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So, if you’ve been following the weather in Southeast Asia — and, let’s face it, who doesn’t these days? — then you’ve probaby noticed that there was a typhoon in the South China Sea that turned and made its way over to North Vietnam, right where I am. Weather, on a vacation? Who’d’ve thunk it! So right now I’m sitting in my hotel room blogging, thanks to “Typhoon Domeng”:http://www.thanhniennews.com/travel/?catid=7&newsid=17181. That means, and you get to learn all about my Typhoon-adjusted travels.
One of the trips I was most excited to take was the cruise around “Ha Long Bay”:http://www.terragalleria.com/vietnam/vietnam.halong.html, a famous and scenic bay in Northern Vietnam. So, like a good tourist, I shopped around and booked a tour, and woke up early to pile onto a minibus and tool (rather slowly, since the Vietnamese drive at fairly low rates of speed) down a four-lane highway to Ha Long Bay. Nearly there, the tour guide turns around and tells us that the storm has closed down the bay. The whole minibus — except for the two Norweigans, who did not appear to respond in any meaningful way to any stimulus at all, even the one with the camera around his neck never bestirring himself to take a photo — was dejected as we turned around, although everyone also enjoyed the green bean cake candy that we got along the way back.
So, deposited back in Hanoi around mid-day, with time to kill and without one much-anticipated trip, I did two things:
* I booked a tour for the next day
* I visited Hoa Lo Prison
“Hoa Lo”:http://www.vietnamwar.com/hanoihilton.htm was built at the end of the 19th century by the French administration. Like many of today’s prisons, it eventually became massively overcrowded; even before the overcrowding, however, the prison was still dank, light on facilities, and all prisoners were kept shackled most all of the day. There was a particularly effective display of the prison’s guillotine, with photos of heads in baskets after the use of said guillotine. I don’t know much about the history of prisons and how awful they were in general at the time, but it was clear that this was not a particularly pleasant prison to be in at any time. Later, the North Vietnamese used this prison to house American POWs, including John McCain; the propagandistic displays on this era decreased the effectiveness of the museum, because it’s clear that US POWs were treated badly, despite any statements otherwise; on the other hand, it’s impossible to assess how much better, or worse, the North Vietnamese were than the French, given the rather obviously silly nature of the more recent displays. The US POWs called the prison the Hanoi Hilton, which makes the brand-new high-rise hotel occuping 3/4 of the property a bit tasteless.
The next day, I took a tour of the area known as the “Ha Long Bay on land,” Tam Coc. Along the way we stopped at Hoa Lu, the capital of one of the first independent Viet states, in the 10th century. Two ancient temples are there, commemorating the two kings who ruled this brief state.
!/images/hanoi/ancienttemple.jpg!
We also had a chance to see some of the traditional life in this rural community. Driving there, along a narrow road between rice paddies, was a beautiful way to see the backbreaking labor of agricultural workers in Vietnam’s countryside. Every house seemed to have a rice paddy in front, every community a large field of paddies, and each field was filled with coolies, planting and transplanting rice in their traditional conical hats, helped, in some places, by water buffalo, in others carrying their impediments on bicycles modified with long handlebars so that the bike could carry sacks while the person walks alongside.
!/images/hanoi/buffalo.jpg!
Then it was down the Tam Coc river, which was quiet and serene, except for the occasional crowing cock, braying mountain goat, or vendor on riverboat offering sodas and woven products. Towers of stone thrust forth from the earth along both sides of the river, with lush jungle vegetation covering almost every surface. We paddled through three caves along the river, enjoying the quiet, still surface and the vistas. Naturally, the Vietnamese boat drivers didn’t keep to either side or make any effort to establish any pattern of navigation; it was every pilot for him (or her) self. Vendors trying to sell low-quality local handiwork and sodas paddled their own boats alone and caused many collisions as they ignored other boats to try to sell to tourists sitting on their boats. Hopefully, in the future, some order will be brought to the area; it was a drag, also, when our pilot tried to sell to us from a chest on his boat towards the end of the voyage. The fee for the voyage should cover the cost of the voyage, and I’d much rather enjoy the incredible beauty of the river in peace — because it was a remarkable, primeval place.
!/images/hanoi/downtheriver1.jpg!
