This guy did not look happy to be in here.

After more than five months on the road, Matt and I found ourselves walking down a dusty road in Cambodia when he had the epiphany, “I think there are more than one kind of chicken.” Maybe it was something he’d been thinking for a while and just hadn’t had the right moment to put it into words, but I found his belated awareness quite entertaining as by that time we’d seen all manner of strange looking feathers and fowl. Reading one tourist’s review of a bike trip through Vietnamese villages, I scoffed at the remark that went something like this, “It was real country, we saw chickens on the road.” Maybe this person had lived in New York her whole life, but if you want to see chickens on the road you don’t have to go all the way to Vietnam. “If you want to see chickens, go to Arcata,” I sarcastically thought, “chickens are not exotic.” To the tourist’s credit, though, there is something interesting about seeing animals in the developing world. They’re used and viewed differently than the way we would see them back home, say, in San Francisco. This chicken has a string tied around its feet. It reminded me of trying on sandals but having trouble because they’re attached by a cord or something.

Water buffalo being used to move the plow. In other places we’ve visited they are used for food—milk (cheese, yogurt, making tea), meat, and skin.

This fella couldn’t hold still long enough for me to take a clear picture, which is probably to the pup’s advantage considering the day after I took this shot I saw a little bit larger dog being taken of a coal pit after a thorough roasting.