Coming to This

My penultimate column was published almost two weeks ago. I'm only posting this so late because I spent the last two weeks in a windowless room devoid of any time cues or outside contact. I was not in jail. I was participating in a sleep study because I'm poor because I spent all my money on the trip that this blog has documented.

As always, the link can be found on the right hand side, or by clicking here (or above). Enjoy it or suffer it while it lasts, either way, there's only one more coming.

The Obligatory Travel Conversation

It's not long traveling until you realize you've had the same conversation with everyone you've met. Where are you from? Oh, I've been there, [say hello in their language]. Where did you come from? How was it? What's your name? Cool. Where are you going? I've heard that place is a-MA-zing. How long are you traveling for? Oh, I'm traveling for longer (thought silently).

This "conversation" is mandatory, and some people just love it. It bores the hell out of me. It's truly miserable after the hundreth time. You get the same set of answers. I know it's necessary though - you have to start somewhere. You can't just walk up to someone in a foreign land, shake their hands, make creepy eye contact and ask them if they believe in god. Unless you're a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.

Like I said, some people wallow happily in it like pigs in shit. I try to get it over with as quickly and abruptly as possible, so I can move on to more interesting things. I rely heavily on trolley/surgeon dilemmas just to hear what people say. Not familiar with trolley dilemmas? The bro over at Philosophy Bro can give you the lowdown.

A certain someone I traveled with for four months seemed to put up with the obligatory conversations pretty well. Sorry brosef, but I remember we met someone once, might've been the Swiss girl in the van to Luang Prabang, and as you two were having the Conversation, I just thought, Kill Me Now. By now a seasoned traveler, I know at this point you're regaling all sorts of people with far more dialogs.

Anyway, Adam and I relied heavily on Would You Rathers to entertain each other, and soon employed classics like "Would you rather spend the rest of your life with latex gloves on, or have your fingers perpetually covered in Doritos powder?" to keep other travelers on their toes. There's always Would You Rathers concerning superpowers, but flying always wins, so it's not so interesting.

The Conversation is possible to overcome. Once the basics are laid down, a blunt question is generally acceptable, and you can move on to discussing involuntary organ-harvesting from executed Chinese convicts.

For the record, I support organ-harvesting, but I don't support the death penalty. If you're gonna ice some people though, might as well make use of them. That was a good conversation to have on a rooftop bar below the peaks of Yangshuo, even when a pony-tailed over-the-hill Canadian hippie butted in and started talking about slippery moral slopes and living and dying for ideals, and his younger sidekick really missed the point and started mentioning souls.

One of the best responses I got from one Conversation was from an Australian girl in Hue. At some point early on I asked her where she was from but she seemed not to hear and instead went on talking about the book she read that brought her to this town. About twenty minutes later when there was a break in the conversation, she said, "I'm from Sydney." I asked you that like twenty minutes ago, replied I. "Yeah, I don't really like to get into that stuff so soon."

At least I know I'm not the only one sick of it. Hey, thanks for stopping by.

Travels Soundtrack: Southeast Asia

There's certainly no dearth of songs about Vietnam, my first stop in southeast Asia. I can only think of like two right now, but I'm sure there's a ton. Anyway, 'Born in the USA' by the Boss gets my selection as the headlining song on my Vietnamese soundtrack. I like this video a little bit extra because it's in France.





Onwards to Cambodia, with an easy selection for 'Holiday in Cambodia' by the Dead Kennedys. I don't actually have this on my MP3 player, but I imagined listening to it while I was there. Another politically/socially critical song, but there's not much else to say in music about SE Asia. At least until you get to Thailand...





The above video was apparently made by some 10th grader. Thanks, kid.

Now to Laos. I don't know any songs that reference or are about Laos, but some of the Vietnam war protest songs might be appropriate since we dropped more bombs on Laos during the Vietnam war than we did on Vietnam. Anyway, this song is at least somewhat relevant to Laos, considering the government there is a bunch of commies, or close enough for all you people who know what these sorts of political terms mean.





