China Continued

Modern Kunming

I've come to realize that I can't really say "China" when characterizing my experience here. China's just too complex and enormous for that. My myopia started to become apparent when we hit the city of Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. Yunnan alone which, in three weeks, we've just started to get a feel for, is a bit larger than California and has 45 million people; several million of which are ethnic minorities with cultures much different than the majority Han Chinese. Sometimes Tami and I feel like we are in an Andean village in Peru, sometimes in a farm valley in Burma. If a person had the time and money, a fantastic trip would be to enter China at a distant southern or western border and travel slowly overland to Beijing or Shanghai. As we've moved north from Laos, the changes have revealed what a huge, teeming country this is.

Prosperity and energy were apparent from the moment we crossed over from Laos. I was in no way prepared for Kunming, though. Accurate numbers are hard to come by because China is changing so rapidly. Our guidebook published in 2003 says Kunming had about four million people at that time. We spoke with a local man who worked for China Railways. He was an engineer and seemed to be very well informed. He said the current figure was closer to five million and the government expected (and was building out the infrastructure to accomodate) a doubling of that to ten million by 2020. Sheesh! We have two metro areas of ten million in the US - LA and NYC. People here keep telling us Kunming is a small, big city in China.

Tami with Kunming Behind


Whatever... numbers only tell part of the story. Visiting Kunming felt, for the first time since Bangkok, like visiting a full-fledged, modern metropolis with all the accoutrements: forests of skyscrapers, constant passenger jet traffic, bright lights and so on. It was not unexpected to find that the people of Kunming while nice, were a bit more like city people everywhere - busy with their own lives and fairly indifferent to a couple of foreigners walking their streets. That said, we did have a handful of very nice interactions and conversations with Kunmingers. Virtually very person we asked for help, whether it was a bus driver or a shoe repair person, took care of us with a smile. I'm starting to think they put courtesy dust in the water here.

Kunming's New "Old City"

Kunming is an old city. They even have what they call an "old city". What's left of that is going away very quickly, though. From what we've read and what we're seeing, the Chinese have not been sentimental about old buildings. Many "old cities" - some centuries old - around the country have been razed to make way for modern towers. Kunming stands as a stark example of that. Here and there you see rickety old slices of villages nestled among modern glass, steel and concrete. Even the area city developers are calling "old Kunming" seems destined for a ground-up makeover. Pretty much every city we've visited has buildings or neighborhoods constucted in traditional styles. Apparently they do this, not out of a love for the past but with the understanding that "old" is what Chinese (and foreign but to a lesser extent) tourists want to see. I'll give them this much, they stick to traditional styles and use local craftspeople. I've never seen so much hand carved stone and wood.

When they cast their eyes to the future, the gloves really come off. Kunming's avenues and huge pedestrian areas show an awareness of what design qualities make for a grand urban experience. The Chinese are clearly thinking big and thinking long-term.

Of course, "long-term" begs a bigger question or two. They seem to be building with only slightly more regard for dwinding oil supplies than we do at home. They're building up with towers rather than out "ex-burbs". American style ex-burbs are unlivable without cars. We've seen rail lines being constructed on a massive scale. That's certainly more efficient for moving people and goods than cars and trucks but it won't be enough. They are following a resource gulping, consumerist model that is adding fuel to the already raging fire.

The Cold Shoulder and the Heat & the Haze or . . . No Accounting for Taste 2

4:30 Sun (No Sunglasses Needed!) - Luang Prabang

So...as I said below, in all our time on the road, we hadn't really heard a bad thing about the country of Laos. Even in conversations with travelers over past years, virtually all of them raved that Laos was a special place. Consequently, as a rare exception, I'd allowed myself to fall into a trap with Laos - the trap of having high expectations. This almost always sets me up for a letdown but it was hard to discount all we'd heard. The one negative we'd come across was in our guide book. They wrote that the spring months in the north of the country could be smokey due to slash and burn agriculture practiced by the ethnic hill tribes. Little did I know.

