so after dinner and a little bit of teaching Ngoc english from a book she had we fell fast asleep.
Tuesday was pretty much a rest day. We did the routine shower and get breakfast at the market. This morning though Thu brought over some mangos and peeled them. They were delicious. I don't think I had ever eaten mango before, except the dried kind. While we sat there eating mango we planned to go hiking on Mt. Cam and to the floating market in Can Tho. That evening we took a little ride around at sunset and took some photos. That evening Mai made us sweet soup, which is a desert style dish with sweet peas, coconut and some squiggly things made from flour that have the consistency of those tapioca drinks.
2009.11.10 by Daniel
The trip home from Da Lat
Sunday morning was warm and glorious. Eating breakfast outside was a treat that morning. We hung around the hotel until a van came to pick us up at 12:30 and take us off to our bus. We had expected the van to arrive sooner and give us time to eat while waiting for the bus, but there wasn't enough time so we boarded and headed out with the expectation that we'd stop in an hour or so where we could find some food. This was not the case.
The first place we stopped was a tea and fruit juice place that had pretty much no food. There were a few things like cakes that you would eat with your tea, so Tien and I got some cakes and ate them on the bus as we headed up a mountain pass that was in the middle of being reconstructed.
The bus had a DVD player and a TV at the front so people could be entertained along the way. This was a home entertainment style DVD player, which means it wasn't really built to handle being moved along a bumpy dirt road winding through jungly mountains. Needless to say it skipped a lot and they eventually turned it off. I wondered why in a country like this with so many dirt roads a company like Mailinh who had busses that went everywhere didn't just rip their DVDs into something that could be played from a cheap solid state media player. I wondered about the technological and business aspects of such a proposition, along with my idea to put wifi at popular bus stops, since there never is any and I'm sure people on their netbooks would use it. Perhaps the country just isn't quite ready for that step...
Tien and I didn't get a chance to eat until 4:30pm. Hu tieu never tasted so good.
Back on the road, I saw a motorbike with logs about 6 feet long stacked sideways on the back seat so that it took up the full lane of the road. The sunset was beautifully colored, like tropical fruits. There were beautiful green rice paddies illuminated by that gorgeous dusk light, but I had a hard time photographing it and I realized it wasn't just because we were in a moving vehicle. Vietnam is so flat that you don't get to see much of the beauty. Trees and lines of buildings block off so much of the natural beauty of the rice paddies and fields, and there are so few mountains that you rarely rise above it so you can look down on it. It's a shame, really.
Well into the darkness of light we passed over a bridge where there were house boats floating on still water, reflecting their lights all around them. It was magical.
As we were coming into Saigon I saw an airplane on its descent. It was the first airplane I had seen since we left the airport several weeks ago.
I saw a huge billboard at the side of the highway advertising HHH Zippers.
Back in Saigon, we caught a taxi to the Bui Phan but it was full except the most expensive room, so we headed to the Ruby Star and got a cheap, awesome room. WiFi on this floor was a problem, I was unable to get out to the internet. Upon further investigation I discovered multiple cascaded DD-WRT routers all using 192.168.1.0/24 on both their LAN and WAN, and this was keeping me from getting out to the internet. After a few guesses I was into the admin panel and was able to reconfigure them each with their own LAN subnet so that there was no overlapping IP space and I was soon able to actually get out onto the internet. I considered different approaches but settled on this since I was doing all configuration over the air. It was good enough for one day.
Monday morning I woke up and when I signed on I had some more problems with the internet. My computer had switched to a different AP with the same SSID and a different LAN subnet. This was no good. I decided to go ahead and fix this problem once and for all by adding the WAN ports of each router to the switch, disabling DHCP, giving all the APs the same SSID and assigning them static addresses in the DSL modem. This allowed roaming access throughout the hotel, the way it should be. It worked like a charm and I felt pleased with having done something productive. I rather missed the IT world and the puzzle of finding elegant answers to technological problems.
Tien and I grabbed breakfast and decided that rather than stay in Saigon and rent a motorbike, we would return to Binh Hoa. There was potential fun in Saigon but returning home for a few days rest was appealing, and we'd definitely be coming through Saigon again numerous times anyway.
The standard procedure for hotel checkout is playing on computers until it is time to catch a taxi to a bus, then check out of the hotel and head out. This is what we did.
I saw a girl on the back of a motorbike reading a book and my NV240HD failed when I tried to take a photo of her.
I saw a girl with a shirt that said "I swoop want water."
That evening we were back with the family in Binh Hoa, sharing the details of our trip to Da Lat. The bus trip from Saigon always wears me out because it's not comfortable and I can't relax without my body moving into a painful position, so after dinner and a little bit of teaching Ngoc english from a book she had we fell fast asleep.
Tuesday was pretty much a rest day. We did the routine shower and get breakfast at the market. This morning though Thu brought over some mangos and peeled them. They were delicious. I don't think I had ever eaten mango before, except the dried kind. While we sat there eating mango we planned to go hiking on Mt. Cam and to the floating market in Can Tho. That evening we took a little ride around at sunset and took some photos. That evening Mai made us sweet soup, which is a desert style dish with sweet peas, coconut and some squiggly things made from flour that have the consistency of those tapioca drinks.
so after dinner and a little bit of teaching Ngoc english from a book she had we fell fast asleep.
Tuesday was pretty much a rest day. We did the routine shower and get breakfast at the market. This morning though Thu brought over some mangos and peeled them. They were delicious. I don't think I had ever eaten mango before, except the dried kind. While we sat there eating mango we planned to go hiking on Mt. Cam and to the floating market in Can Tho. That evening we took a little ride around at sunset and took some photos. That evening Mai made us sweet soup, which is a desert style dish with sweet peas, coconut and some squiggly things made from flour that have the consistency of those tapioca drinks. • • • • •
2009.11.07 by Daniel
A day on a moto
Saturday morning Da Lat was colder than it was the previous day. I couldn't tell if it was going to clear up or pour down rain on us. Regardless, Tien and I decided to rent a scooter for the day and go explore the town.
A man who worked at the hotel said we could rent a motorbike from him for 70,000, which is roughly $8 USD. We walked across the street to another hotel that was owned by the same people and Tien told them we were there to rent a moto. A girl from the hotel disappeared under the stairs into what I thought was a fountain but ended up being the way into the car port. We sat there for 5 minutes listening to that poor girl trying to start that motorbike and I couldn't help but wonder when the last time it had been ridden was.
Eventually they brought round another moto for us that had very little trouble starting. They said that the cops in Da Lat wouldn't pull me over for not having a license, which made sense since it's one of the most popular tourist destinations in Vietnam. Tien was happy that I would be driving. She is a bit timid on a bike, then there is the masculine feminine factor, and then there is romance. Of course, it could also be that she just doesn't like driving... Anyway, I got on in front, started it up and headed off in the wrong direction. As I was pulling a U turn I realized that riding a scooter is different from a motorcycle, and riding and automatic is different from a manual. Also, I had only once ever taken a passenger on a motorcycle, and that was just to give Lisa a ride around the block on my Honda CM450C before I sold it. This scooter took some getting used to, but I got the hang of it in a few hours and felt as comfortable as ever on two wheels.
The first thing we did was buy a map of the town that showed local attractions. This proved to be both useful and useless, depending on just where we were busy getting lost.
The first place we went was Da Lat University. Tien said she had seen it on TV and it was beautiful. We got gas and got lost before finding it on top of a hill north of the lake near downtown. We parked and walked into the campus and discovered that this was not the place Tien had seen on TV. While I took some photographs Tien cleared up the confusion by asking a student where the place she was looking for might be. He showed her on the map where it was, the Teacher Training College.
We left the campus and got lost again before finding the other college which was on a hill opposite the big lake in the center of town. It was indeed more picturesque, but Tien was disappointed that it wasn't more beautiful. There was a couple taking wedding photos by the brick archways along side the building.
It was mid day by then and I got the brilliant idea to have lunch on the lake. The day was bright, and too breezy to open the awnings to shade is from the mid day sun. The restaurant was a tourist restaurant and the food was accordingly disappointing. Tien barely ate any of it and I was just hungry enough to choke most of it down. Beer cost 4x what it was other places and the "classic club sandwich" had eggs on it.
While we were at the restaurant I tried out the GPS on my iPhone and for the first time ever in Vietnam it worked. I pulled up the geocaching app and found that there was a geocache by Trúc Lâm. I also pulled up lonelyplant.com and found a few choice attractions, one of which was not on the map. We paid for our terrible food and left.
After what must have been 30 or more minutes of driving around in circles we found our way to the Hang Nga Crazy Couse. This place was not at all what you'd expect to find in Vietnam. In fact, this was more like Disneyland or something, but it was actually a persons house at one time. An employee there who was very hard to understand told us that the architect had gone to school in Russia and had come home to build this in 1990. I couldn't understand much else of what she said, 
and I wondered how on earth people who spoke such awful english got jobs at tour places while the man at the front desk of our hotel spoke English almost impeccably.
Tien and I wandered the house for a while and I took a bunch of photos. It was a very dificult place to photograph though because of the odd shapes and orientation of everything. One of the interesting things about the house was that so much of it was made from wood. Vietnam is a country that does not have much timber. Most of the homes are made from brick and mortar or cement, even up in the highlands like Da Lat where there are evergreen trees. The crazy house was almost entirely wooden on the inside.
We found our way to some parts that were still being built; there is always construction in Vietnam. We found a really old car in a glass garage and I wanted to photograph it but had a poor time through the glass even with a polarizer. I photographed some construction in a new mountainous tower and then we left.
Next stop was the geocache, but we certainly couldn't do that without first getting lost and finding some more construction. We ended up taking a narrow muddy road, which was precarious on a scooter, and then merged onto what must be the smoothest street in Vietnam. It was welcome and I enjoyed it much as it swayed through a small farming valley and up into a forest.
We were unable to find the geocache by Trúc Lâm, partly because I didn't want to reach into a hole in a brick wall that was guarded by a large spider, though I suspect the cache might be missing anyway. I didn't care that we came all that way and didn't find the cache, I had wanted to return to Trúc Lâm anyway since we got rained out the previous time we were there.
A tour group of older people had just gotten off of a gondola that stops at the temple and we had to wade through the crowd to get to the temple. This time it was sunny and beautiful. There were beautifully tuned wind chimes making wonderful tones in a gentle breeze and I hoped in vain that I would be able to buy such a beautiful chime at the gift shop out front. I am a fan of neuroacoustic science and had learned that monks use chimes to entrain their minds. It was evident here because you could hear the slight detuning, the binaural beat. I started to explain the science of it to Tien, but decided it was too complex for her vocabulary or at least better suited for another time. This was photography time.
We went down by a small lake where there were picnic tables looking over a forest on a hill and down to another lake with gentle forested mountains beyond it. We sat for a while and rested, then decided to head back to town. The sun was beginning its descend and I wanted to find somewhere to watch it set.
We headed to a train station where there was a museum of old trains but it was closed. We went to look for the Buddha and got severely lost and never once even caught site of it sitting up on its hill. Giving up, we got smoothies from a shop in the town center and went back to the lake. The ride there was cold because the sun was almost completely set by then and when we finally found a nice lawn it was mushy and wet. We opted to sit on the sidewalk to see the last bit of the sunset. The smoothies were awful and added to the coldness. We called off our miserable sunset experience and headed back to the hotel to rest for a while.
We were soon hungry since we hadn't eaten much for lunch so we decided to go back out for food. We took our moto down to the town center and got hu tieu, headed back to the hotel, returned our moto, decided to head back to Saigon the next day and went to sleep.
The first place we went was Da Lat University. Tien said she had seen it on TV and it was beautiful. We got gas and got lost before finding it on top of a hill north of the lake near downtown. We parked and walked into the campus and discovered that this was not the place Tien had seen on TV. While I took some photographs Tien cleared up the confusion by asking a student where the place she was looking for might be. He showed her on the map where it was, the Teacher Training College.
We left the campus and got lost again before finding the other college which was on a hill opposite the big lake in the center of town. It was indeed more picturesque, but Tien was disappointed that it wasn't more beautiful. There was a couple taking wedding photos by the brick archways along side the building.
It was mid day by then and I got the brilliant idea to have lunch on the lake. The day was bright, and too breezy to open the awnings to shade is from the mid day sun. The restaurant was a tourist restaurant and the food was accordingly disappointing. Tien barely ate any of it and I was just hungry enough to choke most of it down. Beer cost 4x what it was other places and the "classic club sandwich" had eggs on it.
While we were at the restaurant I tried out the GPS on my iPhone and for the first time ever in Vietnam it worked. I pulled up the geocaching app and found that there was a geocache by Trúc Lâm. I also pulled up lonelyplant.com and found a few choice attractions, one of which was not on the map. We paid for our terrible food and left.
After what must have been 30 or more minutes of driving around in circles we found our way to the Hang Nga Crazy Couse. This place was not at all what you'd expect to find in Vietnam. In fact, this was more like Disneyland or something, but it was actually a persons house at one time. An employee there who was very hard to understand told us that the architect had gone to school in Russia and had come home to build this in 1990. I couldn't understand much else of what she said, and I wondered how on earth people who spoke such awful english got jobs at tour places while the man at the front desk of our hotel spoke English almost impeccably.
Tien and I wandered the house for a while and I took a bunch of photos. It was a very dificult place to photograph though because of the odd shapes and orientation of everything. One of the interesting things about the house was that so much of it was made from wood. Vietnam is a country that does not have much timber. Most of the homes are made from brick and mortar or cement, even up in the highlands like Da Lat where there are evergreen trees. The crazy house was almost entirely wooden on the inside.
We found our way to some parts that were still being built; there is always construction in Vietnam. We found a really old car in a glass garage and I wanted to photograph it but had a poor time through the glass even with a polarizer. I photographed some construction in a new mountainous tower and then we left.
Next stop was the geocache, but we certainly couldn't do that without first getting lost and finding some more construction. We ended up taking a narrow muddy road, which was precarious on a scooter, and then merged onto what must be the smoothest street in Vietnam. It was welcome and I enjoyed it much as it swayed through a small farming valley and up into a forest.
We were unable to find the geocache by Trúc Lâm, partly because I didn't want to reach into a hole in a brick wall that was guarded by a large spider, though I suspect the cache might be missing anyway. I didn't care that we came all that way and didn't find the cache, I had wanted to return to Trúc Lâm anyway since we got rained out the previous time we were there.
A tour group of older people had just gotten off of a gondola that stops at the temple and we had to wade through the crowd to get to the temple. This time it was sunny and beautiful. There were beautifully tuned wind chimes making wonderful tones in a gentle breeze and I hoped in vain that I would be able to buy such a beautiful chime at the gift shop out front. I am a fan of neuroacoustic science and had learned that monks use chimes to entrain their minds. It was evident here because you could hear the slight detuning, the binaural beat. I started to explain the science of it to Tien, but decided it was too complex for her vocabulary or at least better suited for another time. This was photography time.
We went down by a small lake where there were picnic tables looking over a forest on a hill and down to another lake with gentle forested mountains beyond it. We sat for a while and rested, then decided to head back to town. The sun was beginning its descend and I wanted to find somewhere to watch it set.
We headed to a train station where there was a museum of old trains but it was closed. We went to look for the Buddha and got severely lost and never once even caught site of it sitting up on its hill. Giving up, we got smoothies from a shop in the town center and went back to the lake. The ride there was cold because the sun was almost completely set by then and when we finally found a nice lawn it was mushy and wet. We opted to sit on the sidewalk to see the last bit of the sunset. The smoothies were awful and added to the coldness. We called off our miserable sunset experience and headed back to the hotel to rest for a while.
We were soon hungry since we hadn't eaten much for lunch so we decided to go back out for food. We took our moto down to the town center and got hu tieu, headed back to the hotel, returned our moto, decided to head back to Saigon the next day and went to sleep. • • • • •
2009.11.06 by Daniel
A Tour of Đà Lạt
Friday morning I woke up to the delightful news that all but one of the files on my corrupt hard disk had been recovered and I knew I had that file, a photo from last new year, back in america.
Tien and I went outside and had breakfast on the terrace in front of the hotel entrance. It was cold out there but the only place to sit was outside. We needed to find some warm clothes.
After some small interactions with the hotel staff I thought about how at one time I thought that you would know you knew a language well if you got their jokes, but by this time I knew I was dead wrong. Humor exists outside of spoken language and is sometimes the first thing you find to communicate with somebody.
I looked down into the courtyard and saw a man by a Motorcycle with an easy rider logo on it.
Tien and I decided it would be a good way to see the city if we took a tour. After breakfast a bus came by the hotel and took us off to where a tour had just started.
We were greeted by a tour guide who was incredibly hard to understand. Most of what he was saying I could derive from the context and surrounding sounds, but it was the important bits, the things I didn't know and thus had no context for, that I was unable to understand.
The first place we went was a temple called Truc Lan. It was a meditation center where people came from all over in order to study. We didn't stay long and it began raining shortly after we arrived.
Stop 2 was a waterfall called Datanla. The parking lot was at the top and we were given the option to ride a roller coaster to the bottom or walk down. Despite the fact that last time Tien had been on a roller coaster she went into shock I asked her anyway if she wanted to take it. Of course she didn't and so we walked.
The waterfall was beautiful and pretty big compared to all of the waterfalls I've seen in recent years. The path to it went through the forest and under the roller coaster a few times.
Back at the top there were shops that I had ignored on the way down. There were women knitting hats and men carving wood into various shapes. Tien bought a black knit beanie with a white flower on it. I went to look for a drink and discovered that beer was only 9k compared to 15k for a pepsi. We were just getting started on the day so I bought a pepsi.
Stop three was the Lat Kings house. I listened to the tour guide talk for a while and made out much of what he said, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth even listening to him and gave up.
Tien and I took a bunch of photos in the kings house and I really wished I had more of my gear or a d700 to widen the perspective of my PC-E 24mm lens. Some girl from our tour seemed to always be standing in my way talking on the phone so I eventually skipped ahead of her. We ended up with not enough time and were late getting back to the bus, but were somehow the first ones there.
On the way to lunch Tien said that nothing has changed in the 11 years since she was past in Da Lat. This was remarkable because it seems like they're always doing construction everywhere in Vietnam. Colorado Springs would be so jealous.
Stop four was lunch. The restaurant was playing instrumental anthems like Chariots of Fire, Crockett's Theme, and a dream rock rendition of I need Your Love. The sauce with the chicken had a tinge of MSG, but otherwise the food was remarkably delicious. Even the beef that came in a tin foil packet that shouted to us that it was made another and reheated for our lunch was incredible.
Stop five of our tour was a big Buddha statue that the tour guide claimed was the biggest Buddha in Vietnam. Tien and I disagreed silently, knowing that the Buddha on Mt. Cam was bigger. I just smiled and nodded through the rest of what he said about the monks doing something and some other people that seemed really important had done something else.
Stop six was called The Valley of Love. It was a sad, wet, cold place where pale colored carnival rides sat motionless in the mud under a crying grey sky. There was a monkey chained up in a cage by himself going crazy and a metal lattice awning without a single flower growing on the one vine resilient enough to withstand the gloom. There were some miserable horses and yet more construction.
As we were leaving this last sullen stop on our tour I thought about the catch 22 of tourist places. Here in Da Lat I didn't have a thousand eyes staring at me everywhere I went and random people saying hello to me as I walked down the street. The flip side was that it was not as genuine and the prices were obviously geared towards foreign travelers.
We returned to the hotel and crashed, tired from all the walking. It was evening when we awoke. We got some dinner at a place that had only one thing available, then bought and umbrella and went for a walk down by the lake. We found a market where I bought a knit hat and an Adidas jacket and immediately felt much warmer. I thought it was weird that I had to buy a jacket in Vietnam, but I guess that's how it really is. We also bought some pistachios and a bottle of wine, then moseyed on back to the hotel for the night.
We were greeted by a tour guide who was incredibly hard to understand. Most of what he was saying I could derive from the context and surrounding sounds, but it was the important bits, the things I didn't know and thus had no context for, that I was unable to understand.
The first place we went was a temple called Truc Lan. It was a meditation center where people came from all over in order to study. We didn't stay long and it began raining shortly after we arrived.
Stop 2 was a waterfall called Datanla. The parking lot was at the top and we were given the option to ride a roller coaster to the bottom or walk down. Despite the fact that last time Tien had been on a roller coaster she went into shock I asked her anyway if she wanted to take it. Of course she didn't and so we walked.
The waterfall was beautiful and pretty big compared to all of the waterfalls I've seen in recent years. The path to it went through the forest and under the roller coaster a few times.
Back at the top there were shops that I had ignored on the way down. There were women knitting hats and men carving wood into various shapes. Tien bought a black knit beanie with a white flower on it. I went to look for a drink and discovered that beer was only 9k compared to 15k for a pepsi. We were just getting started on the day so I bought a pepsi.
Stop three was the Lat Kings house. I listened to the tour guide talk for a while and made out much of what he said, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth even listening to him and gave up.
Tien and I took a bunch of photos in the kings house and I really wished I had more of my gear or a d700 to widen the perspective of my PC-E 24mm lens. Some girl from our tour seemed to always be standing in my way talking on the phone so I eventually skipped ahead of her. We ended up with not enough time and were late getting back to the bus, but were somehow the first ones there.
On the way to lunch Tien said that nothing has changed in the 11 years since she was past in Da Lat. This was remarkable because it seems like they're always doing construction everywhere in Vietnam. Colorado Springs would be so jealous.
Stop four was lunch. The restaurant was playing instrumental anthems like Chariots of Fire, Crockett's Theme, and a dream rock rendition of I need Your Love. The sauce with the chicken had a tinge of MSG, but otherwise the food was remarkably delicious. Even the beef that came in a tin foil packet that shouted to us that it was made another and reheated for our lunch was incredible.
Stop five of our tour was a big Buddha statue that the tour guide claimed was the biggest Buddha in Vietnam. Tien and I disagreed silently, knowing that the Buddha on Mt. Cam was bigger. I just smiled and nodded through the rest of what he said about the monks doing something and some other people that seemed really important had done something else.
Stop six was called The Valley of Love. It was a sad, wet, cold place where pale colored carnival rides sat motionless in the mud under a crying grey sky. There was a monkey chained up in a cage by himself going crazy and a metal lattice awning without a single flower growing on the one vine resilient enough to withstand the gloom. There were some miserable horses and yet more construction.
As we were leaving this last sullen stop on our tour I thought about the catch 22 of tourist places. Here in Da Lat I didn't have a thousand eyes staring at me everywhere I went and random people saying hello to me as I walked down the street. The flip side was that it was not as genuine and the prices were obviously geared towards foreign travelers.