I listened to this song a lot. I happily discovered in on my MP3 player in southern Laos as Adam was incapacitated when I chose a band at random to listen to; I have a lot of bands I've never heard of on my MP3 player, for just this reason.

Thailand is my final entry for southeast Asia. I was tempted to go with this little ditty by Steven Seagal. Seriously. Seagal has released two albums. I don't know if his video is actually supposed to be Thailand or another SE Asian country, but I think Thailand is the best bet. Either way, I feel pity for the poor girl that has to touch him in the video.

No, the clear choice for Thailand is Murray Head's 80s classic 'One Night in Bangkok'.




After I failed to hitchhike by sea from Thailand to India (so much for any sitars in this series of posts) I went back through Laos and China. Feel free to listen to 'Reds in My Bed' and 'China Girl' again.

Next up: central and western Asia.

Happy Birthday!

Behold this year's first birthday present, received in the wee hours of the morning, before it was even my birthday in America.

Bed bugs, for the third time this trip. In my room, I finally reconcile myself to the fact it's not mosquitoes and I can't go back to sleep. That's not a nice thing to have to accept at one AM in the morning, or again at two or three AM after I try to go back to sleep.

It's what I get for staying in a single room for $7.50, where the ventilation slats in the bathroom open onto my neighbors bathroom, and my view is of the corrugated steel wall of the next building two feet away, and a water pipe runs down past your window; I never know if it's raining outside or I'm just hearing the shit and dirty water wash down from the floor above.

I pack my bags and go to the lobby, waking up the manager sleeping on the floor under a mosquito net.

"I need a new room. Mine has bed bugs and I can't sleep." I show him my bites; well, not all of them. I have them on my feet, going up my legs a bit, some on my arm, and a short line on my right ass cheek. He's not very responsive, standing in boxers, staring at the counter, and scratching himself.

"No rooms." I'm not sure I believe him, but he doesn't seem to be about to change his mind. I can't go to another guesthouse because everyone else will be asleep too. Plus there is a curfew. You never hear about the government in Laos, but they're a real bunch of Nazis, and I don't want to fuck with them.

"Okay, can I have some clean sheets then?"

"Don't have any." I think he's talking about rooms again, and I repeat my question. He understood the first time. He's really not going to give me clean sheets, which of course they have somewhere.

I give up and go back and shake out my sheets as best I can and lay down on top and luckily don't get bitten again. Or maybe I don't get bitten enough to wake up. Either way, this time is better than the other times I was a victim of these little bastards. The first time, I was bitten by bed bugs was in Vietnam, on a boat with nowhere else to go. The next was in Vang Vieng, Laos where I went down to the lobby and woke up the night manager. I got a new room that time. Both times I was with Adam, and both times he wasn't bitten at all.

Happy birthday, and think of the bites on my ass for a happy Valentine's Day.

Best Fight Scene Ever

Adam and I made this fight scene on top of a junk boat in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. It's one of the greatest things I've ever done with my life, I think.




I think the dialog deserves an award. It was filmed in Ha Long Bay. HA LONG Bay. Special thanks to Courtney, the camerawoman, and Randy, Yannis, and Carlos for being card-playing extras.

Books!

Vietnam had the worst selection of books ever. The official bookshops were packed with checkout counter trash, not even up to the level of Danielle Steele. It was all romance and teen serials, and if you were lucky, a classic a la the Bronte sisters or Dickens or someone equally unsuited for travel reading.

Even the hawkers on the street selling photocopied and pirated books weren't much of a step up. They had some interesting books - On The Road, The Sorrow of War, Life of Pi, and so on, but they all had the same exact stuff, and not much of it.

I was dying to read some Haruki Murakami by the time I arrived in Vietnam. It was not to be found anywhere. I felt lucky when I stumbled across one hawker in a backpacker alley that had a Paul Theroux book, a real version, too.

