After we checked in to our cute guesthouse, got the tour, and had obligatory iced coffees, we made two important decisions about how we would tackle Saigon:

1. Contrary to what I normally like to do when traveling, we’re not going to wander on foot a lot. Traffic is just too stressful for walking around, sidewalks are often blocked with motorbikes and carts, and pedestrians are basically third-class citizens.
2. We’ll aim to go to nicer spots when we go out. Higher-end places are still quite affordable by Western standards, plus we can take advantage of rooftop bars in warm weather, something we don’t get back home.

We put our new guidelines to the test immediately by getting a Grab (Southeast Asia’s answer to Uber) and going to Shri, a gorgeous rooftop bar with small bites, fancy cocktails, a beautiful menu designed by a British mixologist and artist, and an amazing view.

After a couple rounds of drinks, we consulted TripAdvisor on nearby restaurants and (slowly) made our way to Citadel, where we had an excellent dinner of crab spring rolls, fish claypot, fried tofu with toasted lemongrass, and passion fruit mousse.

We spent the rest of the evening at a bar in the backpacker/party area around the corner from our guesthouse. It was a Friday night, so there was plenty of people watching to be done. We sat outside on the corner, drinking cold Vietnamese beer in the warm evening and watching the chaos of taxis and cars and motorbikes and food vendors and party people all fighting for space in the streets.

The next day was our motorbike city tour, recommended to us by the staff at our guesthouse. The company conducts non-profit student tours, whereby each participant is paired up with a university student with a motorbike. Tourists get a personalized tour guide for half a day and the opportunity to experience crazy Saigon traffic without actually having to drive in it; university students make some extra money and have a chance to practice their English. And both parties get a chance to learn more about a foreign culture. It’s a great deal.

That morning, two university boys arrived at our guesthouse and after introductions and a conversation about where we wanted to go, we hopped on the backs of their motorbikes. Being engulfed in the madness of Saigon traffic is one of the few times during my travels when I really, really wished I had a GoPro or a pair of those Snap Spectacles. There aren’t many traffic lights or stop signs in Saigon, mostly roundabouts and other merges, which means that traffic is a continuously moving swarm all day long. Watching massive rivers of traffic delicately merge into each other without any accidents is a fascinating sight, especially for a Westerner. There was absolutely no way I was taking out my camera or phone while on the back of a motorbike in tight traffic, so I’ll have to refer you to YouTube videos for the experience.

The first stop of the day was the War Remnants Museum, one of the most important sites in Saigon for understanding the recent history of the country. As an American, I felt obligated to learn more about the war, especially from the perspective of the other side. The logical starting point of the museum is the main courtyard, which is full of American war machines: planes, jets, helicopters, tanks, boats, cannons, and other weaponry.

Other areas of the courtyard have some grisly artifacts and stories of prisoner torture. There are stories on the walls of war atrocities, a replica of a prisoner’s cell and the guards’ walkway above it, and even a guillotine.

The first floor of the museum building has various exhibits with details of life in Vietnam before the war and how lifestyles and economies vary in different parts of the country. The real subject matter is on the second floor; the galleries there are filled with stories and photos that illustrate all the horrors and consequences of the war. Other than S-21 (the genocide museum) and the killing fields in Phnom Penh, this was the most uncensored historical content I’ve ever seen. The photography on display in the galleries included dead soldiers, dead women and children, horribly injured survivors, deformed fetuses, and other brutal health effects of agent orange. The pictures and stories include soldiers of both countries, but clearly all the innocent civilians are Vietnamese. Most of the photos come from American sources, so one can hardly make the claim that the museum is Vietnamese propaganda.

The photo most memorable for me was not gruesome in any way, but simply remarkable. In 1967, a UPI photographer snapped a photo of a plane seconds after it had been hit by artillery and seconds before it crashed to the ground. That photo would be impressive today even with the proliferation of high-powered, high-speed digital cameras; the fact that it came from a film camera in the 60’s is phenomenal.

The museum visit was incredibly sobering and depressing, but I still think that it’s a must-see for any American tourist in Saigon. After we left and tried to mentally readjust to modern-day Vietnam, we lightened the mood by visiting the Central Post Office (now partially a tourist site) and the nearby “Book Street”, a walkable alley filled with bookstores, kiosks, and cafes. Normally, an alley with bookstores wouldn’t be that noteworthy, but finding a pedestrian-friendly area in Saigon is no easy task.

Next up was lunch and the boys had an idea they wanted to pursue. They had heard about a quasi-secret seafood noodle soup from a YouTube video and a blog post and wanted to try it. They weren’t exactly sure how to find the exact location, so we stopped at least half a dozen times so one of them could ask a stranger for directions. Eventually we found ourselves riding down incredibly narrow alleys with low umbrellas and awnings, lined with peach iced tea vendors and food carts on either side. (For posterity, the alley is close to the Ho Thi Ky Flower Market.) I’m not the biggest fan of noodle soup, but even I’ll admit that this was really freaking good, especially with generous helpings of Vietnamese fish sauce and chili sauce. It looks simple in photos, but the flavor complexity is incredible.

