Biker bangers

So in Hue we had good weather even though it was rainy season (only in the middle of Vietnam, not the North or South...) so we took advantage of this during our three days there by getting a motorbike tour all over the city one day.  For ~10 US$ you can hire one moto-bike driver to drive you all over the city, show you the good sites etc.  Good way to see the city, and a good way to spread the money you spend around the community instead of just going to travel agencies..  Gavin's moto-bike driver was really cool and knew English well.  Apparently he is a rice farmer on a Vietnamese coop farm, and a tourist moto-bike driver / tour guide in the off season.

We heard that sometimes the street side moto bike tour guides have been known to take tourists to their friends house and rob them, and there was one point when we had been driving through rice fields for about 20 minutes, with nothing apparent ahead where we started getting a little nervous that we might become victims of such a happenstance, but we dismissed those thoughts and made it through the day no problem.

The trouble with motorbikers came later that night.  Gavin and I went out to a local bar that had about 6 girls patrolling the streets, practically demanding that you take their fliers even if you alraedy have one!  We get there during the early part of happy hour (which is ~5 hours long) and take advantage of the cheap drinks.  We met the DJ, a Vietnamese guy named 'Lucky' who was really cool and charismatic, and after a few drinks we go and get dinner with Lucky, compliments of Gav, then head back to the bar to get some more drinks.  Lucky has to work and Gavin and I have to dance and play pool, so we divide in order to conquer.  Gavin gets caught up dancing with a whole assortment of internationals while I (why?) am still playing pool.  We keep the drinks flowing, and Lucky helps us in our pursuit of intoxication by giving us free drinks every hour (very strong free drinks as well).  Gavin and I spend the rest of the night gigging (a.k.a. dancing hard), until some English girl gets her purse stolen and it kinda kills the buzz, so after a drunk mission to find her purse (Gavin was searching the whole bar and didn't even know what he was looking for!!!) fails, Gavin and I head home on foot.

It's about a 5 minute walk to our hotel from the bar, but of course in Vietnam everyone seems to think walking is a tragedy, and you must motor bike everywhere!  So as soon as we leave the bar we have three motor-bike drivers following us trying to get us to get on their bike, and at the same time trying to sell us various drugs.   Gav and I have both consumed a lot of alcohol (partly thanks to Lucky feeding us free drinks every hour) but Gav seems to be on a different level from me.  While the moto bike drivers are offering drugs Gav is heckling them!  (at the top of his voice) "Oh you have cocaine!!", and  "No, we don't need marijuana, your weed is SHIT!"  This pisses off one of the moto-bike drivers who starts talking mad shit to Gavin, I am trying to get Gav on one of the other moto bikes to get out of there and get home asap because it's not looking very good, but Gav absolutely refuses to pay a motor bike driver a dollar for such a short ride, and "has perfectly good legs".   We continue walking with these guys following us and get back to the alleyway where our hotel is located, and of course where there is yet another motor bike driver waiting...

Gavin is a little bit ahead of me as I am trying to get rid of the moto bikers behind us, Gavin tries to walk by the new moto-bike driver, and of course this one is also trying to sell us drugs, and when Gavin tries to walk by the new moto driver gets in his way, so now we have 1 moto bike driver in front of us, and 3 behind at the entrance of an alleyway.  The new moto bike driver is very pushy, literally and figuratively.  He really wants gavin to buy some pot, and is not letting Gavin pass by.  He has his hands all over Gavin, and there's nothing I can do except step to the side and watch, and make sure his hands don't go IN Gavin's pockets, because they seem to be everywhere else!

We are in a really bad situation being surrounded in an alleyway, so i'm trying to keep the spacing good, I immediately relocate near the entance so i can't be surrounded by these drug selling bikers, who also happen to be pissed off at us... I yell to Gavin to be wary of his pockets, which he acknowledges and finally manages to push past the pushy moto bike driver.  I wait until Gavin is near the door of our hotel before i fully enter the alley, and as i walk through with the bikers all talking shit, the one in front snatches my hat off my head and throws it to one of the others.  I'm getting really tired of this shit at this point!

So after the biker pushes Gav around a bit, don't leave us alone, practically try to fight us, and then steal my favorite hat off my head.  I brisquely march up to the one with my hat, snatch it back and march to the door of our hotel without saying another word to them, and when i get in the door i am quite thankful that Gavin and I both made it home safely and with all our belongings.

After one month of travels

I wrote this after 1 month of travel, though it has been longer now, i'm just getting around to posting it...  I finished my contract teaching in Korea, and it was a lot of fun, I learned a LOT about teaching

I, learned a LOT about teaching, about Korean culture, I learned the language relatively proficiently, and I got involved with a lot of different organizations.  I did some volunteer work at an orphanage on the weekends, I acted in a play (SO MUCH WORK!), I took some Korean classes, I met a lot of good people, Korean and Foreign, took piano lessons, and did language exchanges on top of going out and socializing... In short, I learned a lot, made some great friends, and earned some money while doing it! 

I'm now in Southern Vietnam, I have spent over 3 weeks in VN thus far, and have about 5 days left on my visa.  So Gavin and I are trying to see all of Saigon and the Mekong Delta, and possibly a VN island to the South before heading on to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and to meet up with Gavin's girlfriend!

