Time and Motion

Mike left me in Chengdu with 10 days left to get to Hong Kong for my flight back home. We had deviated substantially from my original mental route and I decided that another domestic flight was a better option than giving up 2 days of travel to get back on track. So I flew to Guilin, which is a 13 hour bus ride northwest of Hong Kong.

Just south of Guilin is Yangshuo, which is a small town surrounded by serene rivers and green limestone peaks. It's a bit of a backpacker's haven with lots of restaurants trying their meager hand at western dishes. Nineteen different accommodations in 3 weeks left me a little travel weary and eager to stay put for at least a few days. Yangshuo was a good place for that, scenic and accessible. I spent my second day floating down the river in a bamboo raft, riding a bicycle into the rural farming community, and hiking up a modest peak. Outlying villages in the area promised for good day trips, but I would need a guide as roads were poorly marked and mapped. That evening I was eating dinner and met Yang Yien, a university student working in Yangshuo for the summer as waitress. We started talking about what I planned to see and do and she offered to introduce me to her friend Ali, a Yangshuo native, to give me some advice on getting around. The next day the three of us set off on bicycles, guided by Ali, to a few of her favorite spots in the area. Being in Yangshuo only for the summer, Yang Yien was interested in seeing the area and it quickly became a mutually beneficial relationship. We were both interested in learning about a different culture, she could translate and help navigate, and I could pay for transportation costs that would otherwise be prohibitive for her. To put things in perspective, food and travel for the day might run you 10 dollars, but her wages amounted to about 2 dollars a day.

We established a routine of meeting at 8 in the morning, hoping on the bus somewhere, and making it back by 4:30 in the afternoon so she could start work. Money was an interesting point of contention on a few occasions. She continually insisted on paying for small things and then was embarrassed about not being able to afford larger expenses. On one occasion she was late meeting me, and I had taken a seat inside her restaurant. I hadn't given it much thought, but she felt that there was an obligation to order something, and since she was at fault for being late, she bought me a coke without asking me. Not really a big deal except for two things. I wasn't really thirsty and didn't really want it, and it cost one dollar. So all I could think about as I sipped down the can was that I was sipping down 5 hours of her life. Then I decided I wanted to check out some of China's steepest rice terraces known as The Dragon's Backbone. Getting there by local bus involved 3 separate buses and 5 hours of travel time. Tour companies offered nice, direct route, air-conditioned buses for $16 round trip, but required advanced booking. I bought two tickets the evening before, and was all set to leave at 7:30 the next morning. However, working until 2am every night and waking up early every morning in order to meet me finally took its toll on Yang Yien. Her friend borrowed her cell phone, which doubled as her alarm clock, and forgot to return it at the end of the night. She overslept and I had to forfeit the tickets. Needless to say, she felt absolutely terrible and ended up crying over the matter, which in turn made me feel kind of terrible. For her it was 2 weeks wages down the drain, for me it was an imperceptible dent.

I ended my trip wandering the streets of Hong Kong. Having only been there 30 hours, I can't say too much about it. It's an amazing city. I was a little bewildered crossing the border but found the public transportation system to be incredibly well designed and managed. The history of Hong Kong is fascinating and it was nice to put a face to a name. The heart of Hong Kong feels like Manhattan and with enough money you could soak up new experiences for a very long time.

So I'm back home now, about to start a new job and trying to figure out when I can hop on another plane. I wish there was an overarching theme to end this on, but there's not. Traveling is good for the soul, or at least my soul. I wanted to travel well and I think I've done that. The world is a big place with all kinds of people and I hope to see as much of it as I can. And of course there's always that spontaneous elation and the long enduring kind, thank you Neil Peart for putting that into words for me.

All my photos can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/jamesmholst/
There are two albums, the complete set and my personal top 10 favorites.

Thanks for reading.

Mike and I blazed a path north and west towards the highlands of Tibet. Along the way we stopped two very old and famous little towns, Dali and Lijiang. The architecture and city layouts were right out of one of those imperial Chinese movies, which is really just another way of saying that they were overrun with Chinese tourists and souvanier shops. It was nice to wander the cobblestone streets but the shear number of people wearing cheap cowboy hats made it feel more like a theme park. Actually, Dali and Lijiang are just the kind of places that Disney World would emulate, and it seems that Dali and Lijiang have in turn have started to emulate Disney World......or something like that.

North of Ligiang is Tiger Leaping Gorge, where legend has it, a tiger leaped over the gorge. The mountains of this gorge rise over 12,000 feet from the river below and is one of the deepest gorges in the world. The trek, which climbs to 4 or 5 thousand feet above the river, took two days to complete. Spectacular views in every direction.

We caught a plane to Chengdu, which is the capitol of the Sichuan province and is the 5th largest city in China. Sichuan is famous for it's hotpots, which is sort of a Chinese fondue where you cook your food at your table in big vat of spicy oil. They also cook up some strange animal parts. One of our more memorable meals included duck blood (gelatin in form) and fish maul. I'm not really sure what fish maul is, toad skin is my best approximation.

