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Luang Prabang

December 3, 2019 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

In Luang Prabang, as in the tropics all over, the line between being inside and outside is very thin. The hallways of the hospital are just covered walks connecting different wards. The reception area is a large open-sided pavilion, with the occasional bamboo screen to roll down for shade protection. The cooking areas are open air kitchens with cement troughs for washing, and charcoal braziers for stoves. Mealtime takes place on verandas. Here outside and inside dissolve into one another, rather than abruptly transitioning at a threshold. They embrace and spill into one another, and make the concept of public vs private more fluid than what puritanical westerners are often accustomed to. I’ve always loved this about South Asia, gated communities, garage doors, privacy fences, the things we use to separate us in the west have little traction here. In Laos, and throughout this part of the world, life is lived openly, out in your street. This open-sided architecture forces you to be part of the community. Forces you to know your neighbors and care. 

It is an architectural style that makes sense given the climate. You can see it echoed across the world. Visitors to Hawaii, Indonesia, or St. Thomas encounter similar motifs, almost always with the caress of an ocean breeze.

Luang Prabang is landlocked. No salt scented breezes here. No daiquiri bars.

It does sit on a bend of the lazy brown Mekong, and somehow uses this fact to marshal a laid back vibe. It is surrounded by impractically steep sided mountains. Their near vertical slopes cloaked in a heavy matt of biomass so green as to be almost black. These karst formations are more like Seuss drawings dollapped onto a page by a cartoonist than real geology. And the misty mornings common here cut them off at their base and leaving them floating in the hazy early morning sun. 

Luang Prabang was an outpost of French Indochina, and French Colonial architecture is dotted about. Black mold running down decaying stucco walls, verandas, galleries, colonnade. It’s decadent the way a good period piece is. Made more so by the numerous French expats making a home here, sipping espresso and chain smoking under lazy paddle fans. 

This neuvo colonial tableau is shot through with lines of orange robed monks, gilded temples, and wet markets selling buckets of writhing eels. It is likely this is the exotic Asia that most tourists are hoping to find as they settle into their trans-continental flights. 

For us Luang Prabang is all of those things but more. It is a community of grass-roots activists, entrepreneurs with an eye toward sustainability, outreach programs and green initiatives. Jen and the kids were able to plug into this scene by volunteering at projects like Big Brother Mouse (an English language tutoring center) and its primary school Sister Mouse. They visited the only buffalo dairy farm in the whole country, where a couple is teaching villagers how to make mozzarella. Jen gave yoga classes and talked about women’s health to weavers at a handicrafts project. There were projects as large as the Elephant Conservation Center and ones as small as discouraging single use plastic straws in favor of bamboo straws.

The atmosphere and setting in Luang Prabang drew us in, but it is the community that we fell in love with. The community of hopeful individuals making an effort to create a better place to live.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Train Trials

October 25, 2019 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

The kids were looking forward to their first long haul train journey. Visions of the Hogwarts Express playing in their imaginations. Jen and I were just hoping that the overnight sleeper from Hanoi to Da Nang wouldn’t be as bad as the third class sleepers we have experienced across India. No matter what we were expecting, we knew that 20 hours on a train was going to be trying. Having booked five bunks in a cabin for six, at least we would outnumber whatever fate threw at us in terms of cabin mates.

Thao Thanh turned out to be a woman in her fifties who spoke zero English. This did not deter her from immediately commandeering my phone and making us FaceBook friends. Her stop was around midnight, about 6 hours after the AC stopped working.

Cabin buddies!

The man in the cabin next to ours chain smoked like an AA meeting, and the toilet resembled a Porta Potty on the last day of Burning Man. The Hogwarts Express it was not, but neither was it the rattling sardine can that crosses Bihar to Calcutta. Thankfully the coffee from the trolly was boiling hot and delicious. Coffee culture in Vietnam has deep roots. 

So hot it melts the plastic cup, but delicious.

Not surprisingly, the driver we had arranged for pick up at the station did not materialize. Bleary from the journey, we were forced to arrange transport ourselves in the scrum of taxi drivers buzzing about the exit hall of the station. We had tried hard to avoid this because it exposes you to another possible episode of overcharging and transportation scams. In some countries drivers will stop midway to your destination demanding more money for “tolls”, “fuel costs”, or outright extortion.