We returned to the hotel and crashed, tired from all the walking. It was evening when we awoke. We got some dinner at a place that had only one thing available, then bought and umbrella and went for a walk down by the lake. We found a market where I bought a knit hat and an Adidas jacket and immediately felt much warmer. I thought it was weird that I had to buy a jacket in Vietnam, but I guess that's how it really is. We also bought some pistachios and a bottle of wine, then moseyed on back to the hotel for the night. • • • • •
2009.11.05 by Daniel
Going to Da Lat
Thursday morning when I woke up the first thing I did was plug in my dead hard disk to see if it had yet another life. Luckily it did and I put my laptop to work backing up my photos and music.
When Tien woke up we went next door for breakfast. I was thinking a lot about Colorado and the fact that my brother was now out of the Army. It had been 5 years since we'd had a family Thanksgiving together since he joined the army just before Thanksgiving. I thought about driving straight to CO as soon as I landed in SF, or perhaps switching my flight to land in Denver instead. It would be nice to have a family holiday again, though I was disappointed knowing that Tien wouldn't be there...
At dinner the previous night Tien and I had decided to go to Da Lat instead of Nha Trang, and after breakfast we went to the travel agency where I'd gotten my ticket for Cambodia and got the information we needed to book a ticket to Da Lat. We went back to the hotel, reserved a ticket on the bus and geeked out for a bit.
We were a bit late checking out of the hotel and the bus service called saying we would miss our noon bus and would have to take the next one leaving at 1pm. We caught a taxi and headed off down Nguyen Cu Trinh to a bus station I'd never been to before.
When we arrived at the bus station, which was a small travel agency in the middle of the city, it was 11:45. Tien talked to some guys on motorbikes who told her we could still catch the 12 o'clock bus if the took us there. She got on one and I got on the other and we sped off through mid day traffic. The ride was quick with a lot of weaving and it reminded me of the ride I took with My just before leaving Bangkok.
The motorbikes took us to a travel agency about 4 blocks from where we had been staying. The problem was that we had booked a ticket with Mailinh and this was not a Mailinh bus. Tien got into a little argument with one of the drivers who demanded that we pay him 100,000 for the ride, which was 4x what our taxi to the 1pm bus cost. When tien gets upset she quits talking in English, even if I ask her to translate, so I didn't know what was going on until after we were already on the bus, otherwise I would've told that guy to get lost because it was not our problem if he impersonated a Mailinh employee with the good intention of getting us to our bus on time. I talked briefly with tien about not clamming up on me so I can help her in situations like that, we accepted a learned lesson and let it go.
The bus was nice. We took off through an area of Saigon I hadn't seen and I decided we should rent a motorbike when we come back so we can go explore farther. The river was cool and there were new buildings being built. It looked more like a modern civic center.
I read the rest of Iron Orchid. It was a decent book but nothing amazing. The ending wasn't all that climactic.
Tien began to feel motion sick because she didn't take her medicine in time. She had some intention of staying awake on the ride and it backfired. I felt really bad and had flashbacks to all those times I've spent taking care of really drunk people.
We stopped for food briefly just before turning off of the main highway into the hills. The terrain was immediately different in more than just the hills. The vegetation was more thick and tough. We continued through winding roads for a few hours and then took a longer break. Tien and I got drinks and skipped food thinking the bus ride would soon be over.
Back on the road we headed into some mountains that reminded me of the western approach of monarch pass in Colorado. The sun soon set and I listened to Tom Waits while Tien slept. The evening silhouettes of hills with hose and street light scattered off in the distant darkness were familiar to me.
We arrived in Da Lat after 8 hours. We'd been told the ride would be 5 hours. I was hungry and tired.
The usual group of taxi drivers were waiting when we arrived. The first man to approach me was dressed in quality jeans and a leather coat and a helmet. He said he was with the easy riders and could take me anywhere. I told him I was with Tien and VN conversation continued with a bus driver who ended up being our local transport.
We were let off at a hotel and were greeted by a happy woman. Since we hadn't arranged a driver or a hotel and had just been scammed in saigon I was very skeptical of what was going on and was ready to walk away if every detail wasn't good, but it ended up that every detail was fine and so we got a large room on the second floor with breakfast included for half of the price we had been used to paying in Saigon.
One of the first things we noticed once we were finally in our room was that Da Lat was cold. Not cool, but cold. It was also raining gently.
We went to find some dinner and ended up at a Chinese restaurant where I once again ordered something that I expected would have no seafood. We weren't anywhere near the ocean, but that didn't stop the ocean gods from frowning on my meal. I just gave the icky parts to tien and hungrily devoured the rest.
Tien was really cold on the way Home so we went hat shopping. We ended up not finding anything and just went back to the hotel. I put my computer to work backing up the files that were on the crashing disk, cuddled up with tien under two heavy blankets and fell fast asleep in the cold and quiet.
• • • • •
2009.11.04 by Daniel
Heading out for Nha Trang
Tuesday morning at breakfast Tien's mom brought over a young boy who was big for his age. His older sister showed up soon afterwards and we all ate some snacks. They were Tiens cousins and I recognized their father from our engagement party when he came to pick them up on his scooter.
We returned home, packed for our trip to Nha Trang, had lunch and caught the bus right outside Tien's house at 2pm.
The bus was not the usual bus service we take, Mai Linh. It took a different route through narrow back country roads that were more jungly than the main roads. I recognized the route from the trip we took where the man was joking about fighting with me. The bus seemed to be going pretty fast but that may just be because the road was so narrow. After a while we got to an area with muddy dirt roads with huge puddles and many bumps.
The driver turned on some pop Vietnamese music and I wondered what a Vietnamese reggae fusion would sound like.
I got out a book, Iron Orchard, and read. Brianna had found the book on the street and gave it to me. It was entertaining light reading that was good for a trip. After we stopped for a break I continued reading until it was too dark, then I just enjoyed music and watched the lights pass in the darkness.
We came upon an accident, the first serious one I've seen in Vietnam so far. The diver of a large truck was standing by the back where a bloody man was wallowing in pain on the ground. His motorbike was stuck between the front and rear axels and there was an anonymous pool of liquid coming from the darkness under the truck. I wasn't sure if he was the only passenger.
Tien looked at the scene then looked away with a shriek. She looked at me with worried eyes and said "He died." I thought this was an odd way to say it. Later I came to the conclusion that her phrase told a story from a scene that she hadn't experienced which was why it sounded weirder than saying "he is dead." I told her that he hadn't died. The bus drove on and I never heard a siren or saw an ambulance.
As we came into Saigon it was clear that it had been raining hard. Pools of water were standing near intersections and the sidewalk by the river was reflecting the tail lights of motorbikes that rode down it.
The ride seemed endless and my ass hurt from having my buttock muscle stretched in the same position in that tiny seat for so long. We rode through some interesting neighborhoods in Saigon including going over a bridge that we'd seen near the new roads on our way out of town last time. Eventually we arrived at the bus station where we caught a taxi to a hotel I'd stayed at once before, the Bui Phan. The issue with the bed bugs at the ruby star made us not want to go back there, plus I wanted a bath tub.
The hotel was conveniently right next door to Viva Coffee, so we ate there for dinner. In Vietnam, most cafes are also restaurants. Tien's mom called up worried and told us that the weather was bad in Nha Trang. Her mom worries about everything, but this time she was right. The latest AP headline read something about 32 people being dead from flooding up towards Hanoi. There was a photo o a man motorbiking in Nha Trang in over a foot of water that covered a whole street, and it was still raining.
Wednesday morning I got out of bed, picked up my laptop and found tiny bugs crawling on it. The Bui Phan had them as well... On top of that there was heavy construction going on outside our hotel.
Tien and I had a late breakfast and talked about cultural differences like how multicultural different cultures are and how conservative they are. Afterwards we went online and looked up new destinations. Traveling as a pair was expensive and airfare was also looking more expensive because it was nearing time for peoples fall and winter getaways. We thought about going to Thailand and I even got in touch with a friend of a Sara's whose family owns a resort north of Phuket. We didn't decide on anything then.
Instead we went out for a walk to look for an external hard disk that I'd meant to install in my laptop before leaving America. As we left the hotel I saw a Yamaha R6 parked at the motorbike shop next door. It was remarkable because nobody rides anything over about 110cc in Vietnam and this was at least 600. Also, almost nobody rides real motorcycles, just scooters which are more practical.
We walked a long way stopping at computer shops and explaining to them what exactly I was looking for, a FireWire 2.5" SATA external hard drive case. Amazingly this was t all that hard. For one, I had one with me so I could just show them and then point out that I just needed the case, a d two, there were plenty of computer part shops with drive cases. To my dismay, none had FireWire ones so I had to settle for USB. the sad life of a technology enthusiast.
On the way home I saw a shirt that said "Hollister California" and hated fashion. What on earth is so great about Hollister? I'd never liked that brand and I liked it even less knowing that it could be found in Vietnam, knock-off or not.
Back at the hotel a confusing technological coincidence happened where my old 500gb drive had mysteriously quit working while we were out looking for a new case, which meant I didn't even need a new case. It also meant I had lost all of my photos and music. On top of that, I broke my only screwdriver while I was right in the middle of investigating the problem so I had a pile of computer parts on a hotel bed and no way to assemble them.
The hotel was conveniently right next door to Viva Coffee, so we ate there for dinner. In Vietnam, most cafes are also restaurants. Tien's mom called up worried and told us that the weather was bad in Nha Trang. Her mom worries about everything, but this time she was right. The latest AP headline read something about 32 people being dead from flooding up towards Hanoi. There was a photo o a man motorbiking in Nha Trang in over a foot of water that covered a whole street, and it was still raining.
Wednesday morning I got out of bed, picked up my laptop and found tiny bugs crawling on it. The Bui Phan had them as well... On top of that there was heavy construction going on outside our hotel.
Tien and I had a late breakfast and talked about cultural differences like how multicultural different cultures are and how conservative they are. Afterwards we went online and looked up new destinations. Traveling as a pair was expensive and airfare was also looking more expensive because it was nearing time for peoples fall and winter getaways. We thought about going to Thailand and I even got in touch with a friend of a Sara's whose family owns a resort north of Phuket. We didn't decide on anything then.
Instead we went out for a walk to look for an external hard disk that I'd meant to install in my laptop before leaving America. As we left the hotel I saw a Yamaha R6 parked at the motorbike shop next door. It was remarkable because nobody rides anything over about 110cc in Vietnam and this was at least 600. Also, almost nobody rides real motorcycles, just scooters which are more practical.
We walked a long way stopping at computer shops and explaining to them what exactly I was looking for, a FireWire 2.5" SATA external hard drive case. Amazingly this was t all that hard. For one, I had one with me so I could just show them and then point out that I just needed the case, a d two, there were plenty of computer part shops with drive cases. To my dismay, none had FireWire ones so I had to settle for USB. the sad life of a technology enthusiast.
On the way home I saw a shirt that said "Hollister California" and hated fashion. What on earth is so great about Hollister? I'd never liked that brand and I liked it even less knowing that it could be found in Vietnam, knock-off or not.
Back at the hotel a confusing technological coincidence happened where my old 500gb drive had mysteriously quit working while we were out looking for a new case, which meant I didn't even need a new case. It also meant I had lost all of my photos and music. On top of that, I broke my only screwdriver while I was right in the middle of investigating the problem so I had a pile of computer parts on a hotel bed and no way to assemble them. • • • • •
2009.11.02 by Daniel
Day to day in Binh Hoa
Friday we woke up and did some internet stuff. I was catching up on a lot of Internet in the morning. Tien got me a breakfast sandwich and made me a banana and strawberry smoothie. What a lucky guy I am, my fiance bringing me food at my computer!
Tien found the information we needed about how to get me a drivers license in Vietnam and it was incredibly simple. We headed to Long Xuyen to get the things we needed in order to apply for it: a photograph of 20x23mm and a notarized translation of my CA driver's license. We also cruised around to look for a DC power adapter since I forgot the one that goes with the WRT54G that I brought from America. We found one near a park, and after buying it I decided to go take some photos in the park. I was looking for high places to photograph down from in order to make the miniature perspective of the tilt/shift work, so we also headed up to the Panda Cafe on the 6th floor of a building overlooking a main intersection and had some drinks and took some more photos from there. We then cruised down to a local market area, past a block full of flower vendors that smelled a lot like San Jose smells in the spring. I told Tien about this as we were passing through. We picked up some stuff for Thu and headed home to spend the evening hanging out with her family. I tried to hook up the WRT54G and found that the power adapter did not work.
Saturday morning we woke up and headed straight to the translation service and then to the police station. It was a day for people to drop things. While we were riding along I saw three people drop things off of their motorbikes. I've also noticed that school is in session now because the streets are full of uniformed students. The girls look beautiful in their all-white traditional clothes, and the boys have a classic schoolboy look in their blue pants, white shirts and red ties. Most of them ride bicycles to school, some hitching rides with others or on motorbikes.
When we got to the police station they informed us that they couldn't give me a driver's license unless my visa was good for at least 3 more months. This was mildly disappointing and I couldn't help but wonder if it was a subtle attempt at extortion. I didn't care enough to find out so we left and went to have brunch at a cafe where we often used to go to surf the net. The food was OK and the drinks were great. We talked about our plans to travel to Nha Trang and possibly to Thailand, what else we would do while I was here, and about whether or not I would return to the USA on Nov 25th, which I think is likely.
We went and swapped the power adapter for one that we thought should work even though it was slightly underpowered, cruised the 20 minutes home from Long Xuyen and found that it did not work. I really didn't think it would be so hard to find a 12v 500mA DC adapter, but surprise surprise, Vietnam is full of surprises.
That evening we went out in the neighborhood for a walk. We stopped at a little cafe where some locals were watching a ridiculous television show. We ate ice cream and mosquitoes ate me. My ice cream was one of those triple flavors, chocolate, mint and durian. That was interesting... it's the first time I've had durian since I knew it was the "stinky fruit." It definitely has a very, very odd and distinct flavor and scent.
Tien and I ate dinner on the floor with her mom and sister that evening. I was a little melancholy and I think this made them slightly uncomfortable, but it's not like we could talk about it. The side-effects of not being able to speak to anybody except Tien were beginning to get to me.
Aside from nonverbal communication, another thing that was getting to me was a pain I'd had in my ankle. Ever since I got off the plane in Tokyo I had a pretty significant pain in my left ankle. I thought it might be a pulled muscle or a bruise on my ankle, but the more I had thought about it the more I thought it might be something with my ligaments. It is a pain stretching from the middle of my shin on the inside, down to the top part of my ankle joint, and also is affected by the arch of my foot. Tien gave me a massage and rubbed some Ben Gay™ that her brother in law had brought from america and that made it feel much better, though not healed.
Sunday morning I woke up at 7:15, which is early for me. While Tien and I were at the market having breakfast I saw a shirt that said "Do u know now much plannet u mean to me" and thought that was pretty funny. We talked a bit about where we wanted to go on a trip, and afterwards we headed to Long Xuyen to find yet another power adapter.
After visiting about 10 stores we finally tracked down a 498mA power adapter and decided to buy it even though the man at the shop said it was not very good quality. We took a back road to get back to the main road which I always enjoy because I like seeing new areas. The road took us by the river and on the way we found a crowd of people standing at the waters edge. They weren't celebrating, but they weren't frantic either. Tien listened to what they were saying and told me that a child had fallen into the river.
A man away from the crowd began to shout, but nobody payed attention. I thought this was interesting because it seems that Vietnamese people shout a lot. This ended up being one of those "never cry wolf" situations because he was trying to tell them he saw something in the water. A few more people also began shouting and soon a teenage boy ran over and jumped in the water to look for the child there. Several people swam along the shore, which dropped off very steeply, and were diving under looking for the child. We stayed a while but the child was never found...
I had talked to Tien before about how children here are not taught to swim which leads to many of them drowning, and here was a real life example of such a tragedy. I feel stupid and ashamed that I never thought about the fact that the children in Tien's family can't swim and it wasn't until a few days later that one of her other family members suggested that they be put in swimming lessons. Tien couldn't swim when I met her, and I wondered if anybody else in her family could.
When we got home I tried the power adapter on the wireless router and it was too unstable and thus did not work. I decided to give up on the whole thing, I'll just mail the power adapter once I get back to the USA.
That night I opened a bottle of Da Lat red and had wine with dinner. It was the first wine I'd had since leaving California and it was delicious and familiar. It felt good to have a familiar taste that is heavily bound to California. That night I slept deeply.
Tien and I had planned to go to Nha Trang on Monday, a beach resort town up towards Danang, but that morning Tien said we weren't going to go. She had a sore on her mouth and did not want to travel far until it was healed. I wasn't sure if this was for medical or aesthetic reasons, though I suspected both and agreed.
At breakfast I was trying to teach Ngoc some english words and realized that she had a very difficult time saying words that begin with the letter S. I asked Tien about it and she said there are very few words in Vietnamese that begin with that letter. I thought about phonetics exercises and games that we could do to train her mouth to say english words.
Instead of going to Nha Trang we talked about going back to Mt. Cam where we could hike up the mountain and swim in the pools of the stream that go down from the lake on top of the mountain. We made tentative plans to do this the next day. We also made tentative plans to teach Ngoc and Nhi how to swim in the pool in Long Xuyen.
We had lunch and I wondered about why there were no tuk tuk's in Vietnam. Tien said that her dad and brother both used to be tuk tuk drivers, but a while back the police said that people weren't allowed to have them anymore. She couldn't explain the detailed reasons why, but said that one of the reasons was because there were too many motorbikes. I suspected that the tuk tuks were causing accidents or clogged traffic. I found it hard to believe that anything was limited on the streets of Vietnam, it seems like you can ride whatever you can build on the street.
That afternoon was very uneventful and empty, and the boredom of Binh Hoa began to set in. We were going nowhere and I couldn't talk to anybody except Tien. I was sitting idle and feeling like I was wasting away. Tien and her sisters decided that evening that we would go to a Catholic All Saints Day festival that was going on up the highway. I wasn't in much of a mood to go by this point, but it was better than sitting at home and I was up for anything at that point.
The crowd was huge. People were filling up the little two lane highway and vendors came to sell flashy lights, stuffed animals, foods, all sorts of trinkets and just about anything. There were hundreds of people walking along the highway buying things, chatting, riding bikes, talking on cell phones, etc.. Some were going to the graveyard to burn incense and light candles for their loved ones. Very few were going to church to pray.
I felt very uncomfortable in that crowd. It was like being so famous that every single person in the crowd knew me, but I wasn't famous for necessarily good reasons. And it was like I had a sign around my neck that said "please say hello." Hundreds of eyes watched me as I did absolutely nothing interesting. People laughed and joked while watching me. Dozens of people shouted "hello" and dozens more said things that I couldn't understand. If I had been in a better mood I think it might have been OK, but with my frustrations from being so idle I wasn't really in a good mood for it.
Instead I just tried to take photos of stuff, but was uninspired. The night was also very dark and it was hard to get a clear picture. We went to the church and I took some photographs of that, lamenting that I had no tripod. I resolved to buy one or make one.
The incense at the church smelled wonderful on the air and there was a full moon.
That night I talked briefly with Tien about how I was frustrated with the inability to communicate and the fact that we weren't finding anything to do except be lazy at home. We decided to go ahead and go to Nha Trang.
• • • • •
2009.10.31 by Daniel
Returning to Binh Hoa and Long Xuyen
Wednesday we got breakfast at a new place. It was in the tourist area in Pham Ngu Lao and had a menu in English, French and Vietnamese. We both ordered orange juice that was fresh squeezed and not sweetened. Its natural flavor was delicious and a nice contrast to the MSG overload from the previous night. The food was so so, you really can't male a tomato omelet too bad or too good.
We headed back to the hotel where I heard from David that he thought he might be contagious and didn't want to expose us, so he declined a meeting and wished us well. With that we decided to plan our return to binh hoa. Tien heard that her cousin was driving to Saigon and back that evening. At first we thought this would be great, but she changed her mind after hearing that there were many people coming along because it was a bus. She said that because we would be guests it would be a cultural obligation for us to buy food for everybody, which would be fine if it were just a few people in the car, but not with a bus full of people. We decided to get bus tickets instead. She arranged them, we packed our bags, checked out and headed off to the bus stop in a taxi.
The taxi took a route that was unfamiliar, through new, wide streets with overpasses and bridges over a river. It was unlike any roads I'd seen in Saigon. It was modern, something I'd expect to find in Hanoi. It made me happy to see Saigon taking on this sort of project.
We were dropped off at a bus stop that I don't think we've ever been to before. After getting our tickets we had thirty minutes left so we got food and coffee. This may have been the dirtiest bus stop I've ever seen, but the food and coffee were delicious.
We boarded our bus and it was very familiar. It's interesting to be familiar with something when you don't understand any of the words that are being said there. I doubt I could navigate this bus system myself. Incidentally though, the man sitting next to me spoke English, which may be a first for Vietnamese buses. Tien and I played wurdle until the bus pulled out of the parking lot, which felt like it was pocked with craters. The music went on and tien fell asleep. I wrote this, and now the man on my right and tien on my left are Leaning their heads on my shoulder as I peck away on my iPhone. I wonder if the camera on the iPhone has a wide enough angle to capture this scene...
Our bus stopped at the usual spot to refuel and let us all move our legs, freshen up and get food. Tien and I ordered pho and it was absolutely delicious. This was great not only because I have a head cold, but I have had a long string of mediocre or bad pho for I don't know how long. Coffee and tea were also nice. We headed off again and got to Binh Hoa after dark.
Mai and Thu met us down the street from Tien's house with motorbikes and rode us home where the family was waiting. It was really great to see everybody and to be home. Tien and I sat in the living room with her mother and sisters and nieces enjoying each other's company and catching up on the last few days. I passed out some gifts I had brought from America, jewelry for the ladies and Jelly Bellies for the kids. Tien's brother said that he was raising frogs. Everybody thought I should take medicine for my cough and that I should eat food, but honestly I wasn't hungry. Tien warmed some water for me, I took a shower and passed out. It's amazing how traveling can wear you out sometimes.
I had a good night's sleep despite that I had to wake up and pee twice during the night. At Tien's house this isn't such a simple thing. You have to unlock this huge steel gate and slide it back, which makes a loud screeching metal sound. The day was already warming up and I took a cold shower that felt nice.
Tien's sister in law was out on the back porch mincing a bunch of tiny fish. I had seen a slap-chop in CA before I left and thought it might be a good gift. I still wonder how it would've gone over...
Tien and I went to the market for breakfast and had hu tieu and coffee. Familiar food and familiar faces. Afterwards we went to see Thu's new house being built. It is a two story brick and cement house at the edge of the market in Binh Hoa, about a city block from Tien's parents house. Later Tien would show me a rendering of what it will look like and it looks pretty cool. It has an upstairs patio, which I love. Thu found one that is similar but looks different and more to her liking, but the builders say they can't make changes after they've started building.
We headed back through the market and went shopping for fruits and vegetables. This is an open air market with fruits and meats laying out in the open air. There were several fruits that I didn't recognize. Thu bought one and cut it up for us to eat and it was very delicious. It tasted like a grapefruit but had a much thicker rind. In fact, it did end up being a grapefruit, but not the ones commonly seen in America.
