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Grime junction

Published May 13, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

We choose our hotel because of its location. Not as in nice view; we look out on the bare wall of another high rise a few meters from our window. But even if we had a view it would be of overpasses, highways and rail lines. In the streets thousands of motorcycles rev their engines as the light turns green. We are at one of Bangkok’s many grime junctions.

But here is why we chose this hotel, a 3 star for 45 dollars a night (adequate, clean): we are a stone’s throw away from the express line to the airport (25 minutes, less than 1 dollar) and the subway that connects us to the Skytrain and everything that is worth seeing or doing here. And right in between the station and our hotel is a massage place with 8 dollar foot massages (1 hour) and 16 dollar whole body massage. We have become good customers.

We arrived in the afternoon and escaped the heat in the food court of a mall. Words cannot describe the eating frenzy of 1000s of people and the number of eating establishments. An adjacent luxury supermarket can best be described as Whole Foods on steroids.

Axel was fasting on tea and steamed rice to get his intestinal tract back in order before the long plane ride home and so I was eating alone. Making a chocie of where and what to eat took nearly an hour and then I made a series of bad choices. The food looks all great but we have learned that appearance can be misleading. I had mediocre nems, mediocre mango sticky rice. Only the green tea ice cream was great. The no-sugar diet is in shreds but I will return to it when I land in Boston.

Completion

Published May 12, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Hanoi, Vietnam

We were having our last meal in Hanoi across from the Lenin Skate Board shop which had as logo a rubber ducky. I thought it a brilliant capture of the Vietnamese version of capito-communism.

Earlier in the day we had finally gotten around to try the famous Vietnamese egg coffee. The Vietnamese coffee we had tried so far (‘white café’) drips on top of a layer of sweetened condensed milk. The egg white coffee was served in a dish of hot water. The coffee itself had a creamy yellow foam on top. I imagine it is made from whipped egg white sweetened with the condensed milk. The Vietnamese coffee is strong and got us hooked. One of the curious varieties of coffee in Vietnam is the kind that has gone through the stomach of a weasel or civet or squirrel. The animal digests the outside of the coffee fruit and poops out the bean itself. This kind of coffee is highly sought after and expensive. It is hard to find out whether you are getting the real thing or are taken for a shitty ride so to speak. We bought some coffee that is produced in a non-animal way.

At the egg white coffee café we ran into our young German solo traveler again and shared a tiny table sitting on tiny stools. Our leg muscles are adjusting poorly to sitting with one’s knees at a 45 degree angle to one’s hips but that’s pretty much how meals and drinks are taken by the locals.

We visited what was once called the ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ the prison where American pilots were held. In comparison to the treatment of prisoners under the French regime in the same prison, the Americans appeared to be treated rather nicely. Most of the prison was dedicated to the struggle with the French. The French regime dealt with political prisoners like they did during the French Revolution with a guillotine and iron foot clamps. The exhibit showed photos and thumbnail CVs of ex-prisoners who had risen to power in North Vietnam. It is quite amazing to think that anyone could have survived a stay of even a couple of months in the French ‘Maison Centrale’ as the Hao Lo prison was called then.

And that was the end of our week in Vietnam. Bangkok tomorrow and the countdown to our return home has started.

Back to the city

Published May 10, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Ha Long Bay, Hanoi, Vietnam

We said goodbye to our travel mates who returned to Hanoi in order to take the night train up north for a trek in the mountains. Axel and I and our young solo German traveler boarded a smaller boat in the middle of the bay and set course for Cat Ba Island.

We landed on a small pier where bikes were waiting for us and biked into the national park along a mostly level road. At a small village we parked our bikes had a cup of Vietnamese (milky) coffee, then continued on foot for a walk in the woods. The wildlife, apart from monkeys and the unique Langur (also a monkey), consists mostly of exotic insects. We were told there are snakes and our guide used a stick to announce our presence. We didn’t see any monkeys or snakes but plenty of insects.

