Maps Are No Fun

I’m not big on planning ahead. Or planning at all for that matter. Some might call me disorganized. I say I’m advennnnturous. It helps that I have the concentration span of a five-year-old at Disneyland after a breakfast of strawberry compote and whipped cream, but even if I know which country I’m in, traveling on the fly is a way to see things I’d otherwise likely never see – a forested temple, for example. A way-out-of-the-way village. An interrogation room.

I’d made it fine so far on my 2007 trip around Indochina, biking through Thailand and across Cambodia without a map. (I might have gone a few miles out of the way on occasion, missing a turn here or taking a wrong turn there, but if everything goes smoothly your stories in the end aren’t very good, are they?) Tomas, on the other hand, had a map – several of them actually, that he rotated through the handy-dandy clear plastic pocket on top of his handlebar bag. (This was back before the prevalence of iPhone GPS apps made it easy for your typical backpacker to not come back with any good stories.) Tomas and I had been traveling together since Trat, near where the Thai coast runs into Cambodia; we’d gotten split up twice in the Khmer Kingdom, once on our way out of Sihanoukville’s Wat Leu (I ended up going thirty miles out of the way that day) and again on our way out of the rarely-recommended coastal town of Kep, where we managed to lose each other somewhere along the fifty-meter gravel driveway of our guesthouse (he went one way around the barn in the middle of the path, I went around the other side and poof!).  Stephan had been on the road well over a year and had ridden thousands of miles with dozens of other fellow cycling travelers. He said he’d never lost anyone until he met me.

The solo ride from Kep to Takeo was fantastic – quiet roads and happy kids and perfect riding weather. Only the last few kilometers consisted of multiple lanes of truck traffic, and it was along this stretch that Tomas was waiting for me, on a shaded patio, sucking down spicy chicken and rice and ice-cold Pepsis. ‘What happened to you?’ he said through an ice cube. ‘Flat tire,’ I said. ‘About an hour back.’ Since that episode in the mountains of northern Japan I’m happy to say I always carry a bike pump.

Takeo, which can be spelled an infinite number of ways (Takau, Takev, Thakheew etc), boasts a rotary with a monstrosity called the ‘Independence Monument’ in the middle. Walking one way from this rotary you’ll find little besides decrepit streets, decrepit buildings and people hanging around along the edges of muddy, decrepit fields. This, we rationalized, was the perfect place for dinner. We found a joint with a few remaining un-upended tables, and after our decrepit dinner we walked around the rotary and found there was a nice side of town. In the morning we would head north, one of us leaving that rotary behind for good.

We rode through villages of wooden homes and bamboo fences, kids hanging around outside in the dirt yard, adults hanging out around machines that may or may not have been working. Before midday – and after an amusing episode at a crossroads lightly populated with people who didn’t know what a Phnom Chisor was – we reached Phnom Chisor, a temple complex sporting various states of disrepair, situated on the only hill (or mountain, depending on your personal distinctions) for miles around. All the way up the long staircase old people were selling brown paper bags of colored sand – apparently you are supposed to guess why – while young kids follow you around in packs, taking turns asking you the same three questions over and over. Not only does it seem that these three things are all the English they know, after thirty minutes you are pretty damn sure that they don’t even understand the three things they won’t stop saying. Until you tell them what will happen to them if they don’t leave you alone.

Turns out the colored sand is used in a sort of prayer ritual. Most everyone up top – Stephan and I were the only whiteys around – were spreading handfuls of the stuff around, in an area squared off with colored ropes. With my fingertips I gathered up bits of sand other people had spilled and joined in the somber fun. Tomas told me to buy my own sand or butt out.

A tour of the functional temple and its attendant ruins, long glances out over the dusty Cambodian countryside and we headed down the stairs to reunite with our bikes – assuming of course they were still there. They were, and after a ceremonial parting photo out on the same dirt road we came in on– it took forever to find someone brave enough to attempt to use my point-and-shoot Casio – Tomas turned to the north and Phnom Penh and I pointed my front wheel toward Vietnam to the east. ‘You sure you know where you’re going?’ Tomas asked. ‘That way,’ I said, pointing. ‘I checked your map. No problem.’ I knew Vietnam was that direction. Seriously, my sense of direction is uncanny.

