Vietnam has, in many ways, kicked my butt. It has also, incidentally, grabbed my butt. Despite all the stresses of traveling in this country, though, I declare that Vietnam is my favorite country that I have been in so far this trip. Why? Because it has BACKBONE. It is pulsingly alive with its own culture and with a fire to keep on rising.
Now, praise be to [...Read More!]
This is the point of the four day motorcycle ride through Vietnam’s Central Highlands (see my expression to the right) where things started to go downhill.
For hours, Lulu and I drove deeper and deeper into the Vietnamese jungle, towards the famed four waterfalls. The day wore on and the sun pounded down. Lulu pointed, as we drove, to a clearing in the thick green. “Cambodia just over there,” [...Read More!]
From Lak Lac, our motorcycle purred Northwest, towards the Vietnamese border with Cambodia. We were getting deep into the countryside, headed steadily towards the jungle and waterfall-filled Yok Don National Park.
One of the most touching moments of the trip occurred as we pulled over on a mountain shoulder near a towering heap of granite blocks. A lone man swung a weighty hammer over and over in the sun, and [...Read More!]
“You want do homestay for first night?” Lulu asked as we wound down the mountain road. We had left Dalat at eight in the morning, and it was now five pm. My motorcycle-sore rear and I said simultaneously, “Any bed is fine!”
On the edge of a mountain we pulled over and Lulu pointed to a sparkle amid the green far below. “Lak Lac down there,” he said. [...Read More!]
Busty travelers of the world: strap on your triple strength sports bras before attempting the passage from Mui Ne, Vietnam, to Dalat! And if you’ve got back problems, hoo boy! Better bring a rigid brace and some Advil.
For the five hours from Mui Ne, our small bus jolted and banged along the rocky road, twisting around mountains and overlooking mist-shrouded green vistas. When a particularly ominous stretch of [...Read More!]
I’ll admit it: when I was in Japan for those ten days in August, I didn’t get it. Everything was so quiet… so mercilessly efficient and effective… so… helpful! The fact that the trains were on time to the MILLISECOND made my free-spirited soul panic.
And yet, I am now starting to get it.
Sitting in Saigon’s hottest new cafe, the Japanese-run “Ministry of Food” (“MOF”), I gazed at my green tea [...Read More!]
There is a toxic lake at the heart of Phnom Penh. If you swim in it, your flesh may sizzle, or perhaps the effects will cancerously explode in a few years. Regardless, though naked children slide through the brownest rivers of the Cambodian side roads, there is not a soul amid the silvery waves of Boeung Kak Lake.
Naturally, this is where I spent my first night in Phnom Penh.
The public bathrooms in Angkor Wat temple complex are some of the most luxurious in Asia. That is to say, they are not holes in the ground, but rather Western-style toilets that you sit on! Sometimes the seats are clean! They have toilet paper and soap! You still can’t throw the toilet paper in the bowl because the pipes can’t handle it (it goes in the trash [...Read More!]
His tiny form flitted past the hole in the stone wall so fast I thought he might be a forest spirit. But then there he was again: sparkling eyes, tiny body in a grubby orange shirt, barefoot… He disappeared again, and I was ten minutes further into the thick jungle path to the next temple when he materialized right beside me.“Hello lady!” he said with a smile. “This used [...Read More!]
One of the visual “ohh!” elements of traveling through a Developing Country is seeing sleek modernity smack dab next to human decay.
Meandering through Bangkok today, four examples of this juxtaposition burst forth.
1. Insanely modern buildings (and sculptures!) cosied up to shacks and rubble.In the U.S. there are plenty of crumbling buildings, and certainly a shack or five thousand, but in a fancy business district in the U.S. you will rarely see [...Read More!]