Chasing Southeast Asia: Stories of a Lost Tourist

By Kevin Huelsmann

An annual Hindu religious festival in Thaipusem (thosands of people to the left of the statue).

I made it to the entrance of the massive stairs around midday. The air was hot and thick and bodies were pressed up against me on all sides. I had been waiting in the crowd for a few hours, trying to make it up the 300 stairs that lay in front of me. A procession of drummers marched through the center of the crowd, intently beating their drums in steady rhythm. Behind the drummers a man with large hooks pierced through his back was dancing in circles. He bounced up and down with the drums to show he felt no pain from the large pieces of metal interlaced through his skin. His eyes were blank, like he was trying to focus on something that he couldn’t quite see. 

In the hour I had been standing there, I had seen 20 to 25 men march past me. Some had hooks through their back, some had metal bars pierced through their cheeks and some carried gigantic shrines on their shoulders and heads, all in honor of Lord Muragon, a prominent figure in the Hindu religion. Most of these men had been marching all night as part of a ritual of cleansing and purification. They had left at midnight from a temple in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia en route to the Batu Caves, about 15 miles away. When they reached the Batu Caves in the morning, they faced a final ascent of 300 stairs into the heart of the cave, where they would make their offerings to various Hindu gods. 

This annual event attracts approximately a million people each year. The festival, Thaipusem, is a time of cleansing and purification for the Hindu people. They make offerings at an altar in the center of the cave in order to purge themselves of the past year’s sins. Not everyone in attendance participates in the piercing or carrying of enormous shrines; in fact, women traditionally are not allowed to partake in the full piercing. Many people shave their heads or dress in traditional dress to show their devotion, but a majority of people attend in plain clothes and simply make the trek to the caves to show their piety.

The scene at Thaipusem was so far removed from that of Kuala Lumpur that it may well have been on Pluto. The sleek metropolitan feel of Kuala Lumpur gave way to scenes of corrugated tin houses and the remains of what once were cars. It was strange to see the faded, rusted out houses set out against a backdrop of Malaysia’s lush tropical foliage. It created a strange juxtaposition: beauty out of decomposition. I had only been in Malaysia for a day and a half when I arrived at Thaipusem, and was leaving the next day. 

Because I was studying abroad in Southeast Asia for only eight weeks, any trip I took was confined to a limited schedule. I would leave on Thursday morning and catch a return flight Sunday afternoon. This arrangement afforded me enough time to spend a few days in a city and catch a flight in time to finish homework for my 9 am Intro to Buddhism class on Mondays. It was a tight schedule, but when you live at a beach resort in Thailand, it’s hard to complain about anything.

My room, on the 9th floor of the VIP Condo chain and Beach Resort, was no bigger than a modest condo or hotel room: two beds (I had a roommate), a small bathroom, a few cabinets over a tiny sink and a dresser. I could’ve opened the door to a trashcan fire and a cardboard box and I still would’ve been happy. It was just a place to sleep at night anyway. My eyes were focused on what things lay outside my balcony: the ocean, the beach and the people, to name only a few.

From the tiny town I stayed by, Hua Hin, I could get a seat on one of the hourly vans or public buses that ran to Bangkok. About three hours later, depending on the number of stops, I would be dropped off in the middle of the city. It was like being dropped in the middle of a pinball machine: blinking lights, loud strange noises and big pieces of metal bouncing past me everywhere. 

My first time in Bangkok I simply stood still for ten minutes and looked around. It is a massive city, approximately six million people over about 1,500 sq. km. Every corner that you turn, there is a vendor, every street that you pass through there are bars and restaurants and stores. Everything is packed in so close that the buildings seem to flow into one another. When you stand still and let it all go by, it’s like watching a mechanical ballet. Cars swiftly weave in and out of each other under the guidance of traffic lights while pedestrians maneuver themselves through the massive crowds that they form. You can hear the music seeping out into the streets from bars, mixing with the music of street performers. You can feel the heat and pollution bearing down on you from all angles. And you can see the massive neon, blinking advertisements, sending light streaking through the night. 

Somehow, a fellow student and I managed to get press passes to a music festival in Bangkok (Bangkok 100 Rocks). Over the course of two days, various local and international acts converged on a small patch of concrete on the edge of the city. When we arrived, we signed in their press register, right underneath Rolling Stone and MTV Asia. I’m still not quite sure how we got our credentials, maybe they were excited that foreign press was interested in their first year event, or maybe they were just confused when they got our application. I didn’t really care either way. 

With a small sticker that said press, my writer and I (I was signed up as a photographer) were allowed access to the press tent and a small runway through the middle of the crowd. For the first three songs of each bands set we were allowed to walk up the front of the stage and take pictures. Amidst a crowd of three-foot zoom lenses, I proudly thrust out my point-and-click digital camera and took pictures of Alex Kapranos (lead singer of Franz Ferdinand) and Liam Gallagher (lead singer Oasis). 

