From Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Saigon

I left Phnom Penh for Siem Reap on an airplane, and it was a very short flight. It would have been an all-day long bus trip if I had chosen to take the bus. But the flight was fairly cheap (I think in the vicinity of $45), so flying was worth it. When I arrived in Siem Reap, I checked my emails to find info on my hostel, and discovered that if I had let them know when I was arriving in advance, they would have arranged a free ride from the airport. Oh, well. I considered calling them, but just decided to pay for a tuk-tuk from the airport to the hostel.

The hostel was pretty nice. It had a pool, a movie theater, and its own fleet of tuk-tuks that charged fixed prices so you didn't have to bargain. I always feel a little bit weird about the bargaining culture in many Asian countries. On one hand, it's interesting to bargain down to get a better price, and to some degree, it is expected. But then again, the people you are bargaining with are fairly impoverished, and you are driving their income downward by bargaining. I hope to usually find a happy medium where I pay the expected Western surcharge, but don't get taken advantage of.

I spent a couple of days just checking out the town of Siem Reap before exploring the temples at Angkor Wat. There is a Pub Street and a Party Street, both of which are popular with tourists. The street that is popular with locals is Khmer Pub Street, which I never managed to visit because it was in a faraway location, and I never really had much reason to go there.

I bought a three-day pass to the Angkor Wat temples, which lets you go to all the areas in Angkor Archaeological Park. "Angkor Wat" is used in two senses; there is the actual Angkor Wat temple, which is the narrower use of the term, and then it can mean, in the broader sense, all of the temples in Angkor Archaeological Park.

The first temple I visited was Angkor Wat itself. I opted for the sunrise tour, which meant that the tuk-tuk I had booked left at four-thirty the next morning. It is best to visit Angkor Wat first because it opens earlier than all the other temples, mostly because of the popularity of the sunrise tour. And there are a TON of people there that early in the morning.

So I set an alarm for four-fifteen in the morning. Most of my life, I haven't used an alarm clock; I have just woken up on my own when I need to. But that costs me a slight bit in stress, so I decided to set an alarm clock. Unfortunately, the sound on my phone was turned all the way down, so the alarm didn't go off. But I woke up and decided to check the time, and it was about four-forty eight. Oh, crap, I had overslept a bit. I hoped that didn't mean that I would miss the sunrise.  So I hurriedly gathered together the stuff I would need to bring with me, and bounded downstairs about five in the morning. Now I was about a half-hour late. But, no worries, the tuk-tuk driver was waiting for me, and there turned out to be plenty of time. The first stop was the ticket office, so I could buy my three-day ticket. And, as luck would have it, there were huge lines for the one-day tickets, but no wait at all in the lines for the three-day tickets. So I was able to just get in and out almost immediately.

Angkor Wat is probably the best restored of all the temples in the vicinity. It doesn't have many huge piles of rubble on the premises like many of the other temples in the area. I toured the temple and walked around the grounds. There was a donkey on the grounds; she looked friendly and gentle, and I had just seen a woman petting her, so I walked over to pet the donkey, and it bit me on the foot. It didn't bite very hard, just hard enough to tell me to fuck off.

After the sunrise at Angkor Wat, the tuk-tuk driver took me to a place to eat breakfast. Then we went to more of the temples on what is called the Little Circuit. These are a group of temples that are fairly close together. These temples include several temples in the Anchor Thom area, and the tour ends with Ta Prohm Temple, which is where many scenes in the movie "Tomb Raider" were filmed, so it is also called the "Tomb Raider" Temple now. It was probably the most spectacular temple of the day (except for maybe Angkor Wat), because of the juxtaposition of chaos, rubble, overgrown mature trees that invaded the walls, and the finely sculpted structure.

That night, I watched the movie "The Killing Fields" in the cinema at the hostel. I had never seen the movie before, but I had seen "Swimming to Cambodia", which was about the making of "The Killing Fields." For some reason, I thought Spalding Gray would have a much bigger role in the movie, but he only had a small part.

The second day, I went on the Big Circuit of temples. These temples were a little farther apart, and there was a lot more travel by tuk-tuk in between the sites. The sites were also, for the most part, a lot smaller than the temples that I visited the day before, except for the first temple, Preah Khan Temple. But the subsequent sites of the day were not very big. The next site was Neak Pean, which was just a series of small shrines surrounded by water. Most of the paths were not open to the public; I went down one path that was apparently closed but marked ambiguously (there was a sign that indicated no entry, but it was not near the path, so I took the expansive interpretation and went down the path), and was immediately told to come back by park employees. Ta Som, East Mebon, and Pre Rup were the other sites I visited on this day, and they were much smaller than the other temples.

On the third day of my three-day pass into Angkor Archaeological Park, I went to some temples that were very far apart, so most of the day consisted of travel. The first temple I saw was Banteay Srai, which is also known as the "Women's Temple." Then there was about an hour and a half tuk-tuk ride to Beng Mealea Temple, which was far outside Angkor Archaeological Park, and was within its own park. This was probably the temple that was restored the least, and was filled with stone rubble and invasive huge trees, and they allowed much more climbing on the rubble than the other temples. Then it was back to Angkor Archaeological Park for the temples in the Roluos Group, which are the oldest temples in Angkor Archaeological Park. The Lolei Temples were the first ones of the group that I visited, and they are the ones undergoing the most extensive renovation. They were built within two layers of walls, each area raised up from the last, and there was an amalgam of ancient and newer buildings on the site. Then I saw Preah Ko and Bakong Temples, which were close by. This was the longest day of temple viewing because of all the travel to get to these remote sites, but not the longest day of actual temple visits.

After the three days of temple visits, I just spent the rest of my time there wandering around the town of Siem Reap before flying back to Saigon. This time I got a private room rather than a hostel so I could take apart my packs and re-pack them thoroughly, and get rid of some stuff (unfortunately, I didn't get rid of enough stuff to keep my main backpack from nearly bursting at the seams, so I'll have to revisit this project soon).

Riding from Da Nang to Hoi An

I woke up early in the morning in Da Nang, and packed my stuff to take off.  I went downstairs, turned in my key, and packed up my bike.  Then I took off to eat breakfast and have coffee at a little restaurant I had eaten at the day before.  After that, I headed south out of town.  On the map, it looked like I was taking the road that ran along the ocean.  But I didn't see the ocean at all, it was blocked all the way down by a line of buildings, or the road ran inland farther.  On the way down, a woman pulled aside me on her motorbike and engaged me in conversation while we were both riding down the road.  It seemed like she wanted to practice her English some, so we bantered back and forth for a while as we continued down the road.  She wanted to show me a mountain that she said she lived near, but I wanted to keep going to Hoi An, so I thanked her and kept going on my way, while she turned off the road to go wherever she was going.  Actually, the mountain looked pretty cool, maybe I should have checked it out, but I had a plan, I guess.

I arrived in Hoi An about eleven in the morning, and started looking for a place to stay.  I headed for the Old City to see if I could find a place to stay that was close to the center of the action, so I wouldn't have to ride my bike, and could just step out and walk around.  But I tried a few guesthouses and hotels, and they were full.  Then I tried Booking.com, but couldn't find anything in the area there either, except for a couple of hostels, but I wanted to try to get a private room.  A hostel would have worked if I couldn't find anything, but I finally found and booked a couple of nights at a homestay online that was several kilometers away from the center of the city.  That would work; I could just find a place to park my bike near the center and then wander from there.  And it would be a peaceful place to stay where I could get away from the hubbub when I needed to.

I showed up at the place, it was called Portulaca Homestay.  There was no sign at all signifying it as a place for people to stay; it just looked like a big private residence.  I wandered in, and there was nobody around on the ground floor at all, so I just sat down and waited for a while.  After a few minutes, a friendly Vietnamese guy came from downstairs and said he had just seen my booking online.  He spoke English really well so we did not have any communication difficulties.  He told me, though, that check-in time was not until two in the afternoon, and that the room would not be ready until at least one.  I told him that was fine, I would just leave my bags there and return when it was check-in time.  He sat down with me for a bit and showed me some sights in the area that I marked on Google Maps so I could check out some of them later.  Then I headed off to the Old City to wander around for a while.

The Old City kind of reminded me of a Vietnamese version of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The buildings were all very short and stylized, and almost all of them had a storefront on the bottom floor and then one more story that looked like a residence, or a more subdued business.  For some reason, there were a lot of optical stores that offered eye exams and glasses.  I was curious about what it would cost, since I hadn't had a new glasses prescription in quite a while, and probably need one.  A guy in one shop quoted me a figure of about $135 in US dollars for multi-focal glasses in designer (or faux-designer fake) frames.  Not too bad, cheaper than most storefronts in the US, but probably a little more expensive than it would be for me to buy glasses online from the US.  So I decided to pass for now.

Then I went by the clothing market, because I wanted to buy some cargo pants or shorts.  I need pants with lots of pockets, and hopefully fairly secure pockets.  But most of the stores there made stuff custom, and it was tailored, rather than off-the-shelf as I'm used to buying.  A woman in one of the shops called me over, “Mistah,” she said, “Come visit my store.  I no have good luck today, maybe you buy something.”  OK, sure, I'll check it out.

