Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay is an overnight trip out of Hanoi, where you sail a junk around beautiful monoliths rising out of the Gulf of Tonkin, considered one of the loveliest places on the planet.

For us, the weather didn’t cooperate. Overcast and rainy the entire time, we managed as best we could, including walking through a limestone cave and having a swim in really cold water. I suppose we were lucky–the next day, the wind picked up, and all the outgoing cruises were cancelled.

There were 12 on our boat, including a British couple and an Australian one, so the guys sent the girls to bed, and me, Nick, and the guys stayed up all night playing the drinking game hockey. The bar tab for us came to 26 beers, 8 White Russians, 1 Singapore Sling, and 1 Other, which would have paid for another Ha Long Bay Trip. But desperate times call for desperate measures. From Ha Long Bay, it’s back to Hanoi by bus for the evening, then the overnight train to Hue.

The Hanoi Hilton

Day 2 in Hanoi included the Hanoi Hilton, which rates a post all it’s own.

It isn’t really much to look at. Most of the prison has been demolished save for the gatehouse.

The prison is a former French colonial prison where political dissidents were jailed and sometimes executed, male and female alike. After Vietnamese independence, it became a symbol of French colonialist exploitation of Vietnam. During the Vietnam war, it was used to house, interrogate, and torture captured American aviators.

80% of the museum tour is devoted to French excesses in the treatment of Vietnamese prisoners. 10% is devoted to selling trinkets, and 10% is devoted, without a sense of irony, to the loving care that the North Vietnamese jailers showed American prisoners. How noble that they learned from their awful experience at the hands of the French and showed such humanity to the Americans!

Yay, Christmastime! Isn’t prison fun!?

The sign above says, “During the war…Vietnamese government had created the best living conditions to US pilots for they had a stable life during the temporary detention period.” There’s even a picture of John McCain being tended by a doctor in a hospital bed, with no mention of the fact that he would never be able to raise his arms again. Similarly there is no mention of James Stockdale having his eardrums intentionally burst by his torturers.

It’s not that the Americans are in sole possession of the moral high-ground for the Vietnam War. But this is hypocrisy too far. I’m reminded of Freud, upon being released by the Gestapo and required to sign a written statement describing his gentle treatment, appending his signature with, “I can thoroughly recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” The Gestapo didn’t see the irony, and apparently neither did the NVA.

Hanoi, Vietnam

From Bangkok, two $10 airline tickets on Vietjet Air and a couple of hours of flight time brings us to Hanoi, Vietnam.

We returned to the Charming 2 Hotel, the most charming hotel on the planet, and home for a few days 2 years ago. Rose has been replaced at the front-desk by Mary, and the free breakfast is no longer self-serve, but otherwise the experience remains the same. (They even gave me the exact same room as before, and I still haven’t learned how to make the sink drain.)

We visited Ho Chi Minh’s tomb, where his body is preserved for posterity, much like Lenin’s. It’s bizarre, not quite creepy, and the tomb is attended by military guards in resplendent white uniforms. The guards find it hard to maintain their dignity given the constant need to shush tourists…though that’s not the only threat to their dignity. They have a lackadaisical approach to standing at attention, far worse than the ragged lines of the Corps of Midshipmen at Navy football games–but those are new sailors and marines, whereas these guys are supposed to be the country’s elite when it comes to drill. Worst of all, they mince to and from their posts, swinging there arms semi-rhythmically and reminiscent of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The Old Guard, these guys are not.

Drill is not the only thing that the Vietnamese take a lackadaisical approach to, as this cobweb of electrical wires demonstrates.

Bangkok: City of Contradictions

After Mandalay, we head back to Bangkok, where I’m met by Nick, famous for taking charges and jumping through tables.

I’m not sure that anyone can explain Bangkok. I sure as Hell can’t. It’s one contradiction after another.

Bangkok is one of the most heavily polluted cities in the world. It also has immaculate and beautiful boulevards and neighborhoods. The government took over in a military coup in 2006, but the Royal Thai Army protects anti-government protestors. On one hand, everyone is proper and perfectly polite. (Even Ronald McDonald bows to welcome you). On the other hand, traffic is the city is snarled by ongoing violent protests and counter-protests,

There are 5 star hotels (we stayed at the W–who wouldn’t like backpacking!?) and the finest shopping malls in the world, and less than a mile away, neighborhoods in crushing poverty, built on stilts over canals with no running water. (Everyone was taking pictures in front of the W Bangkok panel in eveningwear and heels–here’s mine).

You can get a lengthy jail sentence for criticizing the king, but are free to criticize the government.