A few hours outside of Chengdu is Emei mountain, or Emie Shan, which is one of the Middle Kingdom's four famous Buddhist mountains and is an UNESCO World Heritage site. The mountain is covered in lush green forest and ascends to over 10,000 feet. There are a dozen or so Buddhist temples and monasteries following the route to the top of the mountain. It is a beautiful place, which is also another way of saying that the place is crawling with Chinese tourists. My knee prevented me from making the entire climb to the top but Mike knocked it out in 10 hrs. I took a cable car. The photographic potential there was huge, but the air and light quality was absolutely terrible. A permanent haze lingered about and obscured the views for the 2.5 days we were there.

This was the end of the road for Mike. We returned to Chengdu and said our farewells.

The art of tea drinking dates back 3,000 years in Sichuan and I was excited to visit a few of the famous teahouses. Traditionally, the teahouse functioned as a focal point of social gatherings and some still hold chinese opera performances at night. I had a few nice experiences, but seriously, I can't figure out why Chinese people insist on throwing the tea leaves into the pot or glass with no way to remove them. The result is always over-steeped tea. It's common to reuse tea by adding more hot water to the pot, but these teahouses were serving tea that was $5 a glass, which is more money that a decent meal costs. It hardly makes sense to sell premium tea only to abuse it with multiple brews.

I was talking to a British couple at my guesthouse the other night. They asked me what I thought of China so far. I thought for second and said, "Well, it's kind of a mixed bag."

Everything about China has been both good and bad. The nicest restaurants might have the most deplorable bathrooms. People at the bus station have gone out of their comfort zone to speak English and try to help me. Other people at the bus station have been pushy and deliberately cut in line at the ticket booth. The British couple had an interesting story. While on the bus, the girl dozed off. She awoke to find a hole in her bag and it was clear that the man next to her had cut it with a razor. She pointed to the hole and pointed to him. He of course denied it. She took the bag to the bus driver, pointed to the hole and pointed to the perpetrator. The bus driver evidently knew this man did not have a good reputation so they stopped the bus and tried to restrain him. At this point, he took out the razor from his mouth and starting cutting his own arms. One woman on the bus spoke English, and called the police. The police never came and the English speaking woman had a train to catch. There's a lot going on in this little episode. One point is that there were people who would have seen the attempted burglary take place, and then did nothing. This point was echoed by an American I met who was teaching at a Chinese University. He saw my bandaged arm, I told him about my little motorbike accident and how some construction workers fixed my bike. He said, "See, I love the Vietnamese. Chinese people would walk by and not do anything." The British girl wanted a police report so she could at least have her insurance replace her damaged bag. When she went to the police station, they didn't want to issue a report because nothing had been stolen. They gave her a report that turned out to be invalid because it was missing the appropriate stamp.

I've spent the last few days in the scenic little town Yangshuo. When the bus dropped me I was met by Robert, a Chinese man who wanted to take me to his hotel. I was tired, the hotel was nice but slightly overpriced. That night Robert came to my room with a few beers and a sales pitch for a number of different tours I could take over the next 3 days. I had the feeling that he was shady, but I figured it didn't hurt to hear him out. He quoted me prices which I knew were at least 4 times the going rate. I don't want to recount the whole conversation, but he went from being my best friend to throwing a small tantrum because I wouldn't book a tour with him. The exorbitant prices are forgivable, but the blatant lies behind them are infuriating. But Robert is just a small piece of the puzzle and I've met some really nice, honest people here as well.

In Chengdu Mike and I visited The People's Park, which is a charming little park in the heart of the city. It has a small lake with little row boats for rent. Old ladies practice tai chi next to old men flying kites. There is a teahouse and a lotus garden. The following picture is from the People's Park. Humor me here, for $0.40 you can buy a ticket at this little pagoda. Just take a guess at what you get.

You can't really see from the picture, but the big sign has a bunch of girls in tarzan-clad bikinis holding snakes around their necks. The entrance of the pagoda leads underground to an old air-raid shelter. The tunnel below is dark and damp. Off in the corner is some laundry hanging from a line. Through a door is small room with a makeshift stage, lit by a few bare florescent bulbs. The stage is enclosed in cracked glass. A girl, who is maybe 14 years old is wearing a tank top and skirt. She opens a wooden chest and is visibly appalled by the stench emanating from it. She takes out a snake and begins her routine to the thumping dance music. She teases the snake with scarf and it manages to catch her finger. She stops to assess the damage and then continues. A minute later she interrupts her routine again from a complete lack of enthusiasm, as if she has to mentally re-group in order to get through it. She feeds the snake down the top of her skirt and out the bottom. It's utterly depressing. After her routine is over we look around and find a few turtles in plastic boxes. Then, and this is really the best part, on a table is one of those plastic jars which might contain Chex party mix. This one contained a human fetus sitting in formaldehyde. This is the mixed bag of China. This is what you find in the charming People's Park of Chengdu.

The day did not get off to a good start. Mike and I had a few hours to kill before catching the bus to the Chinese border. We rented motorbikes and headed up the mountain. On the way back down, already pressed for time, I swerved on the muddy road to give an oncoming biker more room. That resulted in a crash that left a few chunks of arm flesh on the pavement and a completely bent pedal shifter on the bike. Mike turned back around and after assessing the damage simply replied, "Well, I guess we're spending another day in Sapa." I thought for sure that I was going to be buying a new transmission. But fortune turned and some Vietnamese construction workers saw the wreck and managed to bend the shifter back to a usuable position using a metal pipe. We rode back and returned the bikes. I got away paying only $10 to cover the scratches I put on the front fender. I bandaged up my arm and hand and we headed for China.