We headed home and took a nap. I couldn't sleep much so I played Field Runners, which I haven't played in a long time and not since they upgraded some features. Tien gave me a massage, one of the things I really missed.
That evening we went to Long Xuyen and had dinner on a boat that cruised up and down the river. It was fun, but the boat was really loud and vibrated a lot. Nhi's spoon kept shaking in her bowl, I guess she had the epicenter of the vibrations below her. I spotted a medkit and felt like I was in a video game.
• • • • •
2009.10.28 by Daniel
Killing time in Saigon
On Monday, Tien and I decided to find a new breakfast place. We walked several blocks through the heart of the tourist area at Pham Ngu Lao and found a lot of places that looked overpriced and inauthentic. I honestly don't like things to be too touristy, so when I see people with color t-shirts from the cities they have visited sitting at a fancy looking restaurant where all the seats face the street, I shy away. We walked down a block with big business offices and came upon a fancy cafe with about 20 motorbikes out front and knew it must be good. This is how I am going to gauge restaurants from now on, by how many motorbikes are out front. If there are few it's either bad food or for tourists.
After breakfast we again we went looking for meds and found nothing. Tien said she'd call her friend who is a doctor and ask him about it. We walked and talked and went and had smoothies. We, or rather I, talked a lot about music and culture and how I feel like VN is prime for an alternative culture to thrive. I feel like there is a lot of artistic talent here that has no direction and is still tied to the traditions of the culture, and that if there was a cultural icon who broke away from that tradition it would have a huge effect on the direction of the next generations. Music and visual art were my two main points of illustration. The fact that there is no alternative music to speak of and no graffiti in Saigon demonstrate the ties to cultural traditions.
We headed back to the hotel room and did some research online about pharmacies and malaria. I was horrified by the stories of people on Lariam (Mefloquine). The photos and story of the Somalia Affair were enough for me to stay away from that med. Malarone was probably out of the question, but I did find doxycycline and that looked very promising. What was even more promising was learning that Vietnam doesn't even have much of a malaria problem to begin with, and that's why it's so hard to find anti-malarials. Apparently there is only a problem with malaria in the high regions surrounding Laos, and one remote forested region down south. Tien's doctor friend said this and I didn't believe it at first, but I found malaria maps online to back it up. I wondered about the american medical system...
Again I napped, and again it was too long. I've decided to call off afternoon naps at all costs until I get my sleep schedule well in order. Tien and I woke up just after sunset and went to have dinner. We had pho, and we played a word game that I played with Lila's son Maks in the car on the way to the airport where you find a word that begins with the last letter of the previous word. Car, Road, Dream, Mellon, Nearby. This was a fun game to play for the word association aspect of it and for the vocabulary aspect for Tien.
After dinner we wandered back to a pirate DVD and Book store we found on my last trip, got some movies. We ate smoothies on the way back to the hotel, then stayed up late watching Minority Report on my laptop.
On Tuesday Tien and I went back to coffee viva for breakfast. We sat in the back next to a bronze statue of a topless girl reclining and arching her back. There was supposed to be a fountain or pond, but it was dry and smelled like fish so we moved. Over breakfast we talked about things we could do on this trip. We considered Ha Tien Beach, Ha Long Bay since she had never been there and Nha Trang since I had never been there. Other countries were also considered but Laos was ruled out with the highlands of Vietnam because of malaria. We also talked about getting me a motorbike license back in Long Xuyen.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a motorbike rental shop and looked at prices. It was $6 a day including helmets, which sounded really appealing. We decided to go plan more at the hotel and come back when we needed the bike. We picked up a pizza for an afternoon snack and went to a park by the hotel to look for a geocache. We found where the cache was but decided not to get it in the broad daylight because of the muggles. Instead we went to the hotel and chilled out for a while and ate our pizza. Tien called her old teacher Tyler about hanging out with him but he was busy that evening. I heard back from David that he was back from Singapore but was sick. He was resting for the rest of the day and would let me know if he was feeling better the next day. So, with nowhere to go we decided to nap.
We went out to walk around at dinnertime and had trouble agreeing on a restaurant. Tien eventually pointed to a decent looking place that was Australian themed. I got a big Saigon Red beer and some beef with rice. It was absolutely delicious at first bite, then I was hit by the MSG train. It wasn't a hint, it was obvious. Fortunately it was in the sauce and I was able to eat a lot of the rice and other tasty bits without it tasting too bad, but my mouth was still tingly afterwards. Tien's mixed fried rice wasn't too bad, but I directed us to our now usual smoothie spot for after MSG cleansing. The smoothie shop was conveniently right across from the geocache, which is now the only cache in Saigon. We found it quickly, took a trackable and went back to the hotel. We put on Harry Potter and the half blood prince but fell asleep about thirty minutes in, not because it was a bad movie.
• • • • •
2009.10.25 by Daniel
Hanging out with Dat and Trinh
On Sunday, my first morning back in Vietnam, Tien and I went to our old breakfast place. It was OK, but honestly it's lost its sentimental value with the realization that it's not that great of a restaurant. It is very convenient though. After breakfast we went back to the hotel room and did some online stuff and fell asleep for a long, long time.
When we woke up, Tien's friend Trinh and her boyfriend Dat were on their way to visit us with a couple of motorbikes. Tien and I hadn't eaten dinner yet so when they arrived we went out to find some food. We'd planned on getting pho, but Tien forgot about that and we ended up going to KFC. I was amused by this, expecting their menu to have interesting variations not available in America, but I didn't see anything that was out of the ordinary. I quizzed Tien on what KFC meant and who that guy was, and she had absolutely no idea. Not much of a surprise there from a girl who didn't know McDonalds or Starbucks until she went to Malaysia, and this is one of the things I love about her.
After dinner we headed out into the night traffic and instantly got separated from Dat and Trinh. Saigon traffic can be pretty crazy and Tien isn't used to the big city so she isn't assertive in her motorbiking. This later lead to us putting more effort into figuring out how to get me a motorbike license in VN. The four of us on two bikes cruised around the city a little bit in rain amounts varying between none and pouring, but it was warm so it wasn't all that bad. We did get drenched though, and decided to just call it a night.
That night I found it very hard to sleep, most likely from how long I'd slept earlier that day.
Monday morning we woke up and tried to find a place different from the usual place we eat breakfast, but couldn't find anything before our hunger took priority and we went back there. On our walk we saw a minor motorbike crash. I haven't seen many traffic accidents here, and none have been bad since people tend to go pretty slowly, but this was the first of two that I saw that day.
Trinh and Dat came back to the hotel and we four headed out to a park where Trinh liked to go a lot when she still had free time, Bình Quoí 1. It was labeled as a tourist park, but was essentially a portrait photographers playground. 
There were barely any tourists there, but what there were plenty of was beautiful girls dressed to the 9's posing in front of cameras. There were also several couples who were getting their engagement photos taken by professional photography crews, complete with off-cam lighting, props and makeup artists. The park was laid out with paths leading past backdrop after backdrop. A waterfall, a cart, a cyclo, a ruined brick wall, a ruined wall with pillars, a stone with flowers next to a pond, a bench on a lawn, a bamboo swing, a barrel and ladle, a causeway across a pond, a canoe in the pond, water lilies, flowers growing in vines up trees, stone statues, so on and so forth. This made it easy for photographers to play musical backdrops with each other, shuffling from one to the next to put their respective couples into the various scenes. Honestly it was pretty brilliant, and it didn't cost anything for us to get in either. I assume they made their money off charging professional crews and selling food and water at the eateries that were scattered throughout the campus.
The four of us spent an hour or so walking around and taking photographs, then headed back towards downtown. We stopped on the way back and I got some absolutely terrible spaghetti carbonara while Tien enjoyed delicious vietnamese food. I resolved not to buy anything too culinarily distant from VN food from now on.
On the way home I saw a blind beggar holding a cane and a hat with his eyes rolled back in his head kneeling at the side of the road where hundreds of motorbikes were passing by.
Back near the hotel Tien and I tried to find a pharmacy for my malaria meds but couldn't find anything. We resolved to find it later and went back inside to take a rest. I fell asleep and didn't wake up for several hours. My sleeping schedule still hadn't adjusted yet and it was taking a toll on my daylight hours and my energy.
We went briefly out with Dat and Trinh again to grab some dinner, then they headed home while Tien and I retired to the old Ruby Star.
• • • • •
2009.10.23 by Daniel
My layover in japan was short and nice. I walked around a bit and Took pictures during sunset, then developed some photos from a photoshoot I did for Rob's friends last weekend. I didn't bother with the $6 Internet and before I knew it I was boarding the flight to Saigon.
Vietnamese people are chatty, social people. I really wonder it is they talk about so much. One man dropped a bag out o an overhead bin onto another mans head across the aisle from me then apologized profusely. There were kids running up and down the aisle of the plane, standing on the seat playing with the lights, and a man got out of his seat right as we were about to take off to help a woman with a screaming baby. I couldn't help but smile at it all, what a show.
I sat next to a couple from Indiana who was on their way to volunteer at a cafe called the masters cup which I took to be a Christian entity. They were nice folks and I talked to the gentleman about traveling in Asia. He mentioned that VN was limiting visas since about a month ago, not giving out more than 30 day visas and for only a single entry. Good thing I've still got my 6 month with over 30 days left. He later said that he had been in Vietnam during the war, which makes him the first American I'd talked to about the war who had actually been in the war and then come back. Regrettably we didn't get much time to talk about it because I didn't find this out until the end of the flight.
We taxied forever and I soon drifted off with drams about taxiing to the coast of japan and then floating off across the ocean to Vietnam instead of actually flying there. I woke up briefly for takeoff and then fell asleep to the feelings of the g-force and the many conversations all around, both of which were surprisingly calming. But then, it was 3am so maybe that had something to do with it as well.
I thought I was dreaming when I woke up. On television was a mix between Harry potter, star wars episode 1 and star trek. I wasn't dreaming though, apparently this is some dreadful new show. I kept anticipating a light saber duel between Spock and Malfoy.
I ordered a glass of wine and it was poured from an opaque plastic bottle you'd expect to find juice in. Meh, it was free so I can't complain.
We landed late and sat on the plane for a while before heading to the gate. I breezed through immigration and customs to find my lovely fiancé Tien and her awesome sister Mai waiting for me at the front door. We eventually found a taxi that would take Mai to the bus stop after dropping Tien and I of at the familiar Ruby Star.
The streets of Saigon were mostly empty due to what must have been a decent rain. They were wet and shiny and looked clean. It was great to have my fiancé back after so long apart and so many frustrations with I-129F. Here we were though, back in Saigon. It was very familiar and it seemed like only yesterday that I had been here.
October arrival in Saigon
My layover in japan was short and nice. I walked around a bit and Took pictures during sunset, then developed some photos from a photoshoot I did for Rob's friends last weekend. I didn't bother with the $6 Internet and before I knew it I was boarding the flight to Saigon.
Vietnamese people are chatty, social people. I really wonder it is they talk about so much. One man dropped a bag out o an overhead bin onto another mans head across the aisle from me then apologized profusely. There were kids running up and down the aisle of the plane, standing on the seat playing with the lights, and a man got out of his seat right as we were about to take off to help a woman with a screaming baby. I couldn't help but smile at it all, what a show.
I sat next to a couple from Indiana who was on their way to volunteer at a cafe called the masters cup which I took to be a Christian entity. They were nice folks and I talked to the gentleman about traveling in Asia. He mentioned that VN was limiting visas since about a month ago, not giving out more than 30 day visas and for only a single entry. Good thing I've still got my 6 month with over 30 days left. He later said that he had been in Vietnam during the war, which makes him the first American I'd talked to about the war who had actually been in the war and then come back. Regrettably we didn't get much time to talk about it because I didn't find this out until the end of the flight.
We taxied forever and I soon drifted off with drams about taxiing to the coast of japan and then floating off across the ocean to Vietnam instead of actually flying there. I woke up briefly for takeoff and then fell asleep to the feelings of the g-force and the many conversations all around, both of which were surprisingly calming. But then, it was 3am so maybe that had something to do with it as well.
I thought I was dreaming when I woke up. On television was a mix between Harry potter, star wars episode 1 and star trek. I wasn't dreaming though, apparently this is some dreadful new show. I kept anticipating a light saber duel between Spock and Malfoy.
I ordered a glass of wine and it was poured from an opaque plastic bottle you'd expect to find juice in. Meh, it was free so I can't complain.
We landed late and sat on the plane for a while before heading to the gate. I breezed through immigration and customs to find my lovely fiancé Tien and her awesome sister Mai waiting for me at the front door. We eventually found a taxi that would take Mai to the bus stop after dropping Tien and I of at the familiar Ruby Star.
The streets of Saigon were mostly empty due to what must have been a decent rain. They were wet and shiny and looked clean. It was great to have my fiancé back after so long apart and so many frustrations with I-129F. Here we were though, back in Saigon. It was very familiar and it seemed like only yesterday that I had been here. • • • • •
2009.10.22 by Daniel
Heading back to Vietnam
It's been a long time since I've written anything, mainly because I haven't been traveling. 
I left Colorado and drove back to San Francisco in mid August, over two months ago. In that time I've mainly been focusing on two things: finishing an I-129f petition for Tien and studying and practicing flash photography. Most of that time has been spent sleeping on the floor or couch in Brianna, Lily and Terresina's living room. I did get a sublet for a few weeks right up on top of twin peaks, and I did stay with some other friend in that time. Some people had suggested that I get a job and an apartment and prepare for Tien's arrival in the US, but I just didn't want to do things that way. Instead, once I finished Tien's petition I decided to go back to Vietnam. So, here I am on Northwest Airlines flight 27 from San Francisco to Tokyo where I have a quick layover before flying to Saigon.
Honestly, the last few months have been difficult personally because my future has been up in the air and it's been up to me to steer the direction of my life through wide open uncertain circumstances. My fiance is still in Vietnam and probably can't enter the US for 7 more months. I've been wading through the US immigration system pretty much on my own. I have no job and no home of my own. There was the option of starting up a photography business of my own. For a while I didn't even have a phone, then I realized that was ridiculous and forked over $70 a month for an iPhone plan which was extra great because of tethering. I still don't have health insurance which led to me skipping an optional vaccination and needing to find malaria meds in VN because I didn't find the SF Travel Clinic until last night, and I just started planning this trip 3 days ago.
Two nights ago I took the girls out for dinner as a thank you for being so hospitable and to have one last great time with them before heading out. Yesterday I took care of last minute preparations. One of the things I did was buy a pocket camera to replace the LX3 I had purchased in Saigon last time. I lost the LX3 at Lovefest after drinking a bit too much. I honestly have no idea where I lost it, but I was happy I didn't lose my D300 instead. The camera I picked up was a $150 Samsung NV24HD. The look is what first caught my eye, then its remarkable interface, then its ability to do 60fps video and lastly its 24mm equivalent lens. A few quick googles showed happy owners so I followed the impulse and bought it. Following impulses is working out pretty good for me.
That night I headed down to Lila's house to crash there for the night. Will had wrecked one of their cars so like last time I let her them borrow mine. This works out great because they get a car and i don't have to pay storage costs. Lila and I took Maks to his new school in Palo Alto and then she dropped me off at SFO. My friend Blake is living out in SF now and was flying back to CO for a week, so I met up with him at the airport after checking in for my flight. We caught up on recent life details and future life strategy while he waited in an incredibly long line at the Southwest Airlines ticket counter. I left him still in it when I had to go to the international area.
At the security checkpoint I was happy to see that they had gotten rid of that lame requirement to remove your laptop. The posted signs only said to remove oxygen mask systems, full size DVD players and game systems, but no mention of laptops anywhere. My happiness at not having to unpack my bag was ended with a snide comment from a TSA agent about how I was supposed to remove my laptop for the x-Ray machine. I wished her luck when she said she was going to take it out for me, but thought again about how I needed that luck since I'd be the one repacking my bag. Stupid TSA security theater.
I bought an $8 ham sandwich and a single serving bottle of wine because I'd need to sleep on the plane. International flights may be one of the only legitimate excuses for drinking in the morning. I ate, emailed Tien, canceled my per-month iPhone plan and boarded the plane. We took off ahead of schedule and are looking at a shorter than expected travel time. Maybe I'll catch sunset in Tokyo. Hopefully it's not foggy like last time.
My trip was taking the same route I took last time, SF to Tokyo to Saigon. Last time I flew on All Nippon Airways and it was absolutely the best airline experience I've ever had. I had tried to get another flight with them, but after searching I found that United and NWA (Delta) were roughly half the cost at $680 round trip. I thought this was a fantastic deal considering I was buying two days in advance, but then I remembered the recent flood that ravaged Hoi An and other coastal towns in that region and it made sense.
Transcontinental flights are already pretty awesome with their in-flight entertainment systems in each seat, typically more room than domestic flights and meals and drinks are included in the ticket price. I wasn't so sure how delta would stack up against Ana and was a little interested in finding out. 3 hours into my flight I have some results...
The entertainment system for the whole plane crashed shortly after I started using it. The flight attendant on the intercom said it would take 15 minutes to reboot, and it did. A sight that was familiar to me came on the screen: tux the penguin and a bunch of black and white textual technological jargon.
After a few iterations the system eventually stabilized and I was allowed the displeasure of finding innumerable bugs and limitations. The media wasn't sortable and was not listed alphabetically. When browsing reviews, the "next" function was 4 clicks away while the default was "watch trailer", which clearly assumes that people intend to watch trailers more than skip to the next review. The media was Aldo incorrectly linked so that clicking Forrest Gump let you watch a Honduran movie called Sin Nombre. There were 4 unhelpful listings for Delta TV that ended up being popular american television shows. The most disheartening thing was their lack of selection, there are only a handful of movies available, nothing for me to watch. The in-flight map showed that we had flown 8500 or so miles shortly after takeoff. This was accompanied by a flat map, not a globe. The "comments" link only let you take a survey and not actually leave comments, which stiles one my personal pet peeves of interface elements that say they do one thing and do something completely different. "Download now" is the worst offense of this kind on the Internet. So, yeah, big fail on the delta entertainment system unless the label it as alpha or maybe beta.
The next test was the meal. It was actually very good, but plastic silverware is wasteful and cheap. They did provide hand towels, coffee, beer and wine though, so that was also nice. All in all, not too bad.
One of the highlights o this trip is meeting up with an old room mate and coworker, David Tran. He's a Vietnamese Parisian who is on a trip to Saigon to see his family. he's actually in Singapore right now but will be returning on Monday which gives Tien and I some time to spend in Saigon with each other and her friend Trinh and gives me time to adjust to the time difference, find malarone and get started on that two day lead in before entering malaria infested areas.
I left Colorado and drove back to San Francisco in mid August, over two months ago. In that time I've mainly been focusing on two things: finishing an I-129f petition for Tien and studying and practicing flash photography. Most of that time has been spent sleeping on the floor or couch in Brianna, Lily and Terresina's living room. I did get a sublet for a few weeks right up on top of twin peaks, and I did stay with some other friend in that time. Some people had suggested that I get a job and an apartment and prepare for Tien's arrival in the US, but I just didn't want to do things that way. Instead, once I finished Tien's petition I decided to go back to Vietnam. So, here I am on Northwest Airlines flight 27 from San Francisco to Tokyo where I have a quick layover before flying to Saigon.
Honestly, the last few months have been difficult personally because my future has been up in the air and it's been up to me to steer the direction of my life through wide open uncertain circumstances. My fiance is still in Vietnam and probably can't enter the US for 7 more months. I've been wading through the US immigration system pretty much on my own. I have no job and no home of my own. There was the option of starting up a photography business of my own. For a while I didn't even have a phone, then I realized that was ridiculous and forked over $70 a month for an iPhone plan which was extra great because of tethering. I still don't have health insurance which led to me skipping an optional vaccination and needing to find malaria meds in VN because I didn't find the SF Travel Clinic until last night, and I just started planning this trip 3 days ago.
Two nights ago I took the girls out for dinner as a thank you for being so hospitable and to have one last great time with them before heading out. Yesterday I took care of last minute preparations. One of the things I did was buy a pocket camera to replace the LX3 I had purchased in Saigon last time. I lost the LX3 at Lovefest after drinking a bit too much. I honestly have no idea where I lost it, but I was happy I didn't lose my D300 instead. The camera I picked up was a $150 Samsung NV24HD. The look is what first caught my eye, then its remarkable interface, then its ability to do 60fps video and lastly its 24mm equivalent lens. A few quick googles showed happy owners so I followed the impulse and bought it. Following impulses is working out pretty good for me.
That night I headed down to Lila's house to crash there for the night. Will had wrecked one of their cars so like last time I let her them borrow mine. This works out great because they get a car and i don't have to pay storage costs. Lila and I took Maks to his new school in Palo Alto and then she dropped me off at SFO. My friend Blake is living out in SF now and was flying back to CO for a week, so I met up with him at the airport after checking in for my flight. We caught up on recent life details and future life strategy while he waited in an incredibly long line at the Southwest Airlines ticket counter. I left him still in it when I had to go to the international area.
At the security checkpoint I was happy to see that they had gotten rid of that lame requirement to remove your laptop. The posted signs only said to remove oxygen mask systems, full size DVD players and game systems, but no mention of laptops anywhere. My happiness at not having to unpack my bag was ended with a snide comment from a TSA agent about how I was supposed to remove my laptop for the x-Ray machine. I wished her luck when she said she was going to take it out for me, but thought again about how I needed that luck since I'd be the one repacking my bag. Stupid TSA security theater.
I bought an $8 ham sandwich and a single serving bottle of wine because I'd need to sleep on the plane. International flights may be one of the only legitimate excuses for drinking in the morning. I ate, emailed Tien, canceled my per-month iPhone plan and boarded the plane. We took off ahead of schedule and are looking at a shorter than expected travel time. Maybe I'll catch sunset in Tokyo. Hopefully it's not foggy like last time.
My trip was taking the same route I took last time, SF to Tokyo to Saigon. Last time I flew on All Nippon Airways and it was absolutely the best airline experience I've ever had. I had tried to get another flight with them, but after searching I found that United and NWA (Delta) were roughly half the cost at $680 round trip. I thought this was a fantastic deal considering I was buying two days in advance, but then I remembered the recent flood that ravaged Hoi An and other coastal towns in that region and it made sense.
Transcontinental flights are already pretty awesome with their in-flight entertainment systems in each seat, typically more room than domestic flights and meals and drinks are included in the ticket price. I wasn't so sure how delta would stack up against Ana and was a little interested in finding out. 3 hours into my flight I have some results...
The entertainment system for the whole plane crashed shortly after I started using it. The flight attendant on the intercom said it would take 15 minutes to reboot, and it did. A sight that was familiar to me came on the screen: tux the penguin and a bunch of black and white textual technological jargon.
