Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Alive and Well and Ready For More

So, we’re finished. It’s been a little over a month since we returned home and integrating back into this reality has been so many things. Certain things are slightly disorienting, others jarring, and then there are plenty of times when we feel like we never left.
Last week, while I was riding my bike in a semi-rural area of Long Island (yes, this is possible), I hit my brakes when I saw a big black thing out of the corner of my eye. I had that same feeling I used to get when I'd see a water buffalo in the road ahead of me. This time it was just a garbage can. As for Danielle, she routinely sizes up the incline on parking garage ramps and marvels when she covers distances of 35 miles in a mere half hour.

On our last day of riding, we pulled into our hotel in Bangkok, got off our bikes, jumped up and down and immediately listed all the terrible things that hadn’t happened to us. It was as if we had made some unspoken pact to never broach taboo topics in an attempt to avoid jinxing our luck. We covered over 1800 miles on our bikes alone and managed to dodge true disaster the entire time.

A List of Nevers:

1. Flat tires
(Schwalbe Marathon Plus touring tires are apparently indestructible)
2. Accidents
(I had a mini incident with a moped in HCMC but we both rode away unscathed)
3. Theft
(minus the 11 year old Cambodian girl who stole 13,000 Riel (or $3) from my handlebar bag, was ratted out by her brother and then shamefacedly gave it back to me)
4. Abuse
(aside from the occasional rock thrower)
5. Injuries
6. Sicknesses
(other than the parasites who have taken up residence in our digestive systems)

It’s truly miraculous.

Also pretty exciting is that we raised over $7000 to help stop child prostitution and child trafficking. Once back in Bangkok we finally had a chance to meet with the people at ECPAT. They were so welcoming and thankful. The money we raised will be used to fund one of ECPAT's Youth Partnership Projects in Southeast Asia.

The Youth Partnership Projects are designed to empower child sexual abuse survivors to take the lead in the fight against the commercial and sexual exploitation of children. This peer support program will be set up in a school located in a high-risk area.

Though it’s nice to be home where things are easy and familiar, we both agree that we’d rather be in some far off place struggling up a mountain, knowing only that what’s around the corner is mostly unimaginable to us.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Back In The Land of Plenty

The official biking part of our journey was officially scheduled to end in Luang Prabang . The plan was that once we reached Luang Prabang we would assess our timeframe and either ride to Vientiane or get a bus back to Bangkok.

Our indolence in Luang Prabang was like a sticky slime that we just couldn‘t shake. We schlepped from one annoying situation to another. Ruined shorts after an oily massage mishap, lazy songthaew drivers who preferred to sit around playing cards rather than drive us anywhere for a reasonable rate, interrupted internet service, useless travel agents, not even the rain was good dramatic monsoon rain, it was just dreary and intermittent. We didn’t ride our bikes anywhere other than to the bus station and to get breakfast. We were tired, fussy, anticipating the end of our trip, Danielle’s bike was on the fritz, we both had relentless gas.
It’s a challenge when we arrive in these bigger, touristed cities. Everyone’s got an agenda, the tuk-tuk drivers carefully paint the names of the local attractions on the side of their vehicles encouraging the frenzy. Caves, waterfalls, villages, everyone’s going in droves to SEE. To TAKE PICTURES. But we’ve been passing waterfalls along the way for days, discretely picking mystery meat out of our meals in remote villages and once we finally make it to a city we just want to wash our clothes and then sit still while we watch CNN and HBO and have a few beers. Of course we wanted to see the Buddha statues in the cave too but even Danielle didn’t have the energy to fight out a good price with the boat operators. Plus, I didn’t feel like filing into the cave in a line of other people who look like me, armed with a camera ready to capture the REAL BUDDAH CAVE. I wanted to pretend that I’m different.

But I’m not. Do I really want to eat rice gruel squatting on a tiny stool in an ally near a motorcycle repair shop while a naked baby crawls in the dirt beside me? Not really. I’d rather eat crepes and with a fork and knife under a bamboo hut along the Mekong River. Are there alternative eating opportunities in between these two experiences? Sure. I’m feeling dramatic. But I can’t help but feel sad about the fact that to me, Luang Prabang felt like one big promotion for happy hour buy-one-get-one-free Lao Lao cocktails and all-you-can-eat sandwich stalls specializing in PB&J. I was disgruntled. Dissatisfied with the idea of tourism. Wholly unimpressed and slightly depressed about what we, tourists, have done to dismantle real places everywhere and reassemble them as we prefer to experience them.

And as I said, we chose not to do much. But if we had fought our way into multiple Wats and lined up to take pictures of the novice monks going about their quiet lives or taken a boat ride up the river to see the caves would it have been any different?

In any event, we bussed it to Bangkok in a two fold V.I.P. bus escapade that culminated in our being dropped off an hour before dawn somewhere near Khaosan Road (the backpacker ghetto) in the rain, both our bikes mangled beyond belief, and as usual, swarmed by tuk-tuk drivers.

