser Levy Pool near my home in the East Village, a clean, pretty, free pool where I was the only white guy under sixty.

It was sheer joy, even though I still couldn’t swim a length. My stroke is not very efficient, and scares small children. Like a man who learns to speak English late in life, I will always swim with an accent.

When we arrived last week in Koh Tao, a little island in the Gulf of Thailand, I had never in my life been in the sea without a lifejacket. I was planning to sit on a beach while Summer learned to dive, but I went out on the boat for a day and watching her learn convinced me to try.

Swimming is hard; scuba diving is easy. At the surface you inflate your jacket from your tank, after which you could fall asleep and still not drown. Underwater you breathe normally, fold your arms and kick very slowly, letting your fins do the work. Scuba divers are not athletes.

The tricky part is adjusting your depth by using your breathing: deep breath to go up, exhale to go down, shallow breaths to stay level. But even this is just yoga without the moving and stretching and downward-facing-dog stuff that makes yoga hard.

However, jumping into the ocean with a steel tank on your back and lead weights strapped around your waist is, for someone who only recently learned to swim, counter-intuitive. And for this reason, and because a small but very agitated part of my brain continued to report all through each of my dives that in case I hadn’t noticed, I was sixty feet underwater and wearing a weight belt, I am not a very graceful diver.

It is beautiful down there. Because we are recent arrivals and come only as tourists, the animals have no particular fear of humans. On land you can walk through a forest without ever seeing an animal; they all hide. But dive anywhere in South-East Asia - or just snorkel - and you can see and sometimes interact with dozens of species as you glide, erratically in my case, over coral landscapes.

For me, the strangest moment comes at the end of each dive. You don’t inflate your jacket and float upwards; you swim up very slowly, so that the air in your lungs doesn’t expand too fast and burst them. Again, it takes very little effort and you breathe normally throughout. But it feels as if you’re falling in slow motion out of the water and into the air. I will never forget this sensation.

***

When my father died three years ago, I took a few things back to New York to remember him by, including some home movies that he had shot on 8mm and transferred to videotape. Just before our wedding last year, I finally got round to transferring the movies again, this time to NSTC-format DVDs, so that I could watch them for the first time.

There was very little footage, an hour’s worth in total, and most of it was weddings and vacations. Film was expensive and we were not rich; going to the Canary Islands was really extravagant for us. I was hoping to see my parents when they were my age, but most of the time my dad was panning over some vista, filming his new car, or following a duck.

And then, completely unexpectedly, my dad appears, swimming alongside me in my life ring. We are in the Canary Islands; it’s the day I was pushed into the pool. I’d gotten back into the pool with him later on. And here’s me again, shaking hands with the boy who had pushed me in. His parents had made him apologize; my parents had made me accept.

Now, 25 years later, having finally learned to swim, having achieved what some Americans call ‘closure’, and with the wisdom that comes with maturity, I no longer wish to accept your apology, you little jerk.

"I hate New York," spat the fat old red-faced German squatting next to me. "I was there once. Once!" He raised his voice and his index finger. "For three hours. In 1984. Ach, I hated it."
 
I love the great cities, New York most of all. I love quiet little towns and villages. All the rest, the mid-size towns, the suburbs and exurbs, the provincial capitals, the regional hubs, the world centers of whistle-making, even the fast-growing, awkward adolescent metropolises that may one day seduce me, can all go to hell.

So I do not like you Chiang Mai, you mid-size town, you capital of northern Thailand, you regional center of wood-carving. I much prefer Bangkok.

This is interesting, because so many people had told me to expect the opposite. Chiang Mai is charming, restful, and picturesque, they said, while Bangkok is crowded, frenetic, and ugly.

True, but irrelevant.

Now perhaps I like small towns and villages because they are charming and restful and picturesque. Or perhaps it’s because I am genetically predisposed towards communities of no more than 120 people, the maximum size of a human settlement for all but the last ten thousand of our two million years on earth, and I cannot escape my nature.

Like monotheistic religions, bottle-feeding, and apple pie, but unlike homosexuality and drug use, cities are unnatural. So the love of cities can only be acquired and transmitted culturally. But that happens quite naturally, so to speak, because since Mesopotamia great cultures have been centred on great cities. 

