Southeast Asia Table of Contents

Here is a list of posts in jump-links, for anyone interested in the general chronological order of our trip to erstwhile French Indochina:

Table of Contents

1. Christmas Eve Prep

2. Exhaustion Upon Arriving Home 

3. Introduction
4. Numbers Fun
5. Southeast Asia Background
6. Day Zero
7. Can Tho
8. International Boat Travel
9. Phnom Penh: New Orleans in the Jungle
10. Phnom Penh: Rush 'Round Town
11. Three Asides
12. Tiny Bus
13. Angkor: Day 1
14. Angkor: Day 2
15. New Years at Angkor Wat
16. Aside: French Naming Influences
17. Lao Arrival
18. Treetop Adventure
19. Stuck in Laos
20. China Beach
21. Hoi An
22. Da Nang
23. Random Asides
24. Asides: Massages
25. Fear and Loathing in the Epilogue Section

I remembered two more anecdotes that I had forgotten that I'll drop in sometime in the future...I'm done writing about Asia for a while.

Fear and Loathing in the Epilogue Section

I've mentioned before about how Hunter Thompson is my major non-fiction/blog-writing influece. The concepts that inspired his Fear and Loathing descriptive titles are ones that I've never really felt; being full of fear or anxiety and self loathing while on various adventures isn't part of the ticket.

But part of our return trip had me flasing back to an HST moment, if only briefly.

Last time I was recounting our Southeast Asian travels, we were heading back to our beachy resort in Da Nang after our last massage. (That aside post worked out nicely.) We got back near dusk and headed to the ocean to watch the day leave us.

After dinner at one of the "fancy" western-style restaurants at the resort ("Room 215, thank you," is how you pay), we trudged back to the room and started packing. Dirty clothes, having been washed once in Cambodia, were quite prevalent. Corrie's backpack--the dirty clothes repository--was full and had pushed her rare clean-ish stuff into the original space designated for the dirties. We laid our cleanest stuff out, showered, and went to weary sleep, passing out watching the silly "Machine Gun Preacher" (in English with Vietnamese subtitles).

The next day we awoke, had some runny eggs at the restaurant, and caught a car to the tiny and provincial Da Nang International Airport. From there we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, entered the international flights terminal, passed through the exit Visa control, and waited for our flight. We didn't have to wait too long.

We flew to Taipei, found our new gate, and waited. By dark we started boarding our plane--near 7pm.

I wanted to sleep--for certain--on the plane. At one point in Laos we got Corrie some medicine, and while at the pharmacy we picked up some sleepy pills for the return flights. At least that's what the pharmacist told us. Later on, while at one of the rare computers I was able to commandeer, and still holding the pills, I pulled them out to do a quick internet search. As I read the name before typing it into the search engine I was pretty sure what I was getting: generic Dramamine. The motion-sickness aid wasn't what I would have ever called a "sleeping pill", but I looked up some info on it anyway, just to see what the word on the street was.

Turns out, a dosage in the 500-1000 mg range could produce a psychedelic-like experience.

Hmm...I wasn't so sure I'd heard of that before. Chances are had I known, I would have experimented with that back in the day. But really, who wants to trip inside a hurtling fuselage over the ocean for literally over half-a-day?

After some quick calculations I realized that even if I gulped down all that we had, it was still under 500 mg.
Instead, I split the remains in half, and after the first meal a half hour after we left, I went to the tiny bathroom and knocked off my portion. Hopefully I could get some sleep.

Sleeping on planes for me, while not quite easy, isn't the impossible task it can seem to Corrie and other unfortunate folks. But this time around I wanted to get some actual shut-eye.

Just under an hour after dinner and the Dramamine experiment, I was trying to catch those zzz's, my head trying to balance against the seat back. It was about then that my arms started feeling it.

It began slightly, like they were falling forward. Only they weren't, of course. The unsettling feeling intensified until I felt like I had no control over my arms. It was impossible to get comfortable. I tried propping my arms up against my chest; I tried wedging them under my armpits; I tried pivoting unnaturally in my chair...all for not.

I'm not sure how long this distraction lasted, this odd Dramamine dosing, because I passed out somewhere in the middle. Like the "Maintaining on the Queen Mary" moment, it surely felt longer that it transpired in real time.

