From London To Bath

On my way out of London, I took the Tube for the last time. Since I had lost my all-you can-ride Oyster card and now had one that was pay-as-you-go, I asked the stationmaster if I had enough money on the card to complete my journey to Victoria Station, and I did, with 20 pence to spare.


If I hadn't taken a coach from Gatwick Airport, I might not know that Victoria Coach Station was in a different place from Victoria Station. Not too far, but about a ten minute walk. I got on the first train, which was fairly empty. Then I had to change trains, and followed the signs to the next train on the Tube I had to catch. There was a train pulling up, and it was so packed I couldn't get on. The next train came, and it was equally packed, but I pushed my way on. Some guy who came on right after me bitched me out for having a backpack on the crowded train. Serenity now. I thought it best not to engage with him. Then I heard them announcing all the sane stops as the train I had just gotten off of. Oh crap, I was on the wrong train. Serenity now. How did I do that? I ended up at Borough Station, which I had left from, and started over. Luckily I never had to pass through a pay station until my final destination, because I only had barely enough money on my card to make the trip.


I went back to the station where I had originally changed trains, and found that I had followed the signs correctly, but you have to go THROUGH the stop for the Northern line to get to stop for the Victoria line, which is unusual. Groan. This time I did it right. I was delayed by about a half hour due to my little mishap, but luckily I had left plenty early. I guess it pays to always be paranoid about getting there on time, and factoring in time for some unexpected contingency.


I walked from Victoria Station to Victoria Coach Station, and took the coach from London to Bath. There was some sort of road construction delay that ended up delaying our arrival in Bath by about an hour, but we got there a little after two in the afternoon. I checked into the hostel, got settled with my stuff, and set off to explore the town.


Bath is a beautiful little town with rolling hills and marvelous views in just about any direction you turn. I walked around for a while through the centre of the town, and then decided to wander the periphery some. I wandered along the River Avon, which is sometimes referred to as the Bristol Avon to distinguish it from all the other Rivers Avon in Great Britain. Apparently there are several of them, because Avon means river in Old Welsh, so River Avon literally means River River.


Then I came back into the center of town and checked out the Roman Baths, which are fed by natural hot springs. You can't bathe in the springs there any more, partially because of the lead piping the Romans used that contaminated the water, but also because there is bacterial contamination (some girl died of meningitis from bathing there in the 70s and they closed it down afterward). But there is a nearby place with an outlet to the hot spring that is available for use now that I might check out while I'm here.


The Roman Baths site was first a worship site for the Celts to the goddess Sulis, and then the present site, which was unearthed by archeologists, was built by the Romans in the first century AD, with various embellishments added later.


I feel asleep really early, about 6 pm, and slept until about midnight. Probably all the walking I've been doing and the jetlag are catching up with me, also I've been sleeping maybe about four hours a night. Now I'm laying in bed awake really hungry, but the hostel kitchen is closed, and all my food is in there. Oh well. I'll probably fall back asleep for a few hours in a bit.

Walking, Peeing, And Serious Difficulty Posting Pics In London

I've been doing a lot of walking in the last few days. On the first day of my trip, I didn't walk a lot, but that can be attributed somewhat to jetlag.  But since then, I've walked over 25,000 steps a day. In the last three days, I've walked over 30,000 steps each day, and have surpassed my step count each day. And I'm definitely feeling it. I most certainly can't keep up this pace.


My feet are pretty much shredded. There's not much l can do about it except tough it out. I guess I could buy some moleskin and wrap my toes in it to make it a little better, but a few calluses later, it'll all work out, I'm pretty sure.


I've already altered my clothing somewhat to compensate for it. I am now wearing compression underwear which helps with the chafing on my thighs. And I'm pulling the layers of clothing to cover my waist, so my fanny pack strap doesn't rub against my skin if my pants droop a little while I'm walking.


But it's still not easy. My left leg is not that great after a series of bad things that happened to it in the last few years. My gait is definitely slower than it used to be, and not as natural. It used to be that I was one of the fastest walkers in a crowd, and now almost everyone passes me.


I tested today how many paces I comfortably walk in ten minutes, and if I just walk, and don't stop for anything, at my normal pace I walk a little over 1000 paces in ten minutes. So I should be able to walk about 10000 paces in a little over an hour and a half, right? But it doesn't seem to work that way. I'm always doing stuff that breaks up the walking. And that is a good thing. I don't want to JUST walk, I want to check out cool stuff, take pictures of things that interest me, and stop to enjoy my surroundings when I feel like it. So it ends up being a lot slower.


And urinating becomes an issue when walking. Well, actually, it's an issue when it comes to travel generally. Sometimes, you gotta go, and it's not that easy to find a place to go. I found that in London, at least, you can search for "public toilets" on Google Maps, and you'll be able to find one in the vicinity, if you're in a central area. But yesterday, I searched for two in a row, and walked quite a ways to get to them, Abd they were birth out of order. I was at the point where I was dancing in the street, and about to go in my pants. But finally, I saw one of London's open markets, Old Spitalfield Market, and I found a public toilet there. And it wasn't even a pay toilet! (most of them are) Blessed relief.


