Still Searching For Roger

In this age of email, Google, MySpace and Facebook it seems that you can find anyone you ever knew at any point in your life. This usually means that people can find you as well, and that may or may not be a bad thing, depending on if you want to be found and who might be looking for you.

But like I said, it only "seems" like you can find anyone you want. Sometimes it just doesn't happen.

Not everyone is on a social network site. Not everyone you know has done anything that got them mentioned on the Internet or has their own blog. Some people you used to know have really common names or match the name of somebody famous that makes a Google search impossible (my old friend from high school in Illinois is named Lee Baca, the same name as the sheriff of Los Angeles, so I will never have any luck Googling him).

I've been thinking about this mostly because there is someone I've been trying to get in touch with for over the past year. My wife and I went to SE Asia in November of 2007 for about three weeks, a trip that I blogged extensively about after we got back. (Here, scroll to the bottom and hit "older post" if you are interested in reading all 29 long-winded posts. Lots of pictures.) While there we met several great people, a really sweet gay dentist from San Francisco, a German guy traveling alone and a fun fifty-ish couple from Australia. But there was one person that we really, really loved meeting during our trip.

We were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and we ate dinner at this great Indian restaurant. We ended up striking up a conversation with this really cool guy from Western Australia named Roger. The extensive post about that night is here, so I'll just do a quick rehash.

Roger was this large guy with a buzz cut on his head and a long gray beard that went down to his belly. Seriously. At the time we met him he was 56 years old, just divorced after 34 years of marriage, recently sold his organic farm that he had owned for years, a fairly recent convert to Buddhism and he was on his very first trip outside of Australia. And he's a vegan, which has a lot to do with why we met him in an Indian restaurant. We had a grand night talking to Roger for about four or five hours, a fascinating and charming man. We had such a great time talking to him that we never thought about pulling out the camera for a picture. He was on a two-and-a-half-month trip through a huge section of SE Asia, including Tibet and Nepal. A huge spiritual journey for him. And he was planning on returning in early 2008 for another six months or so, staying with a friend in Chang Mai, trekking through India and spending time in a monastery in Kathmandu.

We had given him my email address that night when we left and I heard from him shortly before Christmas. I responded to his email a couple of weeks later, waiting until I had time for a proper response. But it bounced back as not a valid email address. I'm not sure what happened, if he changed email addresses, decided to go off grid, lost his account or if something happened to him.
I have tried the email address (kevinswatch@bigpond.com) many times since then with the same result. I've googled him and searched for his blog, which also seems to have disappeared. I've checked to see if he is on Facebook. Nothing.

I'm dying to reconnect with Roger, and it seems that I never will. I'd love to hear about his travels and experiences in Asia.

All this technology and you can still lose touch that easily. Sigh.

So if anyone reading this ever comes across a bearded, sixty-ish, former organic farmer, vegan Buddhist from Western Australia named Roger Williams (also why the name is hard to Google) who has lots of stories about adventures in Asia; please let him know that Deni and Lisa would love to hear from him again.

Day 11 (Part 2) - Going Hué Down Now

Trivia - The post title is a play on words of a song by which band?


We finished eating at the Little Buddha Vegetarian restaurant and made our way back toward tourist cafe that was getting our plane tickets ready.

On the way we saw a sight that we had seen several times in Ho Chi Minh City, that I haven't mentioned in previous posts. All over Saigon there are people on the sidewalks, either sitting in place or walking around, with scales for weighing people. It was one of the odder ways I've ever seen poor people try to make money and didn't seem like it would be that profitable. But there were many different people with scales in just about every public high-traffic area around the city, so it must have been something people do. Maybe the Vietnamese don't have scales at home. Of course I don't think we ever saw an overweight Vietnamese person on the entire trip so I'm not even sure why they need to weigh themselves.

We got back to the tourist cafe, picked up our tickets for the two flights (Saigon-Hué and Hué-Hanoi) as well as our luggage and went out to find a cab. There was a guy across the street with a little brown piece of crap sub-compact and a taxi sign on the top. He ran over and helped us across with our suitcases and I asked him how much to the airport.

"Run meter," he said.

