The Charm of the Cham Lands & Triumphs of Minor Medical Emergencies (Vietnam Part II)

So I've been sitting on the stories contained in the latter half of this quick trip to Vietnam I took back in September/October. A lot has happened since then and the triumphs and micro-dramas entwined with these memories seem so incredibly petty, I wonder if they are even worth writing about. But a little voice in the back of my mind, and a number of friends, tell me they are. So here it goes, in no particular order.

Flying into DeNang airport on that sunny Tuesday morning, I knew I was going to have some ignorant American moments but I had no idea how personally it was going to affect me. The airport was fresh and shiny but you couldn't help but notice the vast expanse of abandoned hangers and grown over air strips directly adjacent. As I hopped in a cab with some of my fellow classmates and the vastly knowledgable John Bell, we proceeded to be graced with a local history tour. The vacant air base and miles of half demolished homes studded the landscape in stark contrast with the beachside resorts, villas, golf course, and high rise hotels. It served as a strong visual reminder that what bombs, guns, and nepalm did not accomplish, the promise of a slice of western oppulance did in a big way.

I knew the war museum in DeNang was going to be a somber experience, I was not prepared to feel such a well of emotions as I viewed gruesome photos and artifacts telling tales from beyond the brink of humanity. It made me feel ashamed and angry all at once. Many of the pictures featured dead, or captured U.S. soldiers. These are young men of my parents' generation, sent overseas to die for a cause they likely didn't understand or believe in. There is nothing productive about war. However, as the trip progressed and we met some local tourism entrepreneurs, it became apparent that the positive cultural influence of numerous military presences of this place are now inseparably part of the heritage. The French influenced architecture is one of the draws to little Hoi An, after all. And on a more personal note, I think the crude, simple charm of somewhere like Hoa's Place in China Beach is invigorating and cherish any opportunity to enjoy delicious French pastries, even in a town in Vietnam.

The longest day had to be the one in which we toured all day, broke into an abandoned Cham temple, visited the hauntingly beautiful remains of My Son, and finally I was accidently poisoned by a well-meaning vegan couple. While I wasn't too happy about having to miss presentations and vomiting a fair bit in the charming Buddhist monastery, as well as the side of a busy road on the way back to town, I did not go into anaphylaxis so I consider it a positive outcome. I ate nuts at a temple in Vietnam over an hour away from medical facilities and lived to tell the tale. Maybe Asia isn't as scary as I thought.

Some of my favorite moments were getting lost on the way back to the hotel at night. I was sort of alone but not, so no safety issues. My sense of direction has a whimsical sense of humor, so a few times I found myself in the rice paddies on the edge of town enjoying the concert of frogs and insects that preform most warm evenings despite a pathetic turn out audience-wise. Sometimes the sky would spontaneously open up to a deluge and you'd get to skip home in the soggy tropical streets looking like you just jumped in the pool. On dry nights, you could just jump in the pool for the same effect.

The day after all the fieldwork was completed, I went kayaking on the local river with a classmate, the guy who's wife accidentally poisoned me, and one of the lecturers. It didn't occur to me that I'd be the only girl to join this activity. The 'boat launch' spot was a little family house located on the riverbank, rustic but very inviting and homey. We trudged through knee deep bank mud to get our boats into the river then paddled up river for about an hour and a half. My scrawny, out of shape, nerd arms couldn't really keep up with the other three guys so I enjoyed the solitude and surroundings as I kept pace a few meters behind. Eventually our 'guide' decided to drop back and keep me company. It was lovely conversation so long as we stayed away from the whole vegan issue. Apparently there's a monastery in Hue where I can go to live off rice and spices and meditate my body out of being allergic to foods. While that sounds great to my optimistic idealist side, my practical side is screaming "Bad Idea!!!". Alas, the time and money for such journeys are luxuries I have given up for now. So you win practical side....this time.

After concluding the educational and athletic pursuit that was paddling, we were all invited to join the family (remember this was at a house...oh yes, on a Sunday no less) for a beautiful lunch. This meal featured a variety of fresh catch straight from the river we were sitting atop as well as heaps of local greens wrapped up in spring rolls. Then there was a 'rice wine' served out of a repurposed Johnny Walker bottle. Grandpa and Uncle were fond of the hooch and keen to share. They found it highly amusing that I was infrequent to refuse the next shot....and there were many. These were clear spirits to singe your throat and cleanse your memory. It did just that. Despite massive language barriers, the feast and festivities continued for a few hours..so I'm told. But for me it was more of a cut to next scene situation. That next scene being one of my other classmates coming to check on me and make sure I didn't miss my train to Ho Chi Min. It was perfect timing, I made the train and slowly one of the worst hangovers of my life set in on a hot, smelly, crowded train ride lasting just over 17 hours. I had some fun on this journey, playing with the kids sharing my sleeping car and making friends with a few locals on the train that could speak some English.

Most of the rest of the trip was fairly uneventful but enjoyable. I look forward to time and resources in the future to properly experience this corner of the world. Thank you to all who made this brief adventure fun, mostly safe, and highly educational.

Growing Upward and Onward: A Pseudo-Vietnamese Experience (Part I)

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)

Weekly Grind...Vagabond Style.

The road life takes its tolls, a lost toenail, a bit scraped & bruised, and always on the verge of tired and hungry...but it's still close to comfort to me. Can't quite explain it. It's the solace in desert sunrises as you float down the Colorado River, the first light to hit a frost covered camp at Pinnacles, and the joy of some kid enthusiastically proclaiming something you taught on trail when it seemed like nobody was listening. For the most part, the students have never met people quite like us Natties and most of the teachers probably just think we're a bunch of hippies and dirtbaggers but somehow it always seems to work. With some teamwork and copious amounts of snacks and coffee, almost anything can be accomplished. Even if the weeks seem the same on paper, between the kids, the weather, and the wildlife...nothing's ever the same. And nothing's ever over till that bus is out of eye site. Don't put away those first aid kits a minute too soon.
Over the past few weeks I've frolicked around the real-life Disney movie that is Malibu Creek State Park numerous weeks, seen my first bighorn sheep, welled up thinking about Abby at Lonesome's gravesite at one of the outpost camps in Picacho State Park (slotted to be shut down indefinitely in only a few months now), visited a number of CA's many breweries, been snowed on halfway up a route in Joshua Tree NP, cooked up a storm (figuratively) in the desert and averted one (literally) the next week. Who says you can't play Muphy's Law to your favor...I did! Predictions and plans are great in theory, and sometimes useful, but at the end of the day, life doesn't happen in theory.

Polaris will always point us north, cube trucks can always break down at the least convenient moment, and Natties will always be dirty. These are constants that I find solace in. Its a daily learning process in not sweating the small stuff, it makes that week before your next shower seem so much farther away!