japan and homeward bound

the flight from saigon to tokyo, which was supposed to leave at 11:30, got delayed to 2:20 a.m., so that gave me plenty of time to sit around in the airport. it had been a long day - i'd gotten up at half past six in order to take the long trip out to the mekong delta, so i'd been looking forward to getting to the airport and going to sleep on the plane. but what's three more hours?

i stayed awake, fearful that if i fell asleep i'd miss the boarding call and, like my mom before me in bangkok, have to purchase another ticket home. fortunately, the saigon-tokyo flight was very empty, and i had three seats to myself. i think i was asleep before we even took off and woke up about four hours later when we were cruising over the southern half of japan. i looked out the window to see if i could see where i had lived while teaching english in iwakuni, yamaguchi prefecture, earlier this decade, but it was cloudy. i also hoped to see mt. fuji, but i think i was on the wrong side of the plane.

we had originally been due to land in tokyo at 9 a.m., but the delay in saigon pushed our arrival back to noon. i was kind of sad, because even though i'd only be in the airport, i was still excited to be in japan, and intended to do some shopping and eating of japanese food in japanese restaurants. after all, it's not like it is any more expensive to eat at a meal in an airport restaurant, since the country's so damn expensive to begin with. when i lived there, i discovered that the cost of food was comparable to doing all of your shopping not at a discount grocery store, but at a 7-11.

i ended up having *plenty* of time for that shopping and eating, however, since my flight from tokyo to dallas/fort worth got pushed back from 2 p.m. to 4:30. doh! i wouldn't have minded having more time in japan (and if we'd arrived in the early morning at the originally scheduled time, this would have meant that i would have had enough time to leave the airport and go out and explore the city of chiba, in which the airport is located). but being late to DFW would suck because i was going there for one reason: to spend the day with my dad. the plan had been to arrive at DFW at 9 and then be back at the airport at 5 p.m . for my 7 p.m. flight home to ontario airport in california. but now i wouldn't be arriving in texas until almost 1 p.m.

i ended up using the internet in a free yahoo! internet place they had in the airport, walking around the terminal i was in, watching people arriving on flights from all over the world, then walking around some other terminal after taking the tram thing over to it, then eating yakiniku (mmm....chicken!) and ramen, then shopping for japanese goodies in the stores. i didn't leave out of the international area during the entire six hours.

perhaps the best time i had on this abbreviated trip to japan involved the bathroom. i love japan for many reasons, and one of the big ones is the omnipresent goofiness inherent in things like their fanatical devotion to high-tech bathrooms. you haven't lived until you've dropped the kids off at the pool on a heated toilet seat (don't knock it 'til you try it) on a cold iwakuni morning. sure, the heating wasn't really necessary in the middle of august in a climate-controlled airport, but it was still a nice touch, as were the multiple buttons available to help with booty cleansing after you are done with your business. the press of a button sprays water, bidet-like, and different buttons control the temperature, pressure, and angle of the water. you can have a focused spray or a gentle misting action. afterwards, press another button and a wave of warm air will warm your buttocks before you get back to your day. all the while, sounds of birds eminate from the toilet in order to cover up any embarrasing noises that may be emitted during one's posterior region during the defecation process.

i love japan for things like this, and for the ladies who bow at you when you reach the top of the escalators, and (back to the bathroom) how the bathroom itself was more clean and sanitary than any restaurant or hotel or guesthouse i had used over the past two months. i love the way the people never stop working. i love the strange formal way some of the women (both young and old dress), with kerchiefs and dainty sweaters and fancy shoes and leg hosings and socks that are gloves for your toes (with individual spaces for each individual toe).

watching all these things helped pass the time and it was 3:50 and time to board before i knew it. the 777 was totally packed, but fortunately i was seated next to a cute little japanese girl, a senior in college, who was leaving the country for the first time for a semester abroad at cal state sacramento. we talked alot during the 12-hour flight. she was impressed with my caveman-level japanese skills and my arnold schwarzenegger impression. she was meeting up with other students at DFW (???) and was very nervous. she was very thankful to me for showing her how to use the TV screen in the seatback in front of her and the fold-down meal tray, and she jumped with excitement and glee when, ten hours into the flight, we emerged into daylight (it had been night and dark through much of the trip) and we were over the rockies. "so beautiful!" she kept repeating. then it was kansas, oklahoma, and down into texas.

we landed and made it through customs very quickly. i wished the japanese girl "gambatte" (good luck) before she went off with the group of people who were waiting for her. the guy at the immigration counter asked if i was coming from vietnam because of the conical rice-picker hat i was carrying with me. i said i was, and he welcomed me back to the united states.