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So, now my plane to Hué has been delayed for three hours, so I’m off to grab some Pho, or something similarly unthreatening. You see, I already had my challenging meal for breakfast — I sat down for what I took to be a poached egg and found, instead, that I was eating a chicken embryo, poached in its shell, and seasoned with fish sauce. Now, those of you who are familiar with Vietnames cuisine probably know that this local delicacy is what I should in fact have expected to come from a Vietnamese street vendor’s eggs, but, what can I say, I had my wonderful, strong, oily Vietnamese coffee _after_ I bought the egg, not before. Frankly, I could live on that coffee — and maybe I’ll try!

The lack of “Engrish”:http://engrish.com/ t-shirts in Vietnam is making it hard for me to find funny blog titles, but I do think I hit some sort of Hanoi trifecta today: I saw Uncle Ho’s mausoleum, the Army museum, and had dessert with a hooker. It doesn’t get much better than that! Except for — and I will admit this freely, because sometimes giving bad things a name makes them less bad — it is preposterously hot here.
The day started with the traditional breakfast of a bean cake steamed in a banana leaf, and I’ll be honest that that put me out of commission for the morning. But then I hopped on an _om_ and zipped over to the west side of town, to check out the obligatory Army museum.
!/images/hanoi/tank.jpg!
Because of said heat, I’ve been trying to hit all of the good museums around mid-day — Hanoi’s museums are all built in beautiful old French colonial buildings, with thick walls and big, slow-moving ceiling fans, and it’s actually pleasant inside. The Army museum is famous, with many exhibits on Vietnam’s fight for independence, some fascinating, others absurd in the way that only socialist revolutionary memorabilia can be (“this was so-and-so’s belt worn during the patriotic uprising in such-and-such a place in 1932″). The museum culminates with a virtual pyramid made from pieces of downed US fighter planes, an odd presentation for such material.
I also saw the Temple of Literature, a university for the training of Mandarins, established in 1070. The inner courtyard is lined with stelae outlining the exam results for each year:
!/images/hanoi/stelae.jpg!
Then it was off to Ho’s mausoleum:
!/images/hanoi/uncleho.jpg!
And, further along, to the ancient Tran Quoc temple:
!/images/hanoi/tranquoc.jpg!
The Vietnamese are very sensible about their Buddhist shrines. Of course they’re Communist, which means that, technically, there’s no religion, so everyone can wear their shoes inside the shrines, unlike in Thailand, where there’s a shoes off-shoes on-shoes off again dance at every major tourist site. But, then, they recognize the role of the religion in the country, so people go to the shrines and pray anyway, just in a very open-minded way. Like everywhere, they smile when they see Westerners, and smile especially large when you smile back.
Then I rode a cyclo home:
!/images/hanoi/cyclo.jpg!
Now, in Hanoi, there’s three ways to get around. The cyclo is a pedi-cab: the driver sits on a half-bicycle, with a seat for a passenger bolted to the front and a wheel on each side of the passenger seat. The cyclo is slow but driven conservatively; however, the driver will most likely offer you “good boom-boom one hour” (he will not be upset if you decline). You can also take an _om_, a scooter — then you sit behind the driver, with no helmet (I’ve counted only 7 helmets on riders since I got here) and no other protective gear of any sort. Now, traffic is almost totally uncontrolled in Hanoi, so this can seem dangerous, but I’ve only seen one near miss and no accidents, and really everyone drives at about 30, so it’s not too risky. Then there’s walking, but that just means that you need to cross the street a bunch of times on your way to your destination, and remember that I mentioned traffic is uncontrolled — there’s no crosswalks here. So, pick your poison. If you need some moral support in making that decision, you can always do like me and head to the old French part of town — they’ve got a good spot there!
!/images/hanoi/cathedral.jpg!
Oh, and as for dessert with the hooker — well, after a nice Pho dinner, I wanted to try this one traditional Vietnamese dessert, it’s kind of like boba in sugarcane juice. I bought some from the first vendor I saw, and sat down; turned out the other patron of that fine streetside vendor was a lady of the evening. I enjoyed a little English conversation, but told her I had a woman I loved and was going to marry back home, and then she stopped trying to sell me anything but a massage, Now, after my Thailand experience, I rather would like a massage — and I’m surprised I don’t see places offering massages here in Vietnam — but I imagine this lady only was good at massages that had happy endings, and the only ending I want is the kind with a relaxed back. So, no massage, but I was hardly going to leave and give up my dessert, so I enjoyed my bean-flavored cubes and then went on back to my hotel, where I started on this fine blog entry. And that was a day all around Hanoi.

