Washington, DC - Way Behind Schedule

July, 2010. Days after my move to Ottawa, The Boy and I head to that other national capitol to revel in the geekiness of the Smithsonian. We checked out Julia Child's kitchen, had a picnic nearish the White House (about as close to the White House as you can have a picnic), checked out the First Lady's farmers' market and drank Bud Light with the locals.

B has most of the good photos, but here's a smattering of what I captured:

Then on to four days in the Shenandoah Valley, complete with llama treks and an unsuccessful attempt at geocaching.




Travel tip: try airbnb for accommodations. In DC we stayed in a cute house owned by a fabulous woman named Sara who helped us make the most of our trip.

We're going away again for a couple of weeks in June. Stay tuned.

Lazy Post - Macau

Lazy post - Hong Kong

In front of the Hong Kong skyline with Irene, an old friend from my undergrad, who showed me around and hooked me up with a couch to sleep on.


Lantau Island's spectacular bronze Buddha spawned a commercial enterprise that can only be described as "DisneyBuddhaLand"

By the Way

After much ado I finally got my Bali and Vietnam entries up here. Blogger takes a maddeningly long time to load photos, which partly accounts for the delay. But it was really because of me being preoccupied.

Yes, more updates will come - Macau, Hong Kong, and of course, an inventory of the crazy foods I ate. But for now, a request. Come July The Boy and I will be embarking on another adventure - this time together, finally. We're roadtripping to various locations in the northeastern US. Washington DC is definitely on the list. The rest is negotiable, although I certainly think Manhattan is in order. I'd also like to make a small beach getaway happen. I have in my mind the image of a small rented cottage in Massachusetts where we can spend a few days alone, riding bikes and having picnics and being the kind of cute couple that makes single people vomit in their mouths.

We're talking a very small budget here - most of the trip will involve couchsurfing and Amtrak, with a rental car here and there. If anybody knows of a good place to stay that isn't a 4-bedroom house costing $2000/week, I would love you forever. It doesn't have to be in Massachusetts, although I'm pretty stuck on the beach idea. There's just something so romantic and idyllic about shorebirds and sea breezes. It doesn't even have to be a building. Campgrounds will do the trick, too. I haven't discussed this with him, but any man of mine must be willing to sleep in a tent.

Any other recommendations are, of course, very welcome. The best entries win a postcard.

Good Morning, Vietnam!

I began my 3-week epic in the (horrible) Pham Ngu Lau area of Saigon, then escaped the next day to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta. There I joined a fabulous French lady on an early morning boat tour. It included two of the area's famous floating markets, pho on the river, a rustic rice noodle-making operation, a pomelo-peel fight with another boat driver and getting stuck in the aquatic plants that clogged our route. Kids on the riverbank (like kids everywhere in the Delta***) would wave frantically and shout "hello hello hello hello!". Our guide was a tiny, charismatic fellow who knew absolutely no English except "tip want."

Having seen everything I came to Can Tho to see, I fought through a downpour to get to the bus station. The only option to get where I wanted to go was with a very aggressive tout in a cramped van. Nothing like the Mai Linh bus I had taken from HCMC, which was a frilly, perfumed deal and included a free water bottle and some Vietnamese pop concert blaring on the big-screen tv up front. I arrived in My Tho cold, exhausted and cranky and checked myself into a Lonely Planet - recommended hotel (displaying a true lack of creativity) where I took a lukewarm shower, cried and wished I was at home. A bowl of hu tieu chay (the veg version of the local noodle soup) and 10 hours of sleep made me feel better.

I woke up in the morning and found a lovely cyclo driver named Nip who let me rent his (very decent) bike and even gave me a complimentary cyclo ride to go pick it up. I took a ferry across the river and biked through country roads (and then a highway, and then some less-country-like but still out-of-the-way roads) in Ben Tre province. Feasted on rambutans, chatted with some locals and remembered why I had come in the first place. When I returned the bike, my friend asked with concern how much I had paid for the ferry ride, the fruit, and nodded in approval when I told him - I'd been charged the local price, not the ludicrous tourist price.

I could have stayed, but I was on a schedule - I had to make my way up to Hoi An for when my travel buddies arrived from Singapore. So Mr. Nip arranged for his cyclo-driver friend Mr. Kha to drive me to the bus station and I moved on, heading back to Saigon to catch a northbound train.


