Distance Traveled: 29,100 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB-PP-HCMC-NC-TH-HA-H-L)
Time Difference: -10 hours (from Brisbane)
Soundtrack: None at the moment
Currently Inspired by: There is no need for temples, no need for complicated
philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is
kindness. - Dalai Lama
Stacks: No major ones, although I went for a million skids in the Forbidden City as they have flagstones everywhere that are covered in moss and also in Hanoi I think I nearly got hit by about a hundred cars. Thankfully they are all almosts. There was a very funny stack in this house on Christmas Day but I don't know if the person involved would like me to publicise it ;)
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| The entrance to the Citadel |
My last blog left off in Hue, where it rained almost constantly
for my entire trip. On my last evening
there I went out for dinner with Cam and a very very funny New Zealand couple
that he had met earlier that day and who had us in stitches for most of the
night. On my last day in Hue, I decided
to actually go out and do stuff rather than farting around waiting for nice
weather, so Cam and I trekked off to the other side of the city and visited the
Citadel, home of the Flag Tower and the Purple Forbidden City, which is an
incredible Chinese imperial palace built around six hundred years ago for the
emperor. There are several buildings
within the city, each one more ornate and impressive than the last. It takes a good hour and a half to walk
around it, and I was very glad that I got to see it. The walk there and back is quite interesting
also, as there are many large and well maintained buildings on the city
streets. This is where I said goodbye to
Cam, as I headed up north and he went to meet up with some other friends for
Xmas and New Year. For pictures of Hue
and the Forbidden City, click here.
I took a sleeper train to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam and
the heart of communism in the country.
The train was... err... rustic, let’s say, and its feet smell had
the unfortunate tendency to flash me back to my trip on the Oldest Bus In The
World. I was in a four berth sleeper,
top bunk, and as there were only two of us in the berth at the start of the
trip I bribed the conductor with $5 to let me have the bottom bunk and to make
the later arrival take the top. This may
sound bad but really it’s just business as usual in Asia, and the guy who came
later (a communist soldier in full regalia, I was dismayed to note) was,
fortunately for me, happy to take the top bunk.
I had brief and vivid flashes of being locked up in a Vietnamese prison
for years without trial but of course everything was fine. What was not fine, however, was my Slovakian berthmate. I don’t know how we even got onto the topic,
but it turns out that he is everything I despise in Western men who come to
Asia – an Asian woman chaser. At the
very very far end of the spectrum, it must be said. He goes onto websites and
finds girls that are looking for a western man to take care of them and then
gets into relationships with them, so it’s not like he’s EXACTLY supporting the
sex trade, even though these relationships are really transactional in nature.
He married his second Asian wife when he was 39 and she was 17. So everything about his behaviour is really
borderline, in my opinion. I tried not
to be judgmental (to his face anyway) and just adopted an expression of open
curiosity to which he responded quite eagerly, as though he was keen to talk to
someone about it.
He made several statements that I disagreed with (eg. how
lots of the girls in the sex trade in Asia really enjoy what they do and aren’t
forced or pressured into it and would rather do it than get an education or do
anything more “respectable” and also that “everyone in a relationship is using
the other person for something anyway, it might as well be money or sex”)
however due to the fact that we were in forced close quarters for the next
twelve hours I managed to hold my tongue until he said the following two things
1. “I actually prefer Japanese or Chinese women, but Thai women are just easier
to get” and 2. “All these feminists that have a problem with this kind of thing
are just ugly women that can’t get a man”.
I still didn’t go off as much as I wanted to, for the reason previously
stated, but I let my feelings on the topic be known quite without any room for misunderstanding,
soon after which we both said our goodnights and retired to our bunks, for
which I was profoundly grateful.
Unfortunately sleeping in a narrow, five foot five long bunk surrounded
by three snoring men (one of whom was a hideous, creepy chauvinist) and an ancient,
clanking train is reasonably difficult and I arrived in Hanoi, cranky, crumpled
and bleary at around 5.30am the next day.
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| My cabin on the Eclipse |
I had booked a two day, one night boat trip out on Halong
Bay and they were picking me up from my hotel at 8.00am. When I arrived there that morning the hotel staff very
kindly allowed me to use a spare room to have a shower and a quick nap before
the pick up (as I was not actually paying to stay there until the following
night) and they also held onto my luggage so I could just take a day pack, for
which I was profoundly grateful. It
takes about three and a half hours to drive to the Halong Bay docks from Hanoi,
and I managed to sleep for most of that time as well, so by the time we arrived
I was feeling human, thankfully. Our
boat, the Eclipse, was a lovely, if a little dated, vessel. The rooms were fairly comfortably appointed and
there was a comfortable sun deck up on top which offered an unobstructed view
of the surroundings. The boat had about
ten double rooms but there were only a handful of us on there – a couple (I
think they were Portugese) with their two incredibly well behaved children, a
Swedish guy and a young American couple from San Francisco on their honeymoon,
so it was intimate and quiet, which I very much enjoyed. There were about another ten or so similar
boats taking people out at the same time as we were heading and also we would
pass them at times or drop anchor near them to explore the area. There was one large boat with about forty young
Australians on it who were drunkenly shouting and swearing and jumping into the
icy water and basically making tits of themselves, and I was cross and
embarrassed on their behalf until I had a flashback to my first OE and realised
that I most likely would have been on that boat with them, doing the same thing :)
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| One of the 3,000 limestone islands |
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| Part of the Sapphire Caves |
Although the limestone isles which make up the most
recognisable features of Halong Bay are really superb, for me the most beautiful
part of the trip was our visit to the Sapphire Caves. These are massive caves within one of the
limestone islands. We docked and walked
up a million steps and then down into the labyrinth. There were about four main caves. I think our guide said in total that they spanned
around 1,000 metres (I presume cubic?) and they were simply magnificent, like
nothing I had ever seen in my life. It
is one of those places that you walk around with your head on a swivel and your
jaw hitting your chest, like those clown heads at carnivals. Unfortunately, my camera died about ten
minutes into the boat ride from the docks, and as my charger was tucked safely
away in my suitcase back in Hanoi, I was unable to take more than a few hazy
shots of the limestone islands, which was very disappointing. If you look here in my Hanoi / Halong Bay album,the photos I have included of the Sapphire Caves are from the internet. I’m allowed to do that because I did actually
go there. Isn’t that the rule? The food was delicious, the company was
great, the staff were helpful and overall the experience was very good if a
little overpriced, although I was worse for wear on the second day after
staying up late with Jorgen (Swedish guy) and drinking more than half a bottle
between us of an extremely potent rice vodka.
