I’m sitting in my reclining sleeper chair next to Nick who is sprawled out in the aisle of our all-night bus taking us from Hue to Hanoi. The chairs in this bus offer a little more legroom than the last few buses we’ve taken, but in order to do so, you must stick your feet into a tube that goes under the seat back in front of you. Nick didn’t fit too well, bless his heart. The boy was born broad, and this part of the world discriminates against his kind, constructing everything a little too short, and a little too narrow. However, the boy is comfortable. He is lying flat and has the whole aisle to find room for his feet. I am comfortable and happy.
We spent one night in Hue, the intellectual capital of Vietnam. Highlights of our stay there were extremely long walks through the city, taste-bud massage-with-happy-ending teriyaki chicken, Buddhist celebrations of the full moon, and a journey into a huge, ample market. Hue is a very beautiful city with a large river that runs through it and a huge walled-off sector called the Citadel, a fortress built in the early 1800’s for a Chinese emperor and his concubines and eunuchs and family. Today it is a United Nations World Heritage site. We toured the fortress and saw elephants and took pictures. We felt good that we had finally seen something historical to Vietnam other than the war.
After Hue and a 12 hour bus ride we landed in Hanoi, the former stronghold of the Viet Cong, and now the capital of Vietnam. We stayed in the old quarter which has old French architecture for many blocks around a lake, with a bustling center for buying whatever your heart desires. We had some banging-good food on the streets but were saddened by the unprecedentedly-awful beer of Hanoi, the Hanoi Export, which is kind of like Bud Light, but much lighter.
From Hanoi we booked a tour to see Halong Bay, a four hour drive away and also one of the UN World Heritage Sites. It is a bunch of hills that jut out of the water forming islands in the bay. We had to go. There were gobs of different tours available, at varying prices and with different luxuries. We obviously opted for the cheapest, us being not very far removed from small budget living in El Salvador. This turned out to be a mistake. After viewing the itinerary of our trip we had high hopes for our trip: all meals included with a wonderful stay on a Junk boat in the ocean, then a night at Cat Ba Island in a Hotel by the water, a visit to Monkey Island and all-day kayaking. We learned very soon that the food was cafeteria-quality at best; the accommodations were hot, smelly, dirty, and cock-roach-ridden, without electricity for most of the stay and in the Red Light district. We were treated like insignificant tourists with cameras and money, and anything that we wanted was for a price, and over-priced. Luckily we had some great travelling mates on the journey. A few Aussies, a Canadian, and another American helped us get through the agony of the dirty scam trip that we were on, and enjoy the night life of Cat Ba port, the hours stranded at the port waiting for our boat and unaccounted-for passports, the breathtaking sunset over the bay islands, the full-moon card games on the upper deck accompanied by the crazy afterhours jumping into the ocean that woke up the crew. We loved our trip to the bay because we had good people to share it with. But a word of warning for future travelers: opt for a more expensive tour unless you wish to be haggled, scammed, and duped into something you think will be as good or better than you see in the tour brochure.
Right now Nick and I are sprawled out in our beds in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. We just finished drinking a Lao Beer after our 20 hour bus ride from Hanoi on Wednesday. Lao is surprisingly similar to El Salvador in its appearance and its poverty. I, in a way, feel right at home here. Vientiane is a city of barely 300,000 people and is the capital of one of the 20 poorest countries in the world. We drove in seeing beautiful forested-mountains in the fog which produced a bit of nostalgia for El Salvador. Tomorrow we head north to Vang Vieng to explore the beautiful scenery of Northern Laos.
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