She offered to make some pants for me, and told me she could put pockets and zippers wherever I wanted, and she'd give me a discount if I bought two pairs.  She quoted me sixty pounds for two pair; I said that was a little expensive, so we went back and forth until we settled on forty-five dollars for two pair.  That was about what I would pay back home, maybe, at a discount store, but she did all my measurements and would do it custom fitted.  I asked her if she could make them into convertible shorts, and she said sure.  So I paid her the money, and she gave me a receipt and told me to come back tomorrow to pick them up.  It seems a little bit strange to have cargo pants custom tailored, but I guess that is the way things are done here.

After paying for the pants, I headed back to the homestay to check in and take a shower, as I felt pretty grungy from riding in the heat from Da Nang to Hoi An.  I checked in and my room was pretty nice.  I took a shower and also washed the shirt and underwear I was wearing in the bathroom sink.  I then lay down on the bed for a bit to relax.  When I went back out, I put on the wet shirt, and figured it would dry out riding around in the heat on my bike, which it did.

I went back to the Old City of Hoi An after eating dinner, and parked my motorbike in one of the many parking lots for motorbikes in the area.  Then I wandered around for a while, and a woman on a boat beckoned me over to take a boat ride on the river.  She asked for 150,000 dong, but I thought that was a little high, so I told her maybe I would come back later.  She then offered 100,000 dong, and I figured, sure, might as well.  I paid her the money and got on the boat.  It was a pretty enjoyable boat ride, and it was just starting to get dark on a night with a full moon.  But about halfway through the ride, I started thinking that the ride would sure be nicer if I had someone to share it with.  Especially since most of the other boats had couples on them.  Oh, well, such is the life of the solo traveler.  You get to do what you want whenever you want, but the tradeoff is that you usually do it by yourself, unless you meet a person or group of people who want to do stuff with you.

After returning from the boat ride, it had gotten completely dark, and I wandered up and down the area of the river.  There were more and more people arriving, and after a while it was starting to get to the point where many areas I was passing through were just major pedestrian traffic jams. It was cool being down by the river, but it didn't look like the flow of humanity was going to abate anytime soon, so I decided to go get my motorbike and skedaddle out of that area.  Little did I realize that I didn't just put my motorbike in a normal parking lot; it was one where they just jammed bikes in there wherever they would fit, without regard for whether there were any channels out of the lot or not.  So when I got there, I found that my bike was way in the back of a sea of motorbikes, and it was crammed in there about fifteen levels deep.  Great.  Getting out of here was not going to be easy. I tried to show the ticket they had given me to one of the lot attendants, but it looked like he had bigger fish to fry and was not interested in paying attention to me.  For one thing, hordes of bikers were lined up outside the gate of the lot in a huge mass trying to get in, and they were trying to cram bikes in closer to each other to make room for all the people waiting.  I managed to somehow squeeze past the crammed-in bikes to get to where my bike was, but there was absolutely no way to get out of that sea of bikes.  I did, with some effort, and just inching it back and forth and nudging other bikes over a bit, manage to get my bike turned around, so now it was facing outward instead of inward.  But there was no way I was going to get it out past all the other bikes.  I just started inching bikes over a bit, centimeter by centimeter.  Then one of the parking attendants started doing that too from the outer side of the bike blob.  After about a half hour of this, with me and the parking attendant working toward each other, we finally met, and I was able to pass my bike through a narrow channel barely big enough to squeeze through.  But the ordeal was just beginning.  I had to force my way past all of the motorbikes trying to get into the lot, and then once I crept my way into the street, there was a total gridlock traffic jam there.  It took about another fifteen minutes to get through the two blocks outside the parking lot, and then about another fifteen minutes to get through the next six blocks or so.  Then, for a few blocks, there was steady but slow movement, and finally I broke free into relatively unencumbered movement to be able to make my way back to the homestay where I was staying.  Fuck.  I definitely was not going to try to head back toward the Old City any more for the night.  I figured I would just head back to the homestay and call it a night, even though it was only about nine at night.

When I got back to the homestay, I found some leftover Mekong River weed (no, not marijuana, but an edible weed that grows in the river that they dry out into sheets) that I had bought in Laos, and started munching on it.  I love that stuff.  It's sort of like sheets of nori, only it has more of a cotton-y texture, and it is dried along with tomatoes, sesame seeds, and other spices, so it has this rich, complex, spicy taste that squeezes out of it when you chew it.  Not much of it left, have to savor it while I can.

To Hue On The Train

I packed my stuff up from my hostel in Ho Chi Minh City, and asked Jessie at the hostel to call a cab for me.  She said she would call a Grab car, and that it would arrive at 11:30 in the morning.  I sat around and waited for a while, and before I knew it, it was 11:40 in the morning, and no car had arrived.  So I asked Jessie again when the cab was coming, and she got a flustered look on her face; she told me that she got busy and forgot to call.  So she tried Uber, and a car showed up within a couple of minutes.  It was no big deal; I had plenty of time.  I always try to get to a transportation hub earlier than necessary just in case some glitch happens.  I got in the car and headed for the train station.

I arrived at the train station, found out what track my train was on, and it was already there, and it opened to board about ten minutes before I got there.  I went to the compartment, and found that I had an upper bunk.  Bummer.  But definitely survivable.  There was still at least a half hour before the train took off, so I went and got some snacks and beverages.  Shortly after I returned to the compartment, the other upper berth passenger showed up, and he was from Italy.  I figured that the people assigned to the bottom would let us sit there until it was time to sleep or until they wanted to take a nap, and told the Italian guy that usually the bottom bunk passengers let you hang out on the bottom for a while.  But when the two passengers who had the bottom bunks showed up, they were an elderly Vietnamese couple, and seemed quite disconcerted that we were sitting on their bunks.  Oh, well, obviously they were not going to share their bunks with us, as others had on other trains I had been on.  So we moved to the top bunks, and I resigned myself to laying in that cramped space for the whole voyage.

Then the Italian guy had a great idea.  He said he was going to find one of the cars that just had seats, and sit in an empty seat by the window, and if somebody came along and asked him to move, he'd move.  Or he could go to the restaurant car.  So he took off for parts unknown.  Shortly after that, I decided to attempt the same move.  I went to the car right behind the one I was in, and it had a bunck of wooden seats, and was almost empty.  So I just sat by the window for a while, and I was able to snap some pictures too.

After a while, I decided to try to find the restaurant car.  So I went traipsing towards the front of the train, and in the process, got questioned by several of the car attendants as to what I was doing in their car.  I told each of them I was looking for the restaurant car, and then they let me pass without further questioning.  When I got to the restaurant car, I found my Italian suitemate sitting there talking to a Vietnamese kid who spoke English very well, but it was obvious it was just “school English” rather than English learned from conversations with people, which he confirmed.  I sat down to hang out with them, and he told me he was in the eighth grade, and that he hardly ever had a chance to talk to English speakers.  He was obviously a very smart kid; he picked up on a lot of things and liked to talk about subjects like the kinetic energy of the train.  One peculiarity was that he spoke EXTREMELY loudly.  But he was a good companion to talk to, and could converse fluidly on a variety of subject, even though his English was a little bit unusually stilted.  The kid was only going a short distance, so he got off the train about a half hour after I met up with the two of them; we wished him well.

I went back to the compartment shortly after that to lie down for a bit; I didn't really want to sleep, but just to rest my mind.  The Vietnamese couple was fast asleep on their bunks.  Maybe they were too tired to share, and just wanted to sleep without disturbances.  But it turned out they were going a shorter distance than the Italian guy and I were (we were both going to Hue), because in the morning, when I woke up, there were two kids who had taken their place somewhere along the line.  I went to sleep around one in the morning on the train; the Italian guy went to slep much earlier in the evening and woke up before me.  I went to the restaurant car to eat breakfast, and he was there again, so I joined him for breakfast.  When I woke up, we had just passed Hoi An, so there was only about two hundred kilometers to go to Hue.

Danang was the next major stop before Hue, and in Danang, the kids got off, and were replaced by a backpacking couple.  The guy was from Denmark, and his girlfriend was from Australia.  They had both been living in Australia for a while, and then took off to travel.  They were very social, and we had some good conversation in the short time that they were on the train from Danang to Hue.  It was a little bit drawn out, because we had two stops where we stopped for a very long time, so even though it was not that long a distance, it was a little longer than we thought it would be.  The whole trip from Saigon to Hue ended up being about twenty-three hours in total, but it probably saved me a week of travel from Saigon, and also may have saved me from backtracking (though I could have taken a different route the other way, it was still fun to have the experience of taking the train).

When I got to Hue, I had to bid the three of them good-bye, because I had to figure out where to pick up my motorbike, which I had shipped from Saigon a couple of days before I left.  So the three of them took off into the city together, while I wandered around the train station trying to figure out where the shipped motorbikes were.  I wasn't having much luck, so I asked a station officer, “Xe may di Saigon” (which is a poorly constructed sentence in Vietnamese that means “Motorbike goes Saigon”) and she pointed me to a dock at the very end of the station.  But she seemed impressed that I was speaking (or attempting to speak) Vietnamese, and smiled broadly.