We returned the same way we had come and had lunch on the boat followed by a swim before landing on another part of Cat Ba Island where a bus took us to the hotel at the end of a long boulevard. The harbor was full of fishing boats and floating restaurants. Everything floats here – whole villages with their ‘gardens’ where oysters, mussels and clams are farmed.

The boulevard strip in Cat Ba looks just like any other boulevard strip in a seaside tourist town (I am thinking of Salisbury, NH). Much neon, tons of hawkers, bars and restaurants and a night market full of cheap China stuff, maybe the latter one wouldn’t find in Salisbury. Large blow up plastic swimming pools for kids were filled not with water but with something that looked like black rice which the kids manipulated with their trucks and buckets as it it was sand.

Our guide invited us for a beer by the harbor where all the locals seemed to have congregated. It was a jolly place with cheap eats and drinks. Whatever didn’t go into people’s mouths was dropped on the ground. The place was a mess – not just there but at all the restaurants – someone must come in the middle of the night and sweep everything away.

Dinner was on our own – we had about 100 choices but followed our guide’s lead, which was a good oneL fried rice, nems, smoked pork in a noodle dish, and fresh coconut juice.

At night the rains moved in, excalty as predicted on my smart phone. The next day the skies were dark and something akin to a monsoon hit the island. As a result our departure was delayed a bit. Men in uniform at the embarkation pier held us back until the rains had passed.

Day 3 of our cruise consisted essentially of cruising back to meet up with the big boat, the same one we had overnighted on and make a passenger exchange before continuing to Ha Long from where we boarded a bus back to Hanoi.

At night we splurged and ate at a Trip Advisor recommended restaurant on a rooftop overlooking one of Hanoi’s many lakes. The cuisine was exquisite, the cocktails and wine yummy, and the bill high. The Vietnamese currency has so many zeros in it that it feels like monopoly money. Only when we did the conversion did we realize how much we had spent.

Our new hotel is smack in the center of something big; when we returned from our dinner the streets around our hotel were completely filled with people (several hundreds is my guess) sitting on the tiny plastic stools, drinking and eating. It was a bit like Bangkok’s Chinatown’s pop up restaurants, but much louder. Rave music pumped through the air, indicating that there were some very popular bars hidden behind the mass of people on their plastic stools.

Published May 9, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

The tourist business is Halong Bay’s main business it seems. Hundreds of tourists, bussed like us from Hanoi and elsewhere, embarked on a variety of junks, ranging from small to large, from junky to elegant. This is why it took so long to pick a cruise operator – there too many choices.

We boarded a small sloop, put on our orange life jackets (everything is heavily regulated) and found our way to our home for the next 24 hours, a midsize boat with, to my relief, its center of gravity at a reasonable level.

Our tour guide (Dung but call me Danny) presented the program, we got our cabins (small but comfortable), and then came up for a wonderful lunch while we wove our way between the majestic limestone rocks formations that, according to legend, represent dragons sent here to defend against the ever agressive Chinese. Slowly the pack of boats dissolved as everyone went their own own. Only a handful remained on a similar course

At lunch we learned that Axel’s helpful gesture to turn the fish after we had finished one side, brought bad luck, according to our four table mates, two of them from Singapore and the other two from Canada but all with far eastern ancestry (China, Taiwan, Thailand and Korea). That explained that after he turned it no one ate anymore fish

We stopped for a kayak outing, with rather heavily used kayaks being brought to our boat. I was a little anxious about kayaking which I haven’t done since my rotator cuff operation. Luckily we were in a double and Axel would pick up the slack when my weak arm muscles refused to work. After about an hour, and doing 30 paddles at a time, then 1 minute rest, just like my exercises, the muscles started to obey and things got better.

Hot and sweaty we went for a swim off the boat before cocktail hour arrived on the deck, followed by a cooking lesson (fresh spring rolls) that we ate on the spot. We had lively dinner conversations with our co-travelers most of whom had selected the two day/one night cruise and would leave us the next morning. Only three of us continued, Axel and I and our young solo traveler from Germany.

Squid fishing was also on the program but we were too pooped from the various activities and called it an early night. When one of the Flamish travelers told me her parents would never ever take such a trip and do such exhausting things as kayaking and swimming off a boat, I felt OK for being tired.