After a few iterations the system eventually stabilized and I was allowed the displeasure of finding innumerable bugs and limitations. The media wasn't sortable and was not listed alphabetically. When browsing reviews, the "next" function was 4 clicks away while the default was "watch trailer", which clearly assumes that people intend to watch trailers more than skip to the next review. The media was Aldo incorrectly linked so that clicking Forrest Gump let you watch a Honduran movie called Sin Nombre. There were 4 unhelpful listings for Delta TV that ended up being popular american television shows. The most disheartening thing was their lack of selection, there are only a handful of movies available, nothing for me to watch. The in-flight map showed that we had flown 8500 or so miles shortly after takeoff. This was accompanied by a flat map, not a globe. The "comments" link only let you take a survey and not actually leave comments, which stiles one my personal pet peeves of interface elements that say they do one thing and do something completely different. "Download now" is the worst offense of this kind on the Internet. So, yeah, big fail on the delta entertainment system unless the label it as alpha or maybe beta.
The next test was the meal. It was actually very good, but plastic silverware is wasteful and cheap. They did provide hand towels, coffee, beer and wine though, so that was also nice. All in all, not too bad.
One of the highlights o this trip is meeting up with an old room mate and coworker, David Tran. He's a Vietnamese Parisian who is on a trip to Saigon to see his family. he's actually in Singapore right now but will be returning on Monday which gives Tien and I some time to spend in Saigon with each other and her friend Trinh and gives me time to adjust to the time difference, find malarone and get started on that two day lead in before entering malaria infested areas. • • • • •
2009.08.04 by Daniel
My 39 hour day
By the time Monday morning rolled around I had slept away over half of my weekend while doped up on NyQuil and Imodium. I was finally starting to feel better on Monday, so much so that I decided I was well enough to drive to CO. I think I may have said goodbye to Brianna and Lily while I was still asleep, but Terresina was still there. She was sick too, from a night of drinking. I gave her my sympathies and a farewell and headed out to have lunch with Rob. It was a glorious San Francisco day that made me not want to leave, but I did.
At 3:30pm I headed off across the Bay Bridge. It had been so long since I'd seen it and they had done a significant amount of work on the eastern span in the time I was gone. I'd really love to photograph it during construction. You can't even see it when you're driving because the barriers on the side of the bridge are so big. I was soon off into the hills with the windows down and the music up and began enjoying my drive quite a bit. I remembered other times I'd taken that drive, particularly July 2nd a few years ago when I left at the same time of day to drive all night by myself as I was doing again.
I had been traveling to new places for so long and experiencing new things that I hadn't had much time to let things settle in properly, but as I drove over Donner Pass this began to happen. The familiar feelings of the mountains and the open road were great and helped me sort through some unsettled thoughts in my mind.
I caught a scent in the air that reminded me of Double Dragon.
The sun set as I passed through Reno without stopping; the light was beautiful. I continued thinking about the past. I began thinking about all of the other drives I'd done between San Francisco and Colorado Springs. The trip when Andreas hit the rabbit in the middle of the night on the ice. The trip when Zach and I had to drive hundreds of miles through a snow storm and had to sleep in my car at a rest stop in the middle of Wyoming. The night I drove it alone in my convertible with the top down. The time Fava and I drove out together and he drove back alone. The time when Shawn, Beth, Jeff and I picked up the hitch hiking pro mountain boarder in who had run out of gas in the middle of Utah in the middle of the night. The time I flew to Salt Lake and Vince picked me up and we drove back on the snow in his Legend. The time we got lost on our detour to Las Vegas. The time we all laid down at the side of the highway and gazed at stars. The time Olivia hit a dead deer with my car. The trip when Gabe and I stopped frequently to take photographs.
Yeah, I've done this drive a lot. I just wish it was shorter than 1300 miles.
At about 8:45 PST I was cruising along listening to Rancid and I noticed I was feeling really good health-wise, like I was going to be well very soon. I felt awake and on my game for the first time since leaving Japan. Just as I was realizing this I saw lightning strike way in the distance ahead of me, and just after that I saw a meteorite shoot across the sky towards the sunset. I wondered if the Perseid meteor shower was coming soon.
Tuesday morning at 1:30am PST I was greeted at the Utah border with a sign telling the death toll of I-80 for 2008 and so far in 2009. As beautiful as it is, Utah has never seemed all that welcoming, and it's things like this that really highlight that fact.
At 2:40 I saw another meteorite as I was looking for a gas station. Salt Lake City has hidden its gas stations but I used my GPS to find one that was a mile off the highway, exactly where it shouldn't be. It was closed. I found another one though, and then found my way back to the highway with my GPS telling me turn right, turn left, recalculating. As I got onto the highway it said told me to continue driving for 430 miles. So I did.
As the sun was peaking over the horizon I came upon a wind farm in Wyoming. I pulled over to photograph it and was delighted to find a dirt road that led me nearby the bases of the windmills, so I spent a long time photographing them. The sun was well above the horizon when I left to find breakfast in a nearby town. The coffee I got with breakfast was terrible though and I was nearly out of gas so I stopped again and got some snacks for the road and good coffee. This little convenience store that was tucked away outside of town was convenient indeed as it was the first place to offer truly free wifi. I caught up with some friends and told Nate that I'd be in his city within 3 hours, then headed back onto the highway.
The sun was high in the sky and was hot and I began to get sleepy. I thought about pulling over to take a nap since I hadn't slept at all on the drive yet, but when I looked for a place to nap I realized that Wyoming around I-80 has no trees as far as you can see. There was no shade anywhere and I sure as hell wasn't going to nap in a hot car so I just kept driving.
I made it to Colorado, followed my GPS through the somewhat familiar streets of Fort Collins and out onto I-25. Then I noticed that I was in Colorado and the drivers here are not to be trusted and so I got on my guard. I looked at the highway though and thought that maybe if Colorado would build a highway wider than 2 lanes people wouldn't seem to drive so terribly here. Maybe they would even get along on the road.
When I got to Nate's house he wasn't home. I couldn't sign onto his wifi either, and I had no phone service, so I was in a predicament. I went to find free wifi and couldn't find it for the life of me. Everything was protected. Even the coffee shop didnt' have wifi and the surrounding nets were all protected, including the library. I eventually drove a long way to a coffee shop that I thought Nate would be at, but he wasn't. In fact, nobody was because it was out of business. Like a gift from God though, I was blessed with an open wifi signal and I used it to check facebook where I got a message from Nate telling me he wouldn't be home and I should go to his office on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder.
Boulder was different than I expected. It was more like a normal tourist Colorado mountain town than I had imagined. It was clean. Even the hippies were clean, which was weird. It was rich and expensive and had lots of nice things and people who owned nice things walking around talking and riding bikes and shopping. It's definitely an active place. It seems like a place for people who love the activity of city life but don't like the city.
I went into Nate's office and met some co-workers of his. Then I went to their meditation room, or something like that where there were pillows and Tibetan prayer flags, and tried to take a nap but I couldn't sleep even though I'd been awake for over 28 hours by then. Instead I did online things, made some plans, called Fava, played with cameras. Then we went out for dinner.
It was me, Nate and his buddy Chris who had just gotten back from traveling around Japan, Australia and New Zealand for 3 weeks. We had a good conversation about traveling and some of the interesting differences and awesome experiences that go with it. When the bill came I thought we were in Malaysia, but in fact the price was in dollars and really was that expensive. I remembered a life I used to live where I had a job and hence had money and had no cares about spending $30 on dinner every day. I need to not do that right now.
Nate and I cruised back to his apartment, which I'd never seen before, and chatted a little before I realized my clock was an hour earlier than it was and thought that we should go to bed. Nate went to bed but then I couldn't sleep so I stayed up and wrote this. I am next going to write Tien, then I am going to shower, and then I am going to get a good night's sleep that will be a proper finale to 39 consecutive waking hours.
As the sun was peaking over the horizon I came upon a wind farm in Wyoming. I pulled over to photograph it and was delighted to find a dirt road that led me nearby the bases of the windmills, so I spent a long time photographing them. The sun was well above the horizon when I left to find breakfast in a nearby town. The coffee I got with breakfast was terrible though and I was nearly out of gas so I stopped again and got some snacks for the road and good coffee. This little convenience store that was tucked away outside of town was convenient indeed as it was the first place to offer truly free wifi. I caught up with some friends and told Nate that I'd be in his city within 3 hours, then headed back onto the highway.
The sun was high in the sky and was hot and I began to get sleepy. I thought about pulling over to take a nap since I hadn't slept at all on the drive yet, but when I looked for a place to nap I realized that Wyoming around I-80 has no trees as far as you can see. There was no shade anywhere and I sure as hell wasn't going to nap in a hot car so I just kept driving.
I made it to Colorado, followed my GPS through the somewhat familiar streets of Fort Collins and out onto I-25. Then I noticed that I was in Colorado and the drivers here are not to be trusted and so I got on my guard. I looked at the highway though and thought that maybe if Colorado would build a highway wider than 2 lanes people wouldn't seem to drive so terribly here. Maybe they would even get along on the road.
When I got to Nate's house he wasn't home. I couldn't sign onto his wifi either, and I had no phone service, so I was in a predicament. I went to find free wifi and couldn't find it for the life of me. Everything was protected. Even the coffee shop didnt' have wifi and the surrounding nets were all protected, including the library. I eventually drove a long way to a coffee shop that I thought Nate would be at, but he wasn't. In fact, nobody was because it was out of business. Like a gift from God though, I was blessed with an open wifi signal and I used it to check facebook where I got a message from Nate telling me he wouldn't be home and I should go to his office on Pearl Street in downtown Boulder.
Boulder was different than I expected. It was more like a normal tourist Colorado mountain town than I had imagined. It was clean. Even the hippies were clean, which was weird. It was rich and expensive and had lots of nice things and people who owned nice things walking around talking and riding bikes and shopping. It's definitely an active place. It seems like a place for people who love the activity of city life but don't like the city.
I went into Nate's office and met some co-workers of his. Then I went to their meditation room, or something like that where there were pillows and Tibetan prayer flags, and tried to take a nap but I couldn't sleep even though I'd been awake for over 28 hours by then. Instead I did online things, made some plans, called Fava, played with cameras. Then we went out for dinner.
It was me, Nate and his buddy Chris who had just gotten back from traveling around Japan, Australia and New Zealand for 3 weeks. We had a good conversation about traveling and some of the interesting differences and awesome experiences that go with it. When the bill came I thought we were in Malaysia, but in fact the price was in dollars and really was that expensive. I remembered a life I used to live where I had a job and hence had money and had no cares about spending $30 on dinner every day. I need to not do that right now.
Nate and I cruised back to his apartment, which I'd never seen before, and chatted a little before I realized my clock was an hour earlier than it was and thought that we should go to bed. Nate went to bed but then I couldn't sleep so I stayed up and wrote this. I am next going to write Tien, then I am going to shower, and then I am going to get a good night's sleep that will be a proper finale to 39 consecutive waking hours. • • • • •
2009.07.31 by Daniel
38 hour Thursday
Thursday morning I woke up above the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the coast of Japan. I knew this because right after I saw the clouds and ocean below I looked at the helpful map showing where we were on the planet. I was given breakfast and the loudspeaker announced that we were one hour out from Tokyo.
After eating I dozed some more, opening my eyes once in a while to see what was outside my window. Blue ocean with tiny white caps under hazy clouds. Nothing but a cloud. Picturesque rice paddies that were unharvested and nobody and no boats in sight. Soon we were on the ground and I was sleepily waiting in the security checkpoint line to get back into the international terminal. I looked around at all the unfamiliar people and heard them speaking in accents, some that I didn't recognize. I heard a japanese girl speaking in deliberate, clear english. I thought about the world and how small my world had been while I was growing up, and my world was larger than many. I still couldn't help wondering if I'd done life a little wrong. I only traveled internationally once when I was young, and I didn't travel much on my own volition, and usually not to new places but back to old places. I didn't learn a second language. As an english speaker it is difficult to chose which language to master as your second, but that's really not an excuse because two are better than one. The line was long and I had plenty of time to think about these things. Getting through security was easy and they didn't seem to care that I had a bunch of liquids that I didn't remove for their inspection. So much of security is theater.
I found a little office area with wired ethernet and went to work trying to find a way to get free internet. These guys had done their due diligence though and I couldn't find any way around paying. This was a problem because last time when I tried to pay I still couldn't get online because Boingo's billing mechanism was broken. On top of that, the Boingo software for Mac is terrible, like so many OEM apps for Mac. They really shouldn't bother with those kinds of things and should spend that money on something more productive.
I wandered around the airport, plodding along tiredly. It was familiar, I had spent enough time here last time that I knew where I was and where to go to get whatever. My flight wasn't listed on the display yet though since it was too many hours away, so I just wandered aimlessly. I exchanged some money and went to an electronics shop with some stuff that isn't available in the USA, which is just a novelty to me but still entertaining. When my flight did appear on the monitor I was 2 gates down from where I needed to be, which would've been really convenient if it weren't boarding in 8 hours. I got some tea, found a power outlet and managed to successfully pay for internet access. This allowed me to kill many hours of my layover while catching up on blogging and chatting with some US folks who were up.
After sitting for too many hours I walked around the airport some more. I noticed the stark differences between Japan and Vietnam. Before landing in Tokyo I looked down at the rice paddies and it was immediately evident that we were not in Vietnam, even though there were rice paddies for as far as you could see. Japan was so clean, so quiet, so organized.
As I was walking around looking for gifts for friends a man offered me samples of sake, which I gladly tasted. It was delicious and I thought about buying a bottle, but the fact that you can't even take duty free liquids over 100ml through Japan made me wary of what other ridiculous liquid restrictions I would encounter.
After what seemed like an eternity my plane began boarding and I watched everybody line up and get on, then when the line was nearly nothing I boarded and took my seat. I sat next to an older Japanese woman with a dignified demeanor. She began writing a note and when I glanced over my eyes picked up the word "unforgivable". I was curious, and although I didn't read the whole note, I did also see that she mentioned her choice of airlines by their reputation vs simply price. She folded the note up, put it in an envelope and gave it to one of the flight attendants. From then on the flight attendants would stop by from time to time and talk and talk and talk, saying "hai" over and over as this woman spoke with calm certainty. I wondered what the note actually said...
After watching some of Cirque Du Soleil's Dralion, which has an awesome juggling scene, I switched to The Soloist and proceeded to be thoroughly unimpressed. Afterwards I managed to finally get some more sleep...
Thursday I woke up to the ongoing sounds of a boy crying. Not wailing, but genuinely crying. I realized it had been going on for quite a while and wondered why his, who was seated in the next section up, didn't come back and help him. The first thing I saw was the darkness map of the world with our plane positioned over the pacific right on the border between light and dark. The boy's dad eventually came back and took the boy off to the bathroom. I closed the window shades on the two windows next to me and went back to sleep. I couldn't stay asleep though. It was an uncomfortable drifting in and out of sleep. Eventually we were landing in San Francisco and as I carried my bag off into SFO I finally woke up.
About 5 immigration people asked me if I had all my bags as they checked my passport. It seemed like they couldn't believe that person could have such little luggage. That may have been the thing that set me apart from the rest and made them select me to a full luggage search. The guy going through my luggage also couldn't believe that I only had one bag. He, like the passport control officer, found it hard to believe that I didn't have a physical mailing address. The passport control officer scratched off "San Francisco" and wrote in my parents address in Colorado Springs. The man searching my bag asked me "Why did you write down Colordo Springs if you live in San Francisco?" to which I replied that I did not write down c/s. It seems so simple, move out of apartment, quit job, live out of a backpack, yet so many people don't understand until they stop to think about it.
Sara was supposed to pick me up but I wondered if she'd even be there after my flight was late and my time was wasted while the LEO did a half search of my tightly and intricately packed backpack. She was though and it was great to have a friend there to whisk me away in a sleek automobile. We headed down 101 to Mountainview to meet up with some of the SugarCRM crew. Pretty much the whole local IT team plus Kyung showed up and we filled a nook in the restaurant with loud friendly conversation. Sara had to go and I was bummed that we didn't have long enough time to catch up with each other.
After lunch I caught a ride back to Sugar where Lila had brought my car. I sat and talked a while about my travels and the way that poor countries and technology fit together, then headed up to Lila's house to pick up some stuff I'd left there. When I got there I took a shower, which was great because I had been out for over 36 hours without a shower. I also tried to take a nap but couldn't sleep, so I decided to head on up to SF.
As soon as I started driving I got sleepy. Luckily I'd driven this route a few hundred times so I could drive it comfortably while sleepy. It was lame though, I didn't want to drive that route. I had quit my job partly because of that drive. Between that drive and the SugarCRM HQ I felt like my old life had been severed and I was having to pick it back up to get to something underneath it. I just wanted to let it go and move on, those times were gone.
The first place I went in SF was to my mailbox which hadn't been checked in two months. All of the mail fit into the box, so it wasn't too bad. The post office is right downtown SF, near embarcadero, and it was nice to submerge myself back into the heart of SF, like jumping straight into a pool to help you get used to the water quicker. The weather was kinda bad, breezy with a little rain, but it was familiar and that was great. The air was cool and clean, so different from anything I'd experienced in the previous two months. I also heard seagulls for the first time in two months.
Then as I was driving to the Sunset I witnessed the first crime I'd seen in two months. I thought about how I hadn't felt threatened in any way in Asia at all. The worst thing I'd encountered were animals and the fear of getting ripped off by agreeing to an inflated price, but I hadn't been scared fo being mugged or anything while I was there. I was sad that it took less than an hour for me to witness a crime in SF. I love this city and honestly I don't see that much crime here, so that was a bit of a slap.
Right as I was getting to Golden Gate Park I remembered the microclimates of San Francisco, and even though it was somewhat warm downtown it sure as hell wasn't warm by the ocean. I turned around and drove all the way back downtown and went to my storage unit to get my jacket and picked up some other gear while I was there, including some camera gear I hadn't played with in a long time.
The ocean was vibrant and the horizon had a crisp line as I drove to Java Beach to get coffee and internet. I didn't stay long because Rob told me to meet him at Noriega Pizza, so I headed down there. We talked a little bit and it was good to see a great friend, but I had a hard time saying a lot of stuff about my trip because I still need time to process it. Maybe... maybe this is as good as it'll get and I should just blab about it without thinking too hard. At any rate we had good convo and then headed to Sea Biscuit to meet up with Rob Taylor so they could record a podcast for (d)NOT.
I don't know if it's just the fact that I can understand the language, but I think that San Francisco has more doers than other countries I've visited. Aside from Rob and Rob recording their gig in a coffee shop with friendly and familiar folks walking in and out catching up with the latest goings on, I've seen a lot of other people around already that look like they're up to something fun. There is a cool energy in San Francisco that I really really like. Some of it is the natural energy of the city, and on top of that there is the sentimental aspect, the familiar places with so many good memories tied to them. I was really really happy to be back.
We dropped Rob Taylor off at home and headed back to Rob's place and geeked out with laptops, linux, Star Trek and a sip of whiskey.
• • • • •
2009.07.29 by Daniel
The Last Days in SE Asia
I woke up to an oncoming silence created by the absence of electrical power on Tuesday morning. This was a good way to get an early start because I couldn't sleep without the fan protecting me from the mosquitoes and cooling my body. I took a shower and headed out for breakfast with Tien. We went to a new place that is near the internet cafe we frequent, right next to the lake by the river in Long Xuyen.
At breakfast Tien told me that she'd talked to the principle of the school where she works and he had reminded her that she had employment obligations that last through September. This meant that she couldn't travel with me because she would have to resume teaching in less than a week. We had planned on either moving to Saigon to work or more preferably to travel a bit, probably back from Bankok down through Malaysia where we could see all those beautiful beaches that we missed out on last time. Now this was not going to happen because Tien would be busy. The only reasonable option for me was to return to America on my scheduled flight which left the next night. Even though this was an option that I never wanted to have to pick, it felt nice to finally have a final word on what would happen.
When we got home there was still no power. We decided to go to Saigon that day and stay over night. Tien got on the phone and found us a bus leaving at 4pm while her mom and sister fixed some food for us. Tien told me a story about being attacked by a wild dog near her house when she was in Jr. High. She was outside playing with her puppy and some crazy wild dog ran up and started to attack her and her puppy, so she picked up the puppy and ran but the dog chased them. Some local folks saw what was happening, found some bamboo sticks and killed the wild dog. At the end of this story we realized we didn't have enough time to catch the 4pm, so we shot for the 5pm and began packing.
Tien and I went to the market to get some gifts for my family and friends. Her family kept wanting me to take more and more stuff, not realizing the restrictions that come with living your life out of a backpack. I simply couldn't take a lot of what they wanted to give me because I didn't have the room and I was already heavy laden. On top of that, the food and liquid restrictions are so tight these days that you can't really take either of those products. That was a shame, I was hoping to bring back that bottle of CK Entirety.
I said my goodbyes to the family that had so graciously taken me in two months ago, feeding me and clothing me and giving me all that they could to make me comfortable, and had then become my own family. Saying goodbye is hard when you don't speak their language though. How do you convey the details of the small things you really appreciated? I did my best and then four of us got on two scooters and headed to the Long Xuyen bus station. I had a new energy, the energy that comes with having a plan and putting it in motion. I was happy to be doing anything, and more so happy to be on my way back to the USA where my family and friends were waiting, my car was waiting, and I still had the freedom of unemployment. I was so caught up in thinking about how great it would be that I forgot that Tien wasn't coming with me, and when I remembered this my heart sank a bit and something felt not right. There was nothing I could do about it though.
It was harvest time in her village and I saw a man on a cart pulled by two water buffalo heading off through the waters of a tracked up rice paddy. Many people were out moving big bags of rice from vehicle to larger vehicle.
Back on the bus to Saigon for the last time of my trip, I thought about how I'd be traveling in a few days in my own car with my GPS guiding my way, 80mph across the open highways of western America. That style of travel is so different from the way people travel in Vietnam and I was really grateful for the American ways that I had taken for granted. The automobile and the highway truly were and are avenues of freedom and an opportunity that millions of people do not have.
I put on the Samurai Champloo soundtrack and kept thinking about my old familiar ways, the joys that I had given up when I left America. I was really looking forward to getting back. I had a sore throat though and my stomach was still a little upset. Tien was on my arm, visibly upset but not falling apart, just looking up with those worried eyes that she gets when something is not right.
When we arrived at the bus station most of the ground was under about 1 foot of standing water. We once again found a taxi to take us to ye olde Ruby Star where I got a larger room than usual, complete with a bath tub. I got a beer, drew a bath, and relaxed. Then I got online and began pinging a bunch of people in America and planning what I'd do when I touched down. That night I slept deeply.
Wednesday morning we woke up to the sounds of big engines, small engines, and honking. Our larger room came complete with a double window that was partly broken and created a hole where the sounds of Saigon could assault our sleeping bodies. We did have to get a move on though, so it was probably for the good. Tien got a phone call from FedEx and while I was in the shower a courier showed up with some gear from Joby. They asked to use a photo of mine on their page and sent out some gear as a thank you. I had planned to use this while I was in Asia, but here it was arriving hours from my back to America and I now had to pack this unused gear in my bag with all of the gifts. To top it off, the shipment came from Santa Cruz California.
