Vietnam/Malaysia
I made it to Saigon in the evening and ended up grabbing food with some guys that I met on the bus and split a room to shave some costs. After a few beers I found a travel agency and booked a day trip to the Mekong river delta for the next morning. In shopping around it was apparent that most places charged the same amount of money, but booking an additional bus trip north with the same company saved me a few dollars here and there. The Mekong wasn’t too eventful. I saw a bee farm, sampled some banana rice wine (which was worse than snake/scorpion wine) and rode a low sitting, authentic looking boat through these narrow canals lined with tall palm-leaf looking vegetation. One of the main exports that we learned about was this coconut candy, much like taffy, forever chewy and sweet. It was quite good and others in the tour were begging for more after finishing their teasing sample. I later ended up sitting at a table with some people from China who lived in Singapore. They conversed in Chinese and were surprised when I asked where they were from in their native language. We spent most of the rest of the tour together so I was able to get a little practice in on the road. I wasn’t in Saigon too long so I don’t have much to say about it. One thing that happened was when I was sitting and talking outside with an English girl at a bar. A little Vietnamese girl came up trying to sell her items. The English girl politely said no thank you and promptly after her refusal, the Vietnamese girl leaning in closer and whispered ‘fuck you’ into her ear. I thought it was hilarious, but the girl wasn’t amused. If anything it livened the conversation since my eyes were probably starting to glaze over in boredom. Later on, I hopped on a bus to Nha Trang via night bus, which was equipped with beds and blankets. The bed was a little short, but it wasn’t too bad and was tolerable enough. In the early morning we stopped at a rest stop so everyone could use the bathroom since the one on the bus was broken. Seeing as I had to handle some business, I took a little longer and came out to find the bus gone. “Well, that sucks….” I thought as I shrugged toward the gas station attendant. She made a motion that they could call the bus to come back. Thankfully the Kiwi next to me saw that I was not on the bus as it pulled away and notified the driver. A few minutes later I saw the bus barreling towards me and hopped on without it even stopping. We arrived in Nha Trang around 7:30 in the morning.
Nha Trang was beautiful. Looking toward the ocean you could see distant islands and the silhouettes of fisherman doing their daily fishing in the morning heat. I ended up visiting a temple on a small hill that overlooked a river mouth emptying into a bay, the brown river water diluting to green, then blue as it flowed out to sea. I was only there for the day before I had another bus to Hoi An later that night. I found a nice spot on the beach where I ordered some food, did some reading and slept to pass the time. Afterwards I got a massage, which was just a lot of rubbing and no real pressure, but they had showers so that was the highlight since it had been a while since my last. My “comfortable” bus luck ended in Nha Trang as the tenant directed me to this bench bed in the very back, which was supposed to sleep five people. It wouldn’t have been too bad if there were less than five people. Crammed into the far left corner, it was impossible to sleep with the bus swerving as if we were being chased by a band of motorcycle bandits, passing slow moving trucks and taking turns too fast. After arriving in Hoi An I decided to take a break from busses for a couple days.
Hoi An is an old town in the middle of Vietnam that was a major trade post for the Chinese, Japanese and European countries in the 1600’s. It’s famous for the hundreds of tailoring shops that line the streets where you can buy tailor made clothes cheaply. You can get quality suits for $50-100, coats, shirts, ties, shoes, jeans, t-shirts, anything really for a fraction of what you’d pay for in a department store. They can even send the items back to your home country so you don’t have to lug it with you as you travel. After I checked into my hostel, which looked like an enormous mansion and had a pool for $11 a night, I went down a more obscure looking alley and found a street vendor under a rectangular tent, short table and stools, selling bowls of noodles and various other things. Among those other things was a leaf mixed in that I’ll admit wasn’t a favorite, but the dish and atmosphere were authentic and much more memorable than a place tailored to westerners. Moving around town I found a small shop called “Reaching Out Handicrafts” where Vietnamese people with different mental and physical disabilities were making local crafts, greeting cards, home decor, accessories, textiles, ceramics and needlecrafts. The store revolved around employing people with different physical and mental disabilities, first training them in a particular trade or craft that they enjoyed and were capable of doing and then selling their products to tourists. After talking with the manager I was informed that the training costs vary depending on what was being taught. After reading the profile of a hopeful employee with a hearing disability I saw the training cost for one month was $60 and required 3 months to complete the training. I greatly admired the organization and their mission of empowering those with disabilities and I was soon signing a receipt for 3 months to train someone in needlecraft. For more information their website is www.reachingoutvietnam.com. From there, I checked out the rest of the town, visiting a couple of temples, soaked in the culture and enjoyed the architecture of Hoi An, which pulls from its historically diverse underpinnings. The next day I decided to rent a bike and ride 2km to the coast. On my way there I looked left and became distracted by a narrow road flanked by fish farms and lined with palm trees with a dirt path snaking its way toward the horizon. Naturally I turned left and started heading down the isolated path enjoying the breeze and the scenery. I passed the sporadic local wearing the wide cone hats that define that of a farmer harvesting rice fields. There was the occasional wooden hut, of which one I passed was occupied with four Vietnamese guys. I dismounted my bike and went to the hut after they called out to me and promptly offered me an alcoholic drink in a small cup. After some friendly smiles and patchy small talk they invited me to sit with them and we shared the pink colored alcoholic drink in the soda bottle for the next half hour, attempting English communication. They said they were all students, but later in the conversation a guy said that he owned a transportation company so clearly some things being said was not entirely communicated properly or understood.
www.reachingoutvietnam.com
After my run-in with the locals, I hopped back on my bike and decided to go to the beach to grab lunch and hang out. Restaurants lined the wide beach with lounge chairs and small tables under broad umbrellas made from local palm trees. After ordering some food I hung out there until I decided to head back to my hostel as the sun set in central Vietnam. The next day I left Hoi An in the afternoon for thankfully my last night bus trip. The last ride went out with a bang as I boarded this converted ‘sitting’ bus that again had a bench in the back. Showing them my ticket, they directed me to the back to the five person bench, where there were….five people. Being the last person to board the bus I got stuck in the middle as we headed north. With less than spectacular air conditioning and the hot engine heat seeping through the seats, it felt like I was a planet bending space as the body heat from the two pairs flanking me and the engine seemed to encase the air around me. I still managed a few hours of sleep, waking up sweaty, uncomfortable, and in serious need of a shower in newly arrived, hot and humid Hanoi.
