Parting Shot (Air Jordan No More)

It's surreal posting this possibly last post here whilst in transit at Dubai, as we prepare for re-entry, reverse-culture shock and wondering how our lives will be like when as we head back home. Accessing Internet and Blogspot in Ethiopia had been nothing short of difficult, thus the dire lack of posts in the past few weeks. But here's something we composed almost 2 months back after a harrowing bus ride in Tanzania. And posting it now only as we felt our immediate family would gravely worry for our safety. Enjoy the ride!

10 Jun 2009:
Our recent bus ride from Tanzania’s “Air Jordan” company taught us some things. We learnt never to buy another ticket from this bus company…ever again, the lucrative business of packing as many passengers as possible in a bus to maximize profits, and how to exhale in relief and laugh together with the conductor even as a burning smell pervades the air after the loud bang.

The bus wasn’t exactly the Grassland-type we Singaporeans were used to. Impressive how they managed to screw 60+ seats into a typical 40-seater, and recreate a rattling C-130 aircraft fuselage atmosphere as the vehicle tore down the tarmac. Then came the bang, a dull continuous whirr, a tilt in the centre of gravity, and everyone seemed to start praying. Like a bad joke, velocity was still maintained as we coincidentally hit a downslope. Then Air Jordan finally ground to a stop.



We thought the vehicle had lost a full wheel so thankfully the rim’s still intact. But this sight of the frilly remnants of a blown tyre was a sight to behold. Everyone poured of Air Jordan to de-stress and moan whilst a passing group of Maasai natives snickered at our plight. Impressively, the 3 conductors on-board whipped out a (crappy) spare tyre, swapped it with a hind-wheel and changed the blown front tyre in quite a jiffy. So in no time, our unrepentant driver was back to tearing down the road again, nerves undeterred. Micheal Jordan would be proud of his namesake.

Parting Shot - 2 pictures of many overturned vehicles we witnessed during our road travels in Africa. Makes you wish all buses have seatbelts! (if they ever work at all)

Brief Update From Ethiopia

Our apologies if you've been checking our blog for updates but found none in the past 3 weeks+. Yes we're both still safe! It's the dire lack of electricity and our engagement with Kitega Community Centre that didn't allow us to post anything. For our friends not on Facebook, do check out our volunteering experience at this <a href="http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=126300&id=746514497">link</a>.

 

We now find ourselves in Ethiopia, our last country before heading back to Singapore in a few weeks' time. This is a vastly different country from Tanzania and Uganda which we traversed through. An ancient Christian nation poorly understood by outsiders (including us), burdened with the dubious honor of 3rd last in UN's HDI index, and suffering from an external image crisis that usually invokes the infamous photograph of a vulture waiting to pounce on a starving girl.

 

But our travel guide rightly stated that Ethiopia's yet safe from violent crime despite the outright-visible crippling poverty we see on the streets, full of treasures (including the biblical Ark of the Covenant), and a fascinatingly foreign country to visit. Whenever electricity permits, will post more updates soon!

Begging Makes You Richer

Met John yesterday on the streets of Nansio when I was out alone buying breakfast. An stout man of imposing stature, he chatted me up amidst my brisk pace, even as I was wary of his intentions. But compassion gave way. John was simply looking for a job and badgered me as he felt I could help. But I felt helpless. Lamentable how decent men like John were looking to work for decent wages, but shortchanged due to lack of employment opportunities. My job in NCSS identifies this as a “service gap” and here in Tanzania, it’ll take years of social enterprise and state intervention in job-creation before such needs can be met.

This contrasts with a story we heard from Ron Rieckenberg whom we met in Moshi town 2 weeks back. An American sinking his roots in Tanzania after marrying a local and immersing himself in NGO-work here, he told us how some beggars were raking in much more money daily as compared to the sweating street vendors peddling their wares, or women who had to endure long dusty walks from their villages everyday to sell fruits or firewood in town. Thus the moral dilemma of whether to buy something you don’t need from a street vendor harassing you for a sale, or contributing to the possible pile of a blind man or hapless-looking mother. But since it’s not a zero sum, probably a bit of and to both.

Also better managing my struggle with our roles here in Africa. On one hand, you feel real guilty spending big tourist bucks when you know your nearby neighbour is living on less than a dollar a day. On the other, throwing yourself fully to live/eat like the locals or taking the full plunge to work in full-time development work in Africa is a drastic decision that requires a clear calling. It’s telling how most of the foreigners we met so far are involved somehow in NGO work. Maybe our next stop in Uganda tomorrow in a formal volunteering role will help us better understand what we can or cannot do, here in Africa.

Longcut

So we arrived in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, with no agenda except to get to Kampala in Uganda for a short volunteering stint. I notice that a lot of the decisions we make don’t have a lot of logical backing, but anyway in this case we thought it would be ‘fun’ to overland up to Uganda instead of taking the two hour flight. So its taken 17 days and we are not actually there yet….

Total bus rides: 3, 27 hours
Total boat rides: 3, 16 hours
Total recovery days (from the various forms of transport):5
Tours/excursions: 3 days

One good thing about doing it this way is (no, don’t believe that hype about ‘getting to meet and know the locals’ – that only happens if you really live and work with them), that each consecutive place we’ve visited seems to be getting better and better. Maybe we are finally getting ourselves off the track beaten by hoardes of safari going muzungu (tourists) and its getting quieter.

We have just washed up on the shore of Lake Victoria at a place called Bukoba this morning after an overnight boat crossing from another port city called Mwanza. It was looking to be a sad ride because we did not manage to get any sleeping berths and were expecting to sit exhaustedly amongst piles of cargo for the night. But a crew officer came up to us and offered us his cabin (for a price) which we joyously accepted. We felt a bit guilty for the other people who had to sit all night but it didn’t last that long – cos we went to sleep. Willy says that this boat experience was very colonial (catch phrase for Africa) in that the rich foreigners were in first class and the poor locals were in third class and there was a divider between them. I thought it was a lot like Titanic. Were pretty impressed by the navigational system though, and we didn’t hit any rocks so that was good. Prayed pretty hard though. A ferry in 1996 that sank with 1000 people had stopped passenger ferry traffic between Tanzania and Uganda.

Paranoia

For Willy, this last travel phase of Africa had unfortunately imposed a recent cloud of paranoia raining down on his mind wherever we walk. It seemed most of the people we meet were either trying to hard-sell us something, or making innocuous remarks that could be construed as incendiary to elicit some response. Advice from the hotel staff at Dar Es Salaam to never trust anyone on the street who claims to know you entrenched firmly.