Hanoi is ridiculously beautiful, although there are a few problems. One is that the street my hotel is on shares a name with two other streets, just the tones vary between the three names. So I tried to meet up w/some people a friend knows who live here, and I texted my address, but since I coudn’t include the accents that specify the tones, they had to track down which of the streets I live on. But we met up, and went out. The other unfortunateness is the Vietnamese currency, named the Dong. Not only is its name a silly schoolyard bad word, but it’s also in cartoon-large bill sizes. The smallest is 1000 dong, and, at 15,000 to the dollar, that’s not much. So I changed just a little money but I have a massive roll in my pocket:
!/images/hanoi/massivedong.jpg!
So, first to dinner: my friend from school Phuong, who lived in Hanoi, gave me the number of some of her friends. We met up and they took me to an authentic Vietnamese restaurant and they plied me with all sorts of food. And it was great! I kept saying “yes, make it authentic” and they kept doing it — even when it came to serving me Nem, or tasty eggrolls stuffed with pig’s ears. We’re going out again tomorrow, and I can’t wait.
In general, I’ve been eating authentic; I actually thought about going to a tourist place tonight, for convenience’s sake, but the menu was so awful. Who gets Stroganoff in Hanoi? That’s just a waste of a plane ticket (watch me crave for a hamburger in a week). I’ve been to both Pho and Con places, Pho being the typical Vietnamese noodle soup, and Con being rice + anything. Tonight I climbed to the third floor of a narrow streetside cafe, and was served whatever the proprietress felt like:
!/images/hanoi/dinner.jpg!
In general, that’s been the hot ticket — if I come up to a restaurant and smile, I get some sort of specialty, and the world is good (Vietnamese food is wonderful). It’s an amazing change after Bangkok, a smile goes far with any Vietnamese and almost all of the touts will leave you alone after a pleasant “no thanks!” Meanwhile, at every cafe I’m the only Westerner, and, even though we don’t share a language, they give me big smiles every time they see me doing something authentic — and even a gasp or two as I pour “nuoc mam”:http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=nuoc+mam&gwp=13 over everything, Vietnamese-style. The only real problem is that I kept trying to pronounce the word “tea” southern-style, as “dha”, instead of northern-stye, “tza”, leaving me with no drink, until one kind waitress stuck around for a minute to read my dictionary.
Today I tooled around the Old Quarter, the historic part of Hanoi, just outside my hotel door:
!/images/hanoi/oldcity.jpg!
This part of town is half tourist trap, half old skool — get off the main drag and I’m the only white man on the block.
!/images/hanoi/traditional.jpg!
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Then I walked around one of Hanoi’s two beautiful lakes:
!/images/hanoi/hoankiemsmalltemple.jpg!
For my older readers, I also walked up to the Paul Doumer Bridge:
!/images/hanoi/pauldoumer.jpg!
During the Vietnam war, the Paul Doumer Bridge was the only span crossing the mighty Red River in all of Vietnam. The US attacked it over and over but never managed to get it down for good; the bridge was a lifeline for North Vietnam’s war effort.
Hanoi is wonderful. Hot as all get-out, but less humid than Bangkok, and I’ve only been ripped off once, by a “cyclo”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_rickshaw driver with whom I stupidly forgot to agree on a fare before we took off on a long trip. I think he earned a whole month’s income off of me. But at least I didn’t sweat getting there — I’m taking three showers a day here, I get so soaked walking everywhere. Fortunately, Vietnam TV has great soap operas, Socialist-themed potboilers that discuss major issues like the country’s growing prosperity, foreign investment, the declining infrastructure, and social changes in reverence for past generations. Who knew that all you needed to do to get me to watch _novelas_ was to make them political? (Of course, one might argue that all culture is political.) I just can’t imagine missing an episode.
But now it’s to sleep, and then up early to hit Ho Chi Minh’s tomb, and get a good night’s sleep to prepare for a bar visit with real Vietnamese!

Today I flew from Bangkok to Hanoi. Coming down from the clouds, Vietnam stretching before me — it was kind of a Charlie Sheen in Platoon moment. But, after an afternoon here, I know I love it.
First: Bangkok wrap-up. I know I promised two things, a discussion of steps and of oranges, and I suppose I should deliver. The first topic is boring, but it is worth noting that the only people I’ve found who are as comfortable with challenging steps as the Thais are the Aztecs. Fortunately, there are no games played with human heads in Thailand. At least, that I’m aware of.