It’s become clear that this is when we’re at our best. Toss us in a situation like this, make sure we’ve had close to no sleep, and we’ll be sure to get right down to business. After fishing all our panniers from the pile of filthy, jumbo sized backpacks (our 2nd V.I.P. bus was jam packed with scantily clad 20 something year old backpackers who were covered in mosquito bites, two of whom were nearly beaten to a pulp by me around 2 am when I saw no foreseeable end to their inane chatter) we each began the assembly process. The tuk-tuk drivers in Thailand and Cambodia are unlike their Vietnamese and Laos counterparts; they love to help us. Once they realize we don’t need their services we are all released from the cycle of haggling and harassing and suspicion and free to become friends.

After the crowd cleared, the remaining tuk-tuk drivers took it upon themselves to assist us, our very own pit crew. As I mentioned, our bikes were wrecked during the journey. My forks were so bent my wheel wouldn’t come close to going back on and Danielle’s steering wheel (still, “handle bars“ does not come naturally) was at a 35 degree angle. My tuk-tuk drivers flipped my bike upside down, pried the forks apart until the wheel went on and then fussed with my fender until it didn’t rub the tire. Danielle’s team helped her stabilize her bike so she could align everything. They then held our bikes and passed us our bags and nodded approvingly while we loaded up. The assembly process is always a big hit with bellboys and tuk-tuk drivers. They love how easily everything clips onto the racks.

After an emergency sidewalk pee break, we headed off into the dark, slick streets. By the time day broke we were in Hua Lamphong station and had two tickets for the 9:20 train south. We had a delicious breakfast of spicy fish curry soup for 75 cents each followed an hour later by some genuine Dunkin Donuts Munchkins. This is what I love about Bangkok, somehow it retains its sense of self while simultaneously embracing things western. Like New York, It’s full of tourists but it doesn’t care. Unlike HCMC and Hanoi where the tourist quarters felt almost fenced off from the rest of the city and it was a struggle to find anyone willing to sell us anything for a non-inflated price, Bangkok is a breeze where anyone can ride the trains and river ferries hassle free for less than 60 cents and no one stares at us as we walk by.

Crossing back into Thailand was like riding a V.I.P. rocket ship straight to another planet. From the time we crossed the border we were stunned by the flash. We had no idea how accustomed we’d become to dirt, thatched huts, and inadequate lighting. We crossed a man made line and suddenly mini marts, oversized gas stations and real curbs and street signs lined the highways. Adding to our disorientation was the fact that this was the first border we’d crossed by bus, instead of on our bikes. It’s incredible to think that less than three months ago, when we arrived in Thailand we were amazed by the chaos, the filth, the inadequate lighting and now here we were reveling in how civilized it seemed.

OK, now let me tell you about our bus. The V.I.P. concept is huge in Southeast Asia. Menu items, hotel rooms, buses, really anything can be deemed V.I.P. The term is so widely used that it goes simply by “Vip“ and has been watered down to mean anything from a free bottle of water to a room with a real toilet. One of my favorite pastimes, second only to reading aloud to Danielle the laminated hotel rules and regulations page found in every room (full of stipulations like “Inflammable, explosive, and radioactive materials strictly not allowed” and ”Criminals, ex-prisoners, lepers and prostitutes forbidden from being in room of guest” and “If you choose to take the man or the woman who is not the husband or the wife of you to the room for the love making you will fined and locked to the prison by the laws of the place.”), is trying to figure out what features deem a hotel room/mode of transportation/restaurant menu item Vip. Is it the stickers on the window meant to emulate doilies? Is it the durian flavored noxious Twinkie like thing a shoeless man passes out to each passenger 3 hours into the trip?

In the case of our bus from Vientiane to Bangkok the Vip factor could have been so many things. First of all it was a true double-decker. Finally, my bus dream come true. Two levels, a staircase, this thing was a complete monstrosity. We booked our tickets in Vientiane with a man named Ham who at first seemed to immediately hate us and then just as suddenly, without reason, loved us. As we left he spread his arms, smiled widely and said, “I give you best seats on bus. Number three. Number four. You enjoys.” Ham didn’t lie. We sat on the second floor just above the driver. A panoramic view and more leg room than we could stand. After the foul Vip bus we took from Luang Prabang to Vientiane (where the toilet door was about three feet tall and once pried open revealed a bathroom too with a three foot ceiling and a toilet that flushed out onto the floor) this bus was a gem. It was bug free, had clean (ish) blankets, showed a quality movie (in English), never offered karaoke, and arrived at our destination an hour early.

So, our bike trip was over, but after so much time it turns out we couldn’t give up the dream so easily. We decided to take the train a few hours out of Bangkok and then ride the rest of the way down the Malay Peninsula to Chumphon, where we’d get the ferry to Koh Tao.