I went to the dock, and immediately saw my bike surrounded by a makeshift crate there, and packed in cardboard.  Unfortunately, the helmet was on the rack, and had been wrapped to the rack with sticky tape (I was hoping they would use cord, but if they used tape, that they would wrap it in paper first, but no such luck), so there are now sticky, broad tape marks all over my helmet.  Oh well, I'll live.  There were a bunch of Vietnamese guys sitting on the dock drinking liquor and they tried to get me to drink with them, but I kept begging off.  I've been staying away from the booze lately, and trying to keep that going.  They were very persistent, but I kept saying, “Khong, cam on” (“No, thanks”), until they finally quit trying to get me to drink with them.  They started taking the crate and the packing apart, and screwing the mirrors back on.  While they were doing that, a couple of South African guys came along and were curious about the process because they wanted to ship their motorbikes, and so they asked me a bunch of questions about the procedure.  One of the Vietnamese guys asked where they were from, and they told them they were from South Africa, but the guy looked puzzled, so I told him, “Nam Phi”, which means “South Africa”.

As an aside, my Vietnamese is getting much better.  Its still not to the point where I can have a detailed conversation, but I've been finding that I can have entire simple interactions with people completely in Vietnamese, with multiple back-and-forths, and then understanding what they say back to me, which is really cool to me.

The South Africans stuck around to drink a bit with the Vietnamese guys, who had their hooch in a plastic water bottle.  I had to take off to find gasoline, because they had drained my tank in Saigon.  So I went outside the station to see if I could spot any gas stations, but none seemed to be in sight.  I was getting ready to check Google Maps to find a gas station nearby, when I heard a woman in a conical hat say, “Gas?” to me, and hold up a plastic water bottle filled with liquid.  Apparently there are a bunch of people who hang out outside the train station with water bottles filled with gas for those who shipped their motorbikes.  But they charge a lot more than the gas stations.  It was about 30,000 dong for a small size water bottle, so I bought two.  Strangely enough, the gas was a green liquid, and didn't look like any gas I had ever seen before.  But I poured it into my bike's tank, and it started up.  Yippee!

Then I had to drive my bike down this really steep ramp off the dock, and there was a concrete and iron fence just a few feet past where the ramp ended.  My bike was totally packed with my gear, which made it heavier and more unmanageable, and I didn't want to unpack my bike and pack it again at the bottom of the ramp, so I just gung-ho'd it, even though I thought I might crash into the fence, but it turned out OK.  So I set off to find a hotel in Hue.

I rode around for a while, and didn't see many places, and I thought the hotels I saw might be a little expensive-looking (you can really never tell here...some places that look high-class are amazingly cheap), so I thought I'd try Booking.com, even though I'd had some problems finding places that I had booked with them in the past.  Sure enough, I had a hard time finding the place I booked.  It was not where the map said it was, and I drove up and down the street where it was supposed to be over and over again without success.  I was groaning in frustration, and stopped several times to ask local businesses if they knew where my hotel was.  It turned out it was in this barely visible alley off the street shown on the map, but about a block away from where the map said it was.  I was relieved to find the place, and parked my bike where they told me to put it, a little ways down the alley, and unloaded my stuff.  I was a little concerned because this is the most open and unguarded my bike has been, but it is still there, hopefully it will stay there for my entire stay here.  The hotel is pretty nice, and only about ten bucks a night for a private room, though the wi-fi is spotty and mostly not working.

So I did some sightseeing around the city of Hue on foot, and then came back to the hotel to crash; I went to bed pretty early.  The next morning, I went out to walk around some more (still haven't used my bike since I parked it, but I noticed somebody had moved it a few feet away from where it was, which must have been quite a feat since my front wheel was locked).

I ran across a phone store, and decided to stop in.  I had gotten my phone stolen in Saigon a few days before, and bought one in Saigon that was the same model as the one that got stolen.  But my new phone had been overheating a lot, and the battery was depleting a LOT quicker than the battery in my stolen phone had.  The overheating was also making my camera shut down frequently.  I had decided that I was going to take it back to the store in Saigon to see if I could get it repaired or replaced (they had told me there was a one year warranty on it), but here was the same brand of phone store in Hue, so I decided to see if they would do something about it.  They were really helpful, they changed it out immediately even though I had thrown away the box and had left the earphones back at my hotel (of course, I hadn't planned on trying to trade in my phone when I went out walking, but since I ran across this store, I decided to give it a shot).  They told me they would give me the new phone without the box and earphones, and started helping me set it up.  But I couldn't sign into Google because it was telling me that it thought I was suspicious, and they needed to call my US number that I had given for verification.  Shit.  I'm not really surprised that they were suspicious, though, because I now have three different phones of the same model that have tried to log in to my account from Vietnam.  I couldn't do the verification to my US phone number from there, but I could probably do it from my hotel.  So I could not set up any Google stuff, and here I was all the way across town after just wandering aimlessly, with no access to Google Maps to help me get back to my hotel.  But I just went in the direction that I thought I should go in, and that worked out OK; I got back to my hotel fine.  Then when I got there, Google suddenly let me log in without the extra verification step that it had persistently asked me for at the store (I tried several times there).  So I was able to set up my phone, download needed apps, etc., for the SECOND time in just a few days.  And it seems so far like this new phone is not a lemon.

Shipping My Motorbike

Yesterday I was sitting in the lobby of my hostel in Saigon looking at the map of Vietnam and trying to figure out how I would be able to go to the places I want to go in the time I have left in the country, when Jessie, one of the women who works here at the hostel (I don't remember her Vietnamese name) told me that I can put my motorbike on a train and also head somewhere by train, so that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities to me.  I made a reservation on a train to Hue, but was told that I would have to go to the station two days before I was leaving to buy a ticket for my motorbike and have it shipped as cargo.

So today I set off for the train station on my motorbike to have it shipped to Hue.  I got to the station and parked in the parking lot, which charges 3000 dong to park there; it is maybe around 15 cents.  But I really didn't have to park there, as I soon found out.  The thing was that I didn't know for sure if they were going to take my motorbike right then or if I would just buy a ticket and then bring my motorbike when I was leaving.  But it turned out that they did take my motorbike right then.  They drained the gas out of it in preparation for shipping it, took off the mirrors and taped them to the rack, and covered the handlebars in cardboard.  I asked if I could ship the helmet with it, so I wouldn't have to lug it around with me.  The first guy I asked said no, but someone else who appeared to have more authority stepped up and said that I could.  I set it on the rack after they put the mirrors there, and made hand motions like, “are you going to tie/tape it up?”, and the authoritative guy nodded to indicate “yes”. I hope.  I stuck around for a while to see what they would do with it, but my helmet just sat there on the rack.  I certainly hope that it arrives with my bike.  For that matter, I hope my bike arrives OK with no problems, although it probably will.  I'll have to figure out how to get some gasoline into the tank, since they drained it.

The train to Hue will be about a twenty hour journey, and I will head up there in a couple of days.  This will be the first time I've taken a train in Vietnam, and actually the first time for me to journey by train anywhere in Southeast Asia, so I'll get to see what the trains are like.  I hope to ride down the coast back to Saigon and stop in several places on the way.  Taking the train will probably save me somewhere between a few days to a week of travel, though I wouldn't necessarily have to come back the same way I went up.

I decided to just walk back to the hostel from the train station, since it was only a few kilometers, and I wanted to take my time and check out some more stuff I hadn't seen yet.  I stopped by the Independence Palace, and was going to check it out, but I had gotten there too late...it closes from 11:30 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, and I got there right after 11:30.  Maybe I'll head back in that direction this afternoon, maybe not.

So I have no motorbike for the next couple of days that I am in Ho Chi Minh City.  I doubt it will matter much because I have been walking almost everywhere anyway.  BTW, some people don't know that Ho Chi Minh City, HCMC, and Saigon are all the same place.  I talked to a guy the other day who had no idea.  Just in case you didn't know, they are.

At The US Consulate in HCMC

After some of the recent adventures that I have been through, it turns out that my passport is getting pretty full, and I will probably have to renew it fairly soon, not because it is about to expire, but because I am getting close to running out of pages.  Most countries that one can visit require a minimum of two blank pages in a passport to enter; some require four blank pages.  Right now I have six full pages left and spaces here and there for individual stamps on some pages.  But some countries take up a full page for their visa and then maybe a quarter of the adjoining page for the validity stamp.  Since I renewed my Vietnam visa, there are two full pages in my passport for the visas, and then multiple stamps on the next page.  I only had to get one visa sticker for Laos even though I renewed it; they were able to renew it in Luang Prabang with only a stamp, but if I had renewed it by leaving and returning, I would have gotten another full-page visa sticker.