By the time I got to Saigon I still hadn't learned my lesson and kept checking bookshops. Same romance and serialized teen shit. I nearly bought a graphic novel adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

Phnom Penh was a godsend. After our first dinner of street noodles, we wandered up a random street and found a bookstore that blew my mind. It had books, actual books someone would want to read.

I hunted out Neuromancer, a book I had heard of but knew almost nothing about other than it has a badass name and won a bunch of sci-fi prizes. Judging from the sentence-long blurb on the back (Case was the best computer cowboy in the Earth's matrix. That is, until he double-crossed the wrong people) it's another work that The Matrix stole heavily from.

I found Murder on the Orient Express. I started reading this in the American Corner library in Khabarovsk before Adam and I went to a charity auction in a derelict kids center with Marjana. I now had the chance to finish it.

Adam picked up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It's by Mark Twain so it must be good. Here's something I owe to Paul: Across the whole world a yankee means an American; in America a yankee means a northerner; in the north a yankee means a New Englander; in New England a yankee means someone from Maine; in Maine a yankee means a lobsterman that eats clam chowder for breakfast.

We found another shop with an even better selection of books, and multiple works by some good authors - photocopied - including Haruki Murakami. I was unnecessarily excited. I'd been wanting to read some more of his stuff for months maybe, his writing is just so calm and relaxing. I picked up Underground and After Dark.

Adam got Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Factotum by Charles Bukowski, neither of which I'd read before, and both of which I wanted to. Moral of the story? Don't think you can buy books in Vietnam, that country has the worst selection ever.

Night Train to Saigon

Nobody calls Ho Chi Minh City Ho Chi Minh City. I'm sure there's a better reason than the one I've figured out, but for me Saigon just sounds better.

While waiting on the platform for the train in Hue, a young Vietnamese man walked up to me and pointed to my camera, slung across my shoulder.

"Camera. Canon. Cheap."

"Really?" The camera cost about $500 less than two years ago. Even being old and worn, it was worth at least $150, not cheap by any Vietnamese standards.

"Yeah. Fifty dollar. This old, maybe forty dollar."

I grunted in amusement.

"Yeah, forty dollar." And he walked away. I couldn't for the life of me figure what his motivation could have been for so unexpectedly making such an obviously wrong statement. Could he want me to sell him my camera for a low price? Did he have some shitty knock-offs he wanted to sell me? I had no idea.

On the train, Adam and I busted out our respective instruments and began playing - terribly, as we always do. We had the cabin to ourselves for the time being, soft class this time. A curious Vietnamese wandered in and watched me play guitar and then took it from me to play.

He spoke no English, had terrible brown and yellow teeth and an easy smile, greasy hair and fingers thick and rough from a life of hard work. His left ring finger nail was black and thick and horrible looking, but he played a bit, and wasn't bad. He made eating and drinking motions but we declined. He seemed quite drunk already, even before he showed up with a beer at noon.

The landscape was amazing. We rolled past the coast, high above and caught breathtaking sights through open spaces in the wall of greenery: waves crashing below us on hidden beaches, the front of the train bending around curves and into tunnels 200 feet above the water.

We ate a pretty wretched meal in the dining car. It looked like it hadn't been remodeled since the orangeish-brown wood panels were last in style. The 70s maybe? The view through the big windows and the adorable little girl across from us made up for the bony chicken and tepid cabbage.

She may have been the cutest kid I've seen in all of Asia, and Asian kids are far and away the cutest kids I've ever seen. I made faces at her and stuck chopsticks up my nose, which she really seemed to enjoy. She dug a camera out of her mom's bag and sorta knew how to use it enough to photograph me with my mouth open mid-bite.

Our drunk greasy friend wandered in now and again. He was definitely drunk now, and reeked of incense and dank smoke as he'd lean in just a little too close to me as I was playing, and later trying out some Vietnamese phrases from the back of the guidebook. He was unforgiving with pronunciation: sigh-GONE? sai-GAHN!

