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