I took a late morning flight out of Kunming to Shenzhen, one of China's richest cities (on the border with Hong Kong). I was fortunate that they let me take Yuka's suitcase as a carry-on, as I could get off the plane very quickly and make a mad dash for the port. There was a ferry that was due to leave at 2:00 p.m. for Hong Kong International Airport (my next stop). If I would have missed it, I would have risked missing my next connection, but there was no problem. Before I knew it, I was sailing in the Pearl River Delta for Sky Pier (Hong Kong Airport's Port). They even refunded the Hong Kong tax money that I paid on my plane ticket when I got there (HK$120). There was an altercation with a very, very fat angry Chinese man, his group of friends(?) all in Hong Kong Disneyland attire, and a poor airline representative. It was strange hearing Cantonese again, with its elongated final tones drifting up or down.
After I got out of the port, I re-emerged into the Western world. This was the first time in six months. I was surprised to be surrounded by English books and magazines in the airport bookstore. I stared in wonder for about 20 minutes...things I completely forgot about--the shelves and shelves of business books, National Enquirer, pornographic magazines with their plastic wrap and black covers so only the titles are visible, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal...none of those things I have seen in six months. I also saw a plethora of Western fast food restaurants, lots and lots of foreigners, people in super-trendy clothes...it was a little overwhelming.
Someone (I forgot who) remarked about their China experience, how it all feels like a dream now. I had a similar feeling, like stepping through the looking glass, back into the Western world. Hong Kong, especially the airport, is firmly placed in the Western world.
The next stop was Manila airport. Here's a guide for the Manila airport, in 18 easy steps:
1. Fill out an immigration card on the plane. Get off the plane.
2. Walk over a disinfectant cushion (ala the UK during the foot-and-mouth crisis). There are also infrared cameras hanging from the ceiling at this point and a doctor closely watching the temperatures of each passenger.
3. Get in line and go through immigration, even if you're just changing planes. So I got a Philippines stamp, and had 21 days to stay in the country, even though I told them I was going to Guam.
4. Get in line and wait for your luggage.
5. Get in line and go through customs.
6. Walk outside the airport, and go down a road for 10 minutes to a different airport. Some people were taking jeepneys (very cool transportation in the Philippines), but I didn't anticipating having to have Philippine pesos. It's not clear where you're supposed to enter the other airport, but a security guard let me through a gate.
7. Walk up an obscure staircase and get in line to enter the airport. Show another security guard your passport and airplane ticket. If you don't have a ticket, you have to show your itinerary. If you couldn't print your itinerary for the past few days because every print shop in Kunming was closed for the Chinese New Year, he'll get a wadded-up print-out from somewhere and look you up.
8. Get in line and go through security. You can leave your shoes on.
9. Check into your flight and get a boarding pass.
10. Get in line and go through security again. Take off your belt and shoes and put them into the x-ray machine.
11. Give an official 750 Philippine pesos or US$15.50 for "airport improvement and security development tax."
12. Get in line and go through immigration. First you must fill out an emigration card.
13. Go through customs.
14. Find your gate and go downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, give a security person your passport and boarding pass.
15. Give someone else your carry-on items so they can search it.
16. Someone else will wave a metal-detecting wand around.
17. Give someone else your shoes (take them off) for inspection.
18. Board your next flight.
I arrived on Guam this morning at 4:45 a.m. Back in the US, the first time in six months. I slept for a few hours in the airport until it was time to check into my hotel. After 5 a.m. or so, the airport was completely deserted except for security people and airline workers. I was awoken at 8 or so by Filipino flight attendants laughing loudly at dirty jokes. I decided to save a couple bucks and walked from the airport to the hotel. Nowadays, I think nothing of walking 30 minutes for something. It's no big deal, but I forgot...this is America, even though I'm in Guam. I saw the familiar roadside debris of Bud Light cans, empty packs of Doral. Some people shouted "Eyyyy!" at me, as some Americans shout at pedestrians where pedestrians are uncommon. I also haven't really thought about low-riders and sub-woofers, hip-hop music, backwards baseball caps, desolate sidewalks (I was the only pedestrian). It's strange being in America without a car.