Our typical response was simply to ignore and continue with a brisk walk. But the paranoia compounds. Simply put, I don’t trust anyone on the street anymore, verging on anticipating a robbery anytime a stranger approaches us. Hardly a healthy perspective to travel with. Like the young chap yesterday who had strike up a conversation with us on the street and seemed genuinely curious and friendly, until he started asking for our mobile numbers. A warning on phone charge fraud buzzed loudly in my mind immediately.

Frankly, I detest this inherent built-up of paranoia. Whatever happened to the meeting of minds between strangers? Or getting to know the locals’ stories and perspectives? Yet all that filled my mind was the image of these two Asians sticking out like sore thumbs among the Africans, holding a neon “Rob Me!” advertisement sign. It’s a disgusting perspective since I’m demonizing people who are just out to sell something and make a decent living. Yet it’s this inevitable hazard of being tourists in this part of the world, vastly different if we happen to be working as locals. A certain degree of common-sense caution still needs to be maintained at all times, but wisdom and discernment is currently elusive, preventing me from fully embracing Africa.

A Taste Of Tanzania

Apologies for the radio silence since our last post of almost 2 weeks back – it had been quite a flurry hauling ourselves into Africa. We learnt recently about a bureaucratic requirement to possess an onward/return ticket before flying into Africa and due to our usual lack of planning (suffering from some travel fatigue), it’s all up to prayer as usual. So indeed it was a huge sigh of relief when the immigration officials at Tanzania’s Dar Es Salaam airport waved us through!


For Willy, Tanzania floods back his memories of India – the chaos and clamour of Bangalore, the absence of sane urban planning, the instinct that very same social problems plaguing a developing country stem from the greed and fall of man. But Tanzania has its own unique charms and pitfalls. Such as witnessing two overturned vehicles languishing at the side of the road as our trusty bus driver maneuvers past, and having an ATM officially launched by the Minister of Finance. Don’t take it that we’re poking fun at Tanzania, just that such occurrences are simply foreign to us.

For the past 5 days, we have parked ourselves in the town of Moshi, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. And no we’re not climbing the mountain, out of sheer distrust of our fitness level and sympathy for our limp wallet. Though some people we’ve met lamented about the loss in tourist dollars that’s affecting the entire town. Everyone from the mountaineering porter to the provision shopkeeper is taking a hit from the global economic downturn. From the excellent array of local English newspapers we’ve read, the apparent unfavorable weather affecting crop yields and lack of machinery for farmlands can only exacerbate the pain.

It’s also somewhat true when our guidebook stated that people go to Africa to confirm what they already have in their heads, and fail to see what’s in front of them. No, Africa’s not a mere country, and Africa’s not all about poverty, AIDs and safaris. It’s a diverse continent brimming with promise and hope, of hardworking people trying to make a decent living. Just like you and me. For our days ahead, we’re praying hard for wisdom to understand and appreciate the capacity of this continent, and refrain from stereotyping.

Three Sandwiches and a Pack of Chips

A recent encounter with a mother & child in Bulgaria reinforced our view of how little we knew of each country and its people, being transient travelers on a schedule. Indeed the sights and sounds on touristy circuits were a woeful way of peering into each country’s soul and problems. No tourist bureau would advertise their country’s social problems, or like Bosnia, their scarred war history. And it was typical how it was transportation trouble we got into that day that this chance encounter occurred.

In our sub-consciousness, weekdays had blended into weekends. And so we can only blame ourselves when the agent’s office in Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria) was closed when we tried buying sleeper train tickets on a Saturday afternoon. Scrambles abound, we opted for the only viable alternative of neck-breaking overnight bus ride.

She couldn’t speak our language, and we couldn’t speak Bulgarian too. But her hand-signs were universally unmistakable. Gesturing to her mouth in a feeding motion and pointing to the boy beside her, the mother asked for money/something to eat. Now we’ve heard stories of syndicated begging and even of women “renting” babies out to use them as “begging collateral”. So we offered her our packed dinner instead – pizza (quite tasty) leftover from lunch. The mother inspected the food, thanked us, and walked away.

But kudos to her persistence. She came repeatedly even after that (we confess that it does get annoying) so Willy took her to the nearby food kiosk and paid for her selection of three sandwiches and a pack of chips. Interestingly, she re-appeared beside us shortly and starting deliberately eating the sandwiches together with the boy, right in front of us. We wondered if that was to show us that they were bona fide hungry and appreciated the food we got them. But language did pose a big barrier as she just kept nodding and smiling when we asked and gestured numbers about the boy’s age.

Then they did something pretty heartwarming. When we boarded our bus and it stalled for 15 minutes before leaving (driver’s smoke break), they appeared beside our bus and starting waving goodbye, with the boy making a whole range of funny faces, laughing away, being swung around by his mother. For a full 15 minutes. We could only keep waving back, but not knowing where they live, where they get their next meal, or basically their life stories. Neither do we understand if there’s adequate or any social support in Bulgaria for the poor, or if these are the disadvantaged Roma people who drift around.

Spying On Your Neighbour

We hear that some of you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. – 2 Thessalonians 3:11

Quite interesting how the devotional yesterday reminded me of a conversation with Simona, our apartment-mate here in Bucharest. We had been living in the ministry apartment and just 2 weeks’ back, there was a mission team of 12 pax from Idaho (USA) staying over for a week. A bunch of people in a confined space naturally entailed a higher noise level, and Simona shared with us regarding the “spying neighbour”.

This was a retiree who had lived through the communist regime where a full third of citizens were spying on the other two-thirds. Apparently you can’t even trust your own siblings and relatives. One wrong comment could get you placed on the dissident list, and God knows what would happen to you thereafter.

So our neighbour got real curious about the Idaho team and kept making a few excuses trying to enter the apartment to poke around. She then started chatting up the apartment block’s committee chairman (her good friend) and he started to take some action against these “noisy foreigners who might be a threat/nuisance to the residents” by pasting some notice on our door, and publishing a list of number of occupants per apartment at the lift landing. (Our apartment was listed as having 25 pax, as compared to the usual 2-4 pax per apartment)

Final straw came when they called the police in to gain official access into our apartment, wanting to see what’s going on. Our apartment’s owner (the missionaries whom we were volunteering for) finally got to know about the nonsense and stepped in to clarify. Pretty surreal tale of the communist hangover that still pervades parts of the society in the ex-communist bloc countries. Makes you wonder sometimes what information your neighbour (or country’s authorities) keep on you.