Our last stop of the day was Thien Hau Pagoda, one of many atmospheric Chinese-style temples in the city. We wandered for a bit, took lots of photos, and made a few prayers via burning sticks of incense.

After the boys dropped us off at the guesthouse and we all settled up, Laurie and I got massages and (carefully) walked the neighborhood a bit before dinner. In Vietnam, Christmas is celebrated on December 24th, so that evening, much to our surprise, was Christmas Eve. The staff at the guesthouse were organizing a dinner in the common area and they had invited some of their friends and neighbors and all the guests to join. They had seafood curry and French bread, deviled eggs, snails, fruitcake, Saigon beer, rum, and even a small grill on the table to cook up pork and okra. We all ate and drank and chatted about our respective countries and I scooped up the house puppy as soon as he got within my grasp.

After the dinner party started winding down, Laurie and I went out in search of cocktails and ended up at The View, a great rooftop bar conveniently located on the street behind our guesthouse. We had gotten a late start on the evening though and they started closing not long after we got there. We finished our drinks, went out in search of more food, and ended up at the nearby King Kebab, one of those small, perfect drunk-food spots, but also the #4 restaurant in the city according to TripAdvisor. Go figure.

While eating our wraps and fries, we started chatting with a middle-aged Asian-American man who was sitting out front with his friend and his very young daughter. The girl, Hannah, was smitten with Laurie immediately and insisted on sitting on her lap and talking to her and trying all our food. You may wonder what kind of father brings his two-year-old daughter to a restaurant at 1:00 in the morning to meet people who have been drinking for hours. A former Survivor contestant, that’s who!

I can personally vouch for the “outlandish humor” and “eccentric behavior” referenced in the first sentence of that wiki page. That said, he’s absolutely the Vietnamese version of the most interesting man in the world. For hours, he told us crazy stories about his life – like surviving on McDonald’s when he was extremely sick as a child in a Vietnamese refugee camp – while we were entertained by the antics of his daughter and all the random passersby. For better or worse, one of his approaches to fatherhood is that he would prefer his daughter meet people late at night after they’ve had a few drinks, when they’re happier and more mellow, rather than during the day, when Saigon daily life is stressful and frenetic.

We didn’t turn in until 3:00 or so, so it came as no surprise that we slept in like crazy. Laurie was leaving for Hanoi that night, so we had to settle on a limited itinerary for the rest of the day. We had a late, excellent lunch at Propaganda, then walked down the street to Independence Palace, one of the most important tourist sites in Saigon. We were on such a slow schedule that day that we arrived at the palace at 4:00, which left us with only an hour to explore the grounds.

The whole day had really slipped away from us, but an hour was still enough time to wander most of the presidential palace, taking in the large meeting rooms, 70’s-inspired decor and furniture, large military maps of the country, helicopter on the rooftop, small movie theater, and underground floor with communications equipment and simple bedrooms. The palace was sprinkled with fascinating tidbits of history, including stories and photos of the Fall of Saigon, which is often symbolized by the moment tanks crashed through the front gates of the palace.

After a brief coffee break and a failed attempt to fit in one more tourist activity, we went back to the guesthouse, Laurie packed the rest of her stuff, we said our goodbyes, and she hopped in an Uber for the airport. I explored some more of the city that evening and left for the airport early the next morning to catch my flight to Bangkok.

In retrospect, I was intrigued by Saigon a lot more than I thought I would be. Once I committed to the madness and energy of the city, I really enjoyed it and suddenly three days, which initially seemed like more than enough time, felt too short. I don’t know if I could keep up that pace enough to live there, but I would definitely visit again.

Fast forward to our first morning in Dalat. Laurie and I are at the office of Highland Sport Travel so we can pay for the next day’s activities. It was at this point, sitting in the office and looking at the posters and listening to the guides explain the activities, that I realized what she had signed us up for. Sure, there was some trekking, but there was also a lot of talk about wetsuits. And rappelling down cliffs and waterfalls. And swimming in a river. In cold mountain weather.

My mental monologue at the time: “Um. What.”

But what was done was done, so the next morning, bright and early, our tour guides picked us up at our hotel and took us to Datanla Falls, a nature site just outside of town with various activities for tourists. The only other people on the tour that day were a lovely Dutch couple and we all listened quietly as the three tour guides gave us their briefings and instructions. Once we arrived at the park entrance, the guides led us down to the canyoning training area, where we dumped everything into lockers, stripped down to our underwear, and pulled on wetsuits, still cold and damp from the day before.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: I was fucking freezing. I hopped around like an antsy child and blew into my hands while my teeth chattered and my legs shook.