So I have a conundrum coming up.  My Russian visa is in the passport I have now, and Russia does not allow a visa to be valid in an old passport (most other countries do allow you to have a visa in an expired passport, and then show it along with your new passport, but Russia does not allow that).  And I am hoping to visit Russia a few more times in the next few years, since I have a multiple-entry, three-year visa to Russia.  But Russia only allows you to transfer a visa to a new passport at the consulate or embassy where you got the visa, which in my case, was the consulate in Houston.  So I would have to either return to the US to transfer the visa to a new passport, or, possibly, mail my old passport and new passport (once I get one) to a visa service agency in the US to have that done and then have both mailed back.  I probably can't do that while I'm in a country where the mail service is sketchy, though I could do it by private carrier and pay through the nose...but I have time constraints that make it almost impossible.

So when I was in Laos, I figured out what I thought was a workaround to this problem.  Under certain circumstances (and it looked like this circumstance would qualify), one can apply for a second valid passport.  Usually this is only available in situations where it would be just about impossible for one's travel to continue without the second passport.  A good example is if one is going to Israel, and then to one of the Arabic countries that bars entry to anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport (even though Israel will put their stamp in a separate card rather than in your passport if you request it).  That way, you can get the Israeli stamp in one passport, and stamps from any countries you enter via a land border, such as the West Bank or Jordan (because these stamps are circumstancial evidence that you entered Israel and grounds for some Arabic countries to deny you entry), and then get your stamps for the Arabic countries in the other passport.

My plan therefore changed from entering Vietnam somewhere in the middle and slowly making my way down to Saigon, to heading directly to Saigon so I could visit the consulate and get a second passport, then heading back up to the middle of Vietnam.  It took me about a week to get from Southern Laos to Saigon, stopping to rest in cities along the way and do some sightseeing.  I made an appointment with the US Consulate to get the second passport, and got together all my forms and documents to get it happening.

When I got to the US Consulate, there was a huge line stretching down the block.  But it turned out I didn't have to wait in the line, since the line was for non-US citizens applying for visas to the US.  US citizens could just go on through, going through security, of course.  I had researched embassy visits and it was a good thing I did, because there are a number of prohibited items that you can't bring into a US embassy or consulate, and they won't let you leave the items anywhere on the premises; you will just be turned away and have to make a new appointment.  You can't bring in a cellphone, any keys with electronic fobs, any memory sticks or cards, any cameras, etc.  So I left all those items in my locker at the hostel, and just went there with my identification and documents.

I showed up for my appointment, and presented all my documents, and my letter requesting a second passport, and everything seemed to be going fine.  They explained the procedure whereby I would get my second passport sent to me by courier, and I listed the hostel's address, after letting the hostel know that I would have it sent there.

But then it all went wrong.  I got called up to the window again, and was told that they might not be able to issue me a second passport, because there was a requirement for a second passport that I have a letter from my employer justifying my travel.  I told them I don't have an employer, and they said that they probably couldn't do it then, but they were going to look into it more to see if they could find a workaround.  I was completely baffled by the fact that they were seeming to tell me that I had to be employed to get a second passport.  I went to sit back down while they researched it further, and a woman tapped me on the shoulder, and said she overheard what they told me, and she had gotten a second passport a few years ago without having to have a letter from an employer.  So maybe it is a new thing.

Well, they called me up to the window again, and told me that they could not issue me a second passport, and gave me the cite to the rules in the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) that supposedly explained why I couldn't get it.  So much for that plan.  At least they refunded the passport fee that I had paid.  Now I have to figure out something else.  I probably have enough passport pages to get to Russia once, but probably not after that; I'd have to get the visa transferred in the US to visit further.  So after I got back to the hostel, I went to look up the rules in the FAM online to see what they had to say...and the cites they gave me had no text at all, just said, “Unavailable”.  WTF? The rules they used to turn me down were unavailable for me to read?  What does that mean? Are they classified?  Or just not available for some other reason? It was getting obvious that getting a second passport was just not going to happen, at least not in Saigon, maybe I can convince someone at another embassy to do it.  But it looks like the second passport thing is just not going to happen, and I'll have to figure out some other workaround.  More than likely, I'll just visit Russia once on my current passport, and then apply for a new passport at some point after that, and then any other Russia visits will have to happen after I get the visa transferred via the Houston Russian Consulate, but until then, my Russian visa will be temporarily invalid.  This kind of has a snowball effect that changes around all the plans I had for travel, but I really don't know yet the extent to which my plans will be affected.  But it was my own country that messed up my travel plans, not any of the countries I wanted to visit.  And now I am hearing that Europe may start requiring US citizens to get visas to visit there.  If they go through with that, it will add some additional hassle once I want to visit Europe, but at least that is manageable with planning.  And, likely, it will require a visa sticker that will take up more valuable space in my passport.

Suffering

I was thinking about suffering the other day, while I was sitting in a cafe in Quan Son the other night, just after it became dark, watching small children, some as young as toddlers, playing and frolicking in the middle of the main highway which runs right through the center of the town, in the dark. They seemed quite unconcerned about playing on the highway, and never even seemed to think about moving as any vehicles approached, unless they were totally blocking the vehicles' passage, in which case they moved their play just a little bit out of the way so the vehicle would have enough room to pass. Even the smallest children adhered to this protocol, as if it were innate. And they were also quite unsupervised and unmolested by any of the adults, who might have been in the general vicinity, but didn't involve themselves in the childrens' activity at all, other than an occasional communication or a call to dinner. There were also animals such as cows, goats, ducks and dogs milling around on the same highway. Any vehicles that approached just behaved like this was to be expected, and just altered their speed and their path to avoid the children and animals.

It is one of the main tenets of Buddhism that suffering is an inexorable part of the human condition. Humans will simply suffer, that is just a given. Yet not a single child playing on the highway seemed to be suffering in the slightest; their activity seemed like it was the opposite of suffering, or at least relieving their suffering. In the United States, if a toddler was playing on the highway, unsupervised, everybody involved in such activity or even tangential to it would have a probability of being put through some deep suffering. The driver would not expect the child and might hit her. The child could be grievously injured. The child's parents would possibly hear from the authorities and might even face jail time. Bystanders would be agitated by the sight of the child playing unconcerned on the highway, and even more agitated if the child was injured. No parent in the US would tell their child to go play on the highway unless it were tinged with sarcasm, and every child would understand that any such advice was in jest.

Yet here I was in the only night I spent in Quan Son, watching children happily play on the highway that was the lifeline of transportation for this town. Thinking about how sometimes things can be upside down from an outsider's perspective. Thinking that things are often not what they seem. Wondering if some of the things people do to try to relieve their suffering actually increases their suffering, and that maybe it is best to just accept your suffering, and flow with it, and make it work for you, rather than trying to devise strategies to fight against it. Because how can you fight against something that is an unchangeable part of your condition?

I slept at the hotel I was staying at in Quan Son, and then took off the next day for Laos. There was a lot of uncertainty for me as I headed down the road, Highway QL217. But I guess one of the ways to get to certainty is to follow uncertainty and see how it resolves itself. But in facing my uncertainty I made some mistakes that led me to a certainty that was a bad result, though I did reach some certainties that were good results. And it was raining, and it ended up raining for most of my journey, which was exactly the condition I didn't want to face when roads could be washed out or otherwise made more dangerous by the rain.

Mistake #1 was not leaving early enough. I had no idea if the crossing was open on New Year's Day, or even if the road would succesfully lead me there (as I explained in my last blog post). But I did know from information I found online that the crossing was closed from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm, so I didn't want to arrive during those times. I figured that rather than barely arriving during the end of the morning open time, it would be better to arrive right after the crossing was reopened in the afternoon.

Mistake #2 was vastly underestimating the time it would take me to get there. And I really should have known better about that. I already knew that I was facing an unfamiliar road, so I should have estimated that it would take me longer. And it did take me longer, probably an hour and a half longer than I thought it would.

The road on the Vietnam side was surprisingly not so bad. Sure, it had a few stretches of some pretty dodgy conditions, but on the whole, it was not terrible. But it was definitely slow to move through, because there were a lot of switchbacks, and lot of climbing and descending, and other conditions that made it so speed was not a smart idea.

There was not a lot between Quan Son and Na Meo, which was the last town in Vietnam before the border. There were some smatterings of huts, and a few small villages, but on the whole the stretch was fairly desolate. I arrived at the border station between Vietnam and Laos, which actually is several kilometers inside the Laos border according to my map, at around 2:30.

Mistake #3, and this was probably my biggest mistake, was not planning out what I would do after I passed through the border. I had been so consumed with whether or not the road in Vietnam would pan out that I failed to consider what I would do or where I would go once I got to Laos. So I tried to plan out a route through Laos on Google Maps when I got to Na Meo, as I still had my Vietnamese cell signal there. But that was when I found out that Laos is one of those countries that Google Maps does not fully work in. I should have considered that possibility too. Google Maps does not fully work in South Korea, either, and maybe one or two other countries I've been in. Sure, it will show you the roads, but it won't guide you through your route the whole way like it does in many countries, and tell you how far you have to go to the next direction, and so on.

