Category: Uncategorized

From Vietnam

It’s a fun thing, traveling in Asia, and looking Asian. 

When I was in Thailand, as the days passed and my tan caught up to the local level, people started talking to me in Thai.  In Taiwan and Japan,  I can pass the casual glance pretty reliably (until I start talking, of course).  

The sleeper train from Saigon to Nha Trang pulled in at 5am, and with nothing to do, we dragged ourselves and backpacks for a 20 minute walk to the beach we knew was somewhere out in the tepid darkness.  Actually, I just got annoyed with the vulture-like clamor of taxi drivers right outside the station, and just started following some tourist looking joggers.  Who else would be jogging on a Vietnamese street but a tourist, right?  And a tourist would likely be heading to the beach. 

It quickly became apparent that we weren’t following tourists, but that yes, these locals were headed beach-wards. For pre-dawn, the streets had a decent number of adults just walking, presumably for their health.  

When we reached the beach after about 10 long blocks (and after telling the same motorcycle driver at EVERY INTERSECTION) that we didn’t need a ride, and didn’t care for his hotel either, we found a number of senior citizens doing morning exercises, walking, gossiping, and generally having a good time.  There was clearly a set of regulars, and I suspect we had hijacked one of their two benches.  

Back to the discussion of looking like a local - In Vietnam, I thought it was pretty obvious I wasn’t Vietnamese, but well…these old folks at the beach still couldn’t get it through their heads that someone looked Asian but somehow didn’t speak their language.  One of them finally got it, and started asking me if I spoke Vietnamese … in English. (If I say “No Vietnamese” in English when you ask me in Vietnamese…do you think the answer changes when you ask me in English?  At least he didn’t just try asking louder.)

Anyhow – once sunrise hit, a small group of these energetic oldies decided to hit the waves.  They all had the same faded cottonish shorts, and as they walked into the waves, I wondered when they started doing this.  No one actually swam.  They did sort of reverse jumping jacks into the breaking waves.  Think of a wave breaking onto your back, and making a snow angel onto the wave as you jump up.  That’s what they were doing.  Not particularly strenuous, but it looked pretty refreshing.  

From Vietnam

That was my first two hours in Nha Trang, and I think the most memorable.  Sun risen, we walked to a hotel, booked a room for $5 for the day so we could use a shower and drop our bags.  Bought some hot soy milk from a street vendor, snagged a last minute dive/snorkel trip which occupied the rest of the day (As the nausea set in, I remembered that I get seasick. Heh. Got sick just from snorkeling.)

Taking the sleeper train from Saigon to Nha Trang was a much nicer affair than my previous sleeper train experience in a 3rd class berth in Russia.  MUCH nicer. Maybe because it’s winter now, and before it was hot, sticky summer.  Maybe because we were in soft sleeper (equiv. of first class).  Maybe because we didn’t arrive dripping sweat, and tired from arguing with babushkas to let us ON the train.

At any rate, it wasn’t exactly comfortable – the fan? ac? blasted cold air noisily when we stopped at stations, and seemed to instead distribute heat while we were moving.  The 4 bed berth was shared with a mother+ toddler, and an older woman who, beyond looking surprised to find two foreigners in her cabin, said nothing and went straight to sleep.  The mother was way too popular for her own good.  I’m talking four hours of continuous conversation, punctuated only by the breep breep of arriving texts.  I don’t know how her kid ever gets sleep, or lives with that every day.  The bed itself was barely long enough to fit my 5’7″ self in without cramping my toes.  Happily or not-so-happily, I was awake both times when we pulled into our 5am stops in Nha Trang and Da Nang.  

Taxi drivers will screw you over if you blink twice.  You know the seagulls in Finding Nemo?  That’s what they were like.  Since the last thing I want to do at 5am, post-sleeper-train is negotiate with jerks, I just kept walking, more out of annoyance than any knowledge about where I was going or how far I was from anywhere I might want to be. The one taxi that we rode without help from a “trusted” source like a hotel, made a 5 minute ride into 10 minutes – and that was only because I started grumbling.

Your average motorcycling fellow is free for hire, and probably the way to go, unless you have massive luggage.  They tend to suffer from seagull syndrome too, though, and all seem to get kickbacks from hotels, because they always want to take you to one.  Probably the most fun way to get around, unless you’re worried about head injuries.  Vietnam instituted a helmet law in the past two years, and while everyone now wears helmets, I noticed they’re either really crappy, mostly  open-faced (your jaw is toast in an accident), and that half the drivers don’t even bother to buckle them.  

Me?  After arriving in a place, I got around mostly on foot.  In Hoi An, there was a half day on a rented scooter, but other than that, walking got me where I wanted to be. 

This has seriously been a busy past two weeks. Probably the busiest year end/beginning I’ve ever had.

So after Vietnam, and after a new year’s midnight shrine visit, at 6:30am the next morning, it was off to snowboarding in Hakuba, near Nagano (winter olympics, anyone?).  I posted about running to catch the train (to catch the plane to Vietnam) before – from that experience, I planned to arrive plenty early for this bullet train.  And thankfully, we got to loiter around so much that we could have caught the prior outbound train to Nagano.

Hakuba 白馬 has a few resorts, and we went to Happo-one, and I’d booked a small hotel that claimed to be “3 minutes” from the slopes.  As it turns out, there was a whole street of hotels about the same distance from the Sakka lifts of Happo, but ours was almost at the end of that long road.  Oh well.

I didn’t bring my camera snowboarding, so no pictures, but it did actually snow (lightly, thankfully) while we were there.  The first day was so windy they closed the top two lifts, and certain runs were somewhat whited out, which made the people on the runs look like they were frozen suspended in midair (which was a little cool).  The wind was so cold that as I sat there I became convinced that really, snowboarding was overrated and maybe I would be best off selling my board in Japan and retiring from the slopes.  The second day was much better, and we found a run off the Sakka slopes that went through some trees and bushes and was quite fun (and non-icy).   I revised my previous statement about selling my board to include purchasing a replacement once back stateside.

The B&B had a hot spring built in, as well as an outdoor rotemburo – meaning that with a word to the owner, you could reserve the spring all to yourself for half an hour and watch snow falling on trees from the privacy of a bamboo hot tub.  Of course, getting to, from, and into said tub isn’t much fun, but that just makes the time (and heat) all the more enjoyable…right?

Which is to say, I’m sick now (sore throat, stuffy nose), and I’m pretty sure why, but I’m also pretty sure it was worth it.  Sure beats driving in Tahoe traffic to share a sputtery bathroom with 10 people.