Luckily this did not happen, even though our “taxi driver” who met us on the steps of the arrival area, ultimately led us to a private vehicle in the carpark. Of course he had no clue where our destination was, despite telling us he knew the place before we departed. A common ruse to get the tourist into your car.

The usual strategy is to drive around until you stumble across your destination or until you give up and get a room at one of the guesthouses you keep passing. This time we were lucky enough to be in the small beachside village of An Bang, and spied a sign for our guest house in short order. Within an hour we were in bathing suits and beers, putting the nights journey behind us.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Airport Schooling

October 15, 2019 by byerswithoutborders 3 Comments

Travel days are not ideal for homeschooling. The kids are excited and distracted, the WiFi is typically spotty, and their teacher’s preflight Bloody Mary can easily lead to a second round (if inflight cocktails are complementary, the kids might even get a snow-day). But we often spend multiple days getting to our destination, so en route schooling is necessary. We must adapt during these times.

  • Recess at JFK passenger drop off Terminal 5
  • Multiplying and dividing to find the variable
  • Lines of symmetry
Journal time in Doha

Typical homeschooling days Jen takes the kids to a public library. But yesterday began a three day journey to Hanoi.  So after a short flight from Charlotte, the kids settled into their classroom, JFK’s terminal 5. With good solid WiFi, we were able to log them into their normal online curriculum, Time4Learning. This is the second curriculum we’ve used, and it allows us to schedule their modules to fit our travel calendar. On a travel day with good internet, math and language arts are the focus. As we get farther off the grid, analog backups in the form of Brain Quest workbooks make sure when the wifi quits school work doesn’t. And of course everything their social studies modules get a big supplement in learning about the local countries/cultures we are visiting. In fact this year Jen assigned each kid a country from our current trip to research. Heads up friends and family, expect some PowerPoint presentations this holiday season.

The 12 hour flight to Qatar was a school free zone. A free-for-all of movies and sleep, while our favorite carrier (Qatar Airways) transported us to our favorite airport, Hamad International in Doha. Just 5 years old, spacious, clean, modern, and with big brass sculpture/playgrounds throughout, I do not know an airport in North America that rivals Doha. The concourse is reminiscent of Gattaca, sleek minimalism and high wooden ceilings cut through with thin rectangular sky lights. A ten hour layover might sound horrible, but at HIA it is a respite. It gives us a chance to stretch out, run around a bit and get a little more schooling in before our final push to Hanoi. 

  • Sculpture/Playground Doha
  • Recess at HIA
  • Sculpture/Playground Doha

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Escape Velocity

October 13, 2019 by byerswithoutborders 3 Comments

Our little Stella can get motion sick just by watching Deadliest Catch. She’s thrown up on every flight we’ve ever taken to Bhutan, twice on Jen. She’s puked in vans from Big Bend to Lombok. Her record for one car trip is four times (Rwanda). Once when riding in my lap, she threw up on me, which I promptly repaid by throwing up on her (Bhutan). We’ve tried every conceivable treatment; pharmaceutical (benadryl, dramamine, scopolamine, zofran), eastern (activating an acupressure point with Sea-Bands), behavioralism (stare at the horizon), I’ve even stuffed a tissue into only one ear (a trick I first saw on a chicken bus in Guatemala). Our latest stratagem, anti-motion sickness glasses. They’re the orthopedic shoes of eyewear, but hopefully by giving her an artificial horizon in her periphery, they’ll be the breakthrough. And they arrived just in time, on the day we left Santa Fe.

Stella’s new glasses

Getting these glasses was just one of a long list of tasks and chores that precedes our big trips. Warn the credit cards of our travel, place a hold on the cell phones, organize homeschool supplies (digital with analog back ups), vaccinations and teeth cleanings, haircuts and state department registration, buy the tiny toothpastes and shampoos, and check the passports.

This last one was especially stressful. Jen’s passport renewal had not been processed as of a week before our launch from New Mexico. So add to our list of tasks, a 10 hour drive to the consulate in Dallas for a 15 minute meeting. Ten hours back to Santa Fe, and then continue with the lists.

New passport collected from the consulate just 6 days before departure!