I napped and listened to Lady Gaga. I've become smitten; I guess I never paid attention to her music the last billion times its been on the radio and sound system at clubs. Weird. When I awoke the air was still crisp and clear above the ocean to our left, and hazy and golden with the sun trying to fight through the mist-wrapped mountains to our right.

In the evening, our cabinmates finally showed up. They were a couple escorted on by their older family, a cluster of smiling wrinkled faces who grinned and shook our hands when they heard we were American.

"Me too," the guy said, settling in. "We're from St. Louis." He spoke with the high nasally voice of a Vietnamese, so he wasn't born there. "This is my hometown," referring to the village he and his diminutive wife had boarded at.

She said they'd been married for ten years, so when I said they looked so young to be married so long, they volunteered their ages as I'd hoped. She was 32 and he was 38. That meant he was born in 1972, during the war, which would explain why he was much darker than most Vietnamese, with curly hair. His dad was a G.I.

The couple liked to talk, usually at the same time, which made it harder to understand them than just their accents alone, but they were enthusiastic. They were going to spend a month and a half with her family in Saigon before going back home to St. Louis.

"You can eat twenty-four hours," was his reply to my question about what he most liked about Saigon. He offered to give us his cell number so he could take us out to his favorite places, which would've been great, but we eventually all got to bed without exchanging numbers - or names - and the next morning at 5:30AM, we arrived in Saigon and they were gone with their boxes before Adam and I packed up and disembarked. I foolishly thought the train was going to arrive at 5PM and Adam foolishly trusted me, so we were caught a bit off guard.

The best thing about Saigon manifested itself almost instantly. Honest cab drivers. We got in, told him where to go, and the meter came on automatically, and it counted up at the right pace, and we arrived at the backpacker ghetto of Pham Ngu Lao happy as clams, a first after getting out of a cab in Vietnam.

Night Train to Hue

Because we bought our tickets a bit later than we should've, we were stuck on the top level sleeper in hard class. This was the first time on the trip that the term "hard class" has truly been appropriate.

There were six beds per cabin, and they were actually hard. A thin mattress quite inadequately covered the metal and wood plank I was on. Furthermore, there was about two feet of head space. I couldn't come close to sitting upright.

I threw my bag up top and spotted a big cockroach twiddling its antennae at me from the light fixture next to my face. I smashed it with a shoe and brushed it under the bottom bunk.

There was one other tourist in our car. I saw her on the top bunk of her room when I was moving my bags past, so when she was later standing in the corridor looking out the window I struck up a conversation.

"Stuck on the top bunk too? It's pretty tight up there."

"Mmm."

That was as interesting as it got. She was French, traveling before starting a shiatsu massage course in Hanoi, had terrible English, and was exceeding dull and difficult to talk with. I gave up.

As the train began to roll south through the outskirts of the city where people were still on the sidewalks selling shoes and food for blocks and blocks, Adam and I stumbled our way through the jammed soft- and hard-class seats to the dining car.

Pho noodles, while delicious and cheap and everywhere in Vietnam, are a terrible choice of cuisine to serve on a train. I soon found out why the dining car tables were greasy as the rocking of the carriage sloshed the broth over the edge, nearly ruining the game of cribbage Adam and I were playing while we drank beer.

The night was now fallen and at the next stop, our cabin filled up with the other passengers. Besides Adam and I, a woman got on at Hanoi and slept on the middle bunk until three adults with three children piled in. There were nine humans in a cabin the size of a modest walk-in closet.

I made faces at the little kids before reading, finding myself the only one awake after awhile, so I turned out the lights and put my ear plugs in, and spent the night rolling around on the bunk.

I woke a little before we arrived in Hue. It was early enough in the morning for the sun to still be merciful, and I watched the peaceful countryside roll by. The greens were still damp and sleepy and the air was still hazy. There was a solitary farmer under a conical hat hoeing a rice paddy, here and there were stained above-ground tombs, clusters of cement houses flecked with the colors of laundry and sporadic paint, and lines of cyclists waiting on dirt roads for the train to pass.