"it's good to be back," i told him. "it's been a long time."

I spent the afternoon with my dad and my sister, tera, and ally, tera's three-year-old daughter. i showered and changed clothes and we went out to lunch at a mexican place in bedford. i was overcome by jetlag while we were waiting for the food to arrive. later, i had to take a half-hour nap before it was time to go to the airport for the final flight, back to ontario, where my mom and my brother would hopefully be waiting for me.

the last flight, like all the others, was delayed - but only 15 minutes. i got really tired again while waiting for the plane, but managed to stay awake until boarding. i slept pretty much the whole way back to california, and we were landing in the inland empire before i knew it. mom and jeff were there, in my car (which had been sitting in mom's backyard in riverside for two months). we drove back to mom's house, chatted for awhile, and then i took off for my house, on the other side of riverside, barely remembering where it was since i'd traveled all the way around the world (and then some) since i'd set off from my driveway many weeks ago.

that was two days and nights ago. it's sunday night now and i'm getting ready to go back to work tomorrow morning. we have teacher in-services monday and tuesday, and then students will be there on wednesday. i'll have some good stories to tell them, i guess.

so you know how you feel sad sometimes when you come back from vacation? i stopped feeling like that a couple of years ago. there will (hopefully...probably...most likely) *always* be another trip in the future. the term "trip of a lifetime" doesn't apply to me, not even a two-month trip around the world. my "trip of a lifetime" will be something that i hope to choose on my deathbed, many years from now, when i look back and reflect on all the places i've been and faces i've seen.

there's always another trip. i thought about that as i drove home tonight from dinner at mom's house. and california's not so bad a place to hang in the meantime, at least on a night like tonight. sure, it's traffic-filled and smoggy and there is a severe lack of culture in the area in which i live, but as i watched the palm trees of riverside framing the stars (very visible on this night), and felt the cool air of the summer evening rush past my car as i drove with the window down, i was glad to be home.

at least until the travel bug starts biting at me again, prompting visits to kayak.com and the ordering of lonely planet books from amazon.

expect that stuff to start up probably, oh...tomorrow!

THE END

mekong delta

i finally got out of saigon, but not until my last day in vietnam. woke up at 6:30, left the hotel at 6:45, got to the travel agent place by seven like they said in order to depart at 7:15, but we had to wait around until eight as they funneled various tourists onto various buses, depending on how long the tourist would be spending in the mekong delta. me, i was only going for a one-day trip.

the bus left the city in the pouring rain and drove southward through the pouring rain. after two traffic-filled hours we stopped for a potty break in the pouring rain. we arrived in the town of cae bo in the pouring rain and got onto a boat that looked like one of the boats from the jungle boat at disneyland, only without the festive red-and-white color scheme. oh, it was raining while we were getting onto the boat and started up the mekong river, past floating markets and houses built on stilts over the water and lots and lots of green, leafy trees.

stopped for lunch at a place where they served elephant ear fish, which is a delicacy available only in the mekong, our tour guide had told us back on the bus. he had also wanted to know how many people wanted to sample said delicacy, as they would have to be caught and killed (his words exactly) so they could be cooked prior to our arrival at the restaurant. there were about 35 people in our traveling group (all europeans and australians - i was the only american, as usual) and maybe five or six people opted for the elephant ear fish, which did indeed have big digusting ears and was repulsive looking to me when served to those five or six people, each fish speared on a pair of sharp sticks to give it a natural swimming-like position, right there in the middle of the lunch table.

i ate pork and soup and salad and vegetables. is it me, or is baby corn not widely available in america. it's like, rare here, and i love eating it in asia, where you can get it in most any restaurant. i like to eat baby corn because i can pretend that it's regular-sized corn and that i'm huge. oh, wait. never mind.

we left the boat to walk around some pre-determined shopping areas, as is the norm with tours in asia. it's par for the course: you get cheap, air-conditioned transportation, but you end up having to traipse through gem factories and furniture showrooms. sometimes i get irked at that and sometimes i just don't care that much.

