Adam’s Not Here

I think I said this before, but I am SO excited to be here. SEA was fantastic, but this trip has always been about coming to China. On the train from the border I had a woman come up to me and ask me to teach her English. At first I was like, um, here? now? how? But then she pulled out this vocabulary list and started to read it. So I just helped her with her pronounciation. She was a nurse though, so all the words were medical terms, many of which were very difficult. Some were latin. A lot of them had to do with child birth, so I was sitting there helping her to pronounce ‘vagina’ and ‘uterine canal’ and stuff like that. It was pretty funny. I’m not sure but I think she was asking me to come over for dinner and help her more. But she wasn’t entirely clear, so when I told her I didn’t understand she just gave up. She was very grateful for the help though and gave me a giant bag of lychees.

China definitely feels different than the rest of Asia. Everything seems to be on a much grander scale and much more modern. The train passed through fields of farmers on rice paddies, still using oxen for pulling plows, but the provincial capital, Nanning, is something else. I am in an internet cafe listening to techno. There are over 200 computers, all with flat panel displays. There are fish tanks and cool lighting. It’s like being in a club except that everyone is playing Warcraft or on MSN.

Tomorrow I am taking a train to Guilin which is supposed to be very beautiful. Anyhow, that’s it, just had to share all the bubbliness I am feeling right now.

In the morning before coming to Hanoi, Melissa and I visited the Vinh Moc tunnels near the former DMZ. People from a fishing village lived in the tunnels for 4 years during the Vietnam War (or as they call it here, the American War). It was crazy to see the conditions they had to live in, each family was allocated a little cave space that was maybe 25 sq ft. The tunnels were quite narrow and only about 5 feet high, I thought I was going to come out of them a hunchback. In the evening we took a night bus from Hue to Hanoi. I’m not going to go on about it again, but let’s just say I should have waited for this bus ride before complaining so much, yikes.

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Date: 07/21/2005Views: 476

We arrived in Hanoi to find a very nice city. We stayed in the Old Quarter, which has many buildings with french architecture around a gorgeous lake. This is my city planning backround coming through, but the public spaces throughout Southeast Asia have made quite an impression on me. Despite the fact that these are countries that are looked down upon as less developed, their treatment of the public realm makes us in North America look ridiculous. I know that in Canada it is easy to write things off because of winter, but I think that that is a cheap excuse. Even though many of the cities are choked with traffic, the streets really feel like they are made for people. Each place uses different combinations of wide siewalks, paving stones, water and trees and greenery but the effect is always to create the feeling that life for most people is lived on the streets. And this shouldn’t have the negative connotation that it does back home where it means being homeless. This is something that particularly struck me about India when I was there and that I would often miss back in Toronto.

We took 3 days off from Hanoi to do a tour of Halong Bay, which means “where the dragon descends into the sea.” It is an area that is filled with majestic limestone cliffs jutting out of the water and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. It rained almost the whole first two days and we only got a bit of sun on the return to Hanoi, but it was still a great trip. The area was of course beautiful, but what really made it was having a great group. It turned out that one of the women on the trip was working for a Spanish company in Shanghai. She was very friendly and has offered to help me get oriented in Shanghai and find somewhere to stay. So it is funny how things can work out. There was also a French couple who we got to know that were a lot of fun. The first day was pretty low key because of the rain. We did go kayaking for a bit. I jumped out of the kayak to take a swim and got stung by a jellyfish, but it wasn’t that bad. Melissa also took a swim, but unfortunately got stung much worse. It wasn’t all bad though as it allowed for plenty of opportunity to make pee jokes (a cure for jellyfish stings, if there is no vinegar around, the amonia in urine will do the trick). The next day we went on a trek on one of the islands that turned out to be quite an experience. The guide asked us if we were sure about going at least 6 times, saying that it would be very muddy and slippery because of the rain. The trek turned out to be this insanely gruelling jungle trek. We had to ascend and descend steep and slippery rocks, dodge large spiders and wade through a waist high swamp. The swamp was of course full of prickly plants and tripping vines. It also thundershowered pretty much the whole time. It took about four hours to complete and we were all so wet and dirty and tired by the end of it. It was awesome.

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Date: 07/25/2005Views: 580

Back in Hanoi Melissa and I kept things low key. The one thing we did do was check out the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum where the man himself lies embalmed for all to see. It was kind of weird seeing someone like that. He’s been dead almost 40 years but there he is, looking like he is sleeping and slightly rubbery.