I've been getting really crappy signal in London, so I'm getting behind in posting pics on Facebook. Today I posted two sets of pictures, and four hours later, they still hadn't posted. Five hours later, one set had posted, but the other hadn't. What the hell? I got better signal in Laos. T-Mobile is my carrier in the US, and they give me free data in most countries in the world, but only guarantee 2g speeds. Well, I'm definitely getting the low end on that in the last couple of days. The wi-fi at the hostel is not much better. Hostel wi-fi is usually bad because a lot of people are using it, and the hostel is usually too cheap to pony up for enough bandwidth for everybody, so everybody squeaks by and gets kicked off a lot.


Today, I started my day by taking the Tube to a park I picked out on the map, Hampstead Heath. It looked like a good place to walk around outdoors, and away from the typical touristy areas, a little farther out from the center of London.  It was a beautiful stroll; the weather was sunny for the first day since I've been in London, though it was somewhat chilly. But it wasn't as cold and windy as it had been the last few days, and I didn't have to pull out my umbrella frequently. An added bonus was that there was an English manor turned into a museum, the Kenwood House, bordering the park. It had been turned into a museum featuring paintings by English and Dutch masters, and, best of all, the admission was free! If I hadn't just picked out a random place to go, I never would have found this hidden gem.


I moseyed back into town, intending to walk as far back toward the hostel as I could. I walked pretty much all day, stopping to check out places I encountered along the way. I hiked to the top of the hill at Primrose Hill Park, admiring the beautiful view of the city from there. Then I walked to Regent's Park, Hyde Park, and Kensington Gardens, wandering through the neighborhoods and districts surrounding them. Then I started getting weary, and when the walking stops being fun and interesting, it's time to cone up with a plan to wrap it up.  But I was still quite a distance from the hostel. So I went to the nearest Tube station to get back to the hostel to rest, and when I started to go into the station, I found, to my chagrin, that I had lost my Oyster card, which had a week of unlimited rides stored on it! And I know exactly what happened; this happened to me before. I put my phone in the pocket with the card and I'm sure that one of the times I pulled my phone out, I pulled the card out without noticing and dropped it. Dang it, keep the phone in a separate pocket! Anyway, the stationmaster helped me buy a new Oyster card, and it only set me back about ten pounds. I had bought a week-long card even though I was going to be in London less than that because it ended up being cheaper (um, but not if I lose it).


So I got back to the hostel and rested for a bit, then a couple of hours later, went on a short jaunt around the neighborhood to eat. I was just a couple of hundred steps away from surpassing yesterday's step total, so I just walked back and forth down the block a bit, and came back to the hostel with the intention of staying put.

London Calling

I left Austin on the 31st of March. I flew on one of the first direct flights that Norwegian Airlines had from Austin to London Gatwick, and somehow ended up with a whole row to myself. Well, actually, initially there was a woman in the window seat of my row, and I was in the aisle seat, but she moved to the row just in front so she could have her own row. And, yay! I had my own row, and was able to move to the window seat. Plus, when it came time to sleep, I moved up the armrests and lay across the row. It wasn't the greatest sleep, it was sort of like sleeping in the back seat of a car, but was definitely preferable to trying to sleep sitting upright.


The airplane had window dimmers instead of shades, so you could choose your level of dimming, or make it completely opaque. It was like the glasses that automatically change to sunglasses.


I arrived at Gatwick Airport, which is pretty far away from London. It took me most of the day to get to the hostel. I took a bus into town, and then got an Oyster card to use the Tube for a week, and took a couple of Tube trains to get there. We landed around 9:30 am, but with immigration, customs, and travel, I got to the hostel just before check-in time at 2 pm.


I thought the jetlag would be bad, but it wasn't too bad. I took a short nap, and then explored the town. The last time I was in London was in the 80s, and I had really bad jetlag then, sleeping for a couple of days. London has definitely changed since then. Last time I was here, the cops prided themselves in not carrying guns, and they wore these antiquated looking waistcoats and tall hats. Now they look like paramilitary forces, and usually walk around in pairs with submachine guns.  Back in the 80s, there were tons of people on soap boxes at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park. The biggest group of speakers were Palestinians telling people how bad they were being screwed around. The second biggest contingent were complete lunatics, the type of people who would wear aluminum (sorry, aluminium) foil to protect from time rays or something like that. And that there were assorted speakers for other causes or issues. This time, nothing. Not a single speaker, not a single soapbox set up. Also, when I was here in the 80s, Piccadilly Circus was nasty and smelly, covered with trash and pigeon shit, and had lots of punks sleeping there. This time, it was very clean, though much more crowded.


