nerd’s eye view

Messing About in Boats on Halong Bay

“There is nothing — absolute NOTHING — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Ratty in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

I hate to fly, I can’t bear long bus trips, and boats, good god, don’t get me started on boats. I love to be in exotic places, but the process of getting there, by most methods, leaves me queasy and tired. I will be the first to admit that this is a pathetic and contrary state of affairs in a person who loves to travel as much as I do, but there you have it. I am happiest on a leisurely stroll or on a road trip where the way is straight or I am doing the driving. I’m okay on a train, too, as long as it’s not too terribly winding. I get seasick, at sea and on land, and there’s not much for it. The drugs leave me feeling worse, so I settle for feeling ill at ease, a little nauseated, and edgy, until the sensation passes.

I had great trepidation about spending the night at sea but my reading suggested that Halong Bay is flat as a mirror, mostly, protected and smooth. I wasn’t prepared for the cold, but the water was just as reported. The only disruption to the stability of our ride was the wake from other passing tour boats. It turns out it’s not boats I dislike, only the (sometimes) cramped quarters and the constant motion of what’s under my feet.

Our boat was a neat little junk with drafty windows and heated cabins; we even had our own private bathroom with a shower. Once we figured out how to get the heat working, it was snug and cozy. The bunks were a little narrow, but I slept like a real water rat and woke up hungry and enchanted. I didn’t want to go back to shore, I could happily have spent another day gazing into the fog at the karst peaks and floating villages. [Me in the cabin, early morning.]

Halong Bay is a Japanese painting serviced by little floating convenience stores. Women row their skiffs right up to your boat to sell you Oreos and cigarettes and bottled water, one woman we saw had all that plus a few fresh crabs and a cuttle fish floating in a basket. Freighters and fishing boats and floating homes are anchored all across the surface of the water. The view changes every few minutes, the shape of the mountains, the light, the color of whatever kind of craft is floating by. [Floating shop.]

I should have been disappointed by the weather but instead, I enjoyed the way the mist muffled the sound, softened the edges of the rock, made the sky and water into one floating gray field. It’s easy to imagine how grand it must be to float Halong Bay in the sunshine, drinking cold beer on the deck and sleeping with the windows open, but I’m not sorry that it was otherwise. [Dragon bow of our boat, karst peaks.]

We took a few more boat trips during our journey – a run down the Perfume River in Hue and a long day from the border town of Chau Doc in Vietnam to Phnom Penh in Cambodia (I was there and I’m still stunned at how exotic that sounds) and I enjoyed both journeys tremendously. It’s open water I can’t take, the churn is too much for my weak stomach, but the steady pace of a river journey suits me just fine. As I was lying at the stern in a pile of luggage, a fellow traveler said, “You’re Mark Twain!” and I thought, “Life on the Mississippi. Maybe that’s for me.” I might have an idea for our next adventure.

I’ve posted a mess of new photos to Flickr, here’s Halong Bay and here’s Hue.

[tags]Halong Bay, junk, boating, Vietnam[/tags]

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So, What’s Hanoi Like?

Slideshow here. Suggested tune? Crosstown Traffic, Jimi Hendrix.

Every morning around 6am, the Voice of Vietnam blasts over Hanoi. Our tour leader told us that they broadcast local news, the lottery numbers, and a generous helping of propaganda. (I find it incongruous that a socialist nation has a lottery. Do they redistribute your winnings if you pick the right numbers?) The Voice of Vietnam is the first noise of the day, every day, and the sound spins up into a fevered pitch as the hours pass. The traffic picks up, people take to the streets to work and sell and go from place to place, and they honk and shout and chatter the entire time.

The sidewalks are mostly unusable. As soon as dawn breaks, the rogue restaurants appear, cooking soup and frying omelettes over tiny portable stoves. There’s always a scattering of plastic stools, low to the ground, right up to where the curb crumbles into the street. Where you think you should be able to walk, scooters are parked shoulder to shoulder while their drivers load and unload stunning quantities of goods. Every now and then there’s the frenzy of a sale, a pile of merchandise tossed on to the concrete. The sales are easily identified by the cloud of 20 something girls around the product and there is no passing them, you must step off the narrow goat trail of a path into the street.