Camp Living Waters

After our recent 1-week stint at Camp Living Waters, we finally learnt to appreciate the toughness and tenacity of the (mostly foreign) construction workers toiling away to build up the concrete jungle that is Singapore. And I tell you my friends – handling heavy machinery is no joke. One wrong move and there goes your fingers. We also learnt much more about the plight of orphans here in Romania.


It is at this narrow strip of land 3-4 hours away from Bucharest, where kids from a state institution gather annually for summer camps run by some missionaries. Check out the website of Stepping Forward Romania for more information. The summer camps don’t run until July, so our volunteer work entailed the building of the camp’s tractor shed and slicing up logs. Not extremely fun given the moody weather that ranges from scorching hot, chilly wind to even a hailstorm that disrupted work. But admittedly, we learnt so much more about woodworks than we ever had. Enough to put together a simple birdhouse, but never ask us to build your house from scratch. We assure you won’t have a good night’s rest in it, staring at the roof.

We also managed to visit the kids at the state orphanage. It’s a terrible place for kids to grow up in – no adult role models, lack of discipline, some suffer from inadequate nutrition (literally, the look of stunted growth) and most of these abandoned children are frankly in a mess. Cami Mather from Stepping Forward Romania tells us that it’s not illegal in Romania to abandon babies/children, and that’s what many irresponsible or underaged parents do. Hospitals overflow with them, some lie in the same cot for almost a year since they got dumped there, not given names, and only getting identity papers (ie documentation) when they reach the age of 2. An awful way to grow up is an understatement.

The emotionally-deprived kids at the orphanage we visited (8-14) are desperate for hugs given to them by visitors, and while beautiful and completely heart melting, most of them don’t know how to react, play, cooperate, concentrate, or keep boundaries. As they grow into puberty, there is a difference in appearance and the neglect is actually apparent on their faces and physical bodies.

It not just a money thing, but policy factors weigh in heavily. The planning ramifications of Romania’s recent dictator Ceausescu (read more on this BBC link) and the pervasiveness of poverty, destructive beliefs, and low moral and ethical codes compound the problem. The only answer is love. Consistent, unconditional, long term love. The children don’t need that much material stuff. But like all children universally, they need love so much they can die from lack of it. Our hearts thus go out to those who work with them in love, and to those brave and selfless enough to adopt abandoned or even disabled kids. No wonder we call God’s agape love as amazing. His grace flows even as we people are a real messed-up bunch.

Pyramid Hunting

Our apologies for not blogging as much as we’d like. We’ve come to realize that our style of travelling in a general direction necessitates much last-minute sourcing of transport links and accommodation, and that sucks up time when we use a computer. That’s why we value books quite a bit – those thick ones that you can digest on long train rides, and inevitably, make our bagpacks look ridiculously big.

Based on some local advice, we headed out of Sarajevo to the little town of Visoko where some disputed pyramids lay. We’re certainly not experts in archeology. Merely curious tourists looking entirely foreign (being Asian/Chinese) in a small town where the pyramid saga seemed out of fashion, as evidenced by their incredulous looks and the bus conductor leading the chorus of laughter about 2 silly Asian tourists coming halfway round the world to see a slanty hill (we think).

The hillock looked nothing special. Just pretty pyramid-like from a distant and from satellite close-ups. Some excavations have revealed tunnel entrances and concrete-like slabs of stuff, but we’re not blogging about this. Check out this link to read more. What made our day a misadventure was how this stupid sign turned our 200m walk into a 1hr+ cruel uphill trek to the top of the pyramid only to find some obscure castle ruins and woolly sheep. But despite shivering in the wind, we were thankful how God kept the thunderclouds in the distant from pouring on us or sending us some sizzling bolts at the top.

Quite a bit of exercise we weren’t ready for, we confess. And by the time we descended and got redirected uphill again to the correct excavation site, it wasn’t so fun anymore. It’s like a slab of abandoned concrete left there by Stalin or Slobodan Milosevic when they left in a hurry. However we sought comfort in oddly witnessing a peacock displaying all its feathers near the road, and having a super nice security guard bring us through the underground tunnels connecting the pyramids, amidst a surreal landscape of grimy sheared sheep wool scattered on the grounds of abandoned factories.

Anyway please never come to Bosnia simply to visit these pyramids. It’s a beautiful yet recently wounded country that can offer so much more. We’ve also uploaded more pictures of Bosnia and Croatia on Facebook whenever we have more pictures to share, instead of stories. Please pray for us in our week ahead, as we head out to the countryside of Romania trying to be helpful in building a campsite for the orphans here.

Hungary Hot Springs

We’re loving the hot spring experience in Hungary, a country supposedly covering an deep underground reservoir of hot water. Similar to Japan, the locals have been enjoying the springs for centuries for their supposed curative aspects and spa towns dot the map in Eastern Europe. Not too sure about the health benefits, the closest thing we’ve experienced is sunburn (the weather’s been wonderful lately)


Right now staying in a tiny spa village called Heviz. The whole development is based around ‘the largest biologically active, natural, peat-mud thermal lake of volcanic origin in the world’ (I don’t understand all of that so though I better quote it.) (I heard its mildly radioactive as well) Anyway, it’s a relatively enormous 4.4ha pond 38meters deep that’s warm summer and winter (though winter can’t be much fun – its only the temperature of a swimming pool in Singapore, not at all like a hot bath.) It is tremendous fun though, its like getting good exercise while having soak. Because if you don’t swim you would drown or get too cold.

Budapest (we love that city!) is also full of hot springs and there are thermal baths spread throughout the city. Went to a famous one which had more pools than we could count, indoor and outdoor, all ranging from 16 deg to 38 deg (Celcius), and numerous saunas- wet, dry, hot, hotter, and with strange coloured lights. No slides and stuff, but a few bubble jet sprays and a whirlpool.

Differences from Japan: no one soaks in temperatures of 45-50degrees here, all the bathers wear swimsuits, and the spas are big institutional facilities (from communist times) with people in white coats and medical apparatus. Inside comment to my family (Sharon’s): I learnt that ‘Therme’ is a legitimate word and basically means hot spring. I think its Te-ru-me that actually has no meaning!!

