Archive for the ‘Passport Travels’ Category
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
“Were you in Vietnam recently?” he asked me, pointing at my cap with the Vietnam flag just above the brim. He was a broad faced guy, Nordic looking and very tan, maybe in his 50’s, extremely healthy - the picture of fitness you’d expect from a park ranger. He was sitting behind the desk at the visitor’s center. I nodded and said, yeah, we’d been there earlier this year and had a great time.
“I was there in 2001 on a bike trip - actually it was part of a bike around the world trip,” he told me, as though it was no big deal to ride your bike around the world. We talked about the shocking traffic in the cities and he admitted that they didn’t ride in Hanoi or Saigon, they mostly used the trains. But he also said he’d been there twice before on two tours of duty with the US Army during the Vietnam War.
“I was against the war from the beginning, you know, but I got shipped over twice. We were in Hue, you know, the Citadel there?” I nodded. “You know that big flag they have over the citadel? It was our job to take it down. We fought really hard to do that. Twice. My unit lost 600 - no, 800 guys fighting there to take down that big flag. So when I was there as a traveler, it was really hard for me to see that. That big red Vietnamese flag still flying…”
I told him about My Son, the temple ruins we’d visited outside of Hoi An. I have no memories of the war, really, not personal ones, but My Son broke my heart a little. The VC holed up there and the US bombed the daylights out of it, ruining the Angkor period temple complex. The US lost the war, communism stuck, and the temple was destroyed for nothing. It’s not the same, I get it. I can not compare my experience with the veteran ranger’s. But it was the first time during our travels in Vietnam that the war felt very real to me.
“The army…you know all those rules from the north, they try to keep those people in the south down and in Saigon, it’s still crazy - guys whizzing by will try to steal your watch right off your arm. The government couldn’t stop the craziness,” the ranger said. I told him about how we’d been there in the lead up to Tet and we watched the young and thriving Vietnamese people buy huge flat screen TVs and all kinds of consumer electronics, strap them on the back of their scooters, and ride off home.
I asked the ranger if he’d told people that he’d fought in the war. He shook his head and looked past me, quiet for a minute. “No, no, I didn’t. And everyone we met, they weren’t alive during the war anyway, they’re all too young to remember.” I told the ranger about the kid I’d met in the cafe who told me he was studying IT. They’re all going to eat our jobs, I said, though maybe they’ll eat my tech job and not the park ranger’s. “IT, really?” he asked, and shook his head again.
I’d go back tomorrow, I told the ranger, if I could, and he brightened up. We talked a little bit about his corner of the park where there was once a homestead, a scrappy Austrian family carved a farm out of land that the forest wanted to reclaim every single minute. It’s a beautiful place, green and covered in moss, but it must have been a very lonely life and such hard work with dark winters and a constant battle to be dry. In the photos the cows look huge, but probably, the people were not very tall.
What’s your name? I asked the ranger, and he reached his big brown hand across the counter to shake mine. “You should head up here, to the edge of the lake - there’s one section of paved road and if you look up the slope you can often see bears up there,” he said, pointing at the map. We had to move along - our weekend goal was to visit with friends, not to see the park. I felt okay about shorting our time in the park because I knew I’d be back, but not about shorting our time with our friends. We didn’t make it to spot for bears.
But I am very glad we made the side trip.
Photos: My Son Temple near Hoi An (upper) and Maple Glade Trail in Quinalt (lower) There are pictures from our trip to the coast here.
Posted in Passport Travels, Playing Outside | 6 Comments »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
This morning our house is chock-a-block with jetlagged Austrians, they’re stacked like cord wood down in the basement. (If you’ve been to Austria, you know they are very skilled at stacking. They are a stacking people, a nation of stackers. ) Last night, we took them for pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) which I swear is good for jetlag and just about anything else, After pho we headed down to Alki Beach where we came across the sight of a blazing beach house. Perhaps more upsetting than the site of a house on fire was the fact that people would not get the hell out of the way, already. People, people. Make way. The car in front of us came to a full stop to gawk, the street was full of people, meanwhile, SOMEONE’S HOUSE IS ON FIRE. A-hem. A public service note: If there is a a fire or other emergency get the hell out of the way.