Oranges are a more interesting topic. Those with a grounding in the history of foods — and pardon me if I make some small errata here, but my Larousse Gastronomique is not at my side at this exact moment — may know that the Orange started out as a small, green fruit in either South or Southeast Asia. Thus, you might assume that a fruit that is small and green, with orange meat, found in Thailand, might be the most historically accurate and realistic of all oranges, and that the juice made from said orange would be the orangiest of all liquids. The Thais like to squeeze their juice fresh, cutting the small fruit in half and juicing them in a small press made just for the purpose, at sidewalk carts. One day, thirsty as all get-out, I bought a container of this orange juice, looking forward to the (advertised) unsweetened, undiluted refreshment. And then I drank it. And it tasted exactly like Tang, if you made it with about 33% too much powder mix. I can only conclude that our nation’s top food scientists were sent to Thailand to find the truth about the flavor of orange juice, and that they reproduced that flavor exactly in our space program’s powdery, orange goodness. Too bad! Here’s one fruit that selective breeding made better.
That’s pretty much it for my complaints, though. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about Thailand when I hit Chiang Mai on my return leg, but the brief story is: I could go back to Bangkok in a second and find a week’s worth of fun, new things to do (none of them including excessive drinking or hookers). Two thumbs up, except for the frequent afternoon downpours at this time of year.
Hanoi also gets a thumbs up, at least at this point. I flew here on AirAsia, Southeast Asia’s Southwest, and was blown away just on the flight. As we broke free of the clouds around central Thailand, the ground beneath us switched from tilled farmland cut with roads and dotted with towns to trackless, mountainous jungle. Only a few rivers marred these many miles of dense green, with a few small hamlets, each located at a remote river bend. I’m reading “Hell in a Small Place”:http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/030681157X/wadearmstrong-20/ref=nosim/, a history of the battle between the French and the Viet Minh at “Dien Bien Phu”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dien_Bien_Phu, a classic confrontation in which the Vietnamese guerilla forces besieged a French unit parachuted into the trackless jungle, encircling that unit for nearly two months and, finally, isolating it from the world and forcing its surrender. This surrender brought down French rule in Indochina and led directly to US involvement in South Vietnam. Stories can tell of jungle that can only be hacked through, with machetes, a foot at a time, but it wasn’t until I saw the expanse below me that I realized what it must have been like for a French flier or paratrooper in 1950, with indistinguishable jungle stretching around below you as far as the eye could see in every direction, a doomed expanse for the bailed-out pilot or the isolated soldier, a series of identical and meaningless positions for which you would likely die at some unknown and unknowable minute, without even seeing your enemy. Yet, today, this jungle is some of the last pristine space on earth, perhaps one of the reasons to come back to this part of the world. The feeling was simultaneously intriguing and terrifying.
Then the clouds closed up again, and I didn’t see the ground until we started our landing approach. Then the color of the ground had changed; Sly Stallone and Chuck Norris and China Beach and all of those memories from my youth had shown me a remarkably US Army camoflauge-colored Vietnam, with saturated greens and yellows and browns, just like Thailand, which was always the stand-in for Vietnam. Yet, as we descended choppily below the clouds, Vietnam was a bluish green, as if somebody had turned down the white point a few thousand degrees Kelvin — remarkably, the blue-green matched not the US camo but the pattern that the French used until very recently. Crisp, clear, curved lines delinieated rice paddies subdivided under some clearly specific system that, yet, left no traces of its rules above the flooded-in waters. As our plane flew lower, little villages seperated out from the paddies, looking like little toy models with perfectly-outlined streets, colorful houses that exemplified an exact mix of French and Asian, and even frequent churches throwing their bell towers into the sky; it was as if we had a Tonkinese Normandy beneath us. Then we crossed one of the branches of the Red River and touched down at Hanoi’s airport, our wheels hitting the ground just as we passed a line-up of MiG-21s in concrete shelters at the runway’s end.
From the plane we were ushered into a large, spacious, and completely empty airport, as before us spread aisle after aisle of immigration officers, each with no wait in front of his or her little cubicle. Then we were through, efficiently and quietly, and my hotel’s driver appeared to whisk me down the highways to Hanoi.
