In Like Flynn

Suddenly, Malaysia!

So we arrived in Penang at the end of the last post.  Here’s a picture of me next to the aforementioned train.  Somehow I took no pictures of Penang other than a paper packet of delicious Char Kway Teow I wasn’t sure how to actually eat on the go without making a huge mess!  But you get the idea, it’s super hot, really pretty, full of British colonial architecture, and has some of the best food on planet Earth!  There’s actually a lot to do there, but I spent almost the entire time laying around because it was extremely hot and humid.  Pretty much everywhere I’ve found myself since arriving in Hanoi has been hotter and humider than the last place, and this was no exception!  Penang is quite possibly the hottest and sweatiest place I’d ever been in my life, until I got to Kuala Lumpur, and then to Singapore.  Every day I would wake up, get some street food, sit around, get some more street food, sit around some more, get some more street food, and repeat ad nauseam until the evening.  After the sun went down I’d head over to the place with the cheapest beer on the entire island, which was a random shop in an impossible to find back alley a 30 second walk from Love Lane - they set up some tables and chairs and sold beers and everybody gathered and drank in the street.  Here it is important to note that beer in Malaysia is way more expensive than everywhere else in Asia.  Whiskey is still pretty cheap, when you can find it though.  Along with some of the hostel guests it was full of locals and expats and an interesting and very crazy Australian guy who supposedly was the first foreigner to settle in Java, and he had lots of stories!  But he was pretty drunk every time we saw him and I never got a full picture of what really was going on or what he was doing in Penang, so, if you see Dave say hi, and ask him what’s up?

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After sweating all I could from the heat and the spicy curries, I grabbed a bus and headed up to the Cameron Highlands to cool down.  These are famous for their tea (as pictured) and strawberries, as well as being a nice mountain retreat to escape the unbearable heat of summer in peninsular Malaysia.  When we arrived it was beautiful and sunny, but cool, and still incredibly humid so everything is a little bit damp all the time - which, if you’re Irish or British, should make you feel right at home.  I signed up for a half-day tour to the major sites in the area then grabbed some dinner and had an early night. 

In the morning I piled into a land rover with a bunch of other tourists and our guide took us over to the tea plantations to see the fields and a factory tour (where I got a few new facehole pics) then up to a short hike in the Mossy Forest, which is exactly what it sounds like and looks a lot like Dagobah from Star Wars, containing a very broad array of interesting flora and fauna - I’d definitely check it out!  After the hike was over, we had the option of returning back to the hostel in the jeep or walking back, and I elected to walk back with most of the group, as there’s a good selection of walking trails which run between the three towns which make up the Highlands.  About half the group was very athletic and was excited about hiking, and the rest of us mooks were just reluctantly along for the ride - I mean how bad could it be right?  We headed for the nearest trail, (number 2) and promptly got lost at a questionable fork in the road by deciding to take the path which looked the least difficult.  After doubling back we found a sign which pointed straight up into the mountains and stated that trail number 2 was .86km.  It looked steep, but at less than a kilometer, I figured fuck it, I got this.

I did not have it.

The trail turned out to be a series of murderous slogs up ~50m inclines where you’re essentially rock climbing straight up the roots of giant trees, then heading all the way back down into stream valleys and repeating.  I quickly lost count of the hills as I was far too occupied with breathing and putting one foot in front of (or above) the other.  As with literally every other hill/mountain climbing experience I’ve had so far, my IBS decided to kick in and mess with my heartbeat, so I found myself deep in impassably thick jungle trying to take an emergency shit so the numbness in my arms and face would go away and my eyesight would come back.  I told the ladies to head on for a little bit down the path without me but to wait because I’d be a little while.  I completely lost the strength in my legs, and I found myself laying on the ground fumbling for my phone to call for a helicopter to take me to the hospital because I was having a heart attack.  I didn’t have any service, and they’d never be able to get through the thick jungle canopy anyway.  I’ll just lay here and die.

I sipped some water and thought about mortality for a while.

I got up and stumbled up to the group, hoping the British medical resident would have some good advice or a bottle of Gatorade or a candy bar or ~anything at all~ to help me.  No luck!  I’m probably weirding everybody out right now, better play it cool.  Okay lets keep going.

I can only see my feet.  I can only feel pain.  I take step after step, climb root after root.  We reach the end of path number 2.  Why are we still in the middle of the fucking jungle?  We start down path number 3 you guys I am definitely going to die here I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation I can’t feel my fucking face.

We keep walking.  Some guys in a tent offer us sandwiches, we politely decline, not sure if they’re trying to sell us something or just being friendly.  Boy could I use a sandwich though!

We come out to pavement.  It’s been a whopping 3km*.  I’m extraordinarily embarrassed.  I make the executive decision to stick to the road for the rest of the journey, and the other Americans break off with me to stay on the road while the athletes continue on the trail.  We try to hitchhike, and nobody picks us up.  It rains.  We get back to the hostel, and I don’t feel right for another 20 hours.  

*the .86km trail number 2 has an estimated completion time of 1.5hrs, for perspective on its difficulty.  We did it in 45 minutes, even with my total meltdown.

I eat a bunch of Chinese/Indian Malaysian food.  Malaysian food is the best!  I take a bus to Kuala Lumpur.  It’s a nice bus.  

I’m still alive!  And I haven’t given up!  And this post is really poorly written and barely edited!  Sometimes the flow isn’t there! Anyhow:

Cambodian-Thai Border/Bangkok

The border between Thailand and Cambodia is an interesting experience.  If you’re coming from the Thai side there’s all sorts of scams where your transport of choice drops you off at a fake border and they try to get you to pay a bunch of fees for a fake visa and then they drive you to the real border to repeat the process.  The Cambodian side has none of this.  In between the two is a no-man’s land that I imagine is relatively common in third-world-land-border crossings but I have never experienced before.  It’s full of casinos and restaurants and shops and I guess technically none of it is in any country so anything goes?  Anyway you have to walk past all of it to get from one side of the border to the other and at some point everything switches sides because they drive on the left in Thailand.  Actually crossing the border is a pain and involves waiting in several very long lines to get fingerprinted and stamped between 2 and 6 times depending on how the border officer is feeling at that particular moment, but apparently all of this can be avoided if you take the direct bus either way (which costs a bit more and does not require you getting off, and seems like it would really be worth it for the time/hassle saved).

If you’re like most people you probably booked the cheap bus from Siem Reap to Bangkok, which is *not* direct, and involves crossing the border on foot and meeting a different bus on the other side.  Everybody gets a red piece of tape stuck to their chest so the guy in Thailand knows you’re on his bus, and you end up waiting for a while for everybody to clear immigration.  Then you get shuffled down the road a few miles to wait for 30 minutes-6 hours (depending on how many people came through earlier - we spoke to a French woman who took the early bus and had been waiting for ours to show up for 5 hours).  The bus is actually a van and if you’re unlucky and get a weird seat, the inadequate air conditioning will not reach you, and you will be profusely sweaty for many hours.  On the Thai side the van stops every 5 miles or so to get gas, and everybody has to get out of the vehicle every time for some unknown reason. 

Apparently the smart thing to do is to take the bus from Siem Reap to the border, walk across, and catch one of the cartoonishly decorated (and brand new and very modern AND CHEAP!) casino buses that run from Bangkok to the Thai border all day every day.

Anyway you probably, unlike us, didn’t do that because it was a little more planning and you’ve waited around and got some super cheap and delicious boiled corn and made friends with everybody in your van.  No real loss.

When you finally pull into Bangkok, many uncountable hours later, the first thing you may notice is all the Hebrew around.  I guess there are a lot of Israeli tourists, because a lot of the shops around Khao San road have Hebrew signs, and there’s a Chabad one street over.  Who knew?

I only had a few days in Thailand as I was planning to come back later in the year and I needed to get to Malaysia, so I mostly bummed around Bangkok eating street food and checking out the local scene.  If Bangkok is your first stop in Asia, as it is for many, and you’re not American and never spent a busy weekend in New Orleans, you may be totally blown away by Khao San road.  If you have hung out on Bourbon Street on any given night in NOLA, you’ll find KSR to be pretty small and tame by comparison (it’s only a few hundred feet long).  It’s full of gap year high school graduates from Europe and the kind of expensive/mediocre tourist bars and restaurants you’ll find wherever they gather - and every place is pounding music so loudly it’s physically painful and they all clash with each other and to be honest it seems really tryhard like they have to live up to the reputation it gets from movies.  The beer is 1/4 price a block away, and you’ll find a much more pleasant atmosphere pretty much anywhere else in the city.  

Before the boys all headed south to Ko Tao we headed over to EasyKart and raced each other way too fast with 100cc karts on an indoor track.  I would highly recommend this to anyone, and it’s a lot cheaper than doing it back home.  It may be difficult to get a taxi to take you there, but stay persistent, that’s a pretty common theme everywhere.