Seven Days Of Work

A quick closure of our WWOOFing experience for this entry, as we’ll be loading more pictures on Facebook soon.

Firstly, to properly introduce our hosts. Lukas and Klara Hadasovi had come a long way since their urbanite lifestyles in Prague, to their current ideal of a mostly self-sustaining 20-hectare farm in a rural part of Czech Republic, near the Polish border. A non-commercial outfit, their 3 dairy cows and 8 chickens produce enough to feed their family of six. You can say they’re dreamers. But certainly not a dream for everyone, lovely as it sounds, beautiful are their fields and 4 children. Took them many years of musing solitude before they painstakingly self-learnt how to run a farm, and much trial and error before their homemade food taste scrumptious.

There’s not much of a routine here except to milk the cows, feed hay to the 2 horses, and for Klara to home-school her kids for one fidgety hour. So our work gets pretty varied – Chopping/burning fir-wood, fixing up fences, transplanting seed(lings), shoveling compost, attempting to help with cooking or babysitting etc. Gets tough sometimes but certainly good exercise for us both!

We learnt quite a fair bit too from our daily interaction with the Hadasovis. Like the rest of the ex-communist satellite countries, nobody in Czech Republic likes Russia. Parenting also seem to be a common thread running through our travels as people have been talking to us about a variety of parenting issues. In this farm with 4 children under the age of ten, the discussion centered on freedom and space for children to play, including ideals on safety (like internalizing in children awareness through experience for heights, hot surfaces, sharp objects etc and thereby allowing the parents to trust and leave them largely unattended), training them not to seek attention cry over cuts and bruises (We were very impressed), spending family time, etc.

We also really enjoyed listening from them about nutrition (on natural versus chemical laden), ecological sustainability, and how slower is better than faster, handmade is better than factory produced, poorer is better than richer – it was definitely a refreshing change from urban life. The Hadasovis aim to be fully self sustaining rather than selling their organic products or having a small homespun businesses to make money. We thought that was an interesting paradigm shift.

Besides the philosophy discussions, we learned the multiple uses of milk including butter, cheese (in 7 days Sharon saw Feta, Mozarella, yogurt cheese, cottage cheese, hard cheese, and cheese steaks being made!), curd, yogurt, and cream. We ground raw wheat for bread, pasta, dumplings, pancakes. We made mayonnaise. Klara makes supermarket bought ingredients look like instant food: before use, raw wheat needs to be ground and sifted. Milk needs to be born, fed, de-cowed (‘milked’), filtered, and pasteurized to 65 degrees. Somewhat similar process for eggs. Butter needs to go through the ‘milk’ process then go through several further steps. Tea is gathered, dried and steeped in boiling water. One gets the idea. We do some of these steps while actually preparing meals.

So all these and much more, as we venture towards our travelling phase based on volunteering opportunities around. :)

Hadasovi Farm

Such surreal experiences we are having WWOOF-ing here at Hadasovi Farm in Czech Republic! Just a quick blog on this as we should get to work soon:


- Sleeping in a firelit teepee under the moonlight out in the open
- Eating homemade organic food everyday like cheese, bread, mayo, tea and various other dairy products
- Trying unsuccessfully to be a farmer like helping out to chop firewood, milk the cows, transplanting seedlings etc
- Learning about the Czech way of life. politics, history, and snippets of parenting from the Hadasovis who let their 4 children run all over the farm and playing with the 3 cows, 2 horses and various animals.

Well just 2 pictures to show it all first, will upload more next time! Meantime read more about their farm at this link.

GeoCaching & Taxi Strike

What an excellent game Uncle Alan introduced to us recently! It’s called Geocaching, involving enthusiasts using GPS coordinates to track down concealed boxes of little treasures hidden by other Geocachers. It really puts in some wee-fun into simply hiking or a walk in the numerous parks around UK.

Some Geocaches are even brazenly placed in public areas such as train stations hidden from the prying eyes of “muggles” – non-Geocachers”, using techniques such as magnets behind phone booths. This necessarily involves a security risk though, for Geocaches in such locations as be easily mistaken for bombs. Anyway I’m inspired enough to consider getting a GPS device and jump on the bandwagon!

In other news, we encountered our first union strike in Europe. Thank goodness the whole of Dublin didn’t shutdown. We simply found the taxi stand deserted as most taxi drivers went on strike, campaigning for a cap on issued taxi licenses that had flooded the city, and eating into their earnings. We were lucky enough to source a vehicle eventually through the good people at the airport customer service.

This is apparently a non-official strike which isn’t synchronized between the 3 taxi unions, and not all taxi drivers are obligated to participate in. That’s what we learnt from our driver when we met him at the customer service counter. I wonder if he’ll get mobbed by other tourists or heckled by fellow striking taxi drivers if we met him at the taxi stand instead. So from a pragmatic point of view, it’s probably not such a bad thing that our unions are Singapore are pretty much toothless. But then again, if you really need to fight for fair wages if you’re exploited, who can you actually turn to?

Community Engagement

For someone like me involved in the community sector, it's been a real inspiration witnessing how the Western societies engage their citizens and implement everyday social policies.


Learnt yesterday in Belfast that they have a coastal rescue team comprised entirely of volunteers responding to emergency distress calls. That's a tough job, running out to sea in the middle of the freezing night if it happens so, hauling people or vessels to safety. Then during church service today, noticed an interpreter standing in front of the congregation using sign language to translate the whole sermon for some hearing-impaired attendees. Fair-trade products also dot the landscape as choices open up for the everyday consumer to choose products that give a fair return to third-world producers.

We've also been real blessed experiencing excellent hospitality during our stay with the Dormans here in Belfast. And you somehow pick up snippets of local civic consciousness from everyday conversations. Like Uncle Alan casually mentioning about "too much carbon emissions" when someone else was rattling about flying around in airplanes. And how it seems instinctive to bring out a plastic bag and pick up your dog's poo when we walk around with Dusty the lovely madcap dog. Certainly helps that there're countless bins in the parks designated for dog poo too.

Recently in Vilnius, Lithuania, came across some sturdy recycling bins designed to prevent pilferage. I've learnt it's a problem plaguing Singapore as the 'recycling aunties' tend to break the locks and dig out aluminum cans/paper from the badly-secured recycling bins put up by NEA and SembCorp, even as it's not feasible prosecuting them since it's about their economic survival.