I've always enjoyed border crossings. Border crossing are where it's at - there's people coming and going, usually carrying an absurd amount of goods back and forth, touts are trading money on the black market and it's always a clash of two cultures. Mike and I walked right through Vietnam's emigration. No line, no hassle. As we were entering China's immigration line, I commented to Mike that I was a little disappointed that it wasn't more hectic. That was a mistake. Eight years ago I dropped my passport in a river. My brother and I were canoeing in Belize and had the great idea of backpaddling through some rapids (or as my brother would say, making memories). Anyway, the laminate on my passport is starting to separate from the cover. Mike and I were asked to go to an office for a routine investigation. They questioned us for at least an hour and a half. We were asked all kinds of questions: How did we know each other? How long have we been travelling together? What cities have we lived in? Where did we study? Where did our flights stop on the way to asia? It was exhausting. Then another immigration officer came in, and right in front of our interrogators, asked Mike and I what the problem was.

Finally we were allowed to go through. I dropped my bag on the x-ray machine to go through customs. The customs officer wanted to see my books. I'm thinking, no problem, I'm not transporting Bibles or anti-Chinese propaganda. He starts flipping through my Lonely Planet guide and the map on the second page doesn't show Taiwan belonging to mainland China. Sunnuva.....
Anyway, he took my only guide book. This is a big deal. Mike had borrowed a few older guide books from a friend. But they contained pictures that the customs officer didn't like. One was a picture of a crowd, with a child holding a sign that read: "Honk Kong is our home". Clearly anti- Chinese propaganda. Mike was left with a very old and nearly useless Fordors guide.

Losing your Lonely Planet (LP) in a place like China is a big deal for a few reasons. One, the latest edition wasn't even available on amazon before I left, I had to order it off of lonelyplanet.com. Two, nobody across the border spoke a word of English, key words and phrases are always listed in the back of LP. Three, Chinese people can't read roman characters, and stupid Americans can't pronounce the names of places correctly. Trying to buy a bus ticket anywhere without either the ability to speak or the name of the place written in Chinese characters is near impossible. This pretty much goes for getting a taxi, finding a hotel, trying to get anywhere. Four, LP is a guide book, with lots of other good information on where you might want to go.

So, a few books lighter we were free to wander China. We had booked an overnight bus in Vietnam to take us 12 hours north to the nearest major city. I had the receipt with all the pertinent information but not the actual tickets. We found the bus station and I handed over my reciept, which was met with a blank stare. We had to cough up another $50 to re-purchase the tickets, which meant our cash was dwindling. We got on the bus, and I really hate to be dramatic about this, but it was one of the worse bus rides I've ever been on. It was a sleeper bus, which means instead of seats, it has two levels of beds stacked in the middle and down the sides of the bus. I was in the middle, upper level. The suspension was so bad, and the road so rough, I had to literally hang on to the side bar the entire ride or risk being bounced right out of my bed. Three minutes into the ride I turned to Mike and said, "I'm not sleeping tonight. Forgive in advance for being in a grumpy mood tomorrow."

So the bike accident, border crossing and bus ride all happened in the same 24 hour period. Probably the worst run of the trip, which really isn't too bad all things considered.

The next morning we arrived at 6am in strange city and had very little luck finding a hotel. Mike's guide had a few hotels listed, but the taxi drivers didn't seem to recognize any of them. We finally had a taxi drive us to a very upscale hotel, where the man at the reception desk spoke some English. He was able to recommend a more reasonably priced place. After catching up on some sleep, our hotel staff was able to give us directions to one of the large book stores in the city. We searched the place for guide books but everything was in Chinese. No love anywhere.

Looking for some comfort, I picked nicest looking restaurant in the neighborhood for dinner. And that's when fortune finally smiled on us. The menu of course was all in Chinese and out of nowhere a beautiful young woman came to our table and asked us if we would like some help ordering our food. It turns out she was an english speaking guide working for one of the five star hotels. We invited her out with us after dinner and told her our guide book dilemma. She said she knew of small bookstore near the university that that carried foreign books and offered to take us there the next day. Jackpot. We get there the next morning, I'm looking around and Linda (that was her english-ized name) starts talking to the woman behind the counter. The woman behind the counter pulls out the latest Lonely Planet edition and says that it arrived just yesterday. They were asking $50 for it, which was almost twice the retail price, but who really, who cares.

So that's how things got started in China.

Since then I've done lots of reading in my precious guide book. And this is kind of funny. LP actually warns you that crossing the Vietnam border can be tricky, and that readers have reported losing their book to customs, and to make sure and copy down any crucial information before crossing the border. Crucial information like........ where to buy a new LP in case yours gets confiscated. And of course LP also lists the obscure bookstore that carried our replacement. So the moral of the story is: Read your Lonely Planet BEFORE going to a communist country.

An overnight bus took me from Southern Vietnam, across the DMZ, into Northern Vietnam and on to Hanoi. I spent a few pleasent days in the city but the noise and heat made it easy to leave.