Like any good time-warp trip, we caught up with our past when we landed at LAX, hours before we left Taipei. We'd gone up into the air from Taiwan at night, flown through the darkness and into the sun, passing dusk again and landing back in the nighttime, only the calendar didn't change.

Time warp in reverse.

Not much of an epilogue section. The last time we went on a multiple country voyage I had more day time to compose the posts in a timely fashion, when everything was very fresh. My epilogue then truthfully conveyed that the trip itself was still too fresh to gain proper perspective.

Now it seems like the forty-eight days that have passed since we landed have contained so much life that I'm barely sure what's real and what was fanciful about our Angkor Wat adventure.

I was, I suppose, starting to get into the HST loathing with letting this drag...

Massage Asides

On any trip to Asia, or any other developing nation's cities and villages, tourists can look forward to certain affordable luxuries that they may otherwise eschew. In our case, I'm talking about massages.

We've gotten massages on occasion back here in the States, but in Asia we planned on taking advantage of the market inefficiency and trying for a massage each or two.

We did each get two massages, and they were interesting anecdotes that could have been crammed into the larger narrative, but decided instead to place them together at the end because...well I forgot to add the first one, and decided then to do this hokey deal.

1. Siem Reap;

(or)

Wow! You sure won't shut the hell up, will you?

On our second day in Siem Reap, the staging town for Angkor Wat, we decided to grab a massage after our epic bike ride. That day found us riding for upwards of twenty-five kilometers, and after showering, we rode over to a street that had a massage parlor that was staffed with underprivileged blind masseuses. 

We never did find that parlor, so we stopped into one that had prices posted on a menu-like sign outside. It seemed like a good deal.

We were stashed in quiet and dimmed room where we could change our clothes and prostrate ourselves on our our nicely padded massage-beds. Stationed right next to each other, we awaited our handlers. Two young ladies came in, introduced themselves in cutesy broken English, and got started.

After about ten of fifteen seconds of what must have been excruciating silence, my masseuse started whispering to Corrie's. She just couldn't help herself. Something was just so important that she couldn't keep the gossip inside for the entire 52 minutes of disheartened rubbing on my shoulders, back, and legs.

Part of me thought it was fully unprofessional, but this was a tourist town, and everything in exotic tourist towns runs on "island time" accompanied with the similar mentality, so I try not to gauge based on American metrics. Another part of me, though, thought it was kinda funny, and was curious to see for how long she would quietly gab with her friend. The other girl seemed far more reluctant to talk, but did respond from time to time. It helped that it all sounded so pretty, with its quiet sing-songy effect quite relaxing.

Early on she stopped herself, an embarrassed tone in her broken English asked if it bothered us that she was talking; I lied and said, "No, not at all." Was I bothered enough to eclipse my curiosity to see how long she'd keep it up? Not at all, so I guess it wasn't that much of a lie.

She talked through until the end.

As we were decompressing and before we changed, we got to exchange some words with the girls, basically asking about them and their lives. My chatty masseuse's story I could barely believe, but by then these kinds of stories were associated with nearly everyone we met: her brothers and parents had been killed by the Red Khmer, and her husband had been killed in a later incident while she had been pregnant, or, she was pregnant right now and her husband had just been killed, or died in an accident. Some of the details weren't exactly clear, but the toll of the Khmer Rouge seemed to be paid by everyone. This young lady, couldn't have been but a few years older then me, looked a decade younger, and had a distinctly 'smiley' shape to her face.

You know what I mean by 'smiley', right? Not quite smile-lines, like Nelson Mandela had, but the pre-cursor to that: someone who smiles so much they will eventually get the smile wrinkles. There were a surprising amount of them among the Khmer folks of Cambodia. Thailand? Sure, smiles all day. Vietnam? I think their default face is a stern clenching of the jaw. Lao seem despondent... Some of these Khmer, though...is that how you deal with the violent deaths of a family you likely never knew and a husband who won't be there to help raise his and your baby?

I guess so.

2. Da Nang;

(or)

Holy bejeezus! You're kicking my ass!

On our last full day in Da Nang, when we explored the city on foot, we'd decided that we wanted to get another massage--this one to make up for the Lao jungle adventure. We'd checked the available times and prices at the Sandy Beach resort, but they were either inconvenient or too expensive or both. Well, too expensive by our Southeast Asian concept of pricing.

