As we were crossing the bridge the Kid Koala remix of Moon River came on, and I began to miss 4211 Moraga. I first saw the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s when I was living there, and I remember thinking that it was the most accurate example of how the parties at 4211 would go. Full house, people dressed up, climbing in and out of windows onto the fire escape, etc.. I really loved living there, I think we had something that not many people find in their life, and it was great. This week, a year after everybody else moved off the block, Lauren is finally moving away.

We stopped for a snack and then drove on towards Saigon. Night fell and I put on The Kleptones 24 Hours album. I looked out the window and found it hard to tell that I was in Vietnam. Between the mashup music and samples transporting my mind to somewhere in the Western pop culture ethos, the landscape was also changing. We found ourselves on a highway like no other highway I’d been on in Vietnam. It was raised up on a berm with a view out over the dark trees and neighborhoods. There were even green markers with white numbers ticking away the km. It was a smooth highway, and there were no motorbikes allowed here. It felt like we were in the midwest of the USA.

It was also an extremely efficient way to get to Saigon, as we got there in about 4.5 hours, which is less than any other trip we’d taken. We ended up at the same bus station on some back road of District 5 as when I had left Vietnam last November. It’s essentially a garage on a dirty side road off a main street. I think we even took the same van to get to the hotel that we took last November to the airport. We checked into a room on the 7th floor of the Bui Phan Hotel and went next door to Viva Coffee for dinner, then retired. We had an early morning at the consulate to look forward to.

We got up early on May 25, got breakfast and tried to find a motorbike to rent. Nobody would rent us one though since we didn’t have our passports since they were at the hotel front desk. We had planned to take a motorbike to the consulate, but ended up settling on a taxi since we ran out of time before finding a moto.

We first went to a service that Tien’s sister had hired for her to help handle the consulate procedures. I sat and played Angry Birds on my iPhone and waited there while Tien went to get a letter from the consulate that would tell her when her interview date was. This was a significant piece of information, a huge puzzle piece in the nebulous, infinite maze of US immigration procedures.

And of course they didn’t give it to her. It can never be easy with immigration.

They apparently needed her to have a different address. Why on earth it makes such a big deal which address they have on file, I will never know. It is probably the same illogical reasons that banks use when they require you to have a physical address on file instead of a PO box, even when you don’t have a permanent physical address. They’d rather have inaccurate info that fits within their broken rules than accurate information that doesn’t apply to hoi polloi.

So, I went down to the consulate and stood in line. While I was waiting a security guard walked directly over to me and asked me if he could help me with anything. I don’t know why he picked me out of the whole crowd, maybe he didn’t like my looks or maybe I was unknowingly giving him a threatening look. I told him my business and he walked away.

When I got to the window where you can ask information and asked them for the date of Tien’s interview they said they would not give it to me. They needed updated address information for her file. It’s just so fucking important that they know where you *say* you live even if you don’t spend most of your time there. So, so, so fucking important. And that got me really fucking frustrated. Dealing with immigration is the most painful, frustrating thing I’ve had to deal with in I can’t remember how long, perhaps my whole life. It makes me livid.

We went back to the service, Tien talked to them while I sat there and steamed, we got a piece of fucking paper with some words on it, walked down to the consulate and they gave us the info just like that. I should’ve been really happy, but actually I was just really fucking pissed off at how asinine this whole damn situation is. They *really* needed her address updated that badly? It’s not like they know how to send letters anyway, none of the shit they sent us ever arrived at her cousin’s house when she was living there. What makes us think that if they can’t successfully send mail across the fucking city that a letter will ever arrive in a tiny farming village in another province near the Cambodian border? WTF ever, they got their info and we got ours. It was an intel hostage exchange that we had successfully negotiated by complying with the perpetrators every demands.

June 16th.

Tien would have her interview on June 16th, and if she passed it she would get her visa to go to America to marry me on the 17th. This meant we could be back in America by the end of June. I thought about this and tried to focus on the happy things in the taxi back to the hotel.

We took a nap during the mid day heat, then went downstairs and rented a moto from our hotel. This was an idea that we hadn’t really thought of before, but I remembered our ease in renting a bike in Da Lat and got the idea from that. We cruised down to Highlands Coffee for lunch, then went back to the consulate to get the official letter that should’ve arrived at Tien’s cousin’s house however long ago they sent it.

After that we just cruised the city, at first because we got lost and then after we found our way we just wanted to keep cruising and see some sights. It was the first time we’d had a bike in Saigon. Tien had one while she was living here, but never while I was around. Before returning to the hotel we went and bought some plane tickets to Hanoi, some doughnuts and some sugar cane juice. We took them back to the hotel and watched Avatar on my laptop.

We lazed away the morning of May 26, spending a lot of time online in our air conditioned hotel room. My brother was online and he told me that my dad had almost died while choking on a chicken bone. He had passed out and gashed his head on the way to the floor, home all alone. He woke up covered in blood and called for help. My mom was with him at the hospital and he was doing decent, alive and stable and probably not permanently damaged. My brother and I decided to buy him a helmet since he seems to be making a habit of this kind of thing, having done something similar last Christmas.

Tien and I caught a taxi to the airport. That taxi hit a motorbike on the way there. Just gently though, and the driver bitched loudly as he rode off with his passenger. I wondered how Saigon would handle the influx of cars that would undoubtedly come with its current business expansions.

At the airport there were two girls talking in castilian spanish sitting behind us in the waiting area. The Jetstar flight to Hanoi was unremarkable, other than the fact that it was Tien’s third time flying. She did well.

I got an aisle seat in the bus from the airport to downtown, and aisle seats always suck. My shoulders are too broad and everybody hits them with their hips as they walk by.

This was Tien’s first time in Hanoi and I wondered what she thought of it as I recalled my last trip and took in the differences between the north and south. Things are more ornate up here. There is more dirt and more rocks. Most highways are raised up on berms or on bridges, and there are significantly more cars. The traffic didn’t flow nearly as well as it did in Saigon, and it was because of the higher number of cars. One car could be stopped and it would back up the whole flow, whereas in Saigon the motos just go around. Another thing I noticed was that people would drive their cars like motorbikes, driving into oncoming traffic on the wrong side of the street, as if they could just slip by oncoming traffic as easily as they could on a motorbike. Traffic here would prove to be much more frustrating and less fluid than that in Saigon.