Just south of Hanoi is Ninh Binh, which has some fantastic karst scenery among rice fields. There are also a few imperial temples here, which have natural protection from the limestone landscape.

From Hanoi I headed to Sapa, which was far and away my favorite stop in Vietnam, and it's difficult to write concisely about it.

Sapa is tucked up in the northwest mountains of the country right on the Chinese border. The area is home to many minority villages and has some of the most impressive rice terraces found in Vietnam. Tourism started making it's mark around 6 years ago and has grown considerably since then. Local guides have been offering trekking opportunities, which includes walking from village to village, traversing the mountain side and walking the ledges of the rice terraces. There are half a dozen minority groups that live in the area, some that have come down from china and mongolia. It's also one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

Vu was my guide. An 18 year old girl from the H'Mong tribe who started trekking with tourists when she was 15. Most of the guides I encountered were girls from minority villages. All of them have learned english from tourists and have very little formal education. Apparently the boys were in school when westerners started showing up, so the role of trekking guide has fallen to girls.

I arranged to stay in a few villages over the course of my 4 day trek. A few families in each village have extra mattresses in their attic for visitors such as myself. The first family I stayed with had a son who was around 8 and a girl who was 10. While I was sitting on the back porch, the girl, Chang, started a little game of balancing on the rice terrace and motioning for me to follow. As I got closer to her, she would run further out, turn around and say, "You come, OK?". I followed her up and down the mountain side for the rest of the afternoon. Chang showed me the plum trees and gave me berries that turned my mouth dark purple. Then we met another half dozen village children and went swimming in the river. It was the happiest I've felt in a long time.

The village stays definitely gave me a small taste of life for the people who live there. While the rice terraces are stunning to look at, they require hours and hours of hard labor while knee deep in mud. The terraces continually have to be reinforced with the clay soil, and planting and picking rice is backbreaking work. I also learned a little about traditional medicine, which quite frankly, seems completely ridiculous. For example, in order to get rid of a headache, you take a small bull horn and put a spoonful of hot ashes in it. Then you stick it to your forehead. For reasons I don't quite understand, the heat in the tip of the horn creates a small vacuum, and it sticks to your head. Fifteen minutes later you have a giant purple hickey in the middle of your forehead in the shape of a perfect circle. It takes 4 or 5 days for the hickey to clear up. Sometimes it helps the headache, sometimes it doesn't.

I ended up becoming fairly good friends with my guide Vu, and her friend Sho. Sho was leading a Dutch couple along the same route, so the 5 of us walked together. We returned to Sapa and Vu invited me to go out with her, Sho, and some other friends. This turned out to be really interesting. Once I was their friend, and not just a customer paying for a trek, they really opened up and told me about their lives. They showed me where they live, which are essentially little dorm rooms, with two or three girls to a room. It's kind of a big deal for them to be living in Sapa, and not with their families in the village. (I have to apologize, I don't have any handy jpeg images of Vu and Sho)

I really fell in love with the beauty and simplicity of Sapa during my first few days there, but as with any place, the more you learn about it, the more complicated it gets. I learned for example, that Sho has a total of 12 sibblings, but only 5 are still alive. Her older sister died in childbirth, her younger brother died as an infant. Another one of her younger brothers, who was 11 at the time, got into an argument with an 18 year old about his water buffalo eating their corn. The older boy pushed her brother down on some rocks. Four weeks later he was still in bed suffering chest pains. Sho used her entire life savings to take him to a hospital in Hanoi. The doctors there said it was too late to help him. One week later he was dead.

The after we finished trekking, Vu informed me that Chang was having a birthday party. So we went into town and I bought a few small gifts for her, a scarf and some cheap jewelry. Vu and I took a motorbike to the village. The family was really happy to see me again, and after they found out I came bearing gifts, they really made me feel like I was a part of their family. I felt really lucky to have stumbled upon such wonderful people. The little's girl's aunt, Cue, who was 25 and lived 1 hour away, near the train station, gave me her phone number and invited me to come to her house before I took the train back to Hanoi. I intended on getting to the train station a few hours early, but bus complications only left me an hour and a half. I needed to get some dinner so I called Cue to tell her that I didn't have time to meet her. Instead, she insisted on meeting me at the train station, waiting until the train came, and then walking me to my car. I don't know what more I can say.

After Sapa I met my very good friend Mike in Hanoi. Mike and I went to high school together and have always enjoyed the travelling and hiking together. We last went to Peru together in 2001. From Hanoi we went to Halong Bay, on the east coast of Vietnam. Halong Bay is one of these beautiful places that people flock to, and despite being completely overrun, it was still a great time. We spent a night on a boat and another night on an island. We filled the days kayaking, swimming and checking out some caves.

Mike came to Asia to do some trekking, and also wanted to hit up a few places in western China. It made sense to go back to Sapa for another 3 day trek and then cross the border into China. So we've been in China for about 9 days. All that will come in the next installment just as soon as I have time to type it.

Hoi An, it's a nice place. It's right on the coast, the old town is spattered with colonial French architecture, the new town is full of cheap but relatively luxurious accomodations. The endless white beach is 2.5 miles down the road, and you can get a tailor made suit for $40. The seafood is fresh and every establishment is lighted with colorful chinese lanterns. I spent five days there.

