River festival in Laos

We left Vietnam urgently and abruptly in hopes of catching a Buddhist festival in Vientianne, the capital of Laos. We prompty forgot about the holiday after 13 long hours spent on busses and at the border. Our first night in Laos, at a guesthouse in Savannakhet we were reminded by the cute teenager rocking a side ponytail at the front desk of the celebration occurring the next day along the mighty Mekong River. Tired and travel weary we took a quick tour of Savannakhet's city center, seeing just enough of the modest festival preparations- an inflatable jumpy castle for kids, a miniature ferris wheel, and plenty of food stalls- to peak our curiosity about what was in store tomorrow.

The next morning we headed directly for the main plaza. At 9am the day was already hot. Not many people had arrived at the festival, but those in attendance were sitting along the river bank watching boaters prepare for races. Families, old men, women dressed in silk shirts and long wrap around skirts, young monks draped in bright orange robes, all meandered around the river bank gazing at the water. In the river long, exceedingly narrow, U-shaped boats with delicately curved and carved edges carried a dozen rowers each, all moving in perfect unison dipping paddles in and out of the muddy colored water. At the river's edge each boat team had its own tent and from these tents came live music. Some tents had full bands set up inside, others just drums made of upside down buckets. We couldn't tell where the race began or ended, but from the music played on the banks, we could tell which team won. Laos music is way funkier than other East Asian music and we loved hearing the electric guitarists wail and pluck frantically on their instruments while teh drummers kept the beat.

As the day progressed more people filtered into the festival grounds. A low rider pickup truck blasting hip hop- something we haven't seen in well over a year- cruised the main strip. The beer tents filled up. The game booths grew louder. Children packed the jumpy castles and parents milled around its edges peering over the wall at their happily shrieking kids.

There were very few tourists at the festival, so Travis and I (Travis especially) attracted a lot of attention. Little kids gasped when they saw Travis' big beard and curly hair. Adults whispered "Bin Laden?" to each other as we passed. We ducked into a beer tent to avoid sidewalk gawking and enjoy a Beerlao. Not suprisingly a couple of men shuffled in shortly after and instantly began talking about us. We felt uncomfortable til one of the men called over and told us to speak loudly so he could listen to our conversation and practice his English. Soon we were talking to him. SeeMon, it turned out was very friendly and loved to speak English. For 20 minutes we chatted and he progressively became more fluent, faster speaking and more erratic. He was thrilled to learn we were both English teachers. He started spelling words for us and asking for pronunciation tips, acting things out (he had to stand up and take off his jacket when explaining the word "weather"). At last he was chanting grammar exercises: "I go, You go, He..." "goes" we'd suggest, "GOES!" he'd shout and on and on. His companion meanwhile remained sedate and uncommunicative. Once they'd finished their beers, SeeMon wide eyed and smiling crazily, shook our hands and told us he would teach everything he practiced to his kids. We were happy to get someone so high on English, so feeling accomplished we decided to take a break from the heat and return to the festival later in the day.

In the evening when we returned the area along the river was packed. Between 3 and 5 thousand people were in attendance, hair combed perfectly, wearing their best clothes, walking up and down the strip, eating fried bananas and grilled meat on a stick. Bad karaoke-style music boomed from loud speakers in various tents and collided on the street in discord. Young women set up tables displaying elaborately decorated, dish-size altars made of folded banana leaves, orange and purple flowers and topped with incense and candles. The altars were beautifully crafted, and even as they sold them, the women kept their fingers busy tucking and folding corners and gluing flowers. We didn't exactly know what the altars were for, but we had a hunch they were supposed to float down the river.

We bought one from a girl, and she, without speaking English, led us down the river bank to the water. There she lit the candle and tried to used the candle to light the incense sticks, then she waded into the river attempting to place the altar in the water. Unfortunately, the candle kept blowing out. The wind prevented the incense from lighting. The lighter stopped working, and so did a second light Travis gave her. Our girl slipped in the mud and became soaked up to her waist. After 10 minutes of fumbling, she gave up, returned the altar to us and defeated we all climbed back up the slope. Travis and I felt terrible that we'd let the girl get so muddy for nothing. We sadly posted ourselves in a beer tent, sipped another Beerlao and watched dots of candle light bob along the edge of the dark river. It was too dark to see the altars themselves, but the small flames flickered brightly and the soft smell of incense wafted up into the tent. We went back and bought 2 more altars from our friend. She was happy.