So, back on the train again with our bikes in tow. It was reminiscent of our very first train ride, from Bangkok to Prachinburi back in April before our big adventure began. How far we’d come. That first night our train arrived in Prachinburi 3 hours late, after dark. Other than our spin around the park by Danielle’s house in Boston, our bags loaded with canned food and books to simulate our future reality, we had never ridden our bikes fully loaded until that fateful night. We got off that train and spent what now seems like hours assembling everything. Desperately trying to balance our bikes while the handle bars spun around with the extra weight and the little benches we were leaning against tipped over and sweat poured. Not only had we never ridden fully loaded, but we also had no real experience riding on the opposite side of the road, or in the dark, or in Southeast Asia for that matter. We also had no idea where a hotel might be. I was NERVOUS. I wondered if we were really capable of doing this, if we were completely naive, if we had gotten in over our heads. As we headed out of the train station and merged into traffic, my bike wobbling precariously side to side while I tried to control it with shaky hands, I heard Danielle behind me like a crazed cowgirl yell out, “This is it baby! Ride! Ride!”

Two hours into the trip we were both nodding off when a fat man dressed in dirty clothes that smelled faintly of urine essentially sat on top of Danielle and proceeded to torment us with his savant like knowledge of U.S. geography. Using Boston as his jumping off point, he loudly spewed out sentences like this for about forty minutes, “Oh, Boston! Good! Number one! Harvard University! Cambridge. Connecticut. Rhode Island. New Hampshire. Vermont. Maine. Oh Boston, Massachusetts! New England! Number one!”

We still had a minimum of two hours until our stop if we didn’t poke our eyes out first. This was a third class open air train car. Our ticket cost a little more than $1. We stood out. I got up to go to the bathroom and on the way back to my seat multiple Thai people (4) nodded toward our new friend , scowled and quickly shook their heads “No.” He was really, really loud. Were they mad? I didn’t understand.

Back in my seat, our friend was still going. About the time he made his way to the Plains states the nice man who we had talked to on and off before Captain Geography sat on Danielle, discreetly passed me a note that read, “Do not let him help you with your luggage when you are getting off the train.” Creepy, but this was great news. Not only did this note justify our serious distaste for the dirty man, it also gave us license to be as unfriendly and straightforward with him as we pleased. A few minutes later I looked up at the nice man and smiled to thank him and he gave me a stern fatherly look and nodded at our friend who had made his way all the way to New Mexico.

Danielle wasted no time. She told him flat out that he needed to move now because she and her friend had to rest and he was being too loud. Who IS she? I was proud. He didn’t even put up a stink. He moved and the nice man smiled approvingly.

We’ve developed strategies for dealing with disembarking public transportation. We’re always careful about our bags, but the note made us even more careful. Each of us has 4 bags and a bicycle to keep track of and as soon as the doors open everyone surges in both directions, people push to get on as others push to get off. We really throw a wrench in things when we join in the rush holding our bikes vertically, pushing as aggressively as everyone else. When the train came to a stop we each carried off our four bags and I stood with them while Danielle elbowed her way back on the train and got our bikes. Within minutes we were ready to roll out of the station and our big, dirty friend disappeared. I wish the nice man knew how much his note meant.


So when we got off in Hua Hin we were approximately 275 Kilometers from Chumphon and we had two days to get there. We average about 100/day so we knew we had to ride at least 45 kilometers that day if wanted to make the next two bearable. We’d been traveling for almost 24 hours at that point and had very little sleep but we were excited to be back on our bikes. We hit the rode and less than an hour later when we were surrounded by nothing but pineapple plantations the monsoon of all monsoons hit. They come in fast and we’ve learned that a lot times the darkest most terrifying skies produce nothing but a drizzle, but even after days and days traveling outside here with nothing to observe but our surroundings and the weather patterns, we have no clue how it works.

We observed the sky turning darker and darker, saw the wind thrashing the palm trees, heard the thunder in the distance and then cringed when great bolts of lightening ripped through the dark ahead of us and still we pressed on. Really, what were we supposed to do? Pineapples provide little protection and there was nowhere to stay. We road as far as we could, singing, laughing, eventually shivering until we pulled up to the first hotel we saw and walked in literally so much water all over the floor that we had to stand in the doorway to negotiate a rate. Needless to say, we only got about 35 kilometers that day.

We dried off and settled in for the night. The hotel restaurant was the only alternative to pineapples and the menu featured an entire page devoted to crap. Fried crap. Crap soup. Crap with noodle. Every day we are treated to menu mishaps. Frish and ships, stricky rice with eeg, no name vegetable. Fried crap wins the award.



Fast forward two days and we eventually made it to Chumphon. Where we boarded a cargo ferry at 11 pm and though we were promised air-conditioning and beds, we slept on a mat on the floor in a sweltering room with at least 35 other people. Right in front of a Buddhist monk Danielle killed a cockroach with her shoe on someone else’s sleeping mat (double bad behavior as a good Buddhist kills nothing and regards shoes as vile).

Koh Tao was outstanding. We snorkeled and floated for 7 days. We’re not ready to go home and we are so ready to go home. It feels like we just left and it feels like we’ve been gone forever.


