Auntie Jojo came over and took some really great photos of my toes. Mommy likes to nibble on them and call me “baby tree monkey” because I like to curl my hands and feet up and cling onto her clothes. Ema came over yesterday and tried to give me that bottle thing again. Plahhhh! yuk! gimme the good stuff. I mean, do you really think I can’t tell the difference? Paleeze people. Who do you think you’re kidding?

Mommy said I was a stinky little tree monkey and needed a bath. I wasn’t too sure what to expect but it turned out to be really fun. She put this chair thingy in the shower and scrub-a-dubbed all my chubs. The heat lamp in the bathroom is great. Daddy took some photos and Mommy slathered some pretty smelling lotion on me so now I’m all cute again for Uncle Darren and Uncle Georgie to snuggle me.

As a thank you, I decided to give Mommy a nice present for her anniversary. She’s been asking me allllll month to pretty-please take a nice nap, so I did. I slept the entire rest of the day (10 hours) and let Mommy and Daddy watch their honeymoon videos in peace. zzzzzzzzzz

We had a nice, quiet mother’s day at home. Nana and Grandpa came over for brunch and brought lots of yummies. I’ve still got this daytime nighttime thing mixed up. Mommy is hoping I sort it all out soon. She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks! She’s so tired she dressed me up like a leprochaun thinking it’s St. Patty’s Day. Anyway, I’ve kept myself busy kicking around and making cute noises.

Aunt Meryl came to visit with my cousins Max and Alex. They won’t let me play RockBand with them yet even though I keep telling them I’m a great singer.

Marley’s Second Week Home – Mother’s Day

Marley’s Second Week Home – Leprechaun

Marley’s Second Week Home – Meryl and Marley

This site has transformed from Evan’s personal webspace to his family’s blog. There is still content archived. You can start your exploration of that at http://www.dogboy.org.

We plan on having plenty of baby pictures as well as updates on our life. Feel free to post comments, etc.

As part of this effort, I removed our old travel blog. It was way too spam-ridden.

For nerds out there, this is basically a Wordpress blog, with a tweaked custom theme. Most of our photos are now hosted on Picasa, but displayed in the blog via the fantastic Shashin plugin.  Spam is killed (hopefully) by Askimet.

American Bombings in Laos

In 1964, a new phase of the war in Laos began. With the US pushing hard for an escalation of the bombing. Souvannaphouma (kept in power with help from the US) gave the go-ahead for so-called “armed reconnaissance” flights over Laos, which essentially meant the US could bomb whatever it pleased.

The war took place in total secrecy. US ground troops were kept out and military planes had to take off outside the country. As journalist Christopher Robbins wrote, “There was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified.” From 1964 until the ceasefire of February 19673, United States planes flew 580,944 sorties - or 177 a day - over Laos and dropped 2,093,100 tons of bombs - equivalent to one planeload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years - making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the history of warfare.

The Plain Of Jars

The fifteen-kilometre-wide stretch of grassy meadows and low rolling hills around Phonsavan takes its name from the clusters of chest-high funeral urns found there. Scattered across the “Plain of Jars” and on the hills beyond, the ancient jars, which are though to be around two thousand years old, testify to the fact that Xiang Kouang province, with its access to key regional trade routes, its wide, flat spaces and temperate climate, has been considered prime real estate in Southeast Asia for centuries. The largest jars measure 2m in height and weigh as much as teen tonnes. Little is known about the iron-age megalithic civilization that created them, but in the 1930s bronze and iron tools as well as coloured glass beads, bronze bracelets and cowrie shells were found at the site, leading to the theory that the jars were funerary urns, originally holding cremated remains. More recent discoveries have also also recealed underground burial chambers.

During the Second Indochina War, the region was bombed extensively between 1964 and 1973. American planes levelled towns and forced villagers to take to the forest, as the two sides waged a bitter battle for control of the Plain of Jars, which represented a back door to northern Vietnam. The plain was transformed into a wasteland, the treeless flatlands and low rolling brown hills pockmarked with craters which leave a lasting impression on those who fly over it into Phonsavan.

 

Evan bought the metal brewer to try at home. 

• Reconnected with Henning and Everett
• Became friends with Simon, Ed, and Suzanne
• Rode on the back of scooters through the DMZ
• saw old bases, tunnels of refuge, martyr cemetary, 11th parallel, part of original Ho Chi Minh trail, old tank, Agent Orange decimation turned into rubber factory, small villages with children in the backroads

Hue Highlights:

1. Folk music performance on a boat- set lit candles to float on the river
2. Forbidden City

The bus from Hanoi to Hue stopped for breakfast where we were approached by a Vietnamese guy offering a tour of the DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) for $16/person including lunch, so we figured, what the heck. We reconnected with Henning (german guy) and Everett (dutch guy that I’ve nicknamed Junior since he’s only 19). Friends we made on the busride Suzanne (Kiwi working in London), Cathy (London) and Johan (German), Ed (London) and Simon (London) joined the tour as well. Ed couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilets and was using a bucket. I quickly nicknamed him Bucket Boy in my head. His friend Simon took a liking to it and I think the name has stuck. Simon’s a cheeky fellow who reminds me of The Joker.