after that we had the option to do more shopping or ride bikes through the jungle for an hour or so, but none of the books looked like they could hold my left leg, much less the rest of me, so i just walked around instead. that was fine. there were nice milk-chocolate colored rivers running here and there, and lots of coconut trees, and big-azz snakes in cages (thankfully). i bought a really cool vietnam-style hat for only one US dollar, one of those conical hats that you envision old vietnamese ladies wearing while they pick rice. no, that's not a stereotype, because i saw lots of ladies fussing with rice plants out in the paddies, and they were wearing the hats! the weather, by the way, in vietnam was great! only while walking around in the jungle was it steamy and hot. the rain had let up, and the sun came out for a bit, and i started getting sweaty as we trudged along. the rest of the time in-country, however, had been pleasantly cool.

it was cold, in fact, later on in the afternoon, after the walking around, when everyone else got done with their bike rides and it was time for a ride on a little teeny rowboat. i opted out of this one, thinking that i would either put a foot through the floor of the boat when i stepped into it, or i would ground the vessel so deeply into the beach that they'd never be able to set off from the riverside and paddle onwards to where we would be meeting up with the larger boat on which we had arrived at that point.

why was it cold? oh yeah, it had started raining again. not just raining, really, but pouring. to make the forrest gump comparison again, i'd have to say that in vietnam on that day there was rain coming up from the ground, and sideways rain that stung at your cheeks, and all sorts of rain. i figured i'd be the only one walking back to the bigger boat, but about half of our group ended up going with me. the other half, brave or foolish souls (i couldn't tell) opted to ride in the little rowboats on a river course through the middle of the island and then meet up with us in like half an hour. i felt for them as they got in the rowboats, however, because the rain was really coming down, and it was kind of hard to see through it sometimes. as they rowed away, i thought they would have been more comfortable (and less wet) by falling directly into the river). the rest of us walked back to the boat and sat in there and chatted it up, with the vinyl tarps pulled down over the open sides of the boat. that cut out our view but blocked us from the sideways rain. we also each received a coconut, filled with coconut milk, from the tour guide, who had been hacking away at the pile of coconuts in order to de-top them while we had been bicycling/walking through the jungle.

those who had opted to ride in the rowboats looked miserable when they got back to the boat. to make matters worse, all they'd been doing was riding. it turned out that the little vietnamese ladies at the front and back of each rowboat (which also had seats for four tourists) were in charge of the actual rowing and steering of the vessel. so i was glad that i, for one, had not gone.

with everyone back on board we motored back down the river to the bus. after another shopping stop we were on our way back to saigon. i spent the three hours on the bus (there was lots of traffic) talking to a quartet of very attractive irish girls with whom i'd been chatting on and off with throughout the day. they were all smart and pretty, and had great taste in music. we had time to pretty much tell each other our lives' stories: they were celebrating that two of them had just finished law school and two more only had a year left, and three of the four were engaged, i found out through conversation, trying not to let my smile droop too much when i found that out. it was doubly hard not to get bummed when, through the course of conversation, i found that they all loved the simpsons, and were as bummed as me that sean connery will not be in the forthcoming fourth indiana jones movie, due out next year. not that i don't love amanda and annette, but they never seemed to be that interested in my constant discussion topics of the simpsons, baseball, the indiana jones and star wars trilogies, midgets, etc., while these girls actually KNEW about and ENJOYED that stuff...when one of the girls started singing the "doctor zaeus" song after we got on the ben-esque topic of "planet of the apes" somehow, i almost got down on my knees, right there on the bus, and proposed to her.

despite my hopes for more traffic, we made it back to saigon eventually, at around eight p.m., and we went our separate ways with hugs and quick goodbyes. i'd known there was no use exchanging e-mails (fiancees back in ireland probably wouldn't have been too keen on that), but i'd hoped the goodbye would be longer.

oh well, since we were an hour late getting back to saigon, i now only had an hour to shower and pack up my stuff, as i wanted to leave for saigon airport at nine in order to be there nice and early for the 11:30 p.m. flight that would mark the official start to the end of my vacation and the start of my long trip home.

ho ho ho chi minh city (AKA saigon)

to some it's ho chi minh city. to some it's saigon. either way, it's rainy. like forrest gump once said, in vietnam "We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." it made walking around less-than-enjoyable, but it made the weather surprisingly cool, which was a trade-off i'll take any day of the week in southeast asia.