In was on that last day that we wanted to find a foot reflexology place at least. Da Nang isn't such a hotbed of white folks, and during our walk, we had mostly ditched them. Near the end, after eating at the "Czech" brewery and exploring the bridges and neighborhoods, we started off down a street and just hoped for a massage parlor.

There had been a Belgium guy we met while riding the long bus from Laos to Vietnam who was young and, at the moment, traveling with some older Romanian guy. They seemed to be the connoisseurs of the sleazy type of massage parlor where you get as much as you pay for. On the topic of these types of massage places, or travel book had the following paraphrasable advice: If it looks sleazy, then it most likely is.

Do you want a relaxing massage from a reputable establishment? Then maybe you want to avoid the parlor with the neon lights outlining fully darkened tinted windows and the noticeable bass-line emanating from inside.

In any case, on this hot and muggy last full day in Asia we found in a corner lot a sunblasted waiting room that turned into a greenhouse. It was certainly a reputable place. They had us go into a room and change our clothes, and then they came in and we all centered on the type of massage we both were getting.

This time we were sitting in fancy reclining chairs instead of laying on bed-like mats. They started with our feet, since our "back and neck" massage got a truncated whole body effect.

Now, maybe because I'm a guy, my lady thought she needed to be extra rough with me. Good, hard massages I'm not against, but, not only am I a bundle of tight muscles, I'm also covered in hair.

I'm a hairy man, and if you're rubbing my calf in a fashion that could be considered "mostly excruciating" in the event that I was hairless, and you're not using lotion or massage oil while applying that much pressure? Better turn that "mostly excruciating" up to eleven.

There were about three or four minutes out of my 56 minute rub down that was relaxing, or okay. When we were putting our clothes back on I was still under the impression that I'd liked it, but I told Corrie, "I felt like I just got my ass kicked."

Now, the point about the tourists not really being around that neighborhood was to set the context for the very professional tough lady who was my masseuse: they don't get too many tourists, and so she may have never seen anyone as hairy as me before, and may not have known the effect she was having on me.

I would have been fine with the right amount of oil or lotion, and I think she started with some, but then she just got into the zone and went to town.

Corrie passed out during hers.

Next time I'll know what my expectations are before I get too torn up...

Random Asides

1. A Helluva Place to Have a Wedding

There was one of the ruined temples in Cambodia that was available for weddings. Do you know how we know? Because we walked by and saw them setting up:

It looked very cool:

2. Wi-Fi Shenanigans

Almost every hotel or motel or cafe we went to had free, mostly low-powered, wi-fi. What I liked was when we made it to a lame looking hotel, asked about the wi-fi, and they told us the details were up in the room. Really? Let's see:

Wait...is that it, on the upper left side of the picture?

Yup, right there, written on the wall...

3. Lock Shenanigans

Not everyplace had the same integrity on their locking mechanisms. Deadbolts, maybe?

How about pad-locks. At least the door cracked open only a half inch or so...

4. Electricity Fun

Every room we stayed in had a cool electricity conservation program. To get the electricity to work, you had to insert a key-card into a slot inside the door:

This was the same in every place we stayed throughout all three countries. The one problem was that the AC, obviously, wouldn't be on while we'd be out, so each room was nasty hot whenever we'd return. Small price to pay, I guess.

5. To be Clear...Um...

Whatever you say, sign...

6. "Hot" Water

Hot water was more of a suggestion than a promise. Most showers were spigots coming from the wall, the bathroom a tiled spot with an-easy-to-trip-over raised threshold designed to contain the water. You soaked yourself, turned off the water, lathered up, turned the water back on and rinsed. 

Hopefully it could be warm when that was all happening. Rarely was that the case.

At the Sala Champa hotel in Pakse, during the Greatest Shower that Ever Was, the water was steaming hot and coming from a shower-head (wow!) mounted high on the wall (wow!). After our long and grimy jungle weekend, that shower was magical.

Kinda like when visiting Europe and we Americans have to realize that it's us that have an aversion to body odors, we Americans, when visiting Asia (or any developing nation), must realize that hot showers are just not a regular thing.