Note: Take a tuk-tuk once for the photo op, but then just take regular taxis.  They have air conditioning and don’t cost much more and they all have working meters which they will use if you ask them to (or they’ll say no and you can get in the cab that will inevitably be immediately behind it).

I was fortunate to be able to meet up with my friend Bee, who I’d met in Hong Kong, and she took me to a night market with 1950s American classic cars and an early rock cover band complete with the greaser look and an upright bass.  Consequently, we ended up having pad thai and sushi with a couple of beers served from a modified VW Bus while Elvis played in the background.  No way I would have ever predicted finding something like that in Bangkok!

After a few days I started to get antsy because I felt like I was on borrowed time - I had to be in Kuala Lumpur for a wedding in a week which didn’t leave me enough time to explore Thailand OR Malaysia properly, but I didn’t want to rush down there and hang out in the city the whole time, so I wasn’t sure what exactly to do, but eventually decided to head south.  I got an overnight train ticket to the first stop in Malaysia, Butterworth, which lies directly across from the island of Penang and its capital George Town.  As with all train rides, it wouldn’t be acceptable if it wasn’t eventful, so I wasn’t very surprised when we stopped in the middle of nowhere and everybody started getting off.  I followed along and found that we had become stuck on a rail switch which had only half-way engaged.  This provided about 2 hours of entertainment as the railway officials showed up and tried to sort it out, eventually disconnecting the engine, shuffling it forward a bit, engaging the switch, shuffling it back, and reconnecting the train.  My fellow passengers used the opportunity to meet eachother and chat and smoke, so it wasn’t really a big deal.  We had a hassle-free border crossing and arrived into Butterworth several hours later, where I discovered that there was no ATM, and I had no Malaysian currency.  Fortunately some fellow travelers came to the rescue and invited me into their taxi to a hostel, where I was able to secure a bed and pay them back!

Siem Reap

It’s why people actually go to Cambodia right?  There’s a Hyatt and a Raffles and they’re ~$500/night which is totally not justifiable in this country but sure, whatever.

I got a second vest from the hostel for staying at all of their locations.  This one wasn’t as nice as the first one (both the hostel and the article of clothing) and I don’t think I even have it anymore?  We moved to a different place after one night that was further out of town but much nicer (The Siem Reap Hostel - pretty good!)

All the boys went to the Angkor complex at 5AM for sunrise, but I stayed in because I was having stomach problems.  This worked out pretty well, because I found out that Troy had just gotten into town, and we decided to go together the next day.  We paid way too much for the tuk-tuk even relative to other ones in the same city, but had no choice because Troy arranged it in advance (never let someone else do the negotiating).  Then our driver dipped out and left us with somebody else.  Apparently that’s normal.  We had the slowest tuk-tuk in all of Cambodia, and everyone passed us all day.  Our driver complained about being hungry so we allowed him to take us to a spot for him to get lunch, and he ended up dropping us off at a restaurant that wanted six times the standard tourist prices for everything, so we walked out and found him *not eating*, but whatever, gotta make a living I guess. 

Angkor itself is really beautiful and cool and everyone should go to it.  Bring at least a gallon of water per person though because it’s insanely hot and you will spend the entire day climbing giant stairs and will definitely get heat stroke tired.  The people watching is almost as good, especially when you get the ersatz Korean mountaineers dressed like they’re summiting Everest.  There are also monkeys.  Troy had a special moment lined up for himself where he’d listen to Enya’s Sail Away while meditating at Angkor Wat, but his phone died and I didn’t have a data connection, so I sang it for him.  We bonded.  Monks drove around on tractors.  I drank some sugar cane juice and tried not to fall down.

I could probably write more about Siem Reap and Angkor, but it’s been covered exhaustively by other people and I mainly just wanted to post the pictures so I could use them on dating sites or something.

Siem Reap Comfort Rating: Pretty Comfortable

Angkor Comfort Rating: Not Comfortable

Shuffling slightly sideways...

After a fun and idyllic summer camp experience in Kampot, we headed over to Sihanoukville, a gross euro-junkie paradise where heroin flows like water and the only time scammers leave you alone is when other scammers come to take their place pretty beach town on the southern coast.  We spent a few days being harassed by slave-children selling garbage sunbathing in expensive shacks on the beach before heading over to Koh Rong, an up and coming island destination.  

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Koh Rong is very pretty and definitely not a collection of ad-hoc lean-tos blasting last years club tracks 24/7 and dumping raw sewage down the beach while washed up middle-aged eastern europeans ‘party’.  Make sure to bring lots of suncream and aloe for when the suncream fails and 100% deet for the mosquitos and sandflies which will destroy you, and probably also a tent because your horrifying collapsing wooden pirate shack with no functional bathroom and only 40% of the stairs in place so good luck getting to your sandy oven luxurious apartments will let the rain in.  The main strip resembles a quaint 17th century caribbean pirate town as depicted in bad movies and by the time you realize you’ve made a horrible mistake the boat has already left.  There are no good options for accommodation as of mid-2015 if your standards include things like functional rooves and toilets and prices get very expensive very quickly and are generally ~not~ worth paying.  The beach itself is actually quite pretty once you get a few hundred meters away from the main strip, but the sandflies get worse the further away you go.  If you decide to hike 45 minutes through the jungle you can reach the other side of the island, where there’s an untouched beach, or you can pay $5 for a boat to take you around.  

We opted to do a half-day boat tour which included snorkeling and fishing and a bbq and watching the sunset at previously mentioned untouched beach.  The boats are typical southeast asian fishing longboats (see here) with a small covered area.  The trip started out nicely and we caught a variety of small fish over the course of several hours out at sea, although I only reeled one personally :(.

Later we moved to the beach and hung out for a while as the sun went down with other tourists on similar tours while the crew barbecued the fish on an improvised grill in a small bucket.  There was a massive thunderstorm in the distance, clearly heading our way and bringing a giant wall of rain.  When lightning started striking the water a few miles away and the sun hadn’t fully set, we decided to head back to the boat and get out of there.

The storm caught up to us a few minutes after full darkness as we ate our fish, so we grabbed our plates and piled into the small covered area, trying to avoid accidentally burning something on the various fire-spitting parts of the uncovered automotive engine slowly bringing us home.  As we sat in the darkness and the rain I looked out in the distance and saw a little orange glow, which on further inspection appeared to be coming from the bow of the boat.  After staring at it for a while it resolved into a small fire, which seemed somewhat out of place and the significance of which is fairly slow to register in my reptile brain.  But finally it hits and I start shouting and pointing FIRE! but the crew doesn’t really speak English and doesn’t seem to get it, so Scott and I scramble forward and start dumping all of our water bottles into the bow compartment, which is now a full-on blaze.  I grab the bucket of fish and dump it on the deck, then use it to throw sea-water onto the flames.  We’re in a tiny shitty boat in the pitch-black sea in the middle of a raging thunderstorm somewhere off the coast of Cambodia and the boat is on fire everyone is shouting and I’m throwing fucking fish water at it and we are going to die ~probably~ and like this is what your parents warn you of you guys!  

At some point the crew realizes what’s happening and between us we get it under control and the whole time the captain remains unperturbed.  Maybe this happens a lot?  Now that the emergency is over he asks if we want to swim in the water with the phosphorescent plankton.  Scott jumps in, and immediately starts glowing.  The thunderstorm moves beyond us and is pretty off in the distance.  The imaginary soundtrack shuffles onto something pensive, and everything is beautiful again.  We bring it in and head back for some beers.

They cost a whole $0.75 here.  We stay for a few more days.

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Meanwhile our boys Troy and Kaeli had skipped Koh Rong and gone to Koh Rong Samloem instead, which is much newer to tourism (like one year instead of four years) and has no power and isn’t polluted and they just chilled and played guitar so maybe check that out!

A lot of the stuff written about Koh Rong mentions live bands playing all the time, but I guess that was before they had power full time (they had half-time power and no internet until this year) and could blast shitty club tracks all the time.  Apparently a few years ago it was a cool place, but I’d probably skip it now unless you want to pop molly and die because there’s no medical facilities. 

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Next we took the bus to Battambang, Cambodia’s second largest city.  You end up on a sleeper bus, which everyone describes (having used them in Vietnam) as kind of like the first class lie-flat seats on airplanes.  We board the bus and it looks a lot more like the bunks on a world war II era submarine.  There’s a series of racks and no windows and each rack has a line of berths which would be good for maybe one person but, since we’re in Cambodia, are actually for two (plus bags).  I spoon with Simon and his backpack for the next 8 hours as the suspensionless hell chariot slams its way across the country and some businessman shouts into his iPad mini.  Eventually we are spilled out in the middle of Phnom Penh and shuffled to another, similarly constructed death trap, for the next 8 hours, and then left in the middle of nowhere outside the city subject to the whims of yet another tuk-tuk krew.  Oddly the tuk-tuks seemed to be getting smaller from city to city, and we started to suffer from stacking issues, but that’s something for later.

