Onward, Upward

I have in-hand my Chinese visa (kind of drab: I'd hoped for a little more fanfare considering the $170 price tag, at least a hologram or something, but oh well) and a ticket for a hard-sleeper from Hanoi to Nanning tonight. Hopefully the term "hard-sleeper" won't be a double-entendre, but even on the face of it, it's a little daunting. I asked Giang (pronounced 'Zang,' like from "Wayne's World 2" when Wayne inexplicably knows the Mandarin word for 'excellent!'), the daughter of the guest house owners, if she could describe for me what the hard-sleeper was like, and she reached over to the wooden bench I was sitting on and rapped it disappointingly with her knuckles. Pictures on seat61.com tell a different story, but I suspect the company that runs trains from Hanoi to Nanning may not be the same as the companies operating entirely within China.

I also have a secondhand Lonely Planet China guide, which warns that Chinese customs officers sometimes confiscate the guide on the basis that its maps represent Taiwan as a separate country. They reccommend putting a cover on the book to make it "less noticable," but don't specify what the average Chinese customs agent considers noticable. For lack of direction, I've taken my usual approach of reckless whimsy:

Lonely Planet's guide to The Moon: 100% researched and updated! A convincing facade if ever there was one? We'll find out.

Into Nanning by tomorrow morning, I will hopefully have left behind the incessant honk and buzz of motorbikes for a friendlier, more laid-back atmosphere, but in anticipation of more of the same, I have no less than 6 (six!) paperbacks: LPs for 'The Moon' and The Middle East, an exhausting Noam Chomsky tome, and three new aquisitions, Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played with Fire," Howard Marks's "Mr. Nice," and Aravind Adiga's "Between the Assassinations." Book exchanges are one of my favorite kinds of human interaction. Left behind: Pullman's "The Subtle Knife, Chrichton's "Pirate Latitudes," Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days." If the book turnover continues apace (and this hard-sleeper issue goes well), the many long-distance trains in my immediate future (Nanning-Xi'an: 33 hours) should be very pleasant.

Only three and a half more hours in Hanoi before the migration resumes.

For those interested (mom), I posted a final farewell to Korea in the other blog, to which I'm adding pictures now.

Hanoi Photos and Halong Bay

A few photos from the journey from Phonsavan, Laos to Hanoi via Vinh:

Vietnam countryside from the bus window

The only non-seedy hotel I could find in Vinh: $22

The friendliest porter in Vietnam on the Vinh-Hanoi train. Looking amused to the right is Andreas, an independent tradecraftsman advocate from Hamburg

Random Hanoi buildings

Halong Bay means "Dragon eating to the waters," in the words of our guide. There's a story involving a dragon that kept the country safe from would-be invaders by making the hundreds upon hundreds of limestone karst islands that speck the bay, but it's not as interesting as the islands themselves, which jut up magnificently from the water in such profusion that, when sailing among them, you can lose sight of the coast.

The tour consisted of two days and one night on the boat. We sailed out from Halong harbor at a steady pace and ate lunch as we drifted among the islands. We stopped for a visit to a cave where our guide pointed out the different formations: an elephant, a buddha, a waterfall. After the cave we split into pairs and kayaked around the karsts, then returned to the boat for a swim. The rain began late that night and continued through the second day, relegating the group to a leisurely day of reading and chatting aboard the junk. We headed back to the harbor in the afternoon where a tender relayed us to the shore for lunch and a bus back to Hanoi.

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM

MY ARRIVAL IN VIETNAM WAS SUCH THAT THE MOST APPROPRIATE WAY TO RELATE IT IS IN ALL CAPS. IF YOU CAN IMAGINE ROBIN WILLIAMS SAYING THESE WORDS VERY LOUDLY WHILE JOGGING AROUND YOU IN CIRCLES AND WAVING SPARKLERS, THAT WOULD BE AN ACCURATE IMPRESSION.