The next morning we climbed up the nearly 500 steps to the top of Titop Island with countless other tourists. Titop is (was?) a Russian the Vietnamese clearly revered, with an island named after him and a very Soviet looking statue of him sternly looking out over the waters in his crisp granite uniform.

Next on the program was a visit to an enormous cave, called surprise cave, presumable because the large stalagmite that stuck out like a sore thumb looked a bit like a penis, lit with red flood lights for extra effect. We learned that the French discovered the cave. I had a short experience of wriggling through a small hole in the wall into a bit of darkness. It’s not my piece of cake. I think these spelonkers are very brave. I am sure there are thousands of caves more here, waiting to be discovered. The ones that were, up and down the country, were used to hide people and supplies at war time, probably since ancient times.

Pho and other delicacies

Published May 8, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment

In the evening one of our Vietnamese participants in the recent Tanzania meeting invited us over to a restaurant near our lodgings. We had an assortment of fresh and fried nems and two delicious variations on the green papaya salad that is popular all over the region.

We bombarded her with questions that we hadn’t been able to ask anyone before, about the war(s), about the co-existence of communism with religion and the kind of capitalism that is making Vietnam the fastest growing economy in the region. We asked the same question to our cruise guide later and the answers were the same: we are like that – religion, ancestor worship, temple offerings are part of who we are. Entrepreneurship, from small trade to bigger trade, is what we do to stay alive. You can’t just give any of it up. The USSR and China tried to banish these things too but it never quite worked, the practices simply go underground. People keep praying and keep looking for ways to better their lives and that of their children. I think it is in our genes.

The next morning our host knocked on the door to say goodbye. He was on his way to dancing class in the park. Later we drove by the park and saw hundreds of people practicing classic couple dancing and massive line dancing with complete sound installations to provide the music. There were also people doing exercises with bright red paraols, praticing Tai Chi and Qi Gong, playing tennis, badminton and more; all this very early in the morning, just like we witnessed in China years ago.

The travel agent that we finally selected out of hundreds from Trip Advisor picked us up at 7:15AM on Sunday morning, just when we returned from another wonderful pho breakfast across the street. We are the only foreigners in our neighborhood (right next to the old French quarters). This is kind of nice. It is a little quieter and less focused on tourists we discovered when we walked through the old town. At the pho shops the locals were helpful in giving what they thought we wanted and what we thought they recommended.

We joined 13 other people, twosomes from Belgium, Germany, England, Canada and France and a young girl from Germany on a solo trip of 3 months through Southeast Asia. We picked up everyone at their hotels. The driver of our small bus managed expertly the tiny streets and sharp corners of old town Hanoi.

The drive to Ha Long Bay took about 3 hours with a pit stop in the middle, predictably, at an enormous souvenir complex. We had strong Vietnamese coffee which we are starting to like despite the super sugar-charged condensed milk at the bottom.

Smoke and mirrors

Published May 7, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Afghanistan, Vietnam

We picked the worst time of the year to come to this part of the world, according to our AirBNB hosts (but we picked the nicest place and host). He recommends October and November. At that time it might even be cold up north. People wear coats and hats.

We had another kind of Pho breakfast before going to the Temple of Literature which is one of the oldest universities in the region, founded by Confucius. It is a beautiful arrangement of buildings, portals, courtyards and water reservoirs. It is graduation time here and this is clearly the place to go and have your class pictures taken. We saw hundreds of slender young Vietnamese, the women in their long silk and satin dresses with the split on the site and the pants underneath and the men in white shirts and dark creased trousers, graduation robes and caps slung over their arms or dumped on the ground, much too to wear.

Schoolkids also made the trip to the temple, with their white blouses and red handkerchiefs around their necks, reminding me of the Komsomol youth I saw when traveling around the USSR in 1974. They said their prayers and burned josh sticks. Two boys with offerings places them next to the large than life size statues of the Chinese educator and his disciples: cans of Fanta and beer, dragon fruit and Choco Pies. Here too the ancestors like Choco Pies, just like in Mongolia.