At the end of the ride he really did charge us the meter price, about 130,000d. I gave him 200,000d and told him to keep the change. I guess the best cabs to take in Saigon are the ones that look like independent drivers with worn out used cars. He was the only one that didn't try to take advantage of the stupid American tourists.

We had quite a while to wait at Ho Chi Minh City airport since we got there really early. Lisa left me in a cafe with our stuff to go look for souvenirs and snacks, while I commenced getting liqueured up.

I really hate flying. But after an Ativan and a couple of beers it's not so bad.

We got on the plane and it was only about half full. For those of you wondering, Vietnam Airlines flies regular jets like Airbus and not little third world prop puddle-jumpers like you were imagining in your Western mind.

After the plane took off the male flight attendant came over the intercom to make announcements. He first spoke Vietnamese, naturally. In the middle of his spiel he said something odd. It basically sounded like this - "<Vietnamese, Vietnamese> Captain Randy <Vietnamese, Vietnamese>"

Lisa and I looked at each other, "Did he say Captain Randy?"

The flight attendant then spoke in English and it was the usual airline speech of welcoming you aboard and blah blah blah. And he did in fact welcome us on board on behalf of Captain Randy.

After we leveled out the intercom came on again and a very American sounding voice said "this is Captain Randy from the cockpit..." and did the usual pilot talk of telling us the weather at our destination and how long our flight would be. The weird thing was that what he said wasn't translated for the Vietnamese people on the plane. You know, the actual people whose country we were in.

So that was odd. We got to say goodbye to Captain Randy as we got off the plane, a typical looking pilot with the kind of mustache common among pilots, supermarket managers and members of the Village People.

We got off the plane in Hué about an hour and twenty minutes later. When we walked out to the cab it was raining. It was also, for the first time on this trip, not hot. In fact, it was even kind of chilly. It was also raining, which is something we heard it did a lot in Hué. Lisa even read something that referred to it as the "Seattle of Vietnam."

After about a 30 minute taxi ride we got to the Orchid Hotel and were met at the sidewalk by a bellhop with an umbrella.

If you are ever going to go to Hué you need to stay at the Orchid Hotel. This place is incredible. The staff was super nice to us and the hotel is really cute. They apologized to us over and over about the lock on our door, which was broke due to it being an electronic key-card lock with a dead battery. There was no real put-out to this, they just had to open the door for us every time we came back because they only had one manual key. But they kept apologizing for it anyway. This was not the original room we had reserved because we came a day earlier. They let us keep this one for both nights at the same rate even though this was a bigger and more expensive room, and we were the ones that needed the extra night at the last minute. We tried to tell them to go ahead and charge us the full price but they would have none of that.

And the room was fantastic! A "family room" with a big bed, a separate single bed (good to know for when we take our kid to Vietnam in a few years) and a cheap mini bar, topped off by a balcony over the street below.





It was late and we were slap-happy by this point, remember our day started with the canceled train in Saigon, when I discovered my favorite part of the room. In the closet were some damn sexy silk robes.


I never would have imagined it was possible to look creepier than Hue Hefner. But I think I proved that it is.




Next - The day in Hué

*

Day 8 (Part 1) - Cruising The Mekong Out Of Cambodia

We spent our last morning in Phnom Penh very lazily hanging around the pool/garden drinking coffee and writing in our journals. We had a long day of traveling ahead of us, so we didn't really do anything until we had to go catch our boat. It was now November 16th.

Would have left and gone to do something if I knew I was going to have to listen to the yuppie dickhead (still keeping his poolside laptop vigil) bitching to a poor travel agent over the phone. He was complaining about the price of a ticket to Singapore he was trying to buy for two days later. International yuppie businessman didn't seem to understand the concept of last-minute plane tickets being more expensive.

We caught a tuk-tuk up to the boat dock and went into the restaurant/bar that doubles as the waiting area. The German expat who sold us our tickets had told us to get there a half-hour early and he would meet us there to walk us through the paperwork we needed to fill out. This was an international boat trip we would be taking this time, so there were entrance and exit forms to complete. We already had our Vietnam visa, as you have to have it in advance if you want to travel there.

We didn't really need anyone to help us with the paperwork, but Lisa figured the German was fishing for tip. It didn't really matter since he ended up not showing anyway.