Spring in SE Asia can be unbearable enough with just the heat.There is no breeze and the humidity gives the air a weight you almost have to push through. Like the Laotians themselves, we had to retreat most days to some internet cafe or under the fan in our room (no air-con) for two or three hours or risk getting decimated by the heat. In the capital, Vientiane, the air had a haze that seemed like smoke or pollution but without any distinguishing smell. As we moved north visibility - and breathing - became more constricted.

Like Walking in a Bowl of Hot Soup - Luang Prabang

Mature trees are rare in Laos so the coutryside has a mostly scrubby appearance. On the bus north out of Vientiane we saw our first blackened hillsides. We had no idea why the hills and valley floors were destroyed they way they were. The land often seemed too steep to farm and everything that was burned seemed to be left fallow. Nonetheless, the local people continued to work up and down the mountainsides with what looks like disdain for anything green. Everything is left white ash, black snags and tan and red earth.

We spent time with one woman from New Zealand who went on a couple day trek near Luang Prabang. She was astonished to walk, at times, along the trail with fire buring on both sides of her. This on days when the temps were just shy of a hundred degrees fahrenheit!

As horrifying as the land is, the air has been transformed into the most irritating and inescapable fallout of the burning. From Vientiane north we were plunged into a haze that burned the eyes and lungs and blotted out the sun. Even at mid-day, on the worst days you can stare directly into its light with naked eyes. One day, at a bus stop in Udomxai, pieces of black and white ash rained down on my lunch - and I was eating under an awning! Every time we'd take a shower, the washcloth turned a turgid gray. Our poor lungs...

What could the people grow that would be worth such destruction? For more than a week, in all the areas that had been burned, we saw nothing planted. Finally, up near the Burmese and Chinese borders, we saw rows of spikey plants along the slopes. A local man who spoke some english told us they were trees. They mature enough for harvest in seven years. As far as we could see, they cut and burn the trees so they can . . . grow trees. Okay...

Springtime In Laos

Whatever, I'm not a farmer and I'm most definitely not in the shoes of a Hmong tribe family man trying to survive. The experience of living in that atmosphere was nothing I'd like to replicate, though. If you're thinking about going to Laos, don't go in spring

Agrarian Apocalypse - Luang Nam Tha

The devastation is grim but it doesn't fully answer the complaint I made about not being able to account for other peoples' taste. The big, suprising negative we encountered had to do with the Laotian people themselves. For a lack of any more charitable way to describe them - they just weren't that nice. I try to live by the credo of not saying anything if you don't have anything nice to say but I've never felt so stumped by such a disconnect between what other people seem to perceive and my own perceptions. Why do other travelers give Laos such an emphatic thumbs-up?

I like to interact with the people in new places - even if they tease or have laughs at my expense or struggle with the language barriers with sign language or whatever. I didn't take off on a travel adventure out of misanthropy. I like to try to connect with people now and then. It's fun to make eye contact and see if you can find any commonality. That that approach didn't work so well for me in Laos. You can walk down the street or trail all day saying "Sabadie" (hello) and get only the most tepid repsonses - very often, none at all. That happened so often that, after a few weeks, I fell into following the Laotian example walking along withdrawn not saying anything to passersby. Even then, they still avert their eyes when they get close and almost never initiate a greeting.

One thing that Laos does offer is a chance to see and experience life at the village level. When you come from the West, you don't get that chance very often; if at all. The odd thing for me is, one of the expectations from village life is friendliness or camaraderie, even if it's only in passing. If you don't have those things, walking through a town of people who don't smile or turn away can make you feel very unwelcome. It's too intimate of a situation to be in without friendliness. At best, it felt like acute disinterest. At worst, it felt like suspicion or even judgement.

OK, fair enough. People are what they are and that's fine by me. My question is why so many other travelers speak so highly about how nice the Laotians are. It's not like I'm traveling alone. Tami came to the same conclusions as I did. One of our German friends who visited in Vientiane said, after only a couple days, that he "missed the smiles" （He's spent quite a bit of time in Thailand right next door to Laos and, I guess, expected the Laotians to be similarly friendly.）I don't know, call me blind for the five weeks we were in the country. All I know is that the people of every country we've visited have their character and that character comes in many shapes and sizes. The Laotians were the first people on this trip to make us feel like they were barely willing to tolerate us visiting their country. Weird.