This is the illicit activity capital of the world, but people are greatly offended if you point the sole of your foot in their general direction (no sitting cross-legged here). It’s also home to Khao San Road, the backpacker Mecca of the East. Pretty much anything can be bought or sold here, and the streets are wall-to-wall with, as Nick described it, “hustlers, pimps, greasers, queers, junkies, gypsies, and whores.”  Crude and lewd seem to sell here–it’s almost like a neighborhood-size Wiener Circle.

I would post pictures of the Emerald Buddha, the Reclining Buddha, etc, but all were closed for a holiday that translates as Big Buddha Day. You can’t buy or sell alcohol or smoke cigarettes on Big Buddha Day. The W was near the red-light district at Patapong, so we went to see what all the fuss was about. The valet at the hotel described it thusly: “Is it safe? For your life, yes. For your money, no.” It’s neither exciting nor exotic but is depressingly transactional and commercial. It’s like going to the farmer’s market, but here they’re selling sex. Besides that, it’s just as you’ve heard–sex shows and prostution, including straight/gay/underage/etc/etc. And the goings-on here were seemingly unaffected by Big Buddha Day. Which sort of serves as a microcosm of the contradictions that are Bangkok. On Big Buddha Day, you can publicly engage in child sex trafficking, but you can’t publicly smoke a cigarette.

The Best Meal in Burma

We finally had a really good meal in Burma, the best in the country, which isn’t saying much.

On stilts over Inle Lake you’ll find the Golden Lion restaurant. It’s where our boat took us for lunch, so it’s where we ate.

I had some sort of local lake fish, stuffed with carrots and other vegetables, which was excellent, along with a really tasty green papaya salad.

Jenny had Penang curry with prawns and a green tomato salad, both of which were incredible.

We would have gone back for a second time, but, alas, Golden Lion is in the middle of a lake.

Burma: Inle Lake to Mandalay

From Burma, it’s 7 hours to Inle Lake, an isolated lake 3,000 feet into the mountains. The lake covers over 40 square miles, but is 12 feet deep at the deepest point, and only 5 feet deep on average.

Houses, stores, temples, and everything else a city needs are built on stilts directly over the lake. There isn’t much industry here besides minor commercial fishing. The local fisherman have a unique method; one to a boat, they perch on the very front of a dugout canoe and balance on one foot. The other leg is used to paddle, holding the paddle with the free leg the way that a stripper hangs from a stripper pole, but in reverse. This leaves both hands free to work the net.

They also manufacture some textiles, mostly silk or lotus, the lotus being locally developed. The fibers are extracted, turned into thread, died, and woven into cloth, all with pre-Industrial Revolution technology.

There are a number of canals connecting various ancillary lakes and ponds. To maintain water levels between rainy and dry season, they have a series of small dams in the canals. There are no locks. The dams are no taller than a foot or two, so to get upstream, you just get a running start in the canoe and run over the dam.

Overall, Burma continues to amaze, with a couple of drawbacks. The internet is slow, and the cuisine is mediocre. The food is like Thai but with more Indian and Chinese influence, which sounds like the best food ever, but doesn’t work out that way in practice.

From Inle Lake, it’s 6 more hours to Mandalay, on the same treacherous mountainous roads along which the British Indian and African Burma Corps raced the monsoon and Japanese during World War II. Sadly, there isn’t much to see in Mandalay. It was vigorously defended by the Japanese in World War II and all but destroyed. (As an aside, Defeat into Victory by William Slim is probably the best war memoir of modern history. Slim, in addition to having a great name, is an astonishingly underrated general; despite being an early proponent of the principles of maneuver warfare and counterinsurgency, and handing the Japanese Imperial Army it’s first defeat, almost no one has heard of him.)

Burma: Rangoon to Bagan

Burma was a closed country and a military dictatorship for over 40 years, and is just opening up to the wider world. They’ve begun the treacherous process of democratizing, with adequate success thus far, capped by high-profile visits from Sec of State Clinton in 2011 and President Obama in 2012. There are active insurgencies near the Indian and Thai borders, but the bulk of the country is very safe, particularly where we’re going, along the south-to-north corridor from Rangoon to Mandalay via Bagan and Inle Lake.

As a former British colony, plenty of (heavily-accented) English is spoken, and the people are extraordinarily happy when they interact with you. Which isn’t often. They possess the reticence to interact with foreigners that one finds in a closed society.

Rangoon, the largest city and former capital, is full of decaying colonial grandeur. Everything is cheap here, even by Asian standards. You could easily eat for a dollar or so on the street, and 4 or 5 at the places that cater to foreigners.

