Wanderlust

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

We’re both getting a little tired of the tourist trail in S.E. Asia. Not that we’ll be getting off of it any time soon, but we’re going to try to fast forward a little through it. Vietnam has been great in that we got all of the clothes made. In the end we stayed in Hoi An for 7 nights, not leaving for Ho Chi Minh until the 2nd since my sundress was such a pain. I went to a random place to get it made, and I thought it’d be pretty painless since we’d had such good luck with my wedding dress and Steve’s suits. We picked a place based on the fact that they had the dress I wanted hanging up in the shop. So they just had to make one in my size and the colors I wanted. But it turned out to be a nightmare. After 8 fittings and the tailor remaking the dress twice since she made the wrong dress twice, it looked like a Frankenstein dress and it still didn’t fit right. The lady in the store was mean and unhelpful. She wouldn’t listen to me when I was telling her what needed to be changed and that led to her making the waste tighter when I wanted the skirt tighter, and then blaming me for the change that I hadn’t asked for. In the end the whole dress looked like something a 5-year-old had made (and poorly, at that) and it was so tight I couldn’t get into it by myself and couldn’t breath once it was on. I ended up just walking out of the store, forfeitting my deposit. To me it wasn’t worth dealing with anymore. Even if it somehow miraculous was perfect I still wouldn’t have wanted to wear the dress since the whole process was so miserable. I also met another girl in the shop who was having a similarly bad experience with a pair of pants that were hilariously misformed when I saw them. They just don’t seem to know how to make clothes. So, if you’re ever in Hoi An looking to have anything made, steer clear of shops you haven’t gotten a good recommendation for. I, unfortunately don’t remember the name of the store (I might have the card in my back pack, in which case I’ll update this later), but it’s on a street corner on the main street just past the market.

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Hoi An, Vietnam.

Happy Holidays from Vietnam! It has been a while since I last wrote, but for very good reason. We have been very busy with life stuff–all happy. Steve and I got engaged while we were in Luang Prabang! And for the past five days or so we’ve been in Hoi An, Vietnam having suits and dresses and shoes made! Shoes! It’s been really fun and surprisingly affordable, but also incredibly exhausting and a bit time consuming. It wouldn’t be taking up quite so much time, but we’re getting everything done at different places! Steve had two suits and two shirts made at Yaly. There are four locations of this store, and each seems to specialize in its own thing (they have one that specializes in casual clothes and blue jeans, and I haven’t dared go into it!). His took a bit of time because we made one suit first to make sure we were happy with it before making the second one. It turned out beautifully after 3 alterations and fittings, and other than hemming the pant leg up a little bit the second suit was perfect right off the bat. Both shirts were also perfect the first time. He looks so nice in suits! The shoes were fun to make, too. You can basically just choose whatever style of shoe you want out of their books (or bring in your own photo)  and than choose the shape of the base and the leather that you want, and voila! The next day you have handmade shoes! I got a pair to match my wedding dress and they were right the first try, but Steve’s black dress shoes needed a couple of adjustments (which they happily did) until they fit right. There are hundreds of shoe and clothing store all around the Hoi An and you can’t go anywhere without people yelling “Hello! Buy something!” It gets a little annoying after a while, but it’s no worse than all the other ways people have tried to get our attention over the past 7 months.

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Savanakhet, Laos.

We plan on leaving Laos for Vietnam in the morning. It feels strange to be leaving Laos so soon. We’ve been here almost a month, but we’ve spent so much time in the other countries we’ve visited (except Mongolia, which wasn’t planned so was just a bonus all around) that a month just doesn’t seem long enough. But I think we’re both ready to move on to Vietnam and a little more chaos and excitement. Laos has been wonderfully relaxing–especially today since we’ve just relaxed all day–including a massage for $4 each! How amazing! It was nice and very different from both our massage in Ecuador and in China. The Laos massage was a lot more stretching and more focused on our legs and feet which was nice after being on them so much. Christmas in ‘Nam should be interesting and hopefully we’ll be able to stumble upon some sort of Christmas celebration. I would love some caroling.

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Vientiane, Laos.

We have been in Vientiane for the past two days, and it’s not really the nicest city. As far as capitals go, it’s not too bad. It’s still pretty small and it’s along a river which on the other side is Thailand (which seems really strange that we can look at another country across a little river). The town is sort of hot and muggy and the guesthouses leave a little to be desired (and they’re more expensive). We came here because it’s about a 10 hour bus ride from Luang Prabang and we needed to stop before heading on to Tha Kaek where we plan to go to in the morning. We were going to leave yesterday, but Steve wasn’t feeling too well (he feels better today) and we bought some souvenirs in Luang Prabang that we wanted to mail back home but the post office was closed on Sunday. So today is a day of errands. I just finished typing up a rough draft essay for my last graduate school application. I’m applying for a masters degree in literacy education and I wanted to write about my experience with volunteering in China, so the essay writing was put off for longer than I would have liked.