We hurried out for breakfast at a usual spot, then came back to the hotel where I managed to pack most of my things into my backpack. I gave some of the left-over stuff that I wouldn't need to Tien to take back to her house. We checked out and left our bags with the hotel receptionists. We're in pretty good with them since we stay at that hotel so much, and we trust them, so it was a good alternative to carrying our bags around in the mid-day Saigon heat.
We headed out to find a book store. Tien had finished the tiny book we'd bought for her to read and were looking for something significantly more challenging and intellectual. We asked a cyclo and scooter taxi driver if there were any bookstores nearby, but they said not for 2 km and offered to take us there. We declined and found store selling books about 200 feet away. It was basically a media piracy store. We picked up 1984 and a DVD collection of Tom Cruise movies, a strange dose of western culture for Tien to digest before she (hopefully) gets to America in a few months.
We were hot and parched by then so we went to find a coffee shop. We found a really western style cafe with a bunch of backpackers hunched over laptops and pay terminals. We sat at the cafe and talked for a while, tried to figure out what to do with an empty day in Saigon. I couldn't think of much except shopping but Tien didn't want clothes or jewelry or shoes or any of that stuff. Instead we went to the store where I bought my LX3 and looked at laptops. They had a decent selection, but we weren't really happy with any of them. The Acer netbook was nice feeling but I didn't trust its quality. Plus, I had forgotten my wallet back at the hotel so we couldn't buy it outright anyway.
We ended up grabbing our bags and having a taxi take us to a little street where there were numerous computer shops. We looked around a bit and although I was able to find an Asus netbook, it was more than I had on me. We settled on a Benq Joybook. Interestingly, the one we bought did not come with Windows but ran a derivative of Fedora 8 called Linpus. At first I was thinking this would be bad, but on second thought I decided it could be good. Desktop linux is pretty usable now, and it would do pretty much everything Tien needed, so I decided to take a slight risk and get it. Worst case we could load Windows on it later...
There was a cafe nearby called Jazz Cafe where we went to camp out for a few hours, play with her new laptop and kill some time. They weren't playing Jazz. The laptop was pretty good, a standard current netbook with a decent build, light weight and slightly hot. The screen was nice too. Unfortunately the OS was ... lacking. I decided that rather than trust some one-off distro of Linux I'd load it up with Ubuntu. That is something I'm familiar with and could help her with if there were problems. On top of that, i just happened to have a USB key that had a bootable Ubuntu 9.04 install on it. How geeky is that? I was worried that I'd mess something up and not have time to fix it, but 30 minutes later we were up and running on Ubuntu with no hiccups.
While the OS was installing it finally hit me that I wasn't going to be with Tien much longer. I explained to her that I have this third person mode that I go into that detaches me from the emotional effects of the things I need to do and that I wasn't just unaffected by the pending geographical separation and time apart. I was worried she'd think I didn't care, which I did, but I've found in my life that worrying about inevitabilities is wasteful, even if it seems insincere.
Eventually it was time to go, so we found a taxi to take us to the airport. There was a TV screen inside the taxi that was playing a video of people rollerblading down the Great Wall of China. It then turned to something about Michael Jackson and showed a video morph of what MJ looked like from when he was young to when he died. I realized that the King of Pop died a long time ago and all that remained was a plastic ghost. I wonder if MJ's body has even begun decomposing yet or if it's still as fresh as a McDonalds french fry.
At the airport Tien's mom and sister Thule met us. I went to check in for my flight and when I got to the checkin area it looked like everybody was moving to another country. Everybody in the whole line had at least 3 suitcases stacked on carts. Some had several boxes. I couldn't believe all of the luggage this entire group of people had, and they weren't even together. Luckily a woman motioned me over to some premium super-duper megastar member high speed lane that I did not deserve to be in and I checked in for my flight in about 2 minutes.
Tien's family and I found a little cafe area to sit at while we waited for the last hour before my flight. Tien translated a few things but mostly we just enjoyed each other's company. Tien and I were trying magic tricks with a Malaysia .20 piece and I made a syphon out of two bendy straws to mix Tien's apple juice with my Sprite. I went to use the bathroom and there were two girls in there, a mother and an attendant. At first I wondered if I was in the right bathroom, and I was. I thought about San Francisco and about an Erasure concert I went to, sometimes there just is no gender separation in the bathroom. Another odd thing about this bathroom was that one wall was a huge window that looked out into the parking area, so all of those scooter parking folks could watch you urinate. This was no different from watching men urinate on the side of the road everywhere else in Vietnam, so that too wasn't really uncomfortable. On the way I went to use the hand drier but decided against it when I saw that people had used it for an ash tray.
Before long it was time to leave Tien and her family. I had already said goodbye to Tien's mom and sister a few times, so this was just another goodbye for them, but Tien was in a trance. I thought at first she was trying to translate some stuff in her mind, but realized that she was just overwhelmed with emotion. I thought she fell apart when I embraced her, but she kept herself together. It was only after she was out of sight that I finally felt the effects of realization that I wouldn't see her for a long time. Passport control went quickly, there was a short wait at the gate, and soon I was sound asleep in my seat flying away from Vietnam.
• • • • •
2009.07.27 by Daniel
Plans always change, next stop San Francisco
Like many times before, yesterday we had our plans and then they were changed on us. At breakfast this morning Tien told me that she talked to her school and had learned that she had employment obligations that required her to stay in Vietnam and work through September. With that finality, I've decided the best next step is for me to quit resisting everything that is directing me to go back to America on my planned travel date, and so I will fly back to America tomorrow night and arrive in San Francisco before noon on Thursday.
• • • • •
2009.07.27 by Daniel
The return from Malaysia
Tien had expressed how happy she was to be back in her home country when we were walking through the airport, and it showed once we got in the taxi. She smiled a lot and was chatting up a storm with the taxi driver. I began to sink back into the mindset of not even needing to pay attention to verbal communication because nobody spoke to me in a language I knew except for words that were superfluous when paired with body language.
I had guessed that Malaysia would be hotter than Vietnam, but I had been wrong.
As we drove and looked around at the familiar scenes of Vietnam Tien said "my country is very poor." This is something I already knew, but it was a distinct detail now that she had something to contrast it against.
We had the taxi driver drop us off at the usual hotel, the Ruby Star, and we were given the same exact room we had last time, complete with intermittently malfunctioning air conditioner and partially clogged drain. Still it was nice to have AC at all, and at least we wouldn't get mixed up. We rested for a bit. I caught up on some online stuff and found that I'd lost all of my photos from a day in Cambodia, most importantly the photos of S21. This was disappointing if only because I wanted to use one of them to illustrate a (d)NOT article written by Robert Taylor.
Tien and I headed out to have dinner and shop at a famous market in Saigon. Over dinner I asked her to tell me a story and she told me her life story, which began "I was born into a poor and happy family." It's true, I think I've described her family that way to people before. We talked about the state of Vietnamese people and what Vietnam needs to progress. We'd touched on many things related to this, such as the communist government. It's an interesting subject to me, especially considering the increase of western influence that is riding in on a technological wave.
Tien made me take about 5 pills after I finished dinner. She'd gone to a pharmacy earlier and they had given her a cocktail remedy for my ongoing digestive problems. We then went to the market which was a one story building with many many vendors inside of it and was much the same as the Chinatown market in KL. We bought perfumes as we had wanted to do in KL and then headed back to the hotel.
On Saturday we went to have breakfast at a restaurant we'd eaten at once before but had since been remodeled. I had a hard time eating because I felt really weird in a way that I could not describe. It was a feeling I'd never experienced before but was somewhat like being hung over. I guessed it was a lack of hydration due to the medicine I'd consumed at dinner the night before. We went back to the hotel and I drank a ton of water and went back to sleep. When I woke up 90 minutes later I felt significantly better. It was time to check out, but it was not time to catch our bus, so we sat at a coffee shop around the corner and I downloaded Worms for the iPhone.
A taxi came and picked us up at the coffee shop and dropped us off at the bus station where we sat for another 30 minutes inside a small room where people were having loud conversations and going in and out really quickly. I tried to sleep since I was still feeling a little ill, but could not. Soon enough our bus arrived and we boarded in the far back corner. The bus took off and soon after departing turned down a very bumpy dirt road that we'd never taken before. Tien has motion sickness problems and she didn't have any medicine to take and thus quickly became uncomfortable. I guessed that the detour was to avoid a huge traffic jam just outside of town, but it seemed that many people were taking this detour and it ended up being somewhat jammed itself. Tien asked me to put on some jazz for us to listen to. We got through the bumpy dirt roads alright and once we were back on the paved road the ride seemed smoother than I remember it being on other trips. It was so smooth that we both dozed off and went to sleep for a while. When we woke up we played Worms for a long time, and soon we were in Long Xuyen with just a few more minutes until we were dropped off right outside her house.
With heavy backpacks, gifts in our hands and not much traffic out on that Saturday night, we walked into the house and into warm greetings. It was a happy time as we sat around inside exchanging gifts, showing photos and sharing stories. Tien's family got me a pair of sandals while I was gone, and some beer and wine which was a nice gesture since none of them drink. I drank a beer while we all talked and had food. Then, glorious sleep.
Sunday morning Tien and I went and had breakfast at the market. Now that we were back home it was a good time to talk about where we were, how we felt about traveling and our future, and level with each other about things we'd been keeping aside for the duration of our trip. We had a good personal talk and were both happy at the end of it.
We went back to the house and I opened up a package that had arrived for me. It was a replacement Geomet'r GPS for my Nikon. It looked like it might have the same manufacturing defect that my previous one did, but at least I had it. I tested it and it did work, but I'm still wary of the device and don't recommend it as a reliable geotagging solution. Not only that, it is not flexible as it cannot be used with the LX3, whereas a GPS data logger would work with any camera along with something like GPS Photo Linker. I am definitely going to go that route next time...
We spent the rest of the day being lazy and hanging out at home. I took a long nap, longer than I'd planned. It was nearly sunset when I woke up. Tien and I went out to cruise the village and I took a bunch of video to show people back home what it's like. As a photographer one of the things that frustrates me is that you honestly can't always capture the scene with still images, even as much as you want to, so it's nice to have some simple video to fall back on.
Monday morning we meant to get an early start but did not. We were too late for breakfast so we headed to Long Xuyen and had lunch at our usual internet cafe. Looking at the calendar I realized I was supposed to fly back to the USA in just over 48 hours. We talked about our options for the time between now and when she gets the fiancé visa approved and I decided to not fly back to America but instead stay in Asia. I thought that it would be more important for us to stay together during this time than be apart for however long it's going to take. I'm still really angry at US immigration and I think it's complete bullshit that I have to stay out of the country if I want to be with my fiancé.
It rained hard, then softly, and we left the coffee shop and went to a book store. We found an english book, Sherlock Holmes - Silver Blaze, for Tien to read to me to help her with her spoken language and pronunciation skills. These are the two hardest things for her to have practiced while learning english in Vietnam.
We left the book store and cruised around the city some more just trying to find something to do and found our way to The Panda Cafe which is on the 5th floor roof of a large electronics store and looks down on a large round-a-bout. I had seen this place from the ground and wanted to check it out, but it was before sunset and was probably the wrong time to see it in its proper context. It was mostly dead. It looked cool though.
There were matches in the bathroom so you could smoke; Vietnam is still macho like that.
We had two small expensive drinks and then left. I wanted to get a copy of Wall-E to watch with Tien's family, so we went to a media store where they sold knock-off music and videos. I couldn't find the movie because all of their books were completely disorganized. Chinese movies were stuffed in with Japanese and American, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to what books the movies were placed in. I thought it was odd that I couldn't even find a pirated copy of a movie to pay for.
On the way home Tien pulled off to the side of the road where two people were selling crabs from a basket. Tien asked for something and the woman began pulling crabs out of the basket and dropping them in a plastic bucket where the man made sure they did not jump out and crawl away like I'd seen at another crab vendor a few blocks back. After putting about 10 crabs into the bucket they put a bag over the top, flipped it over and tied the bag off, sealing the crabs inside. I thought that a plastic shopping bag was not adequate protection for 10 crabs, but they double bagged it so I couldn't complain. It ended up being OK though and we were not maimed by the crustaceans.
That night Tien read half of Silver Blaze to me while I dozed on the couch, swatting mosquitoes and helping her correctly pronounce some new words.
• • • • •
2009.07.26 by Daniel
Malaysia, Part 2
Wednesday I woke up to hurricane winds and our hotel shaking. I moved the love seat in off the patio expecting to have torrential rains hitting soon, then I went back to sleep. When I woke up 3 hours later everything was calm. I guess that's just how night weather is in Malaysia.
Sometimes when I dream it is like a movie with actors and character development, a climax and an ending. Some times the credits roll. This night I had a dream in that style about a big heist, but not a bank heist. It was something about ripping off a big corporation. I remember less of the plot from this dream than probably any other dream I've had like this, but I do remember the ending where about 4 of us survived an ambush. The whole dream was narrated by Morgan Freeman.
Tien and I were awake in time for breakfast this morning so we went downstairs and had a surprisingly good meal. We went back upstairs and relaxed for a bit and tried to figure out if we should leave, and then after a big pillow fight we decided to pack up. We checked out and caught a Mercedes Benz taxi back to the bus station. We got on the bus to Seremban, the city where we had to transfer to a train that would take us back to Kuala Lumpur. We turned on some music and zoned out and nearly missed the station. Luckily I happened to see the walkway we'd taken a few days earlier and recognized it in time to get off at the exactly right stop.
While we were waiting at the train station I saw a scale and decided to weigh myself and my backpack. I weighed 97 kg with a bunch of stuff in my pockets, and my backpack was 16 kg. I have to say I'm pretty happy with my backpack, especially since it holds 35 lbs of gear comfortably.
We boarded our train and headed off. I was staring out the window watching forests of palm trees pass by when I was struck with a craving for Mexican food. Then I thought about Puerto Alegre and how lovely their guacamole is with a margarita. There was no chance to have anything like that here though, so I let the thought go...
We checked back into the Mandarin Pacific in KL and had a rest, then headed out to find the Petronas Twin Towers. On our way down to the Pasar Seni station I smelled cloves in the air and realized that it wasn't the first time I had smelled them in Malaysia. I guess people here love cloves, and I can't blame them.
Four stops down the line we got off at a subway stop called KLCC and walked up a few flights of stairs. Walking up the steps from a subway into a new city is always an exciting thing and I recalled my first time walking up to Stockton and Market in San Francisco. I wasn't sure what to expect here in KL, but what I did see when we walked out was a huge ƒ building. I wasn't sure what it was but I began photographing it, and as we strafed it I realized that it was in fact one of the two Petronas Towers.
The Petronas Towers were enormous and awesome. I'd never seen such at glorious building before. They were shiny and clean and all of the spaces surrounding them were huge. Huge entryways, huge fountain, huge driveways. Tien and I spent a long while photographing them from near and far, and then went inside to take more photos. Inside on the bottom levels is a four or five story mall. Outside in the back is a large patio with an impressive fountain and an island. We took many many photos and some videos. TIen had never been inside of a shopping mall before and had never seen skyscrapers aside from those in Saigon, which aren't really skyscrapers so much as tall buildings.
After we got tired from awe at the towers we were hungry, and since mall food tends to suck I resisted the urge to let Tien try Pizza Hut for the first time and we walked a block away and found a better, cheaper restaurant than what would've been available at the KLCC mall. I was beginning to feel a little ill in my digestive system, but that didn't stop me from enjoying two beers and a delicious plate of spaghetti with chicken. Tien got some sort of delicious chicken and rice dish and honey lemonade. We sat and enjoyed our food as it got dark, then returned to the Petronas towers to take some photos of it at night. They are much more impressive at night because of the way they are lit up. Aside from the unique Menara Kuala Lumpur Tower, the rest of the skyline wasn't even remarkable when compared to these towers.
We were really tired by this point so we got on the train and managed to stay awake. Between the train station and the hotel I began thinking about an old friend I used to work with named Ron Abitbol. Sometimes we had to travel for work to the same places, but we did t work together all that long. Ron lived out of his car about half of the time, and sometimes he'd live in his boat or in an actual dwelling of some sort. He was a unique character, his own man. Some people thought he was weird, and I guess he was. He did his own thing pretty much all the time. Before I had met him he had gone to Mexico for a long time and worked on a boat. He ended up marrying a Mexican girl and bringing her back to America. He would wander all over. I felt like I might be a Ron.
That night I slept unusually poor. The sickness had set in and kept me up frequently. Even so, we ended up sleeping in late and missing breakfast on Thursday morning.
We decided to go to the Batu Caves, a place I'd wanted to see since I saw taka's photos of it. As we were getting ready a screw fell loose on my glasses like it had back at Angkor wat. We wandered around looking for a micro screwdriver and found an optics shop where a girl tightened the loose screw for me.
A block later we found a small temple and were invited inside. We went in and as I was taking photos I noticed that the battery on my camera was nearly dead. We went back to the hotel and ended up staying there and not going to the caves at all because I felt so ill. Tien went to find some medicine and food. I had told her to get some dried fruit. She returned with medicine, tea and junkfood which she said was the closest thing she could find to fried food. She did have some multigrain crackers though and that was nice.
We napped the afternoon away and when I woke up I was antsy and feeling a little better, but rather than the batu caves we went to Menara KL looking for a geocache.
Two train stops up we began what was a decent walk to the top of a hill. As we got near the cache location a group of monkeys came running up. We took photos of them and watched them play and preen. When a menara security guard finally left we found the cache and dropped off a travel bug I'd found in SF. This was Tiens first geocache.
Since we were at menara we decided to go up into the tower. It was nearly sunset and the views were gorgeous. It really helped me see the space of the city, which was larger than the maps had led me to think.
There were many Islamic families in the tower and many of the women were dressed head to toe in black with just eyes and hands showing. One of them was having her photo taken, which I thought was funny since you couldn't see almost any of her. It was like taking a portrait of somebody wearing a gorilla suit, it could be anybody. I thought about that custom and the more I thought about it I became slightly offended at it. I couldn't put my reason into words but I was definitely offended and that was strange since I don't usually get offended by people's lifestyles.
We went back down the 1 minute elevator ride, me feeling slightly ill on the way, and at the bottom was a vendor playing with a really neat crazy remote controlled car. I ended up buying it for tiens nieces.
We took a shuttle down the hill to the street. The radio was playing a local Malaysian radio station with pop hits in English. One thing I like about Malaysia is that almost everybody speaks English. On top of that, many of the Malay words are misspellings of english words. For example, restoran, motorsikal, ekspress, monorel, and bas.
I had a hard time staying awake on the train home because I hadn't eaten a proper meal in a day and was extremely dehydrated due to my ongoing gastrointestinal problems. There was a sign on the train that said "Three seats are reserved for senior citizens, disabled and pregnant ladies. Aren't we courteous?"
Back at the hotel I noticed the the battery in my LX3 was dead so I plugged it in with a funky 3 prong plug. Back in Vietnam I'd looked at that plug and had nearly thrown it away since my American plugs had been working great everywhere. In malaysia though all power plugs were these and I'd used that cable to charge my Nikon and my laptop.
I was starving by this point so we went for food. I very irritably dragged Tien Through the market and settled on chicken fried rice with sprite, which was very satisfying. We then went to look for some gifts for her family at the market but couldn't find anything that really stood out and decided to get some perfume once we were back in Saigon since we probably couldn't bring it on the plane. We headed back to the hotel and packed for our early departure the next day. I always take a long time to pack so I gave Tien On the Road and had her read aloud to me while I packed.
We got to sleep later than I had hoped and 6am came too soon. We hit the train to sentral and arrived at nearly 7, which was a bit later than planned. Even at that time Starbucks was not open and we weren't going to eat McDonalds so we just got on the KLIA Ekspres and went to the airport with the intention of getting breakfast there. We ended up arriving much later than I had planned and I was a little worried that the lines through passport control would be as long as last time we were here, but the whole process of getting into the international terminal was actually very easy. This ease was the last bit of joy I experienced in Malaysia.
There were pretty much no breakfast places in the airport. I say this from the perspective beyond passport control. After making one of my innumerable uncomfortable bathroom breaks that were the ongoing result of my illness, we went to a cafe and got coffees and a vanilla muffin, which would've made a great breakfast if we had time to eat it. Instead we went down the travellators, that's what they call the moving walkways, and got to our gate. At the gate there were unsurprisingly no places to sit, and surprisingly another xray security checkpoint. I put our coffee, the muffin, my phone, LX3, ipod and the remote controlled car into a tray and passed it through the metal detectors. On the other side I received my electronic devices soaking wet with coffee that had spilled as it went through the machine along with the spoken notice, although it was not written anywhere, that I was not allowed to bring drinks into the gate waiting area. I had run my coffee through the machine and spilled it all over my new camera, phone and iPod for nothing.
I drank some of my drinks and left the rest there, picked up my soggy electronic devices and my muffin and proceeded to the waiting area for our gate, complete with plenty of chairs and absolutely nothing else. This was a place meant for people to wait, yet they could not bring liquids in, and there were no restaurants or even a drinking fountain. I sat there dehydrated from my illness and ate my muffin with no liquid to wash it down.
I then boarded a plane and sat there for over 30 minutes with really irritating music that sounded like french music mixed with banghra being played backwards and a screaming brat in the next seat over. Neither Tien or I could understand a single word spoken by the man who offered us a meal on the plane and we ended up getting a meal that was to me entirely inedible. At least I got a few tablespoons of Sprite.
Malaysian Airlines had bragged about being one of the few five star airlines in the world, but judging from their airport and their air service, I honestly wouldn't choose them if I am ever given a choice again, and I'll avoid KLIA or at least plan ahead if I have to go there.
I managed to find some calm by listening to Chicane very loudly and closing my eyes, but as we landed that terrible music came back on and that brat started screaming louder and I felt a little like I was on an airplane straight to hell. We were in Saigon though, so at least that was good.
We landed. I exchanged my ringgits and some Lao money that I still had into dong, slew a few taxi touts and found a good driver to take us to the familiar District 1, Pham Ngu Lao, and the Ruby Star.
The Petronas Towers were enormous and awesome. I'd never seen such at glorious building before. They were shiny and clean and all of the spaces surrounding them were huge. Huge entryways, huge fountain, huge driveways. Tien and I spent a long while photographing them from near and far, and then went inside to take more photos. Inside on the bottom levels is a four or five story mall. Outside in the back is a large patio with an impressive fountain and an island. We took many many photos and some videos. TIen had never been inside of a shopping mall before and had never seen skyscrapers aside from those in Saigon, which aren't really skyscrapers so much as tall buildings.