It's thus with both admiration and humility that I realise how much more Singapore can improve in terms of community engagement, social policies, and even simple graciousness to our neighbours, as we clamour to be the top dog only in the usual measures of worldly success. It'll be lovely to imagine the day when foreigners visit our country and "world-conscious citizens" is the first impression they have of Singaporeans.

Learning About Charity

I'm different from my wife when it comes to being charitable. Knowledge and some experience of syndicated begging in India had instilled a certain prudent consideration in me before giving. If in doubt, always try to verify. And if possible, give to organisations that can better channel the funds to worthy programmes, rather than to individuals.

The people asking for money outside the Orthodox churches in Russia was my first lesson. As of most things/people in Russia, I was wary of them. But my wife's simple logic won me over - they indeed look somewhat homeless, destitute and harmless. As there's no easy way of verifying if they're bona fide, why not just give openly, trusting that they'll put the money to good use?

So when Sasha approached us in Vilnius, Lithuania, 2 days back, my second lesson commenced. In a slightly pained and hysterical manner bordering on tears, the young man from Kalinigrad, Russia, implored us for some money to get his leg fixed at the hospital. While he declined our invitation to join us for dinner, he proceeded to show us his malady - a dark-looking patch of scaly skin that hints of clogged blood vessels. Truly not something you apply lotion on and hope it'll dissipate. Especially in freezing winter.

So we prayed for him and gave him a bunch of roubles we still had, supposedly sufficient to his asking. But some questions still bugged me thereafter. What is he doing here in Lithuania and why did he run out of money? Why does he insist on visiting a particular hospital somewhere else but not here in Vilnius, even as we offered to? These questions went unanswered during our brief encounter with Sasha. Indeed we wish him well and will continue to pray for his well-being. For God knows the heart of each man including mine, and it's better to be a generous fool rather than a miserly sage. Like faith, charity can be more easily observed by acting upon it rather than musing.

Soviet Cakes

Our previous B&B host Diga, told us that there were exactly three types of cake under the soviet occupation and they were pink, green and blue in colour. The cakes had a specific recipe and required exact proportions of each ingredient. She told me that there were people checking on these bakeries and at the time of each check the cakes were made to the exact specifications. Somehow everyone knew when the checks would be. In between bakery check days, the cakes tended to be devoid of a one or more of the ingredients…
But no one made different cakes. No one tried a new recipe. Somehow I found this the most tragic and concise description of communism in daily life.

Zucchini

I was delighted to find a zucchini the other day in the supermarket. Not because I knew what to do with it but because it didn’t look too big for us to eat... Cut it, cooked it, and had Willy try it:

S: “How did you like the zucchini?”
~long pause~
W: “It tastes alien”
S: “So I take it you don’t like it?”
W: “No, no.. I need some time to get used to it”

So the next day, we bought zucchini again. It was still the only vegetable around the right size. Well, there were two other vegetables that were smallish enough, and I didn’t even know what these ones were called, so got them as well.

We cooked them into a sort of stew which I thought was great.
W: “It still tastes foreign… but its growing on me”

There’s probably a moral of this story!
Willy says he is storing up KFC credits.

The folly of newlywed husbands to be slightly too enthusiastic about their wives’ cooking.

Neighbours

Most Singaporeans, esp the guys, should be familiar with the flashing green man on TV, accompanied by mobilization code words that sound as cryptic as Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream flavors. Your heart leaps a bit whenever you don’t recognize any of them. And thank God my generation has never fought a war. I hear it’s dirty business.

Good riddance though if you’re a Latvian soldier in the late 20th century. Latvia (like the other 2 Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania) has an unenviable geography of being sandwiched like a pawn between Nazi Germany and Soviet USSR. So the Latvian solder gets sucked into fighting losing battles against their aggressors, and incorporated into the victors’ armies engaged in charmless wars embroiled in pathetic excuses for invasion.

After decades of Soviet oppression, it’s small wonder that Latvians hate Russia openly and intensely after their independence in 1991, though apparently not Germany these days since Latvia’s now part of EU and NATO. For example, the mother of our B&B host Diga hates Russia to the core for reasons too many to list, and not just because the Soviets got her husband Siberia-bound to shiver there for a few years. He came back a changed and broken man, a contributing factor to a dysfunctional family.


Freedom Monument in Riga, capital of Latvia

So, who your neighbours are matter, especially if they’re aspiring empire builders. I’m glad Singapore’s neighbours are generally friendly – the kind that occasionally rambles about cutting off water-supply, or sends us a yearly dose of haze from over-smoking. If that flashing green man on TV really mobilizes me, I know it’s usually not to fight a real war against marauding neighbours. And if the whole world really listens to Jesus about loving his neighbour as himself (Mark 12:31), the Ministers for Defence all over will need to start buying presents instead of missiles this Christmas.

That Thing About Hospitality (2)

Can’t say this enough – we’ve lots to learn about hospitality from Uncle Alex & Aunty Dina. As our ‘Singaporean-ised” church friends who just shifted back to Russia, they basically opened up their house and their lives to us and we’re truly grateful.

Honestly, the furthest I can foresee as a host is having overseas friends sleep in my house’s guestroom (if there’s one) or on the couch if they don’t mind. To have them sleep in a common (bed)room with me and my wife….that’s a bit too much. But that’s what Alex and Dina did! It was mind-blowing.

We didn’t expect them to:
- Pick us up at the train station
- Bring us back to their house for the night after they deemed the hostel we booked undesirable.
- Cook healthy and hearty Russian breakfasts, lunches and dinners for us
- Spend a whole morning scanning websites and maps for decent hotels, then calling a whole bunch of them
- Give us a local mobile phone so that we can call them for any emergencies and update them on our whereabouts
- Give us each a stored-value Metro card so that we can zip around the magnificent Moscow subway

In fact, we weren’t so sure how to take all these in. That’s when we started learning some lessons on how to receive. Now Alex and Dina did many more things for us than that, and whenever we thanked them, they reminded us to thank the Lord instead. Aptly so! Indeed, the only way we can repay them and all our other blessings from God is to pay it forward.

That Thing About Hospitality (1)

It’s not that I (Willy) abhor Russia. And it’s not that Latvia is the friendliest country in the world. But Russia’s now a memorable country for having generally inhospitable and unfriendly people. Indeed not all Russians look like sour lemons though. We were real blessed to have Uncle Alex & Uncle Dina, friends from our church, looking out for and taking care of us like their kids for the past week in Moscow. Thank you both!! :)

The telling contrast between Russia and Latvia was revealed during our train ride from Moscow to Riga. The train timetables were listed in English! (The end of trying to decipher Russian Cyrillic) Then the Latvian carriage attendants stunned us with a hot cup of tea each without expectations of payment. We were so thrilled everytime we saw another smile or display in English.

