3 Months Are Up

I am entering the final six hours of my travels. Although to be fair Korea has and will continue to be part of my travels. Perhaps a better way to put it is, this chapter of my travels or some other hackneyed phrase. Regardless of nomenclature, I prepare to leave Saigon in a matter of moments, and I took some time this afternoon to reflect on the scope of my trip as well as some of the more pertinent reasons for such an undertaking. I will of course leave that for a few more days until I can get re-ensconced in the gunmetal cold of Seoul.

I guess this may be the most bloggish (I take my own meaning of it, don't ask) of my entries. I don't really have the capacity to write anything overly witty or in depth. I had to get passport photos taken this morning and I looked haggard. Perhaps it is just the beard. In any event, a quick rundown since I left Saigon.

Phu Quoc was absolutely beautiful. Saw probably the most stunning sunset of this entire trip (Trevor did make a good case for one we saw in Sulawesi, but we missed the actual sunset merely basking in its afterglow). There was virtually nothing to do but sit on the beach, drink Vietnamese beer, which to my discerning palette could be much worse, and whiled the days away. From there we pushed into the heart of the Mekong. I have to take a moment here to encourage everyone who may be reading this to find time to make that journey. The lower Mekong and the delta are an amazing experience. The colors are a vibrancy that I cannot really describe. The people live within an entirely different rhythm than most people I know. We spent a night in Chau Doc, met a carpenter from Philly who I will have more to say about in another entry, took what could have been the most leisurely cruise up the river into the Kingdom of Cambodia and eventually to Phnom Penh.

Cambodia is another place I highly suggest visiting if you have not already done so. To be sure the hardships faced there are amazing. The lack of old people alone is a telling sign of what life has been like for people. However, without sounding too much like a Lonely planet intro, they are a wonderful and resilient people. Somehow cheerful in the face of so much. Proud despite the dark cloud that hangs over their recent history. Hopeful. If this is sounding too cute, so be it. I am entitled I think. Phnom Penh is certainly sobering on one level. We visited Tual Sleng (S-21) and the Killing Fields. Bottom line: absolute ideology, however misguided or genuine should not be trusted. The excesses that inevitably arrive in its wake are never very pleasant be it Khmer Rouge, Cultural Revolution, Shining Path (hmm stop me if you like Maoism). Anyway, beside that it seems to be a city on the rise. Worth a visit and nowhere near as dangerous as something like wikitravel would have you believe.

Siem Reap is another world really. Almost not part of Cambodia, although the Angkor Temples are certainly the jewels of national pride and rightfully so. The nightlife is excellent, food is amazing and yeah the temples are worth seeing, although I have some intellectual reservations about that as well (I will wait on the archaeology debate for later). Trevor departed from Siem Reap,, and I was glad to get an email from him this morning telling me that it is currently blizzarding in Swillbrook NY. Stay warm Mr. McRo.

There is not much more to say here that I won't want to say in more detail later so I will leave with a tally of sorts

Cameras broken: 2
Phones lost: 1
glasses stolen: 1
money I misplaced: just 50 singapore dollars 3 months ago
disc tournys: 3
people I met that I liked: too many
people I met that I disliked: 5
career paths considered: at least 3
times I was scammed: too numerous to count
shoulder straps torn: 1
amount of noodles I ate: enough that I am fat again
new tattoos: 1
new stamps in my passport: 20 stamps/5 full-page visas
new pages in my passport: 24
best beer consumed in quantity: Beer Lao
best beer consumed: Murray's Anniversary Ale
t-shirts "won" due to alcohol consumption: 2

So, I hope you have enjoyed and I hope you will continue to enjoy as I make my way back to Korea and beyond. I think that Burma and Mongolia are the next places on my list. And please, if you have any desire to come visit I hope you will (see my later post on the carpenter we met). You are more than welcome in Seoul and anywhere else you may want to go I imagine I will be glad to join. Asia is a great adventure, and everyone says its gonna be an Asian century so you might as well see what the hype is about.

palabra.

Saigon Second Time Round

After the Bangkok airport crisis (trying to sound like some 24 hour news program here) prevented a return to Thailand from Manila, tickets were changed to end up in Saigon. I am very glad that it worked out that way. HCMC seems to me to have a vibrancy and friendliness that was just much harder to discover in Bangkok. Believe me I spent hours upon hours scouring the streets of Bangkok, but after a while the blocks full of used car stereos just made things less charming. I admit that travel nor my aims are always about charm or what is easiest, but when you can get charm along with a sense of energy, movement and difference I will opt for the latter.

I have seen possibly a million motorcycles in the last 5 days, heard people talking in tones that I didn't know existed, eaten some exceptionally fresh food and met some great people here in Saigon (and this is my second time here). The beer is fresh, things are cheap. I dunno, this is probably the most personal writing I may do on this trip. Not that you are going to see the inner workings. Merely that I can't help but be gushing about this place. I have run into any number of people over the last three months that have had plenty of bad things to say about the country. I just don't see it. I suppose I can understand (now I am going to go back into discourse mode):

Many people I have met assume that all of South East Asia is populated by these charming individuals who want to do nothing more than smile at you, where everything costs a dollar and every place you go is populated by a tourist industry that speaks good English (Thailand). Vietnam is certainly none of those things. People are not unhappy, just the opposite, but from where I stand it seems that they are much more caught up in their own lives. As people may or may not know Vietnam is on the road to being a middle income country in less than 15 years time. The economy is soaring. Things move a hundred miles a minute. There is a reckless sense of joyful lawlessness as you cross the streets. The psyche of the people has certainly been profoundly affected by colonialism, wars with China, France and the United States; a closed society and every other thing you could imagine a nominally communist state dealing with in the past 40 years. But still there is something cheerful and different about this place. (The Philippines had a similar vibe)

I am not trying to make excuses. People have bad times places. But I think that many of the expectations for what Vietnam is are merely unrealistic. It does not rely primarily on tourism. There is very little English spoken and less written. It is just not as easy a travel destination. This in the heart of one of the most traveled regions of the world. As I have heard so often from casual conversations on the streets of this region to intimate conversations I have been involved in over dinner Vietnam is lacking "authenticity". This immediately hearkens me back to my university days. What the hell is authenticity anyway? More likely what these people are referring to is the fetishization or romanticizing of a country, people, culture or region. Not to go all Said on people, but that is entirely unrealistic and lacks the understanding of what culture is and how it works. The interplay and connections between the east and west are too often blurred by our desires to experience a certain thing that we have built up in our own minds. I caution anyone from carrying any preconceptions into any other country be it England or Argentina, India or Uzbekistan. Yes, you can want the place to be beautiful. Have good food. Be a place you can enjoy. But you cannot assume because a people or region doesn't live up to what you thought it would be that it should be automatically relegated to the dust heap. Authenticity exists without that fetishizing. It exists because people live their lives. That is authentic enough.

So to get back to me gushing, I like Vietnam a lot. There is plenty here to offer and especially to someone who is from America. I went and saw the war remnants museum and the Cu Chi tunnels. Both fascinating things, but will be left for another essay I am preparing. In any event my trip will soon take me into the heart of the Mekong, Phu Quoc island and then into Cambodia for the last leg of my trip. Wish me luck.