But I did determine that I could make it to Viang Xai once I was in Laos, and I recognized that name from previous research that I had done on Laos. So Viang Xai it was. It looked like it was stretching it to get there during daylight. But there were a number of villages on the map before Viang Xai, and surely one of them would have a guesthouse to stay at if I could not get as far and Viang Xai. Or at least that was my reasoning at the time.

When I arrived at the Vietnam side of the border, the process was fairly straightforward. They had to process me for exiting the country, so I had to go through passport control. For some reason, the process was longer for me than it was for many Vietnamese and Laotians who passed through. They got a basic wave-through, but my processing took more time. But it was still faster than most borders I have passed through. Then I had to get a customs declaration form for my motorbike, which I had to pay 200,000 dong for. And the official asked me what currency I wanted to pay in before quoting me that price. Once again, that was pretty straightforward, and they waved me through to the Laos side of the border after one more official checking to see that all the papers I had gotten were in order.

When I arrived at the Laos side, it took a little bit longer, but not much longer. I first had to go to the visa on arrival window, because I hadn't procured a visa in advance, but I had heard that the visa on arrival was easy to get at the border (it's not so going the other way, you absolutely have to have procured your visa beforehand when going over land from Laos to Vietnam). They had me fill out a couple of forms, and then they motioned me to the next office, where they checked out the customs declaration form that I had just gotten from the Vietnam side, and the rest of my documents, to make sure they were in order. Then they sent me back to the visa on arrival window, and had me wait a while while a guy in a leather jacket came to ask me some questions. The questioning was very informal and cordial, and seemed mostly aimed at determining that I was actually going to leave Laos before my visa ran out. Then the guy told me it was 45 dollars in US currency for the visa on arrival, and to go to the window to pay it. I was ready for that and had forty-five bucks in two crisp twenties and a five. Well, they inspected that money closely. Two officials felt each bill individually several different ways, they shook the bills in the air to see how they behaved when they shook them, and they held them up to the light. When they had performed all the rituals with the money to their satisfaction, they placed the visa sticker in my passport and told me I was ready to go.

So I was in Laos! I was elated to be in the next country on my journey. The mountains on the Laos side were even taller than the ones in Vietnam. I was welcomed by a committee of cows on the road shortly after leaving the border station. It seemed that, in general, there were even more animals wandering the road than in Vietnam. But the roads were really bad. Not as bad as the one road that I took for a short time in Vietnam the day before and abandoned, but bad for long stretches of desolate road, and so I really had to take my time on those roads.

As I said, Google Maps didn't fully work in Laos, so I was mostly on my own for route planning and paying attention to where the turns were. Luckily it was mostly one road the whole way. But the weather was bad, and the roads were bad, so it was some pretty slow moving. Lots of mud and ruts and washouts and potholes and bumps and the like, and almost all the time, it was raining. Since it was raining, I had my phone with the GPS from Google Maps in a baggie on the mount on by handlebars. The mount on my handlebars was sort of like a hairclip that I clipped my phone into, and it was bolstered by some rubber bands for strength. But the rubber bands had been wearing out, and with all the jolts on the Laotian roads, each one, one by one, snapped and eventually my phone was only being held by the clip. That seemed to mostly be enough, but I did notice my phone slowly sliding out of the clip, and I recentered it several times, so there really wasn't enough holding power in it for these rough roads.

As I passed through through village after village, it didn't seem that any of them had any hotels or guesthouses, so I was starting to worry that I might not be able to find a place to stay. I didn't even know if I could recognize a hotel, because everything was in Laotian script. I had already driven more than I felt comfortable with in a day, and was ready to stop, but just could not find a place to stop. Plus it didn't seem like my GPS was moving. I looked at the map quite a while after I had looked at it the last time, and it seemed like I was still in the same place. And I really didn't know how far it still was to Viang Xai. I would try to eyeball it using the distance marker on the legend, but then the next time, it seemed to be farther than it was the last time, and this was freaking me out a little bit. It was approaching darkness, and I really did not want to be driving in the pitch black countryside on a crappy road that had animals on it everywhere with very poor headlights on my Vietnamese bike. So I kept trying to keep an eye out for the left turn I was supposed to make, but never found it. The next time I looked at the map, I had passed it by quite a ways, apparently, but saw there was another way to get to Viang Xai via the next left turn. I was really freaking out at this point. It was starting to get dark, I didn't know for sure how far I was from the town, and I didn't want to get caught in the darkness. So I started stepping it up a little, hopefully still being safe, but definitely going faster.

I started noticing that there were kilometer markers on the side of the road marking the distance to Viang Xai about thirty kilometers away. It made me feel a little more at ease to know where I was, but it was still uncertain how long it would take me, because I had no idea what kind of road conditions I would have. When I saw that I was only fifteen kilometers away, darkness was definitely falling and I had a heavy sense of urgency.

Right after that fifteen kilometer mark was when all hell suddenly broke loose. I hit a rut, and my phone went flying out of the clip holding it. I braked and tried to catch it, right as I hit a mudslide and my bike went out of control. I crashed the bike, and I hit the ground. I got myself up pretty quickly and did an inventory to assess my injuries. There was a lot of blood, and I was covered in mud. Both of my hands were completely covered in blood. I could see blood seeping through my pants at the right knee. I tested my right leg, and I could walk on it OK, and move it OK. I felt pain in my right elbow, but it was moving OK, though I didn't see any blood there. I saw my phone in the road and went to retrieve it. It was OK, just a little dent in a corner and maybe a small blemish on the screen.

A crowd of villagers from the village I was passing through had now gathered in a circle around me. I wanted to ask for help, but neither they nor I could communicate. I just looked at my hands covered in blood as the blood dripped down, and I couldn't even tell where it was coming from, though my palms and my hands hurt.

Finally a man motioned to me to come inside his hut. I tried to pick up my bike, but couldn't. A couple of bystanders helped me lift it, and he motioned to me to bring it up toward his house, but there was too much mud in his driveway, and I couldn't move it past it. I was starting to shiver from shock and he motioned to me to just leave it where it was. A woman brought out some leaves and showed them to me; I guess they were some local herbal cure. An old woman in the hut heated some water on a fire, and then the man took it off the fire and mixed it with some colder water to give me some warm water to wash my hands with. I washed my hands, and saw that they were covered with abrasions, and there were some deep ones at the base of both of my palms.

I sat there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. It wasn't getting any lighter, and it was pretty dark. Finally, I told them, “I go”, and made a motion with my hands that I was going to leave and got up. The man seemed concerned, but he nodded his head. I really needed more care than I could get in the hut, though they were terribly kind and did their best. But I didn't know if my bike would start or move. I went to the bike, and it started up, though the handlebars were tilted on their axis quite a bit, and were off-kilter, so now the light was pointing at about one o'clock instead of straight ahead. I tentatively took off on my bike as a bunch of mud kicked out from between the wheels and the fenders that had apparently gotten lodged there in the wreck. The bike seemed like it was running OK, though it was now dark, and the light was not pointing forward, so I couldn't see hardly at all. I just kept driving slowly, just emotionally numb, following the kilometer markers and hoping I would make it OK to the town. I couldn't grip the handlebars with my whole hands because of the injuries, so I was holding them with my fingers, which also had some abrasions on them.

Finally, I don't know how much time had passed, but I saw a big sign pointing to the left turn to Viang Xai, saying the town was a kilometer away. I turned down the street and saw lights. One of the first places I saw was a big building; I was hoping it was a hotel so I slowed down to inspect it closer, and I saw a sign that said, “Hospital” in English. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned into the parking lot.

There were a couple of nurses who looked like they were on break, and there didn't seem to be any other patients there. I walked up to them and said, “Please help me,” and showed them my bloody palms, and I pointed to my blood-soaked pants. They led me into the hospital, and motioned to me to get on a table. I wanted to take my clothes off so I could see what the injuries were to my knee and elbow, because I still had not seen them. A doctor came in, and I motioned to take off my pants, and he nodded. So I took off my pants, then my jacket, then my shirt jacket and my t-shirt. They started working on me right away, cleaning up blood and, to my chagrin, snipping away tissue. I was shaking and my teeth were shattering from shock. They cleaned and disinfected, and dressed my wounds. I had a big abrasion on my knee, one on my elbow, and the injuries on my hands, and various small cuts in other places. At least one limb, my left leg, was completely unaffected. They had me shake everything and bear weight on everything to make sure nothing more serious was going on, I did that and gave them the thumbs-up.

The doctor called me over to a desk near the exit, and he gave me three different kinds of pills, with instructions written on them to take them twice a day. One of them had “ampicillin” written on it, but the other two I had to look up online from the markings on the pills to figure out what they were. One was just 500 mgs of Naproxen, and another was some sort of bacterial enzyme that fights inflammation that they pretty much don't use in the first world at all. He handed me an itemized bill written in Laotian, and it came to 90,000 kip, or around eleven dollars. I paid the fee and made repeated bowing motions to everybody with my hands clasped, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

I then went down the street looking for a hotel. I was worried that covered in mud and blood, it might be difficult to find a place. The first place I stopped at didn't want anything to do with me. They waved me off aggressively, so I left. Then I stopped at a hotel down the street, and the guy was very welcoming. He was Vietnamese, and spoke a little English. Very little, probably about as much as I speak Vietnamese, so between the two of us, we communicated sufficiently. I told him I had just wrecked my bike and he gave me a compassionate look. He led me to the hotel room, it seemed like either I was the only person staying there, or at least the only one with a vehicle.