After some more instructions and safety briefings and demos, we all practiced our abseiling on a 20-foot safety wall. The hardest part was fighting your innate survival instinct while trying to lean back far enough to maintain proper form. Once you conquered that, you still had to be mindful of keeping your hands in the right places and bending your knees and keeping your feet the right distance apart. One or two of the guides were always supporting the ropes with their weight, so the descent always felt safe and controlled, even if you were trying to go as fast (or as reckless) as possible.

After a couple rounds, everyone felt comfortable enough, so we gathered up all our gear and made our way through the park to the first waterfall. We passed dozens, if not hundreds, of Vietnamese tourists on the path who were bundled up in clothing that was appropriate for the weather. They were visiting the park to enjoy the other – much more tame – activities and watched us with fascination as we descended the steps in our wetsuits and life jackets and helmets.

(We weren’t allowed to take any personal items with us, so all the photos below are from the tour guides. One had a GoPro and one had an SLR.)

After trekking a bit into the woods and losing most of the crowds, we finally came to the first waterfall. As with all the waterfalls that day, one of the guides gave us a briefing on any specifics before anything else happened. For this first waterfall, we would lean back and slowly walk down, just as we had practiced, until one of the guides gave a (verbal) signal that we should start jumping our way down. Once we got within a few feet of the river below, he would give another signal and we would let go of the rope entirely and fall into the river.

One by one, we clipped in, attached the rope to our harness, and worked our way down the cliff, following the shouted instructions until it was time to take a dip in the water below. I’ve always been quite comfortable with heights, so dealing with that was easy for me. I lost my footing a couple times during the jumping portion (because I wasn’t leaning back far enough), but was able to recover and make my way down the cliff. And gosh darnit if that water wasn’t somehow warmer than the air! After I swam to the ladder and climbed out, I actually wasn’t freezing anymore.

Invigorated by not dying – and I suppose also by the brief plunge in the cold water – we trekked a short distance to the next cliff. We thought we had heard one of the guides say something about a zipline, but when we reached the cliff, there wasn’t anything resembling one. After watching our guides unpack some of the gear and scramble down the rocks to the river below, we realized what was happening: they were building the zipline on the spot. There were hooks already in the rocks above and below, so once the long, neon green ziplining rope had been securely attached to the hook next to us, the rest of it was thrown over the edge of the cliff. One of the guides who had already climbed down fetched the rope, waded through the river to some large rocks very far away from us, and proceeded to attach the other end of the rope to the hook there.

The instructions for this descent were different than the first one. In addition to being clipped into our usual rappelling line, we also had to attach ourselves to the zipline. We descended normally down the cliff until the guides told us to stop, at which point they counted to three and we released the rope entirely, letting the zipline take us down into the river. It was just as awesome as it sounds.

Next up was a spot in the river with some natural water slides. The correct approach for navigating these was laying down backwards, with arms and feet crossed, keeping our bodies as straight as possible and our necks inline. Look at that form!

Even with the “correct” form, I still hit my head kind of hard on the way down, so I opted out of the second slide once I felt a very minor headache coming on. Laurie assumed the coffin pose and went in for round two.

The next waterfall was the tallest of the day: 25 meters, with a relatively slow descent, capped off by a 7-meter drop into the river below. Evidently the rocks are so slippery on this descent that wearing shoes is actually a hindrance, so we all ditched our shoes and waded through the water in our socks to the edge of the cliff. We each walked down the cliff slowly, especially since the water was hitting us in the face. Once we reached the appropriate stopping point, the guide off to the side would yell for us to stop, then begin the countdown for our plunge.

Laurie’s drop was a pretty fantastic “Jesus take the wheel” moment (see below). I think she was fully horizontal when she hit the water.

After getting our shoes back on and drying off briefly in the sun, which finally decided to come out, we walked a short distance to the next cliff, which was for jumping only. Another (much larger) group from another tour company arrived at the same time, so there was a lot of good spectating as nearly twenty people took to the air. There were three heights for jumping: 7 meters, 9 meters, and 13 meters. Our guides reminded us that we had just done a 7-meter drop at the last waterfall, so even the lowest jump was easily doable for us. The guides stipulated that for anyone to do the 13-meter jump, which required a running start, he or she would have to successfully jump from a lower height first. About half a dozen guys ended up doing the highest jump.

I was happy just to get it over with, so I went first and jumped from 7 meters, as did Laurie.

Big props to Jochem – the other guy in our group – for turning his cliff jump into a fantastic air slam dunk. Photo of the day right here:

After everyone from both groups finished their jumps, we all had a picnic lunch in the woods with Vietnamese sandwiches, banana bread, fruit, and even some actual sunshine! By the end of the meal, we were all well-fed and I was finally almost warm. The next waterfall – affectionately known as the “washing machine” – was the last of the day. It was almost the same height as the previous one, but required a descent into a crevasse. We walked down the cliff for only about half of the descent; for the other half, we dangled in the air and continued to lower ourselves with our hands, even while going through the waterfall and getting battered and disoriented by the running water (hence the name). Eventually the rope ran out, at which point we let go entirely, crashed down into the river, and let the current carry us away from the cliff.

