brian + japan = ?

Vietnam 3: Yes. Yes, I Do Wan Motobai.

[News Flash! For a much more concise pictorial account of our trip, see Tim's site. Also, Karl Rove hates America. That is all.]

Of the zillion motorbike owners in Vietnam, a healthy percentage spends all day loitering on street corners and offering budget taxi service to foreigners.

There they are. The most common pickup line: "You wan motobai?" We quickly learned to ignore the guys completely. But because our destination, Bach Ma National Park, was not on the tourist track, it was motobai or bust. Our chauffeurs were cool, and had enough English to negotiate the terms and schedule of a round trip. Handy!

The park encompasses Bach Ma Mountain's 1450m peak and the surrounding area. (Bach Ma means "white horse", after the appearance of the clouds that periodically roll over the area.) It was originally a French hill station. The bombed-out remains can still be found, especially by ace maritime troubleshooters like Tim.

The altitude eased the heat and humidity somewhat, but it was still sultry stuff. Still, just being away from the city and tourist insanity felt great. The waterfalls were pretty rad, too.

Bach Ma's "Five Lakes", where a river flowing down the mountain runs over a series of terraces.
This results in a river, waterfall, [pond-sized] lake, river, waterfall, lake, river... pattern which is quite beautiful.

Reminded me of northern Minnesota. The park's Big Momma waterfall is Rhododendron Falls. Top to bottom, maybe 250m or so? But I ain't scared. Gonna take me a nap.

We got up bright and early the following morning in order to subject ourselves to the nearly 700-step stairway to the base of the falls. On the way down, we saw this guy, who was kind enough to pose for a picture.

The view from the bottom. Tim wonders why Karl Rove hates America.

We also took a dip in the pool at the base, but I sold all the pictures of shirtless me to Hott Scrawny Pasty Boyz magazine. Sorry. As you can imagine, the hike back up the steps was pure heart-exploding fun!

There were also some pretty flowers.

And what park would forget a sign with some anthropomorphized flora and fauna imploring visitors to be considerate? Cute. Almost (gasp) Japanese!

Next stop, another city that apparently has some famous shit in it.

Vietnam 2: Nha Trang to Hoi An

Nha Trang is Vietnam's beach capital. I have proof.

See the thatched umbrellas? Indisputable evidence of beach capital-ness! The only things missing were drunk sexy teens, vapid MTV veejays, and some Girls Gone Wild cameramen laden with those beaded necklaces that girls show you their boobs in exchange for. Who knew crappy trinkets could be so powerful?

When you're having trouble naming your next café, remember: operating system, operating system, operating system. Only in Vietnam!

Though delighted by the glistening beaches, palm trees, and Microsoft-run establishments (though my latté BSOD'd - ho ho ho!), we were somewhat troubled by the aforementioned lack of modern American beach accouterments. The tour company affiliated with our hotel offered a boat tour that looked like a pretty debuacherous $5 adventure, so we went. Our boat looked kinda like this.

There was no debauchery of any kind, but we met some nice people and ate tasty food.

On the way home, a guy (arrowed and labeled for emphasis) in a boat to starboard stared at us endlessly, probably wishing we were drunk sexy teens. Freaked me out.

The next day, Tim went scuba diving. In a girl's wetsuit. He filled it out remarkably well.

I went snorkeling, which was so ridiculously cool I actually wished I could wear a girl's wetsuit and scuba dive, too.

We probably did some other stuff, but my main memory of Nha Trang will be the pho we ate before taking the night bus to Hoi An. I haven't talked about food much yet. Vietnamese food is insanely good, really simple, light, and flavorful. Pho is just broth (usually beef) with rice noodles and some meat. Bean sprouts and mint leaves, which you can throw in at your leisure, are often included on the side. Very tasty. We'd eaten quite a few bowls already at touristy establishments, and decided to try some at a place where Vietnamese actually ate. The manager, who spoke almost no English, seemed pleased as punch to have foreigners in his shop. After our pho arrived, he showed us how to eat it properly. In a small dipping bowl, he mixed some sort of brown sauce, chili sauce, and part of an evil-looking pepper. He then instructed us to dip the meat and noodles in this sauce and eat them that way. Not being a food critic, I can't properly describe how good it was. Suffice it to say, it was the best thing I ate in Vietnam.

The night bus was hell. Uncomfortable. Constantly stopping to pick up random people. These awful yellow lights that weren't enough to read by and gave the bus a horrible sickly ambience. And the honking, oh god, the honking. In Vietnam, proper (that is, constant) use of the horn is just as important as knowing where the brake pedal is. The ten-hour tour is all a semi-conscious haze now. At $6, you get what you pay for.

Anyway, at about 6AM we arrived in Hoi An, a nifty little town that looked like the transplanted set of an old Western.

The town is legendary for its army of tailors who make quality clothing for dirt cheap. And they can make anything. Really, you're only limited by your imagination and the available fabrics, which are many.

Tim went completely crazy. If I had a larger budget I'd make a montage of Tim shopping, set to "Material Girl". For himself, he bought swim trunks, a pair of lightweight, suitable-for-hiking pants, a dress shirt or two, and two pimptastic suits.

