Setting Sail in Ha Long Bay

Words can't describe what a cool experience our 3-day boat trip on Ha Long Bay was. We went with Vega Travel (after an afternoon of research) and were so pleased with our guide and the tour and everything we were able to see. Our "junk"- which is what they call the style of boat we were on, was nice and clean, and our room was pretty good sized. Y'see, we'd heard horror stories about dirty boats, lost passports and luggage, and junks filled with more passengers than capacity. So we felt really lucky when we had a group size of 8 the first day, and then it was just down to 4 of us for the remaining 2 days. Doing a 3-day trip on Ha Long Bay was great advice we had received from a traveler we met in Hoi An.

The first day we took a minibus to Ha Long City - about 4 hours. Then we hopped on our vessel and weaved our way out of the junk jam to the open bay. It was overcast the first day, which was a disappointment, but it was still beautiful. We explored some caves, did some kayaking, jumped off the boat deck and swam in the water. We had a tasty dinner and then decided to play some cards with our English friends, Chris and Mark. We taught the boys how to play "Somethings Gotta Give" and they were huge fans! And if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure I won! It was such a peaceful evening, sitting out on the deck of the boat, trying to see the stars peak through the clouds and looking at the lights reflecting off the fellow junks on the water. Before retiring to my cabin, I had to pinch myself because sometimes I just can't believe this is real!

The second day was pretty much all to ourselves. The 2 Spanish couples returned to Ha Long City, and we went on with our English friends and our good little guide, Ba. We went into a different bay, Lan Ha. This was our guide's favorite place because we could escape from all the other people. We went on a hike through Cat Ba National Park - and it poured rain on us. We went through a couple's little home in the park. They are the first people I've ever met allowed to live in a National Park - but apparently, they were there long before it was declared a protected area. The man had gone to the market that day, which consisted of an hour hike to the water and then a 3-hr boat trip. Quite the trek to get to the market, huh? We finished our hike, had some lunch, the sun came out, we did some kayaking and then motored away to Cat Ba Island.


We had the afternoon and evening to ourselves on the Island - free to wander around, grab some dinner, explore the uneventful nightlife that the town had to offer. Lani and I tried to hit the discoteca, but it turns out that nobody really goes there on a Saturday night. They were playing techno anyway, which explains why the dance floor was empty! :)

The next day we drove through the National Park and then we were back on a junk and headed into Ha Long City. Fortunately, we got another few hours on the boat, looking at the scenery and the sun actually came out. It was quite a beautiful trip and we totally lucked out with a fantastic guide - who really was a true delight! (Below is Captain Ba himself)

Shop Till You Drop in Hoi An

Well, for two girls who aren't overly obsessed with new clothes and shoes, we sure went crazy in Hoi An. You can't really pass up a tailor-made suit, or leather boots, or a new dress, or...ok, I'll stop. All I know is that we had to factor in an extra day to make sure we made it to all our fittings and that our clothes were finished and ready to be shipped.

Hoi An is infiltrated with tailor shops, and all the prices are competitive, so it was extremely difficult to decide where to go. The first day we spent researching, collecting business cards and talking prices and fabric quality. And then at night we prioritized the business cards and mapped out our day. The first couple days were filled with us ping-ponging from one shop to another. Eventually we got smarter and planned our fittings for the afternoon so that we could go to the beach in the morning or sit by the pool at our hotel. So in between shopping, which did consume the majority of our time, we were able to pedal out to the beach and bask in the sun and enjoy a beautiful ocean view. We did have some pool time too and really enjoyed wandering the colorful, cobbled streets of Hoi An as well. And of course, we found time to eat A LOT! Hoi An has incredible food, typical to the area. There is a shrimp wonton dish called 'White Rose' that was quite good. We were also huge fans of 'Cao Lau' (a pork and noodle dish), and actually found ourselves eating it more than once a day. But it was so good, and such a good price (like $0.70), that it just couldn't be passed up. And when were we going to be back to Hoi An to eat this food again?!