Battambang itself is a pretty ok city.  It’s not very touristy yet and has a few hostels but not a huge amount to do.  We spent a few days relaxing and wandering around and eating at hybrid charity/NGO restaurants (it seems that a lot of the NGOs in Cambodia are based here) and buying comical amounts of bulk tobacco for those of us who smoked.  It was really hot when it wasn’t raining and at some point I almost passed out but then I had a milkshake and somebody fixed my watch.  

The main attractions are a series of temples in the mountains, an enormous bat cave, and the bamboo railway.  The bamboo railway is the regular Cambodian National railway repurposed by civilians with lawnmower engines powering bamboo platforms running on tank wheels (since the rails have become so dilapidated that real trains can’t run on them anymore) which has become a tourist attraction.  For $5 you ride on it for a while with as many people as you feel like piling onto it, stop for a drink, and then ride back.  As there’s only one track for two-way use, when your car meets one going the other direction, everybody gets off and throws one of the cars off the tracks to get out of the way, reassembling the whole thing and rolling on once the path is clear.  As has been the theme for most of my travels, we ended up chased by a thunderstorm, and I wondered at the intelligence of spending a few hours on miles of ungrounded conductive metal tracks as lightning strikes all around.  None of the locals seemed concerned and we didn’t die anyway.  After the railway we moved on to the bat caves, where it began to rain in earnest, and we stood with a bunch of excited French people and got soaked as uncountable masses of black specks spilled from a giant gaping maw in the mountains, stretching out to infinity in writing lines.  Bats are pretty cool.  I’m down with bats.  And Battambang.

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~*CAMBODIA*~ tho right!

Ok actually I really don’t like Cambodia it’s probably the worst place in Southeast Asia if not Asia and you’d be better off spending your money elsewhere!

That said, we take the bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh which is 8 hours or something, and they collect everybody’s passports which is kind of sketchy, plus 35 U.S. Dollars, which is also kind of sketchy, since the visa costs $30, but whatever it’s a convenience fee or something.  As it turns out the border crossing processes is a joke and you all wait in a huge mob while the bus conductor gives in everyone’s passports, and then they individually hold up people’s passports once they are stamped and you collect it, and now you’re out of Vietnam.  But you’re not in Cambodia either you’re just in no man’s land, which I’ll later learn is pretty typical for all the land borders in Asia.  You give your passport back to the conductor and get on the bus, and it drives another 100 meters down the road, where the processes is even funnier because you get off the bus and walk through AN EMPTY BUILDING (which is nominally immigration/customs) and then get back on the bus and it drives away.  At this point you are now in Cambodia, without your passport, eating lunch at a random restaurant, except for the one guy who got left in the bathroom whose girlfriend is freaking out.  Sure why not.  After you’re done eating you get back on the bus and wait for the conductor to arrive on a motorcycle [with bathroom guy on back, phew tho for him right?] and hand out everyone’s passports, now with a shiny new Cambodian visa good for a single entry and 30 day stay.  The bus drives to Phnom Penh, this time with everybody, usually.

Phnom Penh is kind of a giant garbage dump with buildings interspersed between the garbage, and when we are there it’s completely empty, not a single person or car on the street, because it’s Cambodian New Year and everybody’s on vacation. As soon as the bus stops though there’s a large group of tuk-tuk drivers there to take you to your destination for the reasonable price of Too Much Money®, which will continue to be a common theme.  They have all gotten together in advance and determined how much to charge, so you will not get a better deal by going elsewhere.

You check into the hostel which is really nice and owned by foreigners, like everything in the entire country because of how fairly recently the entirety of its infrastructure and culture was devastated by the Khmer Rouge.  99% of development, including roads, is built (and often owned and staffed) by foreign interests.  You eat mediocre western food at the overpriced restaurant and you party at the overpriced bar upstairs with other westerners who are mostly British and [super irritating] and then you go to sleep.

In the morning you pay [a lot of money] to take a tuk-tuk to the Killing Fields, which is roughly equivalent to Auschwitz and is deeply moving and enormously depressing.  Immediately afterwards your tuk-tuk driver asks if you want to go to the shooting range, because everybody loves playing with guns right after spending a few hours learning about genocide - we declined, and spent the rest of the day wandering around the city trying to get heat stroke for some reason.

The next morning, somberness sufficiently worn off, I enquire at the hostel about going to shoot an RPG, because I’m a huge hypocrite^ but mainly because I’m a fan of things that explode and they have signs advertising it everywhere.  They assure me that it can be done and will cost $250, minus a 10% discount by booking through them.  My tuk-tuk driver takes me way out to a military base, where they have an assortment of incredibly poorly maintained weaponry on display and a nice gentleman gives me the rundown which is basically that actually it’s going to cost $300 and I have to shoot at least two rounds ($600) and I should definitely shoot the AK47 (god damnit we’ve been over this already!) because it’s sweet® - so we do a bit of negotiating and I agree to shoot one round as originally intended for the original price, plus a bunch of other crap I don’t really care about to get them to the extortionate price they’ve clearly decided on in advance and which I will not state but was less than it could have been I guess.

We hop in a Mitsubishi Pajero with some random dudes and then pick up a random 12 year old off the side of the road and I have no idea what the heck is going on but we drive for a good hour out into the middle of nowhere, where I figure I’m probably going to get robbed and left for dead.  

I’d also like to say that when I asked what they had for me to shoot at they very clearly and immediately said that I could get a cow.  I don’t want to shoot a cow, but you hear about it online all the time and it’s definitely real, despite the hostels brochures repeatedly claiming that it’s a myth.  It’s not a myth, and it can be yours for $500, if you’re an asshole.  I opted to go for a diesel barrel, because unlike cows, barrels of diesel fuel are not living creatures, and explode when shot with a rocket launcher.  I jokingly asked how much it would be to shoot a tank, and without batting an eye or hesitating they quoted $2000.  So there you go I guess.

Anyway after a while we pull into the middle of the desert and are met by a Cambodian Army Lt. Colonel on a scooter with an RPG in his lap, because you know, whatever.  I put on my white suit, because I’m an asshole (but not like, a cow killing asshole), and they chuckle and warn me that firing a rocket launcher wearing a white suit will definitely ruin the suit. 

They tell me to aim high, I ask how high, they say ‘high,’ so I aim high.  The rocket goes straight exactly where I aimed it, which was ‘high’ and I miss the barrel.  Whatever, I shoot it with a machine gun and it catches on fire, and then I throw a grenade.  Boom.  I paid money for this.  I’m an idiot.

We drive back and I finally learn the purpose of the random 12 year old.  His purpose is to puke all over the goddamn car because Cambodians pretty much universally get carsick* and just cover everything in it and I guess that had to happen because if it didn’t then I wouldn’t be driving in a car full of child puke for an hour and my life would be that much better and that’s not allowed.  We stopped and they cleaned up the puke mostly.

I get back to Phnom Penh and I contemplate life before having like 10 or 12 beers because I get a free vest** if I have 20, and they wouldn’t give me a stamp for drinking ginger ale even though the ginger ales cost more than the beers (twice as much) which is pretty backwards if you ask me and really encourages alcohol abuse.

*Any time you take a bus in Cambodia they’ll hand out plastic bags to all the Cambodians but not the foreigners, and you think, hey, why don’t I get a bag?  But then 20 minutes later everybody is puking and you’re not and you go okay I guess this is why I didn’t get a bag.  But then really they should give you a bag because I mean, how many people can be chill sitting on a bus with 30 people puking around them and not get sick?  Me I guess.

**British people call [wife beaters/tank tops/sleeveless shirts] vests apparently and I like that term because really Americans don’t have a good succinct way to describe [] do we?

In Cambodia if you’re paying more than ~50 cents for a beer you’re being ripped off, HTH.  This is one reason why so many British and Australian people like Cambodia.  Because they’re alcoholics.