Once you’re in the street, your life is in the hands of oncoming traffic. It does no good to look for oncoming traffic because it’s coming from everywhere, even from inside the shops and out of little alleys that seem almost too narrow to walk down.

Picking your way through the city is a daunting task because you have to watch where you put your feet so’s not to kick over a pot of boiling soup, watch for onward traffic because it comes from the wrong direction, watch your head because the network of tarps and hanging goods means you might clock yourself on who knows what or pour a stream of rainwater down the back of your neck, watch your belongings – not so much because of theft though that can be an issue – because your pack can catch on the handlebars of a passing scooter, and all this in the middle of an unstoppable freight train of noise.

Pictures of Hanoi do it little justice because it’s such a sensory assault. In order to experience Hanoi, you have to first surround yourself in the visual mess of telephone wires and merchandise and people in brightly colored helmets, but you have to put it all in motion, swirling 360 degrees around you, with not one still place to rest your eyes. Then, start the soundtrack, the honking, the chatter, the engines. Add to that the smell of food cooking, not always pleasant, of exhaust and dust and damp and sometimes of sewer, and cigarette smoke. Crush yourself into not enough personal space and then, move forward, as best you can. Even if you do all these things, if you haven’t been someplace like Hanoi, you still have no idea what Hanoi is like.

This makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy Hanoi. That’s not true. During our last breakfast in Bangkok, N asked if we’d do it again. Knowing what we know now, would we hit the reset button and do it again? J and I were in complete agreement: Absolutely. In spite of that fact that we were down with the ick (a cold/flu thing) in Hanoi and again, down with the ick in Bangkok (bad belly), we were ready to go. Again.

[tags]Hanoi, Vietnam[/tags]

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Southeast Asia Photo Preview

I’ve started a Flickr album, here.

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Amulets and Altars

The Bangkok Amulet Market isn’t on the street corners outside the Tha Chang boat pier, it’s further down the street – though there is a thriving business along the sidewalks – and this is the amulet making supply district. If you want your completed amulets – or statues or any variety of iconographic items for your home altar, you’ll find them in this neighborhood.

I bought three things – an actual amulet for protection and two hammered metal pieces that are just the prettiest things and have prayers or some kind of text scrawled around the images. I have NO idea what they say or what they are for and because this part of the city is not a touristy area, very few people are available to translate or explain.

The monks are the serious shoppers here, they are carrying eyepieces for close inspection of the goods, checking to see if the stones are real, perhaps, or if the image of the monk is the right one or who knows what… It’s a fascinating scene and we squandered more than enough time along the sidewalks and in the back alleys making amulet deals and watching others do the same. Note to self? Read up on the amulet market upon return home. Hell, you could Google it for me and then tell me about it later.

I gave away my Boddhisatva card to one of our fellow travelers who’d lost some stuff at the Cambodia/Thai border and in doing so may have jinxed my luck. I’ve been down for about 24 hours with a Very Bad Gut. My comrades have gone off to see the Royal Palace, I’m stuck close to our hotel because of my unpredictable insides. Like the broken camera, it could be worse. We fly out tomorrow, late morning, so today I have time for the antibiotics to kick in and to, um, let the situation pass. It’s a shame to miss a day out in Bangkok, but hey, things could be worse.

We’re back stateside tomrrow evening. Things will seem quiet and spacious and probably really boring by comparison. Oh, and cold as hell, I’m sure.

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Fit to Be Thai-ed

For lunch, we had Thai food. It’s all very familiar, but hotter. Delicious plates of phad thai, a big soup bowl of green curry, and a new shrimp salad, swimming in lime juice, lemon grass, oh so delicious, oh so nice. I skipped the markets after lunch and headed back to the hotel to take a shower and a nap.

Julius is still not here – he opted for the bus crossing, I decided that the reason I work is so I don’t have to take nine hour bus trips across roadless areas when a flight will do just as well. I realized this makes me a spoiled yuppie, so be it. I am also clean and better rested than I’ve been since we left Seattle. I sprawled on the bed and listened to my iPod and then, nodded off for a hour or so of much needed unconciousness.