After the paperwork I went across the street to a shop and bought some water, beer, soda and bananas for the trip. It cost something like $8.50 and I gave the guy a ten. As was usual while we had been in Cambodia I got my change as a combination of U.S. Dollars and Cambodian Riel. Anytime something had cents in the price we always got paper riel instead of American coins. It is amazing how many bills it takes to equal 50 cents. The only reason this sucked was that we were about to leave Cambodia and I didn't want to have any more riel since I wouldn't be able to spend or exchange it.

The time came and we headed toward the boat. Lucky for us they had two boats going that day since they had more people than could fit on one. We ended up on the less empty boat with five middle-aged French tourists, a young Australian couple and a Vietnamese girl. So we had plenty of room to spread out. This boat was about a quarter of the size of the one we took from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh and much more comfortable.

The trip down the Mekong River was pretty uneventful. There didn't seem to be as much life along this part of the Mekong as there had been on the Tonlé Sap.




A couple of hours later we got to the border. We pulled up to the Cambodian border checkpoint and we all had to unload.



Just like leaving a country by air, we had to stand in line to have our passports checked.



For some reason, when I got my passport checked the guy gave me somewhat of a hard time. He kept flipping through my passport really carefully. He then asked me why my Vietnam visa was only stapled in my book and not pasted on. By way of example he showed me the way the Cambodian one was glued on the page in my passport. I told him I didn't know and, "That's just the way Vietnam did it."

This really weirded me out in a few ways. First, my wife had gone just in front of me and her visa from Vietnam was in there the exact same way as mine. He didn't ask about hers at all. Second, how the hell would I know why it is only stapled? Does he think I put the visa in myself?

But mostly I was asking myself, "Why the fuck does this guy care about my Vietnam paperwork? He's the damn Cambodian border agent. This really isn't his problem or concern."

I think the guy was just in the mood to bust balls. Gets kind of boring sitting there checking passports all day long.

On our way back to the boat there were young girls selling drinks and snacks. Aha! A way to get rid of some riel. I bought us a couple of bags of some chip-like product and managed to unload the rest of my riel.

We jumped back on the boat and it pulled away. Well that's it for Cambod.....

Wait! Suddenly the French passengers start going crazy and run up to the front of the boat yelling at the driver. They were down a man it seemed.

The guys running our boat didn't appear to take a real close count, nor did the French people. We turned around and went back. There he was, standing on the dock.

All passengers now on board, we cruised down the river out of Cambodia. One of the crewmen took down the Cambodian flag that had been flying on the boat, leaving only the Vietnamese one that was flying from the other end.



Next - Afterword on Cambodia and then on to Vietnam

Day 7 - Tuol Sleng And The FCC

We got up and had breakfast by the pool of our French villa-style hotel. As we ate our bread & jam and our fruit I noticed a couple sitting a table away from us. They both had laptop computers open and were typing away. The guy would get on the phone every once in a while, he was obviously doing some sort of business. From what I could gather, he was some sort of young American businessman and she was his foreign girlfriend along for the trip, as whenever they spoke to each other it was in some other language but when he was on the phone it was English with an obvious American accent. There would not be a time that we went by the poolside bar, either in the morning or evening, that they were not at that very same table with their computers open. I don't think they ever left the hotel grounds. How very colonial.

I often wondered who the heck these people were that could go someplace like Jamaica and spend their entire time in a Sandals Resort, their only contact with the native population being the ones who bring their drinks. Now I know. Blond, yuppie businessmen in khakis and sandals.

After breakfast we made our way to the National Museum. Continuing our theme of Lisa having her picture taken in front of elephants, there happened to be a statue of one in front of the museum entrance.

The museum had lots of ancient Khmer art that was really cool to see. It also had a collection of more contemporary art and some of it was really nice. The sad part was that most of the contemporary Cambodian art was done by artists who were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

The museum building itself was quite beautiful. It is an open-air building with tall, traditional looking rooftops. The four main exhibit areas are arranged in a square to form a lovely courtyard.



After the National Museum we walked down the block to go to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. But, as seems to happen in a lot of countries that are not the United States, they were closed for the midday break.