Da Nang: Coastal City on the River Bank

Da Nang is a coastal city nearly the size of San Jose. It may be as culturally relevant as well. I have nothing bad to say about San Joser, in fact, I fully enjoyed my time there and look forward to visiting again. It's just that San Jose isn't usually involved in discussions about artistic and cultural importance in the US, and you got the feeling that Da Nang could be the same way. It was, though, an urban city that was ripe for exploration.

There were some white folks, but it wasn't like most of the other places we visited. We arrived late that first night, took a cab to our resort, and the next day we went off to Hoi An. The next day, we went off to Da Nang proper to get around.

A large river separates the mainland section of the city from the peninsular section, an area that has many of Da Nang city's own beachy resorts...we stayed way south, outside of the river's drainage. The Han River, named for the great Chinese dynasty, is spanned by four bridges. One, possibly my favorite urban bridge, is known as the "dragon bridge". See for yourself why:

The head and face are off at the other side of the bridge, away from my camera, but they looked pretty cool.

When we visit cities like this, especially outside the country, we try our best to get lost back in the density of where the real people live. "Get lost" isn't the right phrase, because we're never really lost, and we generally know how to return to a main thoroughfare. But we specifically try to get off the beaten path and get to where people look at us with that wild "Crazy white people" look in their eye.

That's how we ended up in here, one of the neatest parts of the walk:

The Han Market is the largest market in Da Nang, and has an entrance along the road the river. We were dropped off there by the shuttle. It was mostly too early when were there, because we wanted to get a look at fabrics. The food stalls were mostly bustling. The following picture is taken from one a stairwell landing, and shows just a tiny portion of the market:

Before we got ourselves back into the cut, we needed some breakfast. We first stopped at what we thought was a cafe. It did serve tea and what the folks call "coffee", but no food. We were sitting outside along the sidewalk, and across the street there was a restaurant populated with locals.

We headed over and took a seat. Below is the establishment, the Tien Hung:

Funny thing: there was no English writing on the menu. So, as we looked at it a waitress came over, nodded slightly, and made the finger sign for "two", like the peace sign. We nodded back and returned to the menu. Before long a plate arrived with greens and sprouts, and then two bowls of noodles and broth, and some weird loaf-meat slices. It was a play on the traditional Asian breakfast. Who knows what the hell the menu was for...

Another thing we did in Da Nang was go to the Cham Sculpture Museum. The Cham people were an Austronesian group that populated the central coastline of today's Vietnam. They were historically pushed around, and today make up one of the minority groups in Vietnam (and, incidentally, Laos and Cambodia). They were quite the sculpture-mad society, and there was a museum dedicated to them. Their talent is unmistakable:

There were shirts for sale in certain quarters of tourist zones that had a facsimile of the following picture with the title "Vietnam Telecom" (I love the jumbled wire look):

One thing we found out about and wanted to see was a brew-pub restaurant billing itself as the Tulip Czech Beer. The beer was less than great, and the menu had the first bit of shocking morsels that we'd seen in nearly two weeks. Check out number eleven:

There was another cool bridge we went out to take a look at and photograph. That's what happens when you're on foot and exploring a city, you go see the things you can actually see. I don't remember the name of it, but it was dynamic:

After our last activity in Da Nang, a massage anecdote that will appear later in an "Aside", we took a taxi back to the resort. Once there we tried to take it easy. The next day we had three flights to catch and one of the longest days. We hung out at the pool and the beach and later organized our gear for the flights.

The trip was coming to a blurry end...

Hoi An: the Sleepy, Tourist Beach Town

Hoi An was called the most beautiful city in Vietnam by our pal Johnny, the boat and bike guide from Can Tho, a time so long ago it seemed by now. After being dropped off by the shuttle in the new part of town we started walking. We needed to find the entrance to the old town.

