This is some sample text I have to insert at the beginning of the post because all pics go to the top. Not very convenient. Let's see how they look when they wrap around the pics.
This is sample text that i am inserting between the small pic and the medium pic at the top of the blog.
This is a test blog entry to see how it handles large pictures when I upload them through the blogger software. Pic set to large should appear below:
Next I am going to try importing the same pic with a medium setting and see if it looks different:
Okay, I see that no matter where I put the cursor, the pics are inserted at the top of the page. That is not convenient. I am going to import the same pic in small size and see where it ends up.
Well, our Vietnam adventure is coming to a close. Tonight was our last night in Saigon and tomorrow morning we head to the airport.
A lot of people have been emailing me wanting to know if Peter is my new boyfriend. No. We have been friends for about seven years and it is always his place that I crash at whenever I go up to San Francisco. We both got busy in late 2006/early2007 and went over a year without checking in with each other.
Just last August, we finally got in touch again. Turned out Peter had moved to San Diego and back to San Francisco without me even knowing about it. He also had quit his job and was getting ready to start a career of independent consulting. I was also about to finish shooting my latest show, so we would be between jobs at the same time.
"Let's take a trip together!" he said.
"Okay, where?" I asked. I figured he would say New York or Chicago or something.
"Let's go to Vietnam!"
And that was that. I thought about it for about a week and we bought the tickets. It all came together rather quickly. It was about six weeks from idea to departure.
This morning we say goodbye to Hoi An. We'll be taking a taxi to Danang where we will catch a short flight back into Saigon. We'll be there for another day and a half and then it's back to Cali.
Remember my earlier blogs about the crazy Saigon traffic? It's a city of 8 million people, 4 million motor bikes and two, maybe three traffic lights.
I shot some video when I was in Saigon at the beginning of the trip, and you have to see it to believe what it is like driving through these crazy streets:
One of the nice things about not having an itinerary is... well... not having an itinerary. We've been really enjoying Hoi An and so decided to forgo Nha Trang ("nah jang") and just stay here for a few more days. This also allows us the luxury of skipping what would be another 12 hour bus ride and instead just take a cheap $50 flight to Saigon where we will finish out our trip.
Bicycles have become our preferred transportation around here. Here is what the less touristy part of town looks like.
The Full Moon Festival continues until tomorrow, so there is no escaping the drums and the dragons. Even on the beach today, these two adorable kids came and did their little dragon dance (which at that age doesn't look a whole lot different from the chicken dance at any Jewish wedding).
Speaking of Jewish festivities, yesterday was the Jewish high holy day of Yom Kippur, so I decided to honor it by going to another temple, even if it was not a Jewish one. We took an hour drive to the temple ruins of My Son ("may sun"), which means "Good Mountain." They have been around for about a thousand years and were built by the Chams people before they were absorbed into what is now Vietnam.
These temples were not as impressive as the Temples of Angkor in Cambodia, but they are a few hundred years older, and you know what they say about respecting your elders.
If you look closely at the bricks, there is no mortar holding them together. That's a real head scratcher for experts who ponder how these temples have held up all these years. Well, they held up until the Americans came and bombed them during the war. Now only about twenty of the original seventy are in good condition.
The Cham people were also very into their phallic symbols. Couples could come rub this giant penis if they wanted be blessed with lots of children. Nowadays if you do the same thing in West Hollywood, it just means you have to tip more.
Rather than drive back from My Son, we took a boat. By this time I was so experienced navigating the waterways of Vietnam that I just told the boat driver to take the day off.
---
Okay, weird story. We were sitting on the beach today outside a little cafe. The wind had knocked over our two bottles of beer so I was returning to get replacements. Out of nowhere, a girl who works at the cafe whips out her camera phone and starts taking pictures of me.
So I whipped out my camera and started taking pictures of her!
But she wanted none of that, so next thing you know, we are dueling with our cameras trying to get shots of each other without being photographed ourselves. She didn't know who she was up against and naturally I kicked her ass in the photo-taking department.
Afterwards she asked if I was married or if I had a girlfriend. After answering in the negative to both questions, she was not shy about applying for either position.
Actually, nearly every conversation with a local includes these questions in this order:
Do you want to buy (x)?
Where are you from?
Do you want to buy (x)? How about (y)?
How old are you?
Are you married?
Do you have a girlfriend?
Do you want to buy (x)? How about (y)? How about (z)? Bring it back to your girlfriend.
Remember when I said it was an eight hour bus ride to Hoi An? it was actually more like 24. The bus we bought a ticket for was a "sleeper bus," meaning the seats could fold back all the way and convert into a bed. Unfortunately, they were about the size of coffins and there was no place to put my rather large backpack. So I had to put my backpack under my feet and try to sleep that way. The guy next to me was snoring like a buzz saw, but that at least meant I was awake to see my first decent sunrise since Angkor Wat.
This leg of the trip lasted 12 hours and ended in Hue, a city which has seen its share of battles during Vietnam's history. We had about six hours to kill there before our next bus would take us to Hoi An.
The sun sets promptly at 6 pm here, so it was already dark when the bus dumped us right in the middle of town. Hoi An turned out to be a cute, albeit touristy town with a lot of shops -- most notably the clothing stores that offer lots of tailor-made clothes at low prices and dozens of art galleries.
One gallery in particular caught my eye because the oil paintings had such vibrant colors. They were all painted by this guy: Nguyen Tan Hiep.
I have never bought art before, but my hallway back home is looking pretty bare these days. Plus, I really liked these two paintings and they were pretty cheap.
After leaving the shop to think about it for a while, I came back and bought both. It was my first time ever acquiring artwork.
We spent this morning hanging out at the beach.