This island is in the west Pacific, three times closer to Manila than Honolulu. There is a huge Navy base and Air Force base. There are lots and lots of Japanese tourists. There are nice beaches, but mostly Guam is used for duty-free shopping. I needed some supplies and headed for K-Mart. Guam has the world's largest K-Mart in the world. It's not nearly as exciting as it sounds. The locater signs in the store (housewares, pharmacy, plus sizes, etc.) are in English, Chamarro (local language), and Japanese.There was an interesting snippet I caught overhead between standard K-Mart muzak: short grammar lessons in Chamarro. I met a woman working at the airport from Palau. She taught me "thank you" in her native language: "muu lang." I also see many Melanesians, Filipinos, S. Pacific islanders. Some people are huge. I went to a restaurant tonight and guys as big around as they are tall kept eating and eating and eating, presumably keeping up their sumo physique.
Most people seem very laid-back and have a good sense of humor. They often lapse from English into other languages, things I have never heard before but include a lot of Spanish and English words. Most of the Japanese tourists here don't speak any English, so many signs are only in Japanese. I helped a family find their destination on the bus today and they seemed a little shocked that I could understand what they were talking about. When they got off the bus, they each waved to me, one at a time, in deep gratitude.
Tomorrow morning at 9 I have my interview at the Guam International Trade Center, 6th floor. The Japanese Consulate General is there, and hopefully this will get me into the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program in August. That's the whole reason why I am there.
Also I wanted to save some money, so I changed my ticket and will go back to the Philippines two days early (cheaper than Guam, whejavascript:void(0)
Publishre nothing's cheap). From there, I'll fly back to Hong Kong, take a boat to Shenzhen, and then to Kunming. I was intrigued with the Philippines and need to see more. But now it's time for sleep.
22 February 2007
18 February 2007
Yuka and I took the night bus down to Hekou, on the Vietnam border. This bus was a sleeper bus, bunk beds, room for about 30. The beds are quite small and not designed for a Western frame, so I wasn't too comfortable. But we made it to the border just in time for the flag raising and the Chinese national anthem, signifying the opening of the border for that day. After we passed the border formalities, we walked across the Red River and into Lao Cai, Vietnam.
Vietnam is booming right now. It has the second fasted growing economy in Asia (8% last year, behind China's 10% but ahead of India's 5%). It just joined the WTO a couple of months ago. Bush was in Hanoi in November, I think that was when. So many things in Vietnam were similar to China, lots of construction, concrete buildings going up left and right, a burgeoning middle class, great optimism for a chance at a better life. However, Vietnam was different from China too. Sure, the Chinese influence was there, but the writing system uses the Roman alphabet (or something similar enough), so it was much easier to read things. There was a definite French influence from years of colonialism, and definitely their own "Vietnam-ness" which makes it completely unique from anywhere else. One US dollar is about 16,000 dong. It was not fun counting all those zeros. I ended up dividing by 2000 and thinking in terms of Chinese money, which was easier as prices in Vietnam are similar to prices in China.
We found a minibus driver who would take us 30km up to Sapa for 20,000 dong (about $1.25, or 62 cents each). We rode up through the winding mountain roads to a beautiful village underneath Vietnam's highest mountain, Fanxipan. This area is full of Vietnam's ethnic minority groups including the H'mongs, Black Thai, Red Thai, White Thai, Dzao, etc. Many people here, including the men (which is not usually the case in China), were wearing traditional clothes. Everyone in this town was in the tourist business.
Before we stepped out of the minibus, representatives from no less than hotels had crowded on (we were already full with 10 people on the way up). "You stay here $5 a night brand new hotel it's not in your guidebook mountain view come check it out if you don't like it no problem, ok?" We had pamphlets, businesscards, brochures crammed into our faces. We decided on the Green Mountain Hotel which did have a great view, private bathroom, balcony overlooking the mountains, and plenty of hot water for $5. We decided to go for a walk.
"Hello? Motorbike?" A guy pulled up on his motorbike. "No thanks," I said, "I just want to walk." "Hello, moto!" another guy shouted as he pulled his motorbike up. It was something we would hear consistently for the next two weeks. Granted, as we rode the bus and made stops, any person getting off, it didn't matter where, Vietnamese or foreigner, would get the same treatment. I didn't see many people walking in Vietnam.