MY TRAIN ARRIVED IN HANOI AT FOUR O'CLOCK YESTERDAY AFTERNOON. KNOWING NOTHING ABOUT HANOI, I WANDERED AROUND THE CITY LOOKING FOR A CHEAP GUESTHOUSE OR AN INTERNET CAFE FROM WHICH I WOULD LOOK UP A CHEAP GUESTHOUSE. ONE RECEPTIONIST SAID HE COULD RECOMMEND A GUESTHOUSE AND WOULD CALL TO HAVE THEM PICK ME UP AND TAKE ME OVER. ALTHOUGH I EXPLAINED TO THE MAN BEFORE I GOT ON HIS MOTORBIKE THAT I ONLY WANTED TO SEE THE ROOM AND I WASN'T SURE I WOULD STAY, HE WAS VERY UPSET AFTER SHOWING ME THE PREMISES TO FIND THAT I WANTED TO CHECK OTHER HOSTELS. I MADE MY ESCAPE FROM HIS STEELY GRIP USING A DISARMING SMILE AND A PROMISE THAT I WOULD COME BACK, WHICH WAS A BALD FACED LIE.

I FOUND A ROOM AT A TINY GUESTHOUSE AFTER ONLY A FEW MORE MINUTES OF WALKING AROUND, DROPPED OFF MY BAG AND WENT FOR A WALK AROUND HANOI. THE FULL MOON CELEBRATION BEGAN WHILE I WAS OUT, AND I GOT LOST IN A CROWD OF LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF VIETNAMESE ADOLESCENTS SCRAMBLING AROUND THE OLD QUARTER HAVING A BALL AWAY FROM PARENTAL SUPERVISION. I WITNESSED TWO MINOR MOTORBIKE CRASHES, NO INJURIES. I EXPECTED TO BE MORE FRUSTRATED WITH THE SITUATION THAN I WAS: EVERYBODY IN THE CELEBRATION SEEMED TO BE HAVING THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES, AND THOUGH I WAS DRENCHED WITH SWEAT AND HAD BEEN WALKING ALL DAY, THEIR HAPPINESS WAS CONTAGIOUS. I FINALLY FOUND MY WAY BACK TO THE GUESTHOUSE AND, WARY OF THE STREETS, RESIGNED MYSELF TO A DINNER OF WHEAT CRACKERS AND A CHOCOLATE BAR, WATCHED TWO EPISODES OF SEX AND THE CITY, AND WENT TO BED

My second day has been considerably more relaxed. I have seven more days to kill in Vietnam before my Chinese visa comes through. I've purchased an overnight boat tour to Halong Bay tomorrow, but I'm not sure how I'll fill the rest of the time. Hanoi deserves at least one more day of exploring. We'll see.

After two days of early rising, I drank in the luxury of sleeping in until eleven this morning. Breakfast (lunch) was a bowl Vietnamese "salad," which I mistook for soup, of beef, rice noodles, bean sprouts, crispy fried slices of garlic, lettuce, crumbled peanuts, and an the stems and leaves of an unidentified herb that tastes a little like anise, and eerily familiar. That I falsely thought it was soup brings up a philosophical question- where is the line between "soup" and "salad with a LOT of dressing"? Regardless of its taxonomy, the sauce-dressing-broth was so rich and buttery and good that it made my chest quiver the way it does before you start crying.

I spent the day exploring the Old Quarter on foot with relative ease. In the daylight, without throngs of cheery locals abounding, the city is surprisingly simple to navigate, in spite of the fact that the street names change after two blocks. I took in the Revolution Museum, which covers one hundred and ten years of abuse, and walked off the ensuing depression around the Hoan Kiem Lake. I scored a used China Lonely Planet guide for ten dollars to avoid any more fiascos like the one I experienced yesterday morning. It'll be a nice read while I take in the limestone caves from the deck of my chartered junk tomorrow.

For dinner, at the recommendation of the daughter of my hostel's owners, I had a spread of grilled, marinated pork, fried spring rolls, rice noodles and a huge plate of greens, including the mystery herb from breakfastlunch. And a bottle of Bia Saigon. With incessant motorbike ride offers, hard-bargaining merchants and whiplash-inducing traffic, Hanoi has none of the relaxed atmosphere of Laos, but I'll deal with the pandemonium if my luck with meals keeps up like this.