Every minute or so another person would walk by and try to sell us trinkets of some kind. The sales pitches on the beach were endless. The lucky ones to actually sell me a necklace were Mimi and Trang. The pile of crap jewelry that Trang carries around every day weighs more than my Betacam.
When it got dark, we went into town to get some dinner and hang out. Sitting at the restaurant, we slowly became aware of pounding drums in the distance, and the sound was getting closer. Suddenly a little boy in a mask runs into the place and he is followed by two more boys under a dragon suit.
Mask boy collected money from the restaurant patrons and the staff and then ceremoniously fed it to the dragon, which shook its booty to the drums really well, I must say. And all before dessert.
The little troupe took off to the shop next door with their entourage of friends and parents right behind. A few minutes later another band of drums and dragons came into the restaurant and went through the same routine. At first I thought it might be a tourist scam, but a lot of people nearby were clearly the kids' parents. The local staff at the shops were all smiling and giving money as well.
Turns out we are nearing the climax of the month-long Tet Thung Thu, or Full Moon Festival. It's amazing how little locals are able to tell me about it, but the nearest I can figure, it is a cross between Halloween and Mardi Gras.
As we biked through the small town, we heard drums beating everywhere. The smaller boys (and I haven't figured out why girls don't participate) were going into each shop, just as if they were trick or treating. The teenagers would actually stop traffic at intersections and put on more elaborate displays like this one:
Think of New York City on speed; that's about the activity level of Hanoi. But compared to what we saw in Saigon, Hanoi was pretty mellow. We spent a day exploring the city and then prepared for our three day trip to Halong Bay.
We woke up yesterday morning and drove about 100 miles east to Bai Chay.
At Bai Chay, we boarded a junk, which is kind of like a mini cruise ship. It had a common area to eat, a roof to lay out on, and about ten rooms. We set sail on a three hour tour (all together now: "a three hour tour...") of Halong Bay, wondering if the captain of the junk had ever crashed into any of the 3000 limestone islands (mostly uninhabited) jutting out of the water like baby volcanoes.
Like in Cambodia, the tour company was apparently having labor problems, because the next thing I knew, I was driving the boat.
Our first stop was a place modestly named the "Amazing Cave." I personally can never get enough of stalactites and stalagmites (depending on my mood).
It's pretty amazing what a little sea water and limestone can do, if you give it enough hundreds of millions of years.
From the cave, we got on some kayaks and paddled our little hearts out to a nearby lagoon. Once we reached the lagoon, we turned around and came back. Not the most productive journey. When we returned to the junk, we dropped anchor and took a dip in the bay. The water was warm like a bath, but much saltier.
Above in the pic are Joy from Australia and Lori from Canada. They were our shipmates along with about ten other tourists from Holland, Singapore, England, and Australia.
We stayed overnight in these junk rooms (the adjective of course describing the location of the rooms and not the quality). I woke up early this morning to catch the sunrise. It was totally overcast so I went back to bed for another hour. After breakfast, we sailed to Cat Pa Island, the largest island in Halong Bay (136 square miles) and one of the few that is inhabited. Half of ths island is a national park, and that was where we landed first. Once on shore we bicycled about 2.5 miles to a point where the forest got too thick for bikes. We hiked for another mile or so through the brush until we came to this small village.
Our guide Tung (pronounced "toom") had been threatening the whole trip that he was going to make us try snake wine.
In much the same way that a worm adds that special flavor to a bottle of tequila, a snake adds to what would otherwise be boring old rice wine. The more poisonous the snake, the better the wine is. Had the one contributing to today's inebriation bit me, I'd be dead in five minutes.
I honestly can't say it was any worse than some of the shots I did freshman year of college. I stopped after two glasses, but mainly because it was 40% alcohol and I didn't want to be too drunk to ride the bike back to the boat.
The boat then took us to the other side of the island.
There is a thriving tourism industry here, although the island is still predominantly a fishing community, as was evident by all these fishing boats returning at sunset.
Half of the island is a national park, which we probably will not have time to see. Tomorrow morning we head back to Hanoi via a smaller boat that gets us to a larger boat that gets us to a minibus that gets us into the city. Once we are in the city, we head south on an even larger bus that will drive eight hours overnight to Hue and Hoi An on the central coast.
This morning we were all templed-out. Even though we had already bought a multi-day pass, we opted not to take advantage of it. The locals were aghast at the thought that we wasted $20 on a day pass that we weren't going to use. I mean really, the look on their faces was complete disbelief.
Speaking of the locals, this is Nap, one of the managers at the gay-owned hotel we managed to find.
Nap put us in one of his friend's tuk.
We made a short trip to Phnom Krom where we hopped on a boat and sailed through the floating village of Chong Kneas.
The water level here rises so much when the rainy season starts that the houses just float on top of the water and don't have to worry about being flooded. There are also floating schools, markets, and even restaurants.
The boat driver apparently had his union break come up because next thing I knew, I was driving the boat.
We stopped off at one restaurant that was clearly geared for tourists. Besides serving food and selling souvenirs, it also boasted...
... a crocodile farm...
... a catfish farm...
... and a boa constrictor that I played with for a short while.
Oh wait, there is no picture of me holding the snake, is there? That's because when Peter was shooting video of me playing with it, I lunged at him a couple of times with the snake and he shrieked like no girl I've ever heard. He didn't want that footage to ever see the light of day, so he erased it before I could get it uploaded.
---
One more thing I noticed about Siem Reap. This is a tourist village that is growing at a Las Vegas-style rate, but I'm really not sure how much of the wealth is staying in the local economy. I saw all kinds of shacks serving as housing and store fronts, but then right next door would be huge opulent hotels being constructed. Watch the video below (no audio) and see how the scenery can literally change in 36 seconds:
