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March 27, 2005
In to the heart of darkness
Major happening in the photo gallery! After nearly 2 months at the top, Peyton has finally fallen from her position as most viewed picture. She's been dethroned by the shot of Adam and I with the "bevy of international beauties", as one reader so eloquently put it. The people have spoken, and it seems the people want pictures of attractive ladies from around the world. I'm only too happy to oblige.
It's time to catch you up on the past 2 weeks. I made good my escape from Vietnam without even having to bribe any authorities (this had become a concern after I learned I should not have thrown out the customs declaration form they had given me at the border crossing from China). At first, I was sad to be leaving; after a month, I had grown quite fond of the country, its rhythms and people, and its daily surprises. However, not all of Vietnam's surprises are the good kind, and by the time I was in to my 2-day tour of the Mekong Delta en route to Cambodia, I was getting weary of some of the hassles of Vietnam, and ready to try someplace new.
The boat pulled up to the muddy shores of the Mekong at the Cambodian border, and a dozen small children launched themselves aboard, clambering to grab our backpacks and carry them ashore for us. A 50 pound boy struggled to lift my 50 pound bag on to his back, the bag standing as tall as his chin. I let him carry my smaller day bag instead, and gave him some coconut candies for his efforts. He cheerily took my hand and, skipping, led me across the border. I'm not sure which country he was a resident of, but the border guards were oblivious to him entirely.
The first inescapable fact that I noticed about Cambodia is that it's hot. Damn hot. The kind of hot where you take a shower, and you're never fully able to dry off. The kind of hot that the A/C on buses is no match for. The next is that Cambodia is obviously much poorer a country than Vietnam - in Vietnam, everywhere I went, the country was under development, with new roads, bridges, buildings, entire towns even being constructed. Roads were paved almost as a rule, even in the relative backwaters of the central highlands (the highway having been completed 8 months ago). In Phnom Penh, the capital and largest city in the country, many roads remain unpaved. Even some of the larger tourist destinations (The killing fields, S-21) are located down bumpy dirt roads. There are more ramshackle wooden dwellings here than concrete ones, and people have more of a K-mart fashion going on, whereas the look was decidedly Old Navy & Sports Experts in Vietnam. And yet, on the other hand, there's a lot more cars on the roads in Phnom Penh, and not crappy old beaters either: SUVs, Mercedes, Toyota Camrys. There's certainly wealth in Cambodia, but there appears a vast disparity between the rich and the poor, the poor, as always, being the more numerous.
I stayed a few days in Phnom Penh in the backpacker haven by Boeng Kak lake, and saw the sights around town (including the horror of S-21, a former highschool converted in to a prison where thousands of men, women and children where tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge; and the equally disturbing killing fields, the site of dozens of mass graves from the same period of atrocities). I then headed south to the beach town of Sihanoukville, rendez-vousing there with many of the same group that I'd spent time with in Nha Trang, and we engaged in much of the same activities once again. Partied- & beached-out after a few days, I bused back up to Phnom Penh and then on to Siem Reap, to again restore the balance by taking in some culture at the temples of Angkor Wat.
Angkor Wat is The Thing To Do in Cambodia. It's on their national flag, and perhaps more importantly, it's the name of their national beer. Visiting Angkor Wat is something that I've been looking forward to doing for years, ever since I first conceived of this trip back when I was just heading in to university. Here, at last, the moment had arrived; I awoke at 5am, having arranged the previous night for a motorbike to take me to the celebrated temple for a magnificent sunrise viewing. "Angkor rates among the foremost architectural wonders of the world," gushes The Book (a.k.a. LP guide), "Relish the first approach, as that spine-tickling moment when you emerge on the inner causeway will rarely be felt again". I sped out to the temple, my spine prepared for the tickling of a lifetime.
Could Angkor Wat have been anything but a let down, after the insane build up of these past years? The only thing spine-tickling about emerging on the inner causeway at 6am was the incredible number of Japanese tourists that were perched there waiting to snap each other's picture when the sun made its fateful leap over the horizon; and the fate that was in store for me and my hundreds of Japanese friends that morning was a cloudy day, and an uninspired sunrise. Truly, Angkor Wat (or Angkrap Wat, as I call it) was not the monumental monument I was expecting it to be. It lacked both the grandeur that its size should command, and the personality that an ancient religious edifice should possess. The most I can say about Angkor Wat is that it's big, and made of stone.
All was not lost, however, as there are dozens of other temples around Angkor, some of which I did find incredible to visit. The Bayon, with its collection of 54 stone towers adorned with blissful, smiling faces; Ta Prohm, its walls and towers partly locked in the embrace of gargantuan root systems; and Preah Khan, a giant complex of rooms and corridors which made me feel like Indiana Jones as I explored its maze-like grounds.