At the bus stop a man with a taxi offered to take us to his hotel. It was nearby where we wanted to stay so we went. We agreed to stay there, but the more I looked at things the more I realized we’d checked into a pretty crummy hotel. Not only that but after walking around our neighborhood we realized that it kinda sucked. Those two factors made Hanoi much less fun than I was hoping.

We went out for dinner and found something just as mediocre as our hotel, ate, then retired for the night.

We found a cafe and sat for a while, watching Hero, drinking smoothies and playing with the iPad. The walk back to the hotel was longer than I’d remembered, and by the time we got there it was time for lunch. We went back to the restaurant we’d eaten lunch at the day before and this time I took time to scrutinize the menu a bit more. It had some very interesting things, to say the least… Sauted [sic] noodle w. 3 special objects, Cow marrow ommelette [sic], Sauted [sic] ox pennis [sic] w. Satay, Grilled bloody clam w. fat & green onion, and Grilled crocodile file [sic] w. fish sauce were some of the highlights.

We watched a movie, then went out for doughnuts. They gave us a receipt.

On the way back I saw a lingerie store with two half naked mannequins in the front window. A sign read “50% off.” Indeed.

As we entered the hotel the man at the front desk lowered his cell phone, which he was holding facing the door, and greeted us. It was interesting because I’d seen him do that before and thought he might be taking our picture. Also of note was that nobody at the hotel was familiar. Tien had gotten to know the staff before and they recognized us every time, but this time nobody knew us, and here was some guy doing something potentially creepy. It weirded me out and I mentioned it to Tien in the elevator.

On May 13 we headed to our usual breakfast spot and sat upstairs looking down on the intersection. I watched all the different people passing by and thought about all the different ways of life in Saigon, and the world in general. I wondered which of my friends would enjoy coming to Saigon and which would have a hard time adjusting. Tien and I talked a lot about cultural differences and how hard it is to give people insight into what a foreign place is actually like, and I said I couldn’t really think of much to show her what American culture would be like.

The original plan was for us to take off to Vung Tau, Mui Ne or Nha Trang for a while, but we decided to go back to her hometown and then go off to Ha Tien beach instead, so we booked a bus home and headed out. The bus driver was really fast and we expected the trip to only last 4.5 hours. The music was loud and there was an intermittent sound of one of those really irritating alarm clocks. We also passed the scene of a motorbike wreck that had just happened. Fluids were still flowing across the highway from the mangled wreckage and a bleeding man was in the arms of another man on the back of a motorbike that was just taking off down the highway.

When we came upon the wreck, Tien had been in the middle of telling me a joke, which she told like this…

“There was a blue and a red monkey sitting in a tree. The blue monkey jumped into the river, which one was left?”
“The blue one.”
“No, that would be too easy.”
“WTF, is that the joke?”
“People here think it’s funny!”
“I think it’s retarded, that’s not remotely funny. So that’s the punchline? ‘No, that would be too easy’?”
“No.”
“Then how does it go??”
“There’s a blue monkey and a red monkey sitting in a tree. The red one jumped into the river, which one is left?”
“The blue one…”
“Nope, the right one.”
“WTF, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it’s the opposite!”
“The opposite of what…? Left? Wrong?”
“No, of wet.”
“Right is not the opposite of wet. Dry is.”
“Oh, yeah, the dry one.”
“…”

It took us 2 hours to get to the other side of the big bridge in Tan Hoa, something I’d never timed before but wanted to do because it always seems to take forever to get from there to Saigon. There was a cute little kid sitting ahead of us that I’d been playing with from time to time. He was really shy, but he warmed up to me and began playing little games with me. Then he began spitting, and all the sudden he wasn’t cute at all anymore. He was just a rude little bastard that I wanted to smack. I didn’t though, and eventually his mom did so for me and made him behave.

Right as we left Long Xuyen heading for Binh Hoa it began to rain heavily. We passed two people on a motorbike and sprayed them with water, and to top it off, one of the employees on the bus opened his window, pointed at them and laughed at their misfortune. I found this doubly hilarious.

I started adjusting my things to get ready to get off the bus, when I noticed that my wallet was missing all of the US dollars that had been in it. When they were in it, I don’t remember, but they were missing then. All that I knew was that my wallet had been in my pocket since we left the hotel, and that meant that somebody at the Ruby Star had been the one who took it. Maybe that creep with the cell phone, maybe the cleaning staff, I’ll probably never find out. I’ll probably never go back to the Ruby Star either.

It was right as soon as I settled on that when we realized the bus had missed the stop in Binh Hoa and was crossing over the bridge into the neighborhood on the other side of the river. Tien argued a little with the bus folks and they ended up dropping us off on the other side of the bridge where rain water was flooding a business at the side of the road. We crossed to a cafe on the drier side of the road and got some coffee. Tien’s sister was busy fighting a leak in the roof of her new house and said she’d come get us when the rain stopped.

Tien and I sat and talked a while with the family who owned the shop. They wanted to talk to me and asked a lot of questions about where I was from, how we knew each other, and said I was handsome. This tends to be the standard set of interaction between Tien, me and interested strangers. She thinks it’s remarkable how everybody says I’m handsome, but I think it’s probably just custom.

There was also a family next door to the coffee shop who knew Tiens family, so we went over there and visited for a few minutes before Tien’s brother and sister showed up on two motorbikes to take us back to the village.

We arrived at Thu’s house, which I had never seen before, and relaxed with the family, finally home. We ate some doughnuts that we’d bought in Saigon, and some chocolate I had brought from America, and tried to find batteries for a remote controlled helicopter that I’d brought as a joking gift for Tien that stemmed from a conversation we’d had online about flying over the puddles. The helicopter ended up being a lot of fun though and I’m glad I brought it. It wasn’t nearly as entertaining as the Wii that I brought though. Tien said she doesn’t know anybody in Vietnam who has a Wii, and had never seen one before I showed it to her online a few weeks back.

The flight had the standard in-flight entertainment systems on the back of each chair, and I watched people trying to touch the screens as if they were interactive. Then, miraculously they were interactive. They were so slow to respond it was hardly usable, and you couldn’t do gestures like so many people were trying, but you could in fact touch things. This made up for some of my gripes about this system from my travels last year.

When we landed and gathered our things, waiting for those ahead of us to deplane, the man next to me laughed, opened up a plastic bag he was carrying and pulled out a whopper hamburger. He said he had 9 more in the bag that he brought for his family.

I had arranged for a landing visa when my landlord Brando from my place on Telegraph Hill had suggested it to me. He said it was quicker and cheaper. It was cheaper, and significantly easier, but because there were so many other people waiting for them it didn’t necessarily end up being quicker. It wasn’t the longest I’d had to wait to enter a country though, so I certainly couldn’t complain.