Hue is historically one of Vietnam's most important cities. The old city is UNESCO World Heritage site. It's home to the Citadel, the Imperial City, and a few dozen mausoleums. The feudal dynasties that ruled the area can be traced back 400 years. Seemingly a lot to offer, but the people were rude and pushy. I think children a good barometer of a place. In Hue, the children were relentless salesmen, and when you declined, they wanted a coin from your country of orgin for their collection.

After spending all day in Hue of walking from one site to the next, snapping pictures like a blundering idiot, my reward came at the end of the day. My trusty Lonely Planet listed a bar, not too far from my hotel, that was owned and operated by a Belgium guy, serving Belgium beer. The place was a hole in the wall, but the owner, Bruno, did not disappoint. Asian beer on the whole is pretty terrible. Rice is typically one of the fermentable ingredients, which is a cheap alternative to barley. I've been avoiding the beer here, so it was a small thrill to enjoy a blue label Chimay out of a proper glass. And Bruno was great, he invited me to come back the following day for expats night. I spent the following evening talking to Bruno and another Belguim guy about Belgium Beer and homebrewing. Then they interrogated me for 3 hrs about American culture. We hit on nearly every controversial subject in the media. Big gas-guzzling cars, gun control, abortion, president Bush, our blind devotion to Israel, and of course, Iraq. They were genuinely excited to hear my personal views and what I tried to convey as the general American opinions. Then Bruno shed some light on Vietnamese culture for me. He has been here 5 years and regards most Vietnamese men as bums.

This is a bit of a contrast to what I wrote in my last update, so it was especially interesting to me. I told him that my impression was that they were hard workers. He told me to really start paying attention. Next time I pass a construction site, look at who is doing all of the hard work, mixing the concrete, carrying the bricks etc. He said you'll see men working, but the women will be doing the most labor intensive tasks. Then he said to pay attention to all the cafes, they are full of men, sitting around all day. If they own a motorbike, they sit on the corners and wait for people like me to walk by, one 15 minute ride can earn them a profit of $1, which is how much the cleaning lady at my hotel will earn for a days worth of work. He said very often the women are the only people earning a steady income, and they have to completely take care of the children as well. Looking back, this matches up exactly to a conversation I had with the woman who worked in the tailor shop. But I'm not ready to call all Vietnamese men bums. I think the problem is more pronounced in the cities, but there are certainly hard working men here, just not as many as there should be. So I need to take back what I said in my last update, the redacted version should go something like: Vietnam's women are giving the country a future, the men are just along for the ride.

Hoi An is not a large city, but it has the highest concentration of tailor shops of anywhere in Vietnam. There are easily a few hundred, most of them looking the same, all of them vying for your dollar. The shop I happened into is a story of chance.

It's a daunting process. I was determined to get a few suits made, but it's a little tricky. You don't know who's overcharging, and what kind of quality you're going to get until the clothes have already been made. I walked into a few shops my first day, but all you really have to look at are bolts and bolts of material. I got a few quotes for different material, got overwhelmed, and quit. That night I was wondering around and I just happened to bump into this German girl, Kathleen I had met in the Mekong Delta. We were on the same bus back to Saigon. She was super tight on cash and we ended up sharing a room for a night ($6, my half was $3). Anyway, Kathleen and her Finnish friend Mira had been to a few different shops. One was terrible, the other fantastic. I said, "Great, I'll meet you at the tailors tomorrow." So I met them, and ordered a few hundred dollars worth of clothes.

The women that worked there were the nicest people, and I ended up spending quite a bit of time just hanging out there. I came back around lunch time for one of the fittings and afterwards they invited me to the back of the store to have lunch with them. So things were going good. One of the girls was 21, cute, friendly, and was talking to an Israeli customer about how she didn't have time for a boyfriend. So I'm sitting there and the Israeli girl is trying to set us up. I say, "Yeah, great, let's get dinner tonight. I gotta come back at 7pm for a fitting anyway, we can eat afterwards." So I come back, get fitted, and she tells me she has to work until nine. "That's cool, I'll come back." But there's this hesitation, and she doesn't know. So I respond with, "Come on, lets just get a drink or something." Then she breaks down and says that if she's seen walking around with a westerner, people will talk badly about her, her parents would disapprove, and it will make it very difficult for her to get married. Yikes. Ok.....so, I take it back.

All of a sudden her life looked a little dismal to me. Everyday she works 13 hours, and gets one day off a month. I wanted to do something nice for her, but it's not always so easy. As I was walking out that evening she yelled out "Sorry!" in way that carried a lot of frustration.

So I have done a bit of sight-seeing. My Son is a temple complex near Hoi An which is also an UNESCO World Heritage site. I have so say though, after visiting the Angkor temples in Cambodia, everything else seems a little lame.

Near the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), which splits northern and southern Vietnam, there are more tunnels that were created in the wake of the war. These tunnels were used by civilians for a period of 6 years as shelter during the regular bomb raids and ground battles. They were considerably more interesting than the military tunnels near Saigon because they are completely original, in tact, and quite a bit larger in size than their southern counterparts. Families would live in these tunnels up to 5 days at a time, and in fact, 17 children where born in the tunnels. The main corridors would have dugouts to the side, which were roughly the size of a 2 person tent. An entire family would occupy one of these dugouts. The bomb shelter went down to 50 feet underground. It really is an engineering feat. I tried to take a bunch of pictures, but, well, you're in a tunnel, not much to really see. I think I walked about 500 meters through them, which was really a small percentage of the complex.