From Rangoon, it’s seven hours by private car to Bagan, home to the largest collection of Buddhist temples in the world with more than 3,000 stretching along the banks of the Irrawaddy, the biggest river in the world that you’ve never heard of. The temples date from the 9th to 13th centuries, and fill the entire horizon.

It’s hard to illustrate without panorama, plus the sky is full of smoke from cane fields and red dust, this being the end of the dry season here.

Our hotel was on the river, surrounded by acacia trees and centered around a house built for the then Duke of York, later King Edward VII, when he visited in 1922. It featured 17 dollar massages and plenty of gin and tonics–our horse-drawn phaeton driver was surprised at how few temples we wanted to see (they’re all the same) and how eager we were to get back to the hotel.

From here, it’s 7 hours to Inle Lake, and from there 6 more to Mandalay. Lots of stray dogs around, but it’s rural enough that they all look healthy, and mutts are always good looking, almost like dingos. This guy found a place to take a nap, of which I was most jealous.

They drive on the wrong side of the road here. I don’t mean on the left. They actually drive British-style vehicles (steering wheel on the right if the car) in normal style traffic (driving on the right side of the road). The drivers here are more aggressive than other parts of SE Asia, though there is much less traffic, or maybe because there is much left traffic. The combination makes for a pretty harrowing experience on twisting two lane mountain rides. If you’re riding shotgun, when the driver moves to pass someone, you see the big rig bearing down on you at high-speed long before your driver does.

The men also stand bizarrely close to the urinals here. Like with their hips in contact with the porcelain. I’m not sure how they manage this without spraying on themselves. I’ve always been more concerned with splashing on myself than with someone else sneaking a side-glance at my penis, but to each his own, I suppose.

Advice to Travelers

I don’t presume to be expert at this whole backpacking thing, but I’ve done it a number of times in a number of places, and there’s lots of standard advice out there that I disagree with. So here goes, my two cents:

1) Drink the water

Everyone says not to drink the water in about 90% of the places in the world. This is bad advice for a couple of reasons. If it comes through pipes, and people bathe in it, you can drink it. If you don’t drink the water, presumably you’re going to eat something other than peanut butter and crackers, so it’s all getting in your system anyway. So you can either drink only bottled water and take a cipro every couple of weeks, or you can drink from the tap, let your body adjust, maybe take cipro once off-the-bat, and be good-to-go. Whether the locals drink the water isn’t even a good test. Plenty of people in DC don’t drink the perfectly healthy tap water because the lead content is significant enough that it may have a one in a billion chance of causing cancer in mice. The locals elsewhere aren’t any smarter. The better test is whether the poor locals drink it. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for you.

2) Pack less

The easiest, cheapest, and most enjoyable way to move is by foot. If you pack a bunch of gear, you create a couple of problems. You become less mobile, so you routinely have to check gear, which costs money and commits you to going back to pick it up. You also end up having to split gear if you can’t carry it all on your person. Better to take one small bag that you can take anywhere. Take electronics and medicine, and anything else that’s hard to find elsewhere. This does not include clothes and shoes–they sell those everywhere, so take as little as possible. Ditch the hiking boots unless you’re doing real mountaineering. If you’re wondering whether you’ll do real mountaineering, you won’t.

3) Ditch the Canon Rebel/Nikon D40/Other SLR Camera

SLRs are bulky, heavy, and unwieldy. They often require their own bag. Everyone who has ever used one has grown tired of carrying it. As a result, it’s never handy when you need it. The most important characteristic of a camera is that it be on hand all the time, because photo opportunities aren’t scheduled. Get something with a high-quality wide-angle lens that you can put in your pocket, and carry it in your pocket. Forget megapixels and zoom–far more important are ease-of-use and accessibility of functions via control rings and actual buttons as opposed to touch screen or scrolling.

4) Get out of the hostels

Americans, Canadians, Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis are great, and it’s comforting to hear English every once in a while. But why go to God-knows-where to hang out with people who are just like you? Either hang out with them at home or go to their countries. If you want to black out with a bunch of meatheads (and admittedly, I do), book a ticket to DC and go to Carpool.

5) Maintain flexibility by not planning

You don’t have much when you’re traveling, but the most valuable thing that you have is almost complete freedom. Don’t sell it cheaply. The best experiences are surprises, which by definition aren’t planned. There’s nothing worse than having to forego something interesting because of a scheduled flight. Avoid flying as much as possible to keep your options open. A 25 hour bus is better than a 3 hour flight.

Motorcycling in Iquitos

Iquitos is the most Asian of South American cities, at least when it comes to motorbike traffic. Here’s 6 minutes of driving a rented motorcycle around Iquitos. Note the passenger with the broom and stool, as well as the Google streetview van.