The next morning, we found a baguette stand doing egg sandwiches for 3000 dong (about 15 cents). We also found a decent coffee shop, and had my first cup of decent coffee in six months. The Chinese are not big coffee drinkers, but the Vietnamese do it right, along with French pastries, baguettes, wine from the highland university city of Dalat, music. We walked down to Cat Cat, a H'mong village down the mountain about 3km away. We had to pay 3000 dong to walk the road. There was a beautiful waterfall and a pretty destitute village, people all sewing the blankets and clothes that were hawked all over Sapa town. The hassle here was much less, and we did see a new school being built. We chatted with some H'mong girls playing a game similar to jacks. Everyone speaks English and takes US dollars: "There are H'mong people everywhere, even in America," one girl told me. I knew this to be true as my friend Amanda told me of the large H'mong community in the Twin Cities, among other places. "Yes, that's right, I said." They of course had things to sell as well, but didn't seem to care if we bought anything. There were so many other tourists with more money to spend than me, a person on a Chinese university teacher's salary. Sapa's nice, really incredible views, but as Yuka said, "We're trapped." You can't go anywhere without having to pay or being offered something to buy.
We spend two days in Sapa, then took an overcrowded minibus back to Lao Cai, where we were dropped off at the driver's friend's or brother's restaurant, serving "Western food," also booking train tickets, which we prefered to do by ourselves 50 meters away at the train station, for cheaper. We ate next door to the station, a place decidedly not on the tourist maps, and chatted with the owner. He gave me a kind of sauce with orange chili peppers, ginger and sugar, and then something to drink that helped with digestion. When we entered the train station, a security guard pushed us to the front of the line and got us past all the scalpers. He even wrote down the price to make it clear. We booked a hard sleeper (6-berth sleeping car) to Hanoi.
Hanoi is called "The Paris of the Orient." I've never been to Paris--my only exposure to France was Calais which I'm told is not the best France has to offer--but I have been to Montreal, "The Paris of the North." Hanoi is not very similar to Montreal. But Hanoi is a great city--lakes, rivers, stately colonial-era mansions, "Hello-you-want-motobike" people in green safari hats ala the British in Egypt, superb coffee, art galleries, a maze of shops, ancient pagodas, Ho Chi Minh's preserved body. There are hardly any cars but tons of motorbikes. When the light turns green, it sounds like a motorcycle derby--every time. There is even a jazz club with live music 7 nights a week, and plenty of English language bookshops which is a rare treat in Asia. We went to The Bookworm and chatted with the Vietnamese owner. I picked up Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Angle of Repose" for 80,000 dong, about $5. The owner pointed out a place for us to eat, a fancy outdoor place where local Hanoi people went, very delicious.
I wish we would have spent more time in Hanoi. The next day we took a city bus to Ha Dong station, got off to tons of men grabbing us and pulling us toward the buses they were selling tickets to, going to Halong Bay or wherever. Yuka cleared about ten of them off her with a judo move and a "Don't touch me!" We scrambled for the bus station office and found someone responsible looking in a uniform. I said, "Ha Tay," the province that were bound for, and he pointed out the correct bus. Soon we were on our way to Xuan Mai, about 30km southwest, home of the Forestry University of Vietnam and my good friend, Chairman Mao.
While we were waiting for the bus to get moving, some young girls came on the bus, begging for money, but soon gave up and just played with us, braiding Yuka's hair. Another man tried to sell me some books...I tried to explain that I don't read Vietnamese very well. The bus driver climbed aboard, gave a couple of big honks, clearing out the non-riders from the bus and miscellaneous debris in the station lot, and we got rolling. Outside of Ha Dong, the road was crowded with bicycles and motorbikes. It was completely flat and straight, but for some reason, many people became carsick and were vomiting into conveniently provided small plastic bags and throwing them out the window. Before we knew it, the bus pulled up to a dusty stop and the driver informed us that this was Xuan Mai.