After we got tired from awe at the towers we were hungry, and since mall food tends to suck I resisted the urge to let Tien try Pizza Hut for the first time and we walked a block away and found a better, cheaper restaurant than what would've been available at the KLCC mall. I was beginning to feel a little ill in my digestive system, but that didn't stop me from enjoying two beers and a delicious plate of spaghetti with chicken. Tien got some sort of delicious chicken and rice dish and honey lemonade. We sat and enjoyed our food as it got dark, then returned to the Petronas towers to take some photos of it at night. They are much more impressive at night because of the way they are lit up. Aside from the unique Menara Kuala Lumpur Tower, the rest of the skyline wasn't even remarkable when compared to these towers.
We were really tired by this point so we got on the train and managed to stay awake. Between the train station and the hotel I began thinking about an old friend I used to work with named Ron Abitbol. Sometimes we had to travel for work to the same places, but we did t work together all that long. Ron lived out of his car about half of the time, and sometimes he'd live in his boat or in an actual dwelling of some sort. He was a unique character, his own man. Some people thought he was weird, and I guess he was. He did his own thing pretty much all the time. Before I had met him he had gone to Mexico for a long time and worked on a boat. He ended up marrying a Mexican girl and bringing her back to America. He would wander all over. I felt like I might be a Ron.
That night I slept unusually poor. The sickness had set in and kept me up frequently. Even so, we ended up sleeping in late and missing breakfast on Thursday morning.
We decided to go to the Batu Caves, a place I'd wanted to see since I saw taka's photos of it. As we were getting ready a screw fell loose on my glasses like it had back at Angkor wat. We wandered around looking for a micro screwdriver and found an optics shop where a girl tightened the loose screw for me.
A block later we found a small temple and were invited inside. We went in and as I was taking photos I noticed that the battery on my camera was nearly dead. We went back to the hotel and ended up staying there and not going to the caves at all because I felt so ill. Tien went to find some medicine and food. I had told her to get some dried fruit. She returned with medicine, tea and junkfood which she said was the closest thing she could find to fried food. She did have some multigrain crackers though and that was nice.
We napped the afternoon away and when I woke up I was antsy and feeling a little better, but rather than the batu caves we went to Menara KL looking for a geocache.
Two train stops up we began what was a decent walk to the top of a hill. As we got near the cache location a group of monkeys came running up. We took photos of them and watched them play and preen. When a menara security guard finally left we found the cache and dropped off a travel bug I'd found in SF. This was Tiens first geocache.
Since we were at menara we decided to go up into the tower. It was nearly sunset and the views were gorgeous. It really helped me see the space of the city, which was larger than the maps had led me to think.
There were many Islamic families in the tower and many of the women were dressed head to toe in black with just eyes and hands showing. One of them was having her photo taken, which I thought was funny since you couldn't see almost any of her. It was like taking a portrait of somebody wearing a gorilla suit, it could be anybody. I thought about that custom and the more I thought about it I became slightly offended at it. I couldn't put my reason into words but I was definitely offended and that was strange since I don't usually get offended by people's lifestyles.
We went back down the 1 minute elevator ride, me feeling slightly ill on the way, and at the bottom was a vendor playing with a really neat crazy remote controlled car. I ended up buying it for tiens nieces.
We took a shuttle down the hill to the street. The radio was playing a local Malaysian radio station with pop hits in English. One thing I like about Malaysia is that almost everybody speaks English. On top of that, many of the Malay words are misspellings of english words. For example, restoran, motorsikal, ekspress, monorel, and bas.
I had a hard time staying awake on the train home because I hadn't eaten a proper meal in a day and was extremely dehydrated due to my ongoing gastrointestinal problems. There was a sign on the train that said "Three seats are reserved for senior citizens, disabled and pregnant ladies. Aren't we courteous?"
Back at the hotel I noticed the the battery in my LX3 was dead so I plugged it in with a funky 3 prong plug. Back in Vietnam I'd looked at that plug and had nearly thrown it away since my American plugs had been working great everywhere. In malaysia though all power plugs were these and I'd used that cable to charge my Nikon and my laptop.
I was starving by this point so we went for food. I very irritably dragged Tien Through the market and settled on chicken fried rice with sprite, which was very satisfying. We then went to look for some gifts for her family at the market but couldn't find anything that really stood out and decided to get some perfume once we were back in Saigon since we probably couldn't bring it on the plane. We headed back to the hotel and packed for our early departure the next day. I always take a long time to pack so I gave Tien On the Road and had her read aloud to me while I packed.
We got to sleep later than I had hoped and 6am came too soon. We hit the train to sentral and arrived at nearly 7, which was a bit later than planned. Even at that time Starbucks was not open and we weren't going to eat McDonalds so we just got on the KLIA Ekspres and went to the airport with the intention of getting breakfast there. We ended up arriving much later than I had planned and I was a little worried that the lines through passport control would be as long as last time we were here, but the whole process of getting into the international terminal was actually very easy. This ease was the last bit of joy I experienced in Malaysia.
There were pretty much no breakfast places in the airport. I say this from the perspective beyond passport control. After making one of my innumerable uncomfortable bathroom breaks that were the ongoing result of my illness, we went to a cafe and got coffees and a vanilla muffin, which would've made a great breakfast if we had time to eat it. Instead we went down the travellators, that's what they call the moving walkways, and got to our gate. At the gate there were unsurprisingly no places to sit, and surprisingly another xray security checkpoint. I put our coffee, the muffin, my phone, LX3, ipod and the remote controlled car into a tray and passed it through the metal detectors. On the other side I received my electronic devices soaking wet with coffee that had spilled as it went through the machine along with the spoken notice, although it was not written anywhere, that I was not allowed to bring drinks into the gate waiting area. I had run my coffee through the machine and spilled it all over my new camera, phone and iPod for nothing.
I drank some of my drinks and left the rest there, picked up my soggy electronic devices and my muffin and proceeded to the waiting area for our gate, complete with plenty of chairs and absolutely nothing else. This was a place meant for people to wait, yet they could not bring liquids in, and there were no restaurants or even a drinking fountain. I sat there dehydrated from my illness and ate my muffin with no liquid to wash it down.
I then boarded a plane and sat there for over 30 minutes with really irritating music that sounded like french music mixed with banghra being played backwards and a screaming brat in the next seat over. Neither Tien or I could understand a single word spoken by the man who offered us a meal on the plane and we ended up getting a meal that was to me entirely inedible. At least I got a few tablespoons of Sprite.
Malaysian Airlines had bragged about being one of the few five star airlines in the world, but judging from their airport and their air service, I honestly wouldn't choose them if I am ever given a choice again, and I'll avoid KLIA or at least plan ahead if I have to go there.
I managed to find some calm by listening to Chicane very loudly and closing my eyes, but as we landed that terrible music came back on and that brat started screaming louder and I felt a little like I was on an airplane straight to hell. We were in Saigon though, so at least that was good.
We landed. I exchanged my ringgits and some Lao money that I still had into dong, slew a few taxi touts and found a good driver to take us to the familiar District 1, Pham Ngu Lao, and the Ruby Star.
• • • • •
2009.07.24 by Daniel
Malaysia, Part 1
Sunday morning we woke up and hurried out for breakfast at our usual spot before checking out of the hotel and catching a taxi to the airport. Tien had rarely been inside an airport before. She had never been on a plane before. She had never left the country before. This was the first of some big firsts for Tien and I was excited to experience them with her.
We waited for our plane at the end of a remote terminal. There mens bathroom had a girl walking around inside cleaning things while men urinated with her right there. I thought this was interesting, and actually I'd seen it before. She pointed me to a toilet that she'd just finished cleaning so I went to it. What else can you do when a woman offers you a clean toilet?
At takeoff I was a little worried that Tien would go into shock like she'd done on a roller coaster at a fun park there in Saigon on the second day I was there. I think I forgot to write about that day, but she basically went into shock for like 15 minutes and I had to carry her off the roller coaster. She did ok though. I took a video of it and will post it on youtube so you all can experience her first airplane takeoff.
The meal on the plane was good, chicken beriani with vegetables on the side, mango juice, wine, chocolates and wafer cookies. Tien always shares her meals with me since she's a pretty small girl, and we shared this meal too. I began to see the benefits of traveling as two, like "I get more food on the airplane." We listened to some music and before we knew it we were on the ground in a foggy Kuala Lumpur. The airport was nice, modern. There was almost nowhere to sit though, and we ended up sitting at a train stop in order to fill out the immigration arrival cards. Then we got forms for H1N1 and there was nowhere to fill them out because about 100 people were needing the same exact thing. Most of us just used the handrail of the broken moving sidewalk. Beyond health screening was passport control where about two hundred people were waiting. I had never seen so many people at passport control. It was interesting people watching though. There were many girls with head coverings, Malaysia is predominantly muslim. The police looked really sharp, great uniforms. There was a cute little chinese american girl doing funny things in the line next to us.
Finally out of the international zone of the airport, we looked for transport. The airport is located some ways away from the actual city of Kuala Lumpur and there was allegedly a train going there. We finally found some signs pointing to an empty area at the far end of the airport. There was literally nobody in sight and it kinda felt like Jacob's Ladder as we proceeded down to the ticket booth and out by the tracks. I had expected to find the train out of service there ended up being a healthy number of people on the train when we got there. It departed soon after we arrived, and it was a very good train. The ride was very smooth, the speed was very quick, the seats were comfortable. A man we were sitting with said that the train system, Kuala Lumpur International Transit Express, was privately owned and used to go direct to downtown, but it wasn't making money that way so it started putting in more stops along the way and thus took longer. He told us some more about KL, Malaysia and Singapore. He was a nice and had a beard and a turban. He was a business man returning from a trip to Singapore.
We got off the KLIA Express at KL Sentral Station, which is a huge transit intersection. About 5 train systems come together there and there is also a small airport. We were pretty tired from traveling so we took a rest at Starbucks and got coffee. This was the first time Tien had ever had Starbucks, she didn't even know what it was. I explained how it was a huge corporate entity that pushed smaller, local coffee shops out of businesses in cities where the government didn't intervene. I then went on a short tirade about how huge corporate entities are bad for locals and how they screw third world countries like Vietnam out of their human rights like healthcare because the suits at the top don't care a single bit about the individual who is actually doing the work down at the bottom of the pyramid. Then we got up to catch a train.
We were a little confused by the whole five transit systems thing at first, but we got some insight by following another pack packer couple who I overheard talking about the same stop we were looking for. When we found the ticketing area for the train we needed, all but two of the ticketing systems were broken. I tried one but it wouldn't take actual money so I went to the line for the other one. Then both of them broke right in front of us as people used them. We bought tickets from a person and then went to the turn style where all but two of them were broken. This was the most broken train station I'd ever used. The train was nice though, and when we left the station there as a great view of the city. We got off one stop down in Chinatown.
As our train was pulling up I was checking out all of the sights. In the distance we could see the Petronas Twin Towers that are in every photograph of Kuala Lumpur, which we also had seen on the KLIA Express on the way in. I saw a tall hotel called the Mandarin Pacific and thought it would be great to stay there because we could see out over the city, so we went and got a room there. After a short rest we went out and got some refreshments including a bottle of cabernet. We went back to the hotel and I enjoyed a glass of wine while taking a bath. I bathe in every hotel that has a tub because you never know when you'll find another one since they're so scarce.
Walking outside we found a McDonalds which was directly across the street from our hotel. I joked with Tien about eating there but she didn't really get the joke because she had no idea what McDonalds was. I told her that we'd eat there some day, but not tonight. Instead we turned left to see what was that way and ended up in the center of the Chinatown market which happened to be a block away from our hotel. The streets were closed off and there were market stands set up selling shoes, bags, shirts, lighters, binoculars, fruit, dvds, scarves, belts, watches, perfume, bathing suits, etc. etc.. I found a stiletto knife with a lighter in the handle and nearly bought it, but I figured I couldn't take it on the plane home so I decided against it.
I asked Tien what she thought of the market and she said it was strange that people were talking in languages that she didn't understand. I guess we all think that the first time we are in that situation, but it had been so long for me I had forgotten that it had happened to me when I first went to Sunnyvale to work for the Chinese.
We found some good smelling perfumes and bartered the price a little until I realized I might not have enough money to pay for the perfume and pay for dinner, so we just left and went to have dinner. It was good dinner, fried rice with chicken that was pretty flavorful. No doubt fresh meat. We had fresh lychee and mango juice too. We walked around a bit more, saw the rest of the market and some of the surrounding area and returned to our hotel.
Monday morning we had breakfast at the hotel, which was so so. They had strawberry jelly to put on toast so that made me happy, but cold eggs and spring rolls aren't exactly part of the breakfast of champions. The coffee was bleh, but hey, it was coffee so I couldn't complain. We headed out to find a travel agency to help us plan our getaway to a beach but amazingly we couldn't find a single one. Usually in the backpacker districts they're everywhere, but here there were absolutely zero to be found. Instead we looked in the Lonely Planet guide that I had and picked out Port Dickson on the map and decided to head there if we couldn't find a travel agent anywhere else.
We packed up, got on the train and headed back to Sentral Station. On the way up to the station Tien turned to me and commented about how she probably looked much more confident today, which she did. I recalled that buzz of riding public transit for the first time, experiencing all the new things like tickets, turn-styles, route planning and waiting on train platforms.
Back in Sentral we were a little confused on how to get to Port Dickson. The map showed a train going all the way there, but people there said that was not so. On top of that we weren't sure which train to take since five different transit systems come together there. In the end we figured out that we had to take a train to a city called Seremban, then take a bus to Port Dickson, and so we did.
Islam is the official religion in Malaysia and it certainly shows. There are girls everywhere with head coverings on, and they sell head coverings in markets just like baseball caps and shoes. On the train there was a girl with a head covering on and a hand bag that said "bikini bottom", which I thought was pretty ironic. I thought about how Islamic girls probably wear head coverings while they swim and figured that the Saudi Arabian Girls Swim Team would perform very poorly. There was another older woman on the train with a head covering and hair several inches long coming out of a mole on her neck. I don't know why, but a lot of Asian people let the hair in their moles grow out inches while cutting the rest of the hair on their face. It doesn't make sense to me, and is kinda gross.
To kill time I decided to play with Cydia on my phone, even though I didn't have internet access. This is when I recalled how poor a lot of OSS software is. Cydia is absolute crap without an internet connection, and honestly is pretty poor as a package manager in general, but not even networking software should crash in the absence of a network connection.
The train dropped us off a ways from the bus station and we had to walk down a long covered pathway to get to the bus station. It took me a while to figure out the bus station, mainly because I associated the numbered bus parking spots with ticketing windows of the same number, but there ended up being no correlation there. You merely had to go stand by the bus stop labeled with the destination you wanted to go to, get on the bus and pay for your ticket once you were onboard. Simple. While I was figuring this out we were walking around and Tien bumped into some Vietnamese people and was really excited to see her countrymen while out and about in the world. It was remarkable too because even when I was in Vietnam traveling the English speaking Vietnamese people had said that not many Vietnamese people travel outside of Vietnam.
We boarded the bus with a huge crowd and were almost the last ones on, so I ended up having to stand at the front of the bus with one foot in the stairwell and sit on the dashboard while Tien stood next to me. Our bus headed off through the city and off across the countryside through hills and winding roads on smooth paved roads. We passed a dead cow at 80kmh. We passed land that had "private property" signs, the first I'd seen in Asia. 40 minutes later we were standing in a town we knew nothing about, so we started walking around. 10 minutes later we realized that we'd need help so we went to look for a map but could not find one. We ended up talking to a taxi driver who drove us south down the coastal road and pointed out hotels. We picked one that was tall and was right on a beach. It was more of a resort hotel than I was looking for, but it was nice and we wanted to be on the beach, and that we were. Our room was large and had a patio looking straight down onto the beach itself, which was quiet and small. Only a few people were on it and the waves were gentle.
We were hungry so we went out to find some food. There was a market across the street from our hotel so we headed that direction. At the main street we stopped and I checked traffic to my left to make sure it was clear, but to my right was a curve in the road that I couldn't see around. I kept my eye on it as we walked into the first lane, but right as we did some maniac came flying around the curve on the wrong side of the road and full speed. Then I realized it wasn't that he was on the wrong side of the road but that people in Malaysia drive on the left hand side and I'd checked the road wrong. We ended up just running across and did not get hit. This was fruitless though because some of the restaurants were closing down and the ones that were still open only had gross food. I wanted to find a restaurant with pictures on the menu so I could just point and say "I want that." I recalled a scene from Lost in Translation where they are at the shabu shabu restaurant and Bill Murray orders in just such a fashion.
We went back to the restaurant at our hotel and looked their menu over. There was mostly chicken and I figured that between the Muslims and the Hindus there wouldn't be much beef or pork in this country. Tien and I talked over dinner about traveling and mixed culture, how things are so different in different parts of the world.
After dinner we went up to our patio and drank some fruit juice and wine and watched the sun set. After it was dark we went swimming in the ocean. The water was as warm as a pool, the waves were gentle, and there was nobody else around. It was really really nice, like the whole ocean was our own pool. I taught Tien some more about swimming and she caught on well, but got cold and worn out quickly so we went back inside after 20 minutes or so.
Tuesday I woke up to thunder rolling in from the ocean from lighting that was going on way out in the Strait of Malacca. I got up and brought the love seat in off the patio thinking that there could be huge rains, then went back to sleep. When I woke up it was not raining, but looked like it had been and would be again very soon. And it did. We caught a taxi to a bank back in town and it was raining when we got out of the car. I withdrew some money and then realized that I had no idea where to go or what to do.
Tien and I began walking through the gentle rain down the side of a main street until we saw the word "restoran" and assumed it was a restaurant. It was, but it wasn't appetizing so we walked around some more and found a place with decent breakfast even though it was after noon. We ate and drank coffee, then walked some more. We found a small temple with huge doors that had just shut when we got to them and the tiny bells all over it were still shaking. It looked like a Hindu temple to me, but I could be wrong.
We bought some drinks from a local market where a friendly man was asking all sorts of questions like "Is she your wife? Where'd you get her?" We left the shop and walked out towards the street and I wondered how on earth we could get ahold of a taxi in a place that looked like it was nowhere special, but just as I was thinking this a taxi pulled right up in front of us and we jumped in.
Back at the hotel we rested for a while and waited for the sun to come out a bit more, and once it began to warm up and dry out we went for a walk down the beach. There was a park at the north end of our beach. While we had been in the taxi I'd seen something that looked like a pier and I wanted to check it out, but when we got there it was closed for construction. We decided to swing on the swing set instead. Tien had never been on a playground swing before and she loved it.
We left there and found a calm beach with white sand near the pier thing which ended up being a bridge to what was once an island but was now a peninsula. We walked out onto it and photographed the bridge, then continued into a forested area with weird trees that grew up out of the ground and had branches that grew back into the ground. Some of the branches grew up from below the ground in an arc and then went back to the ground so that they were only an arch of wood coming out of the sand. It was very strange and interesting and I'd never seen anything like it before. I found a few little statues in the forest and some other neat areas, but it wasn't exactly a beautiful place so we didn't stay long. Instead we went back home and resumed being lazy.
At sunset we went for a swim. There were some men on boats that were pulling these big colorful blow-up rocket looking water toys and were charging for rides on them. We didn't have any money since you can't exactly bring money swimming and you wouldn't want to leave it on the beach. I wondered how they made any money at all, even though it did look fun. Tien and I swam for a long time and played in the waves until after the sun had set and it began to get cold.
The hotel had a sign that said that there was no wet attire allowed beyond the edge of the lobby and especially not in the elevator since it could cause a short circuit in the electricity. I wondered what kind of beach resort would have such ridiculous rules. They didn't even provide a locker room to change, so we just ignored the rule and went in while we were still wet. The hotel had other silly rules too, like "no outside food or drink" even though the room had a refrigerator in it and there was no grocery store in the hotel itself. I realized that this was a place where rules were made to not be followed.
Finally out of the international zone of the airport, we looked for transport. The airport is located some ways away from the actual city of Kuala Lumpur and there was allegedly a train going there. We finally found some signs pointing to an empty area at the far end of the airport. There was literally nobody in sight and it kinda felt like Jacob's Ladder as we proceeded down to the ticket booth and out by the tracks. I had expected to find the train out of service there ended up being a healthy number of people on the train when we got there. It departed soon after we arrived, and it was a very good train. The ride was very smooth, the speed was very quick, the seats were comfortable. A man we were sitting with said that the train system, Kuala Lumpur International Transit Express, was privately owned and used to go direct to downtown, but it wasn't making money that way so it started putting in more stops along the way and thus took longer. He told us some more about KL, Malaysia and Singapore. He was a nice and had a beard and a turban. He was a business man returning from a trip to Singapore.
We got off the KLIA Express at KL Sentral Station, which is a huge transit intersection. About 5 train systems come together there and there is also a small airport. We were pretty tired from traveling so we took a rest at Starbucks and got coffee. This was the first time Tien had ever had Starbucks, she didn't even know what it was. I explained how it was a huge corporate entity that pushed smaller, local coffee shops out of businesses in cities where the government didn't intervene. I then went on a short tirade about how huge corporate entities are bad for locals and how they screw third world countries like Vietnam out of their human rights like healthcare because the suits at the top don't care a single bit about the individual who is actually doing the work down at the bottom of the pyramid. Then we got up to catch a train.
We were a little confused by the whole five transit systems thing at first, but we got some insight by following another pack packer couple who I overheard talking about the same stop we were looking for. When we found the ticketing area for the train we needed, all but two of the ticketing systems were broken. I tried one but it wouldn't take actual money so I went to the line for the other one. Then both of them broke right in front of us as people used them. We bought tickets from a person and then went to the turn style where all but two of them were broken. This was the most broken train station I'd ever used. The train was nice though, and when we left the station there as a great view of the city. We got off one stop down in Chinatown.
As our train was pulling up I was checking out all of the sights. In the distance we could see the Petronas Twin Towers that are in every photograph of Kuala Lumpur, which we also had seen on the KLIA Express on the way in. I saw a tall hotel called the Mandarin Pacific and thought it would be great to stay there because we could see out over the city, so we went and got a room there. After a short rest we went out and got some refreshments including a bottle of cabernet. We went back to the hotel and I enjoyed a glass of wine while taking a bath. I bathe in every hotel that has a tub because you never know when you'll find another one since they're so scarce.
Walking outside we found a McDonalds which was directly across the street from our hotel. I joked with Tien about eating there but she didn't really get the joke because she had no idea what McDonalds was. I told her that we'd eat there some day, but not tonight. Instead we turned left to see what was that way and ended up in the center of the Chinatown market which happened to be a block away from our hotel. The streets were closed off and there were market stands set up selling shoes, bags, shirts, lighters, binoculars, fruit, dvds, scarves, belts, watches, perfume, bathing suits, etc. etc.. I found a stiletto knife with a lighter in the handle and nearly bought it, but I figured I couldn't take it on the plane home so I decided against it.
I asked Tien what she thought of the market and she said it was strange that people were talking in languages that she didn't understand. I guess we all think that the first time we are in that situation, but it had been so long for me I had forgotten that it had happened to me when I first went to Sunnyvale to work for the Chinese.
