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!

trouble in bangkok

so i got off-topic a bit (suprise suprise) on that last post; i meant to tell you of all the bad things that happened to us and i got caught up in the splendor and glory of the terracota warriors...but i digress.



mom freaked out a little when the taxi driver we hired at five in the morning couldn't get his car started and we were standing in the rain, wondering whether we should wait for this guy to get his vehicle working or ask for another taxi. we waited, and he got it going, and we were on our way to the airport.

kind of.

turns out the driver didn't know where xian airport was. now i can't read chinese, but i could tell from the big signs with airplanes on them along the highway that we were going in the right direction - sometimes. at other times, the driver would deviate from the proper course and end up on empty streets in industrial areas. he almost hit a bicyclist at one point, although, to be fair, the bicycylist did come out of nowhere and it was really hard to see the bicyclist what with the windows being fogged up and all (the driver apparently didn't know how to work the defroster). after asking a handful (not a plethora) of roadside people how to get to the airport, the driver was on his way. all we had to was cross a really long bridge over a marshy riverbed and we'd be there.

unfortunately, the back left tire of the taxi blew out midway across the ten-kilometer bridge and i found myself standing on the side of the road, shivering under a little pink umbrella, looking down at cranes and other assorted waterfowl, as the driver hummed to himself and changed the tire. it would have made a great picture, me standing there, but mom was understandably freaked out in the car, so i didn't want to bother her. i stood there in the rain as the sun came up, drinking in the set of circumstances that had led to me standing there under that pink umbrella on a long bridge at a quarter past six on a rainy july morning in shanxii province, china.

we were back on the way to the airport, now an hour into our 30-mile trip, and on the airport grounds when the driver decided to freak us out one last time by driving the wrong way down a one-way street - into oncoming traffic. an airport policeman informed him that his head had apparently been inserted up his azz and pointed us in the right direction. our mr.-toad's-wild-ride-esque adventure came to a finish when he dropped us off at the international departures area of the airport. we tipped him, thanked him for the ride, and went inside.

you're supposed to arrive two hours early for international flights, and it was now only an hour and a half until our 7:45 a.m. departure time, but all turned out well because the airport was not very busy at that time, so early on a saturday morning. we made it through customs and had an hour to sit around and wait for our flight to bangkok, which went uneventfully. en route, however, i did take lots of pictures of clouds, with which i have decorated this posting.

we zoomed from bangkok's new international airport to a hotel i'd booked on sukhumvit road. then came naptime because it had already been a long day, and for mom, a stressful one. she'd been worried about the taxi in china, worried about being late to xian airport, worried that the taxi driver in bangkok was going to stick us with an exhorborant charge when i refused to pay the 450 baht ($14) rate they quoted me at the airport taxi stand even though the guy at the hotel reservations desk had told me not five minutes earlier not to pay over 300 baht ($9) for the 20-mile trip from the new airport to central bangkok. all these stresses built up for mom, and she opted to spend the entire rest of the day and night in the hotel room, opting to come out only to eat dinner with me in the hotel restaurant later that night.

we got up the next morning in plenty of time, loaded mom's stuff into the back of a taxi, and booked it to the airport. this trip was completly easy and completely uneventful, which was a nice change, especially in light of what happened next: we waited in line at the china air check-in counter and thought we were a solid two hours early, like we were supposed to be, but it turned out that we were 24 hours late!

excuse my french, but HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!! mom screamed. my heart sank. the counter lady looked sad for us, but there was nothing she could do: the printout that i had handed her from orbitz.com, the same one we had studied repeatedly to verify times, said bright and clear that her flight home left at 8:25 a.m. on Saturday, July 28th. we were at the airport on Sunday, July 29th.

