Former Irvine Co. spokeman Franz Wisner has regaled friends with e-mail messages as he and his brother Kurt have made their way around the world. An installment from Eastern Europe ran here Oct. 9. Now we excerpt Franz’s accounts of their journeys through the rest of continental Europe and Southeast Asia. The brothers are currently in South America.
Three and a half months. Twenty countries. 7,500 miles in the new car. Another 8,000 via planes, trains and ferries. Phase One of our sojourn is over.
Apologies for being incommunicado as of late. Some of you have wondered if I was in some backward republic that has shunned the information superhighway. The answer is “yes.” It’s called Italy.
Kurt and I have spent the last couple weeks hiking in the surreal, moonscape mountains of Central Turkey; squeezing the last bits of sun and Ouzo out of Greek isles; lowering fashion standards in Milan, Venice and the Italian lake district; and soaking in the all-too-orderly spas of Baden-Baden, Germany.
Here’s a few lessons learned and confirmed thus far:
n If you see a pretty woman on the side of a country road in Nowheresville, Eastern Europe, she doesn’t need a ride. She’s there to provide a different type of “roadside assistance.”
—Travelers’ checks are obsolete. ATMs are the world’s currency,just make sure your PIN number is less than six digits. And the U.S. dollar will often suffice. We paid for gas in Bulgaria, tolls in Turkey and hats in Russia with American greenbacks.
—The notion that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of more prosperous times in the former Soviet Bloc is optimistic at best.
—-When bribing at the borders of Second-World countries, stick to cash. We’ve seen offers of fruit, candy and booze enrage border officials.
—Though tough for me to admit, they really like President Clinton and are sorry to see him go.
—As in America, women do most of the hard work.
—The lower the latitude, the crazier the driving.
—Americans pay $10 to see The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, while locals can enter for 50 cents.
—For us, the open doors were widest from the people with the least. The smiles of dirty, poor children are just as big, if not bigger, than those of their affluent counterparts.
—Final tally: Pulled over by police, 10 times. Tickets paid, two. Total fines, $15.
—The world does turn to CNN.
—You never regret travel,or time,with your brother.
***
One of the first images I saw in Indonesia was a beautiful, sarong-clad woman walking along a road with baskets of fruit piled high on her head. Her young daughter scampered beside. Suddenly, the woman spun around, bent over and spanked her child on the hindquarters, amazingly without spilling any fruit. It turned out to be a decent metaphor for Indonesia today,pretty, delicately balanced and not afraid to use force (see Timor).
Despite the politics, I really love the vivid and exotic images of this island nation:
—Mud-soaked water buffalo pulling men on large wooden rakes through terraced rice fields.
—Bali’s moss-covered, incense-soaked, stone Hindu temples with peaceful lily ponds and chanting priests.
—Colorful and crazy town markets that clog the roads on the outer islands. Adults sell fish, chickens and fruits in woven baskets strewn everywhere. Smiling children are piled high atop carts and buses watching it all.
—A cockfight with dozens of loud, frenzied gamblers who could easily find employment on the Wall Street trading floor.
If I ever disappear, you might find me in the Gili islands off the coast of Lombok. They have all the ingredients for the real escape,no cars, no roads, sporadic electricity and water service; white sand beaches and coral reefs that make you feel like you’re swimming through the fish bowl at the Mirage in Las Vegas. The beach shacks are $3.50 a night, for two, including all the mangoes, bananas and pancakes you can eat for breakfast. The hammocks help speed you through those books you always wanted to read. And the beach bartender on Gili Air island is a music addict with a better disc selection than a New York DJ.
Lombok, Sumbawa, Komodo, Rinca and Flores have all the beauty of Bali at half the cost and with a fraction of the visitors, T-shirt stands and trinket hustlers.
Just don’t go to Timor, that gets me started on politics again.
To the casual observer in Vietnam, it’s hard to see Big Brother impacts or human rights violations through all the neon lights, Western stores and media, Internet cafes and checkpoint-free roads. You don’t witness many uniformed kids marching or military vehicles packed with gun-toting soldiers.
Yes, Ho Chi Minh’s likeness is on every Dong (the world’s most unfortunately named currency) but the cult-of-personality game is nothing here compared to, say, Turkey with Ataturk, Syria with the Assads or the old Yugoslavia fawning over Tito. (By the way, for you embalmed dictator fans, the can’t-miss trifecta is Lenin in Red Square, Mao in China and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi.)
This is not a country obsessed with what they call “The American War.” Half the population isn’t old enough to have remembered or experienced it. Twenty-five years is also enough time to begin healing wounds for those who were here.
Ask a local about the war and within five minutes you’re talking about the Internet, Madonna or dimpled chads. There are plenty of lightly propagandized war sights to see, including tunnels, the DMZ and museums. But the tourism industry gives a much heavier push to the beaches and temples.
Like most other poor,and rich,nations, Vietnam is driven by the dollar. Outdated orthodoxies or re-lived battles don’t sell postcards or cigarette lighters. Learning English and Capitalism 101 does.
Dirty, dynamic, random, young, haunting, beautiful, green, poor, loud, and warm,both in temperature and temperament,are a few adjectives that describe Vietnam today.
***
Southeast Asia is a region full of people scratching out a living with dilapidated food carts, improvised shoe repair shops on sidewalks and beat-up delivery trucks.
Poh was our driver in Cambodia. He’s 30 and speaks broken English learned over the years by listening to tourists and Western music. His life goal is to fly. A more immediate concern is to raise $1,000 so he can convince his girlfriend’s father he’s worthy of her hand in marriage. We spent the three days with Poh, climbing around the breathtakingly beautiful Angkor temples, cheering on the rock-tough fighters at a Cambodian kick-boxing match and talking about life.
I’ve tried to stay away from “gotta see” references, but you’ve gotta see Angkor Wat and the surrounding jungle temples in central Cambodia. Built by the Khmer people between the 9th and 13th centuries, the Angkor temples are stunning, stone-layered, vine-wrapped Tag Amahs with intricate and endless bas-reliefs of Hindu gods and battle scenes. National Geographic ranks Angkor in their top 50 world destinations. We put it in our top 10.
Late one day we drove to a monument at one of the Killing Fields commemorating the two million Cambodians slaughtered during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. As we stared in horror at a glass memorial filled with skulls, Poh quietly told us his father and family were among the victims of the Khmer Rouge holocaust. He survived after being hidden by relatives. The living he’s scratched out has been on his own.
I knew that the trip would be a lifetime education. What I didn’t expect is that our main source of education would come not from museums or churches, but from the inspiring people we’ve been fortunate enough to encounter.