Thursday, June 25, 2009

Wow Laos

We have seriously been smack dab in the middle of nowhere for days on end. Squat toilets, no electricity, navigating landslides with care and river crossings with our sneakers slung over our shoulders. Most telling though is that none of the children we’ve been passing know the word hello. Some are naked, all are dirty and heartbreakingly sweet, serenading us with sing-song “Saba -dii’s” from beneath thatched huts or lined up alongside dirt roads. They have nothing to play with but old tires and huge beetles which they fearlessly crash together like matchbox cars. Children as small as six spend all day with their year old siblings strapped to their back and little ones not yet potty trained go without pants.

After being in Vietnam for 5 weeks we became accustomed to being treated with disdain, outrageously overcharged and occasionally ignored upon entering eating establishments. We needed a major attitude adjustment and the immediate, bashful kindness the Lao people showed us helped sustain us while we traversed the most difficult biking terrain yet. I’m not lying when I say tears were shed (Danielle) and screams were bellowed into the jungle (me) and on two separate occasions each of us was ready to quit as we suffered and triumphed through the unpaved, rocky landslide ridden roads of northern Laos.

Now here we are in our first Laos city relaxing in a mysteriously enormous upscale hotel for 90,000 kip ($10)/night where I‘m pretty sure we’re the only guests aside from a pair of Chinese male cyclists (cyclists are everywhere apparently) who look like they ran off course from the Tour de France and ended up in Laos with their alien head helmets and high tech multi colored cycling gear. If they had been around yesterday when we rolled up in our crumpled up dusty shorts and t shirts on our silly bicycles with the huge padded seats they would have surely snubbed us. Certain western concepts seem to not have translated very well in this hotel, we were given only spoons to eat our fried eggs at breakfast and had to eat our cereal with chopsticks the following day, there is wireless internet but no one knows the password, there’s a toilet paper roll holder in the bathroom but no toilet paper and we had to pay our full bill upon check in.
The countryside we’ve been traveling through since we reached Sapa, in northern Vietnam has been unreal. The mountains are bigger than anything we imagined and we’ve both developed strategies for dealing with them. I breath and exhale in threes while I chant, “ I-I-I-ca-a-an” and stare at my knees moving up and down until I’m borderline semi-coconscious and my brain and body are separate entities incapable of tormenting each other and Danielle plays alphabet word games with herself, games like, name an item found in the pharmacy from A-Z or her favorite, name a swear word from A-Z . Periodically I’m rudely awakened from my meditative state by a yell from behind, “What’s a food that begins with U?”

The day we left Sapa we climbed the highest peak in Vietnam and were rewarded with a 26 kilometer descent. It was tremendous. The mountains here are populated with a mixture of ethnic Vietnamese and various hill tribes, Black Hmong, Red Dzao, people who still wear layers of brightly colored embroidered garments, piles of silver and bronze jewelry and various mind boggling, complicated head gear. They live in small villages scattered throughout the mountains in thatched, stilted huts. We are as bizarre and exotic to them as they are to us. The people near Sapa are used to tourists and were entirely disinterested in us, but as we biked farther west toward Laos we created a serious, wide-eyed stir wherever we went. For the most part the villagers were skeptical of us, maybe even suspicious.
Back in Sapa, we met a woman named Ping who brought us to her village (a 2 ½ hour walk) and cooked us a meal in her little hut over a fire on the floor while we held her youngest baby who did not smell like Johnson & Johnson‘s baby powder and cried every time she looked at me. Ping told us that when she was 10, before the tourists came to Sapa, she remembers the first white people she ever saw. She said she was playing outside when three of them come walking into her village and she ran inside to hide and told her mother the big people were coming. She said all the women in the village told the children to come inside and they hid the babies because they thought the white people were coming to take them. It is with this information that we roll into every remote village all smiles and nods hoping to not incite terror in the inhabitants.

In addition to feeding us, Ping also acted as my nurse. I took a spastic fall on the way to Ping’s village and bloodied both my knees. While Danielle laughed hysterically at my stupidity (I went down like one of those handheld, collapsible toys that stand erect until you push the bottom with your thumb), Ping squeezed my elbow and said, “In my house I give you special medicine for your accident.” After lunch, against Danielle’s fervent protests, I let Ping apply a pungent smelling concoction to my knees which she claimed healed her husband of a broken arm in two weeks (I’m not gangrene yet).

A day before we were scheduled to reach the border we came around a corner and found the road entirely impassable. Rock slides and mud slides are fairly common but we’d always been able to get through up until that point. We rolled passed the parked vans thinking we could just push our bikes through and then we heard falling rock and actually absorbed the situation. There were three men suspended from the top of the rock face knocking the remaining loose rock free with sledge hammers and below them was a pile of rubble covering the entire road the length of about 4 buses and at least 15 or 20 feet high. We’re talking enormous boulders the size of Hyundais piled on top of each other and a cliff straight down to the river below. We stood there stunned, watching the giant rocks come crashing down in a powdery blitz unsure what to do.

