Solo Travels

Asia is the only place on earth where you can go to a McDonalds and order a McRice Burger. It’s also the only place where, while waiting in line for your McRice Burger, you might stand behind a Caucasian man with a shaved head wearing Birkenstocks and a British wool cardigan pulled over top a full length orange Buddhist robe while caring a woman’s purse in one hand, and in the other hand a plastic bag labeled ‘The Body Shop’. Yes, please go back and read that again. Identity crisis with a capital ‘I’.

My short 7-day vacation to northern Vietnam began with an 8-hour layover in Bangkok. Bangkok is a city. Beyond that I have little else to say. If you like cities that are fast-paced, crowded, have luxurious malls and greasy street vendors then Bangkok is for you. Me… I can appreciate it once a year, particularly if it involves a movie at the VIP cinema and a trip to the Outback Steakhouse. The key to an 8 hour layover in Bangkok is timing. Knowing where to go, cramming in as much relaxing as possible in one of Bangkok’s opulent malls, and in particular, gaging just the right amount of currency exchange so that you are not left over with too much Baht and have to spend the extra at the airport on something you really didn’t want, but not so little that you don’t have enough to pay the cab when you arrive at the airport – I ended being about 20 cents short.

My flight out of Bangkok departed at 7pm and arrived at 9:30pm in Hanoi. Foreign countries are always a little spooky at night. If Tara had been on this trip we would have had everything planned out right down to the GPS coordinates including hotel reservation, directions, cafe stops, and transport to and from the tourist hot-spots. As it was just me, I cracked open the Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam on the plane ride over, got my baggage in the Hanoi airport , hopped into a bus that was a mix of Asians and tourists, and 20km down the road leaned over and ask the driver “so where are we going?” I like a good adventure.

Dawn has come and past and it’s now ten minutes of seven; my last day in Vietnam. From my vantage point at the Little Kitchen Cafe here in Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi, I can watch the strange antics of several hundred Vietnamese as they perform their morning ritual exercises around a Lake Kiem, which seems to consist of a rather odd mix of calisthenics and aerobics, jogging backwards, spastic hand waving, swinging around pompoms on a string, and even tossing little sponge balls with a fan-shaped racket. Yes, I am in a foreign country. I’ve been up since 4am this morning and my coffee is having a rough time battling my eyes for possession consciousness. I spent the previous three days in Sapa – a quaint tourist town in northern Vietnam known for it’s rugged mountain-scapes inlaid with a thousand terraced rice paddies. It is amazing – at least from the post cards that I saw.

My three days there were characterized by heavy fog set in by a typhoon, which barely made it possible to make out the indigenous guide 5 steps ahead of me let alone the 1000 foot mountain-valleys I was skirting along on the narrow footpath. When we dropped below 5,000 feet the fog did clear reasonably well and the views were breathtaking – some sun would have made it truly photogenic, but I was not about to complain that the skies above me were cloudy. The Northern provinces are famous for their indigenous hill tribes, minority people groups with their own cultures and languages.

My guide was a vivacious little Black H’mong woman from the Lau Chai village; now a virtual tourist highway through which hundreds of foreigners tromp each day to ogle and photograph the rural farmers and their sub-standard lifestyle. Having spent a great deal of my life in rural, sub-standard villages, I was less impacted by the poverty and more impressed by how industrious and inventive they were as a people-group and I ogled and photographed away with the rest of the tourists.

Visiting Vietnam is not quite like visiting other touristy countries. Being communist, Vietnam maintains ridged control of every aspect of life, paying meticulous attention to the minutia of every foreigner that enters its borders. The Samaritan’s Purse office here is bugged heavier than a bee hive and passports with valid VISA’s are required to be photocopied at every hotel in which you stay. Furthermore in order to even step off the beaten path into a rural community, proper certifications and permits must be filled out and required fees paid. Failure to do so can result in arrest and interrogation and even imprisonment. Fortunately, for all the bureaucratic red tape, Vietnam has streamlined the tourist process reasonably well and all guides and agencies manage the permits and fees for you automatically. If you ever happen to tread in restricted areas without proper paperwork, the locals generally warn you rapidly b/f it comes to the attention of the authorities. For all the West’s prejudice against communist governments one only has to examine Cambodia and Vietnam briefly to recognize that, in many cases, a reasonably benevolent communist government is far more beneficial to a country’s economy and people than a horribly corrupt democratic system. The level of education of even the motorcycle taxi drivers in Vietnam exceeds that of the vast majority of business persons in Cambodia; the roads are better maintained, the cities cleaner, and even the rural areas possess basic services. History proves that democracy promotes greater economic prosperity over the long-run, but in the face of corruption, low education, and dismal infrastructure, a well-managed dictatorship definitely hits the mark in the short-term (though we won’t romanticize the altruism or organizational structure of the Vietnamese government too much).