We were definitely out of place, but, as far as I know, I got a photo credit in my school magazine for my efforts. That single fact: that I was working on a story; validated my presence in the press areas and made me feel better about the whole thing.

The rest of the time in Bangkok my writer and I attended the Bangkok International Film Festival. Held at a massive new mall, the festival screened over 150 films over two weekends. Due to a dispute between organizers and a major organization of Thai filmmakers, many native films did not receive screenings. This conflict between native and western culture is constantly coming up in Thai society. Many Thais zealously guard tradition, while others want new technology and progress. It’s strange to see these two ideals collide and create a scene where tradition and progress are vying for attention. One of the most glaring examples came during my time at the film festival. 

For an upcoming movie, King Naresuanâ, actors had been dressed up in medieval warrior costumes. Around them, the movie theater had made the entrance of the multiplex look like the entrance of an ancient fort. This entire scene was staged at the entrance to a multiplex that housed more than 20 theaters in a mall with 5 floors packed with stores carrying the latest technology and fashions. The ancient guards were surrounded by the ultra-modern decorations of the rest of the theater, every step falling on the mall’s pristine, white tile floor. Behind the guards, giant statues made to look like they were also from medieval times, sat silent and watched the whole absurd scene unfold. 

In the course of one day at the festival, I saw a movie about life in rural Thailand and an older film featuring one of Thailand’s biggest action-hero stars. In one, farmers silently attended to their monotonous daily tasks. In the other movie, the hero gracefully karate-chopped and jump-kicked bad guys on his way to rescue a distressed beauty. The farmers seemed like aliens when compared to modern Thai society, or even the other film, and the maniacal pace and technology of Bangkok. It was like seeing another personality of Thailand that you can only see at random intervals in random situations, like someone with multiple personality disorder. It was something that would come up throughout the rest of my trip.

Throughout my entire stay in Thailand, I struggled to find the “real Thailand.” No one wants to feel like a tourist, but most people can’t help it. You fly into somewhere, cram everything you can into a week and then you’re off again. Being in the country for two months, I thought that I would be able to get past some of the tourist traps and settle into more of the everyday life. The problem is that Thailand is such a schizophrenic country. On one side everything is on the edge of everything modern, technology, fashion, food, anything. The other side of Thailand remains very close to its roots in a rural lifestyle. 

After my first two weeks in Hua Hin, the town where I stayed, I thought that I had a pretty good sense of what the country was like, only to be completely blown away when I went to visit a tiny rural town for a school field trip. After that, it seemed to happen about every week or so. I would think that I had a firm grasp on what Thai culture was about, and then I would travel somewhere or see something that would turn my whole idea upside-down. In the mid-60s Dylan once described his band’s sound as “thin, wild mercury,” elusive and always moving. I can’t think of a better way to describe Thailand. The country always seemed to be alive, pulsing and throbbing with activity and movement. It was unpredictable too. Anything you could imagine was usually only about $50 and a ten-minute walk away. Anything.

More than anything, I just wanted to go to Cambodia. It took me about six hours and $80 to get from Hua Hin to downtown Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. The plane landed in the thin, dry heat of the city and we were off in a cab to find a place to stay. The main street through the city looked like it hadn’t been touched since the 1950s. None of the buildings reached more than three stories, and almost all of them had tiny storefronts at the bottom. 

Imagine one of those cheesy ads from the 1950s with a woman holding some cleaning product with a huge fake smile, clad in a frilly blue apron, all set against a banner proclaiming the product’s great advancement of mankind. Now imagine that ad blurred and faded, scrawled on a dusty brick wall on a tiny side street. That’s what Phnom Penh is like.

The street we stayed followed the Mekong River to its convergence with the Tonle Sap River. It was a site of natural beauty for visitors, but a necessity for those who lives depended on it. While the rest of our group was checking into our hostel, I walked across the street to the edge of the river. All of the people who seemed to be lounging around in the afternoon sun from across the street, turned out to be families washing their clothes, bathing children and cooking meals. People had gathered small piles of clothes and pots and pans around a small tarp; and that was their home. 

I’ve seen homeless people before, but I had never really encountered poverty on a scale like this before. I wasn’t sure how to react to it. I constantly had that feeling that you get when you’re at a stoplight and there is someone with a sign begging for a job or money staring at you. Should you give them money? Should you ignore them and not interfere? I gave what I could, which often wasn’t much, and after that I tried to say no as politely as possible. The problem with the latter solution was that I was riding around in a giant, white, air-conditioned van. Every time we drove somewhere I felt like I was carrying the banner for the annual rich westerner guilt parade.