We hired some motorbike drivers to give us a ride to the forestry university and boy, did we suprise the guards at the front gate. I showed them Dr. Tran's (aka, Chairman Mao) namecard and also Dr. Tran's son Kha's mobile phone number. Soon a Western woman pulled up on her motorbike. Her name was Susan, from Australia, doing research, and the only foreigner in town.
"They called Professor Mao and then they called me," she said of the guards. Soon Mao and his son Kha showed up on their bikes and took us out to lunch. We left our bags at the front gate guard station.
We were greeted at the restaurant with a bottle of scorpion whiskey. In fact, two scorpions were inside, along with various herbs and who knows what else. It was strong, smooth, and sweet. I warned Yuka not to smell it before drinking. "Chuc mung!" Several other officials from the university were there, one the director, with a hammer-and-sickle pin on his lapel. He spoke excellent English. Yuka and Mao went to the restaurant's fish tank and chose a catfish swimming around for our hotpot lunch. Another official had lived during Soviet times in East Germany and spoke German (many older Vietnamese have been educated abroad in other former communist contries--Mao himself lived a while in Leningrad and was educated at Beijing Forestry University). They were all familiar with my university (the one in Kunming that is). Many had been there.
There were numerous toasts and photos. Soon another bottle of scorpion whiskey appeared and was opened, and consumed. The Vietnamese call it ruou--there were also gigantic bottles of cobra whiskey and some other large rodent-sized reptile--this was in restaurants all over Vietnam, as is paojiu (fruit and herb whiskey) in China. After lunch, we rode back to Mao's house, met his wife and looked at pictures. He showed me an award he won from Cambridge University--"one of the 2000 outstanding scientists of the 21st century." Another researcher from the university with excellent English came and chatted for a while. Mao opened his bottle of baijiu from Lijiang (spiced with ingredients from Xishangbanna, Kunming, etc.) and we had a couple drinks. Soon, it was time to go. I climbed on the back of Kha's bike and Yuka onto Mao's.
Leaving his house, which is situated on a small slope, Mao lost his balance and fell off his motorbike, crashing onto the pavement, Yuka tumbling after. The crash left a large scrape on Mao's cheek. He was all right, but shaken up. Yuka was ok. Don't drink and drive.
The next morning, Yuka wasn't feeling well, and Mao and Kha met us at the hotel to go for breakfast. I went with them but Yuka stayed behind. After a bowl of rice noodles, we continued to a small shop to see another Vietnamese friend of mine. His parents own it and greeted us with a draft of cold beer (this is at a 8:30 in the morning!). We ate peanuts, had some tea, some coffee, and chatted in Chinese, a little Vietnamese, and a little English.
I went back to the hotel and took care of Yuka. She was in bed most of that day. I took a step out to use the Internet and found a net bar--2000 dong per hour (about 13 cents). I got lots of strange stares and offers for a motorbike ride. Not many foreigners make it to these parts. Some people sitting in front of a shop summoned me over. I sat down and tried to chat with them. They gave me some pineapple and put a little salt on it. A guy offered me a cigarette. I declined. He then offered me some heroin and a prostitute, a young bored-looking woman sitting with us. An old woman with missing teeth cackled a laugh. I decided it was time to be on my way.
The next day, Yuka was feeling better so the two of us and Kha rented a car and driver and headed for Haobinh City. We climbed up, up, up into the mountains once again and ended up in a village called Ban Lac. The people here are ethnic Thais and live in huts with thatched roofs and on stilts. We were invited into one for tea and sat on the bamboo mat floor. The guest room had no furniture and plain walls. We sat on a hand-woven rug. It was very pleasant. The day was a communist party holiday (the 77th anniversary of the Party), so there were not many tourists. The pace of life was slow and not as aggressively touristy as Sapa.
After lunch we went for a tour of Hoabinh Dam (which supplies electricity as far south as Saigon), had to pay more than double the Vietnamese admission price and 10,000 dong for a required guide that spoke no English and didn't let us into "sensitive" places in the dam. After that, we went to see Ho Chi Minh's massive statue (over 20m tall) which is visible across the entire valley. A friendly Vietnamese girl we met that day took us to the market and had Yuka try on a new pair of jeans. Later we realized that Vietnamese do not wear jeans with worn out knees (as Yuka was wearing). Some kids pointed at her jeans and said something to me, probably along the lines of, "Hey, get your girlfriend some decent jeans!"