Finishing my three days in Sapa yesterday, I took the night train back to Hanoi. The train station is located in the small outpost town of Lau Cai, a jump-off point for tourists to the back country of northern Vietnam and southern China. The drive from Sapa to the train station in Lau Cai is a 5,000 foot descent, which in normal cases takes an hour and a half. We did it in a record 55 minutes. Motion sick beyond belief, the only way I managed not to lose it entirely came from the perpetual terror of immanent death as we careened down the mountain in the black of night, passing vehicles at breakneck speeds on blind curves in the cloak of a dense fog. My life flashed before my eyes like a DVD stuck on continuous replay and I wondered vaguely at one point if I shouldn’t be writing it down for a documentary production or at least as something to submit to a professional psychiatrist if I ever come into the means to afford one. Having experienced a systematic historical review of my life over a 60 minute period, I emerged from the van in Lau Cai with a renewed sense of purpose and a strategic ten-year plan for my life; all of which was tragically forgotten moments later when I hurled the afternoon’s cheese pizza and veggie spring rolls into an obliging dumpster on the roadside. What a shameful loss… But no matter, pizza isn’t very South Beach anyway.

I collapsed in a chair at the crowded train station and spent a solid 30 minutes praying for the world to stop spinning while mosquitoes and cigarette smoke swirled lazily around me. The call for the train came across the loudspeakers in melodic Vietnamese and I recognized it only by a faint recognition of the words ‘Lau Cai’ and ‘Hanoi’ spaced reasonably close together. Train SP2; Coach 3; Berth 28. Crap. My berth was a 6-bed cabin, compliments of my travel agent who waited until the last minute to buy my ticket when all the 4-bed cabins were filled up. Stacking 3 beds to a wall ensures that you have less headroom than a corpse in a coffin, without the luxury of having room mates that are dead. Dead people at least have the decency to be quiet when you’re trying to sleep. My room mates turned out to be newly-weds with an infant, a giggly asian teenage girl, and a middle-age man who desperately needed the Atkins diet book.. One would have assumed the baby would have kept us awake all night… that would have been a blessing. I managed about 2-hours of sleep on the 10-hour train ride because the middle-aged man 18 inches under my head was snoring louder than a #$@%! locomotive! Literally. After three cycles of Yanni in my ipod at max volume I switched ends of the bed and reset my rock-climbing quickdraws to hang the blanket up in front of my bunk, blocking out the light the married couple had left on in case the baby woke up. The train tracks clacked out the passage of time till the tout came around announcing the arrival of 4am; gee thanks, I needed to know that I had a whole hour before we arrived in Hanoi. I was greeted by a cacophony of desperate motorcycle taxi drivers all trying to out-do one another like a flock of roosters fighting for the attentions of a lone, haggled hen. Somehow I managed to select the least capable among them and spent the better part of the 5 o’clock hour trying to find the SP office; a failed endeavor for which I still had to pay an exorbitant amount as he dropped me off in exasperation outside the cafe where I now sit.

It’s 8:20 now and safe to call Steve at the SP office to find out where the heck I am. I will no doubt spend the day walking the street fending off vendors and taxi drivers in an attempt to make the most of my time here. This afternoon I have booked tickets to see the famous ‘water puppets’ and it seems that the weather has finally cleared, with the sun making a welcomed appearance after backstaging it for the last 6 days. I will catch up with you later this week providing I survive my trip back to the United States; a grueling trip with 22 hours in 6 airports, 26 hours of actual air time, and 5 pieces of checked baggage. That’s if all goes according to plan – I’ve been around enough to not be too hopeful.