But tomorrow we go to Tha Kaek where the original plan was to rent motorbikes and ride around the countryside for 3 days or so seeing caves and waterfalls and little villages. Tha Kaek apparently doesn’t have ATMs or the internet, so we’re trying to figure out how much the trip would cost so that we make sure to have enough kip to do it and get out of there. Running out of money in Muang Ngoi made us a little weary. We’ve gotten so used to ATMs being everywhere, that it’s hard to adjust to the possibility of no ATMs and the fact that you have to carry around a giant wad of bills here since the largest bill is 50,000 and that’s easily lunch. I’m also a little nervous about riding a motorbike around. I road on my first motorbike ever on the way to my weaving class the second day since my tuk tuk (little bike taxi thing) didn’t show up to get me and someone from the Ock Pop Tok store (who I was doing the class through) gave me a lift. But we’re going to see about possibly doing one of the newish tours that have started up for this motorbike loop. Or we might try to hook up with some other travelers doing the same thing that maybe have some more experience (than our collective no experience). I think having someone around who knows what they’re doing and could possibly fix a broken bike would make me feel better. But we’ll see. Either way we’re going to go see some of the sites since you can get there without a big excursion. We just thought the excursion would be a fun adventure.

So, we’ll be without internet for maybe a week or so. But then we go to Savanakhet, which is a bigger city where we’ll stop in order to get our Vietnam visa before crossing over the border. We will most likely be there for Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, Stephen and I were singing the 12 days of Christmas last night since yesterday was 12 days until Christmas. We realized that we didn’t know all the verses, so we made up a new song about S.E. Asia. Here you go (only the last verse):

On the 12th day of my South East Asian Christmas (awkward, I know) my true love gave to me:

• 12 bottles of Beer Laos
• 11 hour bus rides
• 10 Thai transvestites
• 9,000 kip to the dollar
• 8 kids to a mother
• 7 sandy beaches
• 6 F’ing roosters
• 5 drunk Aussies
• 4 banana crepes
• 3 mosquito bites
• 2 tuk tuk rides
• and an umbrella in a fruit smoothie!

Yay! Merry Christmas!

Vientiane, Laos.

Our official six months of traveling was December 2nd. We spent a couple of hours sitting on our bungalow’s porch by the Nam Ou River in Nong Khiew talking about the past six months and thinking of things based on silly criteria that we made up. So, here is our list of worsts and bests and favorites. Enjoy!

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Luang Prabang, Laos.

We’ve been in Luang Prabang now for a week, and lately we’ve been so busy that I haven’t had any time to blog (or upload pictures which takes forever here since the internet connection is pretty slow). I feel like whenever I go a long time without writing I forget to write about things or everything just gets all rushed and blurred together. This probably won’t be any exception since we’ve done so much the past week, but I’ll do my best.

We left Muang Ngoi on Steve’s birthday last Friday (December 5th). He turned 24, and we wanted to do something special for the day, but since we’d underestimated the amount of kip we’d need for being stranded without banks or ATMs for a while we had to hit the road or not eat. So for Steve’s birthday we traveled, which seems pretty appropriate for the trip. The boat ride out from Muang Ngoi was pretty and nice. The bus trip to Luang Prabang wasn’t bad, but it was long and not as pretty as the bus ride from Odomxai to the river. We were also a little scrunched since the seat we chose in the minivan was meant for three people but they shoved us and two other local people back there, so it was a lot of trying to rearrange limbs and butts and general discomfort. But we arrived safely, got our first tuk tuk into town and managed to eat lunch with our last few thousand kip.

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Luang Prabang, Laos.

Our first week in Laos was spent relaxing in the two little river towns of Nong Khiaw and Muang Ngoi. From Odomxai we planned on taking a bus straight to Nong Khiaw, but ended up getting up and around (after eating yummy crepes and fruit shakes for breakfast!) too late and missing the direct bus. We were told by our friendly guesthouse staff that we could take the bus to Pak Mong where all of the buses from Luang Prabang passed through as well as ones from farther north. We bought our ticket at around noon  and sat on the van/bus for about three hours before we finally took off. But we’d bought some fresh baguettes from a lady walking around the bus station (which was just a line of buses and a building in the middle of nowhere) and some apples and oranges from a little stand and we had plenty of water, so we just sat and munched and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the people going about their business at the station.

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Luang Prabang, Laos.