These were quiet, slow highways, with red-and-white striped guardrails on each side, looking nothing so much as French. Little mopeds burbled along at 35 in the right lane, while cars sped past at 60 in the left, honking every time a slow car blocked them or a moped drifted too far to the left. It was a sedate ride and the flunky fell sound asleep. Then, in Hanoi, we were surrounded by a biker gang on mopeds, except it turned out this was just the normal Tonkinese, going about their normal business, in completely undirected masses of moped-driving normalcy, making left and right turns and heading straight on any part of the road they felt right. Yet nobody hit anybody else (good since I saw a grand total of one person with a motorcycle helmet on, and nobody had any clothes remotely useful for preventing road rash), and even the ao dai-clad women riding sidesaddle behind their boyfriends were able to relax on their mopeds.
My hotel, the “Hanoi Prince”:http://hanoiprincehotel.com/, is a stereotypical Paris hotel, small and very vertical, with two rooms on each floor and a narrow, winding staircase. Yet it’s beautiful, and there’s free internet so I’d better post every day. Meanwhile the atmosphere outside is distinctively eastern, yet relaxed and European. I think I’m in love. More on my dinner adventures, and tomorrow’s photos, um, tomorrow. Now it’s time to do laundry (I’ve got to wash every day, since it takes two days for anything to dry in this heat and humidity — I think I’lll check out the laundry lady next door in the morning and see if I can outsource my cleaning to the up-and-coming country of Vietnam.

I may perhaps have exaggerated the bad news in the last entry. At any rate, it’s pretty much all been sunshine since. First of all, I finally got to have a tuk-tuk ride. Second, I had really good food (which is what Thailand is known for, after all). Third, I saw great places. Fourth, my back is almost all better. Fifth, I figured out how to get rid of the ubiqutous touts that pester tourists everywhere. And, finally, I’m headed for Hanoi tomorrow!
So, where to start? Well, there’s that tuk-tuk:
!/images/bangkok/tuktuk.jpg!
I’ve actually taken two tuk-tuk rides, and have learned the important lesson that a tuk-tuk is a good thing to take home but a bad ride to start your day with. See, the little things are uncooled and open to the polluted Bangkok street air, so, if you’re headed out, you’ll get a good, yucky sweat on, which you’d ideally prefer to delay until later in the (extremely humid) day. On the other hand, heading home, when you’re already wet and grimy, well, then they’re kind of cute. Now, the downside is that you can’t see out of them, so you miss the scenery, but the upside is that you can’t see out of them so you can’t fear death from driving fast in a tiny, unstable vehicle on Bangkok’s crazy streets.
Now, the trick was to not get ripped off by the tuk-tuk driver, which involved forcefully expressing that I wanted to go “direct” to my destination, not take the discounted trip to some store they highly recommended. One of the two drivers did demand an extra 10 baht a couple minutes into our trip, but, then, I’m hardly inclined to fight over what works out to about a quarter. Rude, not forceful, is the way to get rid of the touts, however. It’s funny, I had just drunk a tasty coconut (coconut juice is served in a coconut shell), and my hands were all wet from the ice water the coconut had sat in until it was fished out to be served to me. I was walking down the street trying to figure out where I could dry my hands, and this little guy comes up and starts pestering me about where I want to go, how the temple I want to go to is closed (this is a common scam and is always a lie), and just won’t go away. He grabs my arm and tries to pull me to the tuk-tuk he’s recruiting for, and that’s when I get my brilliant idea: I dry my hand off on his shirt. He looks at me funny, then actually runs away. Sweet freedom! I was actually disappointed today when a tout gave up, I was about to see if tossing my gum into his shirt pocket would get him to leave me alone.
Anyway, I fought through the legions of tuk-tuks trying to send me to some other destination and got to see the reclining Buddha:
!/images/bangkok/recliningbuddha.jpg!
And the grand palace:
!/images/bangkok/palace.jpg!
Today, I followed up those sights with a Chinese-style temple in, get this, Chinatown, of all places:
!/images/bangkok/chinesetemple.jpg!
And then hit the night bazaar nearby:
!/images/bangkok/chiles.jpg!
Then, it was back to my cute hotel in not-so-cute Khao Sanh:
!/images/bangkok/khaosanh.jpg!
All of these places were lovely, but it was the Reclining Buddha that was the best, not for the beautiful premises, but because one of Thailand’s kings had established there, about 150 years ago, a national academy of massage. Now, students at this school offered massages for fairly reasonable prices, so in I walked, I pantomimed an explanation that my back hurt, and I bought an hour with a nice middle-aged lady who promised to be able to take care of that. And she did! Thai massage, it must be appreciated, isn’t like Western massage — it hurts to get a Thai massage, you feel like you’re being driven into the massage bed, and your muscles are being punished as the masseuse uses her elbows, feet, and knees to work your muscles loose. So, anwyay, the massage hurt something awful; but then I got up and my back didn’t hurt at all, or start hurting much in the next day. So that was a miracle, and I promise to regularly get msyelf massages on this trip, for my health of course.