The next day we headed for the beach. We had a couple carsick bus rides to Haiphong, then took a ferry to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay (UNESCO World Heritage Site). This was slow season, so there had to be twice as many motorbike drivers as there were foreign tourists. Every ten seconds we were offered a ride, which we continued to decline. The beaches were splendidly deserted and the offshore (and onshore) scenery is spectacular--limestone rocks and islets jutting out of clear water for miles and miles.
One day we actually did hire some motorbike drivers and went up to Cat Ba National Park. On the way up the mountains, we stopped at Hospital Cave. During the "American War" (as it's called in Vietnam), this cave served as a secret hospital. One old man, still in his North Vietnamese Army uniform was a caretaker. He showed us around and explained each room in broken English: the kitchen, the officers' quarters, the operating room. Then we came to the meeting room. Suddenly his eyes lit up and he broke into a rousing song whose chorus went, "Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh." You could tell that he had some strong memories from that time and the bare room seemed to fill up with the spirit of the time. His name card sitting beside me now says, "Vu Dinh Khoi--Distinguished War Veteran." He didn't seem to care that I was American or that Yuka was Japanese. He put his arms around us and posed happily for pictures. "Vietnam and America are good friends," he told me, and this is becoming truer each day.
Cat Ba National Park is gorgeous and the hikes and views are spectacular. That's all I have to say about that--the rest you'll have to see to believe.
After our lazy days lounging on Cat Ba, we made it back to Hanoi, took a night train to the border, crossed the Red River once again and spent a day in the boring border town of Hekou, China. It was nice being able to speak Chinese again.
Finally our night bus to Kunming was ready to depart. It was a sleeper again, and an older model, well worn. It proved to be the worst bus trip of my life. For the first four or five hours, there was no road. They are currently building a new expressway linking Kunming and Hanoi, and we were taking a bumpy dirt road instead. People were smoking and spitting on the floor. I saw one guy blow his nose on the floor. The bus lurched and rocked incessantly, dodging earlier landslides and midnight traffic with deafening honks. We had top bunks and I was clutching the sides with an iron grip for fear of being thrown off. There were numerous times I was bucked into the air like a rodeo clown. I was wholeheartedly determined that if I fell, it would be anywhere but on that floor. The bed was too small for me and if I tried to lie on my side, my hips would start aching from the jolts of the bus and the wafer-thin mattress provided no cushion against the metal frame.
The entire ride reeked of diesel fumes--I suppose there was a major leak. The guy next to me was snoring loudly. We stopped a couple of times, but there was no bathroom--we just went behind the bus in the middle of the night, our shoes encrusted with mud. After 14 excruciating hours (the bus was over two hours late), we finally made it to Kunming. It was another hour on a crowded city bus (no seat), and then finally home sweet home and a long hot shower. Later that day, Yuka and I blew our noses--the tissues were blacked from the diesel fumes. Next time, I will look closely at the long distance bus before getting on.
Vietnam is booming right now. It has the second fasted growing economy in Asia (8% last year, behind China's 10% but ahead of India's 5%). It just joined the WTO a couple of months ago. Bush was in Hanoi in November, I think that was when. So many things in Vietnam were similar to China, lots of construction, concrete buildings going up left and right, a burgeoning middle class, great optimism for a chance at a better life. However, Vietnam was different from China too. Sure, the Chinese influence was there, but the writing system uses the Roman alphabet (or something similar enough), so it was much easier to read things. There was a definite French influence from years of colonialism, and definitely their own "Vietnam-ness" which makes it completely unique from anywhere else. One US dollar is about 16,000 dong. It was not fun counting all those zeros. I ended up dividing by 2000 and thinking in terms of Chinese money, which was easier as prices in Vietnam are similar to prices in China.