Next stop was Quy Nhon, a beachy town that doesn't get many foreign tourists. At the train station I met a British investment banker-turned-organic farmer and together we navigated the sea of xe om (motorcycle taxi) drivers to get to town. We rented bikes and spent a couple of days alternately trying to interpret baffling Lonely Planet maps and quaffing cheap beer.

From there I headed to Hoi An, town of the 500 tailors. The bus ride was interesting - the "restroom break" was on the side of the road, where myself and the only other woman on board had to find a semi-private place to do our business. Nothing bridges a language barrier better than squatting together in a ditch. Nearby, an old lady tended to her water buffalo.


Hoi An is cute, with great accommodations and lots to do. It's also full of foreigners and, yes, tailors. I got a custom suit and winter jacket but wasn't in much of a shopping mood. I think it had something to do with the the desperation-tinged approach of many of the shopkeepers - "You buy something now?" - that made me feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed. But the Boy connected me with a friend in town, the lovely and hilarious Kim. We went out for coffee and talked about life, family and men. She took me to the local places and stuffed me full of fabulous Vietnamese food. Sea food hot pot. Rice paper rolls. Spicy snails. Pho from a fly-by-night stall in the cloth market parking lot. Two of my friends from Singapore arrived and we did the tourist thing.



Eventually we moved on to Hue, an area that bore much of the damage from what the Vietnamese call "the American War." The Forbidden Purple City is spectacular despite having suffered massive damage. We went on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone, something I really felt the need to do. My grandfather was in the US Army and served in Vietnam. I stood in a rebuilt bunker at Khe Sang base, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war and a turning point in the USA deciding to get out of the country, and cried. Now, I'm a leftist and not a big fan of war, and I'm skeptical (to say the least) of the US mission in Vietnam to begin with. The damage done to that country was massive and heartbreaking. But what ultimately had the most profound effect on me was the thought of these young American men, sent far away from home to a hot, unfamiliar country to fight an enemy they couldn't see. I thought of the seige, the air thick with artillery smoke and noise, and soldiers - my Grampy among them - watching their friends fall. And I just broke down.


We didn't head any further north - it was December, 4 degrees in Hanoi, and we never would have survived in the scanty clothing we'd brought from Singapore. Plus, our time was limited. The Germans wanted to see the Delta so we headed back towards the south and into Ben Tre, the province beside My Tho and one I really wanted to see. Despite the promises in the Lonely Planet it proved nearly impossible to charter a slowboat there but the hilariously nervous and smiley dude running our hotel had a fledgling tour operation and took us out. The best thing about that part of the country is the slow pace - just Vietnamese people living their lives. We drank beer by the manmade lake and watched an ancient woman make waffles on the sidewalk, so absorbed in what she was doing that she didn't notice us trying to buy some. It cost 1000 dong for two - about 5 cents - and when we misunderstood and overpaid her, she handed us back the extra. How refreshing! We also had the most incredible, big bowls of seafood Hu tieu for a dollar each. Honestly, I could live there.


Kim and her sister met us back in Saigon for the end of our trip. We went to a theme park outside of the city, where they took us into the temple (yes, a temple in a theme park) and taught us a bit about Vietnamese culture and spirituality. Kim came on the Viking ship ride and screamed until they let her off...so we stuck to tamer activities like the paddleboats. At every opportunity they tried to stuff me full of food ("Alex! Bigger!") and Kim repeatedly punched me in the arm and called me "Alex khung" ("crazy") right up until it was time to leave. Man, I miss that girl.


*** At one point I sent The Boy a text message saying "omfg. let's have babies." I hope that didn't freak him out. They're just so obscenely cute.

For Your Good Luck: A Guide to Bali

Early in the semester I contemplated a trip to Bali - after all, I was in that part of the world, and it's such an iconic destination, and I didn't want my Indonesia experience to be defined by Batam Island. But my favourite Australian, disenchanted with the idea of a bunch of her drunken 21-year-old compatriots, convinced me otherwise. Then one day she messaged me in excitement, describing a place where we could witness whimsical ceremonies (and you all know I'm a sucker for whimsy) and bike through strawberry fields. Where could we find such a place? "Bali!"

This being Southeast Asia, we found some S$70 round-trip tickets for the week between class and exams and headed out of the city.

The Balinese practice a fascinating version of Hinduism and the island is full of symbols of their faith. Small offerings are placed outside of businesses throughout the day, full of flowers and food - everything from rice to Mentos to goldfish crackers. This is apparently to get tourists to buy souvenirs at or near the asking price - which, depending on the seller, can be anywhere from eminently reasonable to ten times the price they're willing to accept.