Hue station was aptly described by Paul Theroux as like a forgotten birthday cake, a French confection left to sit. When we arrived, we fought through a crowd of taxi touts and walked towards a cafe for breakfast. Upon seeing us, two women leapt up and ran towards us, screaming for us to eat at their respective restaurants.

The taxi driver overcharged us as usual. He wanted 60, Adam said our guest house's site had said it would be around 30. I asked for the meter.

"Same same," he said, a phrase that irritates the hell out of me, a horrid catchphrase I first encountered in Thailand.

"Okay, same same. Meter then."

"Same same."

"I know, let's use the meter if its same same."

"For 50."

We agreed, and while we were driving the piece of paper covering the meter fell off. The ride would've been about 25.

"I thought it was same same," pointing to the meter at our guesthouse. He gave me a look that was asking for a punch in the face but we paid him and forgot about it, one more crooked driver willing to lie to your face.

The Hue I found was different than Paul Theroux's Hue, both of them. I didn't expect the chaos and war of his first visit, but I did expect something of the sleepy city with open kitchens and locals with memories of bad times that he wrote about five years ago.

I shouldnt've though. After all, I was a backpacker staying in the insulated world of hostels and Lonely Planets. Adam and I spent the day by hiring a couple of motorcyclists to drive us around to the Citadel, pagodas, and tombs, looking at slick cobblestones and decaying decadence. It got old quick, but the riding was fun.

Interestingly, our main driver Duc called his little tour operation Hue Easyriders, and even had a vest with the name embroidered. I asked him if he saw the movie which came out about the time he was born, in 1969. He didn't even know it was a movie.

We spent the evening drinking free beer at our hostel, then I won trivia with an Aussie named Lisa (what European country is Chisinau the capitol of? Cape York is the northern most point of what country? what color is 0 on a roulette wheel?). Actually we tied a solo player, all of us with 15 of 30 questions right.

Then a whole group of us went to dinner in an open kitchen family restaurant, the one part of my time in Hue that could've been in Theroux's book. The family kept cash hidden in a washing machine outside their bathroom, and in the bathroom was a bucket full of water for flushing, a sink full of a wet sweater and jeans, and their toothbrushes and combs.

Back at the hostel, happy hour was still in full swing, two for one drinks, and at $1 a drink, that meant trouble. I drank Leg Openers, a sweet tangy cocktail with passion fruit pulp with a Belgian I had seen in Hanoi. Adam had another patch shaved into his head by his Canadian trivia partner, punishment for a wrong answer earlier in the night.

It was a crazy night that I won't describe in detail for the sake of those poor souls involved, and for some reason I wound up with this phrase written in my notebook, in someone else's hand: Fruitshakes & Cigarettes.

How to Pass a Weekend in Hanoi

Friday night we met up with Courtney, Randy, Yannis, and Carlos from soloing and Cat Ba. After all of us finding our separate ways back to Hanoi, we met in the same hostel and had a little reunion night out; just heartwarming, I know.

We started by playing Asshole and drinking free beer in our hostel, then went out in search of bia hoi which took way longer than it should. Twelve beers on the street put us back a total $3.50. Then it was off to karaoke. At least that was the plan.

Google Maps led us astray, down a little alley by our hostel to where there was most certainly no karaoke. We went to a bar instead and a bartender was spinning and tossing flaming bottles of booze. Then the mouthy friendly woman behind the bar gave us directions to a karaoke place, and the cab driver brought us there to find no karaoke. We demanded karaoke and the driver asked someone where he could drop us because we had agreed to pay way too much for the ride and the least he could do was just get us to a karaoke place.

We got to one, but they wanted to charge like $20 an hour per person. We walked back to eat and drink on the street in our neighborhood.

That was Friday. On Saturday everyone had left except for Adam and I, and we were feeling lazy so we went to the movies. After accusing the cabbie of bringing us in the wrong direction, I was humbled when he brought us straight to the theater.