Once there, you can see it is very charming:

But, if you want to see or enter any of the cool sites, you need to buy tickets. They sell ticket books with six tickets and you get to choose which of the many places you want to see. Sometimes the streets themselves were cool:

One place we went was a traditional home that had been turned into a museum of pottery and silks. Many of the pottery and coinage treasures were recovered from a shipwreck off the coast. The inner courtyard was pretty cool:

There were a few Wat and Buddhist temple sites that were constructed a few centuries in the past, mostly abandoned, and then reclaimed and used as planning sites for the fight against the French. This is opne such place:

Inside it had so many statues of dragons that I would have called it the Temple of the Dragon if I didn't know any better. Maybe that is the name...here's one of those dragons (and another facing the sky in the upper left corner...):

Hoi An retains a bit of the sleepy town feel, no matter how choked out with tourists it gets. They even have one of their old covered bridges, seen below behind Corrie:

At night, since we stayed as late as possible, each side of the main canal was beautifully lit. We even took a ride in a boat/gondola that night, actually, it was right after taking this picture:

We launched candle-boxes from the elder lady-pilot's vessel: they were memories for our grandmothers.

Hoi An was pretty, and we were there, but it was fully overrun with tourists. It was one of those places that's great to visit, and you hold those memories close, but you move along.

A beautiful little stop right up near the end of our adventure...

Sandy Beach at Non Nuoc, Our Own Little "China Beach"

China Beach was a television show that aired for four seasons, from 1988 to '91, a hospital and Vietnam era drama that showed the carnage of war from the perspective of the doctors, nurses and other triage personnel stationed at an evacuation hospital unit.

That unit was stationed in the vicinity of Da Nang, the well known R&R coastal city. The American and Aussie soldiers nicknamed the series of beaches that make up the greater sand-spit "China Beach".

The resort we booked, Sandy Beach, was located at Non Nuoc Beach, and the resort was mostly titled on paperwork and signs as "Sandy Beach at Non Nuoc". The resort was a solid ten to twelve minutes down the coast from Da Nang, and while it certainly wasn't all alone, the isolation was noticeable.

There was a deck past the pool so you could watch the waves without having to get in the sand:

Here's a picture of the pool and the South China Sea beyond:

This time of year I mentioned before was the hectic ocean time of year, and at different intervals there were flags set up telling of the relative safety of the surf for swimming. Red flag is no-go, yellow is very-careful, and green was have-fun. You can see here, an "at-your-own-risk" red/yellow mix:

Of course that didn't stop me from heading out. I was mostly surprised about how the waves, being controlled by the seafloor, would come in at all sorts of different angles. You could feel it trying to drag you out to sea, which was the one very serious consideration that had to be made for an afternoon dip.

Also in the zone between our beach hut and Da Nang are a series of jagged marble pimples called the Marble Mountains. They've been mined for centuries and the marble is well known throughout Asia. I believe there are seven of them, and this next picture is the largest and most accessible:

This, part of our last few days on this fortnight trip, was the first place we saw any renditions of the Chinese fat "happy Buddha". Up until the shop at the base of the Marble Mountain we'd only seen the skinny, seated and meditating Buddha, like from Ong Bak. I guess that shop knows their customers...

So, the resort...

We missed the whale island. We missed Hanoi. We missed Halong Bay, one of the premier sites in northern Vietnam. We missed the Valley of the Jars in Laos. We missed Hue, one of the imperial Vietnamese sites. We missed these spots only because we wanted to see a river delta floating market and tickets to Saigon were cheaper than to Hanoi--and it was tough to get to Siem Reap from the North of French Indochina. We'd decided, when we were all beat up on the way out of the Jungle, to take the last few days easy and relaxing and consign those tings that we either knew were going to miss, or had timed ourselves out of, to another trip in the future.

Sandy Beach was that rebound relationship: at a moment of vulnerability you find yourself convinced that what you need is this, even if your gut says 'that's probably gonna stick in your craw...'

We checked in late after a long, long day on a bus, and found our room; a good sized spot with a big bed and instant hot water. The fridge had beers and they were cheap-ish, and we indulged.

Sandy Beach had free shuttles to and from Da Nang and to and from Hoi An, a port town that grew in power until a major river's course was altered and it, the town, largely forgotten. Hoi An spent over a century as a sleepy forgotten village, and then tourism discovered it. Mostly intact, quaint, and romantic, it was a spot we had wanted to see.

Free shuttles are wonderful--something you hope your money is going towards--but the schedules of the shuttle belie what we dislike about the resort vacation. The resort had restaurants, bars, a pool so you wouldn't have to touch the ocean, tony shops and a massage parlor. They tried to give the intrepid traveler all they could ever want. They even had shuttles...

