[travel] Happy on misery bus

I'm finding few opportunities to write. I'm doing this one on a cramped sleeper bus from Nha Trang to Hue, two cities in Vietnam. You know how little kids sometimes put a bunch of insects in a jar and then shake the jar to get them to fight? That's kind of how the bus is, except with people in the jar. I even spent extra for the “nice” bus, but it's still a hellhole. If they showed people pictures of the cheap seats, no one would buy them. The cheap seats don't have a cushion for your back. This also isn't the just-scraping-by bus for locals... this is the “nice”, “air-conditioned” bus for tourists. I'm happily typing away though, oblivious to the drama between the autocratic driver and the frustrated passengers. Next time I use the train. Thank Science for my little bottle of Ambien.

When this country gets ubiquitous cheap internet access over cellphones plus the high review density that sites like Yelp currently have in the US, half their tourist enterprises will be screwed. For now I try to look things up on TripAdvisor.

Anyway, I'm actually really having a good time. I just wanted to write an entry in a bus full of miserable passengers. Now to write some more...

[travel] Putting a dick in my mouth

So I'm at this restaurant looking at the menu, and I see that in addition to sections for beef, pork, chicken, duck, frog, eel, ostrich, and boar, the menu has an entire section devoted to cow penis. Yup, not just one dish, but six to pick from. I think, why the hell not? When else will I get a chance to try cow penis for $1.80?

It arrived thinly sliced, mixed in with some phallic baby corn and some onions. It turns out that different parts of cow penis taste very different. I had trouble matching the abstractions on my plate to actual cow anatomy. My dining companion, an Israeli guy I met on the bus, picked up a shriveled circular section, and I helpfully guessed, “foreskin”? Some of it is spongy and decent-tasting... as in the texture of tripe but the taste of veal. Some of it is like organ meat, with the typical organ meat bad aftertaste. And the last bits are barely edible. I spent the next half hour walking around looking for fruit smoothies to wash it all down so I wouldn't have to experience any cow-penis-flavored burps.

Aren't you so glad you're reading this?

[travel] Dalat

Dalat is a Vietnamese hill town that was substantially developed by the French in the early 1900s, and still has a very strikingly European feel. While Saigon offered me a big, messy primer in third-world megacities, Dalat presented itself as an idyllic place for an independent thinker with a taste for outdoor adventure, Asian culture, and good cheap food to expatriate (to verb a noun). The hilly streets and gnarled evergreens also give the place a very San Francisco feel. The runaway chain reaction of douchebag foreigners begetting businesses catering to douchebag foreigners (and treating all foreigners as if they were douchebags) has not afflicted this city. Perhaps it's the lack of beaches, late-night bars, and easy cheap access by plane. Those all must be catalysts judging from what I've seen in other cities.

Dalat is also home to the Crazy House, a working hotel built by a woman with aesthetic taste somewhere between Dali and Gaudi, but with more love of purely organic forms and random jungle fauna.   My friend and I spent three hours  there taking pictures, and then I returned the next night and serendipitously met the owner.  She built the whole place on the stunningly small budget of around US$1million, which she was able to pull off because her dad was the head of the Communist Party.

In any case, this place is glorious.. May it not be ruined.

I'm starting to wonder if the tourist industry is like the fashion industry in that even good places (and fashion trends) eventually get too famous and then they become overly popular and then take a turn for the cheap and cheesy.  Of course, old  fashions get discarded while tourist traps continue to trap tourists.

[travel] Pics or it diidn't happen

In downtown Saigon, there was a clothing store called “Gizz fashions”.

The 12 year old in me has also noticed that certain Vietnamese store signs are very good at inadvertently getting Westerners' attention. There's been “Hung Long”, “Long Phuc”, even “Long Dung”, but no “Long Dong” just yet. I really need to look up these things in a VN->English dictionary to see what they actually mean.

