Planes, Various Kinds of Boats, and Automobiles

We were up bright and early at 5:30am, though I had been up since about 4 listening to a rooster with an inability to tell time crowing and doing various yoga poses that I hoped would cause my bladder to miraculously evaporate so I didn't have to venture into the pitch dark to go to the bathroom.   About 5am my need to pee overtook my need to not be eaten alive by mosquitoes or dismembered by monkeys and I used the extra half hour to contemplate the meaning of life and whatnot.

At our sendoff home stay breakfast I consumed about 3 loaves of delicious baguette topped with the Vietnamese equivalent of laughing cow cheese, jam and/or eggs, sugar bananas and my own personal mini brewed cup of coffee with condensed milk.  Then it was time to pile back in the bus- Hai had us on a strict timeline today.

After a couple more van/boat transfers we arrived at the floating markets.  There was an incredible amount of activity and our guide wove us through the various vendors selling items from their boats.

 

We took a break and climbed aboard the roof of a boat selling pineapple where the owner gave us a demo on how to prepare it popsicle style and offered a treat to those of us that aren't allergic to it.

 

 

 

Then it was time for the long trek back to Ho Chi Minh airport for us to catch our flight to Con Dao island.  On our way we saw a ridiculous amount of motorbikes with extreme cargo:

At the airport we bid a sad farewell to  Kaitlin, as it was time for her to jet back to L.A., then went inside where we had a small discussion with the woman at the counter when she asked Nattie to show the credit card that she purchased her flight with.  Of course the only person that she asked was the only person that didn't have it and then she told her she needed to buy a new flight.  We spoke to the manager and got it sorted out, then went to meet Heggie, who had been having her own travel troubles and ended up missing a connection & getting stranded in Austria so she missed the Mekong Delta trip.

After a quick 45 minute flight we touched down over turquoise waters at a tiny airport on Con Dao island.

We arrived at our hotel- Con Dao Camping, where we made a little friend at the check in area.

So we attempted to check in, only to discover after a great deal of confusion, confounded by the language barrier, that although we had booked two rooms online about two weeks ago, they only had one of them for us.  So they ended up basically making a wall of beds and we slept party of 5, all across them.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant by the beach, and ordering was also an adventure since even the girl that they called over to speak English didn't speak any English and also didn't understand what the little pocket translator my mom bought for me spoke at her.  But when all was said and done we ended up with a pretty tasty little assortment of dishes and some beers so all was right with the world and we went to bed shortly after.

The Mekong Delta Experience

Up at the ungodly hour of 6am choking on the smell of popcorn,  we managed to pillage the breakfast buffet for a bit before our tour van arrived to collect us for our Mekong Delta experience.  One thing I love about foreign hotels is they usually have a little fusion of Eastern and Western breakfast so along with eggs and toast we also had fried rice and wonton soup.

Our fantastic guide for the trip, Tai was a sweet Vietnamese guy, about our age, whose family evacuated from the Mekong to Saigon to escape  the Khmer Rouge when he was 4.

We started off the day with an hour and a half drive out of Ho Chi Minh through the country side.  It was very scenic and Tai gave us the scoop on some of the finer historical and cultural points of Vietnam.

We arrived at the river and hopped in a private boat for a ride around the islands.

We stopped off on one of the islands to watch them make coconut candy.  They gave us some samples to entice us to buy and it worked like a charm- I'll be carting them around for the next two weeks to bring back to NYC for my co-workers, so they will be some well traveled candy.

We hiked out of the candy factory and were greeted by a sort of Vietnamese tuk tuk-  it was sort of like an open air wagon attached to the back of- what else?- a motorbike.

Fun fact from Tai today: one out of two people in Vietnam own a motor bike due to the fact that the only public transit is via bus and the import tax on cars is 150% so only very rich people can afford them.  But I digress, we went on a super awesome ride through the main roads, as well as some back road areas that involved taking some care to not get whacked in the face with passing palm fronds and such.  They dropped us off at a bee keeping farm where we got to sample fresh honey in tea with lime & a bunch of fresh native fruits.  It was the perfect mid morning snack break.

After that we scooted on over to the river where a tired old woman shuttled us up the river in our funny hats in a rowboat.  It was very cool and relaxing experience for us, probably not so much for her, as evidenced by her loud sighs.

