It's been a Dong Time

Halong Boat
Originally uploaded by PhoJones

Once again the lure of being a luddite has made this post impossibly late and likely laking.

Since the Vang Vieng adventure, we took a bumpy, winding bus down to Vientienne, the capital of Laos full of old French architecture. A mixture of being further south and closer to the summer made this the hottest place we've been so far. The city itself was gorgeous but our activities mostly consisted of watching movies and trying to find breaks from the heat. We were once again blessed with a shopping mall food court.

After a few lazy days we took an overnight bus to Hanoi, which was our first foray into sleeper cars. They are much like coffins on wheels especially when we arrived at the border to Vietnam 4.5 hours before it opened and they turned off the A/C. The 8 am crossing was pretty uneventful for us sans a Spanish couple that momentarily lost some electronics.

Upon arrival in Hanoi we immediately saw a representative from The Drift hostel, which happened to be the place we found a buy one night/get one free flyer, so we hopped in their cabs and skipped over the negotiating and opted for the easy $5/night rooms. The hostel was a well-oiled machine for young backpackers with food, travel booking and a very calculated "cool guy" vibe (they featured a beer-pong night!)

The next day we walked over to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Luckily we got there 15 min before it closed for 3 days and still had time to march past him. He requested to be cremated but the Vietnamese people opted to put him on display and send him to Russia for three months out of every year to be serviced. This is one of many other confusing contradictions we've seen in Vietnam. Another is that nearly every person you pass says "buy something?" before any other phrase. Communism alive and well?

The afternoon filled up with hot markets, and eventually Alex and I found a six story place by the river and decided to eat at two of the restaurants within a few hours. The next few days we hung out in Hanoi checking out the Temple of Literature and some nice nightlife.

The next natural step for backpackers is to head to Halong Bay, which is in contending to be one of the new wonders of the world. It's a formerly limestone mountain range that's now huge rocks and caves jutting from the Gulf of Tonkin. Our research with booking trips had reviews ranging from "skip it" to "I saw this lady who lost a finger" and "5 people died," so it seemed really confusing on who to go with. We decided to go with The Drift's well-oiled travel machine and booked through them/AST Travel. The boat was beautiful, everything ran on time, the small group of travelers with us were delightful, the cave tour was thorough and hilarious (our guide talked like a south park character), and sleeping on a boat is always a treat. The next morning we were immediately whisked to do a "trek" which turned out to be about 100 people climbing up surprisingly difficult steep, slippery cliffs. The view was worth it but I looked like I'd jumped into a pool by the end of it. Next we were carted over to Cat Ba island and ended up sleeping for 4 hours in the middle of the day before trying and failing to find any nightlife so watching Moulin Rogue instead (though I remember liking it, I do agree with Alex that it's just one long, big Pepsi commercial).

After returning to Hanoi we hopped on another overnight bus down to Hoi An. It stopped right on time at 10 am but we were only as far as Hue. Going from a deep sleep to being hassled to take taxis in a city you didn't know was fairly shocking. We figured out where to get the 1 pm bus to Hoi An and walked around Hue for a bit managing to catch some of the Imperial center and seeing a lot of artifacts for sale from the War (I attempted to look up some of the American names from the dog tags for sale but failed to find mention of them).

Hoi An is known for being the cheapest place to tailor clothing. Much like the decision for Halong Bay, there was so much confusing info on who to go with, so we ended up sort of arbitrarily going into one. Alex and Todd had suits made (which apparently is very hard?), and I ended up having a really hard time making any decision about anything. The crisis of choice was alive and well, but I managed to get a few perfectly fitting shorts, a nice dress, a formal dress (that I really have no use for), and some clones of a skirt I already wear a lot made. The experience of having something perfectly tailored is certainly worthwhile, but I wish I brought more pictures of my mom at my age or Betty Draper to have a nicer guide of something I'd like to have made. Instead I now own a pair of shorts that look like they are from the sound of music.

With our backpacks about twice as large, we caught a bus to Nga Trhan, which is where I currently write from. The first day's pure beach laze turned into some movies, sleeping in and finally doing some sight seeing yesterday. And by sightseeing, I mean the best amusement park in the world!

Vinpearl Island can be reached from the longest cable car over a sea or ocean in the world. Once we arrived, there were endless waterslides and roller coasters with no lines, an arcade where every game was free, a 4D movie theater, an aquarium with a conveyor belt, sharks and turtles, ridiculous kitschy sculptures, a musical fountain show and a circus with monkies riding bicycles and dogs doing a conga line. If you are ever mildly close to Vinpearl Island, go to Vinpearl Island!

We followed up the day of amusement adventure with some drinks at the Why Not Bar? where I once again talked about England with some English girls and headed back with Alex when things started to get too young, drunk and weird. Unfortunately Todd stayed with the party fodder and ended up without his wallet or our bus tickets to Saigon by the end of the long night.

Today was another lazy beach day, and in a few hours we catch another overnight bus to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City.

Happy Birthday Uncle Ho,
Janelle

You say good-Thai, I say Hell-Laos!

Temple
Originally uploaded by PhoJones

Once again slow internet and beautiful, lazy scenery have joined forces to make this update too little and too late.