This time we carried our altars up to the main dock. There were a dozen boys collecting altars and swimming them into the river. The air was thick and sweet with smoke. Hundreds of people watched the lights from the docks. It was breathtaking. Sometimes what looked like the skeleton of a boat would float by on fire. Across the Mekong in Thailand we could see thousands more altars floating along the river's edge. After our altars floated away, we snacked on sticky rice mixed with dark, brown cane sugar and cooked in a bamboo stick and wandered back home.

i'm so cool

I'm not sure exactly how old I was when my mom explained the whole concept of a passport to me, but I do remember that what really perked my interest was when she told me that sometimes, if you really travel a whole lot, you need to get extra pages put into your little personal book. I remember thinking "now that is the mark of a true badass." Years later, when I finally received my first passport, I was disheartened to see all those pages, and those four boxes on each page, each little box on each page needing a tiny little stamp before I would need new pages. When I set out for Australia in college with that passport, I thought I was getting close to filling that puppy up, and might actually make it before the thing expired three years later. Unfortunately, I mailed that passport home on the slow boat, had to have a temporary passport issued at the Embassy in Sydney, and then I had to buy a new, blank, permanent passport when I made it home. I had to start all over again.

Well, it took a lot of work, a lot of time on sweaty central American chicken buses, stuffy trans-Pacific flights, speedy hydrofoils, slow ferries, smokey Chinese trains, etc., but with the help of several full page visas, I am now the proud new owner of extra passport pages. I just had to brag.

One more item, if you've seen my passport, you know that I look like Bin Laden in it, if you've seen pictures of Bin Laden, you've seen what my passport photo looks like. It's fun to show off at parties, but not so great at border checkpoints, immigration offices, or U.S. Embassies. Usually people just laugh it off (the guard on the Vietnam side of the Vietnam-Laos border remarked "very handsome"), but I still get nervous when I have to present that document to anybody with any kind of authority. So, when the Vice-Consul at the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane called me up to the window and didn't immediately return my passport with it's shiny new pages, I started to sweat just a tiny bit. He was chatty, conversational, asking how long I'd lived in Korea, how my Korean was. I wasn't sure where this was going, but he ended up asking if I had ever considered working for the Foreign Service; apparently they're always trying to recruit well travelled, handsome people (Korean speakers in especially high demand) to work for them. It really made me happy that someone had judged me based on the stamps in my passport and not just the picture at the front.

no rae bus

About a year ago, we went on a nice free tour to the capital of the ancient Baekje kingdom in Korea. The only reason I mention it is because they had this contraption rigged up on the bus with a microphone and soundsystem. Everyone was encouraged to get up in front of the entire bus and give a speech. I'm not sure why, I'm not sure what about, but before I knew it, Taylor was shoving me towards the front of the bus to say my piece (she suspiciously never got up there herself). The only reason I mention this whole microphone bus situation is because it caused me to consider the idea of a No Rae Bus (Karaoke Bus). I think this kind of thing could really take off in Korea, especially considering the fact our ferry from Korea to China had a No Rae Bang on it.

Anyway, our bus yesterday between the provincial capital of Savannakhet in southern Laos up to the capital of the country, Vientiane, showed karaoke videos for the duration of the 10 hour journey. There was not, in fact, a microphone for people to sing with, but that didn't stop the teenage girl across the aisle from singing along with nearly every song. The bus soundsystem was severe, so strong that it made listening to your own music on headphones basically pointless because you always had those Laos/Thai(?) pop melodies sneaking in the holes and gaps in your headphones and leaking into any moment of relative quiet. The music here in Laos is thankfully much better than in Vietnam or China, with some "rock", but mostly just a little more funky on the pop songs. The karoake videos that showed behind the song lyrics were bizarre and hilarious. Often looking like high school film projects, they were a little rough, and usually showed some kind of story interspersed with shots of the artist and some ladies dancing awkwardly and superimposed over abstract psychadelic backgrounds. My favorite video portrayed a sketchy looking group of dudes pounding Beer Laos, paying for their tab with a gold necklace, and then the head guy taking off with one girl, and then switching her for another.

Well, the purpose of this post wasn't entirely to fill everybody in on the on-bus entertainment of one particular bus, but more a primer on our experience in Laos. First, most notable difference between Laos and Vietnam: pick-up trucks. In Vietnam, there aren't really even cars, just thousands upon thousands of motorbikes that are cruising and buzzing through any populated area at all hours of daylight (not so much at night). In Laos, there are still motorbikes, but many, many more pick-ups. Mostly bright, shiny new four-door Toyotas. This is a little confusing, because in most other respects Laos seems to be overall less affluent than Vietnam. In Laos, there is neither hustle nor bustle. The towns and cities are small, the pace of life slow. It is hot, and seems dusty and dry, though the stickiness of my skin at any time day or night will attest to the humidity. The dogs here look like they are made from mis-matched parts, with large heads and faces, long, strong bodies, all riding on ridiculously short legs. There is only one brand of beer in Laos (called: Beer Laos), and it is hands down the most delicious we have encountered on our trip.