We decided to go and find a store that Lisa had read about. It is a retail store run by the National Centre of Disabled Persons, where they sell items made by disabled people. In Cambodia, of course, a great number of the disabled people are victims of land mines. They had some really excellent stuff to buy as well. We walked out of there with several scarves and more than a few handmade silk toy elephants (back to our trip theme) among other things. I think they were the most expensive souvenirs we got on the whole trip, but it was the happiest we were about spending money. If we had even a little bit to do with the nice girl, missing half an arm, who rang us up keeping her job in the store instead of having to beg for money on the streets, or much worse, then it was money more than well spent. A great organization, doing the great work that their government seems to not want to do. You can even order items from them through the NCDP website (click on RO Project then click on handicraft catalogue ) and they'll send them to you. They really do have some great stuff, especially for kids, (check out the great elephant mobile) and the money goes to a really worthy cause.

On one of our walks too or from the NCDP we saw a monkey on the street picking through garbage. I wanted to get a picture of it but Lisa thought we should let the poor guy have at least a little semblence of his dignity.

We then went to the Foreign Correspondents Club for lunch. The FCC is somewhat of a famous place in Phnom Penh. It really was started with the aim of having foreign journalists as its main clientele. With its third floor restaurant/bar (with another bar on the fourth floor) having sweeping views of the river and the streets below, and its international menu, it obviously attracts all kinds of white people. In the evening it is full of tour groups.

Not the kind of place we usually like to go when traveling in a foreign land, but seeing the balcony tables from the street below the day before really made me want to go eat and have a beer at one of them.





After a lunch of a Cambodian curry and some french fries with garlic aoili, washed down by an Angkor beer, we made our way toward the Royal Palace.

Along the way we sneaked another picture of monks.



The Royal Palace was closed for the day, so we only got to see the Silver Pagoda area. Funny, that didn't seem to make a difference on the ticket price though, as we had to pay full price even though we weren't going to get to see half of the place.

Either way, the area around the Silver Pagoda was very cool.



And there were more elephant statues.



As well as an exhibit of a traditional Tonlé Sap stilt house, complete with musicians inside the house, who we tipped but didn't take a picture of, and a woman outside the house weaving cloth, who's picture we also didn't get.

We decided to instead go with a picture of me acting like a dork in the window.



After the Silver Pagoda we figured it was time to finally go see the infamous Tuol Sleng Museum. We got a tuk-tuk driver to take us there because it is a little farther from the center of town and we didn't have much time left.
Tuol Sleng was a former high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into Security Prison 21, or S-21. It became the largest detention and torture center in Cambodia during Pol Pot's insanity. We read that between 1975 and 1978 more than 30,000 people (according to former staff at the prison) were held and tortured here before being shipped off to execution, which took place at what is now called the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, which we saw the day before.

What you learn by visiting here is that the Khmer Rouge seemed to take a lot of their modus operandi from the Nazis. They kept very specific records of the prisoners, which included mug shot-style pictures of the victims.

There were rules for the prisoners written on a big board in the courtyard (English translation is a little messy):

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

Most of the museum was all of the different rooms with metal beds set up like they were when prisoners were chained to them for torture.

That was nothing compared to when we hit the rooms with the photos. There must have been three or four full rooms covered in the pictures the Khmer Rouge took of the prisoners. So many of them were so young. There were several of young mothers holding babies. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see. Everyone in the pictures we saw were tortured into "confessing" crimes against the regime, which was documented by the Khmer Rouge and I believe involved forcing the victim to sign.

They were then shipped off to Choeung Ek to be executed or were tortured to death right there at the prison. We know this was the fate of every person in the pictures we saw.

Couldn't really talk much during the tuk-tuk ride back to our hotel.

I went for a swim in the pool while Lisa wrote in her journal and the yuppie couple typed away on their laptops in their fashionably casual clothes.

We then walked back to the FCC for dinner. The place was absolutely hopping in the evening. There were groups of people at just about every table, including huge tables pushed together in the back rooms for big tour groups. The pool table seemed to be taken over by guys who looked like they might actually be genuine foreign correspondents. It kind of looked like the tables were where the tourists were sitting and eating, and the bar was where the journalists were drinking. They seemed to be regulars in any case.

Since it was evening the geckos were out in full force. They were all over the walls of the FCC. Big ones, little ones, baby tiny ones. I pretty much lost all attention of my wife for the evening, as when there is a cute animal around she got stop looking at it and smiling. And the baby geckos were damn cute.