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Next, we go to Kampot, which is actually a pretty cool place!  And cool things happened!  We go to get on the bus from Phnom Penh, which is one of many busses going to lots of places, and who is on the bus but Kaeli, our friend from Hanoi who had to go back to Singapore and ~everybody freaks out because how does that even happen!~

So we go to Kampot, everyone’s excited because friends! and also leaving Phnom Penh! and we get into town and there’s a big river and it’s pretty laid back and I guess that’s nice and also 420 legalize crystal weed*

*we’ll get there

We check into the hostel, which is the same hostel we stayed in Phnom Penh because we really want these free vests.  We drink a bunch and go to Happy Pizza (or was it Ecstatic Pizza? You lose track) and I’m absolutely terrified to order anything on the menu because, is it ALL happy?  The pizzas don’t really specify, and I’m allergic to weed and I don’t really want to have a bad time.  So people order their pizzas (extra happy, with some happy on the side to go [which actually doesn’t cost any extra because why not I guess and you just get a little dish of powdered happy go have fun]) and we eat and everything is pretty chill and I don’t go into anaphylaxis or anything so it’s good and I mean these pizzas cost like $3 which is an absolute steal for once (I didn’t eat pizza I had curry and it was ok but not amazing).  Later we work on getting our free vests.

In the morning we rent some busted looking scooters - mine didn’t even have a license plate but whatever nobody even pretends to care here - and drive up into the mountains to this weird abandoned casino complex.  There’s a giant buddha and some fog and it’s pretty cool and picturesque and a monastery blasting Cambodian rock music which was actually good but didn’t fit the whole everything-here-is-2000-years-old vibe of the architecture and the fog and the mountain top.  Later we went to a waterfall but since it’s the summer there was no water and we did a bunch of scrambling, and then played an asian version of hacky sack possibly called Jianzi with the staff of a giant empty catering facility before heading back to the city (we didn’t want to drive at night).

In the morning we played mini golf for free at a hostel owned by a nice American gentleman (called The Magic Sponge for some reason) and then headed over to the market, which is horrifying and I don’t recommend.  Specifically, it’s very hot in Cambodia, as we all know, and the market in indescribable warren of covered stalls linked together with narrow alleys between them and a gutter and you can buy literally anything there if you can find it, but good luck.  There’s a lot of meat vendors and the meat is sitting out all day unrefrigerated and reeks and at some point we saw a kid standing on a stool completely naked just pissing all over the place right next to one of the meat stalls and the smell of rotting meat, durian, vegetable matter, garbage, and urine mixes into something powerful and really it’s like something out of Blade Runner but worse I would give it a pass [but go anyway seriously].  If you are a tryhard and willing to spend some time looking you can probably find someone willing to sell you a kilo of weed for less than $20 and you can buy precut pipe tobacco for $3-6/kg along with gold and all sorts of other random stuff for super cheap.  Good luck.  The power is yours.

Here I will quickly note the importance of Durian in Cambodia.  I don’t really know what the importance of durian in Cambodia is, but it must be pretty significant, because everybody eats it all the time and they have statues of it and it’s not even that cheap.  It reeks really really bad.  It tastes pretty good.  A lot of people hate it, but I’m a fan, and once you get used to the smell because there’s 5-6 foot high piles of them on every corner, it’s not even that bad.  Every roundabout in the entire country has some kind of statue on it.  We saw a giant durian, and we took a picture.  It’s not too far from The Magic Sponge.

If you’re British and you want a Sunday Roast, you can get it on Sundays, at any of the pubs.  If you don’t know what that is, google it and go find a place nearby that does it, because it’s great.  But maybe don’t do it in Cambodia.  Your call.

Moving right along - after the market experience I got my free vest, because I drank 20 beers.  Take that, cops et al!

The next day we went to Arcadia, which in Cambodia is not a brewery but a hostel on the river.  The tuk-tuk drove us about half an hour out of town and we thought that we were going to get dropped off in the middle of nowhere for having the gall to try (and fail*) to negotiate a lower price, but eventually we rolled up to a quaint little set of bungalows and a super rickety wooden complex built out over the river.  It’s definitely not up to code, but it’s cool, and they have a blob that we successfully used to launch Adam about 20 feet in the air at the expense of me and Simon linking arms, jumping, and concussing eachother on impact.  Pretty rad, there’s a video somewhere.

*because of the tuk-tuk mafia *shakes fist*

Alright I guess I’m due for a catchup.  Most of the next few posts will be quickish summaries because at this point the detail has somewhat faded and I’ve lost a bit of the narrative, which is a shame.  I’ll try harder in the future!

Here’s the rest of Vietnam:

Dalat is a pretty mountain town, famous for its cooler weather and canyoning.  We found some small amusement park and went on an alpine slide, but there were a bunch of Chinese people stopping every 10 feet to take pictures so it wasn’t very fun :(.  We went shopping in an underground mall built into a hill that was under construction and appeared abandoned, but if you push through it far enough you’ll find a nice supermarket and a bunch of shops and restaurants, all full of people.  From all outward appearances there’s nothing there, it’s just a hole in the ground, so, I guess you never know.

A few days in we went canyoning - it cost $25 and we had no idea what to expect.  After driving a little bit out of the city in a van, you hike down into a canyon (predictably) and they give you a quick demonstration on abseiling, for those who didn’t already know how, before you find yourself going straight down a cliff face.  Fortunately they’re also belaying you, so if you screw up you probably won’t die.  Then you slide on your back down a waterfall and float down the river a bit, before everyone abseils down a 25 meter water fall, where you run out of rope and fall the last 6 meters.  You’re supposed to jump so you clear the wall, but a few people either 1) panicked and let go early, plummeting into the river, or 2) weren’t paying attention and suddenly ran out of rope.  Personally I got knocked down by the waterfall as the current is pretty strong, but i was able to get back into position and then jump, which was pretty fun - and I have a bunch more pictures from this up on my flickr account here.  Then we had an 11 meter cliff jump, which was absolutely terrifying and required a running start to clear a bunch of trees and rocks.  We weren’t sure how dangerous this was, but our guide wouldn’t allow anyone to do it unless they did a lower jump first and appeared confident.  A few people we spoke to later in the week had dislocated joints from landing wrong, and someone died the week later, apparently?  Anyway we were fine but it really smashes your balls up if you land at a bad angle and I almost puked from the pain, so I chose not to do it twice and your mileage may vary.  After this you stop for a nice banh mi picnic lunch, then we abseiled down ‘The Washing Machine’ where you basically just slide really fast down a rope like Navy SEALS from a helicopter, except that you’re in the middle of a waterfall and it spins/throws you around as the title suggests, before firing you out a narrow chute between a bunch of rocks (but you’re wearing a helmet and a padded lifejacket so it doesn’t hurt even though it sounds like it would).  It was pretty cool.  Finally everyone has to hike back up out of the canyon, which was pretty much straight up for a few hundred meters and I legitimately thought I was going to have a heart attack half way up because I’m in absolutely pitiful shape.  Drink a lot of water.

Other stuff: The hotel had a very cute pug puppy wearing a police uniform, and I was able to back up my phone which miraculously started working again after a few days in a bag of rice.  Hooray!  Go to Dalat, it’s really nice and has a pretty lake!

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After a week(?) we decided we should probably get on the road and head down to Mui Ne, a well known beach town that is apparently super Russian (we didn’t know this in advance) like Nha Trang.  We made the drive from Dalat with absolutely no incidents to the great surprise and shock of all involved, and arrived at the hostel and checked into a very nice bungalow on the beach*.

*The beach washed away before we arrived, so there were stairs that went straight into the water, which was knee deep and hot like a bathtub and full of trash.  The stairs were extremely slippery - so slippery that it was not physically possible for a human being to use them without falling really hard.  After Scott ate it I figured I’d be careful and I ended up *carefully* falling down the stairs and breaking my finger.  We recommend sliding down on your butt, so gravity can’t get you.

Mui Ne itself is pretty much one long street that goes for ~15 miles, with various groupings of tourist stuff along parts of it.  It’s famous for the beach and for the red/white dunes, which you need to drive to.  We spent a day hanging out on the beach (which actually did exist if you went a few hundred feet down the road, because it moves around between seasons) and watched the kite surfers.  Apparently in the peak season there’s 300 people out there at a time, but we only saw a few.  

The next morning we drove to the dunes.  It’s worth noting that about half way we were stopped by police, who were pulling over all tourists, and were in the middle of issuing some people a fine when they stopped us, and that they apparently hang out there every day.  We showed them our foreign driver licenses (some with motorcycle endorsements, some not) and our motorcycle ownership papers, and they let us go without any issues.  We think they saw that the bikes were from Hanoi, which is very far away, and just assumed that we live there?  I don’t know, but anyway be careful if you’re planning to rent bikes there, and wear a helmet!  Once you get to the dunes themselves there’s a small fee to park and a ton of people trying to scam you and get you to ride broke down quad bikes (google this if you care to know more - there’s plenty of bad reports) for offensively high prices.  We opted to hike the dunes and had a great time running and sliding around, and laughing at the people way out in the middle of nothing on stuck/stalled quads.  They’re a good photo op though if that matters to you.  Further note: as of April 2015 the road was under construction and there’s a lot of very loose dirt and gravel and large construction vehicles all over the place - pretty dangerous to ride on a scooter/bike, so if you’re not confident then take the jeep tour, which only costs $5 anyway.