Transportation in Laos makes me feel a little bit more like we're back on the real dirty, gritty, good travelling circuit. In Vietnam, there were just a few too many tourist buses full of backpackers for my liking. Crossing the border into Laos, we immediately had to walk 1km to the next town to meet our bus, which turned to be basically a straight-up Guatemalan chicken bus sans dashboard danglers and Jesus decals. We're talking old school bus, random agricultural products stacked and strapped to the top, back, middle of the bus, and food vendors coming in at stops hawking sticks of fried grasshoppers and suspiciously canine looking hindquarters. Sure, the air conditioning is more comfortable than the breezy broken window, sure the backpackers didn't chain smoke cigs the whole time, sure the metal bar right in the middle of my lower back wasn't the best, but this bus had flavor. Needless to say, our No Rae Bus was a little more luxurious than the chicken bus, but they still did bust out the plastic stools to set in the aisle when all the seats were taken. The tuk-tuks (taxis) here really draw comparision to Guatemalan transport. These puppies are decked out in colorful murals and paintings. They are also the burliest tuk-tuks I've ever seen, with grumbling diesel engines, wide plank seating for up to six people, twelve chickens, two 50 kg bags of rice, three backpacks and one guitar. Sometimes the tuk-tuk isn't even a three wheeled motorcycle at all, but just a truck with benches in the back.

The scenery from my seat in the No Rae Bus was spectacular. We started off in mostly flat country, travelling past small villages of bamboo houses on stilts. Under the houses were usually a hamock, motorbike, family of pigs, or family of humans taking refuge out of the sun. The forest here in truly majestic, with big, tall, rainforest trees straight out of National Geographic. The areas where the fields are cut into the forest only help to throw contrast onto the size and power of the trees. As we moved further north, the land began to rise up in sharp and sometimes quite tall hills and mountains, mostly off in the distance, dancing around on the hazy horizon. Staying in Savannakhet was our first meeting with the mighty Mekong, which is a strong and powerful river indeed. Vientiane is small, quiet, and lacking any buildings taller than three stories. It took Taylor and I about 35 minutes to walk from the river and center of town to the outskirts today, where those stilted bamboo houses were creeping back in. For all it's smallness, there is a very happening and cool vibe to the central city area. There is also a huge Arc de Triumph (sp?) inspired arch that is wildly out of place.

Easy Ride

In Vietnam the motorbike is king. There are at least 30 motorbikes for every one car. Morning traffic looks like a sea of bikes and motorcycles topped by ladies in face masks and men with keen eyes surrounding a few lone buses and a car or two. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. So it seemed appropriate, when a saucy, sunburned redhead with a bad eye told us about "Easy Rider", that we should hire a guide and take a motorcycle tour of Vietnam's highlands. That's exactly what we did.
If not for the expense- and outrageous $50 per day per bike, the trip would have been a dream come true. But at such a high price, one must raise her expectations, and in that respect our guides fell short. Supressing a million questions for no hope of getting a reasonable answer was a constant problem on the trip. But language barrier aside, it was lovely to sit back (our backpacks made a great back rest on the bike seats) and watch mountains, jungle, farms and towns pass us by.
We stopped quite literally every 15 or 20 minutes and sometimes more. Any roadside activity warranted getting off the bike- men breaking boulders by hand into massive granite bricks, a family feeding stalks of rice into a portable shell schucking mill, a brick factory (the repetive motions of cutting the bricks was absolutely mesmerizing), a silk factory, a gaudy temple, a long bridge made solely out of bamboo and wire. Everything, no matter what it was or who it belonged to, was on the tour map. We walked on private property and our guide explained what was being grown- coffee, silk worms, cinnamon trees, roses, tea. We went into to people's homes who had no idea we were coming and no natural inclination to invite us.
As you can imagine, tramping into someone's stilted bamboo house unannounced and uninvited is pretty embarassing. This sentiment was made worse by our guides pressuring us into taking photos. They seemed quite offended when we didn't snap pictures at every stop. Then again, entering into people's homes and business was absolutely fascinating! I especially loved the silk factory and the rice wine factory/pig farm.
In the silk factory, women soaked silk worm cocoons in hot water to kill the worm, then they removed the little bug (which can later be grilled and eaten- a favorite deliacy in Korea, though seemingly not as popular in Vietnam). With 5 or more cocoons in hand, the women somehow unravelled part of the cocoon, isolating a single thread. The whole coccoon is made of one fine thread that comes from the worm's mouth. The thread is then attached to a spindle on a huge machine that unwinds the cocoon and rolls the silk into large, perfect bobbins. Other machines weave the bobbins into generic-looking patterned silk fabric, and finally the silk is dyed in big tubs.
The rice wine factory was more outrageous. There a family cooked gallons and gallons of rice, then left it in big jugs for three weeks to ferment. After three weeks the rice was already alcoholic, but not very strong. This rice was then strained out of the jugs to feed the pigs. There were at least 2 dozen fat, healthy and moderately drunk pigs in stys all around the rice wine jugs and machinery. Needless to say, the place smelled like shit. After removing the rice, the liquid in the jug (which looked like the Korean beverage makoli) was poured into a hot machine that burned some of the water out, and then through a plastic tube EXTREMELY strong alcohol flowed from the machine and was "bottled". By bottled I mean poured into a thick jug better suited for transporting gasoline or explosive material. The rice wine we bought came in a plastic sandwich bag. Interestingly, the machine that burnt out the water used coffee shells for combustion, a waste product from the coffee harvest that in Costa Rica is usually dumped into the river, completely wasted and producing only an awful smell.
All in all, the tour was awkward and unusaul to say the least, but it gave us a chance to much more of the countryside and daily life in Vietnam than we could have otherwise. At the very end of the tour we rode down from the highlands into Nha Trang beach- the US army's main port during the Vietnam War. All along the road leading from the port up to the mountains the United States sprayed Napalm (poison) to kill the vegetation and thus prevent VietCong guerrillas from hiding in the jungle near the road and attacking US cargo trucks. It was very sad and powerful for us to see the mountains still bald and plantless after 30 years. Beyond the area near the road, you can see dense jungle, but near the road there is nothing but yellowish-green scrub. This grim plantlessness last for miles.