so monday was my first day here, and i went to the museum of war remnants, which is what it's called now, since i suppose the vietnamese thought not a lot of americans would want to go if they kept the original name: "the museum of american war atrocities." they had all sorts of photo displays from journalists, most of whom had died covering the war. graphic photos. heart-tugging photos. ones we've seen before, like the naked 12-year-old girl running from the napalm bombing, and the pulitzer prize-winning one wherein a mother helps her five children swim across a swollen river to escape the viet cong. the photos really struck me because i thought about how many of those young men died in this country. americans, just out of high school many of them, their lives cut short...you didn't have to wonder what had happened to them because for many of the photos, the caption underneath would say that the person had died shortly after the photo, either of the injuries pictured or due to a landmine or something.

i really felt for gene, my mom's husband, who was here in the mid-sixties. i think i heard my mom say that vietnam remains the defining moment of his life. i was thinking about gene, who was (pardon my french) scared shitless the entire time he was here, riding around in helicopters, just like the ones they had outside of the photo exhibit! they had a large collection of US military gear: planes, helicopters, tractors, mortar, artillery, bombs, tanks, guns, left over when we finally lost the war in april 1975, about three or four weeks before i was born. i imagined that the helicopter there in the park-like setting very well could have been the one gene was in, all those years ago.

inside a new wing of the museum was a gallery with photos of the effects of agent orange, and a giant quote from a US senate debate on the use of agent orange, wherein some senator said it was the first time in the history of mankind that an army was at war not just with the enemy, but with the environment and the future. and he was right: the effects of agent orange are still being felt. levels of it are still a thousand times the healthy level in big chunks of vietnam, and babies with deformities that can be traced to agent orange are still being born. the exhibit, in addition to photos, had jars in which floated fetuses with various birth defects: two heads, huge heads, too many arms, little flipper arms and legs, and a whole bunch of people born with no eyes (just skin straight across), which is a common side effect of agent orange.

i'm not going to go all anti-war, etc., on y'all, because this was a totally one-sided museum (the north vietnamese/viet cong certainly did their share of torture and degredation). but the museum really pounded home that war is awful, and that the innocent are often those affected the most.

so that was a real upper of an experience...

the next day i went shopping in a big enclosed marketplace - and was the center of attention, although i personally was more fascinated by the live fish being chopped up before my eyes and the rows after rows of cow and pig intestines, lungs, spleens, and other various disgusting body parts. after that fun i went over to the backpacker area of saigon - the rough equivalent of bangkok's khaosan road - in order to book a one-day tour out to the mekong delta, where you can see the stereotypical vietnam of oxen, rice paddies, and women in conical hats. oh, wait: you can see the conical hats here in the city, which is kind of cool. it lends a kind of vietnam war-era feeling to the place, a feeling that was accentuated on my taxi ride from the airport a few days ago by the taxi driver, who switched the radio to an english-language station that came back from commercial and announced "this is radio saigon!"

the one-day tour was set to begin at 7:15 this morning, but yesterday afternoon, after day after day of eating probably too much fresh fruit that may or may not have been washed in safe water, i came down with the saigon squirts (TMI, i know), and spent the afternoon doing the ho chi minh hustle back to my hotel room every once in awhile. when my alarm went off this morning at 6:45, i knew that i wouldn't be able to stand 12 hours traveling by boat and bus through rice paddies and mangrove jungles, so i skipped the tour and re-booked it for tomorrow - which will be the last day of my trip! i spent today wandering around, taking it easy, and found a pharmacy with an english-speaking pharmacist, who was able to give me some immodium without me having to resort to charades. ick.

i'm feeling better now, at half past 11 p.m. on wednesday night. my flight leaves in 24 hours exactly. red-eye from saigon to tokyo, layover there for six hours, then 13 hours to dallas/fort worth international airport. i'll hang out part of friday with my dad and family there, then take a relatively short flight back to ontario, where my trip will be complete. wow. i'll have been all the way around the world. cool!

saigon

or ho chi minh city, as its commonly known. flew in from bangkok this afternoon; flight delayed an hour by monsoonal rains in bangkok. it's weird to think that i am now in the country immortalized, mythologized, discussed, etc., in myriad movies, books, songs, etc...i stepped off the plane onto the tarmac and could hear "for what it's worth" playing in my head...