No Accounting for Taste

In a million years I'll never understand how some people can see things one way and someone else will see the same thing a hundred and eighty degrees differently. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was apprehensive about visiting China. For years I'd heard how difficult it is to travel here. ''Virtually no one speaks English. Being a vegetarian is impossible. The people try to trick you on prices.'' These and more are commonly heard travelers' laments. By the same token, for years but especially since Tami and I left on this trip, we've heard not a single disparaging comment about Laos, which we just left.

We've only been in China for about six days but, if our experience thus far is any indication, this place is going to be fascinating and enlightening. As I said below, the people here have been the best. Sure, we've had to haggle on some prices but much less so than Vietnam or India. They have been so nice that, in some sense, we feel, for lack of a better analogy, like old family returning after decades abroad. The smiles and enthusiastic hellos are killing me. I helps that we haven't seen the floods of foreign travelers, backpackers or otherwise, that ply all the routes of SE Asia. For the first time in a long time, we feel like we are in a place very far from home.

It goes w/o saying that China is huge. Area-wise it's about the same as the US and it has more than FOUR TIMES the population. This is a world unto itself and you can feel it. In other countries there are lots of concessions to western sensibilities, spoken English, for example. So far here, we've been approached several times by people who start coversing in Chinese as soon as we say "ni hau" (hello). When we try to explain that we can't understand them, they don't get it. One guy yesterday kept pointing to his ear. He thought my lack of understanding was b/c I was deaf! One young woman, when she and her friends realized we couldn't understand what they were saying, took a full minute to write out a phrase . . . in Chinese. She thought we'd at least be able to read it.

Many people here seem to be so inside the Chinese experience that they think everyone else must be, as well. It makes for very interesting travel b/c you really can feel that they're living their lives with no regard what some tourist might be willing to pay for. You can still find that kind of unselfconsciousness in villages in some countries, but it's a rare thing in cities.

The city where we are currently, Jianshui, is great example of this. It looks what I imagine many of the mid-sized American Rust Belt cities looked like fifty or seventy-five years ago. It's kind of grey with mostly masonry construction. All the streets and lanes are lined with shop fronts owned by local small-business people. People are out and about shopping, drinking tea, eating or just socializing. The general mood is genial. People smile and laugh. Employment seems to be fairly robust. Activity really picks up in the early morning and at the end of the work day. Factories (actual factories with smokestacks!) are scattered off in the distance around the edges of the city. People seem comfortably busy.

China has a lot of coal. The smell of it burning permeates the city but that smell is something best taken in small doses. It is, at one and the same time, comforting like a campfire but, because of the sulfur, irritating. (The sulfur dioxide from Chinese coal burning is dumping tons of acid rain onto Japan and killing many of its lakes.) My eyes and lungs have a slight burn especially in the morning and evening when people cook and heat the most. Most of the coal comes in shallow cylinders like those in the photo to the left. Holes are drilled in the center to make the coal burn faster and hotter. The smell of Jianshui reminds me of the cities of the Midwest back when I was young.

I already mentioned that getting some vegetarian food has been no problem. Actually, we've been finding as much interesting veggie food here as any country we've visited. It's cheap, too. We can both have a decent, full meal for one American dollar.

As for people not speaking English, for the most part, that's a big plus. We're forced to learn some basic Chinese words now. Pantomime and struggling to pronounce words correctly do a lot to bond travelers with locals. So, yes, it's early days for us in China but we both feel like we know a good thing when we see it. I'm looking forward to more.

This, of course, has led us to ask ourselves how we ended up spending so much time in Laos. Check out the next blog to see how that unfolded.

Yunnan Hospitality

Tofu Grill in Jianshui - Yunnan Province, China

Yesterday we stopped at this tofu grill for lunch. These grills are all over Jianshui and this style of dining is far and away the most common in town. All of them have charcoal grills the edges of which are heaped with these little pillows of tofu.