After about 45 minutes of waiting I finally made it into the country, fetched my box of gifts and passed through customs without a hitch. I saw Tien before I even made it outside. She was standing in a crowd beyond a glass wall looking beautiful in a black skirt with a bouquet of roses. She spotted me and waved, motioned and ran off through the crowd to get to the fenced area where arrivals are greeted by their loved ones. I set my things down and picked her up in a huge embrace, happy to be back together after more than five months apart. Mai was also there waiting with her, and the three of us caught a taxi back to the Ruby Star. We relaxed for a while and ate some chocolate that I’d brought, then went out for lunch at a place a few doors down that Tien and I had seen but never eaten.

Mai headed home after lunch, and Tien and I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up with lost time and napping. We had dinner and went for a walk through the heart of Pham Ngu Lao. We heard mexican music playing in the park where some people were dancing, and a few other live bands playing english songs, which could’ve been awesome if I’d been gone longer.

Tien’s sisters had prepared some gifts for my family and it was a puzzle trying to fit everything into my backpack. We managed to get everything fit in, though in less of a modular fashion that I would’ve liked. I try to leave my laptop and camera easily accessible right at the top of my bag, but that wasn’t possible this time because of some very odd shapes. We settled with that though and then took a nap, trying to get a head start on rest since my flight left Saigon at 6am which meant we had to travel all night.

It’s always interesting trying to find ways to kill that last unknown bit of time before the bus shows up, and this time around I loaded up Tien’s netbook with snes9x and all the ROMs I had. Tien’s nieces had never played SNES before, but they also didn’t read english. i tried to show them how to work the emulator but hand gestures were again exhausted and I’m sure they didn’t get everything I was trying to show them. I made a note to bring them back some USB controllers so they could play together without having to share the keyboard.

The drive to saigon was the same as always except our driver was notable bad. We arrived in Saigon at 2am, practically asleep. In fact, we did sleep for a while on a bench in some garage at some transit stop where the bus had ended up. I wasn’t sure what exactly the place was, but it didn’t look like a travel agency. A man offered to give us a ride to the airport, which was nice, but he dropped us off right outside the airport instead of taking us inside so we had to catch another taxi the last 1km.

It was 3:15am when we finally got to the airport. I left Tien with my bag outside and went inside to check into my flight, which took less than 5 minutes. Tien, Thu and I sat around outside visiting for the last bit of my trip, taking photos and trying to stay awake.

When it came time for me to go, Tien and I embraced one last time and she melted into my arms. I tried to be strong and positive, but nothing prepares me for that sense of disconnection when I let go of her hand and walked away, realizing that I was then separated by a growing time and distance. It only lasted a minute though, because I had to be ready to navigate immigration and the security checkpoints.

Security was easy this time around, but required a mandatory bag inspection at the gate. This was so inconvenient after the puzzle of packing that stuff into my bag, but I managed to the contents back in with little fuss. My flight left on time, and after sleeping most of the flight away I had a beautiful and clear view of Japan on our descent into Narita. Japan is an absolutely beautiful country and I really want to go explore it some day.

I got online for a while in Narita and chatted with some folks back home. I would be arriving in San Francisco only a few hours date-wise after my departure from Saigon because of the time difference, meaning I flew out at 6am and would be landing at 8am. Kyung asked me to pick him up some Japanese kit-kat’s, and I got some mochi for Lila. I also jumped on skype and re-activated my AT&T cell phone so I would have mobile internet as soon as I landed in the USA.

On the plane to America I was seated next to a scholarly looking Japanese girl. She was studying law of some sort and asked me to keep the window shut because she was allergic to sunlight. I had ever intent of sleeping the majority of the flight away and had no qualms keeping the window closed. Usually, in fact, the flight attendants ask you to do so. I soon fell asleep listening to Kaskade, and the sleep was welcome to my confused body that probably was ready to sleep at any time of the day or night.

When I woke up I started listening to an Audiobook I had picked up, The Forever War. It wasn’t really gripping me though and I found myself struggling to follow the story rather than let my own imagination wander away. I wondered why they didn’t have audiobooks as one of the features of on-plane entertainment, and for that matter why they didn’t have podcasts. This was the terrible entertainment system from my previous flight overseas though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole thing broke down to colored bars.

I put some music back on and began to wake up more, thinking about what I’d do in America. I became inspired to get my shit back on track, to do great things, to return to work and resume making money. I had taken so much time off in the last few months and was feeling an insatiable desire to get back to creative construction of art and technology. I decided to hit life hard.

Blake came and picked me up at SFO and took me down to Cupertino where Lila had my car. We went to Sugar and found my key on Lila’s desk, but she wasn’t there, so the two of us headed down to Barefoot Coffee to pacify my craving for western coffee. Barefoot is the best place to do this, by the way, because it’s probably the best coffee shop I’ve been to in the world. After western coffee the next order of business was to get a proper mexican lunch, which is another thing I can’t seem to find outside of North America. Kyung and Chris met us at Tres Potrillos in Sunnyvale and we all caught up on travels, technological bs, life and whatnot. It was great to be back with my friends in Silicon Valley.

We all went our separate ways and I headed up to Lila’s house to pick up some things I’d left there. Every time I get to her house I don’t want to leave because it’s so peaceful and beautiful, but somehow it seems that almost every time I get to her house I’m in a hurry to go somewhere else.

The drive to SF was nice, as always, and obviously very familiar since I’d done it hundreds of times before. It never gets old though, 280 between Cupertino and San Francisco is one of the most beautiful highways in America. When I got to SF my storage unit was closed, which sucked but wasn’t really a big deal. I also checked my post office box and retrieved my month’s worth of mail which did not include the receipt for Tien’s visa petition, known in the immigration community as NOA1. Later I would call them on the phone and find out that they had in fact sent it and everything was rolling along fine.

I headed a few blocks down to Crossroads Cafe where I had met the SF Flickr Social crew before my trip. It’s a quiet spot with cheap drinks and good parking. There’s no internet though, so I was happy that I’d hacked my iPhone and gotten tethering to work. Lily called me and then came down to meet me. I packed up and we went a few blocks over to Nova to get some drinks.

On our walk from the car we saw a man whose motorcycle had fallen and knocked two other motorcycles over.

It was good to see her and she caught me up to speed on a lot of the things going on in SF and in her life. She was actually on her way out of town so after a drink and a conversation I dropped her off at the BART station and headed over to the coast.