saigon, or at least the part i've seen of it coming from the airport ten kilometers to my hotel downtown, has more motorcycles and scooters than cars. i mean, bangkok's got a good mix of the two, and all the autos are kind of what makes the traffic so atrocious in bangkok, but it's like a ten-to-one ratio here: ten two-wheeled vehicle for every one of the four-wheeled variety, most of them carrying three to four family members apiece, none of them pausing for red lights. it's amazing that they don't collide.

we drove from the airport through sprawling saigon, modern-looking capitalist businesses lining both sides of the street in this socialist nation. there were KFCs, starbucks, chains i recognized from thailand and japan, and a few huge shopping malls. they may not have all of our freedoms here in vietnam, but they appear to have the freedom to spend freely.

the roads, on the other hand, left something to be desired. they weren't as bad as mongolia or cambodia, but the potholes and general bumpiness of the major thoroughfares indicate a serious need for re-paving. it looks like they are in the process of starting that, though: like so many other major asian cities, saigon appears to be in the throes of a growth/reconstruction spurt, now that the asian economic crisis is ten years in the past. times were tough in this part of the world for years after that crisis struck in the mid-nineties (i know i saw lots of aborted boomtowns gathering dust in malaysia in particular), but it looks like they are headed towards modernity and even, smooth pavement here...

kanchanaburi pix

(coming soon)

kanachanburi tale

okay, so it's not really a tale, but i am nothing if not a lover of classic literature, so i threw that title out there...blogger.com is not letting me into the last post, so i'm gonna put up a bunch of pictures on this one...enjoy!

i discovered, by the way, that i can take cool nightime photos (although at lower resolution) using the picture function on my digital video camera! so here's some pix from when i went walking around the spooky 900-year-old temples in ayuthaya at night...

it seems like every trip to asia some of my favorite moments always involve sitting around in a mellow restaurant somewhere near the water, listening to some guy with an acoustic guitar mangle the words to sixties and seventies rock songs. such was the case in ayuthaya the other night: the weather was cool, the people were a friendly mix of thai locals and jovial europeans, the drinks were pineapple-intensive and cheap, and the guy singing was getting about three out of every four words right, but no one cared, because it was just a nice relaxing evening, the kind i wish could go on forever.

ayuthaya and kanchanaburi

nothing much to report from bangkok in the first few days after mom flew home; i walked around the markets and bought bootleg CDs and DVDs, read "dracula" under a shady tree in a nice park adjacent to mo chit (the northernmost stop on bangkok's elevated skytrain), and saw "transformers" in a really comfortable movie theater. in thai movie theaters, you must stand and give respect prior to the film while pictures of the royal family are shown on the screen. "transformers" was okay - typical michael bay explosion-heavy fare - but i really wanted to see "the simpsons movie." unfortunately, that doesn't begin playing here until august 6th, by which time i'll be in vietnam.

tuesday morning i took a lovely three-hour train ride to ayuthaya and spent the next few days touring temples and ruins on foot and by boat. the boat was of the long, thin variety which i've ridden several times in bangkok, but the piers were not nearly so tourist (or chunky brother) friendly, so getting in and getting out without falling into the brown waters of the chao praya river was something of an accomplishment for me.

thursday i took a pair of public buses for five hours 100 kilometers to get to kanchanaburi, a jungle town near the border with burma that is most famous for being the site of the bridge over the river kwai. it was good to see that they had capitalized on this bridge, which was built during world war II under japanese supervision by the forced labor of thousands of american, british, australian, and danish prisoners of war. most every guesthouse and hotel in town contains one of the following words in its name: "bridge," "river," or "kwai." they also had museums and displays and memorials and a really touching allied cemetery in which are buried the remains of some of the 16,000 allied servicemen who died in the construction of the 250-mile thai-burma railway, which the japanese surveyors initially thought would take five years to build, but which was completed, via the POW labor, in 16 months. yesterday was almost unbearably hot here and i can only imagine what it must have been like to have been a forced laborer on the bridge site only sixty-odd short years ago.

i'm taking the train back to bangkok (four hours, 40 baht) in about an hour, where i'll pick up my vietnam visa on khaosan road, spend the night, and then head off to vietnam tomorrow afternoon. enjoy the pictures!