I've been all over the city, and this is my last full day here.  I have seen lots of things, but feel like I've barely scratched the surface of London. It's so big and vibrant.

On The Road Again, Again

I'm getting ready to leave on my next extended journey. I'm not sure what to call it...maybe World Journey 2.0? It's not the second extended journey I've taken, but it is the second one in which I am planning to completely go around the world, and take more than a year. But who knows what will happen. On the last one, I had planned to travel for about a year, but I was a year and several months in with no end planned. However, the journey got cut short because my father died, and I wanted to make it back for his memorial, even though it was difficult to return from the other side of the Earth. But, you gotta do what you gotta do, so come back I did. I returned from Belfast, Northern Ireland, flying to Newburgh, New York, where I spent the night, and then the next day, I took a flight from Newburgh to Detroit, Michigan. I bought a used car in Detroit (mostly because there were no good public transportation alternatives to rural areas in Michigan), and worked my way down from my father's memorial in Midland, Michigan to Austin over a few months. I stayed in a wonderful hostel in Detroit, the Hostel Detroit, on both my way up to Midland and on the way back.

Detroit is a great town that is coming back with a vengeance from complete calamity, and it has to be one of the coolest places I have visited in the world. The re-growth of the city is phenomenal, and though there are vast empty spaces where dilapidated structures have been bulldozed, they have been filled with stuff like urban farms, improptu performance spaces, and the likes. I went to the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn with a retired French automotive worker who was really into it. There was a plethora of fantastic food around Detroit, especially Arabic food, since there are a bunch of Arabic people who live in the area. Also, there was some really good Polish food. I took the People Mover, which is a monorail that doesn't really go much of anywhere, but it's an interesting novelty that circles the downtown.

I met up with some crazy soldiers with Canadian military intelligence staying at the hostel, and they led an expedition of people from the hostel to break into an enormous abandoned insane asylum just outside Detroit. I was really impressed with the briefing that one of the soldiers gave us before we entered the complex. It covered most eventualities that we might encounter in the abandoned structures, and was very comprehensive and informative. He had just come back from Aleppo, where he had been part of a team that had secured neighborhoods house by house, and the stories he had to tell about that were amazing. I told him I was thinking about going to Aleppo, and he cut me off contemptuously, and said, “Dude, don't go to Aleppo.” I told him that made me want to go even more, and he told me that I'd probably be fine if I went, but huge numbers of people would be risking their life to keep me safe. Food for thought, but who knows, I still might go.

On the way south, I stopped in Indianapolis for a couple of days, since I had never been there, and it was a convenient place to stop. Indianapolis didn't really impress me as being a spectacular tourist destination, but it was a decent place to hang out and chill for a bit. The hostel I stayed at there, the Indy Hostel, was a cool place to stay and had some really nice folks working there and staying there.

My friend Dave was kind enough to let me stay with him in Fulton, Missouri for a little over a month on the way back to Austin. We played and recorded some music, and it gave me a little respite from my travels. Also, I got to travel all around the state and to some areas in some neighboring states. While I was in Fulton, I got to see the total eclipse, as Fulton was in the path of totality. There was a big gathering place in the middle of town where a whole bunch of people hung out to watch the eclipse, and right as it went into totality, somebody played “Dark Side Of The Moon”. My phone camera was way too lame to get good pics of the eclipse, but Dave and his mom (who also visited for a while) got some great pics.

After my stay in Missouri, I headed back to Austin, and got back in September of 2017. While I was back, I took care of some details that needed attention at some point. Since I had the car, I was able to drive rideshare for several months once I got to Austin to make some money to get back on the road, often working long hours, sometimes up to 20 hours a day. Also I was able to get some medical attention for some issues; I could have maybe done some of that stuff abroad, but the language barrier in some countries and the brevity of some of my stays prevented me from investigating all my options.

So here I am, getting ready to leave again in a couple of days. I went through the same packing process that I did last time I traveled around the world. I had a huge pile of stuff, and I had to cull it down to what would fit in my backpack. Then I had to cull the backpack a few times also, because it was packed to the brim, and I needed more space so the zippers would close. Now the zippers are closing, and it's still more full than I would like, but I feel like I have cut to the bone. But you need a good amount of stuff if you travel long-term. I still may cull some more, though. If I don't, I'll probably end up getting another backpack to wear on the front, which I REALLY don't want to do. Because I'll need more room for stuff like food and medical supplies that I acquire on the way (you really need a lot of food unless you just eat out all the time, but even if you mostly eat out, you still need some for when you get stranded in the middle of nowhere). I'm not bringing food at the outset, except for a few snack bars. It's a big pain when you cross borders and you have to declare whatever food each country requires you to declare, and then you have to be searched and possibly surrender some items. I prefer to keep that to a minimum. This time, I am bringing an REI 85 liter Grand Tour backpack and leaving my Osprey Farpoint 70 behind. The Grand Tour supposedly has 15 more liters of capacity, but I'm skeptical; it doesn't seem bigger. Both of them have attached removable day packs, but the Osprey's day pack zips in, whereby the Grand Tour's day pack drops into a pouch and straps in. This seems more versatile, as I can maybe drop other stuff into the pouch if the day pack is separate.