During our stay in Hoi An and also the last couple days of Nha Trang, we met a classy couple from England, Andy and Marie, who we got to spend several days with. So it was fun to hang out with them, do a little shopping, go to the beach, and grab treats in the evening together and stroll along the riverside. The town would light red lanterns at night that reflected off the river and made for quite a lovely evening on the water. We needed low key after Nha Trang, and Hoi An was the perfect little town to explore by foot, do some damage on the credit card, enjoy a little beach time in the mornings and then prepare for a downpour in the afternoon while trying on clothes in various shops. Our tailor of choice was Trang at KHOI. She did a fabulous job on our clothes and then had the postmen come to us at her shop to pack up our boxes.


I sent a 14 kg box home, by sea (yikes! check that scale below!).


So hopefully, in the next 3-4 months my package will come floating to the doorstep. That is, if these boys actually made it to the post office on that moto bike - quite a load between Lani and I. Cross your fingers for me that the box arrives by Christmas!

Sleepless Nights in Nha Trang

They say you can get "stuck in a rut" in Nha Trang...and our 6 block radius of fun did end up holding us there for about 5 days...when we'd originally planned for 2. I can't really explain it, but we met so many travelers who just ended up staying in Nha Trang - and we became, for only a brief chunk of time, part of this "locals" group. It was fabulous! We did the same thing each night with the same people at the same bars, danced to the same music, watched the same sunrise, and laid on the same beach each day to catch up on some sleep. The first night we were there, we strolled down the street and bumped into who seemed to be the local celebrity, Bin. He was promoting his pub, Red Apple, and encouraging us to go for a drink. Little did we know that our one drink would lead us to stay in Nha Trang, and cross two of our other coastal destinations off the itinerary. We had such a good time meeting people, that it became what we had to do for the next few nights. The first night, we retired early (about 2 a.m.) as we had already signed up for a 4-island boat trip in the morning, and didn't want to be out too late and risk getting sea sick on the boat.

One of the classic stories of one of the travelers we met was a guy named Jason who is actually from Berkeley and was just traveling through Vietnam for 3.5 weeks. Well, that was 6 months ago, and he still hasn't left Nha Trang. In fact, he's just renewed his visa for another 6 months, and really has no plans of going back to the States any time soon. He told Lani and I that Nha Trang is his rut. Haha, I'd say!

Anyway, to make 5 long days short. We did a day out on the boat island hopping - and that was quite a fun time. Our tour guide, Dat, was a cheeseball - but I guess that was to be expected.


We ate fabulous and fresh lobster at one of the street-side restaurants at night. They grilled it right there on the bbq for us, and it was so tasty. It was huge! I think we're probably complete lobster snobs after that experience.




And then it was the same-same. Our nights out began. At Red Apple Bar we'd mingle with fellow travelers, play Jenga or Connect Four, shoot some pool and/or do a little dancing. Our friend, Bin, was always busy on the corner gathering more people to come on in for good times. Next, we'd head to Why Not? Bar and our nights were the same. We danced till dawn, went for street food at 4:30 a.m., where we'd sit in the streets at little plastic tables and on stools that kindergarten kids would sit in back home. Then we'd watch the streets fill with locals as they marched to the sea for early morning aerobics (and I mean early, because it was still dark outside), and then we'd watch the sun rise over the ocean. Not too shabby of a place to get "stuck in a rut" we decided.

The Easy Riders of Dalat

Oh wow - what an amazing place Dalat was! It was the first time that Lani and I have actually been cold during this trip. It rained on us each day, and we bundled up in our fleece, gortex jackets and tennis shoes.

