Photo Update from Saigon

Our Humble Abode

Home Sweet Saigon

For me, Saigon was definitely NOT love at first sight. It's hot, humid, loud, overcrowded. There's a constant layer of smog hanging over the whole maze of winding streets. Like most big cities in this part of the world, foreigners are treated either as a nuisance or as a dollar sign, or quite often, as both. But, like most places that you linger long enough to sink beneath the surface, it starts to grow on you. We've been here almost a month now... (sorry for the horrible slacking on the blog front! Quick update: we decided to settle down in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), moved into a house and are chasing careers as English teachers) ...and intriguing mysteries and endearing quirks abound.

For example. The other night Christian was chauffeuring me home from my new tutoring gig in some far reach of the city. (The chaotic motorbike traffic continues to terrify me and I haven't sucked it up enough to get my own motorbike. When I'm feeling really brave I drive,but this usually only happens in the middle of the night...) Anyways, we decided to try to find a shorter route home. About an hour later, that plan landed us on some dark street in some unknown district, nowhere near home. Totally lost and disoriented we made an amazing discovery: inner-city shrimp fishing!

Picture this: next-door to a soccer field, a manky-looking swimming pool rimmed by Vietnamese men, women, and kids- fishing poles in hand, staring intently into the murky water. Every now and then someone reels in a huge prawn and throws it into a hot-pot on the table or skewers it and puts it on the grill. Naturally, we had to try. Sadly, we failed miserably. After two hours we left with seven shrimp, five of which were generous "gifts", aka pity donations from our fellow shrimp-fishermen. Considering how utterly lost we were, chances of finding this gem again may be one in a million, but we will definitely try!

Of all the things we could have ended up doing that night, I never would have guessed we'd be posted up at a muddy pond trying desperately to catch shrimp for dinner. It's for reasons like this that I find little cracks appearing in my initial dislike for this city. I have a sneaking suspicion that as time passes these cracks will just grow wider and wider. Only time will tell..

XOXO, Em

Angkor Whaaat?

Cambooodia

From Never Never Land to the Ruins of Angkor

After the madness of Vang Vieng we needed a bit of a cool-off period- spent a couple days in Vientiane and then headed further south to the 4,000 islands (pretty sure the name is literal). A little boat dropped us off on the deserted end of one, Don Khon, and we hoofed it into a quaint little village and found a room complete with a huge bug in the toilet and papaya tree out front. New record low: $3/night. Slowed down and passed the days bumbling around the islands on rickety old bikes, watching water buffalo and Irrawaddy dolphins (with our new German film-making buddies, Anne and Stefan, who spent three days trying to catch them on tape), and trying to escape the unbearably mean heat in the Mekong, Beer Lao and watermelon in hand. Really rough.

Meandered down to Cambodia and over to Ban Lung in the remote northeastern jungle, explored crater lakes and waterfalls and then packed up for the long ride across the country to Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor...

Now, I think we've been at this long enough that I can say with confidence that there are two things about SE Asian bus travel that you can definitely count on: 1. no matter how full it looks, there is always room for more and 2. it will take at least forever and a day to get there. Just for kicks, I wrote down all the stops on our last bus ride, from Ban Lung to Siem Reap. Paints a pretty typical picture...

6:58am Depart Ban Lung (on the 6:30 bus)
7:02am Stop outside town to wait for a straggler to catch up on motorbike (10 min)
8:00am Morning snack (breaky #2?) for bus driver and crew (20 min)
9:00am Shopping for fish at the side of the road (5 min)
9:53am Pick up several large packages of charcoal (10 min)
11:01am Wait for back hoe to dig out and level a new path for bus to pass (5 min)
11:12am Pick up two stuffed manila envelopes (1 min)
11:38am Lunch (25 min)
12:17pm Drop off and pick up people in Kratie (5 min)
1:13pm Family selects and purchases 6-7 jackfruit (largest tree-bearing fruit in the world, smells and tastes like banana-flavored Laffy Taffy) (10 min)
1:56pm Drop off (1 min)
1:59pm Gas, window wash and cool engine bath (30 min)
3:03pm Drop off (2 min)
3:25pm Drop off (1 min)
3:29pm Drop off (3 min)
3:34pm Drop off (5 min)
3:53pm Change buses (5 min)
4:30pm Potty break/snack time (30 min)
5:04pm Drop off (4 min)
8:27pm Arrive Siem Reap

Grand total: 13.5 hours, almost 3 hrs at a complete stop. Can't wait for the next round!