We are thinking about buying some mountain bikes, but also looking into renting some for a week or two, so we can bike all the way through Cambodia.  We heard the roads there are pretty bad, but flat, so biking probably wouldn't take much longer than buses, and it would be a great way to see the countryside, and we could just camp if we didn't find a town with a hostel to suit us for the night.  After ~2 weeks in Cambodia we are going to meet up with some friends in Bangkok, Thailand, and travel to Southern Thailand to do some rock climbing around Krabi during our friends' grad school winter vacation for a few weeks.  Gavin, Gavin's girlfriend, Karenth, and I also plan to get our open water scuba certifications in that area during that time.

The trip is going great so far!  I've met some really cool people, including a really cool Israeli guy named Penis whom taught me a little Hebrew, a cool Vietnam war vet who told me some cool stories about his return to Vietnam, Bamboo the tour guide, and many others!

Gavin and I did some DWS (deep water solo) rock climbing (rock climbing over water with no safety equipment, when you fall or if you get too high for your comfort, you just fall into the water)  in Halong Bay, which is an amazingly beautiful place, and a great way to spend a day there!  My highest ascent was ~55', and I had a few that were ~35'.  Not too shabby for how little climbing I've done in the past 2 years!  We also did some kayaking in the bay, which was also really nice.  I have rented motor bikes 3 times now, in smaller cities, to drive around the surrounding mountains / bay / jungles, which is a great way to see the area, and a lot of fun just in the driving itself!  I was considering buying a motorbike to do the rest of my travels on, but it is quite dangerous, my insurance wouldn't cover me since I don't have a motorcycle license back home (or here!), and I couldn't find a bike for sale in the right price range with the right specs for me.  Anyway, taking the bus and trains around seems like a safer option for now, and I still have plenty to do and see!

Gavin and I got some custom clothes made for us in Hoi An, a city rather famous for its tailoring.  Gavin got a whole suit, a couple shirts, dress shoes, and a dress for his girlfriend!  (She sent him her sizes)  As for me I just got some custom made leather flip flops (which I just lost the other day zip lining...), and a custom made shirt.  I wanted to get a suit as well, as it only costs 80 - 150 US$ depending on the material, but then I would either have to mail it home which is relatively costly, or lug it around with me, which is not preferable.  And I had just bought a new camera since mine was stolen (I've lost many things already this trip!) and I splurged a little bit on the camera, going for the tough kind that can go 10 meters underwater and be dropped from 2M, also takes pretty decent pics, so i didn't want to shell out more dough on commodities I didn't really need.

We just left Dalat the other day, where we did a 2-day adventure tour hiking a mountain and through the jungle, where we stayed the night in a bungalow in a tiny village, and had an amazing dinner there!  The hiking was nice, the sights were beautiful, we saw some cool wildlife, most notably a spider the size of my face!!! And what MIGHT have been a flying squirrel (it was too fast to know for sure what it was, could have been a monkey?).  But the main attraction was day 2 when we went canyoning and repelled down 15 - 25 meter waterfalls and cliffs!  We went sliding down some smaller waterfalls head first (with helmets and lifejackets on of course =) and just had a blast!  We also made really good friends with our tour guide (named Bamboo), and he took us out for dinner to get some dog meat after our day of abseiling, BUT, apparently it's bad luck to eat dog meat during the first two weeks of the all lunar months (or something along those lines) so no restaurants were serving dog meat, so we got some VN BBQ instead, and a few beers.  The next day we went on a nice bike ride around town, with Bamboo again, and saw lots of cool stuff.  And THAT night he took us to his friend's house to have a dinner party with all his Vietnamese tour guide friends (good that they were all tour guides because they knew English!) and we had a BLAST!  Most of them had fun nicknames they went by, that all had sexual connotations! One of the guys was named Hib, which means strong man in Vietnamese, but if you say *Hip* it means rape, which (of course) provided lots of material for jokes after we all downed our first 3 beers in the first 30 minutes and kept that pace the rest of the night!
 

I have been trying to make a point to learn bits of the languages in each country I go to, because it's fun and you get a better feel for the culture, i think...  We have also made it a focal point of our travels to try ALL the local specialty foods at least once.  But we have found just about all the local specialties to be absolutely delicious and want to eat them all the time!  A lot of times I won't go for local breakfast dishes, because I really enjoy (and haven't really experienced for the past 14 months because Korea doesn't really have) a nice Western breakfast!!!  Omelets and pancakes and all kinds of goodies!  But for lunch and dinner it's always Pho, spring rolls, rice dishes, freshly caught sea food, or whatever they say the local specialty is!  And the food (minus one TERRIBLE bus stop restaurant that may have permanently scarred the inside of my stomach) is amazing!!!

The food, and just about everything in Vietnam is very cheap, even after the foreigner tax (10 US$ for a two bedroom, decent hotel with breakfast for two people!!) 2 US$ for a bowl of pho and a beer =). 
Meeting people while travelling is awesome, because sometimes you can make really strong connections with people in a short amount of time!  But the thing that I am loving the most about my travels thus far is the freedom!!! I don't have anyone I have to answer to, anything that I HAVE to do (except leave VN by Dec. 7 because my visa expires =) no time constraints, some money in the bank, and just about limitless options!  It is an amazing feeling that I don't think many people truly feel!  And I am lucky to have the opportunity to do so!

Well this has been more or less an update on my travel through Vietnam, I will try and do a briefer update on Cambodia soon