We found some good smelling perfumes and bartered the price a little until I realized I might not have enough money to pay for the perfume and pay for dinner, so we just left and went to have dinner. It was good dinner, fried rice with chicken that was pretty flavorful. No doubt fresh meat. We had fresh lychee and mango juice too. We walked around a bit more, saw the rest of the market and some of the surrounding area and returned to our hotel.
Monday morning we had breakfast at the hotel, which was so so. They had strawberry jelly to put on toast so that made me happy, but cold eggs and spring rolls aren't exactly part of the breakfast of champions. The coffee was bleh, but hey, it was coffee so I couldn't complain. We headed out to find a travel agency to help us plan our getaway to a beach but amazingly we couldn't find a single one. Usually in the backpacker districts they're everywhere, but here there were absolutely zero to be found. Instead we looked in the Lonely Planet guide that I had and picked out Port Dickson on the map and decided to head there if we couldn't find a travel agent anywhere else.
We packed up, got on the train and headed back to Sentral Station. On the way up to the station Tien turned to me and commented about how she probably looked much more confident today, which she did. I recalled that buzz of riding public transit for the first time, experiencing all the new things like tickets, turn-styles, route planning and waiting on train platforms.
Back in Sentral we were a little confused on how to get to Port Dickson. The map showed a train going all the way there, but people there said that was not so. On top of that we weren't sure which train to take since five different transit systems come together there. In the end we figured out that we had to take a train to a city called Seremban, then take a bus to Port Dickson, and so we did.
Islam is the official religion in Malaysia and it certainly shows. There are girls everywhere with head coverings on, and they sell head coverings in markets just like baseball caps and shoes. On the train there was a girl with a head covering on and a hand bag that said "bikini bottom", which I thought was pretty ironic. I thought about how Islamic girls probably wear head coverings while they swim and figured that the Saudi Arabian Girls Swim Team would perform very poorly. There was another older woman on the train with a head covering and hair several inches long coming out of a mole on her neck. I don't know why, but a lot of Asian people let the hair in their moles grow out inches while cutting the rest of the hair on their face. It doesn't make sense to me, and is kinda gross.
To kill time I decided to play with Cydia on my phone, even though I didn't have internet access. This is when I recalled how poor a lot of OSS software is. Cydia is absolute crap without an internet connection, and honestly is pretty poor as a package manager in general, but not even networking software should crash in the absence of a network connection.
The train dropped us off a ways from the bus station and we had to walk down a long covered pathway to get to the bus station. It took me a while to figure out the bus station, mainly because I associated the numbered bus parking spots with ticketing windows of the same number, but there ended up being no correlation there. You merely had to go stand by the bus stop labeled with the destination you wanted to go to, get on the bus and pay for your ticket once you were onboard. Simple. While I was figuring this out we were walking around and Tien bumped into some Vietnamese people and was really excited to see her countrymen while out and about in the world. It was remarkable too because even when I was in Vietnam traveling the English speaking Vietnamese people had said that not many Vietnamese people travel outside of Vietnam.
We boarded the bus with a huge crowd and were almost the last ones on, so I ended up having to stand at the front of the bus with one foot in the stairwell and sit on the dashboard while Tien stood next to me. Our bus headed off through the city and off across the countryside through hills and winding roads on smooth paved roads. We passed a dead cow at 80kmh. We passed land that had "private property" signs, the first I'd seen in Asia. 40 minutes later we were standing in a town we knew nothing about, so we started walking around. 10 minutes later we realized that we'd need help so we went to look for a map but could not find one. We ended up talking to a taxi driver who drove us south down the coastal road and pointed out hotels. We picked one that was tall and was right on a beach. It was more of a resort hotel than I was looking for, but it was nice and we wanted to be on the beach, and that we were. Our room was large and had a patio looking straight down onto the beach itself, which was quiet and small. Only a few people were on it and the waves were gentle.
We were hungry so we went out to find some food. There was a market across the street from our hotel so we headed that direction. At the main street we stopped and I checked traffic to my left to make sure it was clear, but to my right was a curve in the road that I couldn't see around. I kept my eye on it as we walked into the first lane, but right as we did some maniac came flying around the curve on the wrong side of the road and full speed. Then I realized it wasn't that he was on the wrong side of the road but that people in Malaysia drive on the left hand side and I'd checked the road wrong. We ended up just running across and did not get hit. This was fruitless though because some of the restaurants were closing down and the ones that were still open only had gross food. I wanted to find a restaurant with pictures on the menu so I could just point and say "I want that." I recalled a scene from Lost in Translation where they are at the shabu shabu restaurant and Bill Murray orders in just such a fashion.
We went back to the restaurant at our hotel and looked their menu over. There was mostly chicken and I figured that between the Muslims and the Hindus there wouldn't be much beef or pork in this country. Tien and I talked over dinner about traveling and mixed culture, how things are so different in different parts of the world.
After dinner we went up to our patio and drank some fruit juice and wine and watched the sun set. After it was dark we went swimming in the ocean. The water was as warm as a pool, the waves were gentle, and there was nobody else around. It was really really nice, like the whole ocean was our own pool. I taught Tien some more about swimming and she caught on well, but got cold and worn out quickly so we went back inside after 20 minutes or so.
Tuesday I woke up to thunder rolling in from the ocean from lighting that was going on way out in the Strait of Malacca. I got up and brought the love seat in off the patio thinking that there could be huge rains, then went back to sleep. When I woke up it was not raining, but looked like it had been and would be again very soon. And it did. We caught a taxi to a bank back in town and it was raining when we got out of the car. I withdrew some money and then realized that I had no idea where to go or what to do.
Tien and I began walking through the gentle rain down the side of a main street until we saw the word "restoran" and assumed it was a restaurant. It was, but it wasn't appetizing so we walked around some more and found a place with decent breakfast even though it was after noon. We ate and drank coffee, then walked some more. We found a small temple with huge doors that had just shut when we got to them and the tiny bells all over it were still shaking. It looked like a Hindu temple to me, but I could be wrong.
We bought some drinks from a local market where a friendly man was asking all sorts of questions like "Is she your wife? Where'd you get her?" We left the shop and walked out towards the street and I wondered how on earth we could get ahold of a taxi in a place that looked like it was nowhere special, but just as I was thinking this a taxi pulled right up in front of us and we jumped in.
Back at the hotel we rested for a while and waited for the sun to come out a bit more, and once it began to warm up and dry out we went for a walk down the beach. There was a park at the north end of our beach. While we had been in the taxi I'd seen something that looked like a pier and I wanted to check it out, but when we got there it was closed for construction. We decided to swing on the swing set instead. Tien had never been on a playground swing before and she loved it.
We left there and found a calm beach with white sand near the pier thing which ended up being a bridge to what was once an island but was now a peninsula. We walked out onto it and photographed the bridge, then continued into a forested area with weird trees that grew up out of the ground and had branches that grew back into the ground. Some of the branches grew up from below the ground in an arc and then went back to the ground so that they were only an arch of wood coming out of the sand. It was very strange and interesting and I'd never seen anything like it before. I found a few little statues in the forest and some other neat areas, but it wasn't exactly a beautiful place so we didn't stay long. Instead we went back home and resumed being lazy.
At sunset we went for a swim. There were some men on boats that were pulling these big colorful blow-up rocket looking water toys and were charging for rides on them. We didn't have any money since you can't exactly bring money swimming and you wouldn't want to leave it on the beach. I wondered how they made any money at all, even though it did look fun. Tien and I swam for a long time and played in the waves until after the sun had set and it began to get cold.
The hotel had a sign that said that there was no wet attire allowed beyond the edge of the lobby and especially not in the elevator since it could cause a short circuit in the electricity. I wondered what kind of beach resort would have such ridiculous rules. They didn't even provide a locker room to change, so we just ignored the rule and went in while we were still wet. The hotel had other silly rules too, like "no outside food or drink" even though the room had a refrigerator in it and there was no grocery store in the hotel itself. I realized that this was a place where rules were made to not be followed. • • • • •
2009.07.19 by Daniel
One Day in Saigon before Malaysia
Saturday, Tien and I woke up at the familiar Ruby Star which is situated in the Pham Ngu Lao area of Saigon. Our room was small and had no window so realizing that it was time to get up was difficult from the darkness of our bed, but an incoming phone call helped wake us up and get our morning started.
We went to get breakfast but ended up at a travel agency first. We got a price for two tickets to Kuala Lumpur for the following day, then went to go have breakfast and try to find something better. We had a breakfast of simply bread with eggs and soy sauce with Vietnamese white coffee, so delicious. After visiting a few other travel agencies we decided to go with the more expensive, but more convenient time-wise option that we first found.
With travel plans covered we went to tackle the only other thing we needed to do in Saigon, find camera gear. I was still searching for the Loreo 3d rig and a pocket cam. We managed to find an official Canon store, but the camera that I wanted, the Ixus 870 IS. It's a 2008 model, but surprisingly the Canon store did have... for a whopping 9,000,000+ dong, which is more than $500. We continued our search and ended up at some 5 story electronics store that was having a super duper awesome mega blitz sale extravaganza palooza z0r where gold painted models were standing outside as statues holding a sign that presumably advertised an amazing deal and loud music with a man continuously talking about something that must have been really really awesome could be heard from a block away.
We walked inside and were unable to find any 2008 model cameras, but we did, however, find the much coveted Panasonic DMC-LX3 and my heart rejoiced and then was immediately torn and frustrated. So much like love it might have been just that. "Should I get the Canon Ixus model that replaced the 870, or should I go with the LX3?" I could not even begin to consider buying a camera that I hadn't researched online, so we went across the street to the second floor of a bakery that smelled like sugary pastry heaven. We got some disappointing smoothies and I did some poor online research that led me to no conclusions. I pulled up Skype on my iPhone and rang up some buddies in America. It was only 11pm or so there and it was Saturday night, I figured they'd be awake and probably happy to hear from me while they were up partying or whatever.
Ben didn't answer his phone, which sucked because he owns the LX3 and I wanted to get his final word on its awesomeness. Nathan pretty much said "go with the Lumix", which I wasn't even really considering at this point, and he also said "they're pretty much all the same once you get above a hundred dollars or so, so you can't really go wrong" and that was decent advice.
I went back to the store, saw the price on the Ixus 960 and bought the LX3. Spending that much money when I don't have a job is a tough decision, especially after buying two next day plane tickets to another country, but it was something I needed as a photographer and I knew I'd be happy with it.
Tien and I went back to the hotel and rested. I planned to take a nap but ended up researching some stuff online and talking with Tien about philanthropic technological stuff like the X-Prize and Folding@home. We also talked about Roomba, which I love. We then headed back out to get some food while room service cleaned our room. We went to a local pizza place and got some disappointing pizza and I got a disappointing cocktail. We then tried to find some sandals for Tien, whose feet were sore and in dire need of some function over fashion footwear. We were also on the lookout for an SDHC card for the new camera, which I thought would be incredibly easy to find but instead was incredibly difficult to find. We found some great sandals though, perfect fit and Tien loved them. She put them on and we walked and walked and walked and walked until we were back at the super duper mega sale store where they only had wimpy 2gb cards. On the way back to the hotel I found an electronics boutique that sold me an 8gb card touted as being class six but in fact ended up being class 4. I swear, you can't trust anything around here.
It began to rain a long block away from our hotel and we got to the front door just in time to be completely soaked. Luckily air conditioning helps dry wet clothes. We rested and then went back out for drinks. We found a nice lounge called Classica with only two other people in it. I got a beer and Tien got a chocolate milk. They also brought us rambutan and dragon fruit, which was nice. There was American music playing that was half neat and half awful. All in all though it was a nice place and made up for the mediocre lunch we'd had.
We retired to the hotel with anticipation of our flight to Malaysia the next day, a new camera in hand to document our trip and new experiences.
• • • • •
2009.07.19 by Daniel
Bad Breakfasts, Leaving Binh Hoa with Tien
Wednesday morning I slept through my alarm and the noise of the other people in the house and didn't get up until after 9, which never happens. Shortly after I got up the power went out, which is now pretty normal. Tien and I decided to head into Long Xuyen to get breakfast and return my suit.
Breakfast was notable because it was a pretty miserable experience. Tien took me to a new place to try a new food. Before we even got our food I was having respiratory problems from the fumes of passing scooters. When breakfast came it wasn't very appetizing to loom at, and the flavor wasn't exactly desirable to my taste buds. The thing that finally made me a little nauseous though was one of the most disgusting dogs I've ever seen that came wandering by. Black nipples dangled inches below the low hanging skin of the bitches belly and sores adorned her backside as she miserably waddled past looking for food. Tien asked me "is it terrible?" "yeah..." she just laughed, apologized and said that it was her favorite thing to eat for breakfast.
Things got better at our usual coffee shop near the lake where we got lost in the Internet looking at Stereoscopic images online. I found the Loreo 3d lens in a cap and decided I wanted to buy one if I ever found one. We headed out to look for a camera shop and helmet shops, but didn't really find anything good. We headed home and on the way I wished I had a smaller camera to use for times like when I'm on the back of the scooter, or when the d300 was too large to bring along, or when I want to take video. I decided I really need a second camera.
Thursday was yet another rainy day. Tien and I spent a usual amount of time trying to figure out our future, this time discussing the option of me going back to America at the end of July and having her come later once the visa is approved. This option sucks, but may be the right way to do it... I wasn't happy with that thought because I never wanted another long distance relationship, and I definitely didn't want to be a married couple who live in separate countries. The frustration with this combined with the rain made me very tired and I slept for most of the day.
That evening after it got dark the rain finally let up so Tien, her sisters and I went into town just to get out for a while. We went to the supermarket and I finally found the Da Lat wine I've been looking for, so I bought a bottle. It was a little tart, but I enjoyed it. What can I say? I love wine.
Friday was another interesting breakfast. Tien and her mom try to make me new things to eat, but sometimes they attempt to recreate the type of meal I'd have in America. This morning was eggs, bread, butter, coffee, uncooked hot dogs and pig liver pate with soy sauce. I really do appreciate their effort to show me new things, but I had to tell Tien that coffee and bread with eggs and soy sauce was good enough. Uncooked hot dogs and pig liver pate have no place in an american breakfast.
Unexpectedly, Tien's uncle from Saigon showed up in his Toyota tercel. He was on his way through to drop somebody off and was headed back to Saigon that day. Tien and I had been planning to go there for a day and then fly to Malaysia, and this was the perfect chance to go, plus we wouldn't have to ride in a bus. I was certainly ready to get back on the road since I was setting a new record for consecutive days spent in Binh Hoa, so we packed up and waited for him to come back.
So we waited... And waited. We had thought he would be back in an hour, but he wasn't. I played iPhone video games to kill time. Then I let Ngoc play some. I taught her how to play field runners while we ate lunch and she did better than I expected on her second try.
We finally left Binh Hoa at 2pm in the cool comfort of a private car, a rare pleasure in Vietnam. Her uncle ended up being one of those stick shift drivers who doesn't use the friction zone so my equilibrium was a bit off, but it was still better than the bus.
I saw a person at the side of the road with a sewing machine ready to do alterations and repairs.
Tien's cousins house was on the way so we stopped by for a while. It was a nice house across a wooden footbridge from one lane sub street off the main street. Some men were in the water building the foundation for a wider cement bridge that would be safer for the villagers.
We went inside and sat a while, eating corn on the cob and rambutan. I went into a back room and laid down in a hammock and enjoyed how quiet it was in this place. Quiet was something I had been longing fir since it seems like there is noise everywhere in Binh Hoa even though it's in the country.
It began to rain. The rain was loud in the tin roof of the wooden extension o the house. I really liked that place... The wood was dark and welcoming and the vaulted ceilings made the space feel larger than most Vietnamese buildings which have flat ceilings.
The rain got heavier, then the power went out, then we left.
There were a lot of people out on scooters despite the rain. They all wear and share rain ponchos. I saw a man with an ATI Radeon poncho. This was not because he worked for ATI or owned a Radeon card or probably even a personal computer. He probably got it from someone at the factory where it was made. Just like everything else brand name, it's not for fashion or endorsement, it's what's available.
The skies outside were smooth grey and for some reason it reminded me of Littleton. The journey was now a familiar one and I usually knew what to expect to see ahead.
Tien and I shared my iPod because I finally got a headphone Y splitter that worked correctly. It was nice and I even was able to hear new things, like how Kaskade's song Mccamon uses the sampled record noise to make a beat.
We stopped for dinner and I ordered beef, but somehow ended up with seafood. This tends to happen. I most certainly never order seafood but somehow I end up with it. Oh well...
Back on the road I looked out into the dark night and imagined that I was somewhere else. I used to do this as a kid on the way to Texas. Dark roads are hardly distinguishable so you could just as well be anywhere else in the world. I thought about the trip ahead, going to Malaysia, just Tien and I. The car stereo was trying to drown out the music from my iPod and I wondered what could be less sexy than Vietnamese talk radio.
We were dropped off at the same house I came to my first night in Saigon and ended up at the same hotel I was staying at when I proposed to Tien. Saigon might actually be starting to feel like home.
• • • • •
2009.07.14 by Daniel
Visa Issues
Sunday was a rainy day. Everybody was hanging out because there's not much to do outside when it's rainy, and it's difficult to get places on a scooter while it's raining. I was on my computer fiddling around when Tien came in looking a little sad and told me that her mother and sister didn't approve of us getting a tourist visa to get into the USA quickly because they said it was impossible, and that if we wanted to do it that way we didn't need to celebrate the engagement party. I didn't understand why on earth those two things had anything to do with each other. We talked a long time about it and I could barely make sense of it. I was incredibly frustrated and started questioning everything, which is typical "shit doesn't make sense" behavior for me.
Tien and I went out to a nearby cafe. The place was wide open, as most places in this area are. It was made up of a grid of posts holding up a thatched roof and between the posts were hammocks. In the centers of the squares created by the hammocks were tables and chairs. We sat at one table and Tien ordered a milk that she ended up never touching. We again tried to make sense of things, tried to figure out a plan to get into America at the end of the month. We were still set on getting the tourist visa because it only made sense, so we decided to somehow continue down that path. With that resolve, we rode off to another restaurant and got food and beer. Just as we sat down it began to rain heavily with lots of wind, and for the first time in Vietnam I was cold and wished I had a hoodie. Tien hadn't dressed well for the weather and was freezing. When the wind and rain subsided a little bit we got on the scooter and rode home through the rain, then cuddled up under a blanket to get warm, eventually migrating to the bed and sleeping for the rest of the night.
Monday I woke up with the intent to unravel every last detail I could find about the tourist visa and whether or not it was a good idea. Just as we were filling out the form I noticed one detail and decided to do some googling before submitting the application. About 30 minutes later I had relented to doing things a different way, with the fiance visa. It was not because going to the USA on a tourist visa was impossible, but because the short time frame we were aiming for could create some large legal hurdles in the future, potentially creating immense problems for us that could last years. I decided it was better to wait a few months and get things done easily from the beginning than spend years trying to sort things out. I decided this because I am already exhausted from all the bullshit associated with US immigration. It's unbelievable how difficult it is to get things done the right way, and it is very easy to see why so many people take shortcuts or simply enter the country illegally. For many people I would wager to say there is hardly an alternative to illegal entry. When I looked through forums online I found many many people who were also incredibly frustrated at how difficult it is to legally immigrate their fiance or spouse. This seems to be par for the course with the US gov though. Just look at the recent stimulus bills that essentially gave the irresponsible people a free ride out of responsibility and shared that burden with those of us who had been responsible all along.
Through all of this, every time I ran into another detail with the word "months" in it I thought of Anthony Hopkins after he had his stroke in The Legends of the Fall, talking to his son Brad Pitt. "Screw the government."
I also found a website, www.visajourney.com, that tracks visa processing times and although the estimated time for a fiancé visa is 6 months, apparently it only takes 75 days on average in Ho Chi Minh City, which was much more reasonable. So, after conceding defeat, Tien and I headed into town to take care of some things for our engagement party.
I saw men playing soccer barefoot in a parking lot off the side of the road.
While we were riding I heard somebody call out, and when I turned to look it was the fight guy from the bus. I was so amazed to see somebody I actually knew while I was out and about that before I knew it I'd smacked him on the arm even as we were riding and said "look at this guy!" as if he could speak english. Tien laughed a lot and then some stuff was said in Vietnamese and soon I waved goodbye.
That evening Tien and I went to a more upscale lounge style restaurant, probably the most swank place I've been in Vietnam, and got some smoothies. It amazes me that so many of these places don't even have alcoholic drinks on the menu. A lounge like this place in SF would be charging $8+ for cocktails and probably wouldn't even have a blender to make a smoothie with if you wanted one. We watched some American movie on TV and waited for the standard evening rain to stop, but it didn't stop, so again we just rode home in the rain.
• • • • •
2009.07.12 by Daniel
The Trip from Binh Duong, Conspiring About Visas
At about 1:40am the bus finally arrived at our guesthouse in Binh Duong. 40 minutes late is par for the course in Vietnamese transit. As we were getting on a man in a brown shirt shook my hand and tried to talk to me in Vietnamese. I just passed him and found a seat, stuffed my bag under it, verified that there wasn't a single position I could sit in that was comfortable and turned my iPod on. We cruised around all sorts of weird city streets picking up passengers from dead end dirt roads, big industrial complexes, the side of empty city streets and so on. A few employees were directing people where to sit when they came on, and sent most of them to the back of the bus. The front seats had been designated as reserved by placing plastic kiddy chairs on them.
About 30 minutes into the journey I smelled smoke in the air, but it wasn't the kind of smoke on the breeze that blows in from outside. I looked up and sure enough there was a man smoking in front of the bus. It was the man in the brown shirt. Then I realized the two gentlemen directly in front of us were also smoking. I wondered when they would be told they weren't allowed to smoke, but when an employee stood up and lit a cigarette my hopes of clean air disappeared in the growing cloud of smoke. Pretty soon there were about 10 people on the bus smoking.
A few hours into the ride the man in the brown shirt came walking down the aisle and said something to me. Tien translated it. "He wants to fight you." He was just joking though, and in fact ended up being an employee of the bus service. He began directing people around here and there, and kept coming back to say things to me in Vietnamese. He was obsessed with fighting me. He was also obsessed with the hair on my arms and legs. He kept feeling the hair on my arm and on my legs, saying things about fighting me, and about how he had a beautiful daughter he wanted to introduce me to, and about how he wished he had a son so he could show him all these wonderful things. At one point I could've sworn I heard him say "gay man" as he looked at me, and after that I was convinced that he was gay. This joking and touching went on throughout the whole bus trip. He was good at his job though. I've never seen vendor ladies get off a bus quicker than when he shouted at them.
Another interesting character was a man who got on the bus at one of the stops. He was wearing a pale blue suit and had long wide fingernails. He had medium length black hair and was carrying a black bag. He set the bag down by my outstretched left foot, reached in and pulled out a microphone, turned something on with a spark and then began trying to sell people little sea horses over his PA system. He also tried to sell them some weird herb medicine and something else in a little cylinder. He got off at the next stop and I was glad he wasn't shouting into my sandal anymore.