difficult rider

Dina was only the second American we had met since we began our trip who is in Asia only for travel (all the other Americans and Canadians (both few in number) are living and working in here). She had been in Southeast Asia for about two months, and enjoyed herself, but there was one activity she did that blew away all of her other experiences. She met some guys in a town in the central highlands who are part a loosely affiliated gang of motorcycle tour guides. She took a one-day tour of the surrounding countryside, and was convinced it was worth paying $50 a day (roughly 3-4 days budget for us) to go on a nine-day tour. She could not stop raving about how wonderful her trip was. The places they went, the things she saw, she loved it all. The biggest draw, according to our little Dina, was that you had a chance to get off of the tourist track (which in this country, is such a well beaten track that you see the same backpackers in town after town after town). Also, she loved having the chance to have a personalized guide who spoke English very well and could actually answer her questions about everything and help her communicate with local people. Looking back, she may have been on the payroll of Easy Rider (the name of the loosely affiliated group of guides), her endorsement was so incredibly strong.

Well, we were already weary of overly touristy towns and night buses full of backpackers, so the whole deal sounded pretty good to us. We hadn't planned on going as far south as Dalat, or into the central highlands at all, but when someone tells you about "the best thing in Vietnam" they've done, you tend to listen. After several days careful consideration, scrupulous budget checking, calendar inspection and soul searching, we decided Easy Rider would be in our future.

Dalat is really a lovely town, perched up at about 1,500 meters in a welcomingly cool atmosphere. Unlike most other towns we've been to, it feels like a real town, not some hollow shell of a town that houses only tourist related businesses. As a sidenote, it's also Vietnam's honeymoon capital, and the most incredibly tacky place I think I've ever been (Korea included). We hadn't been in the town four minutes before we were approached by an Easy Rider guide who was ready to whisk us away at that moment. We were too exhausted from 21 hours on a bus to discuss business, and we politely told him so and took his card. Surprisingly, he accepted our plea for a moment of solitude, gave us his card, and headed out. About five minutes later, the same guy came up to us and informed us that we were walking away from town, not towards it. Then he jumped back into the sales pitch. With gentle forcing, he again let up. Our third approach from an Easy Rider was from a different guy, who had higher English proficiency, but more heavy handed sales tactics. We slithered away with another business card, and began discussing our options. One plus side to booking our trip as soon as possible was that we would have an easy excuse for not being hassled anymore. By the time our first guide (who I will now refer to using his name, Quy (pronounced "We")) accosted us again in the center of town, we had all but decided to go with him because he was slightly less pushy.

That this was a mistake was mostly apparent to us by the end of our trip planning meeting over coffee. Not that Quy is a bad guy, but the language barrier was obviously going to be a problem. By this time, however, it was too late, the deal was done, the contract signed, the deposit paid. We were going with Quy and his buddy for a two day trip through the central highlands and down to Jungle Beach. We had one day to rest in Dalat before departure. It was pleasant, but I will skip the details (suffice it to say we visited a place called "Crazy House").

We left on Friday morning. The sky was overcast, but not threateningly so. Our belongings were acceptably waterproofed and strapped to the back of the bikes. Quy gave us what was to become an extremely overly used "Rock and Roll!" and high tens all around. Our first stop was an over the top Buddhist temple dominated by gaudy brightly painted concrete statues of dragons and bearded monkeys. Our second stop was a flower farm. Both stops mostly involved cheesey jokes from Quy rather than information.