Apparently Mui Ne is one of the major producers of the famously pungent Vietnamese fish sauce, which is used in every dish ever.  In small amounts on your food it tastes really nice.  In the area where they produce it, which you will pass on any drive through the town, the smell is overwhelmingly nauseating.  The fishing boats are all hand painted and very pretty though!

At some point during this bit it was my birthday (April 4) and we decided to have a big night out.  We ended up eating way too much Indian food and then nobody had much room to drink, so I ended up wearing the white suit I got in Hoi An for about an hour as we had two drinks, and then passed out.  Somewhere Scott/Gav/Simon got ahold of some randomly colored spraypaint from a bunch of Dutch guys and they made Adam’s bike look like a clowncycle.  He was not pleased.  It was pretty funny.

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After Mui Ne we drove on down the coast to Vung Tau, the beach resort getaway for the Saigon crowd and about 100 miles south of the city.  Scott’s luggage rack snapped off and dropped his bag in the middle of the road, so I ended up driving for a good while with both his and my bags as we could not find anyone to weld it back together until we got into town, but other than that we had no major incidents.  

Vung Tau is home to SE Asia’s largest Jesus statue, on top of a hill like the one in Rio, and you can climb up and stand on his shoulders for a very nice view of the city.  We thought about playing golf at one of the resorts, but it was expensive and had bad reviews online, so we opted to hang out on the beach and drive around the coastline, which was beautiful.  We met some unpleasant older expats, the stereotypical kind that everyone knows exists but doesn’t really want to think about.  Oh well.  It’s a cool little town to visit for a day or two, but since it’s so close to Saigon a nice hotel runs in the hundreds of dollars/night, and the hostels are pretty meh.  

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On to: Saigon!

We arrived, once again miraculously without any major issues other than getting lost a bit and trying to figure out the car ferry with our joke bikes, just in time for rush hour and absolute traffic madness.  Every intersection was an imposing literal wall of motorcycles and making a left turn means racing not to get swallowed up by the oncoming mass.  Fortunately we learned to drive in the even more chaotic streets of Hanoi, so we got used to it quickly*.

*The big difference here is that Saigon has a lot more traffic, but there’s also traffic lights and flow control and people generally on the right side of the road.  The roads are 100% congested but it’s easy to slip into and out of the flow.  Hanoi is a mess of narrow streets with no stop signs or lights and everybody driving all over the place, so it’s more unpredictable and difficult to navigate safely.

Our main goal here was to sell our bikes - we made flyers and put them up all over the touristy part of the city, along with the hundreds of others already up.  There were so many nearly identical bikes for sale all over the place it seemed unlikely we’d ever get rid of them, but within a few days they were all picked up - I sold mine to one of the guys working at the hostel, and then proceeded to follow his journey north to Hanoi on Facebook over the next few weeks.  It’s cool to see your bike retracing the route and giving someone else enjoyment!

I also met up with Troy a bunch, as he was still in Saigon learning Vietnamese after having left us weeks ago, and we spent a few nights hanging out with Saigon locals who were studying English and were happy to show us the good food and drink spots in the city.  Note that the liquor buckets they serve at those little roadside shops for $4 will absolutely make you black out, so be careful!  At some point we all went to see Furious 7, a fitting conclusion to one of the greatest cinematic series ever filmed.  Miss you Paul.

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Before we left, we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels, one of the many tunnel systems constructed by the Vietnamese during the war.  The parts of it open to tourists were enlarged about 3x, so you could crawl/crouchwalk through them for 100 meters if you felt so inclined (we did).  They showed us one of the original tunnel entrances and I lowered myself into it successfully with some difficulty, but did not attempt to actually go into the tunnel, as it required sliding along on my belly and was potentially not even large enough for that.  I’m a fan of caving and I’m not claustrophobic, but this was seriously like trying to fit yourself through a mail slot, and I’m amazed that people lived down there for years.  

There was also a shooting range where you could fire an AK47, and that got a lot of the tourists interested, but they wanted something like $3/bullet, and I have one at home, so we skipped it and got ice cream instead.  

This post is entitled “We’re going to jail!” and is chiefly about why motorcycles are a dangerous form of personal transportation.

Cast of Characters:

Simon, Scott, Gavin, Johnny - English

Adam - Canadian

Me - Everything, basically, and therefore “American”

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Hoi An-Dalat, Day 1:

The weather for the next few days in Hoi An was looking grim, but we decided that we couldn’t wait any longer and would head out very early in the morning in order to get a few hours of travel in clear skies.  We were heading for Dalat, and expected to make the ~300km drive in two days.  We made it about an hour away before Adam’s (the Canadian) bike broke down.  I got out the tow rope and pulled it to the nearest village.  They threw on a new carb and we grabbed lunch, and it began to rain very hard.  We waited for a lull in the rain and continued down the road - there were several choices, the classic Ho Chi Minh Highway, which is long and out of the way but well paved, Highway 1, which is absolute shit and packed with trucks, and a third mysterious road that Google told us was quicker and shorter.  We picked option number three, which was labeled as 676 on Google, but every road sign said QL40, and does not appear on any maps I’ve since seen either way.  After a while the rain picked up and Simon’s (English) bike decided that it would not drive in the rain.  At all.  We stopped for a few hours at a random cafe and sat waiting for it to stop.  It didn’t.  

When things slowed down sufficiently enough to attempt to carry on, we did, and it was all around terrible.  We decided to put in at the nearest town and hope for better tomorrow.  The only hotel we could find was a beatup looking motel with holes in the walls for windows and those sliding-piece-of-metal bathroom locks for the doors, curiously located on both the inside and outside.  After a cursory inspection of my room I inquired whether the other rooms also came furnished with several wasps nests.  When they replied in the negative, I took the initiative and moved my things into the next room over.  As the sun set several million four-winged flies came out and valiantly hurled themselves to death against any available light fixture.  Nobody slept well, and it rained so hard on the tin roof that I was seriously concerned that the building would collapse.

Day Two:

In the morning we were unable to leave the room, as somebody had locked the previously mentioned bolts on the outside of the door.  We shouted for a while until somebody let us out.  A Vietnamese guy with the room in between us all was also trapped, and with his only English phrase called for help, shouting “What’s your name!” until we came over and opened the door.  The entire walkway was covered in dead flies.  The rain had stopped.

We got the hell out of there.

Several hours down the road we were well in the middle of nowhere amongst some of the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever seen.  We also had no idea where we were, and realized after the road markers disappeared that we’d probably made a wrong turn.  We went back and asked a mechanic which way to Dalat, and he pointed down a harrowing looking creek crossing which was mostly mud.  We made it across that, then turned left to continue up the mountain.  The road disappeared entirely, and became a massive wash of deep mud.  My bike got stuck and tipped over, I jumped off, picked it up, pushed it back to the center, and kept going.  We struggled uphill through the mud aways, everybody stalling their bikes, bumping into eachother, getting stuck, sliding and tipping over (the brakes don’t work at all when you’re driving in mud) and generally limping along, until we reached the top, where it began pissing rain.  At some point I was standing at the side of the road with my bike on top of my foot, and I couldn’t bend over to pick it up because of the odd angle in which I was trapped, and nobody else could really help because they were unable to stop.  We made progress.  On the downhill the rain got worse, we turned off the engines and shuffled and slipped around in neutral, heading down.  I don’t think any of us have ever been more miserable, and as we had no idea how far it went, we thought we’d probably end up sleeping in the mud for the night.

After several hours of this, we came around a corner and spotted road, and everyone shouted incoherent joy for about a minute solid.  After consulting a local, we had about 70km of actual paved road to Kontum, our intended half-way point for the whole journey, and we were ecstatic.  Our only casualties were four flip flops, a pair of shoes, three cellphones, a kindle, several wing mirrors, a chain guard, and a headlight to various combinations of water and kinetic damage.

The road turned back up hill, and Johnny’s (English) bike decided it didn’t like the rarefied air of what we later found to be Vietnam’s highest road, and it stalled repeatedly.  Johnny’s bike is a piece of shit by the way.  The first time it stalled was directly in front of me, and I lost one of my turn signals to his rear tire.  The road was under construction but still passable, and that turned out to be the case on and off for the rest of the drive.  It was beautiful all around, and we stopped a few times to take pictures.  Also a few times because Johnny’s bike is a piece of shit.  On a particularly fast downhill right after a mountain top village, his chain snapped altogether.  I got out the tow rope and pulled him back to the top of the mountain, where the mechanic was not in, but they gave me his tools because with some combination of the longest riding experience, the possession of the tow rope/useful tools, and my good looks and derring-do I somehow became group dad and even the Vietnamese could tell.  

