In Cambodia, I am constantly hitting the snooze button on my biological clock. 50% of the population is under 15, and at least half of those are the sweetest, most biteable babies and toddlers you ever saw. If you don’t believe me, ask Angelina Jolie.

The real proprietor of the sugar-cane juice stand I went to yesterday was a two-year-old girl with bangs, a wavy pony-tail, and a red gingham dress like a tiny, Khmer Brigitte Bardot. First she stared at the pale freak who sat down, until, bored, she trotted off and came back with a box of matches. After several tries she lit one, dropped it in fright and then burst out laughing. Her parents looked on adoringly. Then she climbed on Dad’s motorbike, standing up on the seat. (Child passengers always stand up on bikes and motorcycles in Phnom Penh, for some reason. It’s quite something to see tiny kids balancing on the frame of a pushbike while an older brother pedals and a sister sits on the carrier.) She put on Mum’s sunglasses and steered that bike like a Saigon taxi-driver, and I was glad it was still on the kickstand. ‘Vroom!’ she said, or something like it.

One child in five dies before the age of five here. Many are orphans; street kids with old faces are everywhere. But oh, the others, the lucky ones—they lead kid lives that are richer and just plain funner than the cocooned, scheduled, and sedentary western kids I know. It really does take a village.

Hand is still broken. Grr. My soap-opera French doctor patted my shoulder and handsomely bit his lip as the orthopedist set the bone, but it was no compensation for this sweaty cast.

Leaving Saigon for Cambodia tomorrow. We island-dwellers never get over the novelty of driving to a whole other country. I wish I could put Vietnam in my pocket and sneak it out with me.

I visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon today (shortly after learning of Kissinger’s new gig). The broken hand curtails me writing about it, but I have a new appreciation for the life of antiwar protestor Phillip Berrigan, RIP. (Via wood s. lot.)

See also a New York Times piece on Berrigan.

My first view of Saigon was from the back of a speeding motorbike taxi, known as ‘hug taxis’ in my favorite piece of Vietnamese slang. I looked at the sky to avoid seeing the thousands of would-be killers who swerved way too late for comfort each time. My driver cornered like a lunatic and I clutched my left hand, which by now was livid and shiny as a corpse and a peculiar shape. I secretly hoped it was broken, so I’d get to be a cool kid with a cast. Then I remembered I haven’t needed to dodge Christmas exams in fifteen years.

    ‘Here is hospital.’
I struggled to get the fare out of my money belt. The driver wore sunglasses with pictures of iridescent eyeballs on the lenses.
    ‘What you do your hand?’
    ‘I learned how to ride a motorbike in Dalat yesterday. Then I fell off.’

It’s broken in three places. I have to wear an elbow-length cast for four weeks, and I’m already sick of it in the tropical heat. But at least it’s the left hand. I have enough trouble with chopsticks as is.

I hired Daniel to take me on an overnight trek in Kalau. He was an excellent guide, despite indulging in the longest, loudest, most prolonged belching sessions I have ever had the opportunity to share a mountain with.

Daniel’s grandparents arrived in Burma from Kerala in 1890. He has visited India only once, on a two-week holiday, but under Burmese law he is classed as ‘foreign’. Kalau is an old British hill station and has a large population of Indian and Nepali descent, imported as civil servants by the British, who didn’t want to train the Burmese. Over a hundred years later, their descendents are still resented for this former favored status, and are allowed limited freedom of movement and property rights. Perhaps because of this discrimination, the ‘foreigners’ in Kalau have struggled harder to learn English than the ‘natives’. Daniel learned English at Catholic school and from the BBC World Service, and we managed to have good chats as we walked.

He took me to a village school, where seventy or eighty kids sat in a single room, supervised by three teachers. They were divided by age into four groups, and each knot of kids chanted the day’s lessons by rote. Schoolbooks were ancient and scarce, and pencils were donated by the few tourists who passed through. In the middle of the room, the youngest teacher was cutting a child’s hair.
    ‘The parents won’t do it, even though we tell them,’ she explained. ‘Often, we cut fingernails too.’

Among the only teaching materials was a map that the head teacher had made. Burma, divided into regions, each region carefully stuck with a mosaic of representative products. Teak chippings. Tiny paste rubies. Rice grains. Scraps of cloth. Wheat, vegetables, coal. She had rigged a little electrode plate by the names of each province; if you touched it with an old ballpoint, the region would light up on the map. The children had played with it so much that now the battery was dead.

The map had won her a prize at a state competition: three dollars, which she had used to buy ingredients for a meal for the children. She needed to give them incentives to come to school, she explained, as their parents often wanted them to stay at home and help with farming. The oldest child in the room was about nine, the youngest a squalling one-year-old tied to her sister’s back.

As she carefully pointed out the products of each region, Daniel said:
    ‘It is simply amazing that this country is kept so poor.’

Little paper, few pencils, few books. The one gleaming item in the schoolroom was a laminated mission statement that I was to see in every classroom I visited. Though the teachers could barely speak the English they taught, this McKinsey-worthy effort was proudly written in English first, then in bubbly Burmese script.

’Our Mission is to Create a Learning Society to Equip Knowledge Workers for the Information Age.’

The future knowledge workers of Burma chanted the two-times tables. 80% of them will not get to middle school.