While the Russian immigration officers later collected passports in a wooden tray and disappeared to probably shred them, the Latvian ones came by with a mini-laptop, chops and a smile. OK, the latter also disappeared with our passports, but that’s likely to check the authenticity of our Blaring Red Book since few Singaporeans cross this land border.


Alright I shall cease to be a sour lemon here. Russia’s still a fascinating place to visit, but just don’t expect to be treated like a king unless you stay at Hilton everyday. To be fair, we’re probably a spoilt bunch of Singaporeans expecting service standards if we’re paying customers. The Russians apparently don’t know how to deliver this standard simply because they have not experienced it themselves (read this somewhere). Frankly, I feel for them. So if you plan to visit this rugged country steeped in history and unsustainable industrialization, come with a smile and keep it on your face till your Russian counterpart gives up and decide to help you.

Part 2 on Russians (Sharon)

This excerpt from Lonely Planet guidebook (LP) seems very true and made me rethink my impressions: “On a personal level, Russians have a reputation of being dour, depressed and unfriendly. In fact, most Russians are anything but, yet find constant smiling indicative of idiocy, and ridicule pointless displays of happiness commonly seen in western culture. Even though Russians can be unfriendly and downright rude when you first meet them (especially those working behind glass windows of any kind), their warmth as soon as the ice is broken can be astounding. Just keep working at it.”

We met people on the second leg of the train (Irkutsk to Moscow) who were completely friendly, generous and inquisitive – and patient enough to keep working on mutual comprehension in spite of a tremendous language ignorance on both sides. Never come to Russia without a dictionary or a phrasebook!! Our LP’s sad 4 pages covering numbers, food and train vocabulary ran old really fast. Met a lovely young lady (Mariana, 22) with whom we managed to get past the boring superficialities and had some sort of conversation about babies (that we should be getting to work on it), whether or not our parents are important government officials (don’t know how they got that idea!), how to eat a crayfish, potato, and mayonnaise (in separate sessions) and a host of other fascinating subjects. I should add that she really couldn’t speak much English, but our conversations rode on her animated gestures and persistence.

We had a cold on the second day of the train and learnt that Russians are almost as hypochondriac as the average Singaporean. One gave me a eucalyptus nasal spray and offered antibiotics. The older couple fed Willy some cough stopping medicine and tried to force a raw garlic clove on him while he was coughing. (not sure what he was supposed to do with it anyway). We appreciated the gesture.
No one in Russia likes haw flakes (San Zha)!

We are also getting an impression of the role of women in Russian society. Mar 8 is International Women’s Day and we’ve been seeing every woman carrying flowers!! The flower shops are going crazy and you can buy tulips at every metro station. We would say our impression of Russian women so far are – very much a woman and very much in charge. Men open doors, carry bags, fill water and generally do as they’re told. :) Google ‘Babushka’ to read more.

(sorry this is emo) - Sharon

Russia isn’t as easy as we (or maybe I) thought. You get the feeling of this vast nation being largely cut of from the rest of the world, and it’s a difficult sense of being a lower class citizen based on the fact that you speak English. Or is it a white supremacist thing? I think the only time I have come close to this was from kids in Japan and I think it was also that that area was more cut off from foreigners at the time.

In Singapore and most of the places I’ve been – Philippines, Thailand, NZ, Canada etc I realize that on the whole, they are pretty cosmopolitan and have a multitude of races and colours. Dunno if it’s a snobby general look, but we are getting a pretty cold vibe from Russians. Of course there are blessed kindly exceptions to that, and its wonderful coming to a backpackers hostel in Irkutsk which is filled with Russians who are friendly, informative, and interested in other countries. But its really quite a tiring experience to not even know how to tell the time, get directions, and pick food – and then have people give you that utterly disgusted look and ignore you completely when you try. Expectations lowered to the point that a disinterested but willing to communicate attitude is a great encouragement.
Sorry its so negative.. we love Russia and our journey on the Trans Siberian has been really great. Would like to let Nick know that danger of being robbed and shut in the cabin on the train is probably an urban legend cos 1. there are no cabins on third class (the most enjoyable way to travel I think) 2. the only one who can actually lock those doors from the outside is the carriage attendant. If you get locked into the toilet (possible I suppose) other passengers needing to go will make sure you are out. Had a number of unpleasant experiences of being scolded in the toilet on the train! Its depressing to be shouted at in a different language for something you are not quite sure of and when you are um.. needing privacy.

While We Were Sleeping

When we decided to hop on a 3D3N (65 hours+) train ride from Vladivostok to Irkutsk:

We wouldn’t know if:
- World War 3 broke out, because we can’t read the Russian newspapers available along the stations…even though we did see many Russian tanks being transported like ducks via cargo trains.
- Malaysia decides to cut off water supplies to Singapore
- Workers’ Party staged a coup again Parliament
- We smell nice (nice, is subjective)


But we would know that:
- PAP is almost certain to be still in power (thanks Francis for reminding us)
- It’s sensible to buy the cheaper plaskartny dorm-carriage tickets, because you get to see/talk to more people, such as this bunch of taekwondo students who made us feel much safer.
- Food from the train’s dining carriage is horrible. We didn’t try any, but the sour attitude we got from the babushka manning the kitchen was bad enough.


- Being parents must be a tiring lifelong occupation. Not to mention babysitting other people’s kids (see picture of Sharon hard at work)

- The smoked Omul Fish from Lake Baikal is largely boneless, best eaten when offered by other passengers. (these are acquaintances from China who’re busy logging the forests of Siberia…until environmental laws kick into place)

And according to our nice hostel manager, Nadya, Irkutsk is currently blazing along at -11 Deg which she remarked that it’s “hot”. I think Russians can be quite humorous.

Barely Into Russia

What would you do if you were a traveler journeying into an absolutely foreign land without any money, any means of guaranteed accommodation, running out of food and could barely speak Russian to save your skin? Probably just pray for the best.

Especially for our parents and relatives reading this blog, we’re glad to share that we’re definitely safe and sound, our technicalities sorted out. Though indeed this faintly reminds of the biblical patriarchs travelling into foreign lands promised by God. In both senses, we all know God will certainly provide and protect even as the future seemed unknown.