After that we got back in our main boat and our driver took us over to our lunch spot, where we arrived just in time for the sky to open up in a torrential downpour.  Luckily by the time we were done feasting on a whole fish, spring rolls, prawns, assorted noodles, fried rice, chicken and a mushroom hot pot,  it had cleared up a bit.

From there we took a short ride in our boat back to the mainland and jumped back in the van for an hour and a half ride to the river.  While we were driving the rain started up again in full force.  I couldn't imagine being the one out of every two people in this country riding around in that nonsense.  I was watching them, thinking to myself, what could be worse than steering your motorbike through this with just a poncho to protect you from the elements, when a man in just a t-shirt scooted by and that answered my question.  It was then further confirmed it could infact be worse when a shirtless man went by a few minutes later.  The kids were loving it though- every 10 feet there was a group of cute little Vietnamese kids splashing in puddles and running around getting soaked.

We arrived at the town, put on our appropriate weather gear and trooped it up the street and over to the dock where we boarded another boat for an hour long cruise to our homestay.  The ride was really interesting; there was so much activity along the riverside.  We saw businesses and residences and all kinds of boats- from industrial looking ones to simple long boats to houseboats with laundry and whole families hanging off them.

 

 

 

We finally made it to our home stay, though I would use the word loosely.  I was envisioning an actual family with a home- instead we are chilling in mosquito infested open air dormitories in the jungle.  But they have equipped our beds with mosquito netting and I have bathed in deet & am wearing clothes that, if not particularly seasonal, offer less surface area for them to get at so I am hoping for the best.

We had about an hour and a half to rest and then it was time to stuff our faces again.  The family who runs the program was all in the little outdoor kitchen cooking our approximately 10 course meal, so that was pretty awesome.

After dinner it was time to retire to our netted abodes and get ready for another early morning.

Kicking A New Decade Off Right

Woke up this morning feeling so rested & un-jetlagged that it wasn't even funny.  After about half an hour in the waterfall shower, making up for the lack of one for the previous two days, and some delicious exotic fruit that we got from the fruit vendor in the middle of the night, we moved into our spacious new family room, complete with sound system and Vietnamese jams.  Also there was beer and red bull in the fridge so we decided we should probably have a couple of those before we headed out to start my birthday off right.

With breakfast complete, we walked a couple blocks down to the Cua Bac Cho Ben Thanh market and walked around until we settled on one of the aggressively marketed food stands- women were literally grabbing people and trying to pull them over & shove them in a chair to eat at their place.

For the record, it seems the Vietnamese are a sleepy people and will nap just about anywhere (meat counters apparently included) which I can get totally get on board with.

We ordered two iced coffees- similar to Thai iced coffee & equally delicious, and Banh Mi- baguettes and sizzling platters of pork, pate and fried egg to put together in a sandwich with a spicy soy sauce to drown it in.  It was so good, I didn't want it to end.

But end it did and we decided to go get some culture so we cabbed it over to the Emperor Jade Pagoda.  It was really beautiful inside with sunlight streaming down through the rafters and the air was filled with the smell of burning incense.  There were many local people praying to their different gods and all kinds of different little rooms to explore.  The only downside was the koi pond was a bit of a mosquito breeding ground and I felt a little like I was being sacrificed.  Totally worth it though.

 

Next we went to the War Remnants Museum in District 3 which was a pretty intense experience.  All around the outside of the building are planes, tanks & other weaponry on display.

Inside are 3 floors dedicated to preserving the history of the war, from the Vietnamese standpoint.  The first floor was mostly propaganda posters, coverage of anti-war protests and articles about Vietnam's political leaders.  The second floor was a pretty disturbing photography exhibit, explicitly detailing the war crimes against both the Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.  I realize the museum is obviously going to be skewed towards the Vietnamese viewpoint but there is no denying the events occurring in these images and they were difficult to look at.  The room is enormous and by the final section, displaying pictures of the children born with birth defects from agent orange exposure, I had to leave the room.  The third floor was mainly composed of an exhibit which I loved, called Requiem.  It it made up of photographs taken by photojournalists from several different nations who lost their lives documenting the war.  The images were unbelievable and it's just amazing that they put their lives at risk, traveling right along with the military and just the fact that they were allowed to capture everything that went on was shocking to me.