The rest of the excursion was about 30 minutes of trekking through the woods, sometimes going over the river, sometimes going through it, and eventually beginning a long, gentle climb away from it. The climbing portion was beautiful, in part because it looked exactly like northern California: tall, thin trees everywhere and even pine cones being crushed underfoot. The continuous uphill trekking definitely warmed up all of us and it was the first time all day that I was actually comfortable temperature-wise. I could have done that for hours!

Before too long, we reached the van and it took us back to the welcome area that we had started at. After changing and grabbing our things, we sat and chatted and drank hot tea and munched on jackfruit chips. The guides wrapped up the day with their thank you speeches and pointed us to the company’s Facebook page, where we’d be able to download all the photos in about a day or so.

In retrospect, I was happy that I didn’t know what I was signing up for. Had I known ahead of time exactly what the trip would include, I might have changed my mind on the whole thing, but once I was thrown into it, I had no choice but to plow ahead. This canyoning trip was probably the most physically demanding single-day excursion I’ve ever done; Laurie and I were both sore for days. I knew I had gotten a serious core workout when I had trouble sitting up in bed the next morning.

All told, it was awesome and one of the best days of the entire trip. I don’t really feel the need to do it again at any point, but I’m happy I can cross it off the list.

(Sidebar: an incontrovertible truth of life is that the most delightful and relief-inducing sound you will ever hear is the kuh-chunk kuh-chunk noise when an immigration officer stamps your passport. A very close second is the whirring of a foreign ATM after it finally decides it’s going to give you money.)

Dalat

Back in November, when I was working on the Vietnam itinerary, I had decided to end the trip in Saigon to make subsequent travel plans easier. It then followed that Laurie and I would fly into Saigon, but not actually stop there yet. Given the timing of the flight from Chiang Mai and the time necessary to clear immigration and customs, only an evening flight out of Saigon would work for us and that greatly influenced the decision of where to go first. I had initially thought about going to a beach town on the eastern coast of the country, but none of the flight times worked out. Instead, I fell back to another, arguably more interesting, option: Dalat.

Dalat is a mountain town in the central highlands of Vietnam and used to be a holiday retreat for the French; they went there to escape the heat and humidity elsewhere in the country. Dalat is pine trees and strawberries and sweaters; no palm trees or coconuts or tank tops here. In the context of modern travel, its appeal is that it flies under the radar of most foreign travelers to Vietnam and has a lot of natural beauty and outdoor activities. With a massive metropolis and a beach town already on the itinerary, a hill station with cool weather seemed like a nice way to round out the trip.

Our one-hour, $4 VietJet flight wasn’t leaving until 10:00 that evening, so we had some time to kill in the airport. (Okay, so after taxes and fees, the flight was more like $38. But still, on the website, the flight costs $4 before you check out. Four dollars.) Laurie got her first pho of the trip and I got a photo with my new favorite airline. Everyone was happy.

After landing in Dalat, we hopped on the bus to town, which takes almost as much time as the flight from Saigon. We climbed winding mountain roads in the dark, passing dozens of other buses but not much other traffic. Once the bus started making random, scattered stops around town, we intently watched Google Maps on our phones until the bus stopped very close to our hotel, at which points we hopped out and walked the rest of the way.

The night’s peaceful rest was interrupted early the next morning by the sounds of thousands of motorbikes – pretty standard for Vietnam – but also by loud Christmas music and a choir of children’s voices coming from a nearby school. This was my first, but certainly not last, reminder that Christmas is a bigger deal here than I thought.

After a quick errand, we sat down for breakfast: our first banh mi of the trip. The iced coffee I ordered arrived with coconut ice cream in it. I was not angry.

Our first day in Dalat was intentionally unscheduled, as we had planned on simply wandering the town. The most popular – and goofiest – tourist site in the city is the Crazy House: a compound of buildings, trees, rooms, staircases, and other random shit that looks like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. The Wikipedia page describes it very well:

Described as a “fairy tale house” … the building’s overall design resembles a giant tree, incorporating sculptured design elements representing natural forms such as animals, mushrooms, spider webs and caves. Its architecture, comprising complex, organic, non-rectilinear shapes, has been described as expressionist.

Yeah, that just about sums it up. No straight lines, no right angles. And it really is a working guesthouse; you can book a room there.

After we wandered the weird, quasi-creepy compound long enough to build up a sufficient amount of nightmare fuel, we over-ordered lunch at a small restaurant, ate as much as we could, then wandered down to the lake, which is a significant fixture in town. We ambled the afternoon away, walking past workers in conical bamboo hats, half-completed structures for the upcoming flower festival, and the usual unending stream of traffic. After circumnavigating about two-thirds of the lake, I suggested we stop for coffee (a recurring theme on this trip) before getting a taxi back to the hotel.