We are all wildly overstimulated. The temples messed with our collective subconciousness – not a person I spoke to made it through the dark sleeping hours without wild dreams. I had tigers in mine, J had a boat trip, I think, N was in a tiny dumbwaiter watching the light slice through as she went between floors, there were more, there were others. Wandering through the real life set of an Indiana Jones-esque movie will do that to your brain, as will the ghosts of ancient civilizations who carved vast stone bas relief murals of the gods and the demons churning a sea by wrapping a giant snake around a mountain, while dancing on the back of a monumental turtle. Trust me, it makes sense if you’re sleeping, or if you’re walking through the tourist overridden waking dream of Angkor Wat.

We have three nights in Bangkok, enough time to do some final shopping and hopefully, to find the place where cheap photo gear goes to be dumped on unsuspecting tourists. As pennace for taking the flight, I dropped my backpack and my telephoto lens snapped. It’s a drag, but not as much of a drag had it happened a few days earlier. J has the pocket camera – he’s very handy with it – and I have the Boddhisattva amulet in my wallet which I think includes a prayer for finding that which is needed. I don’t know what the Boddhisattva has to say about wayward photographers, but I think she’s on my side.

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Angkor What?

I was pretty sure my head was going to explode when I saw the gates to the Angkor complex, but when there were elephants inside, Actual Elephants… well. I walked up to them – there were five – and put out my hand and one of them started snuffling around with her trunk. “Bananas?” asked the girl standing there. “Bananas for elephant?”

I said no and my pachyderm friend was a little disappointed, but she didn’t turn away, she continued to reach for my hand, spreading a little elephant snot on my palm. I patted her on the bridge of her snout and she was warm and prickly. I’m not sure why I thought she would be cool, elephants are warm blooded after all.

You can ride an elephant around the temple complex and their feet are really quiet on the pavement, like they’re wearing big slippers with leather soles. They are quiet and still with ragged ears and skinny brown boys in dark green pyjama-like suits – they sit astride the elephant’s neck. I wanted to ride, but more than that I wanted to drive. J. said I had to go to mahout school first. I’m good with that, though I notice there were no female elephant jockeys.

The temples at Angkor are, oh, how can I describe them? They are exactly as wonderful and better than I’d imagined them to be. They are huge and everywhere, they are giant smiling faces of the Buddha and piles of carved stone discarded in dry fields. They reach for the muggy sky and are sprouting grass and vines and in some cases, entire trees. They are the fantasy temples of Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones covered in Japanese and German tourists. They are lace cutouts of dancers and square doorways etched with flowers. They are steps that are tall and narrow and long walkways supported by collonades. They are spectacular.

Everywhere tiny children try to sell pocket sized souvenirs, kids who are much too young to be touts, and yet, there they are, their hands pushing bootlegged copies of travel guides and strings of wooden beads and little handbags and scarves in your direction. They flock outside each tourist bus pleading, “Please madam you buy one dollar.” It’s not right, they should be swimming in the lake or playing soccer or something, but there are dozens, no, probably hundreds of them, pacing in circles around our whiter foreign selves.

We’re not buying, intentionally. The party line in our group is that we’re to buy only from sources that send the money to good causes, not from the street urchins, because they hand the money over to who knows where, it’s not putting food in their bellies or books in their backpacks. It’s heartbreaking, as so much is in this country. They’re almost always unfailingly polite, not as pushy as you’d expect them to be, and even, sometimes, funny. To say it’s sad doesn’t do it justice, but that’s the best I’ve got.

The heat was brutal today, one of our crew dropped to heat exhaustion around mid-day and I am carryng around a headache, but it’s worth it to be out there seeing the ruins in spite of everything. At the end of the day we climbed to the top of yet another stunning jumble of stones and looked out over coconut palms and mango trees into a darkening sky. We had hopes a storm might break the heat, but it blew off, leaving the same heat and dust that makes everything feel like we’re in a movie. We leaned up against the big stone elephants and prayed for rain.

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