At about 10am we finally got home. 8 hours and the second worst night of sleep on my trip, successive to the worst night. I greeted Tien's family and spent a little bit of time with them, but was immensely thankful when they suggest I take a shower and get some sleep.
I woke up and caught up on some internet stuff while it was raining outside, then Tien and I headed back to Long Xuyen to pick up the engagement photos that we'd taken before I went to Cambodia. They were good quality, though a bit silly. It's funny, but some of them are actually very good. I dislike the way I look in them and wish I could've gotten a tan and a haircut before the shoot, but everybody here swears up and down that I look handsome and I that's what counts since the photos are more for the family than myself.
When we got home I went straight back to the internet to conspire on how to circumvent the mountainous bullshit related to Tien's visa. I was up late working on that, and when I finally got to bed I slept wonderfully. The first night of great, uninterrupted sleep since I had left Laos.
I woke up early the next day and began playing games with Ngoc. I was fascinated with what was required for an adult english speaker to play a video game with a Vietnamese child. Unfortunately I didn't have many games on my iPhone, but decided to buy a few and see how well she did with them. Crayon Physics was a little steep of a learning curve for a 4 year old with no instruction. Before I could get any more games the power went out.
The morning was still early so Tien and I went down to an internet cafe and I talked with Lila about ways to handle the visa stuff. She gave me some great ideas that I had considered, but not from the angle she was attacking it and I decided that would be my best bet. I was happy with the information I'd found and the ideas I now had on how to possibly get Tien's visa handled in a timely manner. It involved a little extra help from other people, but sounded promising.
On the way home I got this awesome idea on how to circumvent the whole visa thing entirely, bought a SIM card and talked it over with Rob, then came to the conclusion that it was not awesome at all and there was no way it would work. Oh well, gotta keep the creativity flowing, even when it takes you to dead ends.
The power was still out when we got home. It came on briefly, then went off again. Tien and I went to a nearby internet cafe to do a few more bits of research, and soon afterwards the power there went out as well, but I had gotten most of the information I needed. When we got back home the power came on and we went back to work on the visa stuff. We had hoped to get the help of her brother in law for part of the visa stuff, but he was unwilling to help because he said it wouldn't work. This was frustrating to me because it seemed like nobody wanted to even try except me. I had this dream about marrying tien, traveling with her and taking her back to America. Only one of those had even remotely come true, that being traveling to Vung Tau which is a drop in the bucket compared to what I had hoped for, and the other two aspects were mountainous hurdles. I was really frustrated so Tien and I went for a ride on the scooter.
I saw a dog laying in a hammock, chewing on the netting.
We ended up at a spot that I like in a nearby field where they are preparing to do construction. We watched a beautiful sunset as we talked about the hardships we are facing in making our dreams come true, but resolved to keep on trying.
The next day we went out to do some engagement party preparation. I got fitted for a suit without them even picking up a measuring tape. We got some coffee and I sent a quick e-mail from my phone to Dan and Cass asking them for help with the visa stuff. By the time we got home they were waking up back in America, had read my e-mail and had agreed to help however they could. The feeling of receiving their support was glorious and I was reminded of how awesome it is to have great friends in times of need. It's awesome to have great friends at any time, but when they are there for you when you are in a tight spot it is a glorious feeling. My spirits were revived and later that evening I went to work discussing the details with Cass.
At dinner time I had a beer, which is uncommon in Tien's house, and enjoyed watching Ngoc and Tien's sisters play with Labryth and GloBall. These were much more fun for Ngoc, though it may have been because Thule had instructed her on how to play, I couldn't tell. In the middle of it all, a tiny lizard jumped onto me and I ended up chasing it around trying to catch it. When I finally did catch it I found that it was too small to do the belly sleep trick, so I let it go.
It had been a great day and the sleep that Tien got as she drifted off beside me was a great way to finish it off. Saturday morning I woke up to Tien climbing back into bed. "I have some bad news from the people in my village..."
• • • • •
2009.07.11 by Daniel
A short stay in Binh Duong
While we were in Vung Tau Mai was on the phone quite a bit talking with a friend of hers who she knew online and he invited us to stay at his place in Binh Duong, which was on the way to Saigon, so we decided to go. Unfortunately when we found the bus station there was no bus directly to Binh Duong so we had to take a bus to Saigon, then go back on another bus. This was OK though because Tien and I wanted to go down to the consulate and ask them some questions about the visa stuff.
We got on a bus and headed for Saigon. Like many busses, this one had a TV playing random entertainment. This bus was playing a DVD with some apparently famous Vietnamese people singing. It was called Paris by Night 25th Anniversary. Mostly it was people singing, but there were interviews with the set crew and some other entertaining scenes. At one point a girl had a dream that she woke up and found a genie lamp, but when she rubbed the lamp Osama Bin Laden came out instead of a genie. I'm not sure about all that happened since it was in Vietnamese, but by her second wish Bin Laden laughed maniacally and shot off his AK47 in the air and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
Shortly after that scene the DVD began skipping so the driver turned it off and put on music set composed of 8 songs on repeat. One of these songs was Akon's "I Wanna Fuck You" and I couldn't help thinking of the European commercial about english lessons.
When we got to Saigon we caught a taxi to the consulate. I asked them some questions about visas and was dumbfounded at how ridiculous the situation was with Tien's visa. It was such a load of bullshit I thought there had to be another way to do it. She said I had to go to American and file for Tien's visa there. This was astonishing because I was not in America, nor did I have the time or money to fly there. This was the first bit of a mountain of bullshit concerning American visas for Vietnamese citizens. I left the consulate thoroughly pissed off at how asinine the situation was and had a new perspective on what Mexicans probably have to put up with frequently.
We went back to the bus station, got on a crowded and hot bus and headed to Binh Duong. I tried to sleep but ended up just marinating in sweat. We exited the bus and I continued marinating while standing on the sidewalk, then I was chilled for a few minutes inside a taxi, and marinated again on another sidewalk and on the back of a scooter.
When we arrived at Mai's friends house I took a shower. The first thing I did when I got in the shower was break the handle off the water faucet in the bath. I have a real knack for breaking things, and it really shines over here in Asia. After showering we ate a small meal to hold us over until we got a better meal, then went out for a walk.
I soon was grateful that I ate that little meal, because the sight of half of a cooked dog hanging by his teeth in the market right outside our guest house destroyed my appetite. I was also glad I had eaten eggs since they are unmistakeable. Mai's friend was a slick kind of show off guy who liked to have fun, so later on when we were eating I half expected him to say "that's not chicken, it's dog!" Then I thought "so what if it is? It tastes good..." As far as I know though, I never ate any dog meat.
It got dark and we went to sleep with the intention of waking up the next day, but ended up getting up after an hour or so to sing some karaoke. There are never any english songs in the karaoke books so I mainly get to watch other people sing. Tien sings Camly songs and people say she looks like her too.
After karaoke we did end up going to sleep. On the floor. It was probably the worst night of sleep I've ever had. It's certainly the worst night of sleep I can remember, but who knows, maybe I blocked out the really bad nights.
In the morning Tien gave me a massage to help my aching back, then we walked to breakfast. We walked like 15 blocks. I didn't mind though because I was hoping to get away from the market where they were selling dog meat. We had pho and of course I wondered what that meat was...
After breakfast, Tien, Mai and I caught a taxi to Đại Nam Văn Hiến, a safari style theme park inside of big castle walls, complete with its own real temple, a few artificial mountains, and all sorts of other assorted fun stuff.
The first thing we did was get on a train and go to hell. Or rather, a haunted house style thing inside of 5 big chinese dragon heads that was like a trip through hell. It was so dark inside that my eyes never fully adjusted. It had ghouls flying at you in the air, from behind cages, people grabbing at your legs in the dark, and tons of voices screaming, crying and shouting in Vietnamese. I thought about the Vietnam war and S21.
The next thing we did was rent a tandem bicycle. Two seats and two sets of pedals for three of us, complete with a triple ring in front and seven in the back. I didn't have much trouble working the bike and it felt good to be back on a bike since I love biking and haven't done it in over two months. We biked to the temple and went inside. It was a big compound with water fountains and a very large room for the temple itself. It was probably the largest temple I've been in and it was nice that it was real, not just some tourist attraction.
We biked around some more and I took a bunch of photos and then we went to an Italian restaurant and got food. I got an incorrectly made but delicious club sandwich. Tien got some of the worst spaghetti I've ever tasted.
We checked out the go-kart track that was near the restaurant, but Tien didn't want to race so I didn't bother. It was a neat track in a figure 8 with a bridge over the intersection, the first I'd seen for go-karts. The cars were minimal, and they didn't seem to give anybody any training on how they worked before throwing them on the track. It looked fun, but instead of that we went to Snow Land.
I was pretty skeptical of snow land, it was over 90ºF outside. They gave us rain boots, jackets and gloves, but no hat. Then they let us inside to snow land, a freezing cold sledding hill with an assortment of tubes. I couldn't believe there was actual ice created by these air conditioners when it was so hot outside. I quickly got very cold without a hat, but Tien and I had fun sledding down a few times. She had never seen real snow, and technically she still hasn't since this was some of the worst spring snow you've ever seen. Still, it was entertaining and fun.
It was late in the afternoon so we headed back to guest house and hung out for the evening, figuring out our travel plans. For some reason we decided to take a 1am bus to Binh Hoa instead of a 5pm bus. I decided to get some sleep before then since I can never sleep on those busses.
The next thing we did was rent a tandem bicycle. Two seats and two sets of pedals for three of us, complete with a triple ring in front and seven in the back. I didn't have much trouble working the bike and it felt good to be back on a bike since I love biking and haven't done it in over two months. We biked to the temple and went inside. It was a big compound with water fountains and a very large room for the temple itself. It was probably the largest temple I've been in and it was nice that it was real, not just some tourist attraction.
We biked around some more and I took a bunch of photos and then we went to an Italian restaurant and got food. I got an incorrectly made but delicious club sandwich. Tien got some of the worst spaghetti I've ever tasted.
We checked out the go-kart track that was near the restaurant, but Tien didn't want to race so I didn't bother. It was a neat track in a figure 8 with a bridge over the intersection, the first I'd seen for go-karts. The cars were minimal, and they didn't seem to give anybody any training on how they worked before throwing them on the track. It looked fun, but instead of that we went to Snow Land.
I was pretty skeptical of snow land, it was over 90ºF outside. They gave us rain boots, jackets and gloves, but no hat. Then they let us inside to snow land, a freezing cold sledding hill with an assortment of tubes. I couldn't believe there was actual ice created by these air conditioners when it was so hot outside. I quickly got very cold without a hat, but Tien and I had fun sledding down a few times. She had never seen real snow, and technically she still hasn't since this was some of the worst spring snow you've ever seen. Still, it was entertaining and fun.
It was late in the afternoon so we headed back to guest house and hung out for the evening, figuring out our travel plans. For some reason we decided to take a 1am bus to Binh Hoa instead of a 5pm bus. I decided to get some sleep before then since I can never sleep on those busses. • • • • •
2009.07.08 by Daniel
Trip to Vũng Tàu
My layover between Vientiane and Saigon was Phnom Penh. I thought this would be great because I could call Tien using my Cambodian SIM card and let her know that my flight was an hour late, but she didn't pick up. We were on the ground for about 15 minutes, then I boarded the same airplane in the same seat and we flew away.
Along with arrival and departure cards for passport control, the spread of H1N1 has prompted governments to require incoming visitors to fill out questionnaires about the state of their health. Previously the questions had been something like "Have you had dizziness, cough, diarrhea, fever, nausea within the last 10 days? What countries have you visited in the last 10 days?"
The Ho Chi Minh airport has had the most outbreaks of H1N1 that I've heard of yet which explains their additional diligence. "Have you come in contact with anybody who has had fever, cough, diarrhea, nausea within the last 15 days." I couldn't even remember everywhere I'd slept in the last 15 days.
I managed to find the slowest line at passport control. This is something I have a real knack for. I also had done this in Thailand when I was trying to catch a flight that was already boarding and in Laos with the whole pen incident.
As I was walking outside I felt distinctly different from the last few times I was in Saigon and I thought about how much I'd done in the past few weeks that had given me a new confidence in international travel.
As I walked outside Tien was waiting for me in a black blouse and a white skirt, looking beautiful and beaming with joy. I never quite know how I'm supposed to express my feelings within cultural affection allowances, but I managed to find something that was acceptable to show my joy at having her back. She grabbed her sister Mai, who I was not expecting to see, and we went off to find a taxi.
This was where my travel experience came in handy. I cut through the timidness that Tien has, kicked the first taxi driver to the curb and found a ride to the hydrofoil station at a quarter the cost. This is what you learn from getting ripped off at the Saigon airport. "Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. If you fool me... We can't get fooled again."
We got to the hydrofoil station and I was quickly reminded how utterly chaotic Saigon traffic is. Smoggy, loud, and chaotic. What sense is there in calmly walking across a six lane river of continuously flowing traffic?
We bought our hydrofoil tickets for the Vina Express to Vũng Tàu, but it wasn't leaving for over two hours, so we found a place to sit and wait while drinking coffee and eating some noodles. Then it began to rain. Then it began to pour. Then we realized that we would miss the glorious sunset we'd hoped to see from the hydrofoil just as we were to arrive in Vũng Tàu.
The hydrofoil was awesome and pretty freakin quick. It skimmed over the water and made big splashes up onto the window. It was also very agile in the water, so agile that sometimes we thought it'd tip over, but it skimmed by tug boats and ferries and barges and oil rigs down the Saigon River and off into the pacific ocean. A girl came by and told us that because of the weather there were oceanic problems at the port so we'd have to go to a different port and take a bus into town. This frustrated us beyond the mere absence of a sunset, but that's how travel goes in these places. There was also the standard TV display of random entertainment and most of what we saw was some weird kung fu movie with four people who would wring out a shirt and drink water from it, then use it as a weapon.
Right at dusk we pulled up near a dock in an industrial area a little ways up a calm river just south of Vũng Tàu. It was still gently raining as they made us climb over 3 ships with no planks between them while carrying our bags to get to the actual dock. Tien was still wearing her nice clothes but we managed to cross with few issues. She admitted that she'd dressed poorly for traveling because she wanted to look nice for my return and this was fine by me.
Some of us managed to pile into a bus and fill it completely up while others remained outside in the rain haggling with taxi drivers. Soon it was completely dark, the rain had returned to a pour and we were stuck on a one lane dirt road behind a car that had no driver. I was reminded of those idiots in SF who double park on the train tracks and lock their car then disappear inside of a building. One time I sat on a train for 30 minutes while they towed the car. This time it only lasted 5 minutes though, which was nice because traveling can really wear you out and I'd been traveling all day and had already been off schedule twice.
We arrived at the bus drop off and stood under an awning at the local KFC while people tried to figure out where they were going to stay, then tried to find taxis to take them there. It's interesting having people who speak the language with you because they can actually get useful information, but this information is rarely passed on to you. I kept flipping back and forth between "let me handle this" mode and "you handle this" mode. In the end Mai found us a place next door to the house of a girl who was trying to find a taxi, so the four of us got in the taxi and headed off. It appeared to be nowhere near the beach by the time we got there on the back streets, but in fact ended up being only two blocks from the beach. We dropped our stuff in the room, took a little rest and went off to find dinner.
After dinner we walked down to the beach. It was great to finally be there... aside from the fact that the waves on the shore were lined with trash, it was beautiful. With Tien on my back we waded about 50 feet out into the warm water and stood there watching the lightning storm that was going on way out in the Eastern Pacific. It felt great to be back at the ocean. I had been by the ocean for the previous year and a half while living in San Francisco, but in the previous two months I was away from it and it was great to have it back. Even more, it was great to be in warm water as opposed to the cold SF Pacific, and it was great to have my girl with me to experience the lightning show, which was reminiscent. It was, I guess, a mix between old good memories and new joys.
The following day we got breakfast and then headed out to a large Christian monument on top of a hill just south of the strip where we were staying. This was the first real Christian anything I'd seen on my trip. There wasn't a word of english or french on any of the plaques so I have no idea what it was about, but there were angels and moses and cupids and at the top of the walkway up the hill, a huge statue of Jesus with his arms outstretched.
By the top of the hill I was drenched in sweat. I sat with Tien and talked about some of the hardships we faced in getting married and bringing her back to the USA. There are a few big hurdles to pass this month and I wanted to make sure she was still with me on all of our plans. She was, so we were happy. Her sister arrived with a bag of fruit after we'd been there a while, so the three of us sat and ate lychee and rambutan. We stayed at the top for a while, then headed back down the hill and off to the hotel.
Our plan was to clean up and go swimming, but the climb up the hill and the heat of the day had wiped us out, so we ended up falling asleep for an hour or two. This was fine though, we needed it, and afterwards we headed down to the beach. We found three chairs to rent and Mai stayed to watch our things while Tien and I ran off to go play in the water. As it turns out, swimming is not one of the things that is taught in Vietnamese school. Later I had a good conversation with Tien about the differences between an average first world education and an average third world education. The fact that Vietnam is about halfway covered with water yet they don't teach swimming blew my mind. Tien said that 15 students had died the previous year from drowning while riding a boat to school in heavy rains.
This lack of swimming education made Tien terribly frightened by the waves and it took me a while to chase her through the water and coax her out past the breakers to where the water was more calm. Unfortunately she couldn't always touch the ground out there. She had seen a photo I took in Ha Long Bay of a boy floating on his back and wondered how he could do that, so I taught her how and in typical Tien style, she learned very quickly. In 15 minutes she was floating on her own as large waves that were on their way to breaking passed her by. We ended the swim lesson, took a few minutes to enjoy the water and the fact that we were finally traveling together, then headed back to the shore to let Mai have her turn in the water.
There were women walking around with eggs and fish and baskets containing metal cans with fire that was boiling water where they would cook you fresh seafood. Many women were walking around with baskets of fresh fruit, and some guy was riding his bicycle by with a huge speaker system on it that made me think of the pillow fight in SF this year. A few people rode down the beach on their scooters. A group of kids next to us had collected a few dozen shells with crabs inside of them and as we were leaving one of the crabs tried to walk its way off the table. A man nearby picked it up before it got off the table and showed it to the group of friends he was sitting with.
Mai, Tien and I headed back to the hotel. The path to the beach is a typical Vietnamese path, which means it is free to ride scooters on and do whatever else you feel like doing on. Some kids were parked on their scooter talking on the phone. One woman was cooking up some weird fish that looked like a flat octopus.
The next day was Monday, but still Sunday in the USA which means I still had time to post my weekly photo set, The (d)SPOT. Because there was an elevator shaft between our room and the AP, I had to sit in the hall next to the elevator to do my work. I caught up with some co-workers and did other assorted online stuff as I was posting my photos. Just as I was finishing up and saying goodbye to some folks, the power went out. At first I thought the AC had just gone off, but then my internet connection was interrupted. I finally verified that it was indeed the power being out by checking the elevator, which was nonfunctional. I thought about how awful it would be to be trapped in an elevator in a small hotel in a third world country and was thankful that I was not.
• • • • •
2009.07.03 by Daniel
Lazy in Laos
Having arrived late to Vientiane and taken the first guesthouse with an opening, Thursday morning I went to find a better option, an option with Internet. That is vital if you want to stay in touch with people who are scattered around the globe.
I checked into a nice looking guesthouse with a huge bed in a pretty good looking room. I signed on to catch up with photos and whatnot and discovered that even though there was wifi, the actual Internet connection was glacial. It was reminiscent of the 14.4 days. Facebook took over 15 minutes to load. Ping times to google were Averaging 5000ms over 20 hops with 8% packet loss and an MTU of 1100. This was terrible...
On top of that, as the day warmed up there began a breeze that crept in through the window leading out to the tiny alley, bringing with it a pungent aroma of pestilence.
It was mid day so I left the stench and went for a walk. Just as I was photographing some stuff and fearing getting rained on a nice tuk tuk driver came up and offered to take me to some local sites that were photogenic. He had photos of the laces and they were indeed grand so I agreed and jumped in the back of his tuk tuk. Off we went, the tuk tuk bumping and whining all the way.
The clouds went away without raining and left a hot, humid day. The skies were beautiful blue with an assortment of scattered clouds. I was soon drenched in sweat.
We saw four locations and miraculously ended up by my hotel. I went inside to clean up and cool off, then went to find dinner. I also had to figure out what to do in Laos.
I found a resturant where some kid on the way out said the food was good and ended up being wrong. Soon after sitting down a local girl started talking to me and invited me to sit with her. I obliged but soon regretted it. She could barely speak conversational English, seemed mentally vacant and just wanted to go to a bar. Soon after sitting down a man came by and offered me Viagra. I paid for my food and left.
I did go to a bar though. I had a delicious coctail and chatted with some backpackers from the UK. They suggested that I go to Veng Viang and showed me photos from the previous day. It was gorgeous and I thought that I'd like to go. Then they said it was a party town and I thought twice. It was gorgeous though...
I had been in Asia for a month so far and was finally getting a bit tired of traveling. I'm not sure if it was loneliness or exhaustion, but it was probably a bit of both. I was tired of having to look so far past the defacto tourist bullshit to find things actually worth doing. Photographing Veng Viang was definitely worth doing, but I'm the end I decided to fly back to Vietnam to be with tien and go to Vung Tau beach, something we had wanted to do previously but were unable to do. I was a little bummed about not getting to spend more time in Laos, but the world has a lot to see and I can always come back.
The next day I checked out of the stinky slow internet room and went to secure my airfare to Vietnam. I couldn't get a ticket for that same day so I got one for Saturday and went to find my third hotel in Vientiane. This was half the price of the last, had a window looking across a street to a temple and had no Internet. There was an Internet cafe right next door though.
To access the Internet you were supposed to go buy an access card, then log into their web portal and enter the info to get access. I really didn't feel like leaving my hotel room and took this as another cllaw sharpening tech challenge. Within a few minutes I'd found an open HTTP proxy within their network and used it to get online. The access was much much faster than my previous accomodations but had limitations on allowed protocols. It was fine for my needs and I spent the next few hours trying to circumvent the protocol limitations. I never got anywhere with it, but it was a good exercise and it was good to know that my skills hadn't dulled in the last month of unemployment.
I got hungry so I went back to the full mooncafe where I'd met the uk backpackers. This place was a branch of the Cambodian Boom Boom Room, a media store specializing in the illicit sale of music and movies to travelers at terribly low prices. One album was $1.50. I bought 5.
Back at the hotel there was smoke in the air as the monks across the street burned leaves they had raked up. This morning, July 4th, they woke me up with drumming and chanting. I think monks may not be great neighbors.
After a delicious breakfast I checked out, found a tuk tuk and headed for the airport. My short stay I Laos is pretty much over, save waiting for my currently delayed flight. I like it here though and I'd like to come back some day and go farther in. Today though it's airplanes, my girl, a hydrofoil and a beach.
• • • • •