The main transportation artery of Vietnam runs the length of the coast from Saigon north to Hanoi. This is the most obvious route to travel, which I had anticipated following. After doing a little more reading I decided that a few days in Dalat, a hill station in the central highlands would be worth a look. The relatively cool climate and the serene backdrop of lush green mountains, waterfalls and small villages make it a popular honeymoon destination for Saigon newlyweds.

Not long after getting dropped off the bus in the middle of Dalat, I met Binh, a distinguished member of Easy Riders. The Easy Riders are a group of tour guides, men in their 50's, who have traded in their 125cc Honda motorscooters for East German motorcycles. They have been offering tours around the Dalat area for the past 10 years or so. I was itching for something a little more substantial than the standard sights of Dalat and ended up arranging a six day journey through the highlands, ending at the coastal city Hoi An. This meant passing up some of the beaches and islands I had originally planned on visiting, but 6 days of winding through the mountains on the back of a bike promised something more unique in exchange for what would have been a long day on the bus.

Travelling at a slower pace with a personal guide offered a lot of insight into the country. But having a personal guide offers a window into their personal life as well, which is usually just as, if not more interesting than the information you're paying them to provide.

Binh was tenacious about two things, learning english and text messaging. He would randomly think of words he had heard and shout them back to me, to which I would yell my best definition. At lunch I would explain the differences between words like splint and skewer. I was happy to help as much as I could and in exchange he taught me some Vietnamese. My first lesson was:

Hello (addressing a younger person).
You are Beautiful.
I love you.
Do you love me?

He insisted on practicing everywhere we went, which usually caused everyone within earshot to start laughing. And because Vietnamese is a tonal language, getting the pronunciation just right required that I repeat it over and over again. After I finally had it down he insisted that I go practice on an unfortunate hair dresser. She was not impressed. She glared back at Binh which undoubtedly meant, what is wrong with you?

As a young man Binh worked with the American Air Force and was shot in the leg during his service. As we followed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was the supply chain for the Viet Cong, I got a continuous history lesson of key battles and how the country has developed since then. Towns were destroyed and rebuilt. Forests were defoliated, some replanted, some turned into farms, while many other hill sides still lay barren. Graveyards accompanied the old sites of field hospitals. Some people had spinal deformities, from agent orange exposure, which forced them to crawl everywhere they went.

Everywhere we went, Binh was quick to explain things and introduce me to the local people. The first day of our journey we rode through one nameless town after the next. We stopped in front of a wedding. Within two minutes (we were still sitting on the bike) a young man came out and was literally pulling us inside to have a bite to eat and a shot (or twenty) of rice wine. Being white put me at the level of a minor celebrity, which is somewhat endearing, amusing and absurd all at the same time. Every time I turned around someone was forcing more rice wine into my hand. Turning it down only made it worse. By the time we left, it would be fair to say I was completely inebriated.

The Vietnamese generosity and hospitality was something I experienced over and over again throughout the course of the week. We visited a number of Hill Tribes, which is a generally term for minority groups that live without any interference from the government. They don't pay taxes, but the flip side is that they must be self sufficient. We were lucky enough to stumble on yet another wedding in one of the hill tribe villages. It was all outside and instead of taking shots of rice wine, they filled large urns with a similar concoction which was drunk through a bamboo/plastic-tube straw. It was a fantastic day. A decent band played on the porch and I spent the entire afternoon dancing with the local girls and trying to stay sober, which turned out to be an exercise in futility.

Everywhere we went, people were hard at work. I don't think I've seen production at this level in any other third world country. Much of the work is tedious manual labor. Giant concrete urns, the kind that might house a small palm tree in front of a beach resort, were molded from sand and clay and then covered with cement, all by hand. Bark from lumber that is used in the production of laquer was stripped off by beating it with a stick. The land is fertile. Rice fields are everywhere, but I saw so many other crops: black pepper, tapioca, coffee, tea, mushrooms, rubber trees, lumber, and the list goes on. Much of the work is backbreaking. We stopped in one field where they were making bricks almost entirely by hand. They had a machine that turned the clay into rectangles, but they had to shovel the clay, wheel it over, carry the new bricks to dry under the sun, carry the dried bricks to the furnace, shovel the coal into the furnace. It made cringe to think about the level of effort and lack of efficiency for a product that could be completely manufactured with the help of machines. But this is what is giving Vietnam a real future. The economy can't help but to grow as long as production is alive. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, farmers can grow crops that are suitable for their plot of land, and can vary the crops in a way that provides a more consistent income. Vietnam is a well fed nation, and it is a country of laborers. Their lives are not easy, but the future looks bright.