I had not eaten all day, so I asked him if there was a restaurant. He said “everything closed” (apparently everything in this town is closed by seven or so at night), but he led me to a Vietnamese restaurant owned by some friends of his and he said they would make me pho. I was so happy to see the food and I scarfed it all down, then I went back to the hotel to collapse in exhaustion onto the bed. I tried to find a way to lie down where I would not leave blood on the bed, but I had to cover up, because the room was cold and there was no heater. The next morning, I saw just a few tiny smudges of blood on the bed. But then I remembered I had some hydrogen peroxide that I mix with baking soda to brush my teeth with, and that I had used that before to remove small blood stains. It worked like a charm, probably because the blood stains were not that old.

So now, I'm in my own realm of suffering.  Really, I'm at peace with it, mostly.  I'm OK, or at least I will be, I hope.  Or I won't, but either way I don't have much control.  All I can do is dress my wounds, change my plan in accordance with the new conditions, and keep going.

Laos Or Not, Here I Come

Here I am at Quan Son, Vietnam, about 40 kilometers from what I am fairly sure is a valid crossing into Laos. This is the place that I thought I would get to yesterday, but then I took the wrong roads. The road here from Mai Chau, Vietnamese Highway QL15, was not too bad, though it had a few hairy spots, mostly before the turnoff for Highway QL15C. I originally wanted to take QL15 only part of the way, and then take QL15C, which would have taken me through Pu Luong National Park. But I turned off onto QL15C, and it was absolutely abysmal. It was a constant slog through about four inches deep of mud and slime, with many deep pits and ruts and bumps. I probably went about a quarter of a kilometer down that road, probably going slower than I would be walking most places. But walking through this would be a nightmare. Finally, I said, fuck this, and turned around to take the rest of QL15. And it was not bad at all for the rest of the way. I had already gone through the worst of it before I turned off. There were some places where it turned to dirt and/or got rutty, but it was definitely pretty solid for most of the way. I did go through some areas on it where they were laying down fresh asphalt, so maybe a year ago it would have been different.

When I pulled into Quan Son, I had three goals. One, to find a hotel. Two, to get gas. Three, to get an oil change. The first goal was the most important, so I drove all the way through the town Fairly slowly, looking at all the buildings, and I didn't find a hotel. But I did find a gas station on the edge of town after I drove through it, so I filled up. Actually, I found two gas stations; one was in the middle of town, but I passed it since my primary goal was to find a hotel. After I got gas, I doubled back through town, paying even more attention to each building, and finally I found a hotel. So I checked into the hotel, and they put a board on the stairs outside so I could ride my motorcycle into the building and keep it inside.

So now I've met my first two goals, and the only thing left is to get an oil change. I took my bike out again, but realized I had forgotten my helmet. Oh, well, I wasn't going far. The sight of a long haired westerner riding down the street without a helmet definitely did turn a few heads, though. I finally found a place down the main street, typed “oil change” into Google Translate, and the mechanic nodded his head. So I watched him change the oil, it was very quick and cheap, and then I pulled my bike back into the hotel, gunning it and driving up the board placed on the outer stairs through the front doors. Before I had just walked it up that board.

This hotel is probably one of the most expensive I've stayed in in Vietnam, and one of the least comfortable and nice ones. I'm not really complaining, I have a bed to crash on so I'm fine. But there is no toilet paper, the toilet has no flushing handle and no top on the tank, there's no garbage receptacle at all, the TV is completely blank (not that I'd be watching TV anyway, I just checked it out to see what was there and the answer was nothing at all). And the door does not lock from the outside at all, though I can lock it from the inside once I am in the room. Update: there is a button inside the open tank that apparently flushes the toilet. I have a small amount of emergency toilet paper that I bought in Mongolia and still haven't used, so if I need it, it is there. It will probably only last through one or two toilet events. I had a roll stuffed into my backpack, but at some point, I must have left it behind, because it is not there any more. And it's pretty darned chilly in here.  The bathroom seems to have a huge opening in the wall up near the ceiling that just leads to the outside; sort of a window without glass.  But on the plus side, the wi-fi is some of the strongest I've encountered yet in Vietnam.

I'm a little concerned about the road to Laos from here. Supposedly, it goes through to Na Meo, which is the last town in Vietnam before the Laos border, and the border crossing is actually about ten kilometers into Laos, so you are actually in Laos long before you go through a crossing with both Vietnamese and Laotian officials. But the reports I've read of it online vary widely. Some say it is not crossable at all, some say though there are some serious problems, it is passable. And one guy said he had almost no problems. But what bothers me the most is that when I try to find a route on Google Maps from Quan Son to Na Meo, it takes me through two alternate routes that create giant loops going way the hell out of the way, crossing into Laos at places that are probably impossible to cross, and then coming back into Vietnam, but no route actually taking the relatively straight road that goes right there. WTF? Google Maps gave me a frigging goat path the other day to drive on, and it showed me Highway QL15C, which was one of the most abysmal roads I've ever been on. There are only certain crossings into Laos that are designated as international crossings (where foreigners can cross); the rest are so-called domestic crossings where only locals who live around the border can cross. None of the crossings that Google Maps take me through in its little roundabout diversion seem to be crossings that I can actually cross at, and I would probably be turned back.

Another complication is the fact that due to my delay from taking the wrong road yesterday, I will be trying to cross into Laos on New Year's Day, which is an official holiday, but I have no idea if that means the border crossings will be closed. And if they are closed, I just might have to turn back via a road that might be completely hellish. So I just don't have enough information to determine if this whole attempt to cross into Laos will succeed or not. Oh, what the hell, I'm just going to go for it. If you never hear from me again, you'll know why.

Taking A Dribble

This morning I took a shower.  Actually, it was more like taking a dribble.  There was just a very slow trickle of water coming out of the hose.  In general, I really like the showers in many Asian countries that detach from the wall and are on a hose, where the whole bathroom is the shower stall, and there is just a drain in the floor.  You just have to be careful where you aim it so you don't get the toilet paper and your towel wet, or anything else you don't want soaked.Then there is also usually a high-pressure nozzle also next to the toilet for spraying the toilet down after you do your business as well.  There is one next to this toilet, but I haven't tried it out yet.

But the hot water didn't last long at all.  No big deal, hot water is more than I expected in rural Vietnam, and it is not too cold in the morning today.  It started running out, so I just tried to scrub off all the soap as quickly as I could before it got too chilly.  Maybe I shouldn't have run it for a bit to see if it was hot first, but I didn't know it would run out so fast.

I checked out the cable television for a few minutes, and in this town, there are no foreign television stations at all, they are all Vietnamese stations.  This is the first town I have been in where there are no stations in English or French. The majority of them seem to be local stations from different cities in Vietnam; I could tell because the name of the city was usually part of the logo superimposed on the screen.  There is a lot of overlap in programming because some of them are getting the same national feed from whatever affilate they are with.  And the affiliate name seems to always be "Vietnam" followed by a number, like Vietnam5 or so on.  I saw up to Vietnam15. I was hoping to get some French TV for a little while, but no such luck. Interestingly enough, at the last hotel I stayed in in Ninh Binh, they had different cable systems for the foreigner side of the hotel and the Vietnamese side of the hotel.  But even on the Vietnamese side, they had some of the same foreign stations; they were just on different channels.

I hope I don't regret having ditched my only pair of closed-toed shoes when I moved out of my apartment in Hanoi.  I hadn't worn them since I was in South Korea in May or so, and I have just been lugging them around as dead weight in my pack.  Finally it just got to the point where there was no room in my pack.  The North Face jacket that I bought in Sapa has pretty much taken the place of the room they take up in my pack.  Shoes take up a lot of damned room in a pack...having an extra pair you have to carry around is a luxury when you are carrying all your stuff on your body.  Of course, now I'm loading it on my bike, so I can maybe carry a little more, but I'm still trying to keep it down so I don't have issues in loading and balance, or possibly stuff getting loose and falling off (despite some of the massive loads that I see locals carrying on their motorcycles and bicycles; some of them have special cages attached, sometimes welded on, for their stuff).  My shoes had gotten pretty ratty anyway, having used them to walk around for long stretches of the day from Australia to Korea.

In a couple of hours, I'll take off again, hopefully to Quan Son, which was my initial destination before I got sidetracked.  Then I'll make the stretch to Laos, if it is passable, and see if they will let me across the border. In general, I don't want to plan to travel on my bike for more than three to five hours at a time, because the estimates on Google Maps end up being low due to the traffic and the quality of the roads, and because the headlights on most Vietnamese bikes are pretty bad, so I don't want to be stuck traveling in pitch darkness at night.  If Google Maps says it will take three hours, it will probably take five, or even longer.  I think eight hours would be about the max I would want to travel in a day, but I usually don't leave early enough for that to end during daylight.  Plus, I want my travel to be relaxing and fun, with the ability to stop frequently if I want, and not trying to push it to get to my next destination.