Nearly every statue in the compound sat on a turtle, symbol of longevity I learned. I was reminded of there being turtles all the way down.

Afterwards we went to the Hi Chi Minh mausoleum. We were whistled from underneath the covered walkway which was, we assumed, reserved for party officials – of whom we saw none. That too reminded me of my travels behind the Iron Curtain back in the 70s. The whole area is destined for parades and shows of force and cohesion and didn’t do much for me. The inside was unfortunately closed for the day. I would have liked to see pictures ‘from the other side.’

We escaped to the Hanoi Social Club to take a break from the unbearable heat and humidty. It is a hangout and workplace for hipsters and trekkers. When we traveled eastward from Lebanon, nearly 30 years ago, we didn’t have to worry about power sources (there was nothing in our small luggage that ever needed charging), or internet connections. We were informed by old guidebooks and word of mouth. Now the amount of information about where to go and stay can take days to sort through.

We had a lovely (vegan) lunch and set out for the Vietnam Women’s Museum. Downstairs we learned about the social and cultural life of the women of the various ethnic groups in Vietnam while upstairs we learned about their role in the two colonial wars, first with France and then with the US. Pictures of radiant and beautiful young women, some barely out of their teenage years, holding their klashnikovs or wading through muck and mud. They weredetermined to mow down the enemy and the tally below their pictures showed they had dne so indeed. Few survived. Display cases held artifacts and pictures from their short lives; handkerchiefs, diaries, and stuff they hid secret documents in. There were pictures of the underground tunnels and lives that went on: babies born, midwives at work, kindergarten, women selling pots and pans.

During downtimes I am reading the backstory of the beginning of the American role in Vietnam in Seymour Hirsh’s ‘Dark side of Camelot.’ It is maddening to see how much of the suffering was caused simply by selfish men (the rules of society did not apply to Jack and Bobby) with too much testosterone for their and our good. I am nearly at the end of the book and this is the only conclusion I can draw; gone up in thin air the ones I thought heroes and statemen. It was all smoke and mirrors.

In search of wants

Published May 6, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Hanoi, Vietnam

We had breakfast at a recommended Pho place. No one spoke English and there were no foreigners in sight. So we simply said ‘pho’ and got a wonderful meal. We are not in the part of the old town where the tourists hang out, as we discovered later which makes conversation difficult. It also means English menus are missing – here people know what they want and say so. We will point at what looks good and experiement.

In our neighborhood the coffee houses are local. The people who work there don’t know what and expresso is. They serve Vietnamese coffee which Axel didn’t dare to try given his reaction to any coffee that isn’t brewed in the expresso way.

We searched on our phones for our kind of coffee place and discovered the Bialetti Café. Mr. Bialetti, recently deceased, invented the octogenal moca maker which we possess in 4 sizes. We figured we could get the right kind of coffee there. But both Google maps and Waze pointed us to a place that was not the Bialetti Café, even though the address corresponded to our search results. All hot and sweaty we asked our phones to point us to the closest Starbucks where the coffee was right and the airco on extra high.

We have tried to use Uber but with taxis costing about a dollar and being in abundance, Uber (if you want a car rather than a moto) turns out to be a royal pain; try to spot your car in between 100s of motos. We tried twice and then canceled. The Uber moto appeals to me but Axel has no interest in this kind of transportation.

At Starbucks we arranged for a pedicure. I had expected to find mani-pedi places on each street corner here but we are either in the wrong part of town or all the mani-pedicurists have moved to the US. We had another wild goose chase to find the place of our appointment which turned out to have branches, each with a different name. The treatment was disappointing – I have had better – and this in what I thought was the center of the mani-pedi universe. Axel basically had his nails cut and mine were varnished in addition-nothing more.

We treated ourselves to delicious but exorbitantly priced lunch in a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant; no regrets but for that amount of money we could have eaten street food for the next 5 meals. In the evening we did just that, although the food was served inside and not on the street. It was a specialized one dish restaurant: pieces of fried fish with a mountain of dill and scallions cooked in a small frying pan at our table, then poured over a bowl of cold noodles, peanuts, a lime/fish sauce, chilies and fresh mint and other herbs we couldn’t name. It is fast and cheap and with high turnover of customers, clearly a money maker. Madam, the owner we supposed, was sitting at a table next to us counting her money – stacks of it.