I’d picked up the requisite visa for Vietnam a week earlier in Sihanoukville, guessing I’d hit the border around the 17th. And what do you know, trusting reader, today was the 17th. See? I’m organized and adventurrrrous. And according to my guidebook (I did have one – the greatest one ever created in fact, with minimal survival info and rough hand sketches for maps)(plus it was four years old – way outdated for the (relatively) rapidly-changing region) there was a border crossing, Khaom Samnor, between me and Chau Doc, Vietnam. There was also a river but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it – if there was one.

There wasn’t.

I’d been riding for so long it seemed the sun had gotten stuck on its way across the sky. I’d pedaled down dirt road after dirt road, each taking me further east, each a little narrower than the last, all of them rutted and pocked like mine fields (this was Cambodia after all). I passed through a town that may or may not have had a name, the streets all dusty and desolate, the river below packed with boats and mud and evidence of industrious if not prosperous humanity. I met a bright-eyed kid walking along the road, more like a path at that point, and gave him a ride on the back of the tandem, home to his leery-eyed, dumbfounded parents. Their look really should have been a bit of a clue to me, like everything else for miles around, that the road I was on was less traveled for a reason. But did you see Bourne Identity, when Matt Damon looks at that map of Paris for like five seconds and proceeds to escape the entire Paris police force chasing him through the streets? That was me with Tomas’s map of southeast Cambodia. Without the cops I mean. And the car, and the girl. All right the important thing was, I knew where I was going. And dammit if the road I was on didn’t come to an abrupt end under the trees along the edge of a river.

I saw a house, a boat and three people, none of whom seemed to know a single word of the English language – or any language for that matter. None of them seemed to have ever heard of a place called Khaom Samnor; one of them looked like he knew what the word Vietnam meant. Oddly, out here where one could rightfully suspect the people catch fish, grow vegetables and barter with chickens and pretty rocks, all three of them knew right away what a five dollar bill was. A minute later I was hauling my tandem down to the water’s edge and onto their boat, directing the guy at the helm to ply south.

As we motored down what I was hoping was the Mekong, I pulled out my passport. Blank stares all around. I opened it up and pounded the page with my fist, saying ‘Vietnam, Vietnam, stamp, stamp’ over and over. (Well come on, what would you say?) They nodded and half smiled like Grandpa when the battery in his hearing aid is shot and kept cruising down river. Miraculously, a Vietnam flag on a pole suddenly appeared, poking out above the trees on the far side of the (maybe) Mekong River. My guy pulled over and up to a rickety dock amid a cluster of about-to-crumble-and-fall-into-the-water houses.

I have no idea what all those people were doing there on that muddy riverbank, the air coated with an odor you could taste, cavorting like people who have no idea what to do on their first day off from work in twelve years but still enjoying the hell out of it. Of course, they’ve all been writing the same thing about me in their blog posts. But they were nevertheless damn happy to see me. And I was happy to see Vietnam. But just to be sure – and I am never this clear-headed, ever – I told my guy, somehow, that I wasn’t going to pay him for the boat ride until he took me to the official border crossing. To him that meant take me to the nearest – and likely only – place with any sort of authority figure hanging around in a chair worth more than any of those riverfront homes. We rolled down the street on the tandem, the townsfolk chasing after us, smiling and laughing and gleefully shouting something like ‘Kill him, whoever he is!’

We came to a green hut outside a gated compound. Inside a guy in a dirty white tank top was watering the lush garden grounds. The guy in the hut stared at my passport, my visa, me, my friend, me, my visa…and picked up a phone to ask someone to come figure out what the hell was going on.

They were very nice, these two, then three, then six, then eleven men, all standing around me, no one knowing what to do except keep me from leaving. Finally this kid shows up to let me know, in pretty good English, that I needed to personally thank every one of the men behind him for not tossing me in jail. I did, however, have that visa in my passport with today’s date, and I had the name Khaom Samnor scribbled in my notebook – luckily that meant something to one of the guys. ‘You need to get out of Vietnam,’ my young friend said. ‘Now.’

With his heavy-handed help I found a guy with a boat (my original driver, who was not allowed inside the compound where I was being politely and firmly accommodated, had given up and left forty-five minutes ago) who, for that same five bucks, would take me to the nearest village on the Cambodia side. From there I’d find another boat to that town with the dusty streets and all the boats (I will name it Kato for now) (alternatively Kateo, Katev, Katheew) where I had the option of sleeping in a temple (on what was by now an extremely empty stomach) or paying some other guy twelve bucks to take me to…Takeo.

