Since I last wrote, I’ve descended the length of Vietnam, crossed Cambodia, and returned to Thailand (including Koh Phi Phi) briefly before…. flying HOME! I surprised my parents for Thanksgiving, which was really, really fun. Managed to hitch a ride from the ferry boat to my parents’ new house and watch my dad nearly have a heart attack when I jumped out in front of him on opening the front door. =) At night.

So Vietnam… yeah, very interesting place. I began in the north. Visited Halong Bay which is beautiful (full of limestone karst-islands), swam at night in illuminescent water, and slept in a giant chinese “junk” boat. Nothing short of awesome.

On the Junk Boat in Halong Bay, Viȇt Nam

Jumping off the Junk Boat

Hanoi is a quiet, classy city. I learned how to cross the street in Vietnam – don’t look at the vehicles, just walk slowly and steadily in a single direction, and you’ll be fine. ;) The traffic flows around you like water around a stone, but not if you stop and start sporadically. One of my favorite places in Hanoi was called “Beer Corner” or “Ba Hơi Corner.” Just go there. (Ba Hơi is freshly brewed Vietnamese Beer, and you drink it sitting on tiny little stools). Seeing well-watered giant 6’3″ Western guys teetering on these little stools was quite amusing in and of itself.

Hanoi

An example of the stools, although admittedly I took this shot more for the T-shirt. Reads "Feminism, Democracy, Socialism"

After that, headed up to Sapa where some new friends and I followed some random ladies with baskets full of hemp (what?!) to their house where they served us not tea, but hot water. Actually it was the highlight of my trip up north. The kids up there were absolutely adorable. The hemp is used for their clothing… but we certainly did do a double-take when it looked like these women had huge baskets of full of gigantic marajuana leaves on their backs. It was straight out of “The Beach” …except not.

Baskets of Hemp in Sapa

Black Hmong girl near Sapa

Dolcie drinking hot water "tea," with an audience

Sigh... another boring day on a bull

Then I headed south to Hue and Hoi An where the food is good and apparently there are beaches. I wouldn’t know as a giant typhoon hit us when I was there. Apparently 20 people died in the storm – it was a pretty strong. I naively thought it was excellent fun, and became the good ‘American Idiot’ out on a bicycle in the middle of the full-fledged storm and gale-force winds, taking pictures like a good little tourist.

My bike in the floods

Having some scooter trouble

Funny, the only other tourists I saw out and about were American or Kiwi. haha.  Anyway I bet we had more fun that day than any other tourists just sitting around lamenting their flooded rooms and bored state of mind. ;) My favorite quote from the American was “Oh, I’m a little nervous about some kind of snake or something in this water” he says, standing nearly knee-deep in water… and I point down by his feet where water is obviously flowing up, not down, and say “I think that sewer overflow you are standing in is probably more of a concern than snakes.” The look on his face was priceless. Mind you, I was only standing about 3 feet away from him. Oddly enough, that night I had a furious case of simultaneous projectile vomit and diarrhea, during a blackout. Yeah, I know, TMI. I could go on, but I’ll stop there. ;)

"Gee, I hope there aren't any snakes in this sewer water!"

The morning after was beautiful

Saigon, or Hoh Chi Minh City depending on who you ask, was a modern and bustling city where I got a good dose of biased war history and communist propaganda. It was a great experience – learned a LOT. It was mind-opening to see the other side and how warped all of our histories are, no matter how much we try for them not to be. Or not – some places don’t really try.

Saigon at night

Highlights included squeezing into the famed “Cu Chi” tunnels (maybe a little too soon after the Giant Mutant Insect story to be entering a dark tunnel with sounds of scurrying little insect feet everywhere), and shot my first gun, an M-1 carbine.

Cu Chi Tunnels. This one was NOT made larger for tourists, and had no lights, and yes they covered the lid on me.

Cambodia won the “most culturally kind-of-changes-you” award. The people were amazing. Also heart-achingly desperate. They have suffered so incredibly much. I didn’t even know it, really, until I saw it first hand. It’s not a place where you throw away your leftovers. There’s someone right there who’s happy to finish for you – even if they have no hands to eat it with.

Photos of S-21 Political Prisoners. Yeah, children!

Classroom turned into prison cells

The “S-21″ prison, the former high school which the Pol Pot regime turned into a prison, torturing and killing about 17,000 people… is now a museum displaying the rather sickly well-documented inmates and devices.  I’ve never actually cried in a museum until the S-21 experience.

I also paid a visit to the Killing Fields, where thousands were exterminated and buried in mass graves. Walking around you see bits of bone and clothing in the dirt under your feet.

Bones and clothing on the ground at the Killing Fields

Sorry to be so depressing, but it’s important to call these things out. I am appalled that I never learned about Cambodia in school, and that we barely glossed over the political intricacies of the Vietnam war. We seem obsessed with WWI and WWII, because they are Western wars, when there is so much important world history outside of all that. I know there’s not enough time to learn everything, but there’s still no excuse for how innocently biased my own thoughts were going into it, from my own schooling as a child. Here’s what we learned about Vietnam, in a nutshell: “Vietnam was this war where the US went in and took sides during a civil war. This kicked off a really interesting social thing called the hippy movement (… insert more on hippies and free love and all that…) which was amazing because they actually were able to affect politicians and show that the war was all a mistake, and then Nixon was ousted because of this great, grand scandal called Watergate (…insert more on Watergate…) and… Next!” You get the point. Nothing about all the mines we left in Cambodia, or how we indirectly fed the revolt which put Pol Pot into power, or even Napalm.

On a lighter note… Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, is one of the seven wonders of the world and is truly impressive. People say you can spend a week at Angkor. I was templed-out after one day, though. Somehow they all start to look the same after a while (some will gasp at this). Maybe I was just starting to get a little tired of being constantly on the move.  I probably could have done two days of templing with a rest day in between, but didn’t have that kind of time, so I satisfied myself with a day of templing and a day to check out the actually-quite-interesting hell-hole of Siem Riep and the most fascinating Land Mine Museum, more for the stories of the owner than anything else. I have never seen so many people in such a small area missing limbs… and this museum helped explain why.

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Trees growing out of ruins. Tomb Raider, anyone?

Back in Thailand I visited Koh Phi Phi one last time and saw the improvements over the last 6 months. The island is a LOT greener than it was when I first arrived, less than six months ago. Grass is growing everywhere, many buildings have repaired, and new ones in construction. Best of all, it was good to see old friends – I even got to live with Thai friends this time, which was GREAT! :)

Green! Amazing progress from before.

Living in a climbing shop with my lovely Thai mates

Now I’m home and it’s cold here.  Am not used to that anymore.

I hope those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a fabulous one, and those who don’t… well… you are thinner than the rest of us for it. ;)