A woman is like a jar of ghee,
A man is like a hot charcoal.
So a wise man should not keep the two together.– The Hitopadesha
Chris
I’ve been to America
not South America
I’ve not been to South Africa
or Africa …
Red beaded braided hair
Daniella
Show us your ring
You mean like this?
bend over
Throwing the yarrow stalks
before Guanjin
At the Burmese border. Half of us are paying 250 baht for the privilege of crossing. I can’t see the point myself.
For virtually the first time this trip, I feel a little hungry. I was going to have an ice-cream, but Lien persuaded me it’d be bad for my sore throat. Dunno, though.
Bugger it. Bought a chocky ice-cream.
That triggered an old lady beggar to come up and start hassling me. I didn’t give her anything, though. I don’t like being poked and prodded.
“People are extraordinarily rude today,” said Caroline earlier, after our run-in with the leathery Englishwoman + statuesque daughter who accosted us, begging for a lift to the frontier. “‘Is that a public bus? Can we go with you?’ rather than, ‘Would it possibly be conceivable for you to dream of allowing us to …?’”
Agreed to take a picture of a guy with his trophy girlfriend: young, svelte Asian girl in tight red top and black trousers; older Anglophone greyhead (50’s?) in black jeans and blue shirt. She looks peevish; he happy. One invents little scenarios in one’s head.
The monks here almost never look cheerful. They scowl or look sullen or blank – especially the ones in the slightly muddier orange robes coming over from Burma (Myanmar). A frontier is a strange place. The Zone. Like the apotheosis of tourist transience, only on a permanent basis. The DMZ.
Time for more wandering. I’m getting sunburnt, I fear. They’re playing the theme from Indiana Jones in the tuk-tuk [= cheap-cheap] taxi-rank. Some tourist behind me is recording his own quacking voice on a camcorder.
Watched a little fender-bender in the car-park. Desultory movements of the mind.
A woman comes out of a shop with a plastic chair for me to sit on. Good business, no doubt, but nevertheless exceptionally considerate of her, I thought.
Darren bargaining for a jacket.
Vendor: “300”
Darren: “100”
V: “[snort] – 280”
D [to Tracy]: “She’s not serious if she won’t come down by 50”
If free scope is granted to her,
Slavery sits on the head– The Hitopadesha
Mekong Sunset
Lines of inundation
sap the fields
dream landscape
water-towers
like Martian war-machines
Lao-Burmese Border
I was in Saigon
waiting for a mission
last seen at a toilet-stop
in Northern Thailand
bound for Vientiane