For three weeks we’ve been wading through leaf-piles of post it notes and lists, reminders to get visa pictures, renew work contracts and mail service subscriptions, buy an extra umbrella (rain jackets are too sweaty in the tropics), and pack the Elf On A Shelf. We’ve packed and unpacked the bags at least three times. It feels like death by 1000 cuts. But with each little chore completed we move forward, build a little momentum, and get closer to our departure. 

And that momentum has been building since leaving Santa Fe. Amarillo, Dallas, Jackson, Atlanta. Over a week of driving, and yet we still haven’t left. But our route has allowed us to see friends and family along the way, gaining energy and polishing off those last to-do’s. Today we are in Charlotte, tomorrow we finally board our flights east. It finally feels like we’ve accomplished enough to break free of the gravity of our “normal life”. That we have collected enough impetus and thrust to reach escape velocity.

  • First iteration
  • Packing 2.0
  • Ready for launch

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Smell Ya Later

October 4, 2019 by byerswithoutborders 2 Comments

I guess I never really thought much about what the southwest would smell like. Certainly if asked prior to our time here, I would not have expected there to be a varied palate in that specific sense department. Pictures of dry arroyos, sun-baked adobe and gravel yards adorned with cacti did not prepare me for the exquisite experience of standing in a field of sage after a September thunderstorm. Or the almost boozy vanilla scent when you dare to put your nose to the bark of a ponderosa pine. The familiar Christmas smell of the spruce-fir forests higher up the mountains was really no surprise, but who knew spring in town would bring a sticky-sweet perfume as apricot trees bloomed ripened and dropped their fruit all along my bike route to work. And now as summer segues into fall, the smell of roasting chilis dominates. It is as exotic to me as my first whiff of fish sauce or sandalwood. A mixed smell of brushfire and grilled veg, it is a dark odor that nibbles the back of the throat. 

Twenty-pound sacks of fresh green chilis are available at the grocery, and roasting vendors are set up in parking lots throughout the city. So much for the SW being barren. 

Supposedly smell is the oldest sense and the one most likely to trigger memories. As we head east, away from Santa Fe, I’m happy to think back on the many unique and new smells here, and the memories waiting to be triggered. 

Smell you later, Santa Fe. 

Filed Under: Travel, Uncategorized Tagged With: chilis, land of enchantment, smells of Santa Fe

Bus Burrow

March 29, 2019 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Living five people in a 250 square foot bus, it is safe to say Byers Without Borders is not taking up too much room. In fact, it often feels like we’re training the kids for a future in the submarine corps or as the next occupants of the space station. They even refer to their bunks as sleep pods. Hey NASA how about a couple of space camp scholarships? Or some T-shirts? Just none of that flavored styrofoam you’re calling dehydrated ice cream, please.

What’s it like living like this? If you look to the internet to understand life in a skoolie you’ll mostly find Kondo-inspired posts shaming you out of your collection of concert T’s or countless blogs devoted to making your tiny home look like an IKEA fallout shelter. According to the web, living in a bus will make your life a series #nofilter-moments taking you ever closer to parental nirvana.

The truth is you’ll likely arrive at every destination reeking of exhaust, there will always be a line of people at the shoe cabinet, during winter the walls will weep with condensation and during the summer you’ll roast in your tin-box house. These websites never mention that “free-wifi” means sharing a trickle of bandwidth with foil-hat alien enthusiasts trying to upload their latest online seminar about the panspermic roots of octopus intelligence.

The blogs never mention that your sex life will revert back all the way to high school and those hushed, under-the-blanket encounters when your pants acted as a pair of ankle cuffs. With little headroom and no stabilizers, skoolie sex is like a diabetic dessert, a reminder of how much you miss the real thing.

Life in a skoolie is hard!

But it is also one of our most fun and exciting adventure-experiments yet. The tiny space can be a source of frustration, but oddly it is also one of the bonuses of the bus. Our bus has become a cozy little burrow. Maybe its an evolutionary remnant buried in our limbic systems. But don’t we feel more at ease, comfortable and safe in small cozy spaces? Has there ever been a refrigerator box that didn’t spend the week of glory as a kids plaything? Animals make dens, kids build forts, and Byers Without Borders burrow in a bus.  