To Da Nang, the shuttle times were 12 to 2, and then 3:30 to 5:30. That means they left the resort at noon, and would return to pick you up at 2; later, they'd leave the resort at 3:30 and return at 5:50. And to Hoi An, which was further south than Da Nang was north, 10 to 1 and then 7 to 10.

What a crock. That was the most ridiculously convoluted paragraph to show my dislike: the times were complete unhelpful. When we went to Hoi An we left as early as possible and stayed as late as possible. In Da Nang it proved impossible---we got a cabbie ride back to the resort.

These kinds of resorts are designed to make everything easy and clean and, for lack of a better notion, Western. Corrie and I travel not to replicate our world elsewhere, but rather to experience the world as they who live there experience it.

Those aren't really compatible.

Give us the grit and the smoky underbelly, the food carts and the hand gestures...you can keep the well-practiced English language staff and awful pizza.

Oh well...at least we got our relaxing beach time:

Brief Hiatus

I only have a few posts left about the Vietnam trip, but many things have been going on that otherwise I would have been posting about.

The Olympics, and my enjoyment of people who generally don't care about sports who suddenly care too much...

Also Derek Jeter's swan song! He's done after this year--going out without A-Roid on his side.

Alex Rodriguez! Syria's civil war! Brazil trying to become a global power! The World Cup!

Sherweezy's still homeless...

I finally am starting to get into David Guterson...

We're rearranging our living room...

Not that anyone cares so much, but I do care about finishing up this Southeast Asia narrative. It weighs on my neck like a millstone. Corrie said it's good that one of us is trying to rescue the experience from the clutches of memory and chisel it onto the stone of the interwebs. 

Last week the news said that the Pineapple Express, a large weather front consisting of rain and general misery, was hitting California like a sledgehammer. Like the rest of the country, California would now be getting some bad storms.

Down here, the weatherman mentioned, we might get a little dampness, and the temperature was going to dip into the low 60s. Oh the humanity...

Stuck in Laos; Best Hot Shower Ever; Dinosaurs at the Crossing

We'd worked so hard to get to Laos that we'd neglected the exit flight. After returning to Pakse from the jungle, instead if walking back to our first hotel with that tiny room, we crossed the street and checked the Sala Champa Hotel.

The Sala Champa was the first French chateau built in the city, and at some point in the recent past some additions were added to the outer grounds while the interior was converted--it was now a hotel. Weary, grimy, weighed down with everything we'd brought from California, and both harboring some belly bug that kept us close to a bathroom, we checked in. They had a hot shower and an open room; that was pretty much all it took.

The chateau's grounds weren't crazy big; but the main house itself was quite beautiful, and we were given a room in it. Really, I should have typed that as a "room", since we had the large room with the bed, a tiny hallway to the bathroom, and a separate changing room that had a door that must have opened onto a sun-deck that no longer existed. This "room" could have been as our apartment. It had huge windows that opened out onto the quad that now housed the hotel's restaurant.

This picture doesn't do any justice to how awesome the place was:

We showered in their hot water for the first time since before we left for the jungle, cleaning the jungle filth off of us before we were to meet some friends we'd met on that trip. We could have stayed under that steaming hot water for days.

Dinner was nice, but before we met the Kiwi family for dinner, we tried to arrange for our departure the next morning: come back later, we were told.

The next day, it turned out, we couldn't fly either, and we were faced with a tough decision: how to leave Laos, and, more to the point, where exactly should we go?

As we were deciding, I explored the Sala Champa and found a cool veranda on the second floor. I took a picture of the Lai Cha Leung Hotel, our hotel from the first day in Pakse, directly across the street:

Here's the veranda facing the other way:

It was too hot, so we went back inside and tried to work out our problem.

Corrie had discovered a neat island beach resort where we could check out some whales. Whales! Since we couldn't leave the day we wanted to, we'd have to fly into Danang (or Da Nang, depending on how you transcribe it) and then boat it over to the island. There were a few problems with the scenario: you couldn't fly directly into Da Nang from Pakse--you'd have to fly into Ho Chi Minh City and then connect to Da Nang, which is like flying from LA to Phoenix to connect to a flight to SLO. Another problem was that the South China Sea, the ocean thereabouts, is dangerously rough this time of year, which makes the rare trip more expensive.