Our Vladivostok hotel bookings in past week frustrated us over the Net, and the hotels we called up could only respond to us in Russian. As circumstances go, we didn’t manage to suss out a money changer in Harbin in time, nor an ATM to withdraw Russian roubles on arrival. And so we give an approving nod to those who invented the credit card, and our Russian cabbie who accepted payment in RMB albeit at an inflated price.

Whilst Harbin in the past 2-3 days nearly froze us (Willy caught a cough virus), Vladivostok hums along warmly at around -8 Deg on average. At least until the mighty wind-chill factor kicked in. We also recall our little adventure of walking across the frozen surface of Harbin’s Songhua River whilst intently listening out of surface cracks. As the mighty creator of our world, we’re certain God has much in store for us in our journey ahead. But only if we trust Him to lead.

The Great Touts of China

We met the Great Touts (GT) while trying to get to the Great Wall Of China. And we call them great not really because of their hardsell tactics but because of their ruthlessness.

So apparently there’s this cheap public bus that goes directly to the Great Wall but the bus-stand’s empty when we arrived. Only one GT was hovering around so we asked him about the bus. GT1 said the bus isn’t coming anytime soon but he knows people who can arrange for minivan or taxi transport to the Great Wall. 1. Sounds like a familiar tout-story. 2. He’s not wearing a uniform 3. He keeps eyeing us from a distant when we walked away. OK 3 strikes down, sounds like a tout.

While we avoided him, GT1 chatted up another couple waiting for the same bus. We walked to a little office nearby and got successfully directed to the correct bus parked a short distance away. Then before we boarded, I (Willy) started walking over to inform the other couple of this bus. I was however physically restrained by another GT. This GT2 said his “ GT1 colleague’ is busy at work and I should not walk over. Shaz yelled at the couple to come over. GT2 then warned me that another colleague will hit me if I intervene. He indicated to another GT3 a short distance away who glared at me.

Instincts kicked in. I frowned and walked back to the bus. I felt both relieved yet defeated. Should I had stood up to this vicious cycle and would it be worth the effort? Would I actually be affecting the livelihood of these GTs that are keeping them financially afloat?

What ensued caused my stomach to groan. From our bus where we sat, we saw GT2 physically blocking and harassing another female passenger from boarding another bus. He literally pulled at her handbag and she looked visibly upset. It was a devil to watch. Yet nobody around batted an eyelid and some people were even laughing/joking about it. Given the GTs’ previous threats, we struggled with our inaction and the public climate of apathy. This marred our mood partly for the day but generated much introspection and discussion.

That said, we have also met friendly people in China, even including some of the hardsell vendors. But as the recent melamine incident had indicated, personal gain sometimes does cause individuals to cross lines. Sometimes, fatally.

Observations in China

Blogging indeed takes a backseat during our current shuttle-runs of changing locations/accomm. Though being ethnic Chinese roaming China as a foreigner, here're some observations thus far:

1. Like a parallel to Westerners mistaking Singapore as part of China, the local Chinese are surprised that Singapore contains ethnic Chinese and can actually speak Mandarin.


2. The PA-system of Guangzhou's subway announces in 3 languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, then English (likely according to priority).

3. Now I know what it means to breathe the air of a polluted city (picture of Guangzhou). On a good day, it borders on romance. On a bad one, you know your health insurance policy was not bought in vain.

4. While the sleeper class of China's train easily beats the KTMB (Msia) variant, it's still lamentable to witness how the space proportion of humans/luggage to breathable air in the unreserved seating class gets pretty bad. :(

5. Some experiences here remind me (Willy) of what my parents can only relate to me or what I can only watch on TV - rattling of firecrackers all over (esp during Lantern Festival in Guilin), people in crumbling courtyard homes clustering over lunch, cycling through villages just like those in pugilistic movie sets etc.

6. The touts (in Yangshou) are amazingly persistent and remarkably irritating. They'll sell you anything, even if you're in the same line with them buying something, or asking for directions (they'll insist on sending you there). Their strong-arm tactics in not taking a firm "NO!" for an answer even applies to the group of hunching grandmas hawking flowers & peanuts. But sometimes you do get overwhelmed with the "What's wrong with giving up some RMB when it contributes to their comparatively lower income?" moral dilemma that we relent. Otherwise, we've been quite happy contributing to those asking along the streets.

We Missed Our Flight!

Our tragedy occurred a few days back but deserves an entry because it’s high time the procrastinators in us learnt our lesson. Never assume planes will wait for you even after the last call, and always wear a watch (or stop blabbering and look out for the time).

AirAsia flight FD3632 from Bangkok to Guangzhou did not wait for us because we were 3 minutes late at the boarding gate (which closed exactly 10 mins before departure). You can feel a dark cloud descending upon your heart when you realize you’re at that moment experiencing an urban tale – missing your flight. And you know you’ve lost your right to negotiate because it’s nobody else’s fault but yours.

But still we badgered the airline staff manning the boarding gate for alternatives and they started haggling with counterparts over walkies. Some hope crept in when they tried arranging for another bus to shuttle us to the plane parked far far away, but somehow they ended up giving instructions for the ground crew to suck our luggage out of the aircraft (apparently a fairly straightforward task).

And so the dismayed couple soberly followed the airline staff to the Thai customs to have their exit stamp revoked. The husband was dispatched out through a series of doors and procedures to retrieve our orphaned luggage, while the wife shared her sob story with the AirAsia staff at the sales counter and successfully got discounted tickets for a similar flight the next day. And we were thankful that the financial damage was minimal and we ended up experiencing good hospitality from staff at a mission home we sought out that night. Perhaps all this was God’s little way of reminding us never to take things for granted…

Amazing Race Moments

Amazing Race moments(this is my first entry! – I have been slack and let my husband do all the work so far… Sharon)

We are not hardcore. We are actually comfort, order and efficiency loving Singaporeans at heart. The other day when we took a 5 hour busride to Vientiane. We decided on the ‘VIP’ option, and found out that it was one of those beautiful double decker bus (pink curtains and racy coat of paint) types. Unfortunately with no aircon, windows sealed shut, middle of the day.. a sort of claustraphobic’s nightmare. The only good option in these times is to fall asleep. Willy was saved by his 5000 Years Of Condensed Chinese History book and had a very enjoyable trip. The upside for me was that the toilet stop along the way was evidently in cahoots with the person who dismantled the aircon and put icecreams on sale for us. :)


Yesterday was a full day of travel (Vientiane to Bangkok) that was basically lagging by half an hour at every stop. Or, we started half an hour late so panicked at every junction from tuk tuk to bus station to tuk tuk to train. The day was sort of crowned by the fact that the bus didn’t go to the train station, in fact it sailed right past it in full view, and kept going to the middle of town bus station. The train was walking distance from the immigration at the Lao Thai border where we were queueing for ages, whereas the bus station was several miles. This is the point in the show where the contestants usually have a heated argument and sulk, but we did pretty well.