That evening, we had dinner at Artist Alley, a cute restaurant up the street from our hotel, followed by cold beers and people watching at a bar around the corner. This was less comfortable than it sounds since we sat outside in the cold the whole time. The temperature in Dalat consistently remained about equal to a very cold day in San Francisco, so we layered up as best we could and even bought cheap, colorful gloves from a shop in town for 40,000 dong (less than $2). I love those gloves. Almost as much as I love being able to say the word dong.

The next day was our canyoning adventure, which was content-heavy enough to warrant its own post. Read that first, then come back here. I’ll wait.

Thankfully, the best bathroom of the trip – by far – was in our hotel in Dalat, because we each took long, hot showers upon returning. After a small bit of lazy time to snack on coconut-covered peanuts and watch Vietnamese music videos starring incredibly effeminate “men”, we set out for the evening. First, a Vietnamese coffee (of course) at a wine bar up the road, then across the street to An Cafe for pho and spring rolls and a view of the sunset.

We walked to the night market and gawked at tables of strawberries and seedless avocados and other produce, racks of sweaters and coats, and disorganized mounds of shoes, all the while trying to avoid being hit by the motorbikes navigating the crowds of shoppers. Laurie haggled with a shop owner for some clothes, then we went off in search of food.

We ended up at V Cafe, a Western-style restaurant, for dinner and a wholly unexpected helping of festiveness. The food was good, nothing special really, but I found myself having flashbacks to the holidays of my childhood; the feeling in the restaurant was like a patchwork of dozens of individual Christmas memories. Images of my parents’ house, my aunt’s house, and the restaurants my family went to on Christmas Eve all combined into a Franken-memory that materialized in front of me as a warm restaurant with coffee and cake, red linen tablecloths, Christmas songs being played on a keyboard, dark wood furniture, candles on the tables, a Christmas tree lit up in the corner, and people bundled up in hats and scarves coming in from the cold. And just when I started to think that maybe I had been magically transported back home, I noticed the red Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling, which were just enough to remind me where I actually was.

After dinner, we walked up the street to visit the last place on our must-see-in-Dalat list: 100 Roofs Cafe, a drinking establishment cut from the same architectural cloth as the Crazy House. The many floors of the building are each connected by multiple staircases, the rooms are all full of weird shit, and they give you drinks in exchange for small amounts of money. It’s great.

That seemed like a fitting end to our time in Dalat, so after a couple beers, we packed it in for the night and got up early the next morning for our bus ride to Mui Ne.

Mui Ne

After an uneventful, but picturesque, morning bus ride, we arrived in the early afternoon in Mui Ne, a quiet beach town on Vietnam’s south-eastern coast. (Well, truthfully, we were staying in Ham Tien, which is to the west; the towns have gotten mixed up in travel literature for decades because an early group of foreign travelers to the area misunderstood where they were.) We had a short stay – only a couple nights – because we wanted to have more time in Saigon. Two nights ended up being perfect since there wasn’t much to do but relax. Beach erosion is really bad in the area and there was actually no beach at all during our stay, so that limited our activities to eating, sleeping, reading, and getting massages, which is exactly what we did for two days.

Ham Tien is really just a single road running parallel to the water lined with hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops catering to tourists. Like some other places in Asia I’ve been to, there’s even a small Russian part of town, where most of the signage and most of the tourists are Russian. A lot of worthwhile places were relatively close to our hotel, so most of the time we walked. Hundreds of taxis run along the road all day every day, so getting one when we needed one (or didn’t need one) was very easy.

Seafood BBQ is definitely the food of choice whenever you’re in a place like this and we happily sat down to a first night feast of spring rolls, morning glory, scallops, and grilled fish. After dinner, we settled into comfy couches at a bar down the street and I introduced Laurie to shisha while we both took in the scene of drunk party boys and over-dressed Russian party girls.

The next evening we gorged ourselves on amazing Indian food at Ganesh; for me, it was the best meal of Vietnam. I had so much Goa fish curry and chana masala and rice and naan and lassi that I didn’t eat again for 24 hours.

After dinner: a long walk to burn some calories, a nightcap at a new rooftop bar, a good night’s sleep, a quick swim in the pool the next morning, and a 45-minute taxi ride to the train station. Our time in Mui Ne was brief but very pleasant. Onward to Saigon!

Having used only two weeks of vacation the entire year, I decided in September – while in Beirut, actually – to embark on another winter adventure. If you’re wondering why I keep doing this, see my post from last year because the reasons are just as relevant today. Given the success of working remotely last year and the appeal of being able to extend the trip, I pushed my luck a bit with my manager and told him I’d be gone for five weeks: three weeks of working remotely and two weeks of holiday. He was okay with the timing and remembered that I was quite productive when I did this last year, so I started making plans for my trip.