It was 60 mountainous kilometers in both directions to the nearest town with a guest house and it was well after noon. For the next 4 hours as vehicles and motorcycles accumulated on either side of the mess we sat around and waited as a pay loader cleared a small path through the rubble. We couldn’t bare to backtrack 60 hard kilometers and the idea of riding on a winding, landslide prone road after dark was not appealing so we strapped our bikes to the roof of a bus heading toward the border and at 4:30 the debris was cleared and we embarked on the most terrifying bus ride of our lives.

Other than my irrational fear of dogs, not many things truly terrify me. However, I was brought to uncontrollable, hysterical tears three times during this bus ride. In general third world, high altitude bus rides are always hair raising, but this was a kind of reckless insanity I can not fully explain. Our bus driver was a crazed sociopath who spent most of the ride viciously beating the dust off the dashboard and passenger seat with a dirty rag, accelerating with great force as we approached all sharp, blind curves overlooking steep cliffs, and screaming things maniacally to the woman whose job it was to collect money.

During my third crying fit Danielle braced herself and stood up. Using hand gestures she demanded that the driver slow down which actually worked a little bit. I was still convinced the bikes were going to come loose and fly off the roof. At the first stop I climbed out the bus window and got up onto the roof to inspect them. Before I got back in the driver took off and I could hear Danielle inside the bus screaming, “Stop! Stop my friend is up there!!” He did and I climbed back in.

It is truly miraculous that death was avoided and our bikes never flew off the roof. We arrived after dark in Dien Bien Phu, the town 35 kilometers from the border, loaded our bikes up and headed off to find a place to sleep. We ended up in a nasty, formally fancy hotel where there were cigarette holes in the sheets and the towels smelled like perm solution. That night two restaurants refused to serve us and I almost cried again because I was so hungry and tired and frustrated. We found a place on the street that served us some fried rice which we ate while two large dogs licked the ground by our feet and scratched their fleas incessantly. It was the first time since we left that I’d had enough. I wanted to be home in a clean restaurant without food refuse and dirty napkins all over the floor and mold growing along the walls and fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling and dogs and bugs brushing against me and people sitting around staring at me with disgust while I ate. The truth is though, if I really couldn’t take it anymore I’d have the luxury of getting on a plane tomorrow. Not a day goes by here when we aren’t exceedingly thankful that we were born into the ease of life in the U.S.

Usually at the end of every day we experience what we call our “last slap in the face.” Sometimes it’s a busted up petrol truck pouring diesel in our faces for 15 slow kilometers, or a nasty bit of unpaved road, or my personal favorite, the day a grown man threw a rock at me as I rode by (I like to imagine that he‘s still cowering in his flip flops, praying Danielle doesn‘t come back for him). Our ride to the border at Tay Trang was Vietnam’s last slap in the face to us. The last 20 kilometers were straight up without a break and damn it was hot that morning. We powered through like race hounds lured by rumors of friendly people and good food in Laos. When we finally reached the top not a soul was in sight. The border officials were enjoying lunch and made us wait 40 minutes until they were sated. After they had their fill they came out to inspect and prod our bikes. One official insisted on taking Danielle’s bike for a spin. Following the antics we were set free into that odd nowhere land between borders. The road immediately became unpaved and three kilometers later we entered Laos at the very summit of the mountain, with the outline of mountains visible in all shades of blue and purple in almost a 360 degree view around us.
So far Laos has been incredible. We both wish we could scoop up all the children and take them back home with us. There’s so much need here, it’s overwhelming.

We’re making our way to Luang Prabang and will likely have buns of steel by the time we get there.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Alternative Modes of Transportation

We knew we’d have to take public transportation three times in Vietnam. After the train from HCMC to Nha Trang Danielle was determined to look into alternatives for our trip from Hue to Hanoi. This is mostly my fault. Since I know everything, I decided when buying our tickets in HCMC that we should book the top berth on the train. I stood firm while the woman selling us the tickets shook her head and waved her arms and said, “No, no you no like!” I reassured Danielle that I knew far more than the woman who worked for the railroad about what berth would be best for us.

In India the top berth was like a little haven, my own personal nest where no one could invade my space. In Vietnam the top berth is approximately the size of a coffin and maybe if we were less evolved and still had the climbing skills of lemurs it would have been simple to get up to our coffins, but in our present condition as oversized Americans it took a half hour on the first try. Additionally, on Indian trains there is room under the bottom berths for luggage. Not so in Vietnam. Here, you get to sleep with your luggage, which for us meant we each got to drag 2 panniers, a rear bag and a handlebar bag up into our coffins. I also apparently failed to tell Danielle about the squat toilet and how it empties out onto the tracks. For some reason I didn’t mind any of this but Danielle was not in the mood. I thought she might not forgive me.

She did but she also got her revenge when she booked us two tickets on the sleeping bus from Hue to Hanoi. There is something wrong with bus drivers in Vietnam. When best behaved, they drive like inebriated 15 year old boys who just stole daddy’s convertible. We’ve wondered if their pay is contingent on how fast they can get from point A to point B. They pass petrol trucks on switchbacks going 45 miles an hour. They careen through small villages at top speed. It’s a common sight to see two buses driving side by side at 65 miles an hour playing chicken with a truck on a one lane highway with no shoulder where water buffalo and farmers on bicycles (and American tourists on bicycles) are also fighting for space. They run vehicles off the road and miss head on collisions by mere inches all day and night. They never lay off the horn and they’re usually too busy screaming into their cell phones to be bothered with other details. The thought of getting on one of these buses and trying to sleep was absurd.