I sat there at the beach for a while, thinking about my position. No job, no home, nowhere in particular to be. This was freedom, but sometimes freedom comes with emptiness. Freedom longs for aspiration because without it stagnation pools. I didn’t want to be stagnant, but I was so exhausted I wasn’t exactly inspired either. Honestly I just wanted to chill out and relax for a while.

I called Rob and then rolled over to his house. He had just got a pizza and was ready to watch Inglorious Basterds in 1080p, and that was exactly the kind of night I was looking for. American cinema, beer and pizza with my amigo. The movie was beautiful, though a bit drawn out, but all in all it was a great time.

I headed back to the BLT’s house and nobody was home. That night I slept for 14 hours.

Tien was sleeping while I figured all of this out, and I was touched with a magic that so many other people in history have been touched with, that of being simply alive and doing normal activities while their love slept next to them, peaceful and in their own little dream world. It is a great joy being able to unobtrusively observe a peace that is completely independent from yourself. It’s almost like a third person perspective on your own joy, because that person is such a part of the happy parts of your own life but at that moment they are detached from the waking realities, such as being ill while on a stormy weathered vacation.

I did some research online and figured that I probably had strep throat, or a number of other more terrible things. The medicines I had been taking were mostly ineffective, but not entirely. At least I had been taking the recommended pain reliever, tylenol.

We had pho for breakfast at our dark alley pho place, which wasn’t so dark during daylight, and decided to go ahead and go to the Vinpearl since we wanted to do something wonderful on this otherwise ruined trip to Nha Trang. We went back to the hotel to pack up some things to take and instead of going we fell asleep. When I woke up I had a fever of probably about 102, which was just a guess compared to a measurement we would take after getting a thermometer.

I got online and told my bother about my sickness. Tien and I had managed to take a decent photograph of my throat and I sent it to him. Having been a medic in the Army stationed in Iraq he had seen plenty of sore throats. He took one look at the photo and recommended penicillin saying it was probably strep throat. The diagnosis was inconclusive without a lab test, but he said that no matter what I was diagnosed with they would put me on penicillin, so it didn’t really matter what I had.

I sent Tien down to the local pharmacy to get some meds and she managed to score some penicillin, which apparently is not a prescription drug in Vietnam. She also got some of other recommended medicine and a thermometer that we used to verify my fever. Needless to say we did not go to the Vinpearl and instead spent the evening inside with Tien quiet and worrying about me. I kept trying to make jokes and talk while she was caring for me but she thought I was delirious from my fever and just worried even more.

Eventually we both went to sleep, but having slept most of the day I was unable to sleep the whole night. I woke up at 2:45 and couldn’t sleep. I took some more meds and found my temperature to be 100. I stayed up for about an hour playing on my computer before I managed to become tired enough to get back to sleep. Tien later told me that she had drifted into consciousness and had seen me playing on the computer, but thought it was a dream and went back to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning it was 8am and I had no fever. After breakfast we figured out our travel plans to return to Saigon and spent the rest of the morning waiting for the train in our hotel room watching Terminator. Tien had never seen it before and she was pretty intrigued by it. I didn’t go into the fact that the robot who had traveled back in time to kill this woman was also the person who was running the state of California where she would be living within a year.

When we were checking out of our hotel the woman at the front desk chatted with us a bit and asked me to bring a man back from America for her. I chuckled, half out of politeness and half out of amusement that so many people in Vietnam say things like that.

We took a taxi to the train station and found that the train was delayed over an hour. There wasn’t much to do or eat at the train station so we wandered down the street carrying our bags and found a restaurant that looked good but ended up being pretty awful. I longed for yelp.vn so I could write a bad review of the place.

We returned to the train station and waited some more. I went to use the bathroom and the mens room was unavailable. The women’s room had no light and there was a lot of liquid on the floor, and who knows what else since it was dark.

When we finally got on the train the first thing I noticed was that it was pretty dirty. The seats were also pretty run down and rickety, but were actually pretty comfortable. Once we started rolling it was great though, so much more enjoyable than the bus. We didn’t get many great vistas, but we did pass a lot of beautiful landscape that I would love to photograph. Some of the landscape looked like jungle, but there were also mountains with rocks that reminded me of Colorado and Wyoming.

We played cards for a long time and listened to music. There was also the standard television entertainment. I saw an ad for a slim TV that was only like 18″ thick and was amused. A few weeks later I would go to a best buy with Dan Fava and find a television that was less than 2″ thick.

We rolled slowly into Saigon that night and got a new view of city life from the window of that train passing behind buildings, looking into bars and apartments and restaurants that we hadn’t seen before. I wished I had a camera that was better at photographing in darkness because there were some really awesome scenes visible from that window.

Tired from our travels, we did the usual routine of finding a taxi to drop us off at the Ruby Star.

Right after waking up Tien called a bus service and found a bus going to Saigon at 9:30. Thu got us some hot breakfast from the market while we packed. We ate and headed off by bus. We were still unsure about the train schedule and availability and decided just to head to a travel agency in Pham Ngu Lao and see what we could find.

As we were leaving Binh Hoa I saw a scooter stacked 4 boxes high that had fallen over while parked and the driver was trying to pick it back up. A peloton of cyclists passed by. Real cyclists, not just school kids on their way. We did pass a school though and I noticed that all schools in Vietnam look the same. Tan buildings with big fences and blue signs with white text.

As we got to Saigon I noticed some large text written with plants on a wall. As we passed I looked back at it and saw it was a billboard wall made with an array of pot holders so you could use pots containing different colored plants to make patterns. Potted plant pixels.

The clouds were dark and it began to rain. I feared bad weather or worse, really bad weather.

I noticed a police checkpoint set up at the side of the road. I had also seen one as we were entering Long Xuyen and I would see another as we were leaving Saigon. I never found out what the story was.

Just after getting into a taxi I saw a guy on a motorbike with no helmet and a styled Asian hairdo with the addition of a mullet.

I saw two young girls on a scooter collide with a woman carrying baskets on each side of her handlebars in busy Saigon traffic.

I saw a guy on a motorbike sharing headphones with his passenger the way Tien and I do. I’d never seen anybody else wearing headphones while riding.

Our taxi turned down Nguyen Trai street, home of the Ruby Star, and we drove for many, many blocks. There were tons of stores full of awesome girl clothes and I thought about how if I was a girl I’d go nuts in a place like that. For a man of my style and stature there is neither the inclination nor the option for such an occurrence.