I looked into the same flights as last year: EVA Air from San Francisco to Bangkok, by way of Taipei. I would come back on New Years Day again, so Thanksgiving weekend was the obvious choice for a departure date since I was going to lose an entire day flying over the International Date Line. As luck would have it, my birthday fell on the Saturday after Thanksgiving this year, so if I flew out Thanksgiving night, I would arrive in Thailand on my birthday. As an added bonus, Black Friday – the symbol of the chaotic, frustrating, over-commercialized mess that the Christmas season has become – would simply not exist in my life this year and forever be lost in the ether. I loved the symbolism and bought my tickets immediately.

I scheduled two weeks in Chiang Mai and a week in Bangkok before that, since that’s where I wanted to be for my birthday. The end of the trip was also finalized; I had kept in touch with a friend I had met in Laos last year and we already made plans to travel together to Koh Phi-Phi at the end of December before going back to Bangkok for New Years weekend.

All these anchors on the calendar left a stretch of only nine days in mid-December where I could go anywhere and do anything. Like last year, I wanted to go somewhere new, and just like last year, I leaned very heavily towards Myanmar. I read a lot of travel resources, talked to friends who had been there, and even talked to my friend Bebee, who had recently moved back to her hometown in Shan state. However, the news coming out of Myanmar was horrible: the military government was carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in the western part of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh to escape execution, violence, sexual assault, and destruction of their villages and homes at the hands of the government.

Sometime in November, on the morning that I was supposed to buy plane tickets to Myanmar, my alarm went off and I lazily stayed in bed, flipping through the news on my phone. As fate would have it, my news feed contained an article about Myanmar written by a travel website. The author reiterated the (very valid) point that travelers have the power to vote with their money. On the one hand, money spent in Myanmar could go directly to locals who really need it; on the other hand, taxes, visa fees, plane tickets, and similar expenses would go directly to the government. In short, a trip to Myanmar would be directly funding the atrocities I kept seeing on the news.

After a lot of deliberation, I nixed the idea. Once again – and exactly like last year – I begrudgingly put Myanmar back on the bucket list.

Given that I was finishing the remote-work portion of the trip in Chiang Mai and was going to be meeting my friend in Bangkok, I started to look for a new place to visit that wasn’t too far from either city. A brief look at Google Maps revealed the obvious choice: southern Vietnam. I scrambled to research that part of the country, buy flights, and get a visa. Thankfully, Vietnam has recently implemented an e-visa program and website, which made the process cheap, fast, and easy.

An added bonus to all of this was the 11th-hour addition to the trip: my friend Laurie, who I know from San Francisco. She’s taking two months off from her job to travel (mostly in Southeast Asia) and it made perfect sense that we should try to meet up. She’ll be staying in Chiang Mai during my second week there and then we’ll be traveling together to a few places in Vietnam before I swing around back to Thailand to meet my Lao friend.

I also had an incredible stroke of fortune with respect to funding my trip. Just as with my previous multi-week trips, I was able to find someone to stay in my apartment while I was gone. This year, I found a nomadic, remote-working couple in their 30s who wanted to come up from the peninsula and spend an extended amount of time in San Francisco. (Well, really, they found me.) They had even just been to Koh Phi-Phi a month prior! We clicked immediately and I was very happy to have them stay in my place the entire time I was gone. They arrived the morning after I left and left a few hours before I returned home. The apartment was basically never empty and a massive portion (over half!) of my trip’s expenses was covered.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving day. After eating an irresponsible amount of potatoes, stuffing, cheese, and deviled eggs at my friends’ house, I spent the rest of the day burning all those calories while cleaning and packing and preparing for the trip. Even though I started at 3:00 in the afternoon and my flight wasn’t until midnight, I barely had a moment to rest before it was time to grab my bags and leave for the airport.

Who’s excited?

After a quite decent night of sleep, further extended by a multi-hour delay due to track maintenance, we grabbed our luggage, disembarked, made our way through the crowds, and were promptly scammed by a taxi driver while trying to get to the bus station. Clearly we didn’t realize we were being scammed at the time, but it happened. I hadn’t done my homework with respect to researching Hanoi public transportation (mistake #1), so when a driver approached us offering a metered taxi, I agreed without walking to the street first (mistake #2). In other countries in Asia, a metered taxi is worth its weight in gold, as the price will be much lower than the end result of haggling. As I learned later, some of the metered taxis in Hanoi have doctored meters that race through the fare at about ten times the normal rate. We didn’t realize this until we arrived at the bus station and since our luggage was being held ransom in the trunk, we had no choice but to pay up (almost $30 for a fifteen minute ride).

The one silver lining – besides learning a good travel tip the hard way – is that our driver got us to the bus station very quickly and, by complete dumb luck, we arrived just a few minutes before the next bus to Cat Ba Island was leaving. Still feeling the burn of getting ripped off, we triple-checked the posted bus fare against Lonely Planet and other online travel resources before buying tickets.