Being the loving boyfriend that he is, he had even more stuff made for Laura: one dress, two tops, two skirts, and probably some other stuff I forgot about. The grand total for all this custom-tailored clothing was, I believe, $180. See? Crazy cheap! My only interest was getting a clone of my beloved green woolen Australian army surplus pants, which are falling apart after five winters of daily use. Since tightly-woven green wool is not exactly a stylish fabric these days, I had to go with olive corduroy. But for $10, no complaints.

Thoroughly satisfied with our trip to the world's greatest outlet mall, we decided to embrace our granola side by going to a national park.

Also, can anyone identify these weird plants? Saw them on the ride to Nha Trang. I think they're aloe, but have absolutely no basis for that. (Sorry about the blurriness, taken from the speeding, honking bus.)

Vietnam 1: I Wanna Be A Ho

Once off the plane, we were promptly engulfed in crazy humidity. It never really let up, making for a non-stop sweatfest. I probably lost a few pounds in perspiration alone. Once out of the airport, we are promptly swarmed by the budding capitalists of Vietnam. Our first new friend is a taxi driver offering to take us to town for the low low price of $10 (though the Dong - pause for giggling - is Vietnam's official currency, the good ol' U.S. Dollar is also happily accepted and often preferred). We tell him the hotel we want to go to. He promptly informs us that there's lots of construction in that area and it's very difficult to get to, maybe we'd like to check out a great hotel he knows of?

I hate to say it, but this was a fitting welcome to the country.

Everyone is selling something, especially to highly visible white tourists like us. And if they don't sell the item/service you're looking for at the moment, you can bet they know someone who does (and you can bet they get a kickback for referring you). Case in point, our taxi driver and his super-duper hotel. This alone wasn't so bad, but he was also 1) attempting to charge us more than twice the actual fare to our hotel, and 2) blatantly lying about the construction near our hotel. Fortunately, we already knew about this scam (the Lonely Planet really pulls its weight in situations like this) and fled.

We hadn't made a reservation, and of course our hotel of choice was full. This little girl, maybe six years old, leads us deeper into a rather confusing alleyway. I'm fairly paranoid after the taxi guy experience, but follow her anyway, half-wondering why. Fortunately, it turns out well. There's another hotel nearby, where a young woman with passing English takes us up several flights of steps, and everything changes. What appeared to be a very ugly neighborhood at ground level turns out to be pretty colorful and neato.

Beautiful potted-plant-strewn patios were everywhere.

I was also very excited about the banana. She showed us our more-than adequate room - featuring AC, satellite TV, and a refrigerator - mentioned that breakfast was included (dinners on Sunday, too, and it just happened to be a Sunday), and the price? $12. $6 a piece! Suddenly, blowing $1300 on an extra ticket didn't seem quite as painful.

We set out to explore the city. The number of motorbikes is utterly overwhelming, they must outnumber cars a hundred to one. Because of their small size relative to cars and the apparent absence of traffic laws of any kind, it was a sort of fluid mayhem.

Larger intersections had proper stoplights, but traffic flow at uncontrolled intersections was dictated entirely by drivers. Basically, once the idling drivers decided they'd waited long enough, they slowly injected themselves into the cross-traffic, the cross-traffic stopped, and voila, de facto stoplight! Pretty amazing, actually. Who needs stinkin' tek-naw-lo-gee? Crossing the street on foot involved a similar tactic; just get in there, go slowly, and people will drive around you, as though you're a rock in a stream. It was absolutely terrifying at first, but after a few successful attempts it became strangely fun to stand in the middle of eight virtual lanes of traffic whizzing by.

Obligatory propaganda poster.

At some point we went to see some sights. The Reunification Palace is where, in 1975, South Vietnam officially surrendered to the North, and has apparently changed little since then. It serves largely as a reminder of ghastly 60's architecture.

After some intense mental warfare with a motorbike driver who told us the palace was closed, then told us to go to the wrong gate, then followed us all the way around to the real gate, we got inside. Swank!

The Vietnamese are crazy about billiards (the palace's denizens were apparently no exception). Nearly every bar we went to had a full-sized table or two. I was amazed by the ability of many shorter female players to make difficult shots with only one hand on the cue. They'd line up the shot with the tip of the cue on the table. Then, in a very mechanical motion, they'd pick it up, stab forward, and usually make the shot. The bridge is for sissies!

There is no luxury in the world quite like an elephant foot trash can.

History!

There's no basement in the Alamo, but there is in the Reunification Palace! It was a bomb shelter, war room, and nerve center, as evidenced by the many many desks with colored phones on them. Very Dr. Strangelove.

Best of all was the super kickass getaway car!

We also went to see the War Remnants Museum, of which there was no need to take pictures: jars containing formaldehyde and babies disfigured by exposure to Agent Orange are not something I particularly want to remember, but know damn well I won't forget. Not a happy place. If you can step back from the museum's fairly strong anti-American vibe (the Vietcong pulled horrible shit too, people), the photographs and displays on hand make for a very convincing condemnation of war in general.