-E

Laos- Round 2

The day after tomorrow.

It seems we're getting a little tired of being on the move all the time. It's also easier and cheaper to stay put for a while than to be constantly rolling into new towns. As we round our fifth month of this here adventure it seems a trend has developed. When asked by fellow travelers when we are leaving said location we have begun replying "the day after tomorrow". Which roughly means, I don't know, but we're most likely going to stay longer than we planned. SO our latest example is the anomaly that is Vang Vieng, Laos. A four hour bus ride north of the capital Vientiane, this little town is nestled alongside the Nam Song River, shadowed by the limestone mountains that define the topography of central and northern Laos. What separates Vang Vieng from the hundreds of other similar towns in the country is not the topography but the unique tourist industry that has developed here. By unique I really mean wild, drunken, debauchery that burns hot and spits you out ash. During the day this place is the epitome of serenity and hikes through the rice fields and jungle to caves and local swimming holes are beyond cool. At first it's all very confusing. But than you experience a night on the island and it all makes sense. The island is what it sounds like, an island in the middle of the river comprised of several bars selling you children's sand buckets filled with a toxic concoction of the local firewater and what they call Thai Redbull, which should be called Meth-bull. I have never put anything in my body that wanted to exit the side of my stomach with such ferocious vengeance! Bad stuff. But I'll tell you what, you will never dance harder. So after a fight to sunrise consisting of Meth-bull, stomp dancing and flaming limbo, it's needless to say that the day is spent desperately filling your quaking shell with orange juice, water and whatever else that could be used to rebuild your soul. Now the nights are rough and wild but the daily buses full of party-eager travelers have come for the town's main attraction. Four kilometers up the road is the beginning of the inner tube gauntlet. At first glance it appears to be the scene from Peter Pan when you're introduced to the Lost Boys camp. As you get closer you're absolutely positive of your first opinion. The river is lined with bars and bamboo towers of rickety looking rope swings, zip lines and water-slides that would put the bravest to the test. The several hundred swimsuit and body paint clad party people are all armed with squirt guns and colorful buckets of party-aid. Calling this place overwhelming is the understatement of the century! After a bucket you're right in the game, after two buckets the apprehension is replaced by a demanding bravery. Before you know it, you're climbing up the tower with a rope swing handle in your mouth doing quick and hazy calculations. Sorry Ma. Anyways, ten days later we are melting into a bus seat ready for anywhere else on the planet. So here we are back in Vientiane preparing for a trip into the southern part of the country with a rekindled desire to explore with a well hydrated and well slept body.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading this wordy spew:)
C-

Thailand Take 2

Cambodia is like a box of chocolates...

Gone fishin...

Hello all. For those who care, we will be unreachable for most of the next two weeks. We are island bound starting in the morning.
Adios

a story...