Later I tried to explain to Daniel that there were poor people in America too, though the poverty was on a different scale. I told him about a school I’d visited in Brooklyn, where the teacher complained that she’d used her own money to buy a uniform for one little girl, whose father had immediately sold it. He didn’t believe me. How was this possible?
    ‘Well, sometimes people don’t have homes to live in, so they live on the street. Housing and food are very expensive, and if you don’t have a job or a family to take care of you…’
   ’But why don’t they simply take some land and grow food?’
   ’You can’t do that. They don’t have the money to buy land. And they don’t necessarily know how to grow food.’
   ’So all the land is owned by somebody? There is none free to take?’
We pondered this for a while.
   ’It is very strange that people are poor in America,’ he said
   ’Well, it’s very strange that people are poor in Burma, too.’

Daniel brought me to stay at a monastery on top of a hill. The abbot received us with smiles and we had yet more Chinese tea. I had been fed every few kilometers on this trek, and hadn’t yet figured out how to refuse politely. At the monastery, I gorged on lephet, chewy, fermented tea leaves, while Daniel and his ‘boy’ cooked an elaborate meal. I forced down vegetable curry, dahl, fried tofu, and mountain rice, then sat very still as two pints of saliva rushed into my mouth. Daniel and the abbot chatted in Burmese. They had just turned to ask me questions about September 11th when I sprinted for the door, stumbling over a basket of day-old chicks and causing the mother hen to squawk. Outside, I puked heroically.

All night long, the peace of the monastery was broken by retching Dervala. At four a.m., the roosters, gongs, and chanting monks got their own back.

Four monks lived in the hilltop monastery. It was too remote to do a morning alms round, so the villagers brought dry goods up weekly and the monks kept chickens and grew vegetables. Early in the morning they cooked vegetable soup and rice for the day (monks don’t eat after midday). Then they swept, tended the chickens, and carried out various other chores.

The sweet-faced abbot complained that one of the monks, an elderly man, shirked his duties. I wondered if he found them a distraction from sitting meditation or studying Pali scriptures. The abbot snorted. He didn’t meditate either. He was just an old man looking for a more comfortable retirement than his children could provide. All he did was eat and sleep.

This played nicely into Daniel’s low opinion of the Burmese sangha. He was Catholic, and resented the subtle discrimination against non-Buddhist faiths imposed by the regime. He taught me how to pay respect to Buddha figures and monks when we entered a monastery; a complete prostration, three times.
   ’Do you bow like this to every monk?’
   ’No,’ he sniffed ‘Only to good monks who do not drink and smoke and keep women.’

I’ve just finished Air America, an account of the US’s undeclared war in/on Laos (and nothing to do with the Mel Gibson movie). It made me hopping mad. This is what they left behind:

Fifteen westerners had the run of a huge luxury cruiser that set off at dawn and chugged down the Ayerawaddy for eight hours. At first we thought we’d been segregated, then we realized the only locals on the boat were the crew. Burma has so few tourists that I saw the same people at each stop, and here I ticked off several faces in my private game of Falang Bingo. There was a festive atmosphere as we settled into this plush boat after days of chicken buses and dingy guesthouses.

We glided past stupa after golden stupa. The Burmese have no money for roads, schools, or hospitals, but they do not stint on gilding pagodas.

I had never heard of Bagan before visiting Burma, but it rivals Angkor Wat in splendor. (Unfortunately, my appreciation was somewhat blunted by the fact that for the first time on this trip I ended up in a hotel room with a TV. It was hot outside, and it took longer and longer each day to drag myself away from Indonesian MTV and the air-conditioner. Bad tourist!)

Hundreds of huge, perfect temples rise from a plain of misty greenery. Nature and architecture exchange places here, and ancient trees look like upstarts next to thousand-year-old stupas. From a temple roof at sunset, Bagan is a strange enchanted forest, and I half-expected the monuments to slide gently back into the earth as it grew dark.

The temples were built in a 200-year span, at a time when my forebears were illuminating Latin bibles and the English who later colonized both countries were living nasty, brutish, and short lives in the European Dark Ages. The Burmese kings built the monuments of a great civilization, and carefully noted on stone tablets each donation of slaves that fuelled the effort. One tyrant laid down that he should not be able to insert a needle into the spaces between the bricks of the temple he had ordered up: his perfectionism paid off for posterity if not for populism. Bagan reminds you that these were once a conquering people.

And now? Riding my bike down dusty paths to visit out-of-the-way ruins, I was pursued by ragged boys selling cotton paintings of scenes copied from temple art. Most hadn’t sold anything in weeks and they were desperate. They outnumbered the tourists hugely. Beneath the serene elegance of longyis and silky-haired beauty, the Burmese are struggling to buy rice that has gone up in price three-fold in a year. They need dollars to hedge against their frail currency that makes visitors comparatively richer each extra week they stay. Their own Lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, has asked tourists to stay away. But in Bagan they beg us to tell our friends to visit next year.

I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last week, just fifteen years after I’d first started it and five months since I lugged it from Brooklyn to Bangkok. I have finally earned my backpacker stripes.

It’s somewhat embarrassing to be caught with that battered purple cover at 30, but nevertheless I enjoyed it. I like people who think before they speak, who make things, who care about elegant solutions, though I have none of these characteristics myself. That’s why I’ve always sought the company of engineers, to the point of finagling a career in software despite being academically qualified only to parse medieval Spanish poetry.

When I tried to trade my Zen, the Tam Tam Caf&eacute stood in my way. ‘One for one, same or better quality’ said the notice explaining their book exchange policy. I wanted a Rick Moody, which was in better shape, so I offered a Stendhal as well. No, said the woman at the desk. She held up the Rick Moody.

    ‘We only trade one for one. And have to be same size. This book is more big than your book.’ She showed me that neither of my books was as tall or as thick as hers.
    ‘But I want give you two books in exchange! And mine are in good condition.’
She was adamant. ‘No. Have to be one book, same-same size of big.’

Dammit, Pirsig was right. Nobody understands Quality.