We certainly solved many of the world’s problems... if only I could
remember the solutions!
I’m just going to say it – Hanoi is nuts. It exists at this kind of frenetic pace that
even seems to jump up a couple of notches at nighttime rather than calming
down. I know I said the traffic in Ho
Chi Minh City was the worst but Hanoi makes HCMC appear calm and orderly. There is definitely MORE traffic in Ho Chi
Minh, and the roads are wider and appear scarier, but there are just absolutely
no rules whatsoever in Hanoi, and bikes and cars scream around these tiny
corners and cut in front of people, drive on the wrong side of the road, hop up
on the footpaths and hoot and shout at each other constantly. The noise is deafening, and the people are a
lot more pushy and aggressive. Don’t
bother standing politely and patiently in line for something in Hanoi. A local will simply push you to the side and
get in front of you and start talking to the cashier. You sometimes have to force your way to the
front. I was pretty exhausted by the
time I got to Hanoi as Vietnam was so crazy and I spent so much time travelling
overland between all these different towns that I didn’t really have the energy
to deal with it. Apart from a quick food
forage I basically hid in my room the first afternoon and evening back from the
boat and nursed my hangover, and then a horrible sewerage smell wafting into my
room from god knows where drove me out into the streets on the second morning,
which I was actually quite glad about, because it is a fantastic place to walk
around and I wouldn’t have liked to have missed it. Like most nation’s capitals, Hanoi has a
profusion of government buildings however unlike most nation’s capitals, the
buildings in Hanoi are really quite beautiful.
They look like large, stately homes with ornate detailing and lush
grounds.
There is a large lake in the centre of Hanoi with a circular
path all the way around it, which would be a nice inner city oasis if there was
any way of shutting out the incessant traffic noise. It is really quite big. I imagine walking at a decent clip (I ambled
and stopped all the time) it would take about thirty minutes to circumnavigate. This is the point at which I became lost
because I failed to note any landmarks at the point at which I entered the
circle and then had no idea where to get off it. I mentioned I was tired – my last full day in
Asia and I got lost for the first time!
I continued to stroll, figuring I would see something familiar
eventually and became quite hungry so stopped into, purely by chance, the worst
restaurant in Hanoi and possibly even all of South East Asia. I spent an unhappy half an hour patiently
chewing on pieces of beef flavoured gristle, surreptitiously spitting out a
salad that had apparently been dipped in bleach, and quietly choking after
biting into a large and unrecognisable piece of raw ginger. To call their food bad would be like calling
an English winter a bit cool. Speaking of
which... (see what I did there?)
LONDON! Ahhh, how I’ve
missed you. After being awake for
something like twenty two hours on taxis, trains, two planes and the tube I
arrived, shivering and delirious to the station from where Mattie and his lovely
housemate Romana came to pick me up. I
was so happy, just walking through Heathrow, sitting on the tube, and having
everyone completely ignore me! I can’t even tell you how much the anonymity
meant to me after three months of being a white giant devil in countries where
staring (frequently while also picking one’s nose) is not considered to be rude
in the least. I am invisible here. I could don an Indian headdress, a Frankie
Says Relax t-shirt, a pair of pink wellies and nothing else, and dance around the
high street, clucking like a chicken and weeing on lampposts without attracting
a second glance from London’s jaded masses.
How wonderful it is to be back in the land of Marks and Spencer, chicken
and bacon sandwiches, double decker buses and an extraordinary amount of
cultural history in a relatively small area.
Even the house I’m staying in had a celebrity in it once – Marc Bolan of
T-Rex fame grew up here, as the small plaque out the front commemorates. Quite in opposition to the feeling in Asia,
London feels like a place of endless possibilities, and is the perfect place
for me to come and chill out, get hugs, and rebuild my mental defences before
heading to Morocco, the part of the trip that I don’t mind saying is making me
the most nervous.
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| Mattie and I on Xmas Day |
Christmas was a fun day although didn’t really feel like
Christmas at all. We exchanged gifts in
the morning and then ten of us went on for a late roast lunch at a local pub
and came back here for more drinks, which quickly got very messy. I was in bed by nine (as I am most nights –
damn jetlag!) and since then have just been chilling out watching movies and
going nowhere apart from quick dashes to the high street for supplies. It’s been wonderfully relaxing, and I am
getting my fill of hugs, which was precisely what I wanted. You see some shenanigans here in my Xmas album.
So, I am flying to Marrakech on the 2nd January,
and my next blog will be from there. I
hope this one has provided a sufficient eulogy for the Asian part of my
trip. All at once confronting,
beautiful, pathetic, rich, peaceful, harried, pushy, gentle and exciting, it
has been an exceptional and unforgettable three months, and thanks to everyone
who has come along and been sharing this journey with me! I love your feedback and emails.
Til Next We Speak
*LOVE*
N
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