Though I've been home, I'm still living the traveling lifestyle, and still basically living out of a backpack. I've let extended family stay at my place, and there is really no room for me in the house, so I've been living in a tent in the backyard for the last six months. I've been fairly comfortable doing that, but there have been some minor challenges due to weather issues. I tried to go through some of my boxed up stuff to get some items I might need, but was only partially successful, because my boxes were not marked and arranged as well as I could have done, and there was too much to go through.  Plus, every time I move the boxes, they degrade, and so after one go-through, I decided not to do it again, because I'll have a bunch of collapsed boxes in storage.  Oh, well, live and learn.  Note to self: next time put all the stuff I might need at the top of the pile of boxes and mark it all better.

I'll be starting in London, UK, and then a few weeks later, I'll be flying from Edinburgh, Scotland to Porto, Portugal, and right now I don't have more planned out than that. But this time I would like to hit Africa and South America, and go to a bunch of places I didn't visit on my last trip, and maybe visit some repeat destinations. You might think it's all fun and games, but it's not always great, sometimes it's a real slog.

My first day in London is going to be relatively horrible.  I'll be leaving Austin in late afternoon, and flying all night in an uncomfortable airplane seat trying to sleep, which I hate. I don't have a reserved seat (because it costs extra) and may be in the middle seat or whatever the airline chooses. I'll arrive at Gatwick Airport at seven in the morning, probably not having slept all night and feeling highly uncomfortable, and will have to go through whatever immigration and customs decide to subject me to in that state.  But I won't be able to check in to my hostel until about two in the afternoon. Groan. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at the airport for a bit, maybe not. Then I'll spend the next two days recovering from jetlag.

Traveling long-term is a much different animal than going on a vacation. Though, I have to say, the highs definitely outweigh the lows. But I constantly have to plan out my next few days or weeks, and then when I get a little weary, I will stay somewhere for a while if I can. Sometimes I can't really stop anywhere too long for a variety of reasons, and I'll have to wait quite a while before I can find a place to chill. Sometimes my trip is shaped by bureaucratic requirements that are beyond my control. Sometimes it changes because facts on the ground change, or because I have some whim to see something I hadn't planned to see. All in all, I'm hoping for a really rewarding experience over the next year or two or three (or maybe longer?). But there is a small chance that some persistent issues back home will force me to return earlier than expected. Here's hoping that doesn't happen.

Down And Out In Astrakhan

I arrived on the train in Astrakhan, Russia, fairly late at night. The hostel had emailed me and asked me when I was going to get there. I looked at my ticket and it said I was arriving at around 9:30 pm Moscow time, so I figured it would be about a half hour walk from the train station, and I told them 10 pm. But, actually, it was a little blip of time zone that was an hour later than Moscow; I had just assumed it was the same time zone, since all the other cities I had been at close to the same longitude had been in Moscow time. Let the lesson be here, always check. All train tickets are issued in Moscow time, regardless of local time zone, so you always have to translate. I guess I just got lazy about it.

I realized just as we were coming into the station that I was going to arrive about an hour later than I had told the hostel. No sweat, I figured, they are probably used to people who give estimates that are off a bit because shit happens. When I got off the train, I checked Google Maps for the way to get to the hostel. The first five blocks we're no big deal, just walking on well-lit commercial streets. But then I had to turn into this dark, overgrown mudpit with a lot of abandoned houses that looked really sketchy late at night (and even in the daytime it looked sketchy, as I found out when I went back to the station), and it was so dark that I couldn't even see where I was stepping, and there were a lot of deep ruts. Plus, parts of it looked like I was just walking through someone's back yard. I'm not all that crazy about getting into a strange city late at night anyway. I prefer to walk to where I'm staying, or if it's a really long way, I'll try to get public transportation. I've only gone by taxi a couple of times. So I had ignored all the taxis that tried to hawk me at the train station, in favor of hoofing it. Also, I never know whether taxis in a foreign place are crooked or dangerous, which they sometimes can be.

So after I came out of the dodgy looking stretch (it wasn't all that long, maybe a half a kilometer or so, but I had to take it really slowly because I couldn't see a thing), I came out, and saw there was a large police vehicle parked right near the road there, maybe to catch people who have just gotten off the train coming into town. There were five cops standing there, and they were busy with some other traveler, going through his stuff, and asking him a bunch of questions. Nothing to see here. Just pretend you don't see it and keep going. So I just averted my eyes and kept moving, and I had just about thought I had passed the engulfment zone, when I heard a shout in Russian behind me. I just ignored it at first, but then I heard more shouts that we're more insistent. I turned around and a Russian policeman was hurriedly approaching me. He motioned for me to go back to the car where the others were waiting. He seemed a little pissed that I had ignored his commands and that he had to come after me.