Yesterday I karate kicked a Cambodian Jelly Beast. This creature of myth, similar to the common jelly fish roams the worlds seas in search of cross species combat. On Feb 17 2010 one of these Jelly Beasts in search of dual chose its last opponent poorly.
Emily and I had decided after our adventures in Vietnam to take a few week breather, for both our minds and our wallets. Picking a spot on the map we pointed our feet towards a town on the southern coast of Cambodia. The plan was to head to one of the islands and live in a bungalow for awhile. Upon arriving at the coastal town of Sihanoukville we decided to hang on the beach for a few days while collecting info on the islands.
Jelly Beasts are thought to be one of oldest living organisms on earth and have a life expectancy of over a century. It is not clear the system they choose there opponents by, but it is believed that once chosen, that opponent will be pursued till one is defeated by death. Because of the speed by which the jelly beasts travel, it is not uncommon for these chases to last upwards of a decade. It is not clear when this jelly beast picked up my sent and chose me as his mortal opponent by it would be on the beaches of Cambodia that the battle would ensue.
It was our fourth day in Cambodia and Emily and I were really starting to settle into the pace of life in a sleepy beach town. Wake up to the sun around 8:30 get out of bed around 9:30, throw on our suits and shirt grab a little grub and saunter towards the beach. On this particular day we were feeling especially sleepy due to the previous day’s water workouts. Water workouts are a new development to combat travelers fat, or as we like to call it “the fanny pack.” So instead of heading straight to the beach we got distracted and ended up hanging out at an old expat bar trying to catch an update on the winter Olympics. Around noon it gets too hot to think so we dragged our sweaty half stoned bodies down to the water for refrigeration. A half hour later the Jelly Beast made his move. Emily and I had been crouching in the shallows attempting to read each other’s lips when the beast struck my leg. Being a younger Jelly Beast and only the diameter of a car tire It was clear that its impatience would be its demise. In the deeper water, the jelly beast’s home court, I would be no match for its size and sneaky chemical rampage, but here, in the shallows my speed and dexterity reigned supreme. My adversary had also not calculated in my perfectly honed reflexive panic sweep kick. The well placed response hit the great Jelly Beast square in the guts coating my foot and ankle in its vicious chemical wrath. Though superficial, it stung real bad. The kick was not instantly fatal for the Great Jelly Beast but would later become evident in being the death blow. Winner by K.O, man beast. -C.

Scoots

It wasn't until a couple months ago that I started to consider successfully crossing the street something of a big achievement. At any given intersection, especially in the ginormous, roaring, screeching, sensory-overloading big towns like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, you are faced with a wildly chaotic, honking, weaving sea of cars, bikes, and mostly scooters, all swirling within millimeters of each other. Not even the sidewalks are safe from the scoots, as they double as parking lots and side streets, and scooters intermittently shoot in and out of buildings where they are stored in lobbies and living rooms. There is no helping little old ladies cross the street here. Instead, you're lucky to find one that allows you stand slightly downstream from her, using her as a shield as she skillfully maneuvers through the madness. Never mind that the top of her head may not even reach your shoulder; she knows infinitely more than you about this phenomenon and she will basically save your life. Unfortunately there doesn't always seem to be a little old lady in shining armor, or other unsuspecting local, waiting for you to leech onto whenever you want to get to the other side. After experimenting with a variety of methods- waiting for a gap in traffic (turns out you will likely reach and spend your entire retirement on the very spot with this tactic), using crosswalks (they're functionally limited to being decorative patterns in the road)- I've come to the conclusion that your best bet is to just close your eyes and take the plunge. With any luck you'll make it in one piece. Or maybe luck has very little to do with it, because upon stepping into the apparent chaos you find that your body is seamlessly absorbed into the weave, your little bubble bobs to the other side as the surge pulses and flows past you.

There seems to be no limit to the capabilities of these little beasts. They cruise by with loads that seemingly defy the laws of physics. Stacks of boxes piled three times the driver's height, chicken coops, bundles of re-bar fifty feet long, flower gardens, pigs in bamboo baskets, multiple bicycles, families of three, four, five. The other day in Saigon we watched a family of three hysterically lurch down the sidewalk on their scoot as a golden retriever (something of a rarity in the big city where backyards are mythical) circled and chased them, eagerly humping their legs. Turned out he belonged to them, because after he finally took a dump, he scrambled right up onto the scooter, all four paws balanced on the miniscule floor space between the driver's legs, and the little family happily bumped down the curb and melted into traffic.