After several days of templing, sufficiently filled with culture, I returned to Phnom Penh yesterday. The modest dirt road by Boeng Kak lake where I'm staying is home to a buzzing community of both Cambodians and backpackers, sometimes just sharing the streets and other times mixing together with laughs and smiles. Cambodian people are generally more laid-back than Vietnamese, who tended to be more intense. I saw several incidents of fighting and violence between Vietnamese people, sometimes over what seemed like nothing to me; I don't get a sense for that tendency from Cambodian people at all, who seem more inclined to grin and joke. It's a pleasant change.
Alright, you're now officially caught up. I'll be heading further up the Mekong in to southern Laos in a day or two. Judging from the rave reviews I've heard from fellow travelers who've already been, I expect I might stay in Laos for a while. But I'll play it by ear, as always.
Happy Easter all,
Greg
Posted by Greg at 10:50 PM | Comments (176)
March 11, 2005
The Motorcycle Diaries
"Saigon. Shit, I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle."
- Apocalypse Now
This morning I was lying on the beach in Mui Ne, eating fresh squid with lemongrass and chilies, sipping a Tiger beer and contemplating a swim in the south China Sea. After a 4 hour bus ride, I'm thrown back in to the chaos of urban Vietnam, pounding the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon), looking for a cheap yet clean place to sleep. After an hour of walking away from the outrageously expensive places ($10-$15), as well as the deservedly cheap places ($3: can't stand up in the room, no sheets on a stained mattress, smell of fish sauce, suspected rat problem), I settled on a nice in-between $6 room, which even buys me the luxury of a private bathroom with hot water. The sights, sounds, and smells of Vietnam's most populous city are a shock to the system after my past week of traveling, and a hot shower is the perfect thing to calm my overloaded senses.
I ended up stuck in Nha Trang for much longer than I anticipated. I fell in to an easy social routine with the group of people I've met, which involved going out for dinner, then to the Blue Gecko bar, and finally to the Sailing Club to dance the night away to top-40 western dance hits: Justin Timberlake! Usher! Beyonce! I shook my booty to all and more. On the morning of my fifth day in Nha Trang, having seen absolutely nothing culturally significant the entire time, I realized it was time to leave.
While the majority of the group headed on to Mui Ne, Line and I decided instead to go to Dalat in an attempt to escape the tourist trap and see some of the "real" Vietnam. We managed to convince a couple of other people we'd met in Nha Trang to come along; Leila, a Swede, and Angela, from Manhattan. On the recommendation of an Australian couple I had met in Hanoi, we sought out a guide to take us by motorcycle on a trek around the central highlands, and explore the rural areas mostly untouched by western tourism.
The four of us saddled up with our four drivers, and we struck out northwards, in to the mountains. On our three day tour to Buon Me Thout and back, we drove through stunningly picturesque countryside, stopping at waterfalls, a national park, a silkworm farm, a few plantations of various crops, a brick factory, a chopstick factory, and even to take a ride on elephant-back through a minority village.
When I say factory, a large building with big smoke-stacks and several hundred workers pushing buttons and oiling cogs on mass-producing industrial machines must come to mind; however, a chopstick factory in Vietnam is little more than a tin roof perched on poles under which a dozen workers take bamboo from a pile on one side, hand work it on a couple of crude & well-used machines, and stack bundles of chopsticks out the other side. As soon as we show up at a factory, of course, all work screeches to a halt, and the scene turns in to a two-way gawking competition - us curious to know their trade, they curious to know how old we are, where we're from, which woman is my girlfriend, whether Angela is Vietnamese (she's half Chinese), why we're so tall and funny looking, etc. etc. Our guide translates dutifully and laughs along with them at us; we smile and laugh at ourselves as well, learn how chopsticks are made, and discover that the guy manning the machine is a little bit drunk. A fun encounter for all involved.
In Buon Me Thout, our presence in the street market is as strange and seemingly unwelcome as a visit from extra-terrestrials. Curious stares mix with distrustful glares, and my attempt to purchase bananas from one vendor causes her so much consternation that I simply walk away. We're definitely in a place that the tourists don't often go, and are observed nearly as much as we ourselves observe. On several occasions while driving through the countryside, we'll zoom past a small child or two with bookbags on their back, trudging along the side of the road in the middle of a long hike to or from school, kilometers from anything in particular. Seeing me, they'll throw up an arm, waving madly, and yell "Hello!", faces aglow. All in all, it is a fascinating trip and one of the best things I've experienced in Vietnam.