I got back to where the vehicle was, and two of the cops were busy with the other guy, but one cop started interrogating me in Russian. I just meekly said, "Ni ponimayu", which means, "I don't understand". The cop then asked me, "English?", and I nodded. He asked me, "Passport?", and I nodded again, but made no move to produce it. He then motioned me to open my big backpack. I had a lock on it, so I had to undo it, and it was so dark I could hardly see the combination dial. But I got it undone, and he went through every single thing in every pocket, leaving it all in disarray. Then he asked to go through my little backpack, which I carry on the front, and then my fanny pack. He was very thorough, and went through everything, leaving my meticulously packed stuff just scattered all around in the dark. They seemed frustrated that I couldn't answer any of their questions, and just gave up on trying to question me. Then they just waved me off and told me I could go. I had to shove everything back in to my backpacks haphazardly and get them closed, which wasn't an easy task, since they were overstuffed anyway even with everything neatly packed. The funny thing was, they never did check my documentation. I headed down the road, a little shaken by the experience, and since this confrontation had taken about a half hour, I was now an hour and a half later than I had told the hostel I would be.

Finally I found the hostel, and it was well-marked on the outside, which sometimes is not the case when it comes to Russian hostels. I followed the signs up one flight of steps, and the door was locked. So I tried what I thought was a doorbell, but I don't think it worked. Nobody was answering the door at all. I tried knocking several times, and nobody answered. Great, it looked like I was going to have to sleep in the hallway. So I set up my little backpack as a pillow, and lay down on the floor outside the door for a while. Well, that verily sucked, so I got up and tried knocking on the door one more time. Finally a woman answered the door. She was just a tenant, but she spoke really good English, and she said the owner was not there. She asked if I had told them I was coming, and I said yes, but I was a little late. She had the owner's phone number, so she called him, and he approved letting me in, so she did. Well, I had to figure out where the room was, and just pick a bed for myself, and then figure out where everything else was, like the bathroom and the kitchen. Usually someone will show you all that stuff. But I was glad at least that I had gotten in and had a bed for the night. There was one other guy asleep in the big room filled with bunks, and she and her boyfriend were in a private room to themselves.

The TV in the common room was on, and right as I got settled in, the show "Big Love" was starting, dubbed in Russian. I watched it for a while, but couldn't really understand it, so I blew it off and just started channel-surfing. The TV was hooked up to some strange glorified internet-dongle-slash-cable-box with a ton of channels from all over on it. I watched a French channel for a while, but then finally turned in, as it was getting late.

The next day, I woke up, and a hostel manager was waiting for me to collect my money and give me a key. That was all I saw of management there, except for the owner dropping by briefly later that night, which was great because he was able to fix the wi-fi, which hadn't worked at all up until that point.

I walked around the city, and toured the Astrakhan Kremlin. Astrakhan is in southern Russia, close to the Kazakhstan border, right next to the European part of Kazakhstan (it sounds strange to talk about European Kazakhstan, but about 10% of it is in Europe). I wanted to visit the Volga River Delta, but I found out you need a special border permit to do that, which is a bureaucratic mess and will take days at the least, maybe even weeks. So I didn't have the time, as I was only in Astrakhan for two more days.

When I returned from checking out the city of Astrakhan, it was just me and the other guy in my room.  He checked out the next day, leaving me the next night as the only person in the whole hostel, which was kind of weird. I went out for a second day of city exploration, mostly walking along the Volga River, but also checking out other parts of the city I hadn't seen yet. When I got back that evening, it was to the freaky ghost hostel, where I was the only restless spirit there.

Hot Times At The Hot Springs In Tyumen

I arrived in Tyumen on the Trans-Siberian train very early in the morning. I got my stuff together on the train, loaded up my backpacks and proceeded to walk about two kilometers to the hostel​ where I was staying. When I got there, the room was pretty full and all they had available was an upper bunk. It had been a while since I had been assigned an upper bunk. In the last few hostels I had stayed in, they been empty enough that only lower bunks had been available, or I had just gotten the lower bunk by the luck of the draw. It was no big deal though, of course, I prefer lower bunks. But you gotta build some bunk karma, so every once in a while you get an upper bunk to take one for the team. Funny, when I was a kid, I always liked the upper bunk better.

