From mid-August to early September 2011, my friend A and I ventured fearlessly forth into the balmy climes of Southeast Asia for a three-week tour. Our breakneck itinerary:
two days/three nights in Bangkok, one night in Ayutthaya, two days/three nights in Siem Reap (the town nearest Angkor Wat), two days/two nights in Phnom Penh, one night in Chau Doc, one night in Can Tho, two days/two nights in Saigon, two days/three nights in Hoi An, one night in Hue, one night on Cat Ba Island, and two days/three nights in Hanoi.
I shall let the reader briefly catch his breath here.
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| This is how we felt a lot of the time. Hnnngh! |
These nights do not add up to the proper number because we, the intrepid duo, spent 2 nights on Vietnamese trains. These were, as far as we could tell, relics only a couple of years younger than us and likely purchased on the cheap from mainland China. (They were given away by telltale Chinese labels on a few bathroom doors and hot-water machines.)
Speaking of trains: to make our way between this formidable array of places (and hostelries, quality assorted), we placed ourselves in the hands (paws? maws?) of the perhaps even more formidable following array of vehicles.
In rough order, and omitting some of the less interesting repeat entries:
airplane
taxi, legal
tuk-tuk
mini-bus (secondhand smoke + exhaust)
bicycles (no brakes but nice baskets)
crummy local train
coach bus (free flimsy plastic bottles of drinking water)
shifty Poipet tuk-tuk (somehow patched together out of wires and thin steel rods stuck on top of a motortrike)
more coach bus (with loud pop music and flashy party lights!)
more bicycles (brakes, 3 gears! what more to ask for?)
yet another coach bus (bus itself = not bad, road = so pocked with potholes that it was 1/4 the necessary size)
speedboat (well, sort-of speedboat…speedish-boat)
even more bicycles (I think one was a very nice shade of yellow)
back of scooter, more back-of-scooter (terrifying)
hand-rowed ferry (shortest ride ever: creek was about 10 feet across)
outrigger-propellered Mekong riverboat (as romantic as it sounds)
a second and equally brief sway in the ferry
taxi (illicit, 25 x the proper fare)
Reunification Express train (leg 1) soft sleeper (hellooooo China in the 1980s)
our OWN scooter
Reunification Express (leg 2, central highlands) soft seat (still locked in the 80s somewhere in China)
still more bicycles (we rode these poor things to death; one tried to kill me in retribution by bouncing me right off it in front of an oncoming mini-truck)
Reunification Express (final leg) soft sleeper (I thank thee, melatonin pills)
local hard-seat train to Haiphong (they are not joking about the hardness of the seats)
rip-off ferryboat that was supposed to be a speedboat
rip-off tour boats (cheating honest people of a lunch they paid for? a crime that warrants the lowest pits of hell)
taxi (private, minivan, silver-gray)
...and finally, an airplane again.
In later installments I will write more about the many places we visited/dashed past like madmen. But the particle count today in the pearly haze above Old Peking warrants a reasonable bedtime, so here I bid the reader good night!
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