The next couple of stops were nice, when the other guide, Lee (my driver), took us to see how some everyday items are produced. Lee showed us a coffee plantation and explained a bit about coffee cultivation, and then showed us a silkworm farm followed by a silk production factory. Seeing how silk is made was particularly fascinating; the worm weaves a cocoon, and then basically the cocoon is unraveled to gain the silk threads. The majority of our stops were about like this, we would ride for about twenty minutes, and then Lee would show us how something is made. The only exception was a waterfall with a super sketchy approach that every other guide except ours helped their clients navigate.

At lunch was when the upselling really began in earnest. Instead of having meaningful conversation and getting to know Vietnamese people, we spent most of our meal (and dinner as well) fighting off Lee and Quy's attempts to convince us to lengthen our trip. This was annoying at lunch, but heartbreaking at dinner when the table next to us was a similar tour group having what sounded like an interesting conversation about the war, and then (on a different topic) laughing hysterically. And there we were, still trying to get our head guide to understand that we live in Korea, and telling both of our guides for the 23rd time that day that we could not afford another day of $50 touring. This soured our mood for the trip.

Guide relations aside, the trip was really spectacular. We careened along remote two lane roads the tourist buses could never fit on. We passed breathtaking mountain scenery, with alternating coffee plantations, pine forest, and jungle. We dipped down into wide valleys carpeted in bright green and yellow rice fields. We sped through towns where all the children would shout hello and wave at us as we drove by. We saw people at work, people at play, people living their day to day lives in the absence of hordes of backpack laden caucasians. It was harvest time, so people were out in the fields, cutting down the rice, and everyone's front yard, as well as stretches of the road, were were covered in drying rice grains or coffee beans. If the purpose was to get off of the tourist track, we succeeded. No matter how negatively I may portray our guides, they did take us to see amazing places and people, activities and crops that were genuinely interesting and informative. The only really questionable "sights" we went to were when we visited minority people. Mostly what these visits seemed like was we would show up, the guys would hand out candies and cigarettes, and kind of be like: "look at the poor people". It made me more than a little uncomfortable.

We only got a bit of rain on the second day, and the trip was far from a disappointment overall. We saw interesting sights, we went places of the main circuit. We escaped the night buses, and had delicious meals we never would have been able to order on our own. But what we missed out on was the human connection that weighed heavily on Dina's Easy Rider assessment. We didn't make new Vietnamese friends, or really get to know our guides at all. We didn't get a chance to speak with Vietnamese people through our guides. We didn't even get coherent answers to our questions. The only human contact we had was constant upselling and insincere high fives. That left a bit of a salty taste in my mouth.

On the upside, we spent the next three days sitting out the rains in a beachside backpackers resort where we could rest, read, swim in the rain, eat delicious food and slide down mountains, gashing open our knees. Both experiences were totally worth it in their own different way.

blown away: Hanoi & Hoi An

Hanoi was a rush. The city was old and lovely, but extremely crowded. Houses crowded with family members, hotels crowded with tourists, and the street massively crowded with honking motorbikes, women carrying large baskets on their shoulders, and stores so full of souvenirs that they pour out onto the sidewalk. Most of the Old Quater lacks street lights, so at every intersection you just walk directly into the flow of traffic and hope the motorcycles dodge you. They do. They're used to it.

All in all I really liked Hanoi, but it was hard getting used to the character of the Vietnamese. Vietnames are clever, industrious and opportunistic people. Walking on the streets you see everyone working. Motorbike mechanics, women butchering meat, men soldering metal, and constantly people shout at you offering something up for sale.

Many people speak English here, and it's usually not because they studied they language in school. There are many tourists in Vietnam and to take advantage many Vietamese have learned conversational English. All the spoken English makes it very easy to get around the country. Buying bus and train tickets, a major headache in China, is a snap in Vietnam. menus are translated into English, making dinig a snap too. But, leisurely walking down a street in Hanoi's Old Quater takes nerves of steel and a determined attitude. People of all ages try to sell you books, bike rides, lure you into stores, and it all starts with "Hello! Where are you from?" Casual window shopping is nearly impossible because shop owners trail you and smother you with their hard sell techniques. It can be exhausting.

Now we're in Hoi An, more of a town than a city just 5km from a beautiful 30km long, white sand, sparsely populated beach with warm waters and great waves. The beach, however, is not the main attraction here. Hoi An is shopper's paradise. It's also a fascinating place to visit for people interested in sewing and clothing manufactoring.

In Hoi An there are at least 100 tailoring boutiques where you can have ANY article of clothing you want custom made for your body. Unbelievably the turn around time for a custom-made garment is just 8 hours! The tailoring stores have huge fabric selections, books of endless clothing patterns and some even have internet connections so you can show the tailor images online. Yesterday I ordered a side-buttoned, hooded wool jacket and a lined silk and cotton shirt around 10:00am. By 6:30 pm, the garments were made and pressed and both fit me perfectly! There is no end to what you can order in this town, from leather shoes to men's suits, ball gowns to baby wear. It's just incredible.