We stayed in Dalat for about 2.5 days. The first day we just strolled around the city and did some cafe hopping. The clouds were low on the mountains and the rain was on and off, so we couldn't fully see the surrounding mountains, green trees, and hillsides scattered with colored houses and villas that get raved about here. They call it the French Alps of Vietnam, and I could see why...and could've seen better if the clouds would have ever lifted during our stay.

The other full day in Dalat, we took a tour with the Easy Riders. The story behind these fellas, is that they're veterans of the area - been touring for about 15-18 years, and they call themselves the "genuine" or "distinguished" Easy Riders - as the popularity has picked up and there is a younger crew of drivers trying to be like them and lead similar tours. You know the good ones by their grey hair, Uncle Tom (Lani's driver) told us. Basically, our day was amazing, and it didn't rain too badly. We jumped on the back of a moto and toured the countryside and surrounding areas and villages of Dalat for about 8 hrs. There were coffee plantations forever and local produce was being grown on the hillsides as far as the eye could see. We visited a big, fat, white buddha on the hill and saw some waterfalls. We wandered through a minority village - where they still very much live off the land and operate day-to-day without any modern day conveniences. The children there were adorable - they followed us down the muddy road just saying "hello, hello."


We also saw how silk gets made - the entire process - which includes the basket weaving of bamboo to hold the silk worms. We looked inside a family's home in a village where the children were busily working on building the bamboo baskets for their after-school activity. We saw a lot and Titi and Uncle Tom shared all they knew with us. We had such a great day on the back of the motos, cruising through the countryside of Dalat - and only got rained on briefly (hence the sweet rain ponchos). It sure beat seeing the scenery through a bus window.

The next day we were up early and headed out of the rainy hills of Dalat to the sandy beaches of Nha Trang.

Highlights of Ho Chi Minh City

We have successfully crossed the border and are enjoying our time in Vietnam. We spent about 4 days in Ho Chi Minh City - a couple days touring and a couple days shopping. I could already tell quite a difference between Cambodia and Vietnam. HCMC is developed with a much more stable economy - you don't see quite as much poverty in the streets.

While in HCMC:

1) You ever heard of Pho??? Well it's a beef noodle soup that is available on every single street corner - everywhere you look, you've got a Pho stand. It's super cheap, and Lani and I are eating it daily. We're going to have Pho coming out our eyeballs by the time we leave this country in a few weeks.

2) MOTOS GALORE! I have never seen so many moto bikes in my life. We could stand on the street corners for hours just to watch the chaos. And have these people ever heard of helmets?

3) We went to the Cao Dai temple - and these religious followers worship 4 times a day, 7 days a week. (My 3 hrs on Sunday doesn't seem so bad!)

4) We toured the Cu Chi tunnels - which were used by the Viet Cong (Vietnam Communists) during the Vietnam War. They let tourists climb through 100 meters of one of the tunnels, which they have already widened so that the Westerner-size body can even fit through. And I must say, I was anxiously awaiting the end of that tunnel. It was so dark inside...and such a small crawl space - I can't even imagine how they used to climb through the tunnels holding a gun and a torch to light the way.

5) We did a day tour to the Mekong Delta. It was just ok. Since we'd already done so much on the waters of Cambodia and seen the villages and how people live off the land - it wasn't something new and we felt too funneled from one place to the next as a tourist group. However, there was some delightful coconut candy that we indulged in - so we got ourselves some fat kid treats to make the trip more worthwhile. Yum yum!

6) We went out dancing with our English and New Zealand buddies - the 2nd floor of GO2 Bar treated us right until 4:00 a.m.

7) Spent some time shopping at the Ben Than market. In fact, we broke down and bought an extra bag to carry around our goods...we plan to ship a package home once we've had a few suits/dresses/clothes tailored in Hoi An.

8) We got ourselves a Vietnamese mani and pedi for the steep price of $5.00. :) It seems like a steal of a deal, but I did walk away with a battle wound...the woman made several of my toes bleed!

Before leaving Cambodia...