Night fell as my fourth boatman of the day plied those grassy waterways for two hours, finally dropping me off and getting his twelve bucks. I looked around and put up my hands in that ‘What do I do now?’ way. He pointed down the road behind me – a road that led directly to the Independence Monument.

I slept in the same place as the night before. In the morning I found an ophthalmologist’s office, a few doors down from my guesthouse, and asked him which way to Vietnam. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing down a wide, newly-paved road – one that hadn’t yet been built when my guidebook was published. Two hours of smooth riding later I came upon the Tinh Bien border crossing, well south of where I’d made my illegal entry into Vietnam the day before. And much more accommodating.

So really, I didn’t need a map; I’d gone east, found the Mekong and made it to Vietnam – and back to where I started without being jailed, black-mailed or accosted. Admittedly, having an up-to-date guidebook might have helped me understand that the Khaom Samnor border crossing is, largely or perhaps exclusively, for boatloads of tourists traveling between Chau Doc and Phnom Penh. But then with the crutch of complete and correct information I wouldn’t have encountered that kid and his parents, met some of Vietnam’s most forgiving henchmen or set foot, eagerly and illegally, in that muddy, stinky riverside village.

If I’d been less organized I might have even experienced an overnighter in a Vietnamese jail.

Maybe next time.

Going By The (Immensely Popular and Profoundly Flawed) Book

We were making unbelievable time; seriously, I thought we had entered some kind of worm hole. The trip from our hostel (way overpriced – and no breakfast) back to Bratislava Station went much faster than the initial walk across town to the Linoleum Sheraton now that we knew which way was hore. We hopped a train to Trenčin, a small city with a quaint old town and phenomenal ice cream, then traveled on to Ružomberok via a silky smooth connection in Žilina. (Switzerland, I thought at this point, had nothing on Slovakia’s rail system – except maybe in the sanitation department…and in overall comfort…and on a baseline decibel level.)

Right outside Ružomberok Station we jumped on a bus (after a stuttering, embarrassing back-and-forth with the driver). The seats and aisle crammed full of students (wonderfully forgiving of our bulky bags), we stood for the ten kilometers down the road to Vlkolinec, an idyllic one-dirt-road village whose residents’ lives have been turned upside down since its appointment to Unesco’s World Cultural Heritage list. After a prying look around we would take another creaky bus back to Ružomberok for our last train ride of the day; if things continued to proceed as they had since our fortuitous encounter with that blessed street vendor in Bratislava we would make it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš in plenty of time to find a place, fire up some dinner and relax as the sky turned dark over Jasná and the peaks of Chopok Sever. We started walking, me pushing a suitcase, a loaded pack on my back, my wife pushing our son in his stroller right behind. According to the map in our guidebook, Vlkolinec was right there along the main road…

I see that Lonely Planet recently printed its 100 millionth book. To this bit of news I imagine reactions would vary. ‘What’s Lonely Planet?’ This from the majority of folks (including somewhere around 80% of Americans) who do not own a passport. ‘Yeah, I love Lonely Planet!’ This from the great majority of backpackers who buy big expensive backpacks for their long hikes from luggage carousel to bus at the curb outside, from another curb straight to reserved hostel room, back to mini-bus at the curb to the next reserved hostel room, to a waiting tuk-tuk driver ('all the way at the end of the street??'), to …

Then there are those who just shake their heads.

This is where I fit in.

I bought my first LP soon after I got to Japan. The sucker is a shade over 900 pages, I would have left it on the bookstore shelf if I were only going to be in country for a few weeks or even a couple of months. But my plan at the time was to spend about five years here, so I figured I’d get plenty of use out of it – which I have. I was initially dismayed, and still am, that there was not in those 900 pages one single mention of my new hometown of Fukushima - and barely five pages on the entire prefecture, all of them devoted to the Aizu-Wakamatsu and Bandai areas (the latter well worth seeing). Also included was a half-page ‘map’ of the Bandai Region (I will expound on LP’s cartographic incompetence in a bit). Not a word on Fukushima City – not Hanamiyama, nor Jo-Raku-En nor the fact that I now lived there.

