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最近我找不到有汉字的电脑，可是在 Cambodia （东南亚）我今天找到了。我们现在都很好。这星期我们和一个很友好的日本人碰见了。他叫Yuske, 他也骑自行车在一个特长路：日本到澳道理。他二十四岁而且他也带来了一个吉他。所以我们天天跟他又骑车又弹唱音乐。太好了。他打算跟我们骑到泰国，以后我们去印度他还往南走。

Yuske：我们新的日本朋友，他现在跟我们去泰国。

取乐Yuske,意外 ，我们两天前和两个年轻的欧洲人在路上碰见了；那个男的是法国的女的是俄如萨的。他们已经花十八个月从法国骑自行车到东南亚。他们和我们有差不多一样的目的：好一点了解我们的世界所以他们可以帮助建设世界和平。他们有很都很好的故事。他们现在往北走，我们往南走，可是我们一起花了一个晚上野营。他们去了中亚州在特高的山而且根很多特好的人认识了。他们的故事让我们希望也往中亚洲走，可是我觉得我们今年没有机会。欢迎上他们的网站：www.common-life.org

Elena (俄国) 和 Gael (法国)

我肯定想中国，可是我们几次在涝洼找到了中国饭店和中国人。我们在那里吃了很多中餐因为我们想了天天吃中餐，我特别想红烧茄子，南瓜和排骨 =）我找到了中国人的时候，我想跟他们聊天因为我就不会说东南亚的话。这几次我找到了好玩。东南亚的人是很好的人，可是我必须照会说英语的人跟他们聊天。所以我现在少一点很本地人聊天。不过我们弹唱的音乐越来越重要，是我们的国际话。

我希望祝你新年快乐！我在网上看到中国冬天天气的问题，让我很悲哀知道那么都人不会今天回家过春节。我希望你可以好跟你的亲人在一起好吃好聊天好高兴高兴生活。这春节我们都因该记得生活的最重要的部分：亲人，朋友，平安，和聪明点的回答为了我们世界的问题，最后让我们有世界和平。我祝你和你的亲人平安！

-高竹 （Peter)

After little more than 2 weeks of beautiful cycling in Lao, yesterday we crossed our third international boundary, which in Southeast Asia are coming quite frequently in these smaller countries (3 countries in 5 weeks opposed to China for 3 months).  Several people had told us how terrible the dirt road is in Cambodia coming from Lao, naturally leading to growing apprehension, but we were thoroughly pleased to find a brand new paved 2 lane highway built by the Chinese that was just completed last July 2007, as foretold to us several days ago by a very experienced middle-aged Swiss bicycle touring couple, Mr. and Mrs. Karl Gunthard, whom we met on the road.  It is the same road with the same name (Hwy 13) as in Lao, only newer, in better condition, and even less traffic than Lao which we thought would be impossible.  Excellent.

 

From here we are planning to spend about 1.5 weeks heading south to Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia, where we will spend some time with Celina, one of my Maryknoll friends who has been doing mission work there for 2 years.  She has graciously found a host family with enough space for us.  I’m looking forward to learning more about this country by seeing the needs and responses of various organizations through Celina and her friends’ extended experience here.  Since we were unable to visit our German friend, Kathrin, in Vientiane Lao, due to route and timing, this will be our first visit to an old friend since Kevin and Kaishan’s wedding in Guangzhou and Hong Kong back in Nov 2007. 

On Jan. 30, we had the pleasure of meeting Yuske, a 24 year old Japanese man in Pakse town, Lao, who is also cycling far – Tokyo, Japan to Australia. 

He had planned to leave that afternoon when we arrived, but after talking with Nakia (who lived in Japan for 3 years) and having lunch with us, he decided to stay the night in a Guesthouse with us – good choice.  The next day, Yuske decided instead of going straight to Thailand, to join us first to Cambodia and then on to

Bangkok.  Yuske also enjoys music, especially blues, and is also carrying a guitar on his bike!  He is the first cyclist we’ve met who is also carrying a guitar (though we did meet a middle-aged Chinese man with a saxophone).  We jammed together at our guesthouse that afternoon and have played several times since.  Our common songs are House of the Rising Sun and a blues riff in E.  Nakia has also been a great student and has learned the Japanese lyrics for one of Yuske’s favorite songs.