I was unable to fix the chain though because it was missing a link.  I asked if they had one, and in the time they were looking for it, the mechanic came back.  He fixed the bike and adjusted both our brakes and wouldn’t accept any payment.  Classic Vietnam!  Really the best people!  We continued on our way and made it to Kontum after a series of insane high speed mountain-ridge roads with drops on either side.  At some point Simon struck and killed a snake and I may have hit a chicken but didn’t have time to check.  There’s a lot of things jumping straight at your bike in Vietnam [important foreshadowing] - most often you get cows wandering around, but fairly predictably so you can go around them (and they only occasionally charge), and dogs who run out into the street and stare you down, daring you to choose which way to go around them, and then darting in that direction JUST barely avoiding getting struck.  Dogs are assholes.

Kontum was cool and we stayed in a regular place that was quite nice, and at some point we decided to go to a nearby shop for snacks, where we somehow ended up in the owner’s minivan being dropped off miles away at a Vietnamese supermarket.  The supermarket was underwhelming but we met a cool 12 year old who spoke *really* good English and called a taxi for us.  Neat!

Day 3:

After Kontum we were ready to get a good day of driving in and get to Dalat.  Johnny’s bike brown down every 15 minutes or so and we took it to a series of mechanics and wasted a lot of time.  He was getting mad and wanted to just sell it to the next guy who would buy it and take the bus from then on.  We convinced him to stay, but it was continuously a problem.  After limping along for a while, he got it fixed enough (with some glue this time) that we could move quickly again, if the roads would allow it.  Half the time the roads were beautiful brand new and 4-8 lanes wide, and half the time it was straight unpacked gravel several inches deep, which is absolute hell for a motorbike as it’s incredibly unstable, so you can’t go much more than walking speed with your feet down on either side in case it suddenly tips.  Some people tipped, but not me!

After a while we’d made decent, but not good enough progress.  We all felt like shit but had no choice but to carry on, since we were in the middle of nothing.  We’re cruising along at maybe 30-40kmh, and suddenly in front of me Scott (English) swerves hard and goes flying over the handlebars like Superman.  His bag, shoes, and various other shit is all over the road and there’s trucks trying really hard to run it over, so we stop quickly and go grab it.  

And then there’s the kid laying next to the bike.

Oh fuck.

This is exactly the shit that everybody warns you about.

Is he alright?

Are we going to jail?

We run over and check to see what’s going on.  Scott’s a bit bloody in the hands and the elbow, and the bike is bent oddly and definitely not driveable.  The kid is sitting up and holding his leg, crying.  He’s sitting up, and conscious, which means he’s probably not *that* badly hurt.  A large crowd of 50-60 people appears out of nowhere and surrounds the whole scene.  We move the kid to the side of the road and some women come over with bandages and start working on Scott.  An old man shouts angrily for a while then picks the kid up and whisks him off, presumably to a hospital.  We’re left surrounded by a large crowd, composed roughly equally of angry threatening looking old men with large wrenches and other tools, and young kids.  Mostly everyone is standing around confused and chatting.  Someone has taken the keys to Scott’s bike to prevent him from leaving (not that you could anyway).  Several people attempt to communicate through Google translate, which doesn’t work very well, but we get the message that we are not to leave and that the police are on the way.  

After about an hour the police show up and begin to take statements.  They refuse to speak with Scott or any of us, and only talk to the old Vietnamese men, none of whom actually witnessed the accident.  They all give sworn witness statements.  Eventually a woman turns up who speaks English, she’s the English teacher at the local school.  She believes our story, and wants to help (the truth was, Scott was driving down the road and the kid was maybe 2 meters away, facing the other direction.  He turned around and ran into the road without looking, and directly in front of the bike, which was far to close to avoid a collision).  The police take Scott’s bike and lay it down where one of the old men indicated it had gone down, then started measuring things and taking pictures, supposedly for some sort of forensics, I don’t know.

An impound truck comes and the old men gleefully help the police load Scott’s bike into it.  We hear through the translator that we should follow the police to the station to make statements, etc.  Scott and Simon throw their bags in the back of the police truck (since you can’t drive with 2 people AND both their luggage) and it promptly drives off at full speed, leaving us behind.  We have no idea where the police station is, and it’s dark now, but someone indicated it was ‘a few km down the road,’ so we crept along the gravel dead slow trying to find it until eventually a police motorbike drove up and we followed him there.

The police captain turned out to be a 26 year old woman who was very nice, and said that since it was late, we should get dinner and a hotel, and they’d take care of everything in the morning.  She went out for dinner with us and the English teacher, and then helped us get a hotel nearby.  We went to sleep guardedly optimistic.

Day 4:

In the morning, the English teacher took us out for breakfast, and then to her house for tea.  We then met up with the police captain and the kid’s family for coffee, where we learned that he was okay, with no major injuries *phew*.  One of the Vietnamese joked that Scott could marry the police captain and everything would be sorted.  Everyone was very pleasant and the police interviewed Scott briefly, before we were presented with the taxi and hospital receipts, which we paid, and that was that.  The English teacher noted that if they wanted to, they could have taken us to court and wrung us out, but they knew that the collision wasn’t our fault and that it wouldn’t be fair.  We got the bike back, had a mechanic beat it back into the correct shape for $5, and were on our way.  It’s too late to make it all the way to Dalat, but we’ll make it pretty close.  We stop for KFC in the large city which was our planned destination,and decide that we can make it another 50km to the next town.  There’s a beautiful stretch of long straight road straddled by rice paddies in between mountains.  We stop for pictures as the sun gets low in the sky, then make it to Lien Son before dark.  All in all, a solid day.

Day 5:

We’re still on the mix between deep gravel and beautiful road.  On one of the gravel bits, we lose Gavin (English).  Where did he go?  After waiting around for a while I ride back, and his chain is off.  I put the chain back on, and we keep going.  In another 20 minutes, same problem.  Where’s Gavin?  Now we’re on a steep mountain going uphill.  I put the chain back on, and fish out the tools.  We tighten the chain to keep it going until we can find a mechanic.  I’m absolutely covered in grease.  We’re losing daylight.  The chain falls off again a few minutes later.  Repeat.  We find a mechanic who adds a link to the chain and we’re good to go.  We get near the top of a mountain, and Gavin’s bike dies. I get out the rope and tow him to the top, where there is not a mechanic.  Next mechanic is 10km further down the road.  We continue towing, the rope gets caught and snaps.  I drive behind Gavin pushing the back of his bike with my right foot.  It’s very awkward.  We reach a long downhill and throw it into neutral, then coast 6km straight into the shop, where they replace his carb and we eat snacks.  We’re getting to Dalat today, even if we’re going to drive all night.

We get moving.  Dalat’s a mountain town and the road in is long, windy, and uphill.  It begins to rain and it’s freezing.  Twenty minutes ago it was 90 degrees, and now it’s more like 50.  We speed up to try to get to the hotel before we catch a cold.  After an exhilarating high-speed ride the last few km we pull into town and stop.  We’re missing Johnny and Gavin.  We wait for a while.  We send someone back for them.  We keep waiting.  I go after them - something’s got to be wrong if it’s been this long.  As I’m racing down hill to find them, I see them all go flying by the other direction, so I shrug and ease in the brakes to turn around, whereupon the wheels lock up and the bike flips over.  I jump off as it’s going down and run a few steps so it doesn’t hit me.  I look around to see if anyone noticed, take a deep breath, then pick up the bike and head back.  Everybody saw and was talking about it, but hadn’t realized it was me.  We had a good laugh and checked into the hotel.

I’ll just pretend that I haven’t waited over a month to update this and continue where we left off...

We arrived in Hue in time for dinner.

We checked into a hotel in the backpacker district and chilled out.  Up until then I had never been solicited more frequently or aggressively for drugs - every time you stepped outside a guy on a motorbike would drive up to you and try to sell you something.  Apparently that area has a little gang and they post watched at every corner for foreigners, who then alert the motos to bother them.  Yuck.

The city itself was fairly charming, and the citadel was interesting, but we didn’t stay for that long - only two nights, and we missed visiting some of the major tourist sites so I won’t comment on them.  The biggest takeaway from Hue for me was the aggressive and frankly desperate tactics of the touts in the backpacker district - at one point we were herded into a club with fully six (6) female employees surrounding our group of three.  The club was predictably terrible and we left as soon as we could get away from the staff (a common and enduring theme throughout SE Asia in general - for some reason everyone runs bars and clubs as if they’ve only ever seen pictures of them before, and with the idea that louder is better).