Tickets and seats acquired, our long travel day continued with a multi-hour bus ride to the coast, followed by a 45-minute boat ride to Cat Ba Island and a 45-minute minibus ride to Cat Ba Town. The boat and van rides were normal, but the bus ride was very aggravating. When the driver wasn’t laying on the horn or blasting Vietnamese variety shows on the TV or driving like an escaped convict, he was picking up packages or Vietnamese passengers from the side of the road. And since all the seats on the bus were full of tourists, the locals sat on tiny plastic stools in the aisle, filling up any remaining space until the bus became a multi-ton fire hazard on wheels. No doubt the money from all the locals bypassed the bus company entirely and went right into the driver’s pocket.

The pinnacle of irritation was that because of all the unscheduled pickups, the bus was running late, which meant no stops for food or water and one completely botched bathroom break. We stopped at a bus depot, where nearly a dozen people (myself included) got off to use the bathroom, but about one minute later the bus started to leave as the attendants yelled at everyone to get back on. One poor woman was in the restroom at the time and the bus actually left and started driving down the road without her. The driver had to pull over and wait for her to get a ride on the back of a motorbike to get back on the bus. Most everyone was pissed at the driver and the company by the time we arrived at the pier to catch the boat.

Cat Ba Island and Ha Long Bay

The main reason we were going through all this hassle was to get to Cat Ba Town, a small island town that serves as one of the jumping off points for tourists going to Ha Long Bay, the popular home of some of the most beautiful scenery in Asia. Once we were checked into our hotel, we explored the town and the waterfront a bit before booking a full-day tour for the following day.

Early the next morning, we were picked up and taken to our boat, which spent the rest of the day cruising Ha Long Bay and Lan Ha Bay as we admired hundreds of beautiful limestone formations, kayaked, ate a fantastic lunch, swam (or watched others swim), and took lots and lots of photos. It’s not easy to capture the magnitude and beauty of Ha Long Bay in photos, so I’ll include a number of them here in the hopes that enough quantity can somehow add up to quality. The photos aren’t spectacular since the skies were overcast the entire day, but the perpetual clouds meant the temperature was very agreeable and not too hot. Given that we were outside for almost eight hours, I was happy to sacrifice favorable photographic conditions for comfortable weather.

The day after our spectacular outing was a free day, so we did some travel planning, got massages, rented bicycles, and went to one of the local beaches for a bit in the afternoon.

The following day (our last in Cat Ba), we went on a half-day hike through Cat Ba National Park, which essentially meant getting very hot and sweaty as we climbed stairs through the warm, humid jungle. The big payoff was reaching Ngu Lam peak, which offered breathtaking views of green, jungle-covered hills and mountains in every direction. Again, photos won’t do the scene justice, but here they are anyway.

Hanoi

On our last full day in Vietnam, we took the five-hour, minibus-boat-bus-bus combo back to the Hanoi bus station, where we successfully dodged the unscrupulous fast-meter taxi drivers and found a proper taxi company (Mai Linh, the one with the green taxis) to take us to our hotel in the Old Quarter. With only one night in the city, we went out immediately and wandered aimlessly, grabbed beers at a local watering hole, took a pedicab ride around the lake, had snacks in a small restaurant, smoked shisha in a lounge, and had an excellent Indian feast for dinner.

The next morning we made our way to the airport for our flight to Bangkok, again noting the massive difference between Hanoi city traffic (crazy!) and highway traffic (none!).

I can admit that I was ready to leave Vietnam after spending a few weeks there, but I definitely had a great time everywhere we went. For reasons I can’t explain, Vietnam was never on my radar when I was making my Southeast Asia travel plans, but Ayu’s desire to see the limestone islands of the north was enough reason to encourage me to go and I’m really happy I did. We met a lot of very friendly people, had a lot of great coffee and cheap breakfasts, and saw some of the most beautiful nature I’ve seen on my travels.

Since we were rapidly fleeing Cambodia because the heat and humidity were too much to bear, we decided to skip the similar climate of southern Vietnam, start in the middle of the country, and finish in the north. Our Vietnam travel plans were thrown together at the last minute (again, because of our sudden intolerance of the weather), so we paid a travel agent in Siem Reap to handle our Vietnamese visa, then flew from Siem Reap to Da Nang, a mid-sized city home to Vietnam’s third largest international airport (after Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi). Our arrival was one of the smoothest and most painless airport experiences I’ve ever had: no crowds or lines (partially because we arrived late at night), a clean and modern terminal, and a friendly, English-speaking associate to sell us SIM cards.

The muggy weather in Cambodia followed by a sudden change to a much cooler climate was clearly not appreciated by my body, as I woke up with a cold the following morning. Lucky for me, we were staying in a hotel in a quiet, sparsely populated neighborhood that was almost reminiscent of a beach town, except without the people.