After dinner we walked around the lake accompanied by thousands of motos, locals and tourists. This place swings at night, even with the heat and humidity that doesn’t let up. We are here during the wrong season we learned.

We are still trying to figure out what to do from Sunday on. The choices are legion and there are tourist traps everywhere. With internet access we are heeding the ‘Buyer Beware’ but it is a lot of homework that we probably should have done weeks ago.

Departure day

Published May 5, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

The hotel’s breakfast buffet was overpriced and not too good looking. We didn’t feel like shark fins or birds’ nests this early and chose instead to break our fast at Starbucks with their version of an Egg McMuffin and a latte. The American food and drink establishments are the new melting pots – we eat and drink and behave the same way: overpriced coffees, calorie-loaded foods and Wifi so we can consult our devices. We did so too in order to find out whether the museum would be open on Coronation Day which, in Holland, is Memorial Day and my brother’s birthday. It was.

We were only able to see part of the museum. It was simply too hot and humid, even in the air-conditioned display rooms but especially in the temples. Like in other parts of the world all treasures are religious art. It makes you contemplate how much money and energy went into producing artifacts to placate the gods. Actually it still does, considering the extravagant temples and prayer houses we have seen on this trip, both in Malaysia and Thailand.

The most striking room was the Javanese collection, dominated by a towering granite Ganesha. This turned out to be a ‘gift’ from the Dutch Governor-Genneral of Indonesia to King Rama V at the end of the 19^th century. According to the description King Rama V was visiting Indonesia’s famous Borobudur Temple and indicated he wanted some parts of it for his collection. He sent his people up to inspect the pieces he wanted and then had them marked and eventually cut out and shipped to his palace in Siam. He was generous and didn’t take the best and most perfect parts of the temple, leaving those for the local worshippers. He did have to ask permission from the Dutch Governor-General who apparently had no trouble giving away things that didn’t belong to him or his country in the first place. I think we have evolved since then.

There were countless Buddha statues, from different eras and regions, from Nepal to Sri Lanka and from western India to Japan. None were of the big bellied variety that is so familiar to us. Some of the tall stone Hindu statues, representing the many armed Shiva, reminded me of Assyrian and Mesopotamian statues I have seen in that part of the world. We realized that we didn’t know enough of the stories of Hinduism and Buddhism to fully grasp what we were looking at, just as one has to know the Christian stories to understand the art from centuries back in our musea.

We left the museum after two hours. It was enough for one museum sitting. We had a nice dim sum lunch across the street from our hotel and then took a taxi to the airport express train which took us in no time over the endless traffic jams to the airport. Vietnam, here we come!

Foodies on foot

Published May 4, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

Our hotel, an old Chinese opera house converted into a boutique hotel, is smack in the middle of Bangkok’s Chinatown’s most intense eating street. We had already noticed the many restaurants but at night the number is extended by 100s of street vendors with their pop up restaurants that consist of kitchen on wheels, plastic stools and foldout tables on the pavement and in front of closed store fronts. All cooking is done in plain view and the intense fires guarantee that any unwanted creatures in the food would be killed instantly. In fact the cooking fires are so intense that the woks are no longer round.

We randomly selected one of the many restaurants near the hotel for lunch. Many of them advertise their shark fin and bird nest dishes, foods that we thought were outlawed, but clearly not here. We choose one that featured other dishes and ate Singapore shrimp noodles and pork-fried rice. After halal Malaysia, the Chinese obsession with pork is rather striking.

After lunch we retreated to our cool room as the heat and humidity were intense. We considered various ideas of what we could or should do and then we looked at our watches and realized it was getting rather late for tourist excursions and the museum had closed.