As soon as I checked in, I wanted to look around the city. The city looked more modern than most of the other Siberian cities I had been in, and had a much more European vibe, even though I was still in Asia. So I walked around the town and just checked things out.  In the early evening, I ended up stumbling across a pre-Victory Day parade, so I made a video of part of it. After I had finished my wanderings through the city for the day, I got back to the hostel, and there were a bunch of friendly, talkative Russians who were curious about this American guy who didn't seem to fit their stereotypes at all. We had an amazingly broad range of conversation, considering that I know very little Russian, and each of them only knew a few words of English. But I really hit it off with my bunkmate, the guy in the lower bunk. I wish I could remember his name. I also wish that I had gotten some contact with him on social media; I realized a few days later when I was leaving the city that I hadn't. I find that a lot of Russians are not on Facebook, but Instagram is really big here. I started using Instagram just recently; I joined a few years ago but never used it and never took the time to figure it out much after the first couple of times that I had tried to do stuff with it. But I hadn't taken​ enough time to figure it out, so I didn't get far with it. Later in the night, a Russian guy who spoke English really well showed up with his girlfriend, and he kind of acted as an interpreter, which made the conversations easier. But he only stayed that one night. I asked him how he learned English, and he said it was almost all from movies and TV, and that he hardly ever had opportunities to speak English with anyone. He said he appreciated the chance to practice, though he spoke really well.

Over the next couple of days, my bunkmate and I had some remarkable conversations considering our linguistic differences. We discussed things like JFK's assassination, our respective countries' involvement in Syria, the situation in Chechnya, and so on. He was very surprised to find out that there were homeless people in the US, and that they could be found on street corners in cities holding signs asking for money. He asked me how much people made in the US; I told him I thought most people probably made between about two and three thousand a month, and he was surprised that it wasn't more. But I told him that many people made a lot less, and maybe had to cobble together several part-time jobs, and that jobs might not pay as much or have as many benefits as they used to; he made a wry face and said it was the same in Russia. He said he thought we were a rich country, and I told him we are, but the rich people have all the money. He laughed, and said, "Just like Russia!"

While in Tyumen, I wanted to visit one of the many hot springs in the area. I found that there were many hot springs within a fairly short distance, so I looked into trying to get to one of them. I found that some of them were attached to expensive resorts, and most of them were some distance out of town, and I couldn't find any information on transportation to get to most of them. Finally, I found one hot spring, Yar Hot Springs, that was right on the edge of the city, and there was a city bus that went there that only cost twenty-five rubles. What a deal!

I started walking towards the bus stop, and stopped to look at some plants popping up in a garden. The Russian spring is just starting, so green stuff is starting to come up. I was trying to figure out if some leafy stuff that I had seen elsewhere was a weed or some kind of cultivated plant, when I saw a gentleman with a sour-looking face approaching me. He stopped in front of me and unleashed a barrage of hostile-sounding Russian at me, ending in a question that it sounded like he wanted an answer to. I did not pick up on anything he said, since my Russian is still fairly terrible (though I'm studying every day hoping to get to at least a moderately communicative level), so I answered him with, "Izvinitye, ni ponimayu", which means, "Sorry, I don't understand". Well, I understood his response. He asked me, "What don't you understand?" OK, this is definitely hostile. I thought about answering him in English, and then saying, "Did you understand?", but I thought better of it and just gave him a half-smile and a wave, and scurried on my way.

I arrived at the bus stop, and waited for the bus. I was looking at the bus maps, and they didn't reveal much information. Many countries I've been to put their bus maps on straight lines with the names of the stops, and that's the way they did it here. But I sure wish they would draw actual maps. I wouldn't know where the listed stops were even if this was in English.

It turned out the bus I had to take was one of the big van type buses packed with seats, with a partition separating the driver. On most Russian city buses that I've taken, there is a conductor circulating among the passengers who takes your money and issues you a ticket at some point after you board (they use this same model in Vietnam). But there was no conductor in this bus. Usually I try to see what the other passengers are doing for payment, but I guess I didn't notice anything about that when I got on the bus. So at the next stop, I just passed twenty-five rubles to the driver through the window in the partition, and that seemed like the correct method. Every country does buses differently. Who do you pay and how? Some places have a driver and a conductor, others just a driver. Some places make you buy a ticket beforehand. On some buses, you pay at the beginning, and on some, at the end.

I missed my stop, even though I was monitoring Google Maps for where I had to get off. But Google Maps was doing a thing it does sometimes where it takes a minute to catch up, and suddenly the dot shifted to a place past my stop. Oh, well, I figured I would just get off at the next stop and walk a little farther, no big deal. The next stop was right outside the sign marking the city limits, and I got off there. On the way walking back into town, I passed a stolovaya, which is a cafeteria-style canteen with cheap food. I like to eat at these places because they are very cheap and popular with locals. Though all of the main courses are usually meat-based, (why did auto correct just change meat-based to near-impossible? I just changed it back) there are a lot of tasty side dishes that I cobble together a meal with. I had buckwheat groats with a cabbage-filled salad, tea, and a tasty onion piroshki. A piroshki is a bread roll filled with some filling, usually cabbage (kapusta) or potato (kartoshka), but occasionally with mushroom (gryb) or onion (luk). They are all over the place in little restaurants and street stands.