Oh China! We were sad to say goodbye, but were glad we got to know you a (very) little bit. Our last bus ride out of China was pretty uneventful. We spent our last afternoon in China sitting in Prague Cafe in Kunming spending lots of Chinese money (but not very much American money) on the most beautiful food. Really, just look:

I read a National Geographic that was lying around (which was wonderful since I miss them) and Steve read a Foreign Affairs magazine on China. It was a very fitting display of our different personalities! We got to the bus station about an hour or so before our bus was scheduled to leave and we were immediately shuffled onboard. It turned out that all of the under bus storage was mysteriously full (I’ll get to that later) even though the entire bus area was stuffed to the gills with people’s suitcases and boxes! We kept pointing at the bottom of the bus and at our bags but they insisted that we take our bags onboard where we just laid them beside us in the aisle.

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Kunming, China.

Today is our last day in China. Tomorrow at 5 pm we take a bus from Kunming over the Laotian border to Odomxai, Laos. It is also Thanksgiving Day. And I must admit that I’m feeling a little sad and homesick. I knew it would happen, but it still feels a little surprising. But we had a nice lunch of Chinese food that was probably the most American-like Chinese food we’ve had since coming to China. It was a very simple (and cheap) restaurant and our dishes tasted very fresh and weren’t over-sauced (they also didn’t contain MSG which we were overwhelmed with while eating at the cafeteria in Yangshuo). We had a plate of sauteed spinach with garlic and a plate of chicken with vegetables and peanuts. Again, for the first time in China, the pieces of chicken were actually like hunks of chicken breast. We learned in Yangshuo from some of the students that Chinese people prefer meat on the bone. I honestly don’t even know what they do with the chicken breasts or if they even let the chickens get big enough to have real breasts (the chickens at the market in Yangshuo were really scrawny). But the meat on bone thing was something we definitely noticed while in China, especially in Yangshuo. It wasn’t really meat on bone as it was just bone. I just didn’t even bother trying to eat it (especially since you had to eat it with chopsticks!). So our lunch was a nice little surprise. We also got some yummy yogurt smoothies afterwards even though it’s pretty chilly here right now.

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Yangshuo, China.

We had a good time this weekend going on our Chinese government sponsored trip to Guilin and the Longji rice terraces. We stayed in 4 star hotels, ate yummy food, and saw the rice terraces that were really strikingly beautiful. I was told by one of the students that this was not a good time to go see them because all of the rice has been harvested so it’s not as beautiful. But really, it’s hard to imagine it being more beautiful than what it was, so it was well worth the trip. I think the difference was just one of taste–we wanted to see the actual landscape of the terraces while she was more interested in the colors of the rice. It might have been neater without the rice, really, because it made the steps cut into the mountains stand out that much more. But we had a good time. We left Yangshou Friday night, stayed in a hotel, got up at 6 in the morning for breakfast and then an opening ceremony for the event (the IVV Walking Club or something like that). Then we were bused over to Longji (about 2 hours from Guilin) and we had photo ops with some of the women from the local minority group who are famous for their incredibly long hair (it was longer than they were tall!). Then we started what turned out to be a five hour hike through the mountains and the terraces. It was a gorgeous day. Very hot and sunny. We were supposed to stay with our little group (which consisted of about 20 foreigners and the other 200 people at the event were all Chinese), but they walked much faster than I wanted to walk, especially since I like to stop and take photos. So we just bounced around and had a good time and didn’t worry too much about our group. We definintely learned a lot about the Chinese organization system. We had heard that in China you’re given information on a strictly need-to-know basis. And man, is that true. We had absolutely no idea what was going on or what to expect which for us made things very difficult. For example, we were given a little bag with some fruit and some bread and a really gross meat stick that was sort of like a vienna sausage wrapped in plastic. We all thought, “Hey, we get a little snack for the road.” But no. It turned out to be our lunch. So for lunch and to sustain ourselves for the 5 hour hike, we had almost no food. We had asked if food would be provided before hand so that we could bring stuff if we needed to, and we were assured that yes it would be provided. And we asked what kind of food, they just didn’t answer us. Luckily we went through lots of little villages on the walk who had snacks and drinks for sale. So it was okay. But in general it was just difficult to be a part of a group tour where you have to stay with the group but aren’t given any information or warnings for when you need to do something. Literally we’d be all waiting around for ten or fifteen minutes and then all of a sudden our group leader would pop up and say okay we have to go now. And if you were in the bathroom or had wandered off they would get really angry. It was strange. So we were all sort of annoyed and tried to explain about the need for a five or ten minute warning, but the Chinese guide just didn’t get it at all. It’s just a totally different cultural experience.

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