Pantomime got me tasty food, as well. I’ve been enjoying street food, with no ill effects (the only small tummyache came after the one restaurant meal I’ve had so far). I’m not entirely sure what has gone into my food, but it’s tasty, especially now that I’ve figured out what to do with the condiments — fish sauce, sour sauce, chile paste, and sugar — that sit at every table:
!/images/bangkok/lunch.jpg!
That’s about it. Bangkok has been great, and I’d come back in a moment. I’m looking forward to more Thailand in Chiang Mai later in my trip, but am also incredibly excited about the more mellow-themed city coming up next — Hanoi. I’m headed there in the morning and can hardly wait for my first bowl of Pho. There’s even the promise of free Internet, so you should see more updates from me in the next few days. Now if I can just make them amusing!
* Seen on a t-shirt today. The runner-up for today’s headline were the “Adolf Hitler” t-shirt and the food cart serving “crape”.

Today started with a wardrobe malfunction, included a language malfunction, included boats and mostly-naked broads, and ended with a back malfunction. Assuming I can get out of bed tomorrow, I’ll count it as a very good day.
But first, tuk-tuks, or the lack thereof. Now, since I’m paying per-minute I won’t provide you with a convenient link to explan what a tuk-tuk is, but I’m sure Google or Wikipedia can give you a good explanation with even the tiniest search. Anyway, tuk-tuks are emblematic of Thailand, so much so that my Lonely Planet guide has one on the cover; yet I haven’t been able to take a ride anywhere in one. That’s because the tuk-tuk drivers are so focused on running their little scam — taking me to some store where they get commission on my purchases, then sticking me with a high-pressure sales pitch from the owner, far from my intended destination — that, since I want to actually get to, you know, Thailand’s greatest wonders, I just haven’t been able to blow the time to take the cheap tuk-tuk ride anywhere.
Today I replaced the tuk-tuk with a cab, a boat, and the Skytrain. The cab was the source of that language malfunction — I was trying to get to the pier, but the cabbie didn’t know the word pier, so I tried to say “boat” in Thai but clearly bollocksed that up, so finally we agreed on “boat station.” Unfortunately the cabbie thought that actually meant “bus station,” and we got halfway there before the whole thing got straightened out. That brings us to my business idea of the day, which is that you get a whole bunch of bilingual Thai/tourist language speakers, put them at a phone bank, and have them translate between local service and product providers and the tourists they’re trying to sell to. For cabbies, etc., you could probably sell a subscription that would easily pay for itself.
At any rate, I got where I was going in the cab. Now I was only taking the cab ’cause I’d lost an hour and a half in a wardrobe malfunction. See, before I left I decided to buy a whole new travel wardrobe, since there was no way I could pack 30 days worth of clothes, and my mostly-cotton wardrobe was not ideal quick-drying material for a tropical vacation. So, off to REI I went, and I bought a few shirts and a pair of those convertible pants that zip off to be shorts. Well, three of the shirts are great, but I went off in the fourth this morning and was immediately soaked to the bone. Worse, the shirt was soaked too. That being socially unacceptable, I went back and changed, and, to make up the lost time, took a cab instead of walking to the pier.
OK, I realize this is slow, but I’m getting somewhere, I promise.
So that was my first wardrobe malfunction. Later in the day, one of the zips on my convertible pants got stuck, so now they’re permanently shorts. So, two wardrobe malfunctions. For the one shirt I give up, but for the pants I’m either going to replace them with some knock-offs or see if I can’t just get the zipper replaced. I mean, this is Thailand, right?
Anyway, that’s mostly frustrating to me; I realize this topic is fairly uninteresting to you, my loyal readers. You’d much rather hear about what I saw and what I did. So, here goes:
* I wanted to go to Siam Square, so I took the long, scenic, experiental route. First I got on a fast ferry and shot down the Chao Phraya, the river that goes through the middle of Bangkok. The river was dirty but the view was exceptional, a side of Bangkok that it’s probably easy to miss these days.
!/images/bangkok/longboat.jpg!