We were wrapping up our promenade as the sky was blacking with smoke, but it was a truly lovely evening at the beach before that - the weather was warm enough for shorts and a t-shirt, the volleyball sand courts were in full use by gorgeous boys and girls (something for everyone!) and a group of people had set down a dance floor made out of big cardboard boxes and were involved in some serious stepping to Latin beats.
Last week we were at Alki with Janelle from Intelligent Travel - same place, different diversions. I wrote about our encounter with the paddlers from the Intertribal Canoe Journey here, but Janelle has give West Seattle and Nerd’s Eye View a lovely write up on National Geographic’s blog. Her post comes complete with my 16 second screen test. I’m sure that the Travel Channel now thinking that Samantha Brown needs more than a working vacation and should be replaced in the interim by someone shorter and more Jewish.
Posted in Seattle, Travel Reads | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
You’d have to be blogging from underneath a rock (or be blissfully disconnected from blognews) to not know that BlogHer was last weekend. If you’re a regular reader of Nerd’s Eye View, you know that I didn’t go. The first reason I didn’t go was because I felt like the offerings were insufficiently enticing for this travel crazy blogger. I later received a shockingly generous offer of sponsorship from Uptake, but by then, it was too late, the conference was sold out.
I hear that Suzanne Reisman did a terrific job of running the far too short travelbloggers meetup. And Debbie gathered names and has (wow, thanks!) now published a list of women travel bloggers - it’s here and you can add yourself in the comments.
I am so sorry I was not in that room. It’s not just that I didn’t get to meet you, it’s that I missed out on the conversation about What Travelbloggers Want. Luckily, the folks that were there have not been shy about sharing their feedback with me. If you haven’t guessed, I think blogging about travel is, well, the sh*t, and probably one of my favorite things on the planet. I’m as disappointed as you are that there was no travel session, but I do think that BlogHer has the potential to deliver the goods to my fellow wanderers.
In the meantime, there are two messages that came through loud and clear in the feedback. First, people are looking for you, travelblogger, and they can not find you. And secondly, there’s no focused travelbloggers community. I really want to help. Really.
Enter the Internet. Good lord, it is easy to make stuff happen. Dear Internet, I love you.
I’ve added a forum to Nerd’s Eye View that I hope will serve as a starting point for that community you’re missing. If nothing else, I hope you’ll introduce yourself, share a link to your blog, and maybe ask a question or two. It’s a start.
A few caveats:
- I’ve not run a forum before, it’s brand new to me. Please be patient while I work out the technical details.
- There’s no reason for me to expect otherwise, but please stay on topic - travel blogging related posts only! While I have included a place for discussing travel - because it’s what we love! - there are lots of boards - at BootsnAll, Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, Matador, Rick Bless His Big Brown Shoes Steves, oh so many others, that do a great job of talking about destinations, but not so many places that focus on travelblogging.
- Finally, profanity, abuse, spam, won’t be tolerated (duh). Okay, I’ll probably be lax on the profanity if it’s used in a travel related manner. As in: “Angkor Wat was effing awesome!”
Registration is easy and the boards are open. Let’s get connected.
Posted in Passport Travels | 11 Comments »
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
Snoqualamie is about half an hour’s drive east of Seattle - it’s right where the Cascade Range starts draw a line between the Puget Sound area and the rest of Washington State. Snoqaulamie, sadly, has been overrun with McMansions and shopping malls and wide parkways that go from one cookie cutter housing development to the next, but the downtown is still darned cute. It’s home to a terrific little hardware store, a micro brewery, and the Northwest Railway Museum.