We only kicked ourselves for not asking directions then raced on tuk tuk into the sunset (the sunsets here are fabulous), where we got to the station about ten minutes before the train pulled out. Unfortunately they were out of sleeper class seats so we made the 12 hour journey into Bangkok on hard straight backed seats with the windows open and blasting cold air in. It was not too bad - we rewarded ourselves with a slightly nicer hotel with a really fancy hot shower. Too bad for Willy, he couldn’t find out how to use it and had a cold one instead hee hee

Slow Boat Activists

A relatively post-dated entry. Our slow boat ride from Chiang Mai to Laos about 1 week back spelt bad news for buttocks – it either makes you wish you had more flesh on them, or it may remind those who had paid for expensive exercise regimes targeting the posterior.


In any case, we thankfully got seats. One miserable family didn't. They ended up dwelling in the engine room amidst a mountain of backpacks. These harsh conditions of rattling eardrums and breathing exhaust fumes are perfect for nurturing activists. And so came along two outstanding younglings no older than 10-years-old, intent on seeking public opinion regarding their plight and the general boat ride experience.


My picture here shows the interim collation but the results are predictably heartening. Majority of the 100+ passengers voted against a recurring experience, and indeed nobody was crazy enough to want to sit in the engine room. But still, we're just tourists. I shudder to think of illegal immigrants all packed up in the suffocating hulls of benign-looking ships, dreaming of a better life in foreign lands provided they survive the trip in intact health, and manage to find a non-exploitative job upon arrival. Maybe that's what my grandparents were thinking of when they migrated to Singapore...

Whimsical Qualities

It's only after travelling with my wife for a while did I realize a strange habit of hers. She keeps leftovers in her daypack, even the expired Khong Guan biscuits that we accidentally bought in Pak Beng. This continued for a few baffling and tormenting days (my issue over freshness) before the truth dawned upon me. She uses them to feed creatures big and small we meet! Thus animal-feeding has somehow integrated itself as a component of our travels. And I'm sure the pigs and ducks in these pictures don't mind expired food. We certainly don't.

Fairtrek Cobras in Laos

Just 3 days ago, we got ourselves a trekking trip around Luang Prabang (Laos) from Fairtrek. It’s a little more expensive, but just a little step further for our tourist dollar injection going to a better cause than another rich man’s pocket. Don’t believe the Lao locals when they claim a trek is a “short” one. Like our Hmong guide who lived in the mountains before seeking higher education in the city, the trek’s like a walk in the park for Guy (not sure how to spell his name). And we had some great conversations with him! And that’s a picture of him happily strumming away at his creaky Hmong string instrument, and us witnessing cock-fighting.




Some interesting things we learnt. A Singaporean encountering a cobra will shriek and runaway; In contrast, a Laotian encountering a cobra will shout for joy over his lucky day, kill the cobra and ask friends over for a meal of snake meat. Next, we learnt that the Laos government outlawed the growing of opium as a cash crop based on moral grounds. While that caused many farmers’ incomes to plunge (like that of Guys’ parents), drugs still find its way easily through the borders with Cambodia or Thailand. Would then legalizing opium-growing be a lesser of two evils given how black market drugs may still devastate youth in such a country?




And a mind-boggling observation bugged me – why are so many villagers spending so much time collecting plant stalks to weave broomsticks, when only one sells for S$0.60? Feels almost like broomstick exports comprise 25% of Laos’ GDP. Though gleaning some insight off Guy, prosperity does hinge much on the availability of opportunities. If broom-making is the only viable skill that these villagers have acquired, there’s indeed much space here for social enterprise to make an impact.

Slow Boat To Laos

And so we decided to take this slow boat ride into Laos. The advice from Lonely Planet wasn’t far off – indeed humans get treated like hapless cattle on occasions. Our boat (over)brimmed with mostly backpackers like us, and the operators seem to hold the belief that all of us knew what’s happening, so instructions aren’t necessary. Even what time the boat will leave. It gets tragic for some travelers who aren’t conversant in English as people start bouncing updates off each other.

The boat made a pitstop in the middle of nowhere. Small kids from a distant village then came racing by with snacks and drinks, shuttling with heavy bottles of over-priced Beer Lao to feed the alcoholic habits of the frat-party-like backpackers in our midst. It gets a bit heart-wrenching. Thoughts fly – do these kids get to attend school and why are they here selling beer? Where are their parents? What opportunities lie for them ahead?

Linda (a Thai we befriended and who’s working in Singapore) shared with us during dinner that the people in Lao are much poorer than those in Thailand, and the outward syndrome of “greed” stems primarily from the lack of opportunities in Laos. A structural and systemic problem indeed. So who’s to blame the kid for (presumably) skipping school and sell Beer Lao to touristy farangs? If I were that kid, I might just run a bit faster to reach that farang waving that fat dollar in the air. That could possibly mean a difference in whether my household gets any electricity that week.

Gibbons in Boiling Hot Soup

Given our patchy access to Internet, updates to our travel blog are likely to be more on a post-dated basis than for whatever happened today. Anyway we survived Flight Of The Gibbons a few days back! It’s much safer than we thought – the insane notion of flying around using zip-lines at the near-canopy level of the forest. Go google about it if you’re keen, with some of our pics posted on Facebook here.


Our nice driver who also happens to be a Christian, later brought us to a nearby hot springs to soak the weariness away, with a mysterious alchemic post-effect – our wedding bands minted in silver turned gold. And strangely it regained its silvery appearance a few hours later in the van. Either the hot spring waters had some interesting chemical composition that flirted with our rings, or our jeweler sold us fake stainless steel ones.

Then our 2 nice Japanese friends (the Yamaguchis) from the Gibbons gig scooted by the hot springs to join us! Apparently the practice of cooking in eggs the hot springs is a norm in Japan (and for Thailand), so we had great fun watching the eggs boil away for a small egg party thereafter.