The map I had looked at showed it way north of us; it turns out that the Internet is occasionally not to be trusted. Who knew? It's hard to give the benefit of the doubt sometimes when you're constantly getting hosed - my bad.

We went to see Faster, but Adam talked me into seeing Due Date instead. It fucking sucked. Don't see it unless you like flat rehashed jokes that just aren't that funny, and films that are broadly uninspired in every way. The best part was when Robert Downey Jr. punched an obnoxious little kid in the gut.

Fortunately, we got there early and the movie was finished by 8PM and Faster started at 9PM.

Double feature!

Faster was infinitely better. The Rock was pissed off the whole time and had about eight lines of dialog, like a juiced up inked up Frank Morris. Here's an example of dialog:

After the warden's lengthy monologue -upon The Rocks release from prison - about darkness, life on the outside, and turning a new leaf,

Warden: Do you have any questions?
The Rock: Yeah. Where's the exit?

Truly awesome stuff. Billy Bob Thornton is a junkie cop, and there's some sissy British guy who's a prima donna hitman. There were no boobs, despite a quick scene in a strip club, and after taking so many steroids to get so jacked, The Rock strangely didn't even take his shirt off.

Here's one more example of how awesome the movie was:

The Rock is about to execute a pastor who had severely wronged him in the past, before the pastor "found God" and turned his life around. The pastor, invoking his unwavering faith, beseeches The Rock for mercy in God's name:

The Rock: God can't save you from me.

Pure class, pure entertainment. It's a train to Hue tonight, then Saigon, then god-knows-what.

More Photos

It's always a fucking debacle with public computers and shady interfacing, but I got more photos up. I finished off my album of China, and made one of Vietnam. The links will always be on the right side bar.

Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay is what Yangshuo would look like if it was flooded. It's stunning. There are thousands of islands rising out of the sea of pale green water, many of them ripe for climbing.

I was indifferent at first, but that was apparently the draw for us: deep water soloing. We booked a tour that had us shuttled around like cattle onto this bus and this boat, eat now, sleep here, let's go to a cave. It was nice enough, but I was in a foul mood to start with. The bed bugs that ravaged me after karaoke on the boat the first night didn't lighten my mood either.

We stayed for a night on Monkey Island after that, at a quiet little beach resort from where we hiked to see the eponymous monkeys frolicking. After that night, instead of getting shuttled back to boat to bus to boat to bus, we ditched the group on Cat Ba Island.

Cat Ba is the biggest island in Ha Long Bay, and home to the only thing resembling a city: a strip of tall cement hotels along the waterfront with villages and national park behind it. We booked a soloing trip for the next day.

We wound up soloing two days. We made some friends the first day, had a blast, and went back for more the second day, though it was grayer and colder than the first day, which was a tad gray and cold to begin with.

Didn't matter. The soloing was great. Putter up to a vertical island on a basket boat, grab onto the wall and hold on while the boat backs away. Climb up until you fall or until you're so high that you don't want to jump, and then you jump anyway. I found one of the joys of this was taking photos at high speed as people were falling and then zooming in on the faces they made. Sorry Randy, but this one is one of my favorites:



Evenings were pretty quiet in town. After coming back from the bar or a friend's room, the hotels had steel curtains down and we had to bang on them to get in or out. Hotels were also, as I said, tall, and Adam and I were on the 7th floor of a place with no elevator. Just exercise though, I didn't really mind.

After four nights on the island, relaxing, climbing, jumping off boats, cruising on scooters, Adam and I tagged onto the latest batch of tourists coming from Monkey Island, where we had ditched our tour days before, and got back on the bus to Hanoi.

First Impressions: Vietnam

Well my first impression was that there are a shitload of scooters on the roads. I don't understand how it works. But soon after that, we got off on the wrong foot.

First a taxi tout tried getting us to pay an exorbitant amount off the meter from the "bus station" (side of a scooter-choked boulevard). We demanded a metered ride so he put us in his buddy's car, a bit too cheerfully. We wound up paying almost double the initially quoted price on a circuitous route. It was obvious what he was doing and it pissed me off. I wrote down his car number, like I could ever do anything with it.