Considering that traffic accidents and fatalities are supposed to be super high in Asia, we've witnessed very few mishaps. They've all been minor bumps, and no party involved ever seems to be the slightest bit ruffled by the incident. The most unique was during a torrential downpour in Hanoi, where everyone ignores the rain and continues about their business, albeit encased in long multicolored ponchos. A man on a scooter was pulled to a sudden stop because the tail of his neon yellow cape got wrapped up in the wheel of a passing car. Everyone was fine, and of course traffic carried on around them as they untangled themselves. Thankfully, our own mishaps aboard scoots have also been few and far between. At the end of a dirt road overlooking Niko Beach in Bali I learned the painful lesson that after your driver (in this case, one Christian Sellers, desperately chasing waves) pushes your little scoot to unthinkable limits on unimaginable roads, the exhaust pipe gets a little hot and won't hesitate to take a bite out of your calf. On Lembongan Island, Indo we rented a finicky little scoot that needed a lot of encouragement to start and had extremely minimal brakes- made for a very interesting ride around a very hilly island.

The most recent incident was in Mui Ne, Viet Nam, when we temporarily lost my mom in the desert. My parents, Christian, and I were wrapping up our whirlwind adventure through Laos and Viet Nam, and we wanted to check out the sand dunes before we caught our afternoon bus to Saigon, from where my parents were to fly home the following day. Motorbike taxis cruise the Mui Ne strip looking for fare and for a couple extra bucks they'll usually pull up a stool at their buddy's shop, hand you the keys, and let you roam freely wherever your little heart desires. We found two such drivers, piled on and we were on our way. We cruised along the beautiful coastline, mistakenly turned inland, passing through a couple dusty towns speckled with waving school kids and finally found our way to the majestically rolling dunes. We had to rush back to town to catch our bus and a Skype date with Christian's ma, so when we got separated Christian and I figured my parents had just taken a different turn-off. I had a little feeling that something was amiss, and the sight of my dad pushing their scooter down the road, sans Mom, confirmed my suspicion. They'd gotten a flat several miles back; my dad came for help while my mom trudged on foot down the desert road. Christian and I had already given up our scooter so another driver was enlisted to carry out a search and rescue mission. He turned up empty handed- "5 km, no madam!"- and kindly handed over his scooter so my dad could give it a go. Finally, he returned with my hot, sweaty, parched, but glad-to-be-rescued ma in tow, just as our bus pulled up, ready to haul us off to Saigon. Exactly according to plan. -E

Picture-palooza!!!

Just dumped a TON of pics on Photobucket. Check the rhyme.

"Viet Nam-O-Rama"

"How Now Little Laos"

"Tasty Thailand"

"Window to Indo"

OhRock the Cat Ba!

The last days have been spent slowly navigating thousands of limestone islands off the coast of Vietnam. Sharp and stoic, mammoth spires pepper the landscape like tops of mountains protruding from a thick fog line. From time to time junk boats seemingly float by like hot air balloons adding to the image. Mostly uninhabitable these beasts loom with a sense of immortality. Reminded of our frailty we can only watch as the fog blankets then reveals again the layers of stone and brush. O rock the Cat Ba, rock the Cat Ba! Someday I would like to see this place in the sun.
The camera Emily just bought consumed most of our time as we passed through the natural labyrinth. Click, click, click. Erase, erase….erase. Jan and Melinda generously treated us to this little vacation within another. A few hour bus ride from Hanoi to Houlong bay and we were setting foot on our very own classy Junk. Our guide Teu (pronounced 2) hooked us up with the two conjoining rooms at the stern. A private balcony on a private ark. As we slowly navigated the islands we would stop from time to time to go ashore. At one point we climbed into a massive cave and did a little exploring. That sounded a little rugged…we followed a concrete pathway through the cave. Needless to say we were not the first ones to explore the place. It was huge and full of local myth and legend and Emily got to really go to town with her new Canon soul snatcher. Ha. Back on the boat we ate fabulous fresh caught seafood that we stopped and snagged from local floating villages. The villages consisted of a few small and colorful shacks and a few dozen netted floating ponds. We got to walk around one of them and check out the different species in each of the ponds. Emily said it was the coolest zoo she had ever been to. I thought so to because than you could eat em, ha. Crazy creatures ranging from your common grey cod to 20lb horseshoe crabs and cuttlefish the size of footballs…pretty damn cool I tell ya. After our night on the boat we got a night at a hotel on the largest of the islands, Cat Ba. Oh, rock the Cat Ba! So here’s a little story for ya grandkids! One of the stops in the tour was a beach Bbq on one of the smaller islands. Ha, I’m laughing to myself as I type this…anyways so the boat pulls up to this islands where there is a floating dock to the beach. Or so we thought. The dock probably stretches close to a hundred yards from where the boat is moored to the beach. To paint the picture a little bit, it’s about 70 degrees, raining slightly and there is close to 20 of us passengers unloading onto this wobbly ass dock. Like a giant drunk caterpillar we inch our way toward the beach. Because we were all watching our feet with white knuckle grips on the railings it wasn’t till the last second that we realized we had come to the end of the dock. Normally not a situation but the thing ended about 50ft from shore. Just victims of physics they sway and they rock these 20 dumb travelers stuck on a dock. The best part was that the people on the beach looked just as confused. Oh man that was disconcerting. So after several quizzical looks were shot between the beach people and us the dock people I watched a little light bulb click on above our guides head right before he reached down and untied the section of dock with the caterpillar on it. Just victims of physics they sway and they rock these 20 dumb travelers stuck on a dock. HA! We eventually got pulled in and laughed our way to the bar. Good times I tell ya.
I’m getting tired so I’ll leave you with a thought…..