Watch a typical Saturday morning on the bus.

https://youtu.be/G7xo8kGOLXw

Filed Under: Adventure, bus life, Bus Life, nomad life, skoolie, Uncategorized Tagged With: adventure, family adventure, happybus, living with less to live with more, nomad life, skoolie life

Hope in Rwanda

January 27, 2019 by byerswithoutborders 1 Comment

Unmarked grave

In the spring of 1994, over the course of 100 days, one million Rwandans were murdered. 10,000 people a day were killed by militias encouraged and supported by the government. Most North Americans only know this story through a handful of news reports and Don Cheadle’s movie. So it is understandable that our plan to travel to Rwanda was met with much disbelief and concern from our friends and family. Why on earth would we choose to take our young family to such a horrific place?

The history is indeed horrific. One in eight Rwandans were slaughtered that spring. There is a grave in Kigali that holds the remains of 250,000 victims. Toddlers were bludgeoned to death. Churches were bulldozed while victims sought shelter within. Machete wielding militias left corpses littering the streets. The history is horrific.

But the place, the country is not. Rwanda is not the genocide. Rwanda is a survivor of the genocide. The entire country is a victim of trauma, and to witness how it has chosen to heal is inspiring.

How these people can overcome the desire for revenge astonishes me. I doubt I could. When questioned on the topic our safari driver (who was made an orphan at the 10 by the militias) responded “We have no choice, we can not tolerate more killings, more death”.

Every April there is a week of national mourning, citizens attend Kwibuka sessions in their villages where they discuss and share their genocide stories, trying to heal. Tribal identity is no longer recognized; no Tutsi, no Hutu only Rwandans.

We did not take the kids into the memorial. Because of the graphic nature of the exhibits, children under 12 are not admitted. But of course they had questions, “What does genocide mean? How does something like that happen”?

Genocide is the horrible end of an ethos of “the other”. The mindset of Us versus Them. The scapegoating of all of your problems on a marginalized group. Of slowly demonizing that group until they’re not even human, then trying to get rid of them with the hope that your problems will go away too. It’s so much easier to hate a disenfranchised group than a broken system. Rwanda’s genocide is a lesson in how this mindset fails everyone and Rwanda’s recovery is a lesson in how unity is the only real hope.

That’s why we took our kids to Rwanda. I hope they learned the lesson. I hope we all can.

Filed Under: Africa, Hope, Rwanda, Travel, Uncategorized, Volunteer Tagged With: genocide, hope, peace, rwanda, travelafrica, travelrwanda

Faces of Rwanda

December 18, 2018 by byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Colorful Women of Nyangwe

We hold certain cultural norms inviolate, assuming that the entire of humanity must believe as we do. The taboo against staring is one of these. I first ran across this cultural difference decades ago in India. A long hard stare at something or someone is not considered impolite or aggressive. In fact, staring at something that strikes your interest sounds pretty reasonable on the surface. But when you’re the object of that gaze, and you’ve grown up in our western society, these hard looks can make one twitchy.

Rwanda is turning out to be one such culture. Here the hard stare is coupled with another phenomenon, smile rationing. History has taught Rwandans to be wary. Smiles are not handed out willy-nilly to all-comers who happen to catch your eye on the street. The people of Rwanda do smile, but those smiles must be earned. Stella sharing polaroids with her subjects, my stumbling attempts to speak Kinyarwanda, Jen bargaining for an avocado, these have earned us happy faces and smiles.

Curious faces

So our first weeks, as we nervously learned to negotiate Kigali, was a time of hard stares and uncomfortable walks through the city. But now we’ve learned the secret. With just a word or two, Muraho, Amakuru, the stares dissolve and the faces open up, curious, friendly, proud. It’s then that we see the true faces of Rwanda.

Newfound friends

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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Recent Posts

Luang Prabang

December 3, 2019 By byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Train Trials

October 25, 2019 By byerswithoutborders Leave a Comment

Airport Schooling

October 15, 2019 By byerswithoutborders 3 Comments

Escape Velocity

October 13, 2019 By byerswithoutborders 3 Comments

Smell Ya Later

October 4, 2019 By byerswithoutborders 2 Comments

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