Ubud - our temporary refuge from the drunk tourists who have stripped every shred of beauty from the town of Kuta - is a yuppie Western treehugger's paradise: organic restaurants, yoga, a new-agey feel-good vibe. I ate life-altering raw vegan food and got a sandalwood oil massage. We stayed in an adorable guesthouse with a garden and full breakfast for an embarrassingly low price. That said, it's still a major tourist destination, complete with all the trappings that come with that. One woman proudly assured me that her brother had made the (clearly mass-produced and cheap) earrings in her shop. "Oh," I replied, "so how comes these ones say "made in Korea?" Without missing a beat, she beamed at me and said "oh, that's just the packaging!" Indeed.



We finally discovered the more Indonesia-like part of town - just outside of the yuppie area, where locals set up candle-lit stalls and sell home-cooked food wrapped in banana leaves - the day before we left.

Nonetheless, it was an amazing week. Bali is home to a number of volcanoes and you can arrange early-morning tours to catch sunset from the peak of several of them. We went to Gunung Batur, the second-largest. Our guide was a young local guy who works as a guide on weekends to pay the school fees for himself and his brother. The fees are 60 000 rupiah per month for each of them - about $6US, but a hefty sum for the locals. We stopped at a shrine halfway up the mountain so our guide could make offerings. Later, one of the girls in our group expressed concern that her chucks weren't the safest things to be climbing in. Our guide earnestly assured her that she would be okay, since he had prayed for our safety and the gods would protect us all. That didn't seem to be comforting to her, but strangely enough, in some small way, it was to me.

We also discovered, in Ubud, a gift shop run by an organization called Senang Hati, which provides housing, support and job skills training for people with disabilities. We arranged for a driver to their headquarters and met the residents, hung out with them for an afternoon. They're obviously badly in need of funding but they invited us to lunch and the students in the esthetician course practicised their skills on us. They lent us sarongs and took us to the Holy Springs Temple, where tourists milled around but only Balinese were actually bathing. They invited us to get in, the only limitation being that we weren't to use two certain spouts - they were for dead bodies. The prayer I said at the first spout was one of thanks - thanks that the pools had good drainage. Honestly, it was amazing. To share in these people's lives, in the practice of their faith and their struggle for acceptance in their society. Also: they have a great handicrafts store on-site, with amazing prices (about half of what they charge at the Ubud shop), no haggling and purchases help support the Foundation. After days of relentless touting and being quoted ludicrous prices for cheap tourist swag, it was so refreshing.



For our finale we went back to the Kuta area, only because we had to catch our plane from there. We actually ventured into the famous "Poppies" area, known as backpacker central. It was dirty, disgusting and overpriced. We hightailed it back to the place we had stayed the first night - in Legian, nearby, but quieter, cleaner, cheaper, less obnoxious. We wandered the beach, used our dwindling supply of rupiah to buy a lunch of avocado and corn chips and to rent a couple of surf boards, and got a complimentary mini-lesson from the surfboard dude, Edi, who apparently had taken a fancy to my fair travel companion.

We ran into him later and ended up spending a few hours with him and his buddy before we left for the airport. They told us about coming from Java in search of work; about learning to surf and speak English on the beach; about how it's boring to look at the same stretch of beach every day but at least they get to make a decent living doing something they enjoy. His friend had previously worked in Malaysia without a passport, swimming ashore from the boat and living in secret to avoid deportation. It drove a lot of things home - these guys were our age but so many of the things we take for granted - mobility, literacy, opportunity - are unimaginable luxuries. We were able to connect over a couple of drinks and some bad salsa dancing, and I guess that's the magic of travel.

Conclusion: Do not go to Kuta. Skip directly over Kuta. If you must stay there, at least get a decent place in Legian. Soak up some arts in Ubud and eat at a couple of swish restaurants because they're so ridiculously cheap. But see the real thing, too. Find the banana-leaf stalls that open by candlelight after dark and get out of the touristed areas. Be careful who you ask about public transport - just about everyone has a vested interest in making you think that the only way around is by private driver. Visit Senang Hati. Most importantly, have faith in people - even the most relentless touts are just trying to make a living, and there are lots of really amazing people who just want to interact with you, the way that you want to interact with them.

Time warp

Okay, I am home. My beloved Macbook died when I got back from Bali (just in time to NOT be fixed for my final exam) and promptly broke again in Vietnam. So yes, I am hopelessly behind here. But fear not, I will treat you to an extravagant buffet of Asian destinations and food porn as soon as I get my baby fixed. Again.