We found a minibus driver who would take us 30km up to Sapa for 20,000 dong (about $1.25, or 62 cents each). We rode up through the winding mountain roads to a beautiful village underneath Vietnam's highest mountain, Fanxipan. This area is full of Vietnam's ethnic minority groups including the H'mongs, Black Thai, Red Thai, White Thai, Dzao, etc. Many people here, including the men (which is not usually the case in China), were wearing traditional clothes. Everyone in this town was in the tourist business.
Before we stepped out of the minibus, representatives from no less than hotels had crowded on (we were already full with 10 people on the way up). "You stay here $5 a night brand new hotel it's not in your guidebook mountain view come check it out if you don't like it no problem, ok?" We had pamphlets, businesscards, brochures crammed into our faces. We decided on the Green Mountain Hotel which did have a great view, private bathroom, balcony overlooking the mountains, and plenty of hot water for $5. We decided to go for a walk.
"Hello? Motorbike?" A guy pulled up on his motorbike. "No thanks," I said, "I just want to walk." "Hello, moto!" another guy shouted as he pulled his motorbike up. It was something we would hear consistently for the next two weeks. Granted, as we rode the bus and made stops, any person getting off, it didn't matter where, Vietnamese or foreigner, would get the same treatment. I didn't see many people walking in Vietnam.
The next morning, we found a baguette stand doing egg sandwiches for 3000 dong (about 15 cents). We also found a decent coffee shop, and had my first cup of decent coffee in six months. The Chinese are not big coffee drinkers, but the Vietnamese do it right, along with French pastries, baguettes, wine from the highland university city of Dalat, music. We walked down to Cat Cat, a H'mong village down the mountain about 3km away. We had to pay 3000 dong to walk the road. There was a beautiful waterfall and a pretty destitute village, people all sewing the blankets and clothes that were hawked all over Sapa town. The hassle here was much less, and we did see a new school being built. We chatted with some H'mong girls playing a game similar to jacks. Everyone speaks English and takes US dollars: "There are H'mong people everywhere, even in America," one girl told me. I knew this to be true as my friend Amanda told me of the large H'mong community in the Twin Cities, among other places. "Yes, that's right, I said." They of course had things to sell as well, but didn't seem to care if we bought anything. There were so many other tourists with more money to spend than me, a person on a Chinese university teacher's salary. Sapa's nice, really incredible views, but as Yuka said, "We're trapped." You can't go anywhere without having to pay or being offered something to buy.
We spend two days in Sapa, then took an overcrowded minibus back to Lao Cai, where we were dropped off at the driver's friend's or brother's restaurant, serving "Western food," also booking train tickets, which we prefered to do by ourselves 50 meters away at the train station, for cheaper. We ate next door to the station, a place decidedly not on the tourist maps, and chatted with the owner. He gave me a kind of sauce with orange chili peppers, ginger and sugar, and then something to drink that helped with digestion. When we entered the train station, a security guard pushed us to the front of the line and got us past all the scalpers. He even wrote down the price to make it clear. We booked a hard sleeper (6-berth sleeping car) to Hanoi.
Hanoi is called "The Paris of the Orient." I've never been to Paris--my only exposure to France was Calais which I'm told is not the best France has to offer--but I have been to Montreal, "The Paris of the North." Hanoi is not very similar to Montreal. But Hanoi is a great city--lakes, rivers, stately colonial-era mansions, "Hello-you-want-motobike" people in green safari hats ala the British in Egypt, superb coffee, art galleries, a maze of shops, ancient pagodas, Ho Chi Minh's preserved body. There are hardly any cars but tons of motorbikes. When the light turns green, it sounds like a motorcycle derby--every time. There is even a jazz club with live music 7 nights a week, and plenty of English language bookshops which is a rare treat in Asia. We went to The Bookworm and chatted with the Vietnamese owner. I picked up Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Angle of Repose" for 80,000 dong, about $5. The owner pointed out a place for us to eat, a fancy outdoor place where local Hanoi people went, very delicious.
I wish we would have spent more time in Hanoi. The next day we took a city bus to Ha Dong station, got off to tons of men grabbing us and pulling us toward the buses they were selling tickets to, going to Halong Bay or wherever. Yuka cleared about ten of them off her with a judo move and a "Don't touch me!" We scrambled for the bus station office and found someone responsible looking in a uniform. I said, "Ha Tay," the province that were bound for, and he pointed out the correct bus. Soon we were on our way to Xuan Mai, about 30km southwest, home of the Forestry University of Vietnam and my good friend, Chairman Mao.