"doh!" doesn't even start to describe it. i felt two inches tall. i'd booked the ticket online in pingyao five or six days earlier, and we'd both looked at it on the screen many times, and we'd both pored over the printout, yet still we'd shown up a day late, and, to mom's great dismay, all flights home were quite booked that day, and there were 40 people waiting in taiwan on standby to go to LAX, lest she decide to fly from bangkok to taiwan and take her chances there getting back to america.

we sat down, crushed, trying to decide what to do. i tried to keep a brave face but i was dying inside to see my mom crying like she was. it was on the verge of uncontrolability. we paced back and forth, inquiring at ticket offices about the chances of getting her onto a flight back to LAX as soon as possible. each time, however, we got shot down. mom said she didn't care how much it was: she wanted to go home.

then, a godsend.

this guy in a nice black suit (who looked like mola ram from indiana jones and the temple of doom, but i won't hold that against him in light of what he did for us) saw our consternation and asked me if there was anything he could do to help. turns out he worked for eva airways and (after sitting us down and bringing us coffee) was able to get mom onto a flight leaving that morning at 11 a.m.! mom gladly paid the money to get home - we figure we'll worry about potential refunds later on - and the man took her information and his very pregnant assistant, a lady with a beautiful smile who had been working her cel phone on our behalf for the last hour, handed mom a ticket home.

by this time it was 9 a.m. - two hours before the flight was due to leave. i wanted to hug the man and lady who had helped us soooooooo much, but it seemed that it would have been uncouth. mom's tears of desperation transmogrified into tears of thanks and gratitude as she flipped through the tickets, which would transfer her to LAX via kuala lumpur, malaysia, but then to fret-filled tears of worrying as she prepared to go through customs and begin the long journey home - alone.

"i don't want to leave you," she said, crying, as she prepared to go through the customs checkpoint. "don't worry - i'll be okay," i said, typically oblivious to her consternation at the upcoming solo flight and all the worries she had about successfully changing planes in kuala lumpur, etc. "i know you can do it," i told her. "just follow the signs."

mom disappeare behind the partition, 22 hours from home, and i sat down in an airport lounge and just waited. it had been a hell of a morning. i felt bad, and would continue to feel bad all day. causing all that extra stress to someone who didn't need any extra stress'll do that to a guy.

i waited until her flight read "departed" on the big information board, then caught a taxi back to the hotel on sukhumvit road, and began the last two weeks of my vacation - alone!

trouble in xian

did you ever see, or have you ever read, "the world according to garp?" in the novel and the movie, garp, the main character (played brilliantly by robin williams) persuades his wife to buy a house that a small cessna airplane has just crashed into. "this house has been pre-disastered," he tells her. "what are the chances of ANOTHER plane striking this place?"

well, this trip around the world has been a little bit like that - interestingly bad things keep happening (to each and every member of the traveling party), but i still believe that everything will turn out okay. otherwise, i'd pack it up, pack it in, and return home right now.

so let's recap: annette had massive diarrhea (to put it bluntly, and why not this far into the game) for about a week, which greatly distracted her from the beauty and splendor of siberia. i had my iPod, GameBoy, camera, and travel clock stolen from my train compartment somewhere around ulan-ude, russia, which allowed me to concentrate a lot more on the beauty and splendor of siberia, although without an appropriate soundtrack blaring in my ears. amanda and i both got violently ill, threw up repeatedly, and spent days in our beds in our hotel rooms. i tripped and fell not once, but twice (once in a heat-induced daze as we trudged slowly towards a taxi across a dusty parking lot in mongolia, the other in the slick mud after a heavy rain in pingyao, china). the first fall resulted in a thick scab the size of four postage stamps on my right knee and some loose cartilage, it feels like, in my left knee; the second fall re-opened the injury on the right knee just as it was almost healed.

but it's got to get better from here, right? damn straight.

but first, it got a little worse.