Because of Lao’s beautiful natural environment, clear skies, and sparse population, we’ve been camping more and more.  In fact, we hit a new record last night with 4 consecutive camping nights.  Unlike in

Vietnam’s dense populated countryside, Lao’s countryside even right off the main north-south Hwy 13 that we’ve been on for the past week is very sparsely populated making it easy to find secluded camp sites. 

However, after meeting Gael and Elena last night (biking from France to Beijing and then back to France – www.common-life.org), we’ll try asking people if we can camp in their yards to increase our interaction.  Gael and Elena told us that most of their time in

Cambodia, if they tried to camp away from people’s houses, the people would come out and invite them to camp right in their yards anyway.  Indeed last night, the one house of neighbors came out to our site smiling and talking to us in Khmer (the Cambodian language) even though we didn’t understand, and re-started our dieing fire by putting on all the big logs we had for quite a large fire, we think, to keep away what few mosquitoes there were, and possibly to keep away evil spirits (according to Gael and Elena’s understanding).  See the post below, “Gael and Elena”for more info on their incredible journey. 

 

Something that has surprised us is how dry Lao and northern

Cambodia are.  I was expecting jungle, and although our first 150km in Lao from Vietnam on Hwy 8 had plenty of old growth forest, it wasn’t humid and soon gave way to younger forest and cleared areas reminding me a bit of Kenya’s semi-arid landscape east of Nairobi, seemingly parched by the dry season’s powerful sun.  After crossing the border yesterday, the

Cambodia side has many small brush fires burning in the forest for no apparent reason as there is no agriculture there.  Much of the forest along the brand new 2007 Chinese-built highway has been cut down and now has patchy fires, perhaps to clean the forest floor and hopefully not simply slash and burn. 

The benefits are that mosquitoes have been kept to a minimum and it’s been easy to find dry wood and start camp fires. 

FYI: Lao is Laos.  For some reason, English has added an “s” to the local and therefore actual name of the country, perhaps analogous to Vietnamese boiling down “

America” to “Mee.”  Conversely “Vietnam” in English is the same as in Vietnamese minus the space between the two words,

Viet Nam.  How about calling every country by its real name in its local language? 

It was getting late and we were hoping to make it another 18km or 1 hr to Stung Trung town, especially since it is the first and only town for another 160km in this northern forgotten and unpopulated part of Cambodia.  It wasn’t meant to be though, as instead we were blessed with running into two other seekers with similar goals - young people in their mid-twenties also bicycling the world for greater understanding and goodwill…but in the opposite direction.

Meet Elena and Gael, found on-line at their website: www.common-life.org

  

Elena is from Russia and Gael is from France.  They’ve been bicycling from France for 18 months, having extended their original plan of 1 year to over 2 years, planning to end also in France around December 2008, going back through China and Russia.  As we found with Kuang Sub and Su Ji from Korea, Gael and Elena were extremely talkative, pouring out many of their incredible experiences especially from Central Asia for most of our (camping) evening together, perhaps since they don’t have a larger group like us to float around in to process what they’re experiencing with different people…or maybe they’re just on fire for what they’re doing, or both.  Either way, they are an inspiration to us. 

Unlike us, they were not afraid to tackle India in the summer and parts of Central Asia (“the stan’s”) in the winter – the most direct route from Beijing to Europe.  They told us of high mountain climbs with their loaded bikes, one 50km uphill, an amazing 20km long plateau at 4000m above sea level with no one around, brakes icing up on a different occasion, and camping in -30 C (-10 F) weather.  Confirming reports I’ve heard from other cyclists, they raved about the kindness and hospitality of the people in Kazakhstan, Kashmir, Uzbekistan, and

Kyrgyzstan.  So often when they would be pitching their tent, people would come out and invite them to stay in their homes, to eat, drink Vodka, and occasionally party with their friends and family. 

However, they were perhaps most excited about their experience inPakistan.  They said they thought Pakistan was their favorite country so far on their journey, the people having given them a warm welcome with nearly all not caring much for politics (which seems to be common trend in the world among average citizens).  They traveled safely through areas close to Afghanistan and though they were there a few months before last fall’s turmoil in Pakistan over the opposition leader returning and later being assassinated, Karl Gunthard from Switzerland who runs his own bicycle touring company (www.bikereisen.ch) told us last week that he was there last October and November during the thick of it and that he had no problems from those political issues as a bicycle tourist.  “You biked through

Pakistan?” I asked Karl surprised.  “How was that?”  He looked at me with a smile, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Fine.  It was just fine.”

Gael and Elena also told us they ran into two Americans traveling in Pakistan by motorbike, who told them likewise that they had had no difficulties and instead similarly had had positive experiences with the Pakistani people.  Moreover, though Gael and Elena didn’t go to Afghanistan, they had met another couple who had traveled safely through Afghanistan, though the couple said they did feel it was a bit more dangerous which required additional caution.

One of Gael and Elena’s goals, similar to us, is to seek the truth about a country’s situation and the character of its people first hand, instead of blindly relying on bent and imperfect media sources and worse, commonly held misconceptions about countries and their people (stereotypes).  Beyond the common human error of projecting the violence and turmoil of a small number of countries onto whole regions (as in the Middle East and Central Asia with regards to Israel – Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan) and even onto whole continents (as in Africa[1] with regards to Sudan and Somalia), another such misconception, among many residual fallacies left over from the Cold War that French Gael and Russian Elena have faced together, is the idea that Central Asian people (from countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan which used to be part of the Soviet Union) don’t like Russians and didn’t like life “under the USSR.”  I mean, the USSR was a “bad” and “evil” thing, right?  Were they not the “enemy” from the American sphere’s perspective?  How could anyone possibly have liked the USSR and what they did?In fact what they found, proving Gael and his west European education wrong, was contrary to this line of thought.    1) Central Asians warmly welcomed Elena and talked with her and Gael (in Russian) about how they like Russia and Russians – in addition to enthusiastically explaining their culture and sharing their lives with them, taking advantage of their common language, Russian, unlike most cyclists that pass through who don’t speak Russian.  2) Many Central Asians also talked about how they had liked life in the Soviet Union and the advantages they had, one big one being that the Soviets brought in better education, and for free.

This is similar to what I found among a couple of my Serbian friends living in Beijing and among East Germans in Wittenberg when I studied there in 2002.  I don’t remember anyone in Wittenberg jumping to say that life now is better than before the Berlin Wall falling in 1989.  Instead, most said the DDR (East Germany) had advantages that are now lost, while unification withWest Germany and a capitalist economy have brought different advantages and the best system would combine both.

Beyond sharing their experiences with us, we were impressed with their organization and involvement in a project with UNESCO to build a database of the world’s monuments and their having a formal sponsor from a French-Swiss bank which has allowed them to extend their trip, buy a new tent and a lap top computer, in addition to a French bicycle company that initially gave them free bicycles.  This has got us thinking about how we here at Fueled By Rice could more precisely encompass our principles and goals with a product or project now, besides a probable end product like a book or video, in addition to considering possibilities for sponsorship.  Advice welcome.  For now one of our main goals is being realized with the production of this website, allowing you to experience our journey with us and to learn some of what we are learning via this blog, the photos, and the videos.  Thanks for your interest!

We only had one evening with these quality people, but their effect on us will be felt on the rest of our journey.         

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[1] Africa in fact is the second largest continent and has the largest number of countries - 47 of them- of any other continent, yet is most commonly clumped together simply as “Africa” even in sentences when specific countries of other continents are being named – listen for it while people are talking.  Although many African countries have had turmoil over the last 50 years during which nearly all fought wars to gain independence from their European colonizers and occasionally civil wars to deal with conflicts stemming from arbitrarily drawn borders by Europe, currently, there are only a few countries with war and major violent conflict: Sudan (Darfur region) 20yr civil war between north and south, Somalia – over 10 years of anarchy and war lords, and for the last month, Kenya, due to public discontent over their rigged presidential election.