The hotel has a spa and a massage seemed just the right thing to do. Because there was a staff party (a masquerade ball no less) in the evening there was only one slot left for the day, just before the cocktail hour. We took it and had a most wonderful and relaxing massage, at least I did – Axel always has masseuses work on one muscle group or another that is tight, so his massages are satisfying in another kind of way.

It was the cocktail hour after that and we gave up all ambitions ‘to do’ something by sitting at a street side bar sipping a G&T and a Dr. Beam on the rocks. And then it was time for food again. The hotel provided us with a foodie foot tour in the hotel’s environs, each stop describing what was offered there in terms that made us want to eat right there. We followed the trail until we lost it and also had gotten too hot and sweaty to go on. We finally settled down on wobbly plastic stools in a side alley from where 100s of food stalls and pop up restaurants could be seen in all directions. We ordered two different prawn dishes and a vegetable one with strands of greens that looked a bit like what’s left after weeding the garden. Stir-fried with garlic, chilies, lime juice and fish sauce it became a yummy dish that gave me some ideas. All the while the water and beer we were drinking came straight out of our pores; the humidity did not let up after dark.

We topped off our meal with durian ice cream – Axel had only gotten whiffs of durian but never tasted it. In Melaka we noticed it is called durian belanda (dutch durian), a combination that I don’t quite get. We weren’t quite ready to eat the real thing as they were sold in packages too big to eat in one sitting. I don’t think he will have it again. I bought a kilo of mangosteens knowing he would certainly like them with their citrusy flavor. He did.

Sleepers

Published May 4, 2016 On the road , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: Bangkok, Thailand

We have arrived in Bangkok. I am now past the regrets and can actually appreciate this adventure that I thought we were too old for. We are reminded of our hippy trek days – we are the age of the parents of the young trekkers with their backpacks and bronzed faces, those who are of European, American, or Australian stock. The locals are more in our age category, at least some of them.

With all the boxes and cases stowed it started to get kind of cozy. Our seats already had a table put up between them with the meals we ordered back in Malaysia and two cups of tea. Axel had his remaining beer and we placed the full and empty can in the handy bottle rack until the steward told us that alcohol was forbidden. There was indeed a large sign that we had not seen. He quickly grasped the empties and squeezed them until the labels were no longer readable. The full one was pushed out of sight. A sign, next to the alcohol sign, said that inappropriate behavior would not be tolerated. We were happy about that.

Around 9:00 PM the sleepers were prepared by the steward who moved fast through our car, lowering the upper berths and making the beds with the bedding hidden behind the folded up top berth. Each sleeper bed had a turquoise curtain for privacy. The number of each seat was embroidered in the middle of the curtain reminding us to creep into the right berth after a visit to the toilet.

At first things were a little noisy – mobile phones went off and kept ringing when the owner had already fallen asleep. A few small children played electronic games with the most annoying sounds, but eventually everything went quiet as we thundered through the narrow landmass between the Malaysian border and Bangkok.

We stopped a few times, some people got off but no one got on, except for hawkers feeding the few sleepless travelers and knowing exactly when it was time to get off the train. Cars were added or taken off judging from the loud maneuvering bumps up and down the train.

The toilets were old but stayed cleaner than the toilets on Emirates’ Dubai-Dhaka flight. There were sinks for brushing teeth and washing up and a restaurant car that served meals and (non-alcoholic) drinks. A tiny galley produced food for those who didn’t want it from the hawkers.

Everyone slept late – by 8:30 AM most curtains were still closed. We waited in vain for our paid breakfast and bought it again from the restaurant car when that transaction seemed not to have registered: a sandwich made from soft white bread with mystery stuff inside, two tiny bottles of over sweetened Tang and a cup of tea. A little Thai or Chinese girl entertained us for a while waiting for her grandparents to wake up. We rehearsed colors in English and she helped me with my iPad puzzle – moving the pieces with her finger to her great delight. She babbled on and we talked back in English, smiling and getting smiles.

I concluded that it had indeed been a great adventure. We had spent a very comfortable night, more comfortable than business class in a plane – all this in 2^nd class. And now we are in Chinatown in Bangkok in the Shanghai Mansion boutique hotel, ready to have a great meal.