While we were waiting for the bus to get moving, some young girls came on the bus, begging for money, but soon gave up and just played with us, braiding Yuka's hair. Another man tried to sell me some books...I tried to explain that I don't read Vietnamese very well. The bus driver climbed aboard, gave a couple of big honks, clearing out the non-riders from the bus and miscellaneous debris in the station lot, and we got rolling. Outside of Ha Dong, the road was crowded with bicycles and motorbikes. It was completely flat and straight, but for some reason, many people became carsick and were vomiting into conveniently provided small plastic bags and throwing them out the window. Before we knew it, the bus pulled up to a dusty stop and the driver informed us that this was Xuan Mai.
We hired some motorbike drivers to give us a ride to the forestry university and boy, did we suprise the guards at the front gate. I showed them Dr. Tran's (aka, Chairman Mao) namecard and also Dr. Tran's son Kha's mobile phone number. Soon a Western woman pulled up on her motorbike. Her name was Susan, from Australia, doing research, and the only foreigner in town.
"They called Professor Mao and then they called me," she said of the guards. Soon Mao and his son Kha showed up on their bikes and took us out to lunch. We left our bags at the front gate guard station.
We were greeted at the restaurant with a bottle of scorpion whiskey. In fact, two scorpions were inside, along with various herbs and who knows what else. It was strong, smooth, and sweet. I warned Yuka not to smell it before drinking. "Chuc mung!" Several other officials from the university were there, one the director, with a hammer-and-sickle pin on his lapel. He spoke excellent English. Yuka and Mao went to the restaurant's fish tank and chose a catfish swimming around for our hotpot lunch. Another official had lived during Soviet times in East Germany and spoke German (many older Vietnamese have been educated abroad in other former communist contries--Mao himself lived a while in Leningrad and was educated at Beijing Forestry University). They were all familiar with my university (the one in Kunming that is). Many had been there.
There were numerous toasts and photos. Soon another bottle of scorpion whiskey appeared and was opened, and consumed. The Vietnamese call it ruou--there were also gigantic bottles of cobra whiskey and some other large rodent-sized reptile--this was in restaurants all over Vietnam, as is paojiu (fruit and herb whiskey) in China. After lunch, we rode back to Mao's house, met his wife and looked at pictures. He showed me an award he won from Cambridge University--"one of the 2000 outstanding scientists of the 21st century." Another researcher from the university with excellent English came and chatted for a while. Mao opened his bottle of baijiu from Lijiang (spiced with ingredients from Xishangbanna, Kunming, etc.) and we had a couple drinks. Soon, it was time to go. I climbed on the back of Kha's bike and Yuka onto Mao's.
Leaving his house, which is situated on a small slope, Mao lost his balance and fell off his motorbike, crashing onto the pavement, Yuka tumbling after. The crash left a large scrape on Mao's cheek. He was all right, but shaken up. Yuka was ok. Don't drink and drive.
The next morning, Yuka wasn't feeling well, and Mao and Kha met us at the hotel to go for breakfast. I went with them but Yuka stayed behind. After a bowl of rice noodles, we continued to a small shop to see another Vietnamese friend of mine. His parents own it and greeted us with a draft of cold beer (this is at a 8:30 in the morning!). We ate peanuts, had some tea, some coffee, and chatted in Chinese, a little Vietnamese, and a little English.
I went back to the hotel and took care of Yuka. She was in bed most of that day. I took a step out to use the Internet and found a net bar--2000 dong per hour (about 13 cents). I got lots of strange stares and offers for a motorbike ride. Not many foreigners make it to these parts. Some people sitting in front of a shop summoned me over. I sat down and tried to chat with them. They gave me some pineapple and put a little salt on it. A guy offered me a cigarette. I declined. He then offered me some heroin and a prostitute, a young bored-looking woman sitting with us. An old woman with missing teeth cackled a laugh. I decided it was time to be on my way.