Bangkok has some of these qualities. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha and Wat Pho would grace any city, and the less famous Vimanmek Palace is of all the palaces that I have seen, hypothetically, the one that I would most like to live in.

I love the layout of Bangkok. Radiating out from the old heart of the city are a dozen or so arterial roads that branch and divide into a network of fine alleys, almost all of them dead-ends. The narrow streets and lack of through traffic mean that Bangkok is made up of hundreds of little villages, some very quiet, each no more than a few hundred feet from a main road. It’s very confusing for the first-time visitor, but for this branching topology Bangkok has adopted a recursive address system, as logical as New York’s grid and much more flexible. A marvellous monorail runs east-west high above the city, and the central shopping area is linked by skywalks at the same level. If there’s anything in the world that you want to buy, you can walk from one soaring mall to the next for several miles without ever descending to street level. 

I loved taking a river taxi along the Chao Phraya, the river that marks the western boundary of Bangkok. The Hudson and the Thames have retired to riverside parks and receational boating, but the Chao Phraya still works for a living. River taxis are the best way to travel north or south, and there are many more warehouses than warehouse conversions. In the alleys along the waterfront there are dozens of small businesses with jerry-built piers.   

Thailand is a vibrant democracy - notwithstanding the strange status of the royal family and the authoritarian style of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra - and Bangkok is the center of that democracy. One hundred thousand people gathered here peacefully last week to demand Thaksin’s resignation. At a time when people elsewhere are rioting over cartoons, both the respect for free speech and the respectful way in which that right was exercised were an example to the world.

Yet I do not really love Bangkok. Most of the construction in the last twenty years has been haphazard and ugly, concrete boxes in the center and strip malls at the edges. The Chao Phraya is filthy and the canals - this city was once called the Venice of the East - are rimmed with slums and stink so badly that people travelling on them wear facemasks. And there is terrible poverty here, whole slum towns under some of the bridges.

But twenty years ago the Thames was biologically dead; now whales get lost in it. Twenty years ago New York was a dangerous place to live; now it’s the safest big town in America. Twenty years ago Thailand was still a third-world country; now it is a middle-income country. One day it will be rich, and one day the people of Bangkok, casting about for things to do with their money, will reclaim their river and canals and their architectural heritage, and throw great new buildings into the sky.

Chiang Mai, however, will still be a mid-size regional capital of wood-carving.

Dignity, dignity, above all else dignity.

At the Mae Sa Elephant Camp, near Chiang Mai in Thailand.

"Over there is Luang Prabang," said Doua, our guide. "It’s so noisy!"

We were standing on top of Phou Luang, the highest peak in the area. Straining to hear the sounds of the bustling metropolis of Luang Prabang in the valley below, I thought I could just make out the putt-putt of a long-tail boat on the Mekong.

Not many travelers come to the Hmong village of Phou Luang Tai: a few each month in the high season. You can only get here on foot, and it’s a five-hour walk from Luang Prabang that ends with a steep 700-meter climb, the kind that hurts your calves on the way up and your knees on the way down. On this day it was over 30°C (86°F), which didn’t help. But the last stretch was beautiful, as we rose above the treeline and saw hills rolling to the horizon, covered in virgin forest.

We arrived near sundown at a burnt clearing near the summit. Thirty-five thatched huts were scattered across the slope below us. We sat on a bench next to Doua’s parents’ house and watched the sky turn as red as the clay, then fade to a deep, deep blue. The moon was almost full. To the South, in the valley below, we could see the lights of Luang Prabang, a town of 25,000 people that to the Hmong seems vast and remote.

There’s no electricity in Phou Luang Tai and inside the house it was utterly dark. Hmong houses are simple: wooden walls, thatched roof, dirt floor. Typically eight or nine people live, eat, and sleep together in one room. The toilet is a bush out back and there’s a bucket of cold water and a plastic scoop in one corner if you feel like a shower.

Doua’s brothers and sisters have all left home, and his parents don’t know what to do with the extra space.