Lost In The Wilderness

I stayed an extra day in Ninh Binh. Well, or three extra days, depending on how you define it. I had booked three days, but then I asked if I could stay another two, and then I asked if I could stay one more day. The last day, they had to move me to another room, but that worked. I mostly wanted to stay to try to work on my Vietnamese flash cards, which are becoming my latest unhealthy obsession. So the last day, I just stayed in the hotel room, and toiled away, and ate on all the leftover food that I had brought with me from my apartment in lieu of going out for actual meals. There was a little container of seaweed...when I bought it, I thought it was going to be like those flavored nori sheets that you can get as snacks in the US. The container looked just like that. Nope. It was a tangled mess of really hard, chewy, salty seaweed. I don't even think it was meant to be eaten before it was soaked, but I ate it anyway. I just considered it seaweed jerky. I contemplated drinking a can of diced tomatoes, but I'll save that for another time. I ate lots of cookie-like thingies and finished off a can of vegan meat-like stuff. Strange how in the States, when you buy vegan meat-like stuff, it is super expensive, but here in Vietnam, when you buy vegan meat-like stuff, it is cheaper than meat. I mean, it is basically soybeans, or gluten, or some kind of stuff like that. There is no real reason why it should be boutiquely expensive, other than the fact that American consumers like to feel like they are investing in a designer experience, or whatever.

The next day, I woke up, packed up my stuff to put on my bike, and went out to get gas for my bike before I strapped on the packs. While I was coming down to get my bike, one of the hotel clerks was standing with a German guy near my bike, and they were both admiring it. The German guy said he had wanted to try to rent it from the hotel, but he found out upon asking about it that it belonged to me. Anyway, we ended up having a nice little chat over coffee in front of the hotel. His name was Florian, and he was from Berlin, and he was taking four months off to travel. I told him about my experiences taking French in Hanoi, and he seemed intrigued by the notion of doing that.

The place I stayed in Ninh Binh was the Hoa Bien Hotel. I recommend it highly, it was a really cool place, and the staff was great. After packing my bike, I went to Google Maps to chart my path, and took off in the general direction of Laos, which I'm hoping will be my next destination, unless I get sidetracked by something shiny. I ended up leaving Ninh Binh via Highway DT477, which met up with Highway QL12B after a while. Then QL12B merged with the Ho Chih Minh road for a while, which roughly follows the path of the Vietnam-war era Ho Chih Minh Trail (which, incidentally, the NSA called "one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.") Then it splits off into QL12B for a while again. The reason I'm including the roads I am driving on is because I looked at several people's blogs who have done the same or similar things, and, dammit, they never say which way they went, which is what I was looking for.

I rode through a lot of spectacular countryside, and was getting hungry, so I stopped at a couple of restaurants that didn't have any of the stuff they advertised on their signs, so no food for me, which was frustrating after a day of eating strange ingredients that were not meant to be eaten on their own. I got some snacks at one store...I got these little corn puffs that ended up being oddly sweet, and wanted to buy a little cake that was sort of the Vietnamese version of a Little Debbie cake, but it turned out that I had bought a whole case of them, so after eating a couple, I strapped the rest on to the back of my bike. That held me for a while.

I stopped in one village to take a picture of some water buffalo by the side of the road, but then my bike would not start again. Oh, crap. Now I needed to find a mechanic. So I started walking my bike down the street. A woman on the street stopped me, and seemed concerned about my bike, and started shotting off directions to somewhere in rapid-fire Vietnamese that I didn't understand at all, but I nodded my head dutifully, which is what you are supposed to do in that situation, I guess. Anyway, I continued pushing my bike down the street. Then a guy across the street motioned me over, and gave my bike the once-over. Then he pulled out the kick starter and kick started it right up. Of course. I didn't even think about the kick starter. I told him “thank you” repeatedly in Vietnamese. So it worked with the kick starter, but not with the electric starter. At least I could keep it moving.

I kept driving and driving, and thought I was a half an hour away from my destination, but suddenly it dawned on me, wait a minute, wasn't I supposed to be on a different highway by now? I started realizing that I really had no idea where I was. I took a closer look at Google Maps, and, sure enough, I had gone the frigging wrong way, and was about as far away from where I was supposed to be as the distance I had already traveled. So, first, I started to chart a path to the right place, which was the town of Quan Son. I started backtracking to get to the road south that would take me there, when I decided, aw, screw it, I'll just go the way I had been going, since I was almost there. So I turned around, and just kept going in the direction I had been going. But I'm sorta glad I did, because then I wouldn't have discovered this spectacular mountain pass that I drove on. The only thing was that up in the mountains, it was a lot colder, and I didn't feel like unpacking my pack to get my heavy jacket, so I just bore the cold. If it had been much colder, I probably would have pulled over to get it. But I was also trying to avoid letting the engine stop, because I would have to kick start it to get it moving; the electric starter was deader than a doorknob.

Why did I end up going the wrong way? I might have just mapped it to the wrong place, I'm not sure.  Also a couple of times in the past, I could swear that sometimes the destination has just changed in mid-map...seems like I've had that happen, and I should watch out for that possibility and be vigilant to make sure the route I'm on is still the right one.  It seemed like that happened to me a few times in Hanoi, but the stakes are higher when riding cross-country than they are within a city.  Anyway, if I had been paying enough attention to my technology instead of the damned scenery, none of this would have happened.

Then I stopped at this overlook over the town in the valley below, surrounded by mountains. What was this place, anyway? It turned out the town was Mai Chau, and that was going to be the new place that I would spend the night. So I wound my way down Highway QL15, which was this steep road into the valley with lots of switchbacks, and had to use my gears to slow me on the steep incline so I wouldn't use my brakes, and pulled into Mai Chau. I found a hotel that was only about six fifty in US dollars a night, and the room was not bad (I'm in it typing this now). The next order of business was to find a mechanic to fix whatever the problem was with the starter. So I walked right around the corner from the hotel, and found a place that would fix my bike, after making a key-turning motion with my hands followed by an “X” with my fingers, and then a kickstarting motion with my foot (hoping that would explain to him that the starter didn't work and I had to kick start it; he seemed to understand) and then I went back to the hotel to get it; the guy from the mechanic shop went with me.

I brought it to the shop, and sat down to have a Coke from the store attached to the shop. He fixed it before I finished my drink. It turned out the battery was dead and he replaced the battery. I just hope there wasn't some other problem that was causing the battery to die...maybe something related to the problem I had with my USB slot on the bike that caused me to have it removed. I asked one of the guys how much it was, and he said it was 15,000 dong, which was about 75 cents. I couldn't believe it; I gave him the money. I was amazed that it had cost so little.

I took it back to the hotel, and was sitting in my room, when I heard a knock at my door. It was the mechanic. It turned out I had just paid for the Coke. The battery replacement was 350,000 dong, still a bargain. I apologized profusely for the misunderstanding and paid him.

Then I wandered around the town to see what was going on, and finally found a restaurant to eat at, where I got some noodles with tofu and braised veggies. It was delicious. Tomorrow I will take off for the original destination that I was going to go to today, and it will probably take me about as long as today's drive did, so I'll end up a day behind. No big deal. Then the stretch of road to Laos is supposed to be spectacularly bad, a road filled with muddy pits and god knows what. Some accounts online have said to plan twelve hours to travel this fifty kilometer stretch of road. And that the road is under constant heavy construction.  Google Maps doesn't even consider that road as a possibility for going that way, which is a little intimidating, considering that it had me going down basically a goat path the other day. That all sounds not terribly encouraging, but it is why I planned to make an overnight stop in Vietnam, rather than just trying to cross over to Laos in one day.  But some accounts have said it's not too bad at all.  I think maybe the key is whether it has rained heavily before traveling in that direction.

Christmas Holidays in Ninh Vinh

It has been an eventful few days over the Christmas holidays here in Ninh Binh, Vietnam. I arrived on Christmas Eve, settled in for a bit, and then decided to walk around the town. So I just wandered for several hours, and got back to the hotel a little after dark. The USB port on my bike has quit working. For a while, it was sporadic, but on the way here from Hanoi, it just didn't work at all. The little light on it was on, so it was getting electricity, but the slot was not putting anything out. So I figured I would try to see if I could find a motorcycle mechanic who could fix it. But that could wait until later. I have a couple of serious power bricks, but I haven't much kept them charged up. That will probably be more important now that I will be trekking through remote areas of Vietnam and Laos to keep my phone charged. I really only need it on the road for a map function; maybe to occasionally put up status updates and blog posts. But I do have some backup if my phone dies.

