I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and energized. Two days down was what I needed and the little fling didn’t hurt anything either. I went to the airport and did a complete preflight making sure the plane was ready for a couple long over water hops. Now, I was sort of following the same path as my last trip and that made for a certain amount of confidence.
I took off from Kanchanaburi and was soon over water. I climbed up to the cooler air above ten thousand feet even though that meant being on oxygen. Off to my left was Cambodia, Kampuchea, where the Khmer Rouge established a very pure economic communism. They did, for a while. The wacko eco-groups like Earth First are always looking for ways to kill off all of the people, except themselves of course, and return the earth to the natural state, natural meaning no people except the elect. The Khmer Rouge showed them how. Just get everyone to establish pure communism exactly as Lenin described and within months everyone, except the leaders, will be starving to death. That’s what happened in Kampuchea. The more pure the communism or socialism, the quicker everyone starves. 80% of the food grown in the old Soviet Union was grown on the small private plots the government allowed to the farmers. That and purchases from those 'horrible' but productive free market countries Canada, Australia and the U.S. are the only thing that kept communist Russia from starving. I see nutcase filmmaker Michael Moore is making a screed against Capitalism. I say send him to a real communist state. One, he’ll lose all that fat and two, he’ll come back understanding the reality of it. I won’t say anything good about Capitalism. But I will say this: maybe capitalism isn’t good; but it is better than any other alternative we have found to date.
Cambodia slipped behind the wing and Vietnam stuck out towards me. Vietnam doesn’t resonate the way it did many years ago; memories fade. To teens today, it was just one more war they have to study. Hard to believe the intensity of the battle that happened, not the military battles since there never was much of a military war, but the political battles between countries and between Americans in their own country. For something that had so polarized the country I was amazed at how little emotions still resonated in people. The Civil War still resonates among Southerners today, but Vietnam is quickly fading for those that came after.
I headed south to Borneo and down the west coast of the island. This was familiar airspace. These islands are different than anywhere else in the world because they are caught between two great land masses: Asia and Australia. Avian species change island by island even though you would think the birds could fairly easily travel from island to island. The birds in the southern islands all are related to the birds in Australia, while in the north, they are related to birds in Asia. If there ever was a working diagram of how evolution works in dispersion of species, it is the birds in Indonesia. Why would a ‘designer’ make two different species physically similar, but unrelated? Of course an intelligent designer wouldn’t. This alone is enough to end the argument for me. But then I don’t go looking for Dinosaurs in caves in the Congo.
I landed at Bali and grabbed a shuttle back to the same hotel I had stayed at before. The six hours of flying across the equator had taken a lot out of me, so I drank a lot, only a little of which contained alcohol. I enjoyed watching the women. I remember one tourista lady in a bright bikini. Damn, but the fantasies I had sitting on the veranda bar and watching her sunning herself. She came up to the bar at one point to get a drink and I drank in her loveliness. Really, is there any better way to pass the time than enjoying young vibrant attractive women with almost no clothing on? I can’t think of a better way.
Balinese cooking is similar to Thai, just not as hot, but using many of the same ingredients. I love the cooking myself and had a fine dinner of grilled and marinated fish, lobster, and squid, (Calamari for those who hate the word squid.) Everything was served with rice, reminding me that, culturally at least, we were still in Asia.
I retired to bed early and slept until I was rested, having another long flight the next day.
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Copyright Rod O'Steele © 2009