I assumed that when Binh pulled over to the side of the road to explain something, or take me into someone's home, they were places that he had established during his decade of touring the country. We made one stop in front of a house that had rice noodles out front, drying in the sun, but no one was home. A few hours later we stopped at another house, also making rice noodles. As we wandered into their front yard, the owner came out, greeted us, and then showed us the new house he was building. The shack next door housed the sacks of rice, the giant boiler, and the lever contraption for turning the rice paste into noodles. He pointed everything out to me and got us a bowl of fresh noodles mixed with soy sauce and garlic. He also pulled out a large jar, filled with a clear liquid and something resembling blackened banana peels. He poured me a shot, Binh said it was an herbal medicine, an alcoholic herbal medicine. Binh and our host talked for another 20 minutes or so. As we were walking back to the bike, I asked Binh how they had known each other, he gave me a quizzical look. I asked, how long have the two of you been friends? He burst into laughter and said that this was the first time they had met. I think this is a great illustration. I had assumed that all of the familiarities between them was based on an existing frienship, when really, our host was just a gracious person.

Of course, by the weeks end I was ready to part ways with Binh. A week can be a long time to spend with someone you've just met. I would lose patience when he insisted I needed a break when he just wanted to text message. Or when we would sit down to a meal and I would finish before he started, because he was text messaging. You lose a certain amount of freedom with a guide. You're at the mercy of their suggestions, and although you are the customer, it's difficult to suggest alternatives when you don't know what the alternatives are. However, it was good getting out of the main flow of traffic. My favorite town of the trip isn't even mentioned in the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide guide books, and that makes me feel good.

It's easy to overthink things when you spend a lot of time on a bus. It's especially easy to overthink the philosophical challenges of travelling when you're spending a lot of time on a bus reading books with titles like "The Art of Travel" and "Fresh Air Fiend". But that's what I've been doing and I figure I might as well write about it.

I've been reading a lot of Paul Theroux lately, whom I admire as a traveller in the same way I admire Itzhak Perlman as a violinist. The idea of not just travelling, but travelling well, is on my mind these days because I feel compelled to make the most of my time abroad. I also keep thinking about how to respond to the requests I've gotten to let people know how I am doing and what I've been up to. To be honest, a lot of what I have to say is boring, and if it's not boring, it's....well, it sounds a little overdramatic. That's the problem with most people's accounts of their travels. They have these intense emotional experiences, and when then try to convey that experience, it just sounds a little overdramatic. The other half of the problem is that you experience lots of novel things when you travel and it's easy to substitute novelty for substance. It's kind of novel to have diarreah for a week, but it's not very interesting to read about. Good travellers and good travel writers make discoveries, and put those discoveries in a context in which they make meaning out them. So I'll do my best, at the very worst you'll at least get to hear what I've been up to.

From what I've seen so far, tourism is a big business in Vietnam, and the people have been friendly and helpful. It's a sharp contrast to northern India and an indication that Vietnam is following in the footsteps of it's friendly neighbor Thailand. I have mixed feelings about this trend. There are a lot of nice things about it. It's nice having a hassle free experience when booking a bus or train ticket, it's nice meeting other travellers at the cafes. On the other hand, it obscures what I think is the essence of travel. Travelling well implies elements of discovery and unpredictability. And travelling well usually involves an element of risk. The Japanese style of travelling is the antithesis of what I believe it means to travel well. The Japanese style of travelling typically involves a large bus, packed with families, which drives from sight A to sight B. Everyone gets off the bus, they all take the exact same photo of each person in front of sight B, and then get back on the bus. With organized tours, it's possible to have a similar sort of experience in an exotic place like southeast asia. And to be clear, I don't think that there is necessarily anything wrong with with a sight-seeing tour, because I certainly do it myself, but sight-seeing is not travelling well. Sight-seeing is completely predictable, lacking almost (but not completely) in discovery and involves almost no risk. The distinction is the difference between having a pleasant experience and having a deeply rewarding experience.

My own attitudes towards travelling have shifted over the years. As my passport nears capacity, I'm less and less surprised by what I find in other countries. I used to believe that looking at something exotic or navigating myself through a foreign land was enough to constitute the idea of travelling well. But travelling well requires understanding. This challenging and involves much more than just showing up to a new place and taking some snapshots. Understanding a place and its people is an indeterminate goal, which means the job of a traveller is never done.

I say all this because travelling well is what interests me. I'm on vacation, but vacationing (having fun) really isn't my goal. I usually struggle when people ask me how I choose my travel destinations. Of course I want to go to places that sound interesting and have something beautiful (or novel) to look at. But I think the answer that makes the most sense is that I choose places that I think will help me become a better traveller. People like Paul Theroux can make an adventure out of say, paddling a kayak from cape code to nantucket, but a less seasoned traveller needs a place that has lots of potential and at least moderate accessibility.

A few weeks before I left, I got into an argument with my good friend Nate about the value of taking pictures. Nate is in the middle of travelling himself and was stopping in Washington between Europe and Mexico. He expressed that his desire to take pictures was dwindling, and that the obsession of taking pictures detracts from the experience itself. I argued that looking for a good picture actually forces you appreciate your surroundings more. We went round and round on this and eventually conceded that we both had good points. I was pretty excited when I came across this very topic in my readings. John Ruskin was a 19th century British philosopher who advocated that every person learn how to draw. He didn't think that drawing well was important, only that you learn to pay attention to things. He believed drawing forced you to notice things, not just see them.

Yet Ruskin's enthusiasm diminished as he began to not eh devilish problem that photography created for the majority of its practioners. Rather than employing it as a supplement to active conscious seeing, they used the medium as as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possesion of it.