Corrie then found out about a reasonably priced beach resort outside of Da Nang, and once it became apparent that the cost was quite high, we decided to go for the better priced option.

Remember, we just wanted to relax for a the last few days. We were tired, sick, and beat up and figured a few days chilling would be nice. While Corrie rested at the Sala Champa, I roamed Pakse trying to find the best deal to Da Nang:

There was a creepy, overgrown city park among other neat spots:

It turned out the best deal, money-wise, was a bus trip from Pakse to the Vietnamese coast. Only that trip takes, supposedly, fourteen hours.

Having learned from the ride from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, we got tickets for the bigger bus, the one with the same reclining lounge seats that we had on Day Zero. But fourteen hours is a stupidly long time to be on a bus, especially for a trip that's closer in distance to Sacramento-to-San Diego. Also, the trip burned up an entire day of our vacation. Also, we'd be doing the first border crossing by foot/road of the whole trip.

With the tickets bought and the rest if the day left, we rested. The next morning we were going to be picked up at the hotel and driven to the bus stop--a perk won from our bus ticket broker. Our bus stop was a dodgy looking zone with no other tourists:

I went walking around while we waited and saw a group of guys carrying a building. They were relocating it:

Eventually the bus arrived. It was full, and by that I mean FULL. Sure, we had our reclined spots, so in that sense it wasn't too full, but the aisles were full of bags of rice and the bags of rice all had folks using them as bean bags. It was wild.

When we got to the border crossing everybody jumped off the bus. We started the arduous task of getting processed at the exit point, then crossing the no man's land that's the length of the black line that separates two countries on the map, and then entered Vietnam.

Below is a cool picture of a jungle Wat with a brontosaurus, one of the last things you see in Laos before heading into the line:

The Vietnamese border entrance is a Communist-styled design that's part-Asian-castle and part-fort:

If the trek through the exit of Laos was arduous, then I can't come up with a word for the Vietnam entrance. It took maybe an hour as the Vietnamese military and border personnel searched the bus and everybody's bags.

It was not for no reason. Lao is one of the world's top opium and heroin exporters.

There was some beautiful mountains along the spine of Vietnam, and the next picture doesn't do justice to the views, but does show a bit of some valley village:

We made it to Da Nang fifteen hours after we left Pakse. At the last stop there were only us and a trio of American NGO girls who'd just spent four months working in Cambodia. We negotiated a price with a cabbie before he knew where we were going, and we got our money's worth.

We got to our place, the Sandy Beach Resort, around 11, checked in, and, upon noticing the prices on the minibar and fridge, raided that bastard before we went to sleep.

Back in Vietnam, this time in style.

It didn't take too long to realize resorts like this weren't for us.

Treetop Adventure

Zip lines! Treehouses! Jungle hikes and adventure! It was all just too good to be true. I had been playing email tag with a guy who's name was showing us as Thor from the second half of November all the way up til Phnom Penh, and eventually worked out our reservations: we were going to be leaving on January 2nd for the two-day, one-night adventure.

The spot where we mustered for the trip was maybe a hundred feel away from the hotel with the tiny room, and when we got there we stashed our big bags upstairs. We had been informed to pack smaller bags for the day-night-day adventure, seeing as how we'd be hiking all our stuff in and out.

Here's a sidecar supply delivery guy piling up provisions for our weekend. There were thirteen or fourteen of us, so the pile was serious:

Then the drive.

We piled into these Hyundai people-mover vans like sardines, and off into the hills we jammed. The sky went from hazy white, to hazy baby blue, to fully blue in the forty minutes it took to get out of a "city". This was officially Paxsong. Then, we turned down a dirt road and the driver turned and smiled and said, "Only a half hour to go!"

And then the driving adventure started. That was thirty minutes of the bounciest, the roughest, the most destructive swath of "road" I've ever seen. We were thrown around like rag-dolls for a half an hour, coming out all bruised and weary.

We were weary still from all the biking and hiking at Angkor, and here we were getting our asses kicked by a drive. And Corrie was still pretty sick, but feeling well enough to keep up with the trip.

Finally the roughest half-hour we'd had so far was done, and we were able to grab a snack as we waited for the rest of the party. And the gear.