After eating, I moved onward toward the hot springs. Yar Hot Springs only charged 250 rubles to enter, but they also had little cabins there for rent that you could pay modestly more for. So, if you're thinking about staying in Tyumen, that's an option that would let you use the hot springs whenever you want during your stay. It looked like the price was about twice as much as the hostel where I'm staying, but still a deal for a single room, though the rooms looked tiny, and I have no idea what amenities the cabins have.

There was a changing room with a shower, but no place to lock up belongings, so I just hung a plastic bag I had brought a change of clothes in along with my wallet and phone on a hook near the hot spring pool, and kept my eye on it. It seemed like people were mostly just leaving their stuff laying around, so it seemed pretty safe. But you never know, there could be opportunity snatchers anywhere.

After I was there a few minutes, a bunch of Russian police in uniform came in, made some announcement that I didn't understand through a bullhorn, and then wandered around the grounds. They didn't mess with anyone, though. It seemed like there were a bunch of police hangers-on, people who were buddies with the police and hanging out with them, or maybe even police in plain clothes. I just try to keep out of trouble and nobody messed with me. The lifeguards seemed pseudo-police-y too. They would occasionally say something through a bullhorn, or release a siren-sounding alert with a stern instruction to someone, stuff like stay off the ropes or telling kids not to run...typical lifeguard commands.

The water was a brownish color and very minerally...I tasted small amounts on my lips, and it seemed like there were a lot of salts and minerals in it. I hung out in the pool for quite a while, and discovered there was a little walled-off section that was even hotter. It was very relaxing, but I realized I'd have to get out of the pool into the cold, windy weather, so I readied myself for that. I got out of the pool, got dressed, and then stopped in the little cafe that they had on the premises.

I just stopped in the cafe to sit for a bit and drink a soda. A few people came in and out while I was there, and there was a really drunk couple who were drinking a lot of booze while I was there. I saw them go through a bottle of vodka, then they ordered another bottle, and invited me over to drink Schnapps with them. I said, "nyet, spasiba," several times, as I'm not really drinking these days, but they were very insistent, and came over to my table to sit with me. I told them, "nyet alcohol", which was about all I could manage to communicate about why I wasn't joining them. They said, OK, then ordered beers. Apparently many Russians don't think of beer as alcohol. Last year, when I was traveling in Eastern Siberia, a guy in a hostel told me that we Americans probably think of Russians as heavy drinkers, but he had a neighbor who didn't drink at all. But in the course of the conversation, he later indicated that his neighbor drank beer.

So they poured me a beer, and I kept begging off, and finally pushed it away. I tried to be gracious about it. Anyway, the wife ended up drinking the beer. They told me their names were Sasha and Olga. After a while, the guy was so drunk I though he was going to puke on me a couple of times, and his wife was hanging all over me and pushing her legs against mine; I couldn't tell if it was flirty or she was just so drunk that it was for support, but I suspected the latter. He started ranting about Obama and giving him the finger.

This drunken, aggressive vibe was getting a little weird for me, so I started contemplating an exit strategy. They kept trying to get me to go with them in their car to their house, but I didn't want to be driven by people that drunk, and I didn't want to go from the edge of town to who knows where, and who knows how I'd get back. Finally Olga went out to smoke, and Sasha went to the bathroom, so I darted out the door to go catch my bus back into the city. But they ended up leaving right after me, and caught up with me, and kept saying stuff about money; maybe they wanted me to give them money, but I just wanted to move on. A guard at the gate asked me if everything was "normalna" (OK), and I smiled and answered, "Normalna". But I used the break in continuity to break away and walk faster, and they didn't catch up.

I walked to the bus stop and caught the bus back into town; that evening was pretty uneventful, but I had more conversations with my bunkmate. By that time, the room has emptied out, and I probably could have changed to a bottom bunk, but I just stayed in my bunk out of inertia.

The next day was Victory Day, May 9. I was planning to go out and check out the activities, but I procrastinated, paying bills and stuff, and ordering train tickets and hostel reservations online, and didn't get out until two in the afternoon. But by that time, it was mostly over. I guess it's more of a morning thing. I walked around the city, but only encountered groups of people in uniforms and wearing ribbons milling around after the celebrations. Oh well. But at least there were fireworks in the evening that several of us watched from the hostel balcony.

The next day, I had to take off on the train. I packed my stuff, said, "Da svidaniya, udachny", to my bunkmate, and left for the train station to take off for Kazan in Tatarstan. I looked at my electronic train tickets, which I had been able to use without printing before, but they didn't have a train number, car number or seat number on then, so I figured I had better get them printed at the train station. So I went to a window, and they printed tickets with all the required info on them.