Caves and Tubes, Bikes and Jars

The mountain view from the guesthouse

Vang Vieng was great. The Englishmen (Matt, Scott and Nick) and I visited a small cave just across the river from our guesthouse. Outside the cave, from somewhere within the mountain, a stream of water was pouring out and had created a pool with a swift current. The movement of the water coming out of the mountain was such that you could swim against it at a leisurely pace and not move forward at all. It was fun until I started to let myself drift under a bridge, noticing the giant spider clinging underneath it only after getting uncomfortably close.

The bridge to the cave

The cave, a quick in-and-out with a Buddha inside

The pool outside the cave

The next day, we rented innertubes and got a lift a few miles up the Nam Song river. Along its banks are bar after bar, employees of which will toss you a line with an empty soda bottle at the end for a buoy. Once they pull you in, you stay for a while and drink a beer, maybe swing into the river on a trapeze hung from a 50-foot post, play a little soccer, then grab your tube, hop back in the river and move on to the next spot.

Entering the river

The first bar

From L, Nick, Matt, Scott

The flying trapeze

It's a pretty fun way to spend the day, but when the Englishmen you're with get distracted celebrating Nick's birthday until after the sun goes down, navigating the river's turns and obstacles becomes more intense. After a mile of clinging to each others' tubes, losing one and scraping the odd log in the middle of the river, we decided to paddle to the next sign of civilization on the banks and try our luck on land. The lights we aimed for were a building still a ten minute taxi outside of town, and Matt decided to carry on tubing without announcing it to us. This decision affected us more than we'd anticipated once we realized he had the drybag with our wallets and flip flops, but a pair of Mexicanos fronted us the cab fare back to the tube rental, where we quickly repaid them from our returned tube deposits.

That was enough excitement for me for a day, but the English were not so easily daunted. I retired to the room for the night and, with Nick's laptop, soaked up the unexpected luxury of watching movies in bed. The boys stumbled in, one by one, after a ferocious Laotian downpour struck at about one in the morning. Nick had had seven or eight too many and aroused some animosity in a taxi driver which neither he nor the driver were able to explain to us, but it was such that the driver wouldn't leave the guesthouse without some reparations. Matt took care of the debt, which had the unhappy effect of transfering the driver's animosity to him, and in the resulting brawl between Nick and Matt, one of the room's window treatments tragically lost its life. Order was restored, eventually, and in the wake of excitement, sleep came fast.

I took that, along with the fact that my Vietnamese visa had reached its effective date, as a sign that it was time for me to move on, and left on a bus for Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars the next afternoon.

The bus made its way after dark through switchbacks up the mountains. The view made up for the rattling back-and-forth motion of the swinging coach: under a nearly full moon, as we ascended above the fog, the Laotian lowlands seemed to be submerged under a sea of clouds with mountaintops forming islands. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, and it kept my spirits high throughout the jostling seven hour ride.

The following day in Phonsavan was lost to anxiety and fruitless skype calls to Visa after discovering the local ATMs had no interest in my debit card. I was resigned to waiting until my bank decided to open again and seeing if they would wire me some emergency money, but one final go at the ATMs turned out to be the magic word, and the Kip has flowed unimpeded ever since.

Today was spent on a rented 125cc motorbike, Fekon (Chinese, from the characters etched on the engine), or Fifi for short, exploring the three Plain of Jars sites outside of town. The jars' purpose remains mystery to modern archaeologists, but each one makes a different noise if you slap them with your palm, so my suggestion is, "giant drum kit." Time will tell. The sites, for all their ambiguity, are wonderfully intriguing. and beautiful to boot. The jars range in size from microwave ovens to walk-in closets, and there are probably a hundred or three scattered over the three sites.

Fifi at the entrance to site III

I found myself inexplicably stuck with different songs in my head at each site. In the order I visited them: Site II- "Let My Love Open the Door," Pete Townshend; Site III- "Sophisticated Lady." Rosemary Clooney; Site I- "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work and See My Baby," Tom Waits. Site III was a few minutes' walk on raised paths through rice paddies, and the visit was interrupted by an hour long downpour, which I waited out at a hut beside the entrance with a bowl of chicken and rice noodle soup with crispy fried garlic, green onion, lots of black pepper and a big handful of unidentifiable greens. The chicken was tough, presumably one of the free-range kin of the hens skittering about outside the hut, but the greens and garlic were phenomenal, and the hot broth was revitalizing after the cold rain.