[travel] Saigon

Saigon was my introduction to independent travel in the third world. After the clean efficiency of Singapore, I had dropped myself into a messy, chaotic city. I had an especially aggressive taxi driver from the airport (though I didn't know it at the time), and watching him plow his way through the herds of motorcyclists with his horn blazing gave me a reaction halfway between stunned amazement and laughter. The first hotel I tried (on recommendation of a friend) turned out to be something out of Delicatessen... a windowless depressing pit for $8 a night. I instead stuck with my original $15 hotel option for my pampered first-world ass to use while I acclimated to things. As I relearned basic skills like walking on the sidewalk, buying things, and crossing the street, I started to enjoy the chaos that the city provided. My travel companion and I spent a day wandering through various neighborhoods, walking into lesser known temples and looking at markets.

There are some interesting day trips from Saigon. One is the Cao Dai Temple. This religion, more or less unknown outside Vietnam, worships Shakespeare and Victor Hugo alongside Jesus, Mohammed, and others. Their temple looks like a Disney version of a Chinese palace crossed with an Illuminati conspiracy theorist's living room. If it were at Burningman, it would out-weird most of the other camps. The other nearby attraction is the Cu Chi tunnels. The inhabitants of these tunnels (Vietcong fighting the French, and later the Americans), are some of the most hardcore inhabitants of the planet I've ever heard about. The tunnels allowed them to harass various surface-dwelling enemy forces while remaining almost entirely undetected by them, even when said enemy forces were occupying the territory above the tunnels. They lived in a massive underground city (of several thousand inhabitants) spread over hundreds of square kilometers and connected by tunnels so small that you have to crawl on your hands and knees to get through them. They managed to hide things like cooking fumes through ingenious ventilation systems. Even though the US discovered several tunnels (and dropped massive amounts of Agent Orange onto the forests so the tunnel entrances would be easier to find), the network was never substantially compromised.

One big disappointment in Saigon has been the food. I came in with great expectations, and instead have eaten fairly miserable fare. On my third night, we went out to a really high-end restaurant in the downtown business area, which gave us an excellent three-course meal for the exorbitant price (relative to most of Vietnam) of $30/person. This not only replenished me, but allowed me to verify that not all fish in Vietnam tastes like cardboard.

[travel] Guns and motorcycles

As of a week ago I had never shot a gun or been on a motorcycle.  Now I can check bot of those off.

I shot a few rounds out of an AK-47 at a range in Vietnam.  I will say that modern videogames replicate the sound and feel very well, but the sensory assault you get from it in real life is fantastic.  the target (a giant sign far away) was kind of boring though... I would have preferred some tin cans on a fence, or better yet, a propane canister.

On to the motorcycles.  I met up with someone who taught me how to ride the small Honda motorbikes that make up 90% of the traffic in Vietnam.  For the shockingly low price of $4.30, we each had a motorbike and a full tank of gas for the day.  After practicing in a hotel parking lot, we headed out toward the Marble Mountains, a group of stunning Buddhist temples carved into limestone mesas.  We also discovered an incredible seafood place off the tourist trail.  The knack for getting really good food  is to look for places on side streets where there are large amounts of well-dressed locals  eating.  We also went into the Son Tre mountains, a set of forested mountains that form a long peninsula near Danang.  The combination of forest, beach, ocean, and city was stunning, and zipping through it on a motorbike thrilled me at a primal level. 

By the end of the day I had experienced beach highways, windy mountain roads, potholed roads, third world city traffic and even dirtbiking.  I briefly got the bike up to 50mph on a wide open road with no one around.  I liked watching my subconscious pick up skills and adjust quickly to a new mode of moving through the word.  My very strong self-preservation instinct kept me on a good path toward mastery without risking my life.  The constant tinge of fear it brought on ensured that I paid very close attention to everything that was going on.  A full day of doing that is exhausting, and I was barely conscious at dinner 

In any case, I would like to try more motorbiking when I get home.  I should get some proper instruction too.