LP’s tongue-in-cheek slogan – ‘Almost too much information’ – is a credit to their sense of humor as much as it is a jab (likely unintentional) at their average customer’s mindset. I’m glad Mr. Groundwater brought up the example of Vang Vieng, Laos in his article. When I rolled into that same town at 10am on a flawless day, the only life I saw was in the form of a couple reclining in a café watching Friends. Are you kidding me? Blue skies, gentle temps and some of the most amazing karst scenery in all of Indochina and you two slugs are lying around watching morons making stupid sexual innuendos to canned laughter? This is what happens I guess when paradise turns popular: the outsiders pour in, the locals pander to their creature comforts (and who can blame them?) and suddenly, just as Yosemite falls victim to Curry Village, the amazing beauty of Vang Vieng becomes mere backdrop for the gluttony, sloth and stupidity that has become the norm. Groundwater maintains that if LP doesn’t turn paradise into a plundering ground someone else will. This I find wrongly forgiving – if I don’t sell your kids coke someone else will so don’t blame me for Joey’s deviated septum – but maybe I’m pointing the wrong finger. After all, a guidebook is supposed to guide you to the greatest treasures a land has to offer.

Unfortunately, now there are 100 million people out there following blindly along.

My personal stance with LP has nothing to do with their success and the associated decline in the average traveler’s propensity to go anywhere without being told where that 'anywhere' should be (not to mention their ongoing neglect of my continued presence here in Fukushima). What I raise issue with is something I’ve been fed on several occasions: false facts.

There I was in Phnom Penh, my first real travel experience, armed with my LP Cambodia, picked up at Bangkok's Don Muang Airport for a mere 30 bucks. Two friends were on their way, cycling into town from Băttâmbâng and Sisŏphŏn and Thailand and San Francisco. I was hungry; I was sure they’d be ravenous. I flipped through LP's pages and pages on Phnom Penh until I found what I was looking for – a description of a village past the outskirts of the bustling city with a row of intimate local establishments where we could eat and talk and soak up a slice of (as yet) unexploited Cambodia. Two hours later I was apologizing profusely to my two friends plus a third girl, also traveling by bicycle, for leading them along this dark, deserted road to nowhere. There was nothing out here, ‘just over the bridge and down the road’ as my so-called guidebook had assured me.

We did eventually come upon an amazing sight: a massive outdoor banquet hall filled with red carpeting and kitsch, karaoke machine still blaring for the guests who had by all indication long since gone home.

At least the kitchen was still open.

On the way back over the bridge we had to run from the cops. We will never know why.

Among the many disclaimers LP puts forth in their books, one of them states (quite correctly) that ‘Things change…nothing stays the same.’ Apparently this covers the disappearance of entire communities.

By the numbers, Lonely Planet is the king of guidebooks - much as McDonald’s is the king of hamburgers. Personally I would rather go hungry than fork over any amount of any world currency to the Gilded Arches. Similarly, I would now, before even glancing at a LP map, resort to any means of finding my way – asking the locals (with their wildly varying ideas of how far ‘not far’ is); translating road signs (often necessary outside of the main cities and off the main roads); muddling through a Japanese guidebook (easier said than done) or just going with my internal gyroscope and getting lost – which is pretty much the same as following a LP map anyway.

In the Thai border town of Mae Sai (the northernmost point in the country, separated from Tachilek, Myanmar by a modest river and a ten dollar donation to the oppressive Burmese regime) I had a choice to make. My destination was Mae Salong, a village of Chinese refugees and tea, high in the hills to the southwest. Right from the door of my hostel was a road that, according to Julian, the hostel owner (who got rip-roaring drunk the night I was there and spent hours falling on the floor and screaming not-so-nice four letter words at his ex-wife over the phone) led directly to Mae Salong. In this case, however, directly meant winding around, through and, most worryingly, up and down and up and down the many miles of mountains that stood between here and there. (Did I mention I was traveling solo on a tandem bicycle?) ‘It’s bloody suicide,’ Julian warned me as he cracked open the evening’s first bottle of 100 Pipers scotch.