Following that exhausting day in Bangkok, which now seems lifetimes ago, we woke up at 5:30 am to Todd getting back from going clubbing with his new Thai friends. The stories were confusing and made me happy to be living vicariously from a comfortable bed. The next morning we went to the largest market I had ever been to. Seemingly endless rows of clothes, shows, home decor, flowers, fruits, juice-bags, and animals (including puppies with pricetags affixed to their heads) took up several city blocks. Some of the stalls seemed straight out of midwestern good-will stores with T-shirts of random Iowa middle school sports teams and the like. It also featured a surprising abundance of cowboy paraphernalia, proving the asian cowboy is alive and well.

We took a long ride on the air-conditioned subway back to the train station and hopped an overnight car to Chiang Mai, which was delayed a big but generally harmless. That afternoon we went to the Tiger Kingdom, which is a santuary raising about 35 tigers at different phases of life. Fear not, the tigers are fed several chickens a day and have no interest in harming humans, so we were able to play with them like sleepy cats. We happened to get to play with Meatball, who coincidentally shares the name with what I called my cat for about a week. East meets west.

The following day we signed up for a trek and departed for the jungle at around 8 am. The day started by touring an Orchid farm where I saw someone wearing a "Kansas City Sports Club" shirt. I talked with the family for a while. They were from Bethany, MO and spending some time in Thailand because their son lived and worked in India but had to spend two out of every eight months out of the country by law. His wife was pregnant and just had the baby in Thailand so they were entertaining a brood of other children at the flower farm. One of them was a very scared little boy named Jonathan. He hated elephants.

Our day continued by riding elephants for about an hour. I shared the back my elephant with a Swedish boy named Victor who explained that there aren't many opportunities to ride elephants in Sweden. Go figure. Our elephant kept putting his trunk in watering holes and spraying us and peed a great deal. We fed him lychee berries, which taste remarkably like warheads when not yet ripe (delicious!)

The day continued with a hike up to a waterfall for swimming and eating noodles. We even found a young boy who looked exactly like Mowgli from the Jungle Book. Next we white-water rafted for a few hours, which was more like "try to get your raft from getting stuck on the rocks" as the water levels were quite low. The journey was gorgeous and went by several hill tribes where the children splashed water on us. At one point they instructed us to take off our helmet and life jackets and get on long bamboo rafts. We floated along on this while an old man with very poor English skills instructed the one of us to use a long bamboo rod to direct the raft away from rocks. At the end he told us to all get out and kept saying "SWIMMING!" Our raft navigated the waters much more efficiently than the other raft in our group thanks largely to the Boy Scouts of America and very little to my inability to stay sitting on the slippery benches and stop laughing long enough to help. We reached the swimming area with 30 minutes to wait for the second raft during which time the guide kept saying "SWIMMING!" and little else. At point point an Australian fellow told me a turtle was next to my head. I turned and say what was actually a snake and moved out of the way. Our group stood up and tried to figure out from the guide if the snake was dangerous or not. He didn't really understand us but changed his refrain from "SWIMMING" to "WALKING!" so close call maybe? The snake looked like a harmless garden snake to me but who knows.

After the boat we took a tour of a hill tribe and learned about the communities that arrived from China years ago and made up camp on the hills of northern Thailand. They previously had been very rich due to opium production, but about 10 years ago the Thai government cracked down so now the trade is supposedly nonexistent in Thailand and has largely moved to Burma. The tribes now make money by selling souvenirs.

The next day we caught a bus to Chaing Rai and saw the White Temple, which has been my favorite so far. It's the work of a modern artist who started the project in 1997 and expects it to be completed by 2070. We saw a little over one completed mural that featured superman, spiderman, darth vader, the twin towers with planes, alien and buddha imagery. There were people painting and building while we were there, so it ranks among one of the places I expect to change the most year after year.

The following day we made it to the golden triangle where we intended to take a two-day slow boat from the Lao/Thailand border over to Luang Prahbang. Instead we opted for an 11 hour bus ride which turned out to easily earn the mantle of worst bus ride I've ever been on. Our book, which is only two years old, did not mention the bus as an option likely because the roads are horrible. Winding, narrow, bumpy and in the middle of nowhere. At about 5 am the bus broke down and we had to stop for 5 hours to wait for enough daylight to fix it. During this time Alex started hallucinating, thinking we had arrived and trying to get off the bus. A bee hung out by my head and there were several baby opera singers. One baby had a very loud cell phone that played songs in Chinese.

We arrived in Luang Prhabang, found a place to stay and wandered. The city is an old French colony and a current Unesco World Heritage site. The entire country of Laos has no chain stores, which is fantastic and probably due to how hard it is to navigate the roads.

The next morning we walked around the city and Todd got free breakfast by setting up a stereo for a cafe.

Now we are in Vang Vieng after another motion-sickness inducing van ride. Yesterday we rented tubes and went down the river. They have quite the set up of kids who throw ropes out to you in a tube and pull you over to the bars on the coast. Each bar has swings or slides, free shots if you buy a drink and deafeningly loud (or Laos-d) music. The only good music I heard was a bar that played exclusively Fleetwood Mac.

Today we opted to stay in Vang Vieng since, as Alex keeps incessantly saying "it's so chill." Our hostel is even called Chillao. Every few fee there are bars with pillowed platforms playing the simpsons, friends or family guy and food and drink is very very cheap. I have purchased two of the best pairs of sunglasses I've ever seen as well as some flip-flops with cats on them (I lost my other ones by taking them off to enter a room.) Tonight, we chill!

In the Tubing,
Janelle

PS - I forgot to mention it but several of the restaurants along the way have played TV or movies with hilariously poor subtitles. We watched Pineapple Express and every time they said "Taco Bell" it came up as "Uncle Bill."