I ate nuts in a rural Buddhist monastery and took a romantic late night stroll through deserted historic Hanoi with an entrancing Baltic wildman...and survived to tell the tales. Well, some of them. Maybe it was my complete lack of expectations, maybe thats just Vietnam but I could never have predicted these highlights. It really goes to show you, the best things in life you never see coming. So just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Have you ever really pondered airports? I have, and they are amazing. Airports are the real-life time and space travel vortices! They are filled with people in motion; figuratively and literally, dozens of languages, cultures, and perspectives. They are the modern day port towns, only with a synthesized base layer of constructed consumer productivity. Almost every one has at least a few corporate logos to remind you of home and probably even salty-sweet comfort of fast food indulgences. These are the locations of anticipation and fresh memory relapse of almost every new excursion these days. Here resides a community of inbetweeners; processing excitement, anxiety, decompression, and giving up comforts of 'home' for something else. With this in mind, I set aside the frustration of two nights in a row of red-eyes and don my best smile and gear up the inquisitive mind for what's head. More questions than answers, that's how I like it.
On the cusp of this next step, or leap as it may be and hurdles lie ahead of me that, like always, I haven't even begun to think about. All I can see from this point are days above 25 degrees and nights filled with broken English in back ally bars. It's dawning on me, yes I am a student for the technicalities, but I already am a travel specialist in my own right, an informal facilitator of excursions into the unknown. Like a horse to water, people will drink up when they're thirsty... and we live in a world that's drying up. Gazing out my window at the over-wing shadow, my eyes relax, look at the big picture and realize my old friend Orion is staring back at me. Nights and days, seasons pass, but even on the other side of the world the stars will always welcome you home.
Today, what did I do to today? I traveled four hours starting at 1:00AM, slept on a bench for two hours, stared down a giant crocodile, fed some little ones, helped six people touch or hold their first ever reptiles, sent my family post cards, walked about 6 kilometers, gave two people directions in a city I'd only just arrived in, and make friends with two very lost, nice Korean backpackers. All in a day in sunny Darwin, I guess. Until next time.
Now, I have been in Hanoi for about seven hours. Found my hotel, being all grown up to me means booking accommodation before arriving at the airport. There is something very important looming over me at this point. I'm not unnecessarily scared of normal things like crocodiles, snakes, spiders, being kidnapped or robbed. These are all things I have experience with and have always come out fine. There is one thing however that I am truly fearful of: death by anaphylaxis. I have always felt that my food allergies pose an overwhelming mental impediment in my life. This trip is largely an exercise in overcoming that barrier. If this trip goes off without incident, in this case hospitalization or death, I will have successfully navigated through one of my life's major hurdles.
If you have never had the pleasure of strolling the streets of historic Hanoi, let me try to paint the picture for you. Beautiful architecture, a plethora of shops, smells, tastes, and sounds, and everything going very fast. Getting anywhere is kind of like a real life game of Frogger; motorbikes everywhere, people eating and drinking on tiny stools, women cooking simple meals, trash burning, dogs patrolling their owner's shops and broken-spirited cats on strings eyeing birds in trees longingly. After two days safely enjoying the urban landscape and a warp-speed looksy at the Heritage listed Ha Long Bay, I reconvene with friendly faces from class at a loud backpackers' hostel on the other side of town. Within less than two hours, I have unknowingly placed that most notorious of little nuts upon my tongue. The crunch and taste translated in my brain to alarm bells meaning "
purge now!" I did, took some medication, and was fine. Hurdle one, down.
As the days, and coursework, progressed I had the enlightening pleasure of meeting the wide array of unique lecturers who were so kind as to come to Vietnam and share their experiences and perspectives. The real learning happens, as always, outside the classroom setting. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon at the Temple of Literature, how fitting, with the esteemed travel journalist and t.v. producer John Bell. He radiates old school, British, academic charm that pairs quite well with an elbow-patched jacket and red converse sneakers, well maybe the red Chucks are a modern twist. We were sufficiently entertained by the odd, ornate, hodgepodge of religious symbols surrounding us. It was quite refreshing to actually be able to discuss a tourist experience while having it. Next, upon the gentleman's suggestion, we were off to sip a cocktail poolside at the Sofitel Metropole Hotel bar. There is something oddly comforting about sitting at one of the fanciest hotel bars in a city, while exchanging crocodile and snake stories from other beautiful and exotic locations. That is precisely what we did. You know what pairs lovely with a gin & tonic: a story about a woman swimming across a known croc-infested lake, getting attacked, losing her arm but still swimming to safety with the one remaining. When you live in Africa for ten years, these things happen.
As this day wound to a close, I found myself sitting on the tiny plastic stools that constitute street-side hospitality at its finest. Twenty five cent beers, over half a dozen different nationalities represented, ages ranging from 14 (not drinking) to over 50, and nothing but flights to catch midday tomorrow all add up to a great evening. About two or three beers into the night, not that we were for want of entertainment, our Estonian comrade whipped out a plastic recorder -yes, recorder...one of those things you might have been forced to learn in primary school music class- and began to delighted us with a mashup of Beatles classics and Baltic folk songs. To say the least, many of us laughed so hard we fell off our stools that night. Luckily, we were only about 5 inches off the ground. The Vietnamese guys especially couldn't stop starring at the giant (he's well over 6 feet tall) Thor look-alike playing the silly, youthful wind instrument. Rarely a dull moment with this crew, and these were mostly the teachers!
Later this same night, people have been retiring to get some sleep and it has boiled down to myself, a colleague 15 or so years my senior, and Mr. Tall, Muscley, and Funny (Pied-piper of Estonia). After a heated discussion of America's role in global perspectives in which I got schooled on being too defensive of my self-perceived 'American problem', we got booted off our present street corner stools and led to a skuzy shisha bar infested with British backpackers. Next thing I knew we were being handed free, super sweet, florescent colored shooters. When in Hanoi... so I danced it up with some Brit chicks for a few songs, let the men-folk talk boy stuff and tried to ignore the lack of quality of the music for as long as possible. As soon as I gave up and rejoined my course mates, my colleague, B, said something and hastily departed. This of course left me and Mr. E standing there surrounded by the stench of booze, backpackers' hormones, and that smell a smoke machine emits before its about to die. It was at this point that I realized we might have a little more than a love of adventurous, outdoorsy things in common. Flash forward, we are walking across the vacant streets of historic Hanoi, not sure exactly why but I gave up on questioning hours ago. After about 20 minutes my heat-swollen feet were blistered and quite painful in my normally reliable croc mary-janes. He started to notice me slowing down and eventually kind of hobbling. This was after we had stopped once a few blocks back for me to pee behind an ATM. I was trying to put on my best 'I'm fine' face but he could see through it. Next thing I know he's sweeping me off my feet into his sizable arms. Yup, literally swept off my feet. We made it a few more serene blocks before I convinced him to put me down. While I appreciated the gesture, I was also fairly embarrassed. This landed us in a cute European-style park complete with little iron benches. Yes, the moon was out and, yes, he put his arm around me as we proceeded to get into another discussion. And that is where I'll leave this part of the story.
*To Be Continued (sorry, I really need some sleep)