The Grillmaster

As people eat, the grilltender moves more tofus to the center to brown over the coals. In a glass case at the door they have bowls and bottles to concoct various dipping sauces with ingredients like peanut paste, chili paste, fermented soy bean paste or soy sauce. They also have a bunch of bowls of cooked veggies, meats and cold relishes. You get a small plate or two of the veggies, sit down by the grill and pull a tofu pillow off the grill when you want. People sit shoulder to shoulder, low to the ground dipping tofu and driking tea. For the first time in a LONG time, we're in a city that does not see many tourists from outside the country. People often stop and stare at us like we have two heads, especially the older ones. As soon as you say "ni hau" (hello), though, they break into huge smiles.



I liked this guy's hat

Anyway, people here can be nice, and I mean catch-you-way-off-guard nice. While we were eating at the above grill an old guy sitting next to me put his hand on my shoulder, pushed a ten yuan note into my hand and motioned at my and Tami's plates. He was buying us lunch. I did my gracious best to decline but there was no way I was going to override his hospitality. This was a totally working class place and he was the image of a working class guy (Jianshui looks to me like a true-blue working class city, something like Saginaw might have looked in 1925.)

Our first night in the country, we were sitting at a little noodle stall on the street. It was hot and had been a LONG day traveling from Laos so we were looking for a beer. Everything on the menu was printed in Chinese script. All we could do was point at a bottle and hold up a finger. The food was a mystery. We left to go down the street and saw a man selling fried potatos and tofu squares (tofu's everywhere it seems). Armed with snacks, we went back for a second beer. The young people working the noodle stand saw that we got food and, after bringing our beer, dropped a plate of noodles on our table (w/o meat!), no charge.

We haven't been here long but China is certainly working hard to make a great impression. We're liking it!

Waxing and Waning?

New Grade for the Freeway - Yunnan

We just crossed over from Laos into Yunnan, a southern province of China. Two words describe my feelings about coming to China: curiosity and apprehension. I'll explain the latter in another post. The curiosity comes, more than anything else, from twenty years of hearing about the stupendous economic growth and development in China. The first stories I'd read described areas like the capital, Beijing, or Guangdong outside of Hong Kong, where new skyscrapers, factories, even whole cities were being built at a speed that hadn't been seen in anywhere in the world since the period after WWII - if ever. I remember talking to a neighbor from my hometown who took a trip to China with his wife around 1992. He was a very successful businessman back in Michigan; by many accounts the richest man in the county. When we visited in California shortly after their return to the States, he said if he were a young man then, he'd take a quarter of a million dollars and head straight to China. I didn't have the quarter mil but, knowing how well he'd done in his career, I got the point. His eyes saw a China on the rise.

Stories of China's emergence as a world economic player played on the front pages more and more frequently and with greater detail. Maybe four years ago my former boss took a trip to Shanghai. He returned with eyes wide in wonder. He said he'd never seen such a concentration of human energy. The famous quote making the rounds at that time was that three-quarters of all the overhead building cranes at use in the world at that point in time were in the city of Shanghai.

All this is old news now. I read the other day that China will pass France this year as the number four economy in the world. (Due to opaque financial reporting and doctored govt. statistics in China, many think it passed France some time ago and is much larger than officially reported.) Way out here in the Chinese hinterlands, I wasn't sure what we'd see. As soon as we crossed the border the difference was tangible. Laos is the scruffiest and poorest country in SE Asia. China's side of the border crossing felt like Thailand, now a wealthy country in its own right. The road north, though, was rough. For several hours we crisscrossed back and forth on an old road running beneath an under-construction super-highway.

The Chinese are punching an expressway, conceived no doubt in Beijing, from the provincial capital of Yunnan, Kunming - five hundred (+) miles north of the border, down through northern Laos into Thailand. You could say this is China's own version of a 'NAFTA' freeway. For the entire ride we saw small mountains carved out, forest cleared and overhead flyways built to smooth the route through areas filled with tribal (not Han Chinese) farmers who still have yet to run plumbing into their houses. Talk about imminent culture shock.

Seeing the juxtaxposition of something so sleek and modern slicing through a farm landscape reminded me of seeing the final stretch of I-69 between Lapeer and Pt. Huron get completed. My dad worked building the highways of Michigan . . . back when Michigan had an economy that the world envied. Four-lane divided ribbons of concrete crossed the state from city to city. I think his last job was helping to complete that stretch of 69 in the late 1980's. His and perhaps industrial Michigan's swan song?

I-69 Just east of Pt. Huron

I remember being a kid in Bad Axe in the '70's and '80's. Every now and then, the rumor would make the rounds that M-53 might get upgraded from a two-lane to a four-lane divided highway. The trip to Detroit and all the glamour of the city would be just an easy cruise away. Life in a small town would be salvaged from total provincialism.

Reunion

Toasty Afternoon At Buddha Park

Add to the heros of our travel experience the wonderful couple Jorg and Corinna from Germany. This past June we stayed at the same guest house in Ladakh. They are very nice folks with whom we didn't get to spend enough time last summer. Lucky for us, they love to travel and decided to come down to Laos to have a look around while are here. They've stayed in touch with us and we were able to meet up here in Vientiane for a few days. What a treat to spend time with some familiar faces.

With luck, we'll share a few Pilseners in Germany or treat them to some California hospitality sometime in the future.

:)

Lost Mail

It's come to my attention that I have not been receiving some e-mails both here in Laos and in while we were in Vietnam. If you've e-mailed me since late January and I never responded, please try again.

Vietnam Post Script

A few nights ago we drank a couple beers looking, for the first time, across the Mekong River toward Thailand. Laos marks something like our ninth country since we left the US. Looking back, some images of Vietnam that'll stay with me...

Fairly Typical Saigon Street

Scooters - I've never seen a country with such a preponderance of two-wheeled motos on the roads. You can be riding down a major city avenue with a view for many blocks. The street will have hundreds or even thousands of 100cc motos (and bicycles) but not a single car or truck. The streets look more frenetic but the traffic actually moves more slowly and you're not separated by walls and windows. It's more fun and somehow more civilized than auto culture. Huge plus. If you want to cross a street, you merely step out into the flow and ford it as if it's a stream. In Saigon, we met a young architect from England who was so astounded by how flawlessly this worked that he crossed an entire avenue with his eyes closed.

Side-saddle Tami

We bought bread from this man every morning in Hue

Food - I'd be challenged to find a country with a more vibrant food culture. That's right, France or Thailand, you might be beat. Vietnamese markets have an unbelievable variety of fresh produce and ingredients. People are obsessed with food there. Everywhere we walked with groceries, the locals would zero in on what we carried and try to figure out what we'd bought. If we stopped to show them, they'd go through every single thing in our bags. Their coffee is nothing short of a revelation. I am spoiled forever as all other coffee else will be a weak, pale reminder. If you eat seafood, Vietnam might be the ultimate heaven. The entire length of their coast with the South China Sea is one gargantuan fishery. The variety and freshness of what they catch is like nothing I've ever seen.

The Love Hotel - We stayed at a place in Hue that had us scratching our heads at first. The room was decent enough and the price was right (about $5). The only hitch was that our bathroom was separated from the bathroom next to ours only by a partial wall. Over the top we were able to discern (all too well) our neighbors' comings and goings. After a couple days, we realized the room next door turned over a few times in a day . . . and it was always couples going in or out. Empty wine bottles often appeared outside the rooms for the cleaning lady. Then Tami noticed that many of the fluorescent light tubes gave off a lurid pink light when they were on. The giveaway was the wall-sized banner in our second room (we moved to get more privacy in the bathroom) picturing an undergarment-clad couple (Caucasian, oddly enough) surrounded by mounds of fruit and wine. At least the new room had a balcony.

Smoking - Vietnamese smoke a lot . . . and they smoke early. It's limited almost entirely to males but age seems to make little difference. I wish - I WISH - I'd gotten a photo of the young boys playing video games in the internet cafes SMOKING. I'm talking kids ten or eleven years old.

History - Vietnam certainly took me back to a different time. Apart from Cuba, I've never traveled in a country where I felt so cautious about how, as an American, I might be perceived. In many places I feel like I'm able to establish who I am as an individual without being labeled as part of something larger or external of me. In Vietnam, though, American history is so wrapped up with theirs and so recent that you can't help but be aware of how it's impacted the people. The devastation that was caused in Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos) by the US lasts until this day. Yes, other forces added to the chaos in Indochina but I can only speak as an American about our involvement and impact. We withdrew our forces but the populations left to sort out the mess. To paraphrase one American general - 'the Vietnamese will never be able to recover from this (the war). They lost an entire generation of men. 'Famous Photo of Kim Phuc After Being Burned by Napalm and Photo of Her Twenty Years Later

The culture of life on the water - Between the Mekong Delta which takes up the southern quarter of the country and the long coast, I'm surprised Vietnamese don't have webbed feet and worship Poseidon. I grew up with the term "Vietnamese boat person" as part of my lexicon. I had no idea how apropos that is. Deliberating the Morning Haul - Mui Ne
Scene From a Mekong Delta Floating Market
"Big Belly" Freight Boat in the Mekong Delta

Link to Vietnam Central and Highlands photos.

DMZ and Out

The other day we crossed over into Laos following the southern edge of what was formerly the DMZ (demilitarized zone) separating North and South Vietnam along the 17th parallel. The last day before we left Vietnam we rented a scooter and drove a hundred and sixty kilometers visiting the sites of some past battles. One of these was the small mountain plateau where the US marines established the Khe Sanh combat base. Pieces of military hardware sit scattered around rusting in the clouds. It would be tough to overstate the sense of grim empathy one feels for the men who fought there. It was surreal to ride around the empty, green countryside with my girlfriend on a rickety old Chinese scooter in an area where, thirty-five years prior, any American - practically any human, combatant or not - would have been shot at or mortared on sight.



How angry do you have to be to shoot this at other people?

More than 10,000 people died fighting around Khe Sanh and the US set records for supplying the base by air and bombing the surrounding area to protect it.

Partial and unexploded bombs from some of the 40,000 TONS dropped around Khe Sanh

Relic Chinook


Apart from the few Vietnamese attendants at the entry, it was just us - quiet, misty and gray. Very haunting.

Tet Pt. 2 - The Dark Side

Tet marks another milestone for Vietnam - and for America. On the first day of Tet in 1968 the North Vietnamese army launched country-wide surprise attacks against US and South Vietnamese forces throughout South Vietnam. Up to that point, president Johnson and the Dept. of Defense had been unflappable in their insistence that the ability of the North to mount or sustain any campaign had been irretrievably broken. Anyone who lived through it or who bothered to learn recent US history knows that the Tet Offensive , instead, turned the tide of public opinion in America against the fighting that was killing so many of its sons. In the ensuing malaise, Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for re-election and Richard Nixon was elected on the basis of his (secret) plan to end US participation in the war. We know where that led.

The upcoming fourth anniversary of "Shock and Awe" will distinguish the American war in Iraq as the second longest in US history . . . after Vietnam. Additionally, the money spent in Iraq and on the wider "war on terrorism" since 9/11 is also reaching levels that have only been surpassed twice in our history: "If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war — combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism — is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year. " (From a recent LINK Los Angeles Times story - full story below.)

In his book about the Vietnam War, Dispatches , Michael Herr said of the human and capital expenditure of that conflict, "There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lit up Indochina for a thousand years."

Surely one has to wonder if history has not, in painfully short order, repeated itself costing lives and money no one would choose to spend if not for all the fear fomented by our government. Do we know where this is leading? I read quotes from members of Congress saying the only acceptable path is one that leads to victory. Large-scale, direct US military involvement in Vietnam lasted about ten years. The country, engulfed in what was essentially a civil war, still fell to the North. What will "victory" accomplish in Iraq and what are we willing to pay?


War costs are hitting historic proportions
The price tag for the Iraq conflict and overall effort against terrorism is expected to surpass Vietnam's next year.
By Joel Havemann
Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2007

WASHINGTON — By the time the Vietnam war ended in 1975, it had become America's longest war, shadowed the legacies of four presidents, killed 58,000 Americans along with many thousands more Vietnamese, and cost the U.S. more than $660 billion in today's dollars.

By the time the bill for World War II passed the $600-billion mark, in mid-1943, the United States had driven German forces out of North Africa, devastated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway, and launched the vast offensives that would liberate Europe and the South Pacific.

The Iraq war is far smaller and narrower than those conflicts, and it has not extended beyond the tenure of a single president. But its price tag is beginning to reach historic proportions, and the budgetary "burn rate" for Iraq may be greater than in some periods in past wars.