I felt kind of guilty about going to the FCC for dinner, rather than supporting a smaller business owner. But Cambodia was a little more tricky when trying to be sure you are getting actual vegetarian food and the FCC had vegetarian specific items.

It is the only time on the whole trip that I had pizza.



Next - The boat out of Cambodia and my impressions of the country

Day 6 (Part 2) - Eating Indian In Cambodia With A Man From Oz

We arrived at the boat dock in Phnom Penh around 1:00pm or so on November 14th, about five-and-a-half hours after leaving the boat dock south of Siem Reap. As we pulled up to the dock, dozens of tuk-tuk drivers gathered at the railing above the landing. A couple of them even managed to jump on the boat and make their way through the cabin asking if anyone needed a tuk-tuk. We kind of got corralled by one of them. The guy was pretty persistent, and we did need a ride anyway. We told him we had big bags and we might need an actual taxi, but he was sure he would be able to take us. So after giving a 10,000 riel note (unloaded another one!) to the guys that carried our bags off the boat, we loaded up in the tuk-tuk.



The driver asked for $5 for the trip to our hotel, which was $3 or $4 more than I heard from people that it was supposed to cost, but he did load our bags for us and we aren't really talking about a lot of money. Like I said in earlier posts, I really don't like the whole bargaining thing. He also came across as a little slick, which made me a little nervous.

On the way he of course wanted to see if we needed to go anywhere else that day, and he suggested the Killing Fields. I knew that the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek site was a little ways outside of town and I thought we would be doing that the next day, but Lisa agreed with the driver that we should do it this day since it was already afternoon and too hot to walk around the city. I asked him how much to go to the Killing Fields and he told us $15. Again, he wanted about twice as much as I heard it cost other people. But we knew it would be a long ride, about 30 minutes each way, on a hot day so we didn't really want to argue over a few dollars. Besides, even if he asked a lower amount we would probably end up paying him that much or more anyway because we always tip really well, especially in poor countries.

Despite our tuk-tuk driver assuring me he knew where out hotel was when we hired him, he had no idea. He turned around several times and had to stop to look at the address again, which luckily had printed out at home before we left and also had it marked on our map. Eventually he found it. He dropped us at the front door of what turned out to be the walled compound of our hotel and told us he would meet us back outside for our trip to the Killing Fields.

The bellhop took our bags and led us into the Pavilion Hotel. I couldn't believe my freaking eyes when we saw this place. Inside some walls in the middle of the city was this little resort villa, complete with a pool surrounded by tropical trees.


And with a poolside bar/cafe where breakfast was served in the morning.


As well as secluded lounging areas in the middle of the little jungle.


The whole design of this place made me feel like I was in one of those old black and white movies featuring rich white people hanging out at a resort in one of their country's colonies. I felt like I should have been wearing one of those gray safari outfits, speaking with an English accent and sipping Cognac in the library.



We checked in with the manager, a French woman with a complete lack of personality, and we were shown to our room. The rooms at this place are actually separate cottages, we even had our own secluded seating area outside of our room door.

This was costing us $50 a night.

We headed back outside the walls of the compound to meet our driver and we were off to the Killing Fields.

Up to this point in our trip we had managed to avoid taking tuk-tuk rides, and now here we were doing it in the middle of some of the craziest traffic I'd ever seen (at least until we would get to Vietnam). The only real way to describe the way people drive in Phnom Penh is to imagine what it looks like when you see a colony of ants on the ground zig-zagging all around with no real semblance of order. Yet somehow they manage to not kill each other. Intersection were just massive groups of motorbikes and cars criss-crossing, all coming within inches of hitting each other. There were times I had to make sure to keep my knee away from the edge of my seat because it would be able to touch the side of a car that was next to us!

Going through a large roundabout intersection on a tuk-tuk in Phnom Penh was more exhilarating than riding the Cyclone at Coney Island





The road to the Killing Fields was dusty and busy. My mouth was pretty gritty by the time we got there. Most of the places to buy gasoline along the way were roadside stands with glass bottles full of fuel. Often sitting in the direct sunlight.