But how can one turn down the chance to travel by sleeping BUS. What would it look like? Would there be special seat belts? Would it be a double decker? Would there be a staircase? These were the kinds of questions I had and luckily for Danielle they were pressing enough that I agreed to put my life in the hands of a Vietnamese bus driver just so I could finally get some answers.


Again, the bus company charged us a ridiculous fee or our bikes. Another passenger on the bus stowed a refrigerator sized ventilated box of baby chicks in the bay and I’m pretty sure he didn’t come close to paying what we did, but we consoled ourselves by thinking about all the money we’ve saved by using our legs to get us through most of Southeast Asia.

While waiting to board we peered in the windows to scope out the scene. The bus had three rows of what were basically bunk beds that didn’t fully recline and in the very back of the bus were two king sized bunk beds where strangers would be crammed in like sardines. There is no way we were going to end up in one of the king sized fun beds. We have learned to be as pushy as the locals here and elbows out, we held our place to be first to board the bus. Upon entering we were confronted by a woman hunched over holding open a small blue plastic bag. Danielle stopped and the woman yelled something angrily in Vietnamese and shook the bag. Danielle shook her head and her hands indicating no understand. The woman stamped her foot and shook the bag and kicked Danielle’s foot and again yelled something in Vietnamese.

The bag was for our shoes. How could we have been so foolish? It was one of those times I wished so badly I had the language to say something along the lines of, “Listen lady, you may think it’s completely normal that you want us to put our shoes in a baggie but you would never, under any circumstances, be ordered to remove your shoes and put them in a bag upon entering a public bus in the western world. So please, for the love of God, give me a break for two seconds.“

Barefoot, we walked the aisle to claim our bus beds. Again, we were confronted by a bus employee. This time it was a man who spoke English and without looking at our tickets, motioned to the big fun bed and said, “You sleep.” We refused. He yelled, “Assign seating. You sleep there!” Now maybe 4 weeks prior we would have reluctantly climbed into the king sized sleeper. But we’ve grown wise to this kind of nonsense by now. The seats had no numbers. My ticket had no number. Who was this guy anyway? I tossed my bag over the guy’s head to a Canadian who was standing behind him and said, “Put my bag on that bed. I’m sleeping there.” Like some kind of NBA All-Star Danielle threw her bag across the entire isle of sleeping beds and ducked under one dodging across the isle to avoid the bus Nazi and claimed her single bed. This really pissed him off. He yelled out something in Vietnamese and then took up his fight with the Canadians who also refused to be bullied. We were a unified front and we won.

There was no toilet and the AC shut off at 9pm. About an hour into our trip the horn broke, which was both a blessing and a curse. It didn’t break entirely, it just went from being the typical Vietnamese ear piercing air horn to what sounded exactly like the loudest kazoo ever played, which for some reason, only Danielle and I and the Canadians found absolutely hysterical. We endured this for the duration of the trip.



I spent most of the night gripping the metal rail and involuntarily yelling out when I felt the bus listing to the left so much that I was sure we were going to tip over. After a couple of hours of no AC the available oxygen inside the bus was so low I started to feel like I was going to suffocate. In an act of desperation I fussed with my window and discovered to my complete relief and horror that the window, which stretched the entire length of my body, slid all the way open. This is the kind of thing that just wouldn’t fly in the U.S. It was entirely up to me whether or not I rolled out the window. I opened it a bunch and held onto my bag so it wouldn’t fall out and continued to cry out sporadically in fear.


We made three stops to pee, one of which was in what was likely the filthiest, seediest, most foul smelling place in the developing world, another was at a place that had a cement trough of sorts instead of toilets but Danielle and I and most of the other female passengers on the bus opted to squat in the dirt beside some stray chickens. Every time the bus stopped I’d collect my shoe bag and make my way off the bus and find Danielle and she’d groggily greet me, wondering why I looked so wrecked. Just as I didn’t mind the train coffin a bit, she seemed completely content to be violently thrashed around a dirty, half-reclined bus bed while a jumbo sized kazoo sounded every 4 minutes.

Sometime around dawn chaos outside roused me from a semi sleep state. I opened my eyes just as we were approaching the aftermath of a head on collision between a bus and a truck. People were lined up along side the road bleeding, fanning themselves, crying. It was a scene.


When we finally arrived in Hanoi it was after 9am - we’d boarded the bus at 5:30pm. We’d had no water since then in an attempt to avoid having to pee and I’d eaten one Oreo cookie around 7am simply because I was ravenous and it’s all I had. Now we had to assemble our bikes, figure out where the hell we were and ride in morning traffic to find our hotel. Sometimes I really question what the hell we are doing here.