It was starting to get a bit sprinkly outside so we headed back home for some ice cream and a little 4 hour nap.  Unfortunately the Vietnamese appear to be working on an early time table so the restaurant we had planned to eat dinner at stopped serving at 9pm.  They gave us a recommendation to go around the corner to Nha Hang Ngon where we got some killer fried rice and fried vermicelli noodles.  We were hoping for some Vietnamese pancakes and some desert but because it was soooo late at 10pm we were told they were finished.

We went back to the room and waited for the girls to arrive where we had a joyful reunification & story time before resting up for our big trip to the Mekong Delta tomorrow!

SEA part 2

Off on another South East Asian adventure!  Or at least after 23 hours of flight time I will be.

As expected, there have been a couple of minor travel incidents.  I arrived at the airport and tried to check in at the kiosk but got an error message and was directed to the "resolution desk".  There. I was told that I did not have a seat on this flight.  It was then that I recollected, about a month ago, Priceline called me and said that American Airlines had changed the flight time to LAX and because of that, we would miss our connection to Shanghi and they needed to change me to an earlier flight.  Not a big deal, except for the fact that apparently they only changed it on the itinerary, not in the actual ticketing system, so the airline still has me booked on the old flight.  This, the woman at the desk informs me, is a problem.  Fantastic.

So I stand there, wishing for a paper bag to breathe into,  while we wait for the manager to arrive.  Arrive she does, and she is......how can I put this nicely?- an unsympathetic bitch.  No hello.  No apology.  Certainly no smile.  Just a frosty explanation that, it's really between Priceline and I because it's Priceline's fault, not theirs.  I'm torn between bursting into tears and leaping over the counter to rearrange her face, but I don't think either of those actions are going to get me very far with the ice queen.  Instead I say that I don't actually care whose mistake it is, I want her to tell me what I need to do to fix it because I'm trying to get to Vietnam for my birthday.  I get no response, she continues typing away at the computer for what feels like an eternity, turns to the other woman behind the counter and says, "That's really all we can do," and walks away.  What!?!  I wait for the woman to tell me I'll be spending my birthday alone in the Beirut airport or  some other equally appealing scenario, but she doesn't say anything either and keeps typing away.  I finally can't take it anymore and ask her if I should continue having a panic attack or if I'm going to get on this flight.  Turns out, "That's really all we can do," means "I fixed it, you're all set, sorry for the inconvenience," in bitchspeak.

Nattie and I meet up and make it on the plane.  I nap blissfully all the way to LAX since planes work better than NyQuil to help me sleep and I only had about 2 hours of napping time last night by the time I finished packing.   Upon arrival it occurs to us that we don't actually have the boarding passes to get onto our next flight, so we have to go re-check in at the desk and get them.  At the desk Nattie realizes she forgot to print out the picture she needs for her Vietnam visa, then busts the zipper on her bag and we two things become evident; we are perfect travel companions and it will be a miracle if we make it to our destination.

Picture-less visa doesn't turn out to be an issue and we make it to our gate without a problem, unless you count forgetting your newly acquired boarding pass and your passport in the bin at the security  screening area- which I may have done and not realized until my name was announced overhead throughout the airport, suggesting that I return to security and collect them.

The 15 hour flight itself was okay.  I woke up from a 2 hour nap to be served some truly terrible airline pork and rice, so I ate the accompanying square of cheesecake and went back to bed.  I got about another 4 hours of sleep in before I was awakened by a baby a few rows back who decided that she was over this whole flying thing & was going to let everyone know about it for the next hour or three.  That was followed by 2 hours of staring a George Clooney's dreamy face for the inflight movie & another sub-par airline meal.  By then I was ready for another nap and before I knew it the flight was over.

We landed in Shanghai and had about 4 hours to kill before the next flight. A couple of facts about the Shanghai airport- they do not sell backpacks, they do not have ATMs, and they do not have soup dumplings.  So all in all, a rather disappointing experience there.

I was knocked out for the entirety of the flight to Vietnam except when they came around with what was by far the strangest assortment of snacks I had ever seen arrive on a tray.  It had onion cookies (who thought that was a good idea?), radish spread, a roll with a mini hotdog hidden inside (that is not the kind of birthday surprise I was looking for, I need to know in advance if I'm going to be consuming a hotdog so I can get in the right mental state), some sort of fruity flavored bread, and two cookies that were a cross between an Oreo and those cardboardy sugar wafers. 

When they woke us up to land I had turned 30 in the interim, and Nattie gave me a disposable camera that prints the pictures with birthday borders on them, so that was a pretty awesome start to a new decade.