The next day, Yuka was feeling better so the two of us and Kha rented a car and driver and headed for Haobinh City. We climbed up, up, up into the mountains once again and ended up in a village called Ban Lac. The people here are ethnic Thais and live in huts with thatched roofs and on stilts. We were invited into one for tea and sat on the bamboo mat floor. The guest room had no furniture and plain walls. We sat on a hand-woven rug. It was very pleasant. The day was a communist party holiday (the 77th anniversary of the Party), so there were not many tourists. The pace of life was slow and not as aggressively touristy as Sapa.
After lunch we went for a tour of Hoabinh Dam (which supplies electricity as far south as Saigon), had to pay more than double the Vietnamese admission price and 10,000 dong for a required guide that spoke no English and didn't let us into "sensitive" places in the dam. After that, we went to see Ho Chi Minh's massive statue (over 20m tall) which is visible across the entire valley. A friendly Vietnamese girl we met that day took us to the market and had Yuka try on a new pair of jeans. Later we realized that Vietnamese do not wear jeans with worn out knees (as Yuka was wearing). Some kids pointed at her jeans and said something to me, probably along the lines of, "Hey, get your girlfriend some decent jeans!"
The next day we headed for the beach. We had a couple carsick bus rides to Haiphong, then took a ferry to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay (UNESCO World Heritage Site). This was slow season, so there had to be twice as many motorbike drivers as there were foreign tourists. Every ten seconds we were offered a ride, which we continued to decline. The beaches were splendidly deserted and the offshore (and onshore) scenery is spectacular--limestone rocks and islets jutting out of clear water for miles and miles.
One day we actually did hire some motorbike drivers and went up to Cat Ba National Park. On the way up the mountains, we stopped at Hospital Cave. During the "American War" (as it's called in Vietnam), this cave served as a secret hospital. One old man, still in his North Vietnamese Army uniform was a caretaker. He showed us around and explained each room in broken English: the kitchen, the officers' quarters, the operating room. Then we came to the meeting room. Suddenly his eyes lit up and he broke into a rousing song whose chorus went, "Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh." You could tell that he had some strong memories from that time and the bare room seemed to fill up with the spirit of the time. His name card sitting beside me now says, "Vu Dinh Khoi--Distinguished War Veteran." He didn't seem to care that I was American or that Yuka was Japanese. He put his arms around us and posed happily for pictures. "Vietnam and America are good friends," he told me, and this is becoming truer each day.
Cat Ba National Park is gorgeous and the hikes and views are spectacular. That's all I have to say about that--the rest you'll have to see to believe.
After our lazy days lounging on Cat Ba, we made it back to Hanoi, took a night train to the border, crossed the Red River once again and spent a day in the boring border town of Hekou, China. It was nice being able to speak Chinese again.
Finally our night bus to Kunming was ready to depart. It was a sleeper again, and an older model, well worn. It proved to be the worst bus trip of my life. For the first four or five hours, there was no road. They are currently building a new expressway linking Kunming and Hanoi, and we were taking a bumpy dirt road instead. People were smoking and spitting on the floor. I saw one guy blow his nose on the floor. The bus lurched and rocked incessantly, dodging earlier landslides and midnight traffic with deafening honks. We had top bunks and I was clutching the sides with an iron grip for fear of being thrown off. There were numerous times I was bucked into the air like a rodeo clown. I was wholeheartedly determined that if I fell, it would be anywhere but on that floor. The bed was too small for me and if I tried to lie on my side, my hips would start aching from the jolts of the bus and the wafer-thin mattress provided no cushion against the metal frame.
The entire ride reeked of diesel fumes--I suppose there was a major leak. The guy next to me was snoring loudly. We stopped a couple of times, but there was no bathroom--we just went behind the bus in the middle of the night, our shoes encrusted with mud. After 14 excruciating hours (the bus was over two hours late), we finally made it to Kunming. It was another hour on a crowded city bus (no seat), and then finally home sweet home and a long hot shower. Later that day, Yuka and I blew our noses--the tissues were blacked from the diesel fumes. Next time, I will look closely at the long distance bus before getting on.
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