After this sobering experience, we reminded ourselves that this was a vacation, not a Tour of Guilt for a war we had nothing to do with. So we went up the coast - to the beach!

Vietnam 0: brian + tokyo = cash hemorrhage.

After years of painstaking research, months of planning, endless vision quests, and the guzzling of innumerable beers, Tim and I finally assembled an ideal itinerary for our epic journey. It looked something like this:

June 4th: fly to Tokyo
June 5th: fly to Ho Chi Minh City
June 5th - 18th: on foot, make way 1800km north to Hanoi
June 19th: fly to Tokyo (arrive morning of the 20th)
June 20th: stew in horrible airport, fly to Sapporo

Peachy, just peachy.

Perhaps none of my spirit guides were blessed with the gift of speech. Quite possibly they didn't take a liking to me. Or maybe the error was mine in that the cosmos' answers become twisted when one induces vision quests through the guzzling of innumerable beers. The why is not terribly important. What is important is that a singularly vital piece of information was not transmitted to me:

A night in Tokyo inevitably results in financial disaster.

The plan for the night of the 4th is to crash with one of Tim's friends, a guy I'll call "Mike", probably because that is his name. Mike is making mad cash in the real estate game and generally living the American Dream, which has apparently been outsourced to Japan. We deftly navigate Tokyo's public transit labyrinth and meet Mike at a station near his place. I was told that he lived in a shoebox-sized apartment in spite of his Scrooge-esque wealth. But people pay $40/night to sleep in a coffin-sized hotel "room" in Tokyo, so any free place to stay is good. But as we approach a swank building whose newness is evidenced by the sheen of wet concrete, Mike informs us that he's upgraded to a space-age bachelor pad. Indeed. The only thing missing is Esquivel on the stereo. Mucho muchacho!

Thirty minutes later, the evening is well underway. We are drinking a posh English liquor called Pimm's that tastes vaguely like root beer when mixed with 7up. We are enjoying this stuff from some guy who allegedly strapped 5kg of said stuff to his body in LA and flew to Tokyo, somehow living to tell the tale and sell the stuff at a hefty profit. (Don't worry, mom, it was only pot.) We are basking in the glow of the plasma-screen TV and in awe of the bathtub that tells you when it's filled. We are adrift in a sea of opulence, too happy even to wonder why the fuck we are living in The World's Ugliest City and praying that one great day our students will realize that "I like cat" is grammatically incorrect.

Thoroughly primed for a quality evening, we set off. Whoa, is that gin in my gin & tonic? In Sapporo we are slaves to the nomihoudai (all-you-can-drink) specials offered by most bars. A low-cost, quantity-over-quality experience, the cocktails are notoriously weak. You'd probably be better off ordering some fruit juice and hoping it ferments a bit before the evening's over. This gin & tonic probably contains more alcohol than a two hour nomihoudai's worth of drinks. (It also cost about as much, but that's beside the point.) Delicious! We end up hitting four or five establishments. Along the way, we watch and then celebrate Japan's victory over Bahrain (making them the first team to quality for the World Cup), I have a deranged conversation with some middle-aged drunkard, and the friendly bouncers at some club let me pass in spite of my blatant dress code violation. (What the hell is wrong with shorts? They are skirts with an inseam, and skirts are perfectly acceptable. Some club-savvy hipster explain this to me, please.)

At 5:30AM, we end up back at Mike's. Our flight leaves at 11:00AM, and it takes ninety minutes to get to the airport. I set my cellphone's alarm for 8:00AM and promptly pass out. I woke up as Tim made his way to the bathroom. I checked the time. 9:30. Well, damn. If we'd left at that very moment, maybe a miracle would have occurred, maybe the plane would have been delayed, maybe the airline staff would've taken mercy on our poor hungover souls and given us a ticket on the next flight. That was the best thing to do. But we did not do that. Instead, we called our utterly useless travel agent. Then we called the airline, several other travel agents, and anyone else we thought might be able to help us, to no avail. We had no choice but to buy tickets for the next flight to Ho Chi Minh and hope for some sort of refund on the ones we'd failed to use. As panic faded, our hangovers returned and the reality of the situation dawned on us. To console ourselves, we went to Subway. It was good.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing, cursing ourselves, and trying to piece together what exactly went wrong. I realized that my phone was on manner mode. So the alarm did go off, but only vibrated, not nearly enough to rouse me. Mike had apparently passed out with alarm clock in hand, in the process of setting his alarm. Tim, trusting that his travel partner was not an idiot - a mistake he would not make again - didn't set an alarm. From that horrible day forward, we made a blood pact: Never Again.

The next morning we woke up about five hours early. Got to the airport and pled our case one last time to the ticketing gals. No dice. Open wallet, remove credit card, hand it over, stare at $1300 receipt, wince, sign, see winged $100 bills flying away in thought balloon, try to ignore pit in stomach, get boarding passes, clear security, clear immigration, wait, wait, wait, board plane, fly away, fly to vietnam, accept reality, leave worries on tarmac.

Never Again.