The visas that we got online ahead of time proved to be nothing more than a way to rid ourselves of $25 pesky American dollars, as we waited in the same line with everyone else, and still had to pay an additional $25.

After paying a taxi driver an astronomical amount of money to drive us to our hotel, the Ha My 2, and unsuccessfully attempting to haggle with the front desk to get a deal on the room they would clearly not be renting out to anybody else at 1:30am, we ditched our bags and went out for something to eat.

The guy at the hotel gave us a recommendation for a 24 hour noodle place that turned out to be awesome.  We sat down at a little table on the street and had some delicious, delightfully spicy, noodle soup and a couple of birthday beers before heading back, full in my stomach and my soul, to the hotel for our first horizontal sleep in 2 days.

Us vs. the Volcano

Having decided that the 3.5 hour drive each way to Arenal to see the volcano was a bit much, the plan for today was to visit the closer, if smaller, volcano in Rincon National Park, about an hour outside of Liberia.

My mom elected to skip the hiking portion of the day in favor of hanging poolside so the 4 of us set out for another adventure.  After only one wrong turn and subsequent turnaround- some sort of record for us- and a 14 (fourteen!) mile ride down the bumpiest dirt road in the universe, we arrived in one, overly jostled, piece.

At the ranger station we got the lowdown- the trail to the volcano crater was closed due to activity and they were out of maps, but invited us to take a photo of theirs.  So we didn't see a volcano, but we did see many other interesting things, despite the lack of a map.

Hanging bridges

Waterfalls

Mud Pots

Water Pots

Mineral deposits

Giant trees

Interesting Foliage

Streams

Two hours later, the "easy hike" left us looking as though we had completed some sort of survivalist training and we piled our sweaty selves back into the car.  As we bumped on out of the park, we saw a sign for a $10 spa at a geothermal spring and decided to stop.

The woman running the show at Symbiosis escorted us to the changing room and after we emerged, scantily clad in our tiny blue towels, she led us to the sauna.  It was highly enjoyable for about 7 minutes, then the fact that I had eaten a coconut cookie for breakfast and then gone on the ironman nature walk took effect and I had to remove myself from the area and sit with my head between my legs, turning six shades of pale and trying not to pass out while our nice hostess fetched me a glass of ice water.

After I revived, sauna time was declared over and we moved on to the next area.  Here there was a giant pot of hot volcanic mud and 4 large paintbrushes.  You really haven't lived until you and three of your closest family members have spent a semi nude afternoon painting yourselves (and occasionally each other, for those hard to reach spots) with mud.

Next it was drying time & we were instructed to lie on the provided wooden lounge chairs and bake in the sun.  This was semi-relaxing, it probably would have been more so if we weren't so worried about keeping our legs crossed so we didn't have to charge the nice couple getting a tour of the facility for a free show.

Next it was time for the geothermal pool rinse.  There wasn't much getting around it- the towels were coming off.  After a little eye averting soak to remove our mud, followed by a cool shower, it was time to return to the towels.  Two more quick dips in the mini pools where we elected to just go knee deep, except for aunt dawn who opted to just wear her towel into the pool, and we were ready to go- only slightly scarred.

Well past the point of hunger we continued down the road and stopped at the Canopy Bar at Hacienda G.  We ordered some Tico Tacos and out came an interesting dish-

Chicken rolled in a flour tortilla and fried, covered with fresh cabbage and topped with mayonnaise and ketchup (though I would be hard pressed to identify it as ketchup in any taste test).  Our waiter also brought us a little ceramic jar with hot pickled vegetables to put on top.  He warned us it was hot but this stuff was no joke and my lips burned for about an hour after we finished.  This combination of items sounds pretty gross as I write it, but it actually tasted quite good.

We arrived back at the house in time to catch the sunset which was really spectacular and the resort next door had a live band playing so it made for a nice final trip to the beach.

After a much needed shower (funny how I didn't feel clean after a muddy splash about in the volcanic waters & putting back on my hiking clothes that didn't need to be washed, so much as burned) it was off to try and have dinner at Picante again.  Our persistence was rewarded and we had a very enjoyable meal of plantains with bean dip, fish and shrimp casados, fish tacos, coconut shrimp and pork with spicy blackberry sauce.  The hotel was really nice with connecting infinity pools overlooking the beach & if I ever get to come back I would definitely invest some time in day drinking here.

Back at the house it was a craaazy last night of packing and finishing our books.