The former depot now houses exhibits about railway history and there are a lot of rusting but very appealing old rail cars standing on the siding that runs parallel to main street. We were there to provide entertainment for the Day Out with Thomas the Tank Engine, an event that brings the kid’s book train engine and loads of excited kids to extract money from indulgent parents. On non-event days you can take the train from Snoqualamie to North Bend and back again. The whistle blows about every half hour or so, the cars fill up, and there’s the low rumble of the engine - it’s pretty grand.
After our set, we headed a few miles west to another suburbanized foothill town for chow. The Issaquah hillsides are littered with little boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same, but just off the freeway there’s an old school diner that serves up the biggest milkshakes I’ve ever laid eyes on, along with some serious burgers and fries type grub. You could probably share a burger and not be sorry, though eating an entire one on your own, along with crunchy breaded onion rings and/or the excellent fries may also find you apologizing to your arteries.
On Saturday evening, the parking lot of the XXX fills up with classic roadsters. With the 50s music pouring out over the patio, the rumble of a 57 Chevy, and the unbelievable amount of kitch packed in and around the XXX, it’s an American fantasy, complete with high calorie delicious junk food. I am not a food snob, I will eat the trashiest of food as long as it’s tasty and the XXX delivers. It’s getting added to the out of town guest rotations - a sunny afternoon with junk food and classic cars is going to perfectly fulfill a high number of American cliches - and why not.
Heads up, it’s not cheap to eat there - they have a burger on the menu that’s 12.50 and the big shake is 6.99. Forget about any kind of dietary restraint. That 6.99 chocolate shake probably contains the caloric allotment for a family of four for a week. Big food, big cars, big fun.
Posted in Passport Travels, Seattle | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 18th, 2008
Someone asked me recently about photo tools and I remembered the oh so fun to play with Animoto. Off I went to make a new slideshow. Let’s go back to Hawaii, okay?
Posted in Aloha Oy, Pics | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Disclaimer: As you probably guessed, Holt sent me this book.
Steve Hely and Vali Chandrasekaran have a crazy idea. They are going to race each other around the world, one going east, the other west, and whoever makes it first wins a very expensive bottle of scotch. Oh, part of the challenge? No airplanes. They have somehow managed to convince their publisher - Holt - that it’s a good idea to fund this project in exchange for a book about their adventures when they’re done. Along with making it home first, there’s an “awesomeness” contest - meaning the guys are trying to each have the most awesome travel experience. This is a ridiculous premise for a book, an absurd idea, and man oh man, how do I get a publisher to fund my insane junket around the planet?
There’s plenty of “dudes doing crazy things” in The Ridiculous Race
, as you might well imagine. There’s disgusting food, drinking and smoking, difficult border crossings, trains, boats, horses, and jet packs. There’s plenty of snarky comedy, rivalry, and, every now and then, some surprisingly sensitive and lovely descriptions of places that express the truly wonderful moments of travel. Those don’t last long, it’s right back to “Oops, gotta run, I’m on a race, I wonder how much the other guy’s trip sucks right now?!”
It’s a funny book, full of sweeping generalizations accompanied with unapologetic explanations that all come under the “what do you expect from a guy who’s in Mexico for, like, 20 minutes?” (My paraphrasing, not a quote from the book.) Nothing that happens is truly surprising because you get the sense that anything can happen from the get go. All the rushing about leaves you with a feeling of amused mania and an ardent desire to avoid traveling like these two. They’re the guys you meet on a train ride and after they get off, you shake your head saying, “Man, can you believe that? What kind of way is that to travel?”
The book is a fast read, it’s entertaining, snappy, and yeah, totally ridiculous. And a little maddening. On bad days, I feel like some guy is always going off to do some thing and getting someone to pay for it. Riding a Segway across the US. Eating his way across the planet. Racing his buddy around the world for a bottle of scotch. Whatever.
Let’s be honest. I totally envy them.
Posted in Travel Reads | 4 Comments »
