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Published: October 21st 2009
Ready to Roll!
Bruce and Sandy Anticipating Our Trip!Gettin' Antsy
The plane tickets are purchased, the itinerary is set, the hotels booked, the clothes bought, the shots endured. It's 7 days and counting! What have I forgotten (whatever it is I'll be sure to remember it as soon as I get on the train headed for the airport)? What will go wrong (hopefully only things that will result in a fun new adventure)? I hope that I can do as promised and provide you with some interesting stories, observations, and photos of our 50th anniversary trip to Southeast Asia! We leave October 24 by NJTransit train to NYC, then Long Island Railroad to Jamaica Station and the Monorail to JFK Airport. It's amazing to me that, except for a mile-long ride to the train station, we can go from our house to Bangkok without getting into a car!
Why This Part of the World As a little background: in 1964 and 1965 we lived on Okinawa (then an American trusteeship, now reverted to Japan). It was the beginning of the Vietnam War and Bruce was an Air Force Rescue helicopter pilot. We had lived in northern Maine for two years where we froze our bippies off;
Nakhon Phanom in 1965
This is the main intersection of the town with the clock tower built in tribute to Vietnamese immigrants. so when orders came to go to Okinawa, once we found a map that located it for us (there was no Google back then) we were excited about living in such an exotic location with SUNSHINE and WARM WEATHER! Little did we know that as soon as Bruce, who preceded the rest of the family by about 3 months, landed there he was informed that he would be sent on a "temporary" assignment to a secret location, not to be divulged to his family upon penalty of death, or some such threat. The secret location, as it turns out, was Nakhon Phanom, in northeast Thailand, a sleepy little town on the Mekong River directly across from Laos and within spitting distance of the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail, over which the North Vietnamese moved military equipment and ordinance to South Vietnam.
Bruce was a member of the 33rd Air Rescue Squadron and their mission was to rescue any US pilots unfortunate enough to go down in Laos. His family - I and the first 3 children, with the 4th in the cooker, were abandoned to fend for ourselves on Okinawa for several months until he returned. Because there was
Typical House 1965
This is what homes in the village looked like in 1965. no real base yet in NKP (as it is often called), Bruce and his fellow pilots lived in a motel (of sorts) in the town. That early in the war there were very few locals who spoke English, so they made friends with the few who could, including an American Baptist missionary couple, the local airport manager, and the cute young women who taught English in the village school. Since they ended up having no rescuing to do, it was a pretty cushy assignment, what with a maid, all their meals cooked for them, and time to play badminton with the Thai military. As to the cute young women?......
Our First Visit to Thailand as a Couple Several months after Bruce's tour was over in NKP I was fortunate enough to be able to go there and visit all the people that he had met. The missionary couple put us up in their home and the school teachers hosted a big party for us. We managed to take the local ferry across the Mekong and into the small villages on the Lao side of the river, probably only a couple of miles from the bad guys hiding in
In Nakhon Phanom 1965
This is us - nearly 45 years ago with the friends we made in Nakhon Phanom! the beautiful mountains there. I even took a swim in the Mekong River - and have the photo to show for it, my white swimsuit a lovely shade of Mekong brown!
This was a long intro, but I wanted to give you some background. It was because of these ties that we decided for our 50th anniversary to travel back to that part of the world and, besides returning to NKP, visit the two countries that were pretty much off limits to us back in 1965: Laos and Cambodia. For all the intervening years Angkor Wat in Cambodia has been one of my Holy Grails, high on my bucket list of places to visit before we die. It hit me just recently, as I approach the big 7-0 (Bruce having already gone by it) that the number of good traveling years remaining could be fairly small and there is soooo much of the world that we still want to see. Instead of joining a group tour without control over our time and destinations we opted to plan our own itinerary. Then we engaged Global Basecamps of California and their Asian counterpart Buffalo Tours to put together our trip of a lifetime.
Itinerary So here's the itinerary: Bangkok, Ayutthaya (ancient Thai capital), Chiang Mai (all in Thailand), Luang Prabang, Vientiane, Konglor Cave (all in Laos); Nakhon Phanom and other towns in the Isan area of Thailand; Pakse, 4000 Islands, and Bolaven Plateau (all back in Laos), Siem Reap (Angkor) Cambodia. Well be on the road for nearly a month and will travel by train, plain, automobile, boat, and many tuk-tuks! I have no idea how often we'll be able to get an internet connection for my nice new netbook, or how exhausted we'll be at the end of each day, but now that Ive committed to you to do this blog it will give me the incentive to post often. I plan to lace the entries with photos of our travels, so I won't even have to bore you to death with a slide show when we return.
Wish us luck! We're off into the unknown!!
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Lisa formerly Duffy
non-member comment
What me worry?
Since I was only a babe in arms when the first southeast Asian adventure began, I have no recollections of the event that my mom describes in this initial blog post. I am excited for them but nervous... kind of like my parents used to be when I didn't come home until two o'clock in the morning after 'hanging out with my friends'. I hope that there will be some folks in the little village who remember my folks. Now that would be blog-worthy! Have fun, mom and dad, be safe, be well, and don't drink the water. Love ya, L.