[As many of you may know, what we call the Vietnam War is called the "American War" or "American Aggression" here. Interestingly enough, there almost zero hatred of Americans here now. In fact, the U.S. is now a key trading partner with Vietnam. People are very friendly to us.]

Each of us climbed onto a motorbike with a driver. We first went to the Rubberplant Jungle. The guide told us all about how the area used to be a real Jungle, but a Napalm bomb was droopped onto the site and everything was devastated. About 20 years ago the governement started a program for reconstruction and planted rubber trees. What a strange sap texture it had! The locals took to calling it the Condom Jungle, since the rubber was used to make free condoms to prevent AIDS.

We also saw a concrete bunker for high ranking US officials. Here’s where Cathy and I decided to bless some plants (boy, I’ve sunk low, but I really had to go. Honestly!) only to come back onto the trail and find a mine sweeping truck combing the area. Lovely.

Next up we rode over to the North Vietnamese martyr cemetary. It was really sobering to see row after row of grey headstones. Over 3.5 million people died during the war- 2 million of them were North Vietnamese. Unlike southern Vietnamese who were drafted at 18 years old, northern Vietnamese girls and boys were prompted to join the ranks as young as 9 years old by way of Communist propoganda. Also, unlike the Southerners who received dogtags for identification, the Northerners carried bottles that contained personal handwritten identification. Many bottles were destroyed during the battles prompting an entire section of the semmitary to be devoted to the unknown soldiers.

We rode off to see the bridge that now connected the North and South over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once the US discovered the trail using radar devices, they dropped thousands of bombs and sprayed Agent Orange to destroy the Jungle covering the route. The VietCong made a “Noodle Trails” of it and went into Cambodia and Laos, wrapping around and reentering the South. In answer to that, the US bombed the hell out of there as well.

We saw a few other things along the way but the last stop was the best. We went to the civilian refuge tunnels. Our guide took us all through thte tunnels with torches and we saw the cramped living quarters for families, the kitchen, bathroom pit for 500 people, well for drinking water and a maternity ward where 17 babies were born. Could you ever imagine being born in a dark, damp, cramped tunnel during bombing raids??

The whole adventure was totally worth the money. Riding on the bikes was a blast- my driver would lay on his horn so that the village kids and minority children would come out and wave to us. I felt like a celebrity!

1. boat ride in Ha Long Bay
2. walking through the Surprising Caves
3. swimming in the bay
4. night on the boat
5. bong hit of tobacco - a North Vietnamese favorite

We spent a night on a boat in Ha Long Bay. Everything was fine until Evan saw a huge roach smack in the middle of the bathroom floor. I screeeeched. Like the gentle person that he is, Evan wanted to catch it and set it free on the side of the boat, but I was having none of that. I took his sneaker and whacked the hell our of it. It was soo nasty; the guts went everywhere. I then made Evan take his writhing carcass and flush it down the toilet. He wasn’t too happy about it.

Evan took a bong (water pipe) hit of tabacco. This is common among men in the North. When we first saw it on the street, we thought it might be opium or something, but it was done quite openly and in front of police. We inquired and found out it was tabacco. Our guide, Zhong, offered us some on the boat. I (Evan) took a hit and felt very lightheaded, albeit relaxed. Soon after I felt very queasy, almost like I wanted to vomit — supposedly I looked green. I relaxed on the top deck of the boat which was very beautiful,

It was crazy how we had to get on and off the boats. They all jam together at a dock, bumping and scratching into each other. With full packs on our backs, we had to scramble up onto the closest one and then literally jump from one to the next until we got to our boat. There were times I was sure I’d fall in!

Day Two

1. hiked the Cat Ba National Park — don’t bother with it if you ever visit
2. climbed crazy rusted tourist tower
3. visited “Monkey Island”, which indeed had some little monkeys waiting for us
4. Kayaking among the karsts
5. drank a bit at bars on Cat Ba Island

We almost got left behind! We got out of our boat onto one of the fishfarmer places, carefully waliking across 2′ x 12′ beams hovering over shark and large fish bins. I was like, “Are you insane?!” Good thing my momma sent me to all those ballet classes- great balance. One cool thing was when we folllowed the guide through a natural archway into a large lagoon; the archway was so low that the lagoon was hidden during high tide! The water was clear and we could see some sea fans and coral, but that’s about all there was to check out. The guide took off and headed back to return the kayak but it felt so short, especially since we were originally promised 4 hours to explore. Evan and I decided to go around the rock from the oter side. Somehow we got lost. We started to panic at the thought of having to spend a night on one of those dilapidated fishing boat houses. Luckily, the boat sailed around the corner just as were we getting desparate. They didn’t seem very pleased with us holding up the schedule but you know what?? I wasn’t very pleased being abadonded in the middle of god knows where with sharks!

Day Two

1. cruised the UNESCO World Hertage site, passing a floating vilage and school
2. back to Hanoi

The bus from Hanoi to Hue came at about 7:45pm. It was an overniter packed full of backpackers. Such an awesome vibe. Pleaple from all over the world trading bits of helpful info and stories- who’s going where, who just came from there, best places to see, how to get around, cheapest hotels… My 8 week trip pales in comparison to these long-term trekkers. I could easily keep travelling for a year. What an awesome experience!