Finally on this trip, I would leave Siberia, and cross over into European Russia. When I got on the train and got in my compartment, I found that I was the only one in the compartment, and there were even very few in the whole car; maybe only two other compartments were occupied. The pravadnitsa stopped by to offer me tea or coffee; I opted for a coffee. About a half hour later, I closed the door to my compartment for some solitude. After a few minutes, to my surprise, some woman barged in to my closed compartment to try to sell me some shawls. All I could think was, "what the fuck are you doing in my compartment." I kept just saying, "nyet" and didn't let on that I didn't speak much Russian and didn't understand anything she was saying in her obnoxious hard sell. What are you doing, lady, casing my compartment? Finally, I said, "Nyet, nyet, nyet!" very aggressively and waved her out, and she left. That was the first time anybody has ever just pushed their way into a closed compartment I was in and it kind of annoyed me.

Anyway, here I now sit on the train to Kazan, Tatarstan, awaiting new adventures.

May Day in Novosibirsk

I woke up this morning and packed my stuff to take a bus to Tomsk. I repacked my bags and left my big backpack at the hostel because I'll be coming back in three or four days. I'm taking a smaller bag with just some essentials to Tomsk. I knew it was May Day but didn't think much of it. When I got to Red Avenue I quickly found that they were preparing for a May Day Parade. The parade hasn't started yet as of now but groups are assembling on Red Avenue.

I had to pass a certain corner I'm not too crazy about. Often in former communist countries there are barriers along streets dictating where you can go. On this particular corner there are barriers along all four corners of the street. You can cross the street if you go into the metro station underground, but the metro station leads into an underground mall. This particular underground area is fairly byzantine and twisty, and I often come out on the wrong cormer. You immediately have to go the wrong way to cross the street and then through a series of chambers that lead you past storefronts. Also, one of the corner stations is shut down for construction so you just can't come up in that corner at all.

I walked down Red Avenue and watch the various groups assembling for the parade and people getting together by the side of the road to be spectators. As I pull up to a big central square the police are not letting anybody past that point and they pulled me over for a document check and a search. This is not going to be easy now heading to the bus station because a lot of the way there is blocked and I'm going to have to walk a good deal around where I wanted to go. It's too bad that I'm going to miss the May Day Parade though because I have to get to the bus station.

I'm walking around the affected area but constantly finding that there are police blockades so I'm having to walk farther and farther out. I hope I can get back into the bus station without any problems. I left the hostel about two hours before the bus is scheduled to leave and under normal circumstances it would be a half an hour walk to the bus station but now I don't know how long it's going to take.

I walked up to the bus station and saw there was a police blockade right around it. But there was a walkway several meters away that I took and I did not have any problems. So now I'm at the bus station with about half an hour to spare getting ready to take the bus to Tomsk.

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).

Chilling in Phnom Penh

I thought that I had booked some flights from Vietnam to Cambodia and back.  I was getting ready to leave Ho Chi Minh City and head to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and I went to look in my email to find the airplane ticket, but upon checking the email trail, the fly-by-night online operation I booked with never booked the ticket.  I had booked Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh, as well as Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh with Travel2Be (avoid them like the plague), but they had never booked my tickets or charged my credit card.  Phnom Penh to Siem Reap was OK and I had the ticket; I had booked that one through someone else.

So I had to find alternate ways to get to the places I needed to go around the same times.  I booked a bus to Phnom Penh, since it was only a six-hour trip, and then booked a plane fare from Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City, both of those voyages through the hostel in Saigon. So now I was covered again.

I've never been entirely happy with most of these third party online booking agents.  There are a lot of them, especially for Southeast Asia, and it seems like sites like Skyscanner are sending people to these third-party sites more lately.  Many of them don't have any contact info or method of redress if things go wrong.  Up until now, I've used some of them warily, and it has worked out, but I imagine if one little detail goes wrong, you are stuck.

I took the bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, and got to Phnom Penh right after it got dark, and it started pouring rain.  I got out my umbrella and walked to my hostel since it wasn't too far from where the bus stopped.

Phnom Penh has been an interesting place to visit, but the place just doesn't grab me like some places do.  It has been raining a lot, too.  This morning I woke up, and it was pouring rain to the point that the streets were flooded.  But this afternoon it has calmed down.  It does look like it is going to rain all week.  Mostly I've just been walking around checking it out, but I did go visit the high school that was turned into a death camp, S-21. Of the tens of thousands of people who entered, only a small number were known to have survived. Many sent here were told they were being relocated to new jobs, or some other ruse. People who wore glasses were killed for ostensibly being "intellectuals."

In Cambodia, the US dollar is pretty much the de facto currency. The Cambodian riel  is the official currency, and when you pay with dollars, you will usually get back a mish-mash in change of riel and dollars. If you are due less than a dollar back, your change will be riel for sure, because nobody messes with US coins. Also the ATMs give out dollars; some might let you choose between dollars and riel.

So I've just been chilling in Phnom Penh for the last few days, getting ready for my next journey.

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.