After arriving at the same travel agency where the two motorbike taxis had dropped us off at last time, Tien and I quickly figured out our travel situation, bought bus tickets and went to find coffee. We only had to go next door to Highland Coffee. We had eaten lunch here before, it was the cafe where the French club owner was negotiating with the local DJs. The food was good here but we just wanted coffee. It had western prices but with them, western flavor, which was very welcome. I had savored a cappuccino.

We stayed there for an hour while I caught up on some internet stuff and charged my phone whose battery had been depleted while playing Fieldrunners on the bus, then went outside and boarded our bus to Mui Ne.

There were very few people on the bus and about half of us were white, though not all speaking English. Most were a group of three girls and one guy who I thought were Ukrainian.

As we headed north there was a variety show on the TV with guy and girl hosts who I recognized. Tien said the man’s name was Nguyen Ngoc Ngan, which may not sound like you think but is still pretty hard to pronounce.

There were a lot of songs sung between guys and girls reaching dramatically out into the air and gazing at each other during the harmonies and looking away during the solos. I asked Tien why so many Vietnamese people like this kind of thing and she just laughed and said it was romantic. I asked why Vietnamese people like romance so much and she didn’t know. It seemed odd for a conservative culture to be so enamored with romance. I thought that as far as video media is concerned, romance was to Vietnamese people what action is to Americans.

A bit later two Vietnamese people got on, one guy and one girl, and immediately struck up a conversation in English with the Europeans. They both spoke english very comfortably and phrases such as “you know, like” made it clear they had lived in America for a while. The man said he was engaged, though not to the girl he was with, then continued to flirt with the Norwegian girls, a detail I garnished from unwilling eavesdropping. He talked on about money and living in America, and it even seemed like his girl friend was being his wingman. For a while I thought he might just be the guy we stayed with in Binh Duong. He was certainly just as sleazy with all the same lines.

One of the bus employees came by asking where to drop us off, but we really didn’t know because we hadn’t planned that far ahead. The man in front of us said he could recommend a cheap hotel to us.

I put my headphones back on and we lost ourselves in a variety of music that I picked while scanning the songs. Debussy, The Thompson Twins, Oscar Peterson, Simply Red, Zero 7, Above and Beyond. We settled on classical and I drifted off for a few songs.

When I woke up we were slowing down next to the ocean to let the Norwegians off. There was a sizzler restaurant and a wind surfing and scuba diving tour place. We rode a little farther and got off where the man who was recommending our hotel got off. A guy on a motorbike was waiting for a fare, and he flagged down another passing motorbike to take us to a hotel. As we were riding Tien’s driver talked on and on and on in Vietnamese. We left town and headed inland a bit, which wasn’t encouraging because I wanted to be in the city or at least by the water. We took some big roads, passed an empty round-about by some big sand dunes, and eventually popped back out onto a highway that paralleled a beautiful beach. I could see the caps of breaking waves in the darkness. The air was warm, and it was magical riding along the coast through that warm night air on a motorbike next to Tien.

Tien’s driver led us to a dark resort hotel with trees scattered between various buildings. Tien later told me that he had skipped the hotel that the man had recommended because it was apparently too loud and was a dirty place. I honestly couldn’t imagine what a hotel was that was dirtier than the place he took us to. It had water stains on the wall, chipped plaster, it smelled funky, there was a board covering the window in the bathroom, and it looked pretty much like it wasn’t kept up very well.

We checked in and agreed to pay 400k a night, which was clearly too much for what we were getting. We had come so far out of town and hadn’t passed anywhere that was definitely open that I figured the price to take the motorbikes elsewhere would’ve been more than the difference, so I decided to go ahead and take it.

Right after checking in we went 50 feet down to the beach where there were lots of red and blue lights bobbing in the dark ocean. We couldn’t tell what they were, though it was clear some of them were boats because a few times somebody turned on a flashlight and shined it around the boat they were standing on.

There were also some circular boats that looked like baskets sitting on the shore. Somebody was busy filling one of them up with some kind of supplies as if they were about to go out into the water.

The sand was coarse and the water seemed a little dirty, so with that and the fact that I was tired we decided against swimming or even staying at the beach and returned to our room for the night.

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.

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.

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.

Tien and I went for another walk to find a screwdriver and some dinner. We tracked down a screwdriver with little problem and on the way back to the restaurant we found a doughnut shop. Regular people do not eat doughnuts before dinner, but Tien had never had a doughnut before so we indulged and bought six. We walked down the street and shared three of them on the way to dinner.

We chose Viva Coffee for dinner and got a table on the upstairs patio. During this stay in Saigon we ended up eating there quite a bit no only because most of our other outings to find decent restaurants came up fruitless, but because it was literally 2 skinny VN doors down from our hotel.

We had only ever sat downstairs outside, and as we made our way through the inside and upstairs we found that the rest of the cafe was quite different. Outside was decent patio furniture and glass tables with trees that had colored lights hanging from the branches. There were large reaching awnings that could be set nearby your table to give you cover if you needed it. Inside there were rooms with bright colors under dim light with couches set around central coffee tables. The stairs going up were zebra print. There were large screen TVs everywhere playing various asian and American movies. There was even a large TV outside where we were going and at first nobody was there to watch it.

We ordered dinner and I had a cocktail. The cocktails in Asia are never, ever as good as they are in America. Most aren’t even close to the same taste, and sometimes they’re flat out wrong. I had been making my way through the cocktail list trying to find anything that was made right, but this last night turned out to be no victorious climax as I was served a Sex on the Beach with a cherry, a pineapple and a little straw hat as garnish. Not even close. Fortunately it still tasted decent, whatever it was.

Tien and I talked about differences again, mostly differences in freedom. I explained again how Americans have rights that we believe that every person should have by default, not because of some exception or allowance in the law that says it’s OK, but because it’s a right that should never be taken away. Free speech, freedom of religion, the right to bare arms, etc.. The freedom of speech was a big point. She kept asking me if there was anything an American could say that would get them in trouble. I told her there really wasn’t, we were free to say whatever we like. We could bad mouth the government, the police, the president, whoever we want that we disagree with. If you got in trouble it was because of the circumstances surrounding what you said or it was unjust. She thought this was amazing because, of course, she’s from Vietnam where they say you can say what you want but then they don’t let you say anything contrary to popular thought or anti-government or revolutionary. The VN government is even giving buddhist monks a hard time because they see even such a passive religion as competition to the leadership of the government.