We made it in record time and found our little hotel to be staffed with the most helpful, sweet people in all of Hanoi (The Royal Hanoi II if anyone‘s interested). Through them we booked a tour to Halong Bay and had our visas extended.

Back in HCMC we took a tour bus to see the Cui Chi Tunnels, but it was a half day trip and seemed far less involved. Our tour to Halong Bay was the first time we left our bikes in the dust and boarded a real tour bus for the long haul. The Royal Hanoi II kept our bikes and some of our bags and we headed out.


Halong Bay is one of the places we’ve both been really excited to see since we began planning the trip. It’s basically a sea of about 2,000 limestone cliffs which rise all craggy and dramatic from the greenish blue water of the bay. They are covered in vegetation and some have been eroded away enough that we were able to kayak underneath them. It was truly gorgeous and the boat we stayed on was a real dreamboat (minus one cockroach).There were about 15 cabins and we met some incredibly fun, raucous Australians who did a superb job of convincing us of the merits of living in their country. Chicken salt, vanilla slices and an incredible social welfare system were among the highlights.


After two months of relying on only each other for all conversation and entertainment we ate these people alive and thankfully for us they were hilarious. We jumped from the top, top of the boat into the bay, swam, consumed an excessive amount of alcohol, watched the sunset and succeeding lightening storm from the top deck and then tore it up with a riotous evening of karaoke, dominated by Aerosmith songs thanks to our new found friend AnnaMarie’s love of all things Steven Tyler.


We’ll likely move to Australia next where we’ll marry Shawn and Michael and visit AnnaMarie and Shane in Sidney on weekends.

When we got back to Hanoi the van dropped us off on the wrong street (Hang Mam instead of Hang Manh) and we ended up having to take a cycle rickshaw with all our bags to our hotel. We’d avoided this form of transportation up until that point as every tourist we’ve seen riding in them look like absolute morons, but being absolute morons ourselves, we couldn’t avoid it forever. As we were slowly being pushed through the busy streets of Hanoi by a 25 year old guy the size of a pre-teen girl a woman selling conical Vietnamese hats took it upon herself to use the opportunity to try to sell me some of her wares. She slowly jogged alongside the cyclo repeatedly putting the hat on my head yelling, “Lady you buy! Lady cheap hat for you!” and I’d take it off and hand it back to her. As this was happening a book seller appeared from nowhere on Danielle’s side and began trotting beside us displaying her cardboard box of photocopied books. In classic form, Danielle actually negotiated with this woman and bought a guidebook to Laos. The hat lady did not do as well with me and I eventually shooed her away.

When we finally got to our hotel we found there was no power because there had been a fire in the hotel across the street the previous night (which explained the piles and piles of melted power lines all crumpled up in the street). We had to change hotels, but first we had to ride our bikes through rush hour traffic to the train station to try to (unsuccessfully) convince the meanest, most miserable man in Vietnam to sell us tickets for our bikes so we could send them up to Lo Cai where were heading the following day. He refused and we rode home dejected and dragged all our crap through the neighborhood over the burnt tree limbs and power lines and charred debris to a new hotel that had power where we finally showered, washed all our laundry, and went out to get water and food for the following day. When we came back to the new hotel the elevator was broken so we climbed to our room on the 7th floor only to open the door and find out that power was out. These are the kinds of scenarios we’ve learned to put up with on a daily basis. I don’t know what we’re going to do when we get back home and everything runs smoothly and makes perfect sense and everyone understands what we’re trying to say.

And this day was just a warm up for what happened the following night when we tried to get our bikes on the train to Lo Cai.

Hai Van Mishap


The Hai Van Pass has become the joke of our journey; our training wheels in the form of a mountain. It’s a mountain pass just north of Danang, Vietnam. Once over this mountain the climate is supposed to change dramatically. In my head, I secretly hoped that meant I would climb the mountain and descend into the Catskills. The road over the pass is a consistent climb straight up for 10km (6 miles). There’s a tunnel that goes through the pass but we would never pass up the chance to challenge ourselves and simultaneously see an amazing view. Okay, and the real truth is that bicycles are not allowed through.

We were pretty confident after nearly 6 weeks of biking that we were in good enough shape to conquer the pass comfortably. The previous day we lounged around My Khe Beach, also known as China Beach which was a preferred spot for American soldiers during the war.

We floated in our tubes; Corinn’s bright pink and decorated with dolphins and fish, mine a bright green hippo with an inflatable head and a circumference the size of my thigh which I stubbornly wear around my waist. We had a couple of beers while sitting in beach chairs and talked for hours with the most adorable and friendly Vietnamese man of all time. He is an insomniac who learned English from watching American movies over and over and over again when he couldn’t sleep. His favorite is Home Alone. Can you imagine the impression that Home Alone has on a young Vietnamese man? He was convinced that all Americans are rich and that Bruce Willis’ character in Die Hard was a reliable source on what Americans earn for a living. He also asked Corinn why she didn’t have a baby since she was so rich. Corinn set the record straight about a woman‘s right to choose whether or not to have children and tried to explain that her non-profit salary did not make her rich. He was shocked by this.

