Matt: I heart SE Asia, So Far

I left mom and dad and Claire on a cold morning in Denver Colorado with great thoughts of travel and food and people and foreign languages. Of course I was also thinking of all the insecurities and political turmoil that could be waiting for us in our first port of arrival, Bangkok, but Nick and I had made the proper preparations to leave Thailand immediately before the milk got too sour. I flew from Denver to Seattle where my knight in shining armor was waiting for me, a big grin on his face, full of the same emotion of traveling to a truly foreign place within the next twenty four hours that I had. It was good to see Nick. I had last seen him a week before I left in El Salvador when he was passing through San Salvador with his sister and brother-in-law. Now me and him were going to stay at his sister’s and brother-in-law’s abode in Bellinsham, WA. There we made our last arrangements and toasted with his family over a chicken barbeque and pasta dinner, overlooking the ocean towards Vancouver Island.

The next morning Nick and I shuttled ourselves to Sea-Tac, or the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport if you haven’t heard it before. Remember this. Everyone will give you a pretentious frown if you don’t know what Sea-Tac is. Anyways, we hopped on the swank Korean Air Boeing 777 to Seoul on Monday afternoon at 2:20, and touched down at 5:00 pm on Tuesday! We landed in almost-zero visibility fog, to our amazement. We both were surprised when suddenly the runway appeared right below the plane we touched down without a bump. Thank you modern technology! We barely caught our next flight as we were both passed out in the terminal, and quickly we were on our way to Bangkok. Sadly, we couldn’t see any of the city since we had booked a plane to fly us immediately to Saigon. Bangkok has been alight with burning tires and gunshots due to political violence, so we bypassed Thailand and headed straight to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), but not before we had some knock-out Pad Thai and got stared down by a serious-looking transvestite.

We arrived in Saigon at 9 in the morning and grabbed a bus to Pham Ngu Lao, in the center of 9 million-people city and settled in to Madam Cuc’s guesthouse. We wasted no time to hit the street and find our first Vietnamese dining delight. It just so happened to be a block down the road, on the sidewalk, a woman throwing together soup next to men sitting on short stools bent over tables picking away with their chop-sticks at something that looked, well, very Vietnamese. They passed us two stools and we perched on them waiting for our grub. The woman handed us our bowls and sticks and we took our first bite. And we both looked right at each other and gave an expression we both understood, that this food was “are you kidding me?” delicious. It was a bowl of bean sprouts, rice paper, basil, pepper, and two kinds of absolutely amazing tofu. It was love at first taste, and to top off the moment we were given two ice-cold Saigon Exports (a pretty good local lager) to wash the goodness down. We went back this morning for breakfast and already feel like regulars. We plan to go for dinner tonight.

Today we went out of the city on a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels dug and used by the Viet Cong during the war. On our way out of the city we got to enjoy our driver dodging and weaving through the giant sea of motorbikes that consume all traffic in the urban areas. Vietnam is a motorbike-crazy country. At the tunnels, not only did we get to crawl around fifteen feet underground in tunnels less than a meter high, we also got to see how Victor Charlie (military for Viet Cong) made ad-hoc explosives, weapons, and tools as well as the different types of booby-traps they used to fight against the US military and the Vietnamese Army. It was an important thing to see, as an American. I couldn’t imagine the horrors that the US military faced while in the bush in Vietnam, as well as the horrors the Vietnamese faced. Seeing these reminders of the war tells a more personal story of “America’s nightmare” and I predict that there will be many more humbling experiences along the way.

Tomorrow we head north in a sleeper bus to see the coast and make our way towards Hanoi. Till then, adios.