Like I said, the Vietnamese are unimaginably clever and hard working! At first I was irritated by the persistent pestering of street vendors and motorbike "guides", but now I am awestruck and impressed of the Vietnamese spirit and work ethic. This country is amazing.

a study in contrast

Travelling from Sapa to Hanoi is like being fired from a cannon straight into a brick wall. Or something like that, suffice it to say that the transition is rough. We finally made it out into the countryside surrounding Sapa on Saturday as the rains eventually abated. We took a nice trek down to Lao Chai village, where our little H'mong friends live. It was a stunning walk, as we quickly descended steeply down slick muddy slopes to the valley floor and the raging river. The hillsides were all covered in contoured rice paddies in a patchwork of smooth, rolling greens and yellows. The village itself was quite an interesting place to visit. The community consists of low, wooden houses, and the only structure that varies from the architectural norm is the school, which is a tall ochre French colonial style buidling. Needless to say, it is out of place. We were lucky enough to be invited to see our friend Soethe's (pronounce Xou-xou, I think) house. Ten people live in this wooden building, which was actually a little bit bigger than I expected. There was a main open room with a large shrine at one end, which is surprisingly free of furniture. Sleeping seemed to take place in a couple of side rooms. The main kitchen was to one side, though there was also a small fire cooking area on the other side. The house had electricity, but the two bulbs left the building incredibly dark inside, even though we visited in midday. Overall, the living conditions seemed relatively high, and the only concerning aspect was the toddler (Soethe's niece) who seemed to be the only one home when we arrived.

From that kind of atmospere (and relaxed, beautiful, comfortable Sapa) we took a sleeper train to Hanoi. We shared our cabin with two Korean men working in Hanoi and their "girlfriends" (we were a bit skeptical that the drop dead gorgeous 19 year old Vietnamese girl would (without monetary incentive) choose to marry a 46 year old man she couldn't speak to, as well as plan to move to his country). We were very happy to meet some Koreans, but a little sketched out by the whole situation. We arrived in Hanoi at 5 am thanks to the the wonderfully convenient train schedules, and were promptly scammed and basically robbed by our taxi driver. Even at just after five, the park where we decided to wait it out until things opened up was a flurry with activity. People were jogging, stretching, exercising, generally moving their bodies about in jerky and rapid fashions.

The tone for Hanoi was well set by this scene, save for the fact that not everyone (as I initially, pessimistically and rashly decided) is trying to rip us off. Hanoi is a lot to handle; to give the very definition to an adjective: intense. The streets are narrow, the traffic is constant, the honking incessant. The motorbike to car/bus ratio is at least 78:1. The only way to cross a street is to slowly and steadily wade your way into and across the steady current of traffic. Anything you want (or more likely, don't want) is constantly available from street vendors. All the sidewalks are primarily areas for motorbike parking/maintenance, or makeshift restaurants and bars. Intimidated at first, I have come to embrace the throbbing life of this city. Stepping directly into an onslaught of motorbikes isn't really as scary as it seems at first, and eating and drinking from a tiny plastic seat on a sidewalk isn't as dirty as it seems at first (and you can't beat the price; "fresh beer" is about 18 cents on the street). Getting outside of the super-tourist section decreases the bothering to negligable levels, and seeing the industriousness of the city's residents is incredible. Along every row of shops, people are grinding motorbike pieces, taking apart sewing machines, cutting up some sort of animal or vegetable, always working, selling, making, moving. It's impressive to see. Also, huge tropical trees line the streets, their roots snaking down and sometimes encasing fences and buildings.

All in all, Hanoi is (once you get used to it) a pleasant place to be, but it seems worlds away from the quiet mountain pace of Sapa.

H'mong-ous little friends

The moment we got off the minibus that transported usfrom the China-Viet Nam border to the sleepy touristtown, Sapa, a pack of teenage girls was ready to meetand greet us. Missing my students back in Korea, Icouldn't wait to chatter mindlessly with giggly younggirls. We dropped our bags in our room and headed tothe balcony to admire the lush mountainside view. Below us on the street the girls were waving madly andentincing us back to the street.
Once on groundlevel Tai and Soethe proceeded to tell us everythingwe could possibly want to know about Sapa from theperspective of 2 charismatic, friendly, middleschooldropouts dressed head to toe in traditional H'mongtribal clothing.