Melissa flew back home this morning, so now I am all by my lonesome. Tomorrow I am catching a bus to China and I will make my way towards Shanghai over the course of a week or so. At that point I am going to start pounding the pavement and try to scare up a job. I am actually really, really excited about this. I probably haven’t felt this way since I was about to start university. At the beginning of the trip I was excited but also very apprehensive as I didn’t know what to expect. But everything has gone wonderfully. I haven’t gotten sick (and this is without malaria pills and with eating uncooked fruits, vegetables and ice), I haven’t been homesick and aside from the odd time of being overcharged, we weren’t scammed or robbed. Now that I have said this I’ll probably be struck by lightning as I leave the internet cafe. And all the wood around me looks like that fake veneer…. oh well. The cherry on top is that I have also more or less been on budget. I tried to be careful with money, but we certainly weren’t stingy. All told, costs since arrival have been about $1900 Cdn for two months. And this includes the scuba course ($250), a new wardrobe (about $120) and all my visas (around $150). So it has worked out. If any of you out there have thought about going away for a while but were unsure or scared, my advice is definitely to just go for it. Things have a way of working out.

Keep the emails and comments coming, and you’ll hear from me next in China!

On our last day in Saigon we visited the Reunification Palace (formerly known as Independence Hall) which is where the government of South Vietnam was headquartered while it existed. It has been totally preserved since the country was taken over by the communists in 1975. It was pretty cool as it still had all its original 70s decor and old maps and equipment from the war.

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Date: 07/15/2005Views: 502

From Saigon we took a night bus to the beach town of Nha Trang. The night buses seem like a good idea since you save on the cost of a hotel and don’t waste your day in transit. In reality, they cram the seats so close together that you get no leg room. Coupled with stops every couple hours throughout the night, it is difficult to get any real sleep. So every time we take a night bus we end up sleeping half the day away wherever we arrive. In Nha Trang we met up with our Dutch friend, Bas. We first met him on Ko Tao in Thailand and then ran into him a couple weeks later in Chiang Mai. We actually got to spend enough time with him to develop a real friendship, which was really nice in comparison to all the rent a friends that one gets for a couple hours or days.

After another night bus we arrived in Hoi An…. and fell asleep. Hoi An is a charming town with narrow streets and architecture with a French influence. It is famous in part for its tailors. Melissa and I thought it would be wise to sample their offerings. So for $70 USD I got a pair of wool dress pants, two casual pants and three dress shirts. Not as cheap as the streets of Bangkok, but it is all made to measure. The results seem pretty good (I won’t be able to take them for a real test wear until I encounter some milder temperatures) although the process was a bit stressful. You tell them what you want and they say ok, but I am not sure if they didn’t understand everything or they just weren’t really listening. My stuff turned out pretty much fine but Melissa had to get a lot of changes made, sometimes she had to ask for the same thing twice as they didn’t do it. But in the end everything turned out pretty good. We even got custom made shoes. I hadn’t even thought you could get this done, but you just pick out the style in a book and then they measure you’re feet. The shoes are ready in less than 24 hours. So now I have a good part of my wardrobe for China and I will no longer have to show up for job interviews in shorts and sandals.

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Date: 07/20/2005Views: 471

Tomorrow it’s off to visit the Vinh Moc tunnels and the former DMZ. Following that is another night bus….

Our time in Phnom Penh was fairly quiet. Although it is currently the rainy season, we had had tremendous luck on the trip so far. Every time we arrived somewhere people said that it been raining so much the last while. Yet we rarely encountered more than an hour of rain. This luck seemed to run out in Phnom Penh as it rained much of the two days we were there. So we pretty much limited ourselves to vegging at the guesthouse and making limited excursions walking around the streets. On one of the nights we thought that we would try and go clubbing. However, we found that all the clubs we could find were in hotels. This basically meant that they were full of foreign businessmen and prostitutes. Add cheesy Chinese music to that and our Phnom Penh clubbing experience was over before it began.

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Date: 07/10/2005Views: 671

When celebrating last night, we decided to try our luck again here in Saigon. Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) has about 12 million people and seems to be quite busy all the time. We went to a place called Apocalypse (Now?) with some English, Irish and Americans that we had met on the bus. We didn’t arrive at the club till just after 11, as one would back home. The club had decent music but wasn’t that busy. It wasn’t dead, but there was definitely a serious lack of buzz. The clientele again seemed to be mostly foreigners and prostitutes. By the time we got some beers and took a seat (no one seemed to be feeling dancing) we had 20 minutes before they turned off the music and started closing up. Yep, show’s over at midnight. Our one conversation with someone (late 30s white guy) went like this:

Guy: You guys been here long?
Us: No, maybe 15 minutes.
Guy: Yeah me too. You know what’s up with the girls here?
Us: No, we’re guessing they’re prostitutes.
Guy: All I want to know is how much and how safe is it.
Us: Uh, I dunno, maybe you should ask them.