I had a guidebook with me – a 240-page work of genius (check out the price) written on the premise that some people out there still prefer adventure and intellect over hand-held surety along the cattle trail. This book was only four years old, but in that time a lot had changed (including the paving of a once-impassable road out of Takeo, Cambodia which, had I known, would have caused me to miss out on miles of back roads, a spectacular bout of haggling for a boat ride with people who I don’t think had ever heard another human being speak in such a language, and a sweaty two hours being held and interrogated and (fortunately) not subsequently jailed by one then a group of Vietnamese officials). Plus all the maps were hand-drawn and not to scale and not exactly intended for cyclists bent on dying in the hills of far north Thailand so only a few main roads between the more significant towns were included. And virtually none of them had numbers or names.

Getting to Mae Salong would be a climb, I already knew that. What I wanted was a non-lethal route to the base of that climb. I scoured Julian’s library of tattered books and found, to a mix of delight and dismay, a recent LP Thailand. The map showed a straight line leading directly south out of town; this would be the same smooth, flat road I rode for the last three kilometers into town after coming in from a side road out of Chang Saen. Cool. It looked like an easy 20 kilometers to Huay Khrai, where I would bang a right onto another straight shot west to Ban Pakha, then roll straight south to Pa Miang which would from there bring me around to the day’s ascent.

To make a simple story long and convoluted, that straight-as-a-ruler road west to Ban Pakha started winding and rising and snaking north until I swore I was almost back in Mae Sai. Lucky for me it is near impossible (and certainly not advisable) to eat an entire kilogram bag of lychee in the course of a single evening and I had something left over from the night before to lubricate my system as I looked at the road still rising and twisting out of sight ahead of me. That road did eventually lead to Ban Pakha, a place I was by now positive no LP writer had ever been to or passed through. Then for the next four hours I pedaled my bike up and down the most ridiculous stretches of road I have ever almost puked on. This, I decided, was the mountain road that led away from the door of my hostel; the road Julian told me to avoid before he started in with his histrionics; a road that passed not a single shred of human evidence beyond its own curbs and the bridges that crossed the streams that ran between these golden-grassed monsters.

Mae Salong itself was fantastic – and not a single LP in sight.

I say without exaggeration or sarcasm that I’m sure no one involved in any LP Thailand has ever seen Ban Pakha or even bothered to scout out the area. What other excuse could there be for having a straight line represent that serpentine road leading up into the hills? What defense for claiming the existence of a Cambodian village that doesn’t exist? Maybe I was being naïve or unrealistic, but I had a hard time believing anyone would include in a guidebook – from the most popular guidebook company in human history – made-up information on places they have never visited.

Until I realized that at least one person has written for a guidebook about a country he never visited.

On the map in the Czech Republic & Slovakia LP – which I’m guessing is pretty much a copy of the old Czechoslovakia LP with a revised intro and a new cover – Vlkolinec is denoted by a circle situated directly on the road we and forty kind, patient students had just rumbled down. Perhaps what threw this particular LP writer off (assuming he or she even bothered with the bus ride down from Ružomberok Station – or the train out of Bratislava) is the bright and very visible arrow-shaped sign right there along the road pointing toward a side road and, ostensibly, Vlkolinec. A full hour of pushing our luggage and our kid up this desolate (and in a few places blessedly shaded) road and we came upon another sign for Vlkolinec – pointing up a steep road that, indicated by the cartoonish tourist map next to the gravel lot for the tour buses that can’t make it any further, led another two kilometers up to the village of Vlkolinec where, at least in the drawing, everyone is happy.

After trying and failing for that first hour, within minutes of turning up this new and maddeningly steep road we managed to hitch a ride. Then afterward we really hit the jackpot when we bummed a lift from a guy who had been selling jars of honey out of his car and was just pulling away to head home when I threw myself in front of his grill and asked him if he was going toward Ružomberok Station by any chance.

We made it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš just in time to find the tourist office (open until 5 according to LP) closed at 4:30. I ripped through a couple of pages searching for accommodations listings before I shoved that so-called Backpacker’s Bible in my pack and we walked on up a residential road. Within minutes we came upon a man who, by good fortune and historical border shifts, spoke German (as do I, more or less). Next moment he’s on his phone calling a friend to come pick us up to whisk us to their home with a very comfortable guest loft apartment from where we could watch the sky grow dark over the peaks of Chopok Sever.

I can’t say for sure because I didn’t check, but I would have bet this place – this neighborhood and this woman’s house – wasn’t listed in our LP. God-willing, it will stay that way.