Ho Chi Minhs Mausoleum
After finding and checking into a place, I finally took a blissful shower, cleaning off all the sweat and heat finally allowing my body to breath again. I tried to venture out more than I did, but Hanoi was truly unbearably hot. You walk 50 meters and you’re sweating bullets. I headed to Ho Chi Min’s museum after negotiating a motorcycle ride where the opportunistic driver tried to rip me off by charging double, to learn more about the communist leader of the north and found it to be very one sided. Needless to say, I still need to do my own research to get the entire story. After negotiating another cab ride back, this time almost laughing in this guys face after he tried to charge me 5 times the regular amount, I booked a two-day trip to Halong bay.Halong bay is beautiful, encompassing tall limestone peaks surrounded by placid water, sporadic caves, and overall calm when the boats are docked. I’ll let the pictures below do the talking.
I left Hanoi International airport on a day equally as hot as the one the day I arrived. But Hanoi as a city had a lot of charm and an overwhelming authenticity that left me with a feeling of wanting to go back. One cool thing about Hanoi was the way you crossed the street. With the seamless flow of traffic whirring past, just do as the locals do and step out into the street, moving very slowly. As you slowly make your way across the street, placing your life in the competence of the drivers coming toward you, you’ll soon find yourself in the middle of the road, and cars and motorcycles flow around you like water around a stone in a creek. After half a minute or so, you’re on the other side safe and sound. Riding to the airport it was incredible to see people crossing a highway full of motorcycles, semis, cabs and cars, some carrying big baskets of food, others guiding bicycles and the ever-so-slow old person, whose age exudes so much confidence in the system that he doesn’t even look before he steps out. It was a system that had much more human to human rather than human to machine interaction and I loved it.
Malaysia
Arriving in Kuala Lumpur I quickly found myself in a much more developed country than Cambodia and Vietnam. Where taxi drivers in the previous two countries fought for my business, walking out of the airport they looked up once, then went back to reading their newspapers or cleaning their finger nails. The ride into town was smooth and familiar with the traffic laws mirroring those back west. After finding a hostel in Chinatown, I realized that it wasn’t half as clean and overpriced compared to what now seemed like luxury accommodation in Cambodia and Vietnam. I was happy to leave the next day for Kota Kinabalu as it seemed everyone at the hostel I stayed had some terrible cough, client and owner alike.
I went to Kota Kinabalu for one reason really and that was to climb 4095M Mt. Kinabalu, the tallest mountain in Southeast Asia. It’s privatized so climbing the mountain costs a couple hundred dollars and the journey is purposely split into two days. You climb up to 6km one day and then to 8.5km the next morning at 2 am in order to catch the sunrise over Sabah. They make you get a mountain guide, which I found useless since mine didn’t do anything except annoy me with his cell phone as it screamed the same song every time he received a text. His English was pretty limited so we couldn’t have any significant conversation and after about a kilometer of trying to get to know him or the mountain I gave up. The next morning I lost him completely in the darkness, and then when I decided to go down he had to go up to help someone who was hurt near the summit. He, like me was probably thinking the same exact thing: ”I can’t believe I’m/he’s getting paid for this.” Climbing Mt. Kinabalu you experience a significant change in vegetation as well as temperature. From jungle to bare rock, 75 degrees to 45 degrees, my short sleeves and short pants that were very comfortable at the bottom were clearly insufficient even at mid mountain. I managed to rent a coat for the climb in the morning thankfully or I’d have been a popsicle before the sun came up. I ate the early morning breakfast they provided before I headed up at 3am. Even at 3am there was still a lot of people ‘snailing’ up the mountain and I felt I knew what they meant when they said there were “traffic jams” on Mt. Everest, albeit this was a much warmer, much less demanding scenario. While passing the slow pokes, I would look up and enjoy the stunning stars, their immense numbers collectively named The Milky Way, beaming overhead and inching across the sky as the earth rotated toward dawn. I was the third one up and found that I had to wait another hour for the sun to come up so I found myself a good spot and began the waited. Since I wasn’t moving it was cold and all I could do was just deal with it really. But it was all rewarded when the sun peeked from the east, rising above the South China Sea and through the clouds, splashing Sabah with light 8 seconds old that was created 93 million miles away. All of Mt. Kinabalu, Sabah, the ocean, and the clouds reflected the light coloring the landscape, exceeding expectation and affirming my efforts.
All in all, traveling to Southeast Asia was an incredible experience, one that everyone should take. I by chance went from least developed Cambodia to most developed Malaysia and seeing three countries in three different stages of development was cool to experience. The differences in culture, the way society acted, the infrastructure of each country and overall everyday life as a result of each country's economic wealth was eye opening and incredibly interesting. The experience was well worth the inexpensive trip and my only regret was that it was only 3 weeks.