We also talked a lot about gun ownership and how that is a dividing issue in America. Tien said she’s really scared of guns and she thinks that Americans always want to shoot and kill each other because that’s what’s on TV and in the movies. Obviously she doesn’t think American life is really like the movies, but to what extent it is different she does not know. I explained both sides of the argument and then went into detail about my perspective on the issue, that we should be allowed to own guns in order to protect ourselves from intruders and as principle to keep oppressors in check.

While we were chatting and eating I checked my phone and saw that my brother had posted a Facebook update. After 4 years in the Army, including two tours in Iraq as a combat medic, he was once again a civilian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sleep at last… Tien and I talked and I drifted off into a Lon nap. When I woke up we discussed the details of my third attempt to get to Cambodia. We would go to saigon by bus early the next morning, leaving from long xuyen.

We woke up at 3:30. I thought about how many times I’ve gotten up at odd hours of the night on this trip. Tiens brother went to find somebody to take us to the station but didn’t come back in time and we ended up motorbiking down with her dad and sister.

It was completely dark, it was warm and there was a crescent moon shining through haze in the sky. We shared headphones and listened to the garden state soundtrack. There weren’t many people on the road, but it seemed that when there were they’d pass us in groups and the headlamp would shine a bright circle onto their backs.

We arrived at the bus top late and had to wait 45 minutes for the next one. Tiens dad shook my hand and smiled big, then rode off on his motorbike. I thought about how interesting it is to communicate things nonverbally, like saying goodbye to your future father in law.

The morning light began to show the details of the rainclouds that had been sneaking up on us in the dark, and as I photographed them they retaliated with a gentle sprinkle. It was pretty dark and my f/4 was not giving me much as far as shutter speed and I thought about how nice it would be to have a tripod. Incidentally the guys at gorillapod.com emailed me the other day asking to use a photo I took on their website and offered to send me some gear. I wished that I had it with me already and later told Tien that when I get back to Vietnam we’d have to go take photos in the morning light if I had received a tripod yet.

As we were boarding the bus I realized that I didn’t have any earplugs. Luckily I had brought a second set of headphones so Tien and I could both listen to music, but we couldn’t share it on a single iPod. I made a mental note to remember earplugs from now on.

We made our way down the bumpy and now familiar route to saigon, the first time in dayligt. At the ferry station I watched crowds of people passing. I saw a guy on a bicycle flirting and joking with the girl he was with and thought about how great it is that mannerisms transcend spoken language. These two were happy and I could see that. Some women behind them were happy and I could see that. Another woman was in a hurry and I could see that. When you’re surrounded by people who don’t speak your language you begin paying attention to such things and they take on a bigger weight in the absence of words.

I saw a half white girl on a bicycle, easily distinguishable because of her brown hair, and realized I had seen another in a restaurant a few days earlier. I wondered if these were products of war.

I saw people taking a motorcycle riding class.

When we stopped for a break Tien and I got breakfast, eggs and bread and coffee, which made me very happy. When a skillet was placed before me I touched it to move it and burned my finger a little and cursed. Instead of the American ever-liable reaction of sympathy and placation, the employee who had set it down laughed and smiled at me and said something in Vietnamese. I thought this was awesome. People need real world conditioning, not the legal shelter from physical reality and responsibility that so many liability lawsuits in America display.

When we got to Saigon the traffic was terrible. I realized that even though Saigon is great for so many reasons I really don’t like it all that much. It’s not bad to stay a day in, but I wouldn’t recommend an extended visit over Hanoi or more rural places. Then again, maybe it’s different if you speak the language, know the hidden gems, or at least have your own transportation.

Tien and I checked into a mildly crummy and hence overpriced hotel and caught up on missed sleep. We sat on the bed and ate pringles and drank soda from the fridge and went back to bed. The best thing about vacationing is a lack of responsibility. We were free to do whatever we wanted with our time and chose to be lazy. Eventually we got up and had lunch, discussing some details of her immigration, then realized we wouldn’t see each other for a few weeks and had a sad goodbye. I gave her a few billion dong, the Vietnamese currency, put her in a taxi and was alone again in Saigon.

I spent the rest of the night in my hotel room catching up on computer stuff and being lazy some more. In the morning I shaved my head, checked the charge on my gadgets, checked out of my hotel and headed for an Australian cafe I’d seen.

Apparantly Australian cafes are not the same as American cafes, which I stupidly expected because of the shared language. I did have a cappucino though, my first in weeks, and a Vietnamese breakfast of bread and beef stew.

A Filipino man was sitting at the next table and began talking to me. He asked about my travels and my work and said he was looking for a cheaper hotel. It was nice to have a conversation and I hoped to find more English speakers on my journey through more popular tourist destinations.

I wnt to the bus HQ and checked in for my ride. I was required to hand over my passport and was told it would be given back at the border of Cambodia.

As we boarded the bus I was asked to let them pack my backpack. When I asked to take it on the bus they said no, so I took my book and gave it up. This was the first time letting it out of my control while traveling.

I got on the bus, found a seat centered between the axels and read until we began to drive away. We passed the bus station where I proposed to Tien as we crawled a crooked trail out of the city. I wished that I had my bag, or more accurately my camera.

I’ve wished several times on this trip that I had just brought along a panasonic LX3. I’ve even considered buying one and mailing my D300 back to America, but have not. Maybe I’ll buy a messenger bag instead, something easy to carry a few accessories in. A man purse.

So here I am on the bus to Cambodia, writing again on my iPhone. I really wish the iPhone had real GPS support. I thought that it did, and the accuracy of the 3g iPhone made it seem so, but I have not been able to get a GPS signal on it since leaving SF even though my Geomet’r works fine. It sucks because it’s not like I knew that before I left, it’s not something I could’ve tested. Maybe if I put in a local SIM card it’ll work…

At dinner we found ourselves on a side-street with many english speakers and restaurants that had Asian and western cuisine. We shared a ham and cheese crepe along with a VN dish, and I had a Saigon Red. It was very satisfying to taste a bit of home and to drink that cold beer on that hot day with my new fiancé. I thought about asking the other English speakers about traveling to Cambodia, but decided not to since my plans were not set.

We went back to the hotel room and took a short nap, checked out of the comfort of the hotel and instead chose to (try to) sleep on the bus on the way to Binh Hoa where we would tell her parents about our decision. I got just about no sleep, and was hardly comfortable until we got to Long Xuyen where other passengers got out. This was like 2 miles from her house. It was 1am.