After Hue is the Hai Van pass, one of the most famously beautiful roads in the world as popularized by Top Gear, and rightfully so.  On the way there I stopped to get my exhaust pipe screwed on tighter, which turned into a several hour affair involving the mechanic riding away with my bike for a while without explanation (in order to find some tools he didn’t have) and ended up in an impressive overhaul for about $4, but lots of lost time.  Charlie had to leave in a few days, so we told him to go on ahead and we’d catch up.  When we finally made it to the top of the pass, it was surrounded by a large fast moving cloud, so it was chilly and you couldn’t see all that much.  It’s topped by several dilapidated pillboxes and defensive structures from the French Colonial period, but also used by the Americans in the Vietnam War - I wondered if my uncle had spent any time in them, as he was stationed in the area at the time (we later spoke and he’d been over the pass several times, but it wasn’t so pretty in his day due to trains and all the military activity).  Anyway, the approach and descent were both stunning and I’m glad that we got to see it, instead of opting for the new tunnel which bypasses it entirely whilst significantly reducing travel time and traffic fatalities (the pass being extremely windy at points and difficult to navigate for large trucks, etc).

We arrived in Da Nang, which is massive as Vietnam’s third largest city, but also very modern and pretty.  It’s a city I would like to spend more time in, but we were really just passing through.  Once a week there’s a Dragon bridge which spits fire and water, with a massive crowd, and we lucked out having arrived just in time to experience it, getting absolutely soaked in the process.  Later we were chased by a group of ladyboys on motorbikes, right after a long-term expat had been saying that he’d never seen a ladyboy in Vietnam.  We had to climb and jump over the 10+’ high fence to our hostel to escape them, as the 24hr receptionist was passed out on the floor.  Whoops!

In the morning we drove down the beautiful coast road half an hour to the smaller, much more touristy historic village of Hoi An.  It’s got really good food, and is home to hundreds of custom tailor and cobblers who can make you a suit in as little as several hours for ridiculously low prices.  I didn’t plan to get anything, since my bag was full.  

Later while waiting for a mechanic to put a new tire on my bike, I started chatting with one of the employees of the shop.  She started telling me about this tailor who could make me a suit while I waited and I replied that I didn’t need anything and couldn’t fit one even if I did, but jokingly asked how much it would be for a white linen suit.  Anyway I bought a white linen suit.

Vietnam Road Trip Phong NHA - Khe Sanh

We spent a few days in Phuong NHA checking out the ridiculous caves.  There’s a lot of options, ranging from free to thousands of dollars (the largest cave in the world costs $3000 to visit and only accepts a few visitors per year) - we did Paradise Cave and Dark Cave.  The first is an enormous cavern as poorly depicted in photos 2-6 - we went about 1k into it, where the walkway ends, but you can continue a further 6k into the cave if you book a tour.  There’s a very long hike or set of stairs (depending on how you go) before you even get to the mouth of the cave, so I wasn’t up for the longer tour as there were no bathrooms in the cave and as I well know now, hiking does bad things to my body.  That said, I wish I had been able to continue further, as it was absolutely awesome in the literal sense of the word - it’s not even the third largest cave in the world, but it’s big enough that you could probably fly a helicopter around inside it without much issue.

Dark Cave, on the other hand, is a completely different experience.  You put on a lifejacket and a helmet with a light, then zipline across a river to the cave, before hopping in the water and swimming inside.  You then walk deep into the cave before reaching a large mud pit.  You cross the mud pit, and go through a narrow crevasse, and head further down - after this point, the entire floor, walls, and ceiling is all very thick mud and clay.  By the time you reach the end, you’re in a pool of mud so thick that you can sit on the surface of it and float like you’re in a lounge chair.  After all that you head back out to a freshwater area, swim around in it to clean off, and then they turn everyone’s lights off and tell you to swim back to the entrance about 200m away (you’re wearing a life jacket so you can’t drown, but it’s pretty creepy regardless).

I’d love to have stayed longer and explored more of the park, but we were on a fairly tight schedule.  After three days there we decided to head to Khe Sanh via the Western Ho Chi Minh Highway, frequently described as the most beautiful part of the drive as it passes right through the park.  The only problem is that it’s a 240km stretch, and there’s nowhere to stop and no gas for most of it.  To ensure we had plenty of time we got an early start, which was spoiled when Charlie’s bike totally lost power 1km outside town.  We pushed it to a random mechanic, as you do, and he listened to the engine for a few seconds before disassembilng the entire bike and welding some shit.  No idea what he did, but he got it working better than new for a total cost of about $3.  

Unfortunately because we lost so much time in the morning, we weren’t able to make Khe Sanh before sundown.  In fact, we only got about half way.  We lost additional time when Troy skidded on some gravel around a corner and went over the handlebars into a ditch.  The poncho ripped a bit and he got a tiny cut on his chin, but was otherwise fine.  The bike was a bit worse off, and the throttle cable had disconnected and therefore was stuck open, so we couldn’t move on.  We grabbed the pliers and after a bit got it reconnected before continuing.  

As it started to get dark, a Vietnamese man wearing a nice suit jacket on the side of the road waved us down.  We stopped and inquired about the nearest hotel, which he indicated was about 50km back the way we came, but offered to let us stay at his place for free.  He also indicated that he road ahead was very bad and dangerous to drive in the dark, which was further reinforced by a gate barring the road a few meters ahead.  We decided to push on anyway, but thanked him for the offer.  

After about 4km on some of the steepest curviest roads in pitch black, rain, and thick fog, we decided that we were probably going to die if we went much further and should probably take the nice man up on his offer.  We headed back three abreast driving in first gear to give the most power to our headlights, and slowly made our way forward.  We found the approximate location of the houses, and turned off the bikes, and then some flashlights came from up the hill and found us.  They brought out a wooden board so we could get our bikes across the ditch on the side of the road, and we drove them up a steep muddy incline to the house, which was a one room hut up on stilts.  They brought us inside and immediately offered food and tea, which we gratefully accepted, and gradually a small crowd began to filter in from neighbouring dwellings.  Somebody brought out a plastic bag of rice wine, and shots were poured all around.  And then again.  And then again.  And after the first bag was done, another bag appeared, and then a third.  Overall it was a pretty good night, and we hung out with about a dozen local men and chatted in a mix of bad English and worse Vietnamese (on our part) before settling down to sleep on the floor packed like sardines.  

In the morning they made us breakfast and shots of rice wine which we were unable to refuse (a note that everywhere you go the Vietnamese seem to think that a few drinks makes the roads straighter or something [I do not recommend or endorse drinking and driving]), and got us back on the road.  I’d just like to stress that this family probably saved our lives because we either would have ended up at the bottom of a ravine or frozen to death in the rain if we had kept driving.  We were extremely grateful and thanked them profusely and when we left everyone in the whole village stood on the road waving.  These are the kind of experiences you can only get by getting off the beaten path (and into trouble)!

 In the daytime the road was much nicer and we drove for a few hours through some of the most stunningly beautiful landscape in the world and reached Khe Sanh (yesterday’s planned stopping point) by 11:30AM, which was way too early to call it a day.  We decided to get some coffee and lunch and then push on to Hue, another 180-something kilometers, making for a long but manageable day.  As we were getting coffee a girl came up and asked if she could practice her English with us, and we of course agreed - after chatting for a while it turned out that she was the owner’s daughter, and she invited us to lunch with her family.  Everything was delicious, and her father insisted that we have a round of Ballantine’s with him before we left (again, the bikes being perfectly visible just a few feet away).

After that was a long, exhausting, bone-shaking, but mostly* uneventful ride into Hue, where we arrived in time for dinner.  

Vietnam Road Trip Days 2-6? (Lam Son-Phuong NHA)

The next day we picked up Troy’s bike around 1, then drove to meet up with Charlie at Lam Son.  It took a few hours to get there and we cruised around some ancient ruins for a while before finding a hotel for the night and packing it in.  

Unfortunately when we awoke the next morning, it was raining, but we had to push on.  We threw on our raingear and rolled out - within a few hours becoming completely soaked.  We were trying to reach Pho Chau by nightfall but had a few minor mishaps along the way (running out of gas, etc), and decided to stop at a promising looking wooden structure which promised food and lodging.  It turned out to be a sort of conference hall in the middle of nowhere, and there was either a police or local party meeting, and they wanted to eat and drink with us.  I was on antibiotics or a stomach infection at the time and didn’t want to drink, which made them suspicious, and they demanded to see my passport to prove that I wasn’t a member of IS (their words, not mine) - except I couldn’t show them my passport because the hotel front desk had it.  This did not deter them, and I don’t know if it was the language barrier or their lack of knowledge of their own laws, but they didn’t relent until I agreed to drink a bit.  Terrorists don’t drink.  Or something.