If U.S. involvement continues on the current scale, the funding for the Iraq war — combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and other foreign fronts in the war on terrorism — is projected to surpass this country's Vietnam spending next year.

And the accumulating cost is adding to resistance to President Bush's war policy in Congress as well as in public opinion, even though concern about the cost in human lives, the war's impact on America's place in the world and other such factors loom larger.

Last week, when Bush unveiled his new war plan — which included sending an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to Iraq and launching another effort to provide jobs and public services in Baghdad — the cost issue was raised by Republicans as well as Democrats.

But it had been simmering for more than a year.

Members of Congress have talked relatively little about the war's accumulating price tag because of the human costs, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said. "But certainly we're cognizant of it," she said. "When you say for what we're spending in a month in Iraq, you could fully fund and double the science budgets of the United States and come up with a viable alternative to oil, it puts it in perspective."

Even so loyal a Republican as Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who chaired the budget committee until the Democrats took control of the Senate this year, criticized the administration's approach to war costs, calling it "without any discipline as to how much is going to be spent."

"They're gaming the system," Gregg said.

At a media briefing before Bush's speech Wednesday night, a senior administration official said the president's plan would entail $5.6 billion in military expenses and $1 billion in reconstruction and other civilian costs.

In the broad landscape of federal spending, those are not huge numbers, though $6.6 billion is more than enough to cover the budgets for all the country's national parks, national forests, historic monuments, protected wetlands and wildlife refuges for a year.

What makes the cost issue increasingly sensitive is not just questions about whether it will buy success but also the fact that the new plan's cost will add to a mountain of bills for earlier military and reconstruction efforts with what many see as little or no positive return on the investment.

Some Republicans, especially fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit, are particularly unhappy because, they say, the president and the Defense Department have refused to address the war's impact on the budget in a straightforward way.

Instead of including war costs in the regular budget, such as the one Bush will send to Congress next month, the administration has been asking Congress for emergency-spending bills that short-circuit many of the usual review procedures for appropriating funds.

"Muting and undermining the legitimacy of the congressional role in funding is, I think, undermining to some degree the commitment to the war effort itself," Gregg said.

The administration says its approach is necessary because it is unable to determine what it will need for the war in the coming fiscal year, which begins each October. Critics say that may have been true early in the war but that by now most costs are predictable far in advance.

Last year, Congress approved a provision in the annual defense authorization bill calling on the administration to change course and put its request for war funds in regular spending bills subject to full congressional review.

Said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the provision's author: "Neither the White House nor the Congress is making the tough decisions about how we are going to pay for the ongoing wars. Adding hundreds of billions of dollars that are more conveniently designated as emergency expenditures — so they do not have to be budgeted for along with other national priorities — is only making our fiscal problems that much greater."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) proposed that Congress block Bush's new plan by withholding funds. To date, Congress has not used its power of the purse to limit Bush's prosecution of the war, partly because it doesn't want to seem to deny U.S. troops any needed support.

"If you cut off funding, you're cutting off support for the troops," said Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida, a top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. "Whether you support the battle they're involved in or not, the vast majority of the American public is still very supportive of our troops."

During Vietnam, Congress did threaten to limit the use of the defense budget. At one point, for example, it prohibited the use of funds in Cambodia.

But Congress flexed its fiscal muscles only toward the end of the Vietnam War. Bush's war on terrorism is in its seventh year, and at a comparable stage of Vietnam, antiwar lawmakers could muster only a handful of votes for limiting funds.

From the beginning of President Lyndon B. Johnson's troop buildup in 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, the United States spent the equivalent of $662 billion in 2007 dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service. The war in Iraq is harder to measure because its costs tend to be mixed up with those of the war in Afghanistan and Bush's broader global war on terrorism, says Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation enacted a week after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Kosiak figures the United States had spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended Sept. 30.

For fiscal 2007, Congress has so far approved $70 billion. The president is expected to ask Congress for $100 billion more.

Even if the fighting stopped soon, which few expect, the bills would continue to accumulate as the Pentagon pushed to restore what the war had cost in troops and material.