I do believe Lani and I spent a little over 2.5 weeks in Cambodia, and we enjoyed most of it. For all it's worth, I figure Phnom Penh can just fall into the Earth and we'd all be ok. But the rest of Cambodia was beautiful and we were quite pleased with where we were able to go and the sites we saw. A few country memories include: our "relaxed" beach time in S-ville with the constant nagging of impoverished children to buy their bracelets; the mice on my pillow at our cheap hostel; the 7-people piled high on motos; the plentiful amount of moto drivers and tuk-tuk drivers constantly shouting out "madam or hey lady"; our cooking class, dancing with the locals at a wedding celebration, and the colorful monks who strolled the streets. We enjoyed the rice paddy fields and seeing how the village people live off the lands, while we motored slowly by in our boat. The cute little children running around naked and living and laughing in the muddy river that rolls by (or under) their homes. It was saddening and discouraging to see the poverty and hear the stories of broken families caused by the Khmer Rouge. But I'm grateful that I was able to come here and become more educated on what took place just over 30 years ago. It really helped me understand the current status of Cambodia, and it makes me hope the best for the people and their country. They are beautiful and kind...and I really can't say enough about the adorable little children and their smiling faces.

Before saying good-bye to Cambodia, we spent a couple more days following my Siem Reap post. We stopped overnight in Kompong Thom to visit the Sambor Prei Kuk temple complex. Feeling slightly templed-out, these small structures didn't really compare to what we'd just surrounded ourselves with for days with Angkor Wat. We hopped a bus the next day, for yet, one more night in Phnom Penh. Although we sincerely disliked this city, it certainly did end up being our home base while traveling in Cambodia. We stayed at a quaint little family run place - the TAT Guesthouse - where the children were playing on the floor with their toys, the mom was in the kitchen cooking, Grandma was sewing, and the Old Man was sitting shirtless watching the tube, while the nephew, son or uncle carried our bags up the three flights of rickety stairs to our room. It was a fine place to stay on our last night in the country - giving us a good-old family feeling. In fact, I started to get sick this night and when we arrived home at midnight, the young girl whipped me up a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. You don't get that service everywhere!

On our last night, we had to do a Cambodian bbq - which consisted of A LOT of butter and us trying to cook our own food with chopsticks (Lani has imporved tremendously). Our waiter stood by closely to help us out along the way.

Now we close the chapter on Cambodia and we are off to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in the morning. I know Lani pulled together a list of Cambodian memories, so check out her blog: www.getjealous.com/lkalemba

Temple Time in Siem Reap

Well, you may or may not know, but Siem Reap is famous for Angkor Wat and it's neighboring temples. So basically, we spent the last couple of days seeing temples. However, before our sight seeing, we rolled into town on a Saturday, so we decided to have a night out on the town. We hit up Bar Street - which is a street lined with restaurants, bars and a couple dance floors. It's apparently where you find the social scene in Siem Reap - a street thriving off of tourism and catering to the Westerners. We actualy bumped into our friend, Sam, and made a new friend, Patrick from LA, and the four of us did a little dancing at Temple Bar. It ended up being a late night, considering we were meeting our tour guide at 8:00 a.m. But hey, you're only young once!

The next morning, we met our guide, Rith, who spent the day with us in the hot-hot sun, wandering the temple grounds and teaching us all about the structures and the Buddhist and Hindu carvings on the walls, that contribute to making these temples so intricate and beautiful. Having a guide was essential - it helped give more meaning to everything - rather than just an old building on the side of the road. It was a full day though. We started with the gates at Angkor Thom, went on to Bayon, where there are 216 faces carved to form this temple - plus detailed carvings on the walls to display the way of life of Cambodians in the 12th Century. It took us several hours just exploring the grounds and hearing all about the carvings.

We went on to Ta Prohm, which is the temple where Tomb Raider was filmed. I liked this one a lot because much of the stone has begun to crumble and the large roots of trees were growing over the temple walls.