He told us that on average he earns $2/day. He is learning English with the hopes of becoming a tour guide. He told us that in Vietnam it is very hard to get a good job unless you know someone in the government or have a lot of extra money to pay bribes. He told us that there is no such thing as social welfare in Vietnam and seemed to think that no one really has to work in the U.S. because the government passes out free cash whenever someone declares they don‘t have enough. He told us how the Chinese gave the Vietnamese a very strange chemical (that he pronounced with the hard ch sound) that makes pigs grow to their full size at 6 times the normal rate and keeps seafood looking fresh a week after being caught. He also told us that sleeping buses were way nicer and more affordable than trains (more to come on how that turned out).

After hours baking in the sun we parted with our new friend and headed out to find some dinner. This proved to be an enormous challenge. My Khe Beach was at the height of its tourist season so people were out in droves. These were Vietnamese tourists, we were the only westerners amongst the hordes. For blocks and blocks the road side was full of impromptu seafood BBQ joints, all outfitted with the standard sets of mini chairs and tables found at all Vietnamese eateries. These chairs and tables are exactly the same size as the ones found in preschools for snack time. I was never able to sit down and relax at these tables as I was always afraid that when I tried to stand up I would have a tiny chair attached permanently to my ass. Corinn and I never lost our fascination with their choice of dining furniture (we are happy to say that there are normal sized chairs and tables in Laos).

Anyway, at the place we chose were given a bowl of peanuts and menus in Vietnamese. Not one word looked familiar so when the waiter came over I pointed to the people at the table across from us and said “Same, same” to which he replied “feeeeeesh?” and I shook my head yes. About an hour later we were served a plate of fresh greens (none of which I could identify) and rice paper wrappers hard as a rock and some fish sauce. He then placed in front of us what appeared to be a small, square piece of rubber garnished with chilies. We poked at it with our chopsticks and determined it to be a sting ray. We had a lengthy discussion about sting rays and how that woman in Florida was killed when a sting ray flew out of the water and smacked her in the head as the boat she was riding in sped by. We remembered the crocodile hunter and how he was killed by one. Eventually we realized what we were trying to eat was far too small to be a sting ray and we identified it for a second time as a skate. It turns out skates are delicious. But they do not have a lot of meat and we went to sleep pretty hungry. The next morning we realized mid-meal that our cereal had been infiltrated by ants and we were forced to abandon our breakfast.

Unfed and mildly dehydrated, we got a late start at 9 am. The sun was out with a vengeance and ready to wreck our worlds before we even started pedaling. We got a little side tracked on the way to the pass. We needed to get water. We needed to get fruit. We needed to get deodorant. What better time to do a little shopping than when the temperature is rising and we’re heading closer and closer to the hottest part of the day. Jackasses! We didn’t make it to the pass until around 11:30.


We started to pedal up hill. The sun was suffocating. I was trying to breath but couldn’t catch my breath. I kept thinking, “Slow and steady, slow and steady” and “Nothing worth doing is easy” as well as a multitude of other self help phrases when all of a sudden I heard Corinn scream in rage “I just need some shaaaaade!!!! I hate you sunnnnnnnnnnnn! She was at an all time war with her nemesis, that big, giant, fiery ball in the sky.

Delirium was setting in. I know I’m losing it when the pattern on the shirt Corinn wears all the time starts to take on different forms. Sometimes it’s Barack Obama’s face, other times it’s a big giant lion. On this day it was a furious dragon breathing fire at me.

At one point a large van passed us. The side of the van said “Intrepid Bicycles”. The westerners inside stared and pointed at us from their support vehicle and we had a good time yelling after them, “Seriously? You’re the intrepid bicyclists??”

As we rolled up to the top I was near death and so proud of us for pushing through. The reveling in our success was short lived as we were swarmed by women selling pearl necklaces and bracelets. Sales tactics are not well thought out in Vietnam. We were soaked in sweat and barely breathing., they had bottles of cold water and yet they approached us with bracelets?

As we crested the peak 4 British guys each on the back of a moto taxi passed us going in the opposite direction. The first one raised his arm and shook his fist and yelled “Well done!” The second one yelled “Good effort!” We smiled and descended at top speed with the bright blue South China Sea in front of us.

Every pass we’ve climbed since one of us has yelled out at some point, “Why can’t this be the Hai Van Pass??” We miss our training wheels a little.

Right now I’m in a really comfortable hotel in Udomxai, Laos and I’m thinking about my Pops, hoping that you all think good thoughts about him while he is recovering from a quadruple bypass. I love you, Daddy-O!

Sunday, June 7, 2009

More Pictures

These are of HCMC and biking between Nha Trang and Quy Nhon, which was our favorite little cities so far. More later of the remainder of our trip up the coast. There's a ton as usual, as they are pictures taken from both our cameras. Since Nha Trang the scenery has been absolutely stunning!

Ho Chi Minh City

Pictures

Lots from the floating markets.......

Rach Gia - Can Tho