Tai and Soethe are 16 and 15 respectively. Ithought they were much younger though because of their diminutive size. Standing perfectly straight, theirheads barely reach my armpit, and next to Travis theylook even smaller. Tai and Soethe belong to the BlackH'mong tribe. The wear dark bluish-black dress/vests made of hemp and dyed with indigo. Both girls havebluish palms and fingertips from the dark indigo dyethat characterizes their clothing. Their dressesreach just below the knee and underneath it they wearT-shirts. Their outfits are hand embroidered in long bands of color above the elbows, under the colar and in a scarf wrapped around the waist. Tai shows us a piece of embroidery she is working on for her New Years outfit. It is extremely intricate and will take a year to complete. The girls wrap bright ribbonaround their legs to hold up black velour leg warmers. Ontheir feet are plastic sandals. One girl carries a hugebasket as a backpack. All the girls have hugecollections of silver and woven bracelets on theirwrists as well as clunky watches, their onlynon-traditional accesory besides a bright plaidumbrella. Their hair is long and straight,but Tais's is the longest, falling well below herwaist in one thick ponytail. She wears massive silverhoop earrings dangling with metal triangles. Thehoops look heavy, but her lobes aren't streched abit. Both our new friends have beautiful white teeth, bright smiles and are very animated when they talk.

They love to talk! The girls walk us around Sapa, showing us a man-made lake and helping us locate anATM that will accept Mastercard, talking to us abouttheir tribes many customs- dating is a popular topic that makes them squeal and blush. Despite dropping out of school, Tai and Soethe are perfectly fluent in Englih,Vietnamese and their native tongue, however they admit their reading and writing skills aren't great. They can alsorattle off phrases in French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean,German... you name it. They learned all the languages simply by hanging out with tourists. Travis and I are extremely impressed! Talking to them is not much different from communicating with my students. Tai and Soethe, despite living in houses without any electricity and spending sunny days working in rice fields, seem perfectly up to date on the modern world. They know all about belly button piercings and the marriage rituals of Western countries and they use the Internet regularly.

Soethe has a very strange accent, and she like to do imitations. When she imitates other people's voices her own awkward voice become so strange, it'shard to follow the story. Fortunately, she repeatsthings a lot, and judging from her own laughter, it'seasy to guess when the story has reached its climax. When Soethe takes down my email address she whips out a notebook full of hundreds of addresses of previous tourist friends. She calls everyone her friend. The most interesting thing about Tai and Soethis is that their knowledge of the wider world does not deter them from maintinaing their own ancient traditions.

Both girls plan to live in Sapa, with their families, forever and not get married. Some girls in their traibe their same age are already married and having babies, but that's not the life for our friends. Tai and Soethe do not like boys! Even if they did, they say, it wouldn't matter because they can't choose a boyfriend. The boy must choose them. I ask the girls why they don't become tour guides. That was the magic question. The girls already ARE independent tour guides- for $5 a piece they'll walk us 7km to their village and back. They don't work through agencies or hotels, they say, because they don't trust the Vietnamese people. They tell us horror stories about local minority girls being kidnapped and disappearing. Because of this they never walk anywhere alone. Or maybe they are just more persuasive in packs...

Spending the day talking with Tai and Soethe was fascinating. Of course they weren't just trying to be our friends. They were very eager to take us to the market and help us choose things and negociate prices- certainly getting a cut of the sale themselves. These ulterior motives don't bother me in teh least though because the girls are both sweet and as long as they're walking us around town, no other people swarm us and try to force their postcards and blankets on us. Tomorrow we'll walk with them to their village.

Aside from hanging out with our little friends, we've had a great time in Sapa sitting on our hostel balcony, playing music and singing into the white foggy mountainside with other travellers. Viet Nam is lovely, and very very wet. And Travis has a mohawk, of sorts, now.






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rained in

Taylor will or has already told you all about our wonderful H'mong friends that we made here in Sapa, so I'll focus on weather, geography, guitar playing, and drinking. The geography here is really stunning and spectacular. Sapa is an old French "Hill Station" (I'm not sure exactly what that means), and sits perched high up in the mountains of northern Vietnam. The drive up to the town was basically a cruise up switchback after switchback flanked on both sides by terraced rice paddies spilling down the severe slopes. The rice is at just about harvest time, so the yellow grains contrast nicely with the surrounding green jungle. Small streams and rivers cascade through and around the patchwork fields. The town of Sapa itself clings near the peak of a mountain, and thus everything in the town is built on a steep slope (information that will come back into play shortly). We are about 12 km from Fansipan, Vietnam's tallest peak (standing at 3000+ something meters). Looking out from the balcony of our hotel, we peer straight across the town's main street to see the towering peaks beyond. There are a large number of ethnic minority groups in this area, and hiking down to visit their villages or climbing Fansipan are the major recreations of the region.