And then of course, near the end of our day, we explored the famous Angkor Wat. It was beautiful and impressive and quite the spectacular structure to see. However, after a day in the heat and battling thousands of tourists for the "best" photo opp, it was all I could do to pay attention to our guide - telling us more about the carvings of gods and demons, immortality and re-births. And did I mention that two of the five towers are currently under construction - just our luck, huh?! Look at those sweet green construction tarps in the pic below. :)

So we wrapped up our day touring temples and we spent the next day just hanging out in Siem Reap. We ate some tasty pastries at the Blue Pumpkin (yum yum!) and did some shopping at the local markets - Cambodia has great silk! On our third day in Siem Reap, we got up at 4:30 a.m. to venture out to Angkor Wat for the sunrise. We took breakfast with us in our bags so that while all the other tourists went back into town for breaky, we could tour Angkor Wat by ourselves (more or less) and take the type of pix we'd been hoping for. It was nice - we wrote in our journals and ate breakfast in the morning sunlight, with Angkor Wat as our backdrop. Does it get much better than that?!

Battambang to Siem Reap, By Boat

This boat ride, from Battambang to Siem Reap, is so far one of the highlights of the trip. It was beautiful...and ended up being an hour shorter than we'd expected, which is nice when you're sitting on the rooftop of a boat for 7 hours, completely exposed to the sun. Plus, let us all be grateful for technology these days - as our little iPods and our sweet dance moves made the trip go by even faster.

Would you check out the width of that river? That little helper out front had to get out a paddle at times to push us off the side banks. In fact, we're lucky it's wet season, because we've heard that in dry season, the trip can take up to 12-15 hours and passengers have had to help push the boat up the river and tromp through the mud. Glad that wasn't us! Also, whenever we would come around a bend in the river, we'd have to honk the horn, for fear that we might run into the locals on their little paddle boats...and there just wouldn't be room enough for the both of us!

Anyway, the best part about it was just seeing all the agricultural lands and the way people really live out in the country. There were several floating villages that we passed through. Apparently, these people couldn't afford to buy land, so they built their "homes" on the water. The structures are built up on stilts so that the water sits below, and then they use boats to transport themselves from here to there. Or, they've just built themselves a boat - that's covered - and then it's their home and their transportation. Crafty, huh?!

Along the route, we had to drop a few people off, which meant that our boat driver would just honk the horn, and someone from the riverbank would come paddling out and pick up their mom/sister/uncle/friend. It was great! And there were several women that we dropped off who unloaded bags full of fresh produce and goodies. It was as if one woman each week made a trip into Battambang to shop for the community. It was quite cool.

Throughout the ride, I was also just in shock with the color of the water - check it out below, pretty brown, huh? Well, this is the water they use to wash their clothes in, to bathe in, to wash their food in...and if you look closely, you can see 2 little heads popping up in the water...all the children (no matter what age) are playing in the water all day long. They love it - and don't even think twice about it's murky color.

As the boat pulled into the docking station, we were all absolutely swarmed with tuk-tuk and moto drivers, just pleading with every passenger to be their mode of transport. They are so aggressive and excited, and so in-your-face, that it's sometimes hard for me to have patience with them. Luckily, our hotel from Battambang had arranged our transport and Mr. Kha sat waiting for us with a sign reading our names. We stepped off the boat with ease, through the floods of drivers and shouting, hopped in the back of his tuk-tuk and bumped down the road to Siem Reap.

It was a day for me to note how extremely fortunate I am to have a roof over my head, the ease of transportation and clean water at my access. There were several homes/huts lining the roadway into town that we saw families of 5 or 6 living in. Their bodies are piled amongst each other on the hardwood floor or kicking it in a hammock - but these people's entire homes are seriously the size of an office cubicle or a small bedroom. I left the day and the river impressed with how they live their day to day - it's quite incredible, and quite different from how I grew up - that's for sure!