Phnom Penh has a sensational side ten times more hedonistic than any Las Vegas wet dream. When I was walking down the street on the first day there, I was offered anything from a cheap evening with some girls to the chance to shoot off some semi-automatic weapons to the opportunity to buy enough drugs to be sentenced to death in many countries. 

In fact, one book about Phnom Penh has a title that confirms my experience: “Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Guns Girls and Ganjaâ.” In the book Amit Galboa recounts his time spent in the city as one ridiculous story after another. When you read the book without any prior knowledge, it seems like pure fantasy, like nothing that could ever happen in the real world. But it does. I walked past the taxi drivers that invited me into it. I passed things he talked about. 

It was exciting at first; to feel like you’re in a place where anything can happen. Around one corner you might stumble upon a row of stalls set up for prostitution, around another corner you might find a market that sells bags of weed, or another corner where a market seems to have randomly sprung up out of the pavement. Once I saw the people who were a part of these things, it lost all the excitement and became a sight of deplorable, exploitative conditions. Children were being used as prostitutes. Beggars constantly roamed the streets in search of money. Entire families lived under tiny tarps on the banks of the river. Everyone seemed to live in extreme poverty. Everywhere we went it felt like the people there were so ready to throw themselves at our will to make us happy and get our money. It wasn’t greed-induced service, but it definitely felt like it was a necessary thing for these people. 

I think I would have rather they stood up to us and told us off. Told us we were exploitative tourists and gave us the finger. I wanted them to stand up and protect the integrity of their country, defend their identity and history. It’s such a beautiful country, but so much of it has been tarnished by war and corrupt leaders. I know that not all Khmer people are ready to lay down at the every want and need of tourists, but I don’t think that the group I was with got to see any of that. We stayed on the path.

That path did lead us to Angkor Wat though. Angkor Wat is an enormous site of ruins believed to have been built sometime between the eight and thirteenth centuries. Originally built as religious temples, they were passed from hand to hand during times of invasion and war. We drove to Siem Reap, the town closest to the ruins, two days before we had to leave. 

The six or seven hours we spent in our van driving across Cambodia were probably the best six or seven hours of my two months in Southeast Asia. As the miles piled up behind us, the pavement seemed to crumble away, leaving only dirt and rocks; the tiny stores and hotels gave way to simple shacks, and eventually it all gave itself over to the land. It was simple. There were no distractions, no advertisements, no salesmen, no flashing lights, no nothing. It was quiet. We listened to a Cuban-jazz band on the way there and I fell asleep on a rolled up t-shirt stuffed against the window.

The next morning we woke up as close to sunrise as we could and set off for the ruins. Across a large lake, I caught my first glimpse of Angkor Wat, the main temple. It loomed over everything: the lake, the surrounding walls and all of the people roaming around. The three massive towers pushed their stone-grey tops into the heights of the blue sky. It looks like a gigantic stone mass, heavy and solid. When you walk through its hallways, you realize how delicate it actually is. Everywhere you look there are tiny carvings chiseled out of the slabs of stone. You see the rolling curves of doorways, the carefully carved statues and then you turn around and look out over the grounds and see some of the other temples. You get quiet too. You just have to sit down and appreciate what you’re walking through, the history that you’re walking over, the age of the stone that your fingers are passing over. Then the moment passes and you get up and walk through some more.

The other temples each had their own eccentricities. One temple that I especially remember was eroding into the forest. Tree roots and vines had pulled the stones down, like long, slender fingers reaching out from the forest. The stones looked eroded and worn down, constantly decomposing and wearing away, back into the dirt, the leaves, the forest. After being bombarded by technology and all of the trappings of “civilized living” it was remarkable to see nature taking an active role and taking back a man-made structure. 

At sunset, we drove to a temple that overlooked the entire ruin grounds. There was a huge crowd, and after a while I just sat down and gave up trying to push through people to get the best spot. Everyone was really quiet when the sun started to fall closer and closer to the horizon, when the bright oranges and reds of the day gave way to the cooler purple and pinks of the night. With nothing else around, the light seemed to stretch out so much farther than usual. As the uppermost arc of the sun began to dip below the horizon, the crowd filed back down the temple and dispersed into waiting taxis. We made it to ours and set off back to the Phnom Penh airport.

Everyone was tired on the way back and no one said a whole lot. The van’s headlights were the only lights that could be seen for hours at a time. The night sky was a dark as pure oil, slowly dripping over everything, leaving nothing uncovered. The only thing I could really see clearly was the stars. Thousands and thousands of them littered the sky. Out of the millions of similes and descriptions that attempt to convey the beauty of the stars, nothing could come close to these. Adding another one would not only fail to do this scene justice, it would also damage my memory of it. So I leave that part up to you. Think of the most beautiful scenes of stars you have ever seen, the most serene moment of your life, one of the happiest memories, and put them together. That’s as close as I can get to describing the stars I saw, the people I met, the land I traveled over.