In fact, Da Nang as a whole baffled me with its apparent lack of residents. After multiple drives and walks through town, we had seen many multi-lane roads and barely any traffic. At first, I thought it was because we had arrived very late at night, but then I noticed the same absence of vehicles during a daytime taxi ride. In fact, I noticed this same phenomenon in multiple places throughout Vietnam, a country that’s infamous for traffic so chaotic and dense that Westerners have to relearn how to cross a street. While we did eventually see some classic Vietnamese traffic, we saw just as much non-traffic. My best explanation is that the Vietnam War – called the “American War” in Vietnam – gave the country a clean slate for construction, as the old roads and towns and bridges were destroyed. Given this clean slate, they rebuilt things with future expansion in mind and the vehicular population simply hasn’t caught up yet. Is this actually true? I’m not sure, but it sounds reasonable to me.

Given my illness and the rainy weather, we mostly took it easy in Da Nang for a day and a half: massages, some laptop work, trips to Vietnamese cafes, and the first of many breakfasts (throughout the country) of eggs, French bread, and strong coffee. After a couple nights, we left for the next destination, making sure to include a quick visit to the massive Lady Buddha statue, one of the big tourist sites in the area.

Hoi An

After a 20-minute van ride, we arrived in Hoi An, a very popular tourist destination on the coast. Besides the waterfront location, the city is famous for its Old Town, a historic part of the city with architecture that incorporates Vietnamese, European, and Chinese influences. The old buildings have been converted into restaurants and shops, mostly selling clothes. In fact, one of the must-do activities in Hoi An is to go to a tailor – by some estimates, there are upwards of 500 of them – and have clothes custom made. I sprung for a pair of “jeans” – the material is stretchier than denim – and a pair of shorts. Though I’m sure I could have shopped around or haggled more, I was happy to pay $40 for two perfectly-tailored pieces of clothing. Ayu and our new travel friend Kimberly got similarly excellent prices on several pretty dresses.

The rain was sporadic over the next few days, which thwarted our attempts at any real excursions, so we filled the time with shopping trips to old town, delicious food, a tea tasting, and a one-hour boat ride along the river.

When the rain finally stopped and the sun came out, we went on a gentle afternoon bicycle tour (with Heaven & Earth Tours) through the countryside, admiring local villages and homes, villagers showing us their crafts, traditional bridges, waterways, and the gorgeous green rice paddies Vietnam is known for. We capped off the day with an amazing dinner at Morning Glory, probably my favorite restaurant in Vietnam.

The next day we rented bikes from our hotel and set out on our own, riding through more rice paddies and villages before grabbing a late lunch, then riding to the coast for a well-deserved beer on the beach. We spent the evening, as usual, in Old Town, enjoying dinner, live music at a quiet garden bar, and the narrow lanes and strings of lanterns that make the quarter so atmospheric.

Hue

After our unexpectedly long six-day stay in Hoi An, we took the bus to Hue, the old capital of Vietnam and a city with a lot of historical significance. However, my first impression wasn’t so great, as the bus ride there was awful. Instead of seats, we were each given inflexible, plastic half-coffins to slip into. Needless to say, sleeper buses in Vietnam aren’t built for someone who is 6’2″, so I spent most of my time readjusting my legs to find that perfect, least-terrible position. Once I had mostly accomplished that, the bus’s air conditioning started to drip disgusting, black water on a select group of individuals on the left side of the bus, myself included. At our half-way rest stop, the bus attendant switched me to a seat in the very back of the bus, which turned into a sauna when the aircon was turned off, so I was wet with sweat too. It was a shitty four-hour trip.

For our first full day in Hue, we booked a daylong sightseeing tour, which included several ridiculously expansive and ornate mausoleums, the ancient city, a “dragon boat” ride on the river, and displays of martial arts, incense-making, and conical-hat-making. By mid-afternoon, the heat and humidity had drained all of our energy, so we called it a day and bailed on the last hour of the tour.

The weather hadn’t changed much by the next day (our last in Hue), so we all scattered and had personal days; I worked on photos on my laptop, had more delicious coffee and veggie food at some local spots, and got massages with the girls in the evening.

The following day was our 16-hour train ride to Hanoi, so after a leisurely lunch and some window shopping, we took a cab to the station to catch our mid-afternoon train. The three of us booked beds in a sleeper cabin and the fourth bed remained unoccupied until a train employee hopped up there in the final part of the journey to catch a few hours of sleep. It was a pretty standard sleeper car experience, with the occasional noisy stop as passengers shuffled on and off the train and food vendors shouted on the platform. The food sold onboard the train wasn’t vegetarian at all – which we had been warned about in advance – so we were very thankful we had brought with us some takeaway from our favorite Hue restaurant. Most of the time on the train was spent sleeping or reading, but we did make sure to savor the incredible view; from our western-facing side of the train, we had a picture-perfect orange sunset over the lush rice paddies of the countryside.