On Christmas Day, I took off riding on my motorbike. I meandered around for a while, then I ended up in the little village of Tam Coc, which has some spectacular boat rides through incredible scenery, including three water caves that the boats pass through. Whenever you go to one of these attractions, there is always someone right outside who flags you down to park in their area, and they charge you a small amount of money. So I pulled over to park, and paid about seventy-five cents so my bike could be safe. I also left my helmet in the office there. After I parked, I watched a bunch of foreigners just blow the lady in the booth off when she tried to wave them down to park their bikes there. I guess that you don't really have to park there, but I don't mind.

I got on the boat at Tam Coc, and it was being rowed by a vivacious young woman who rowed with her feet. Most of the guides were rowing with their feet, but I saw some rowing with their hands. The areas we passed through were just amazing, and the water caves were out of this world. The boat ride was about two hours long, and the terrain was just magnificent the whole way. I gave her a nice tip when we got back to the dock, and also bought her some fruit and beverages. She asked me during the trip if I had ever eaten snake, cat or dog. I told her I hadn't ever eaten any of those animals. A couple of guys on a boat next to us asked if they could take my picture, and offered to sell me a picture for 20,000 dong, which is a little less than a buck. I told them OK, even though I really didn't want any pictures to take with me, but I figured it was not much, so I went along. Then when I got back to the dock, some woman had a photo album with a bunch of picture they had taken of me, and wanted 250,000 dong for it. I told her that the men who took the pictures told me it would be 20,000, and I tried to explain that I really didn't want physical photos, because I was traveling and they would get messed up, but I would be OK with digital pics on a flash drive or something, but there was just not enough language ability for me to communicate that concept. Finally I just started to walk away, and she offered to sell the pics for 100,000, and I accepted mostly just to get the whole thing over with.

My next stop on Christmas was at the Thai Vi Temple.near Van Lam village. This temple seemed like it was under heavy construction, and there was some sort of ceremony going on there with some musicians and a lot of people attending. I watched for a little bit, and then stepped back to video part of the ceremony.

Then my final stop was the Bai Dinh Pagoda. This 15^th century structure meandered up a steep mountain, with very craggy steps leading in and out of caves up the side of the cliff, and intricate designs all the way up. At the top there was an amazing view of the surrounding countryside. That was my last real stop, though I rode my motorcycle around for quite a while after that. I ended up at Mua Caves, and was at first intending to check that out, but it was late in the day and almost getting dark, so after pulling into the parking lot and getting out to check out the caves, I decided to blow it off, as I didn't know how much longer it would be open, and I didn't feel like rushing it. So maybe I'll check it out in the next few days, maybe not.

I headed back to the hotel, and decided to see if I could get the USB port on my bike fixed. Nothing in town seemed to be closed for Christmas; it was just business as usual. I guess that might be expected in a country that is mostly Buddhist. So I asked one of the hotel clerks if he knew a place where I could get it fixed. He told me he would take me to a place to get it taken care of. So I had him get on the back of my bike while he directed me to a mechanic. This was the first time I had taken a passenger on my bike, and was a little hesitant, but it was pretty easy and not that bad. The extra weight was not much more than what I was carrying (well, actually, it was quite a bit more, but didn't seem so), and I had no problems maneuvering the bike with him on the back. We went to one place, and they didn't have the part, and then another place, and they didn't either. I was kind of tired, so I told him I'd try again tomorrow rather than check out some other places. So I dropped him off at the hotel, went off in search of dinner, and then headed back.

On the next day, the day after Christmas, I took off early in the day to explore some more stuff in the area. The clerk asked me if I wanted to try another mechanic, but I told him that I would ride around first, and when I got back, we could give it a shot. He asked me where I was from, and I told him I was from the US, but he asked where in the US. I told him I was from Texas, and his face lit up. “Oh,” he said, “You are cowboy! You ride around on your motorcycle like cowboy!” I don't really identify much with the cowboy thing, but, sure, I went with it, because talking about it seemed to make him happy. He was asking me all about cowboys; I told him I didn't really hang out much with cowboys in the city, but there were probably a lot in the country.

Anyway, I took off and ended up at the floating village of Kenh Ga, which means “chicken canal”, and is named after a wild chicken that apparently is from that area. I drove across this flimsy bridge somewhere in the middle of the village, and an irate old woman wearing one of those cone hats came out of her hut demanding money for me crossing the bridge. OK, I told her, and turned off my motorbike to get my wallet out. But by the time I got it out, she was nowhere to be found. I was trying to pay her, but she disappeared. I waited for a minute or so, and then just took off. I figured I would pay her on the way back, but I never did end up going back that way.

After leaving the floating village, I ended up in the vicinity of Bai Dinh Pagoda, so I stopped to check that out. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to get in. I circled the perimeter several times, and there was just a high wall surrounding it everywhere, and all of the gates to get in were locked solid. I finally found a tiny opening in the back, and started to go in that way, but a guard shooed me away, so I left. After surrounding the whole area for a while, I finally found a little road that turned off in a different direction from the temple, so I took it. It ended up being the way to the entrance...I had to actually drive in a direction far away from the temple, park my bike, and then walk back toward it on a path that went through what looked like a sewer tunnel running under one of the streets bordering the perimeter. The pagoda and the surrounding complex were ornate and beautiful, and I climbed to the top of a mountain that had a giant Buddha statue at the summit.

Then I took off again, and ended up on this very winding scenic road that was just a joy to ride on with my motorcycle. I was thinking that this was the very definition of freedom, to be riding on this curvy mountain road in Vietnam through amazing scenery. I ended up at the ancient capital of Vietnam from the 10^th and 11^th centuries, an ancient city called Hoa Lu. A woman motioned to me to park my bike at her restaurant, but when I asked her how much it was to park there, she said “no money.” That was the first time that had happened, but I left her a tip anyway. Then I went in to check out Hoa Lu, which was spectacular, but almost anti-climactic compared to all the other stuff I had seen in the last few days. After a while, you just get inured to spectacular sights...even something that is wildly out of the ordinary just becomes another thing to see, and the sense of wonder starts to fade.

After checking out the ancient capital, I decided to see if I could try again to get my USB port fixed on my bike. So I went back to the hotel clerk, who wanted to try a place recommended by his boss. I took him there with me on my bike, and he talked to them for a while...they didn't have the part, but he thought he knew a place where we could get it, and then bring it back. He wanted to talk about cowboys again, so we had a discussion about cowboys in Texas. It seemed to make him really happy. We went to a couple of computer stores, and they had a USB cigarette lighter plug at the second one; I bought that and we took it to the other shop. They installed it, but I just could not get any electricity out of it to power my phone. So they tried to re-install the first one, and the light worked on it, but it still was not putting out power. So neither the old device nor the new one were working; I told them to just go ahead and re-install the old one even though it didn't work. But when they tried to do that, it started smoking heavily. Obviously it had somehow gotten burned out. So I told them to install neither and just tape up the wires, and they did that. Well, it sucks that I'll be riding through rural Vietnam and Laos with no charger on my bike, but I'll manage.

This morning I woke up and decided to work on my Vietnamese flash card deck for a little while before I got out of the room. So I worked on it for a couple of hours...now I am up to the letter “K”, with almost 1800 entries. Work on it will likely be proceeding slower now that I'm not stationary any more.

Today, a couple of days after Christmas, I rode to the Big C Hypermarket on the edge of town to get a few food things. The Big C is sort of like a Wal-Mart...it has a ton of groceries, and then also sells a lot more retail goods. Every one that I have been to is in a big shopping center with a bunch of other stores. On the way there, I saw a store that sold police uniforms. I briefly thought about buying a Vietnamese police uniform to ride across Vietnam with on my motorbike. But, then, I thought, nah, maybe not a good idea. I stopped at the post office to mail the photos from Tam Coc that I never wanted anyway to my kids back in the States; I had stopped at the post office earlier in the day, and it was closed for lunch. So I went again after the supermarket jaunt, and it was open. On the way back to the hotel, I totally lucked out that I didn't lose my room key. I had put my bike key and my room key together for convenience, but the room key fell off my bike while I was riding it, and it lodged between some wires connected to the frame. I parked my bike, and noticed the room key was not there, and briefly panicked, but then I saw it on the side of the bike.

Today I really haven't done much to get out and around, other than the trips to the store and the post office. There is still time, but I'm mostly just lethargic. If I don't get out and see some spectacular stuff, it is good to take a day off to just chill. And I still have another full day here, and probably the option to stay longer if I want. I have a bit of a headache anyway, so maybe I'll just rest, and catch up on administrative matters.

Well, tonight the staff of the hotel invited me to come down and have dinner. So, of course, I accepted, and they told me to come down in fifteen minutes. So I came down to join them for dinner, and I thought that there would be a big dinner with other guests and the staff and such. But, no, I was the only one there, and they served me a plate of noodles that I ate alone in the lobby. It was a nice gesture, but not quite what I thought it was going to be.

For most of tonight, the Internet has just been down, and now that I'm done with this post and ready to post it, it is still down. So I guess I'll post it tomorrow, or whenever I can get a connection again. Signing out now around midnight on the 27^th (getting ready to move into the 28^th), but this post will just go up whenever I have signal. It's time for me to crash anyway.

Looks like wi-fi is up again this morning, so I can post this now.