A clay pot was propped over an open fire that was also the main source of light. The family lit some candles and had a torch as well. We shared a meal of beef noodles that we’d carried up with us. People here can seldom afford to eat meat (they trade their pigs and chickens for clothes and tools) so the meal was much appreciated.

The Hmong are subsistence farmers. They grow corn to feed their animals and dry rice to feed themselves. These are the only crops that will grow at this altitude, on a thirty-degree slope, in an inch or two of soil. And to grow even these crops they have to slash and burn the forests. Each family must find a patch of land large enough to support them for one year. They strip the trees, plant and harvest their crops, and then have to leave the that patch fallow for at least three years. Next year, they start again. Doua’s parents are both in their sixties, and won’t be able to keep this up much longer.

Once the meal was over, it was time for sleep. Lao radio carries two hours of programming in the Hmong language each day and people in Phou Luang Tai can listen on battery-operated radios, but there are no other distractions. People here still go to bed and wake up with the sun. Doua’s parents gave us their own bed, a wooden platform in one corner with some blankets laid over it. 

We woke at dawn, and I slipped out the back door to wander around. Three pigs were blocking the front door, waiting patiently to be fed. A rooster was marching around the village like a town crier. Men and women were already heading out to roam the surrounding countryside, looking for suitable places to slash and burn. Doua’s parents fed the pigs, the chickens, a very small horse, and finally us.

Around 8 am we heard the slow beating of a gong. The Hmong are animists, and the village shaman was beginning his morning ritual. We stood outside the shaman’s hut respectfully and peered in. He was sitting on a table with a cloth wrapped round his head, chanting steadily and jangling bells that were strapped to his wrist. Behind him, a second man was beating a gong. Doua explained that the shaman was riding into the spirit world to beg favors on behalf of the villagers; his self-induced trance would last an hour or two. Then he too would head out in search of forest to burn. No surplus here to pay for a layabout priest.

Nearby, Doua pointed to a hut with leaves hanging over its front door, a sign that the house was taboo. Probably because of an illness, the shaman had decreed that no-one should leave or enter the house for a week. (Quarantine; a good idea in the case of minor illnesses, successful enough to convince everyone - including the shaman - that the shaman knows what he is talking about.)

We walked through the rest of the village and saw people weaving baskets by hand, mending clothes, grooming a cock to lure a few wild hens.   

At the far end of the village, we came to the primary school, a shack about the same size as one of the Hmong houses with two blackboards and some very beat-up old benches.

As we walked up, there were fifty schoolkids playing outside. They will spend most of their lives in that shack, all ages in one classroom with one teacher and three or four books between them. Their chances are not good. Doua grew up in the same classroom, also with 50 other kids. Every year a few more dropped out. He was one of only two to finish high school.

Doua told us that many of these children have not left the village yet; they are too young to go with their parents. All they know of Luang Prabang are the ghostly lights in the valley below. They have no TV or internet, few books and magazines, only the two hours of Hmong radio to connect them to the outside world. They were both excited and afraid of us, as you can tell from the expressions on their faces in the photo above. One little girl burst out crying and would not stop.

Some westerners have a very romantic idea of peasant life. The Hmong don’t. For a thousand years, people in South-East Asia have dreamt of being ‘rescued from the mud’: getting work as a bureaucrat, a monk, a concubine, anything but toiling in a rice field. As far as most people in Phou Luang Tai are concerned, development can’t come fast enough.

Ironically, environmental activists feel the same, but for a different reason. Forests act like reservoirs, soaking up water in the rainy season and releasing it slowly during the dry season. Burn them down and you alternate between floods and droughts. In the worst cases, as in America during the Depression, the topsoil dries out completely and blows away. Things are not yet that serious in Laos, but river levels are falling and habitats are being lost. The Lao government and its international sponsors want to change the Hmong way of life, resettle the people to the cities, and restore the forest.

In ten years Phou Luang Tai will probably be gone. And though the pictures are pretty, and it was a privilege to come here, and even though I know that many of the people here will go from rural poverty to urban poverty, few will be truly sorry to see this little village die.

More photos from our visit here.

Phou Luang Tai: N19°59.976′ E102°08.899′ Z1023m