I’m not sure what all was said because Tien is the only english speaker in her family, but later she told me that she had told them and they are happy with our decision and give us their blessing. I wasn’t sure when she was going to tell them and having learned that they already knew I felt a little weird being past what would’ve been a moment in the spotlight for me to ask for their permission and thank them for their blessing. I really have no idea how this works in Vietnam, and I doubt I’d be much good at it even in American culture. I guess I’m just used to doing things my own way so when it comes to doing things the way of tradition I’m lost.

We had a delicious breakfast at the market and talked things over. We decided that she would stay here to finish a class she is taking, get her passport and her visa to come to America, and that I would continue traveling as I had planned. This tears me a little because I had so hoped that she would be able to come with me, but it’s just not possible. It will be good to continue to travel though, but it would be good in a slightly different narrative as well.

I spent the evening on skype and on chat with friends and family, telling them about how our engagement came about, and everybody was very happy and congratulated me as I knew they would. I had at one point thought about calling a close friend to ask his advice on the situation, but thought better of it knowing exactly what he’d say. I was right, and it was great to have the support and excitement of my friends and family.

Several people told me before I left to come to Asia that I was “living the dream.” I never really thought about it like that, I just thought I was doing what I wanted to do. Now though I am having dreams and making them come true and so I do feel like I am doing as they said, I am living the dream.

On my VN flights there has been a view from the cockpit of the runway displayed on all of the video displays during take off and landing. It’s pretty neat and I’d never seen that sort of thing before.

I wondered how many miles I had traveled so far. It’s too bad there’s not a tool to go through my flickr page, order by date and create a rough estimate of distance traveled.

The controller for the entertainment system on this plane was labeled on the back as an “Enhanced Passenger Control Unit.” I had to laugh at that, envisioning myself being controlled through some enhanced method.

After reading several pages, which is about how much I tend to digest of books at a time, I put it down and turned the music back on. I had beautiful, inspiring music in my ears and outside of my window were huge billowing clouds, some of the most beautiful clouds I’ve ever seen. I took some photos with my iPhone but they came out pretty bad. The motion of passing them was also part of their wonder. I became really inspired and began dreaming about the future… what I would do with my future, where I would go. My mind kept wandering away from my trip to Cambodia and so on, I was dreaming about a girl instead.

I was deep in the zone. “The Zone” is one of those things you have to experience to know exactly what it is. Some call it The Ether. I was having great dreams of great things and a great life. There are people that dream great things and let them go, and there are those of us who dream great things and make them happen. I had dreamed about quitting my job, selling my things and flying away to Asia and I made it happen. Now I was having new great dreams and I wanted to make them happen…

I landed in Saigon, only the name of a hotel in a note on my iPhone. Walking out to the front of the airport I thought Tien might be there waiting for me, so I stood by the window and looked for a while. I didn’t see her, so I went outside and found a taxi driver who said he knew where the hotel was and we headed out.

Rush hour traffic was nuts, I’ve never seen traffic so chaotic, so packed. People were driving their scooters on the sidewalks through the park just to get around the gridlock. A man on a scooter ran into the back of another scooter and knocked her over. People were intentionally driving the wrong way down one way streets to get closer to where they were going. We drove down tiny one lane alleys with scooters coming at us and passing us. One of them hit the mirror of the taxi and knocked it inwards.

It took us a long time to get a short distance, but my taxi driver was on top of stuff and got us to the neighborhood quicker than others would’ve. The problem was that when we got there he didn’t know where the hotel was. We had a minor argument in broken english and written amounts of money and he dropped me off at the Ruby Star hotel.

The Ruby Star ended up being a good choice. The staff was nice, the woman at the counter spoke english, there was WiFi in my room, a stocked fridge, and it was a block away from where all the backpackers were staying. I stayed in for the night, catching up with friends and checking e-mail, facebook and flickr. I chatted with Tien and she said she was in fact in Saigon and had intended to meet me at the airport, but traffic had been so bad she couldn’t make it. I was happy that she had even tried, and more so that she was there in Saigon. We agreed to meet at my hotel the next morning at 8am.

She showed up right on time and we headed out for breakfast and to see what was nearby. Breakfast was good food and good company and good conversation. I was happy as could be to have her back, I’d missed her a lot on my trip and was sad that she couldn’t go, especially since she’d spent so much time setting the whole thing up. I thought about the dreams I’d had the day before and was happy. We talked about life and traveling and I don’t really remember what else…

Then we went and got lost in the city trying to find a book store. We didn’t really get lost in the city as much as lost from the bookstore. People kept telling us to go different ways, and then when we found the bookstore it was closed so we had to find a different one. We finally found the other one and it was quite a ways away from the hotel, especially given the late morning sunlight beating down on us.

The book store was cool inside. We found some ESL books for her to use in teaching her neighbor. There were a lot of books, many of them with incorrect info about customs, typos, etc.. I found two that looked good though, things that I’d use if I were teaching english. We looked for another book to use that would teach small business conversation. I picked up one that had silhouettes of business people with one man talking on his cell phone and no words on the cover in English.

To my surprise, when I opened it up the entire book was all about graphic sexual things. There were diagrams of body parts and translations for things like exhibitionism, bondage and masochist. I flipped through it and sure enough, it was not at all about business and entirely about sex. I thought for a minute about buying it for my friends in San Francisco as a joke, but I thought the novelty of it was only worthy of a story and not of the book itself.

A Vietnamese girl spoke to me in very clear English, I was impressed with her pronunciation. Like all conversations with white people in Vietnam, she started out by asking where I was from. Then she went on to ask me why on earth the word “bad” meant “really awesome.” Aside from using Michael Jackson as an example, I explained to her that Americans use a lot of negative things as slang to mean “really awesome.” Phrases like the bomb, the shit, dope. It never occurred to me that this is how it worked until that moment. She looked so inquisitive, like she couldn’t possibly comprehend why on earth we would do such a thing.

Then she asked if Tien was my friend. Tien thinks that everybody looks at she and I because she’s so short and I’m so tall next to her. I think this is partly true, but people stare at me all the time anyway.

We went out and got some strawberry smoothies to cool off. Even in mid-day heat in Saigon you can still get brain freeze from drinking a smoothie too quickly.

We walked and walked and walked and got sorta lost and found our way back near the hotel. I was a little irritated with how loud the city was, how smoggy it was, and how hot it was. Saigon is an ubiquitously noisy city. There’s nowhere you can go that isn’t noisy. This noise is created mostly by scooters, and thus there is almost nowhere you can go where it isn’t smoggy.