After our return to Dalat, we all headed to Mui Ne, a vast and uncrowded (to the point of feeling empty) stretch of beach, where I stayed for one night in a bungalow right on the sand before coming to Saigon today. Angela headed back to Nha Trang and then on to Hoi An, as she was in the middle of a northbound journey when we convinced her to backtrack with us. Line and Leila are staying one more night at the beach. I, unfortunately, am running out of time on my visa, and will have to shove off from Saigon the day after tomorrow to head up the Mekong River and in to Cambodia.
If there is one thing that traveling in Vietnam has taught me above all else, it's that you never know what you're going to get. You can read the guide book, the menu, the brochure, the packaging, or whathaveyou all you want - when you walk through that doorway, when the bus or motorbike pulls to a stop, when the goods finally hit the table, you never fully know what you're actually going to get. Every single day is different from the last, and I've learned to let go of expectations entirely. There are some people who try to fight it, who kick up a fuss when they don't get what they thought they ordered, when the accommodation wasn't exactly as promised, when the tour guide didn't tell them that was the last stop to eat for the next 6 hours. These people only ever succeed in making themselves upset, nothing more. As long as you've got a totally open mind and are prepared to deal with anything, nothing can throw you off; even when you order "crat soup", expecting they've misspelled "crab", only to discover that they have, in fact, misspelled "rat". (Rat, by the way, tastes worse than you imagine it would.)
Oh, almost forgot to mention, I posted a slew of new pictures in the gallery. Check it out!
Posted by Greg at 11:42 PM | Comments (780)
March 01, 2005
The road much travelled
First off, a member of the reading audience pointed out that I failed to give a proper account of what became of Henrik, my traveling companion from Hong Kong to Nanning. Henrik continued on to Yangshuo, while I headed south. He reported that he spent several days there, and enjoyed it immensely despite the weather. He's since returned to London, where he lives, and is alive and well though perhaps overworked.
As for myself, I've fallen in to the deep groove carved out by hundreds of thousands of tourists before me. Because it's a long & narrow country, traveling through Vietnam can be done in any one of two ways: top to bottom, or bottom to top. Along the way, everyone makes basically the same stops: Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Mui Ne, Saigon. In fact, you can purchase an open bus ticket to take you the whole length of the country, stopping in these cities, for about US$24. This means that the further you travel, the more you start running in to the same people over and over again. By this point, I'm traveling in a loose group of about a dozen people, who are moving on roughly the same schedule as me. My main traveling companions are Adam, an Australian, Line (pronounced Lynn) from France, and Justin, a fellow Canadian, all of whom I met in Hue.
After Hue, we headed down to Da Nang for a day to see China Beach and the marble mountains, and then on to Hoi An, where I spent about 4 days. Adam and I rented a beat-up motorbike in order to cruise around town and drive out to the nearby beach, and I learned to drive in a 15 minute crash course (not literally). Hoi An is a sleepy little place with a relaxed, laid-back atmosphere, filled almost entirely with tailor shops which produce custom made replica clothes based on any picture or design you give them. Traffic, both pedestrian and motorized, moves at a slower pace than the other cities I've visited in Vietnam, and the local populace is friendly and warm.
Hoi An was so nice, actually, that I came close to not leaving at all... I met a few Vietnamese people there in their early twenties, quick-witted, outgoing and fun, and we became fast friends. It was hard to say goodbye, but the open road beckoned onwards, and as my fellow travelers began to slip away by bus to the next stop on the route, Line and I jumped on a train to ride the 12 hours to Nha Trang in comfort and style. The only ticket we could book was a 6:30AM departure from Da Nang, 40 minutes by taxi from Hoi An, so we made the judicious decision to stay up all night at the Full Moon Bar on the outskirts of town and save sleeping for the train ride. The plan went off without a hitch and we hit Nha Trang several hours ago refreshed and ready to hit the beach.
After 2 weeks in Vietnam, here's a few things I've learned:
1. Sometimes breakfast is eating peanut butter out of the jar with your fingers, squeezed in between two men in cheap polyester suits at the back of a bus.
2. When you go to a massage parlour, you can't always expect that you will be able to get a massage there. Sometimes a sleazy dude with several missing teeth will offer you "boom boom" with the staff instead.
3. The food you get at the street stalls is almost always better than the food served in restaurants, and much cheaper. I've eaten at a street stall at least once a day for the past week, and not only do you get to try new and exciting foods that you can't find on a menu, but you also get the opportunity to interact with local people more. I don't find the sanitary conditions any worse than some of the restaurants I've eaten in, either; one restaurant I visited, I walked through the kitchen on my way to the toilet to discover vegetables being chopped on the greasy floor. To be honest, you don't really want to know how your food is prepared - it makes for a more pleasant dining experience.
I'm off to meet some folks at a nearby bar and check out the nightlife in Nah Trang. Hope all's well in the world with you.
Cheers,
Greg
Posted by Greg at 09:28 PM | Comments (191)