!/images/bangkok/riverhouses.jpg!
* Then I took the Skytrain, an elevated railroad, to Siam Square, walking through the busy commercial area and seeing all the shops.
!/images/bangkok/streetscene.jpg!
* I got to stop by Jim Thompson’s house. Jim wasn’t there — probably because he disappeared in Malaysia in the mid-1960s — but all his stuff was, which was nice because it’s cool stuff. Jim built an empire based on exporting handmade silk products, back when he was the only guy doing that, and he used that empire to buy a lot of cool old art for his house. He also bought his house, which was assembled from the pieces of various houses he’d found around the country; he loved the carving on the house pieces so much that he actually put the walls up backwards so that the ornamental carving faced inwards.
!/images/bangkok/elephantstatue.jpg!
* Then I went to the night market at Patpong, where I filled a number of orders from friends for souvenirs (Milla, I have your Thai slave in my bag now, although that leaves no room for my underwear).
* Walking from the night market, my back started to hurt a lot, so I got a one-hour Thai massage which blew my mind but, unfortunately, only moderately helped my back. This little tiny woman had vise-like hands and, when she finally turned me onto my stomach to work on my back, she shoved me into the mattress with her knees in a way that can only be described as linebacker-like. I’ve never been into Asian women but, after that, I’m taking applications below.
* Then I got waylaid by a man promising a “ping-pong show” at one of the bars at Patpong. I had studiously avoided the row of red-light shops, in order to focus on the knock-offs, but one guy finally got me in with a promise of “no cover!” I mean, how could I go to Bangkok and not do a tourist run of the red light district? The place was smart, they put the one hot dancer where I could see her from the outside, so I came in, got a drink, and was promptly rushed by eight strippers, two of whom I guess were attractive. Of course all eight wanted drinks, which was a little much; when I finally broke down and bought them the orange juices they wanted, all except for one ugly, older one left. She tried to sweet-talk me but with so little skill that I figured my walled would be sucked dry far before anything else was, and I called it a night. Don’t even ask me how much I had to pay to get out of there! And there wasn’t even a ping-pong show, although I did get to see one girl play with sparklers, if you know what I mean.
Tomorrow: all about stairs, and why Tang is more like orange juice than orange juice.

Day One in Bangkok started with a torrential downpour; thenceforth, humidity held just below the level required to create spontaneous cloudbursts, although the sky was happy to host intimidating clouds all day long. Perhaps because of this humidity, and the heat — in the 90s — I saw almost no other westerners as I walked around Banglamphu and the region around Khao San road.
It was a pleasant enough walk. At first I got all heated up because every few steps came a person who wanted to rip me off with some tuk-tuk tour; but then I realized Thailand’s scam artists were just not good at their job. See, a Thai scammer will just keep talking, which gives you chances to to say “no!”; I’ve traveled to other countries with scammers before and, let me say, if you want me to say “yes!” to a 50-real shoeshine, you’ve got to be closing pretty well. Perhaps we need to send Alec Baldwin to get ol’ Bangkok to shape the tourist-harassers up.
Now, in between “need tuk-tuk?”s, I did manage to get some sightseeing in. I got to check out a number of Wats, and even wandered my way to Monk Bowl city, where they make the alms bowls for monks. Along the way, I got three or four good meals at streetside restaurants (apparently, Thais like to eat several small meals a day — a good way for me to lose weight!). At one of these restaurants, I perplexed the poor patrons and chefs with my total inability to answer even the simplest question in Thai (one man even gave me a dirty look suggesting that I fell short of even his minimal expectations of what any reasonable visitor should know how to say). Even with that, I managed to muddle my way into yet another wonderful Thai street meal. I can’t wait to get around town more tomorrow!
For the visual types out there, here are a few of today’s photos:
!/images/bangkok/firingbowl.jpg!
!/images/bangkok/guardian.jpg!
!/images/bangkok/houses.jpg!
!/images/bangkok/pigeonroyale.jpg!
!/images/bangkok/holycow.jpg!

Today was fascinating, not least because it was twenty-eight hours long and also included all of tomorrow. For a day that was almost entirely spent on an airplane, I got a fair dose of excitement.
It began, really, when I arrived three hours early for my flight to Bangkok, via Taipei. The first step was to shepherd my bag through security, a shockingly boring two-hour task, followed by a well-run 15-minute check-in at the China Airlines desk, followed, in turn, by a 30-minute wait in a line for security that stretched the length of LAX’s international terminal. Why, if one weren’t paying attention one might have thought that the Taiwanese were the organized, efficient first-world nation, while we were the inefficient, bureaucratic developing nation.