we had a great time in pingyao, but that was not enough to keep my mom in asia. she had decided to come on this trip a few months ago, visions of the great wall and the terracota warriors and angkor wat dancing in her head. the first two of those were great - i've already described the fun we had at the great wall and an account of the terracota warriors is forthcoming - but she won't be around to see angkor wat, because a week in beijing was enough to convince mom to forget about the plane tickets she already has and book some to get home ASAP. it was a combination of things, she told me: the crowds, the challenges of traveling in a difficult country like china, and, more than anything, the general feeling that she didn't belong in the orient.

i started out trying to convince her that southeast asia was totally different than china, that it would be more relaxing in thailand, more kick-back, etc., but talking with amanda and mom's continued lack of fun made my attempts half-hearted, so i knew it would be for the best last week in pingyao when we sat down in an internet cafe and booked a flight home from bangkok to ontario via taiwan and los angeles.

i was bummed, i must admit, for i wanted her to have a great time more than anything - to see the great things i've spoken of and photographed, to share in the same exhilirations i've felt - but the decision to help her get home (to her husband, gene, who she missed incredibly from the time her plane took off from america) was made all the easier when i saw that she was spending so much of her time not having a great time.

we booked the tickets for her to leave from bangkok on sunday morning and set out from pingyao to xian via an overnight train on thursday night. this train trip was infinitely better than the horrendous, cramped, hot, stinky, third-class train from beijing to pingyao had been. it was a second-class hard sleeper train, with six bunks in each little open-air section, stacked three-high. i spent most of the first few hours of the trip, which began at 8 p.m., talking to a group of chinese men and women who were all teachers on a vacation retreat to pingyao, and my snoring, in the words of one of them, "shook the train" as we rolled down the track, i was informed the next morning.

xian was cool. we took an all-day tour out to the terracota warriors, which were made like eight billion years ago to protect an ancient emporer in the afterlife. each of the life-size figures has a different facial expression. they were discovered, buried underground in an area the size of about three football fields, by some chinese farmers in 1974. now, a giant hangar-type building has been constructed over the terracota warriors, and tourist after tourist goes through and checks them out, in awe of the scale and splendor and artistic skill necessary to create such a display.

amanda and i were particularly impressed with how there were special VIP photo sections available, where, for extra yuan, you could get much closer to the warriors and get better photos. "won't you feel sad if you get home and didn't get the picture you wanted because you didn't pay the money?" a sign near one of the VIP sections asked. i've got to give it to those chinese: they are really embracing capitalism!

we wandered through the three hangars, looked at stuff, and then wandered back 15 minutes to the bus parking lot, giving us ample opportunity to be hassled by stall after stall of merchanise hawkers. they could have built the parking lot right next to the hangars, but then we would have been denied the chance to (not) buy all the crap they were selling.

back at the guest house in xian, we were just getting ready for dinner and plotting out what time mom and i would have to leave for the airport the next morning when amanda discovered that she had (ominous music) lost her wallet!

so there it is: evil fate strikes again! she'd already been sick and throwing up, and now she was without credit cards or her ATM card, in frikkin' china! doh! but she stayed calm and i stayed calm (mom, eh, not so much with the calm...) and we discovered that she still had her passport (whew!) and, with a large loan from my mom and a small loan from me, would be okay until replacement cards could be issued.

we ate dinner and said our sad farewells. mom really, really enjoye getting to know amanda, who is one of my favorite people in the world, and i was sad to say goodbye to her as i sat packing my stuff in my room at half past midnight. she left, however, to go back to her room, and to prepare for the next day's journey, which would be taking her to a six-week kung fu school in a city somewhere south of beijing.

a little more than four hours later, i was awake, and i lugged my stuff into the guesthouse lobby at two minutes after 5 a.m. mom was already there - having been up and worrying all night about the flight to bangkok, and we set off in the dark rainyness of the pre-dawn chinese morning towards the airport and our flight to thailand.

pingyao pix

here in bangkok, chillin' like a villian...i'm trying to get a vietnam visa so i can go there in a few days - alone. which is part of a longer story, one of multiple misadventures, which i shall relate to you in the next posting. but for now, here's some cool pix of the good times we had in pingyao...