So maybe the early close wasn’t such a bad thing.

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Date: 07/15/2005Views: 572

I really like Saigon. The pace is somewhat frenetic, which makes it simultaneously exciting and exhausting. Just walking around the streets for most of the day is really fun, but it takes a lot out of you. And as we had heard, the traffic is insane. It seems like all 12 million people that live here have motorbikes and are all using them at once. I’m not sure if it’s just Saigon, but Vietnam appears to be quite developed. It is around the same level of Thailand and noticeably wealthier than Laos and Cambodia. We’ll see if this holds true as we make our way up the coast and into the north.

So we took the fun route to Cambodia and it actually worked out. Everything we have been doing is on the regular tourist circuit and so there are VIP tourist buses plying the major routes and handling the connections. So far it hadn’t exactly been the romanticized version of roughing it on the roads in SE Asia that I had imagined. This time turned out to be a little more of an adventure. What appeared to be the most direct route from Vientiane (Laos) to Siem Reap (Cambodia) was not offered by any of the travel agencies. So Melissa and I decided to make it on our own with local buses. This ended up being closer to what I had imagined. We had to take 4 buses and several tuk-tuks, and there were no other foreigners along the way. We had to figure out our connections by asking the locals who barely spoke English and pass through towns not on the map or mentioned at all in the guide book.

Crossing into Cambodia you realize what a difference a border makes. Compared to Cambodia, and to a lesser extent, Laos, one really gets an appreciation for how developed and organized things are in Thailand. The border town of Poipet is 150km from Siem Reap, but the bus ride took over 6 hours. Imagine driving on a dirt road and hitting a big pothole. Now imagine going on a dirt road and all four of your tires hitting giant potholes at once. Now imagine that happening for 6 hours straight. Yes, serious air time. On top of that, I had a seat over the rear wheel housing. So I had to bend my legs into a fetal like position which made my knees hit the seat in front of me. It was kind of like being stuffed into a tiny suitcase. After a dinner stop 3 hours in, I decided to finish the journey by climbing onto the bags at the back of the bus. I think it was the best decision I have made this entire trip. Despite all this, the journey was pretty fun, it was dark and raining a lot at first. There was a certain charming ambiance of adventurous discomfort.

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Date: 07/09/2005Views: 649

Siem Reap is certainly an interesting town. The name means ”Thailand Defeated,” so you kind of get an idea about the feeling Cambodians have for their neighbours. This is due largely to the fact that Angkor Wat, the pride of the Cambodian nation, was once occupied by the Thais, who looted many of the artifacts from the temples. A few years ago, a Thai pop star mistakenly referred to Angkor Wat as being part of Thailand, which sparked violent anti-Thai riots in Cambodia. The town itself has plenty of luxury tourist hotels but the majority of its residents seem very poor.

To tour Angkor Wat Melissa and I rented bicycles and made our on way around the complex. At each temple children would run out and try and sell postcards, water, bracelets and such with incredible persistency. We spent the whole day biking around and looking at all the various temples and buildings. Angkor Wat is the name of the main building as well as the entire area. It was built by the Khmer empire (precursors to modern Cambodia) around the 12th century. The place is on a scale unlike anything else I have seen. I (and maybe you) sometimes think about how if someone from a long time ago saw the modern world they would be totally blown away. But seeing this made me think of how awe-inspiring it would have been to have seen this place at the height of its splendour.

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Date: 07/09/2005Views: 745

The way back from Angkor Wat capped an interesting day. We had to ride back in the dark, surrounded by a rush of motorcycles leaving Angor Wat. It was a little intense being surrounded by the chaotic traffic. On the way back we stopped for a free concert at the Children’s hospital. The concert was the director of the hospital playing Bach on the cello. He plays these concerts every week in order to raise money for the hospitals. There is no admission but of course you donate a little money. It was weird coming back from a tiring day around Angkor (we biked over 40km!) through crazy traffic and then finding ourselves in this peaceful concert in a very modern building in the style of the Isabel Bader Theatre back home.

Today we caught a bus down to Phnom Penh. We haven’t had much of a chance to explore yet, but it looks like there is a lot to see around here. I had initially been somewhat apprehensive about coming to Cambodia as we had heard not so great things from other travellers. One guy said he really liked it, but everyone else said it was expensive and stressful. We heard stories about people rushing on to the bus when you arrive and getting in your face about taking a taxi ride or coming to their guesthouse. People here are certainly more into pressure tactics and less willing to take no for an answer, but it is understandable given the poverty here. So far it hasn’t been as bad as I had feared and there have also been a lot of nice, friendly people. So it’s working out.