GOOOD MOOORNING VIETNAM!!!

In advance, I must apologize for waiting so long to update and because this is going to be short...some may thank me. Whatever, so here's a little ditty and a brief catch-up. Right now we are in Hanoi, Vietnam. At this very second it is midnight and the street patrols are calling out the curfew on loud speakers mounted to a car. One droning and repetitive constant in a cacophony of scooters, their horns and the jabber of the last shop owners shutting them down. A quick word on the use of the Hanoi car horn. At home in the states the horn is used most often as an audible slap to the recipient, like "Hey! What the shit?", but louder and more concise. Here, in Hanoi it has developed into a language of its own. You have short, short spurts, long, really long and my favorite...constant. And from what I've picked up they're saying (horning) here I come, I'm right behind you, I'm right beside you, hello, thank you, there I go, here I come, I'm right behind you, I'm right beside you...madness I tell you.

OK. Moving on. So from Bangkok we went to Chang Mai for New Years and it was unreal! We ran into a good friend of mine, Sydney, who was also Emily's neighbor growing up. Just ran right into her on some little back street. So we partied the end of '09 away together and stumbled cheerfully into 2010.

From there we parted ways and headed off towards Laos first stopping in Chang Rai for a night and gorged ourselves on green curry and sticky rice in preparation for the long travels ahead. Through another border crossing and POW! new country. Lazy ol' Laos, I loved it and we plan on heading back for a longer stint. So we took this rad long slow boat for two days down the Mekong river to the city of Luang Prabang. Cool place, heavy in its colonial French flavor and beautiful Buddhist wats...and bread.

Yeah the other stuff was cool, but my diet craved good bread like a heart craves blood. Emily and I ate approximately 30 baguette sandwiches apiece in the week we were there.

And you know what? I'd do it again right now. Yup...hungry. We went to this beautiful bread-stuffed city to surprise Jan and Melinda (Emily's rents) who thought we were going to meet them in Hanoi. That was fun and on we rambled to this chaotic noise stuffed wonder of a city- Hanoi. By rambled I mean took a 40+ hour bus adventure across the border. Not Jan and Melinda, they flew....1hour. Deep down I really like this place. Your sensory meter is always maxed out. Noise, color, fast-moving motorized objects of all sizes coming from all directions...madness I tell you. Oh, and let me tell you! Carnival freak shows ain't got nothin' on what the street vendors put out for your gander. About every living thing you could put in a cage and every dead thing you could pickle. Yup, saw some cooked k9 today... won't forget that one. Speaking of k9s and weird pickled beasts, yesterday Jan points out something fermenting in what must have been a 10 gallon corked glass jar. So upon closer examination I realize I'm looking at what I think is a Komodo dragon folded in half in some amber looking liquid. And right as my mind registers this fairytale beast a screaming chihuahua jumps out from behind a shelf and starts yapping and I swear I just about shit myself.

-Ciao, Christian