Currently, our balcony offers views not of stunning mountains, but swollen, gray rain clouds. Hiking to villages or climbing mountains are not really possible, because of the torrential downpour that has only just now begun to let up. Apparently, a tropical storm crashed into the Southeast Asian Peninsula yesterday, dumping prodigious quantities of rain on us up here. From the moment I woke up yesterday to the time I went to bed, the sky was dumping water on everything around us. The geography of the town being sloped, of course that water was gushing, streaming, rolling and pushing down every surface in town. The main street had two streams on either side that spilled out to cover the entire street every time a lamppost impeded their path. Every stairway became a pummeling cascade and waterfall. To get to the restaurant where we had dinner, we had to tromp through a waterfall of what definitely smelled like sewage. I thought the whole spectacle was quite beautiful, though later in the day (after the lobby of our hotel was flooded) I began to seriously worry about our home for the night taking a quick slide to the bottom of the valley.

Without the hiking opportunities, there is not a lot to do in Sapa. The rain was so heavy that even cruising up and down the one street and checking out the market (where you can purchase day to day items like bamboo water pipes and butchered dog (paws included)) were not really options. Taylor and I wasted away the morning yesterday drinking coffee and enjoying several breakfasts and lunches. Come afternoon, I decided to buy a couple of beers and play a little guitar on the balcony. I soon had one visitor, a very nice fellow American who is teaching in Ho Chi Minh City, who brought a bottle of wine. Soon Taylor got up from her nap, and then a Japanese traveller from downstairs showed up a with a couple of beers and some bags of pig's ear and other food products from the market. We made an afternoon of it. Luckily, the store was only a few doors down the street, so we could make continuous beer runs without getting too wet, and our teacher friend knew plenty of songs on guitar. We drank, ate, and traded songs late into the evening.

Today was about the same, but the rain is beginning to let up. We have planned to go check out Lao Chai, the village of Taylor's H'mong friends, tomorrow. I hope the drizzle stays to a drizzle, or even lets up.

tiger leaping purge

Yunnan province, in severe southwestern China, is shaped roughly like a left-handed thumbs-up. The northwestern section of the province constitutes the thumb, and it wedges itself right into a crevice created between the wild western regions of Sichuan and Tibet. Along the western ridge and the tip of the thumb, the Earth leaps towards the sky as the foothills of the Himalayas begin their march up. Not really having the time or resources to properly delve into Tibet, and Sichuan being a bit out of the way, we opted to explore this section of China to at least get a feel for the mountains. We spent several days in Kunming, the provincial capital, getting our Vietnam visas arranged before making the bus ride out to popular and picturesque Lijiang.

Lijiang is traditionally home to the Naxi ethinic minority. There is a beautiful old town, where narrow, uneven streets wind through, around, up and down among architecture that may or may not be quite old. There are waterways of fast running, clear water that vary in width from a fist-width trickled to a rushing stream. This is my favorite part of the town. There are often people scrubbing their clothes on steps leading down to the gushing channels. There are special square pools where the water rises clear and fresh out of the ground. In the larger waterways, schools of fish face upstream swimming in time to the current and feasting on the debris swiftly moving downstream. There are goldfish, some kind of white fish, but the trout are my favorite to watch. Their slender, muscular bodies seem perfectly adapted to sit suspended in the current effortlessly. Bridges over the streams range from proper stone arches to almost haphazard wooden timbers. Sometimes the water disappears completely, and you can hear it flowing beneath the very stones that constitute the street. To know the geography of the erratic organization of this cluster of buildings is the know the location, movement, beginning and confluence of these unnumberable waterways. It is fairly common to see older Naxi women with brown crinkled skin, a royal blue Mao-style cap and basket backpack. Of course, all of the buildings in old town are occupied by tourist shops, cafes and hotel/hostels.

Because we have an affinity for domestic tourism in action, we chose China's busiest holiday (Golden Week) to go to one of the most popular destinations for domestic travel. This actually turned out to not be too big of a problem.

The real reason Lijiang is on the backpacker circuit map is because it is the jumping off point for Tiger Leaping Gorge, one of those attractions that everyone you meet on the road insists is "A MUST!". After waffling back and forth about going by myself and leaving Taylor in Lijiang vs. dragging Taylor along on the two-day trek, along with lacking required gear, I had kind of resigned myself to skipping the gorge. A last minute, night before conversation and photo viewing had convinced me that I needed to go ahead and just do it.

It had rained the entire week before we arrived. It continued to rain everyday after our arrival in Lijiang. 4000 meter gorges with sparse vegetation are not known to be among the most pleasant or safe places to enjoy daily thunderstorms. To add insult to injury, I became afflicted Saturday night with sudden, swift and severe intenstinal distress that made sleeping, moving, leaving the bed, eating, enjoying life in general, not to mention gorge trekking, out of the question.

A little salty about having to give up my precious Tiger Gorge, I was not made to feel any better by my sleepless night last night on my 10-inch wide slat directly above the engine of the old Yunnan Express "Sleeper" Bus.

Vietnam here we come!