I found a park looking area at a central bus stop and found some shade on a short wall under a tree for us to sit in for a while. Tien began talking about sad things… about how she had missed me and how our cultures were different and how we could only be friends and she was going to have to accept that. I’ve regarded her as a girlfriend, so this was disheartening, and I didn’t feel like leaving it at that since I knew she was giving up.

I asked her about what she would have if she could have it her way. If things could be great, how would they be? What were here great dreams? She didn’t want to tell me, so I told her I’d tell her my great dream if she told me hers.

She said she wanted to be a pharmacologist, which is true and is great but wasn’t related to what we were talking about.

She said she wanted to be with me, to travel around the world with me.

I told her my great dream that I couldn’t get off my mind. The great dream that had been growing in me for a long time and had blossomed on the plane from Hanoi.

I asked her to marry me and to come back to San Francisco with me.

I told her that whenever I thought about the future of my travels I quickly ended up on thoughts of her and I traveling and discovering great things together. I told her that all of the great things I thought about for the future somehow ended up with her. I told her that we had an opportunity to have a great, amazing life together, in love, seeing the world, enjoying each other side by side from now on.

There was some confusion and reiteration and assuring her that I was serious and not just speaking hypothetically.

It was not traditional, it was not a Hallmark card. There in the mid-day heat on a little wall under the shade of a tree in that crummy park at the bus station surrounded by construction and oceans of noisy, polluting scooters in the middle of Saigon, without a ring but without any hesitation or doubts, with just a shared dream of being happy together I asked Tien to marry me and she said yes.

One earbud and one earplug each, Tien and I lost ourselves in music as our bus flowed through mixed currents of scooters and buses through city streets and country fields, stopping a few times to exchange passengers with the outside world. At one stop I saw a slender american looking girl appearing somewhat lost, standing next to a bus and chatting with a metropolitan looking Vietnamese girl. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her, though I would’ve liked to see what she was doing out in An Giang.

I saw a man on a bicycle with a trailer that said “hamburger” and was carrying two panes of window glass.

When we arrived at a ferry building some vendors poked into the bus selling sweet corn on the cob and tortillas and for a moment I forgot what continent I was on. As the ferry approached the far side of the river the bus driver turned on a light and yelled something back to Tien. “We need to pay more because you are a foreigner.” I didn’t care much to argue about it, and later when I gave the driver 50,000 more he took it and went to eat.

We went on listening to music and driving through the night. On my left, Tien fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and the stranger on my right did the same. I couldn’t sleep though, these seats were made for short people so I got no head rest. My neck was hurting and my head kept falling back. We drove a long way, sometimes down dirt roads with one lane bridges. There were countless bridges, including the beautiful My Thuân bridge.

Eventually we made it to Saigon and found a taxi to take us back to the house we stayed at on my first night in Vietnam. Two familiar faces unlocked the iron gate and let us in. By this time it was 11pm and we had to wake up at 3:30am. This didn’t stop Tien and I from staying up late saying goodbyes and sharing the last of the time we’d have together for a long time.

The morning came too early and as soon as I was done showering a taxi was waiting outside to take us to the airport. The streets of Saigon were very empty at 4am, so it was a quiet, dark ride. I kept thinking of Late Night Alumni’s Sunrise Comes Too Soon.

When we arrived at the airport we found our contact at the travel agency. He gave me a bright orange bag and a bright orange hat which I had no idea what to do with. I managed to stick them in my luggage though, I thought they might come in useful. Despite wishing me well a few times, Tien stayed with me until I was right at the security checkpoint, which is fantastically easier to manage than american airports. I gave her a 500,000 bill, said a final goodbye and stepped through security.

She had been my translator and guide from the time I had stepped out of the secure area, and here I was back inside it, once again without her, headed to Hanoi. I thought about this while I was sitting at the terminal, thinking about how she was probably crying in the taxi on the way back to the bus station.

I slept on the flight, somehow, and before I knew it I had landed in Hanoi and was out walking around in the terminal, wondering where the hell to go. I didn’t see anybody with a sign that looked familiar, or any of the folks from the tour that had been on the flight. I decided to put on my orange hat, and no sooner had I done so than a man was welcoming me and telling me to sit and wait for the rest of the group to arrive.

So I did. I sat and waited. I ate a Snickers bar and drank a Sprite. I read some of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I wrote most of this.

The rest of this city that I’ve seen so far is amazing too, in some good ways and some bad ways that add up to awesome.

The architecture here is fantastic, I haven’t seen one building that isn’t interesting in some way.

There’s this river that flows around here, more like a canal, and it’s black as crude oil and smells like death with trash floating on the top and people actually fish in it.

There are chickens walking around outside of restaurants where they serve chicken.

Most of the people here have figures that americans would pay personal trainers big bucks to get.

I saw two girls sharing a bicycle eating ice cream. The one in front had her right foot on the right pedal and her left foot on the neck of the frame. The girl in back had her left foot on the left pedal and her right foot on the rear fork.

I saw a whole family on a single scooter passing us in heavy traffic at like 25km/h, something that is a bit frightening, but then you see these same people taking their kids to the amusement park to put them on a kiddie train that goes like 4km/h and call it entertainment.

They have these scooter repair shops where you ride up and let somebody fix your scooter while you sit back drink and smoke cigarettes.

People’s houses don’t have garages, they just have entry ways with double-doors where you ride your scooter straight into the house and park it there, inside the house.

Almost every shop on the street just has a wide open front, no front wall, and you ride your scooter right up to the front, park and walk in.

They have three-wheeled motor trikes with cargo areas in the front.

There are a million shops just selling scrap metal. You see people outside welding stuff together or running spools of metal through machines that straighten them out into rebar.

They have showers where there is no separate shower stall, you just shower on the tile floor of the bathroom and the water washes off to a corner drain, which I think is awesome.

Unfortunately I still haven’t found any plugs that work with my laptop and haven’t found a converter, so I don’t have photos to post just now, but will soon.

I decided to throw caution to the windo and went against what everybodytold me to do: be safe. I jumped on a scooter with Tam and headed through the crazy Saigon traffic to one of the many hole in the wall restarutants and had pho for breakfast with Tien, Tien, Tam and Mai. Afterwards we went back home and walked to a stylish coffee shop on an open patio where Vietnamese men were sitting with laptop computers smoking cigarettes while sipping iced coffee with run and listening to loud Japanese music like Maximum the Hormone and Megumi Hayashibara. I’m wondering when I’ll get sick from the ice and water, but so far so good!