Any thoughts otherwise were, certainly, relieved when the “terminal was evacuated”:http://cbs2.com/topstories/local_story_165215312.html. Nobody told us nothing, and none of the TSA cops followed-up that we were leaving the building; somehow, however, the momentum of the mass of humanity got moving outside, and, with some help from the LAPD, we were herded down to the next terminal.
!/images/SEAsia01/evacuation.jpg!
Actually, the evacuation was probably good for me, because I sprinted back in and got to security before the line managed to grow much more than a half dozen people long. Then I sprinted the length of the terminal to get to my gate; then I waited because they had to delay the plane for an hour to get it fully-fueled. Oh well, that’s better than flying an incompletely-fueled plane.
Once in the air, I fell asleep fast (recall my original 1:15am departure), but was rudely awoken in mid-Pacific by 40 minutes of medium-grade turbulence. Ten minutes were fun, fifteen was still kind of cool, but by 25 I was getting a little bit of motion sickness and I was glad to leave the bumpy air behind and get back to sleep. Morning brought a very Chinese airplane meal of pork congee and pickles.
The next step was a seven-hour wait in Taiwan’s Chiang Kai Shek airport, which was universally referred to there as CKS airport — I wonder if that’s a political statement? Anyway, I could tell I’d gotten to my gate early:
!/images/SEAsia01/taipei.jpg!
So I took the time to look at all of the signage, quite the challenge since I neither speak nor read any Asian language. Fortunately, at least one of the following signs doesn’t need any translation:
!/images/SEAsia01/birds.jpg!
!/images/SEAsia01/ducks.jpg!
I think the second sign says, top to bottom:
* Waterfowl will be imported into TRON
* No right-facing ducks, left-facing ducks and pigs only
* For that matter, no right front wheels
* Don’t forget to call your duck when traveling
* Dynamite is fun!
I had a nice bowl of beef and noodles at the airport, then, finally, got to sleep all the way to Thailand (I noticed that my flight’s map studiousy avoided any overflight of China. Then I landed in Bangkok, welcomed by a sudden thunderstorm that lit the sky with flashes. I made it past crowds of hucksters, keeping on the straight-and-narrow until I went to a stand that said “taxi” and procured a transport there which was not, in fact, a taxi, being rather about twice as expensive for the same service. After that I got to see my hotel room:
!/images/SEAsia01/room.jpg!
And its scenic view
!/images/SEAsia01/outwindow.jpg!
Well, all that’s not bad, since I’ll be heading out tomorrow to see the real Bangkok and not the real Khao San road (yes, I’m in the backpacker’s haven — thought it would be easier to find a drink out if I wanted one). I had a quick dinner at a streetside stand today, and tomorrow we’ll really test if I can survive more of that. For now, I plan to collapse in complete exhaustion, since two days is a lot to fit into one!

So in about four hours I will leap out into the unknown and get on one of China Air’s widebodies, headed for Southeast Asia (via Taiwan, with a seven-hour layover — yecch). I’m filled with that mix of excitement and dread that always comes before a big trip, with part of me deeply enthused and the other part wishing for a good night’s sleep in my comfy bed. Seriously, I’m incredibly looking forward to this trip — and glad that I was able to make it an environmentally-sounder “green” trip.
I made my trip green by offsetting the carbon emissions of the major modes of travel I expect to take — air, in particular. Now, it’s hard for me to be more environmentally-sound in getting to Southeast Asia, because the only way to do that is to sail, which takes rather too long. There’s really no way I can get out of contributing my 1/300th of a widebody’s carbon output; but I can offset those emissions, by paying a small sum of money to “a company that makes investments in programs”:http://www.carbonneutral.com/shop/index.asp that either remove more carbon from the atmosphere — for instance, planting trees — or add less carbon to the atmosphere — for instance, replacing a polluting coal power plant with a wind farm. The net result is that I’ve invested in programs that take out as much carbon from the atmosphere as my flight puts in, so the world is just as nice when I get home as it is now.
That is to say, already altogether too hot. I’m excited to get out of here and enjoy too much sun and too much heat as part of a regularly-scheduled vacation, rather than a Los Angeles Summer. With luck, there will be Internet in the Far East, and you’ll hear from me regularly. Sa wat dee krap!