We got to the Killing Fields and spent about 45 minutes there. A place where mass graves were found with thousands of victims of the Pol Pot regime. It consist mostly of large pits where they found bodies with signs stating the numbers of men, women and children found there. There are still a lot of bone fragments scattered about. An eerie place.

Obviously we didn't really take any pictures while we were there. It seemed like it would be both distasteful and disrespectful. The only shot we took was of the Memorial Stupa, and we only felt OK about doing that from a distance. Inside here were about 8,000 skulls, piled all the way up to the top on all four sides behind glass panels. There's not really much you can say about that.


We made our way back to town and had our driver drop us off in the downtown area by the waterfront. He kept wanting us to commit to more rides the next day, but we said we would be walking around the rest of the time. We weren't actually sure that was going to be true, but we didn't want to commit to this guy as our driver the whole time.

We told him that we needed to go buy our tickets for the boat to Vietnam and he offered to take us there, but we declined. I wanted to find the place to get tickets on my own instead of trusting a tuk-tuk driver to take us. He did tell us that the boat left everyday at 12:00 noon, which was different than I heard, so we were concerned about that. We thought the boat left in the morning and were a little worried about it leaving so late.

Anyway, we walked up the waterfront and saw a little tourist shack with signs for bus and boat tickets. We walked up and started talking to the guy sitting there, who turned out to be a German ex-pat. Lisa got to use her German with him and we asked a bunch of questions about the boat and eventually bought the tickets from him for leaving Phnom Penh two days later.

We then went to find food. We went to an Indian restaurant a few blocks away that was in the Lonely Planet book. They only had two vegetarian items on their menu and they were out of one of them, which happened to be the curry. Not being in the mood for just sauteed vegetables, we left to find another place.

Their lack of anything for us to eat turned out to be the best thing that happened to us that day.

We went to another Indian restaurant, probably the highest rated one in Phnom Penh and one of the most expensive restaurants there. I wanted to go there originally but it was a heck of a lot farther away, that's why we tried the other place first. We walked in to this very fancy looking place and got shown to a table. It was still pretty early so there was no one else in the place except for one guy, seated all the way on the other side of the dining room from us. He had a buzz-cut and a really long gray beard, like down to his belly.

At one point I looked over his direction and he said hello. We started chatting across the room about where we were from and where we were traveling and Lisa invited him to join us. We were in the small table next to the front window with no room to slide another one next to us. We moved to the table next to ours with the intention of pushing it up against another table. Seeing what we were about to do, the waiters ran over and slid the tables together for us and moved all of our stuff.

The man was from West Australia and his name was Roger. Roger was on a two-and-a-half month trip throughout Asia. He told us he was 56-years-old and recently divorced after 34 years of marriage, and this was the first time he had ever been outside of Australia. He was hitting a ton of great locations while he was traveling, Nepal, Tibet, Vietnam and many others. He had already been in Vietnam and was going back the next day to spend three weeks doing volunteer work in a village north of Ho Chi Minh City.

Roger is a Tibetan Buddhist, which had a lot to do with his choice of itinerary for his first ever international trip. He was in the Indian restaurant for the same reason we were, a place where you know you can get vegetarian food when on the road. He's a full-on vegan. Over the course of the night we learned that he had been an organic farmer for years, though he had recently sold his farm.

So in a nutshell, Roger is a Tibetan Buddhist, vegan, organic farmer from West Australia.

There can't be too many people that can claim all of those terms at once. Roger might very well be the only one.

We talked all night with Roger about just about every topic you can think of - religion, politics, poverty, travel, philosophy - and had a grand time. We had been the only three people in the restaurant when we started, the dinner rush came and went, and we were the only ones in the place at the end of the night. We had been talking to Roger for something like four or five hours. The best night on the trip so far. We were having such a great time just gabbing away that we forget to get a picture with him, which is too bad.

We did give him my email and we finally heard from him right before Christmas. He was back at home but getting ready to leave again to go back to Asia, staying with friends in Chang Mai, Thailand. This time I think he is spending something like six months over there, staying for a while in a monastery in Kathmandu and seeing a bunch of India before going back into Tibet.

He is certainly making up for all those years of staying on his farm.

I know Lisa and I both hope we get the chance to see Roger again. He is one cool, fascinating man.

Next - Tuol Sleng and the FCC