All of the sites are pockmarked with bomb craters from the 'secret war' the U.S. waged on Laos, secret because it was in violation of the official stance of the U.S. that Laos would be neutral during the Vietnam war. Honeywell, it seems, decided those many decades ago that plain old craters wasn't a long enough lasting legacy, so they designed their cluster bombs to be only 70-ish percent efficient. The remaining 30 percent are spread across the country, waiting to be struck by a farmer's hoe or investigated by a curious child before spreading their "Honeywell Howdy." The "Honeywell Howdy" is a euphamism I have given to the exploding and spreading of ball bearings in every direction at thousands of feet per second. The inappropriateness of the phrase doesn't quite match the inappropriateness of the bomb, but it's a start.

In spite of Honeywell's best efforts, the Plain of Jars remains a stunning archaeological phenomenon that I put on par with Angkor Wat and Macchu Pichu. It's made even more alluring by the fact that I was the only person at sites II and III, which is not a statement I could make for Angkor or Macchu Pichu. But after a day's worth of jars and sunburn, I puttered back into Phonsavan and returned Fifi, the Fekon motorbike, and arranged for a taxi to the bus station tomorrow morning, from where I'll be departing to Vinh in Vietnam.

The Ocean?

Laos is landlocked, and I honestly did expect to do most of my post-work relaxing on a sandy beach. But Vang Vieng is everything I had hoped Thailand would be- the people are relaxed, not chomping at the bit to squeeze a few extra Baht out of the foreigners. The scenery is sublime, verdant cliffs, not garbage and filth. The prices are low, the food is good, and the weather is delightful after three days straight of rain. Four days is probably not enough time here, but I'm in no hurry.

I met up with three North-Englishmen at the border and we shared a cab all the way up to Vang Vieng, a four hour trip over mostly sealed roads and a few flooded spots reminiscent of fording the rivers in Oregon Trail. We're now sharing meals and a guesthouse room for dollars a day, and the company is excellent. There are caves to be explored and rivers to be tubed, and I got a few novels from the book exchange in Bangkok, so I'm ready for maximum vacation.

Back To School

The Longtail Taxi

to the...

Dive boat

Tanks a lot

Divemaster Lee Nightingale with ze Germans

The Galley

The island off of which we dove

Dutch dive instructor Steve with his cat

Ready for action

Diving is fun!

Diving buddies

Step One

Thailand- a little west and a lot south, but a step in the right direction toward home. During an all-airport layover in Guangzhou, I met Tori. There are worse ways to spend 11 hours than playing movie title hangman with an international fashion model. Once the flight arrived and I got gouged by a taxi driver, I collapsed into a dark dorm bed in Bangkok surrounded by snoozing Danes. I woke up at about 10:30 and the Danes invited me along to lunch with them at an alleyway food stand a few blocks down the road. For about 66 cents I got a full bowl of rice with my choice of stews to pour on top. Very little of it was identifiable, but all of it was astoundingly good. And Spicy. We toured the Grand Palace, bought apples, lounged at the plush guest house and parted ways.

Before leaving the guest house, I had them recommend and then book me a bus/ferry ticket to an island in the gulf called Koh Tao (Turtle Island), home to the venerable Ban's Diving Resort. Ban's makes the remarkable claim to have PADI-certified 10 percent of all of Asia's scuba divers. At the rate my certification course is going, I don't doubt it's true.

My class consists of one dive instructor, one dive master/assistant instructor, myself and eight other students: three Brazilian ex-pats from London, two (more) Danes, two Germans and an Irishwoman. We're all getting along like kings, having dinner together and discussing the peccadilloes of cultures worldwide (Danish bike rentals are unimaginably utopian, London's less so, etcetera).

Tomorrow morning are the final two dives before I'm awarded my PADI certificate, after which there will be celebrating.

Click on the pictures for a magnified view.

The Grand Palace

The ferry to Koh Tao

Freedom Bay, south Koh Tao

The view from my bungalow on Freedom Bay

Jelly