We had to put on all the harnesses and helmets before we started hiking. The tiny village where we started was cute and it seemed like every single person grew coffee cherries and dried their own beans. (I bought a bound for a few dollars when we were leaving.)

We started walking down a dirt road, very bombed out and similar to the rough one we rode in on, and eventually it turned into green and lush jungle:

Then the hike got rough, and my knee, which hadn't quite recovered from the Angkor shenanigans, was struggling to keep up with my spirit. Corrie, of course, soldiered on like a delirious shaman, her fever spiking. We realized it broke at some point during the heat and humidity of this first day. And I say heat and humidity with respect to living in Long Beach; it was between 75 and 85 degrees with 70% humidity, and this is the cold season.

We came to grassy clearing:

And the crew started setting up banana leaves on the ground like a table. Then then set up the food we were to eat for lunch right on the leaves. It was the most traditional meal I might have ever eaten in any of our travels. We rolled up sticky rice in our hands like clay and dipped it into a wide variety of grub, some better than others. Here's the leaves with only some rice and pork jerkey, before the food really came out:

Unfortunately, both Corrie and I got sick (differently than she had been), and we're petty sure this meal was the culprit. In any case...

After the lunch and the rest, we hit the jungle again and got to our first wires. Here's my brake, a stick:

The first wires were walking ones, holding the top wire and inching along the bottom, all hanging a few feet above a creek. It seemed silly, like we could just hike down and out of the creek-bed, but the point had been to get used to how the harnesses and safety lines worked.

Things got much scarier from there.

We made the first zip line, harnessed in, and stepped off a perfectly good platform.

I have some pictures of the lines, kind of, but really, nothing does justice to the feeling of being a hundred feet off the ground, strapping onto a skinny wire as thick as you thumb, and jumping off. The other end is, in the case of the longest zip-line, 435 m away. That's like 1400 feet, and 45 seconds of zooming over a canyon that opens up to far, far farther than hundred feet down. It was something else. At 1400 feet, you can't even see the end point:

Eventually we made the grounds, and the cliff barrier was pretty cool looking:

But definitely not as spectacular as breakfast view:

Our group was told that if we wanted to shower, we could either: 1) go down to the swimming hole (but it was very cold); 2) try out the shower stalls (also very cold); or 3) climb up to the waterfall and use it as a shower. As dusk was coming in, the waterfall was also the place to get a good look at the sunset. These reasons together wee just the motivation corrie and I needed.

I chose to "shower" in the waterfall, and the following picture is the last I took before I dropped the camera, my shirt and shoes, and headed off for the water:

The time under the falls was mystical: it was me and the water from a thousand years of storms and humidity. It was me and nature, nature and herself, the mist and roar and cold water...it all felt so good, worthy of the dangerous barefoot hike along the slick rocks.

That night the generator died, so the only lights anyone had were the headlights we all seemed to have brought. After dinner we were brought in tiny groups to our zip-lines that took us to our treetop bungalows. It was dark and we couldn't see how high up we were. We made it to the tiny bed, slipped under the mosquito netting, and fell asleep staring out at the stars.

This next picture is a look at one of the tree-houses, but, specifically, NOT ours:

This is the view the next morning from ours. Those broad skinny leaves, I feel obligated to mention, are half as big as me. that's when we realized how high up we were:

We went on eleven more zip-lines that morning before coming back and packing up, and starting the hike out. Through all the ass-kicking hikes and fever breaks and battles to be the first in line at the toilet I called out to Corrie, in the middle of trying to catch my breath, "Does this mean we're not up for a jungle safari?"

She called back, "We're on a safari right now!"

Yup, we absolutely were.

It was during the hike out that Corrie and I made a conscious decision to take it easy once we got back. Lounge on a beach or something...

We had one last harrowing part of the trek left: the thirty meter rock climb up and out of the canyon.

This was done with rebar loops that were drilled into the side of the mountain:

The path went up, then snaked around the face, then up some more, then a little back tracking, and then up to safety. And if you were about to shit your pants before...

We chose a different driver from Paxsong to Pakse and made it back last. We went across the street to the Sala Champa Hotel, and ended up with the largest hotel room I've ever paid for myself, directly across the street from the smallest room I've ever had. Cool symmetry there.

It was also the site of the Greatest Shower Ever, but that's an anecdote for later...