The the hostel said they had to keep my passport, which I wouldn't have really minded if I hadn't just gotten hosed by the taxi driver. It bothered me, though I knew it would be safe. I eventually left it.

Then I wanted to find a good book. I couldn't manage to pick up a Haruki Murakami book for the life of me in China, blowing the chances I had because I thought I could just do it later. I walked to one pile of books in an alley. There was a Paul Theroux book retracing his Great Railway Bazaar. I held out for Murakami, walking 20 minutes to a street of bookshops.

All the shops had the worst imaginable selection, if any at all, of books in English. The stores on the street had photocopied Lonely Planet guides. I nearly paid six dollars for one until I opened it up and saw it was fake and its maps were unreadable. The whole little excursion was a waste of time. I settled for the Theroux at the first place.

And then Adam insisted on leaving for Ha Long Bay the next morning. We'd been in Hanoi about four hours and he wasn't impressed though I thought it was a cool city. We booked a tour and the next morning was shuttled onto a bus and then, after a couple hours dropped at a "rest stop". It was really an overpriced souvenir purgatory, with insubstantial food and everyone stood outside under the roof and out of the rain.

Then we arrived at the port to head into the bay. It was a zoo of tourists and I know where I stand as just another tourist, but the sight was depressing nonetheless.

Fortunately, that's about where Vietnam stopped sucking, or I should say, I stopped being so testy.

Buses Buses Buses

It was time to get out of China. I was in the south and Vietnam was the next logical step. We left Yangshuo at 11:30AM on a bus and got into Nanning, the provincial capitol around 6PM. You wouldn't think it's too hard to find a taxi at a long-distance bus station after a bus gets in - and it wasn't - but it was difficult to get someone to let us into one for some reason.

After collaborating with a British couple we were on the bus with, we got some guy to get some other guy to let us in his van. We all spent the night at an apartment hostel, quite similar to the one I stayed at in Busan on what was technically the first night of this trip. It was run by a talkative Texan named Weston who had questionable but entertaining parenting impulses.

The next morning we had another problem getting a taxi because the massive boulevards were jam-packed with such a torrent of vehicles that it was uncertain whether one would actually be able to stop to pick us up. We did make it though, and boarded a bus to Hanoi, again with the British couple.

Two days on a bus is not my idea of fun. You stop at piss-rank gang bathrooms and can buy only imitation Pringles and shrink-wrapped meat and flat Red Bull to sustain yourself. I guess it could've been worse though.

When we got to the Chinese-Vietnamese border, we were shuttled off the bus to the first processing building on the Chinese side by long covered golf carts. The Chinese official had a hard time believing that the handsome, bearded, long-haired man in my passport was the same handsome, clean-cut, short-haired guy standing in front of him. Just like the offical when entering China. Fortunately his superior came over and waved me through.

We were shuttled to the Vietnamese processing building, breezed through, and were shuttled onto another bus on the Vietnamese side. All in all the border process was like a casual drive through a leafy mountain park, a world away from the penitentiary-like marches on the Mongol/Russian and Mongol/Chinese borders.

The "bus stop" in Hanoi was a wide street even more choked with scooters and traffic than any street I'd seen in China. It was borderline inconceivable how a coach bus like ours could navigate the beat-up alleys full of scooters coming towards us, and even pull U-turns across roads that seem too dense to walk across. I guess if you're big enough, anything will stop for you.

As if two days on a bus weren't enough, Adam insisted on getting the hell out of Hanoi ASAP. He claimed it was just another city, but I thought it was possibly the most interesting city I've ever been to based on the few hours and one night we spent there. I can visit more on the way back.

We took a bus, part of a three-day tour, the next day to Halong Bay, a world-famous climbing destination of thousands of gumdrop karst pinacles towering above turquoise waters. Judging by the tour buses and hordes of tourists, it's also a world-famous tourist trap. Understandably so, as beautiful as it is, but that's another story.