The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous.

It's a good explanation. I think everyone with a camera is guilty of this, but when people say that they don't take good pictures, I think it's because they're not looking enough. The mechanics of shutter speed and aperature are really the only concepts you need to understand 95% of all photography.

Well enough bable....Here's what I've got so far:

Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) is actually pretty nice as far as 3rd world big cities go. It's loud, busy and crowded, but it doesn't have the suffocating smog of Bangkok and there are lots of great little cafes and restaurants. I spent my first day doing the obligatory city tour, which included some buddist temples, markets, and significant sites related to the American War (aka, the Vietnam War). The War Crimes Museum was a pretty sober look at the collateral damage caused by the war. It featured a lot of disturbing photos, many of which appeared in US publications, of farmers being executed, children on fire, and the contining deformaties caused by agent orange exposure. You come out of there really hoping that some greater good was served by our involvement in the conflict.

The Mekong Delta region is just south of Ho Chi Minh. The region produces most of the fruit and rice for the entire country, as well as for exporting. It is characterized by a labyrinth of tributaries, floating river markets and endless orchards. I ended up booking out a tour out of Ho Chi Minh with a company that, for an extra $5, offered one of the nights with a Vietnamese home-stay instead of a hotel. After one of the ferry crossings, I met my host who came to pick me up on his motorbike. With my backpack balanced between his legs, we drive out of the city to a rural settlement. As the road turned from pavement, to loose gravel, to puddled dirt, back to loose gravel, back to puddled dirt, I really amused myself with my own little sales pitch: Come enjoy the Mekong Delta! We have a nice air-conditioned hotel for you..... But wait.....If you act now.... for an extra $5 more, you can drive out to the middle of nowhere, have your bag dropped into a puddle of mud (it didn't happen, but I thought it might), and stay at the home of a complete stranger!

The home stay was nice, but unremarkable. My room was in an external building adjacent to the house, so it didn't turn out to be much a home-stay. My host offered to bring me a coke, which I accepted. What I got was a coconut with a straw. Dinner included a piece of braised meat, which my host said was opossum, I relunctantly tried a piece and found that it was a delicious piece of fish. 0 for 2 on communication.

Booking the tour provided an outlet for me to meet 3 Vietnamese girls, who had booked a day trip as a weekend activity. I immediately fell in love with one of them. They were all in their mid 20s and worked together for a textile company in Ho Chi Minh City. They worked on the business side of the compnay and were middle-upper class by my estimate. When I got back from the delta, I met up with my new interest and she took me out to the local markets for dinner. Then we headed to the night club Lush,which was, well, lush. Nice. The following evening we met with her other two friends for more local cuisine, which included pig stomach, chicken feet and duck tongue. They were all a ton of fun and very intelligent. Their company was opening a new factory this week. I jokingly offered to take pictures of the occasion. One immediately replied that they would tell their boss that I was from the Washington Post. I was quite impressed she new my hometown newspaper.

I spent a few afternoons wandering around the city and certainly saw a few interesting things. I came across a guy who was using a wire coat hanger to coax bees from their hive in a utility pole into a plastic bottle. The bees were to be drowned in wine and left to sit for 10 days before drinking. This is similar to the snake wine that is available where a cobra in put into a jar and filled with rice wine. After wandering around and getting lost in china town (how is it that every big city in the world has a china town?) I stumbled across a funeral procession. There appeared to be small band, which I can only liken to a marching band with brass instruments. It was a lot of noise and it hardly seemed respectful. Then a man with a small batton did a terribly improvised routine while vertically balancing his hat on the bridge of his nose. While I was standing there, an old woman came up to me, took my pulse, touched my forehead and then walked away.

It's always interesting to find out how American culture has pervaded throughout the world. My favorites so far:
1) A girl wearing a T-shirt with printed plain block letters, "Too young for Ashton".
2) A respectable art gallery with beautiful paintings, one stands out, the likeness of superman, but it's super-Bono, with U2 stamped on his chest. He says, "Buy a guitar, not a gun".

About 2 hours outside of Saigon are the Cu Chi tunnels, which were part of the tunnel network used by the Viet Cong during the war. It's one of those things that you hear about but don't give a lot to until you get there. The tunnels have been restored for tourism, and the various components of the villages are mock-ups, but it's enough to at least give you an idea of what it was like. I can't imagine fighting a war in that sweltering jungle. One section of the tunnels were enlarged by 40% to allow tourists to crawl through. You start by taking stairs to an underground room, which then has more stairs leading down to the tunnel, so you're approximately 12 feet below the surface. Then hunched over as far as you can, you waddle down the 75 ft stretch in either dim light or complete darkness. The few minutes it took me to get from one end to the other was enough to not wish tunnel existance on my worst enemy. The hot, musty air was really unpleasant. I was in complete disbelief that a group of people would have the fortitude to construct and spend extended periods of time in such a system. I really left with an appreciation for the Vietnamese soldier. When I mentioned some of this to one of the girls in Saigon she said, that's why our parents beat your parents. Ouch.

Thanks for visiting. I'll have something posted just as soon as I have something to say. Feel free to subscribe, you'll get an email every time I post.

- James

jamesmholst@yahoo.com