In the morning none of our clothes were even slightly dry - I ended up tossing the insoles for my shoes and we threw on our wet everything and headed off.  Right before we reached Pho Chau, Charlie’s bike totally died.  We couldn’t get it started at all, so we got some rope and towed it to a mechanic.  He spent some time looking at it and decided whatever it was, he couldn’t fix it, and motioned us further down the road to town.  We towed Charlie to a Honda dealer and dropped the bike off there for work - it actually took them two days to fix it and cost 3x as much as Troy’s work, for what turned out to be exactly the same problem.  We got the bike back and thought we were good to go, but it broke down again 4k further down the road, and we just pulled it back.  They did an oil change and told us to drive slowly because it’s an old bike - not really a satisfactory answer, but we had to get moving.  Eventually we pushed on at a slightly reduced pace and made the entrance to Phuong NHA national park before sundown.  The whole approach to the park is beautiful and the pictures I took don’t do it any justice, but we always felt rushed for light and didn’t stop too frequently for snaps, since driving in the dark is so unpleasant (and dangerous, and stupid).

I'm still alive AMA.

I spent a month and a bit in Hong Kong volunteering at a hostel.  It was a really cool city and it's a lot like New York, if New York was all Chinatown.  I don't really feel like writing about it right now though, sorry!

I've been in Hanoi, Vietnam for the last week and I bought a motorcycle.  It's a complete piece of trash, and I'm going to ride it to Saigon - roughly the equivalent of driving a lawnmower from New York to Florida.  Thousands of people have done it before me and not died, and I'm going with some cool dudes I met here who have the same plans, so ~most likely~ it will be okay.  But if I disappear, now you know why!

Right so I went to the Philippines. 

I took Dragonair from Xi'An to Hong Kong, a flight of maybe an hour and a half, and they gave us a full meal and two drink services.  This is a budget airline!  Get it together United.  Arriving at the airport in HK I thought I had somehow made a mistake and ended up back in New York.  There were SO MANY white people, and a ton of Asians speaking English with American accents, and Indians, and generally a large multicultural mess that didn't appear anything like I'd seen in the last few months.  But no, that's just Hong Kong.  And they had free wifi which was fast, reliable, and outside the Great Firewall.  But more about that later!  I got on Cathay Pacific to Manila and had an uneventful flight, and Matt + family met me at the airport and took me to their grandparents' house in Quezon City (part of Metro Manila).  Here I discovered that Manila is a massive urban sprawl - it's not walkable at all, and has probably the worst traffic in the world.  Nobody wears seatbelts because it's literally impossible to ever get to a high enough speed to hurt yourself.  

For the next several days we ate a lot, went to several museums, hung out at the mall, and generally didn't do much touristy stuff.  We watched 10 movies and drank a bunch of beer.  I got my glasses fixed and bought a bunch of T-shirts for 2USD.  Everything in the entire country is incredibly cheap.  It was amazing.

I convinced everybody that they wanted to go Scuba diving, since the Philippines is a notably great place for it and nobody had ever done it before besides me.  We booked two nights at Seas Spring Resort in Anilao in southern Luzon, then headed out to get there - 2.5hour bus ride which cost 3USD and showed a bootleg screener of American Sniper, a 1.5hr Jeepney ride which cost 2USD, and a 20 minute tricycle taxi ride where we were too heavy and had to stop to refill the tires, make two attempts to get up a hill, then run next to it on the way down so the brakes didn't fail.  Eventually, we did get there, and it turned out to be beautiful, with a natural hot spring, a pool with water slides, and an amazing view.  For some reason the menu was mostly Korean so we ate a lot of bulgogi and japchae.  There was a large Korean family next to us eating budae jjigae but it wasn't on the menu and the waiter wouldn't let us order it - apparently the owner had requested it personally.  The next day we went scuba diving with Mike, who turned out to be the owner and said it was totally cool to just ask for the budae jjigae so we had it for dinner that night.  The scuba itself was great and I definitely need to go back to explore more.

After we checked out the next morning, Matt's parents picked us up from the resort since they were going to be in the area anyway, and we drove to Tagaytay, where there is a Caldera volcano with a lake inside a volcano inside a lake inside a volcano (specifically, a cinder cone inside a caldera).  Very cool.  Since it was up in the mountains it turned out to be pretty cold and wearing only shorts and sandals I was freezing.  But we had an excellent lunch and then went to Sky Ranch, an amusement park right on the rim of the caldera, where we rode a sketchy ferris wheel in high winds and ziplined over a massive canyon.  

In the morning we went to the Philippine National Museum to check it out, then hung out behind the scenes with the director of art restoration and got to see some priceless paintings in the process of being restored.  It looks like an impossible task, but somehow they're able to do it.  We also played with a bunch of lizards in the herpetology lab, one of which tried to escape and caused a bit of a panic (apparently not for the first time).

Right before we left we all did Mystery Manila, a sort of urban exploration trivia game where you have to solve a bunch of clues in order to unlock a series of locks to access the final clue which allows you to disarm a 'bomb' all in <90 minutes.  We ended up running around the mall nearby desperately trying to sort out a bunch of things none of us know about Philippine history, and got 4/5 locks opened which allowed us to jimmy the box enough to pull out the clue paper.  It was a simple riddle which we solved in no time and it told us to clip the green wire.  I told Matt that there was probably something on the lid of the box that would tell us not to believe the clue or whatever, but we couldn't access it because we didn't have the last lock.  We clipped the green wire and ~DEAD~, lost the game.  They then opened the last lock for us and showed the final clue on the inside of the lid of the box which indicated that you needed to clip the yellow one.  Oh well!  MYSTERY FAIL.

I had been able to get Matt to extend his flight back to the US (without which it wouldn't have been worth going really) but only for a few days, so on the 13th he had to head back home to work.  We all said our goodbyes, and in the morning I got a flight back to Hong Kong, figuring I'd stay there for a few days, get a new Chinese visa and then figure out where I'd go next.

Ok, we're back!

After Luoyang we caught a train to Xi'an, and checked into Warriors Hostel, which we had somehow booked for 5rmb/night for a week (roughly $.65/day) and ran into our friend Jose (who Enrique had met in Mongolia and I met in Pingyao).  We decided to spend a few days here before heading to Chengdu, and because the hostel was so reasonably priced (and actually pretty nice regardless) didn't feel like we were in much of a rush.  

We spent a few days exploring the city itself, primarily around the Muslim Quarter, where we had most of the locally famous foods.  I especially liked the Biang Biang Mien (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles), which we had spicy.  The whole area is packed during both day and night and they sell all sorts of things, including a lot of unrefrigerated raw meat and things that appeared very questionable, but generally turned out to taste pretty good, and since I didn't get sick, I'm not complaining.  

We were also now apparently far south enough that bao referred to steamed buns instead of dumplings, thank god.

After a few days we caught a bus to see the Terracotta Warriors.  I wasn't nearly as wowed as I thought I would be and there's fewer of the warriors intact than you're generally lead to believe, but it is still pretty impressive and worth visiting either way - just don't expect to need a whole day there.  Lots of tour packages will take you for a few hundred RMB, but you can take a public bus for about 20 and be there in an hour.

That night I decided that I couldn't wait anymore, and I downloaded Steam on one of the hostel computers and gathered a bunch of friends back home (where it was ~noon on a Saturday) to play Counter-Strike, but my ping was way too high and it was a Russian server so everybody was lagging terribly and we got wrecked.  Worth a shot though!

The next morning we decided to go to Hua Shan [Mount Hua], one of the several famous mountains in China.  We took a high speed train 40 minutes, then a shuttle bus dropped us off at the base of the mountain, which although being 2000m tall and not very far away was still impossible to see through the thick smog.  There was a bit of confusion about admission fees because like everything in China, it was absurdly complicated and we had to buy 4 separate tickets, one for the two separate parks you're entering, and one for the two separate cable cars, since you take the West cable car up and the North cable car down - both of which are operated by completely unrelated companies.  It ended up costing about 400RMB which we were pretty sour about because we weren't expecting to pay much of anything, but it ended up being worth it.  After handing over the random assortment of tickets they herd you onto a bus and drive a good way up the mountain, dropping you off at a set of stairs.  For whatever reason, they built the cable car at the top of about 500 stairs.  I should note that the cable car exists as an alternative to walking up thousands of stairs for 9 hours to reach the peaks, so I'm not sure why they felt it necessary to include that feature!

Anyhow, we got on board the car and were immediately blown away.  The peaks themselves are very slim and you can see staircases that go straight up the ridges - the very ones we would later be hiking - which looked extremely steep and precarious.  The car ride takes you pretty much straight up and then right into the side of the mountain, as they've dug a giant cave near the top and you feel a bit like batman going inside.  I've never seen anything quite like it.

Once you get to the top of the cable car you're in between the summits of the West and South peaks - the mountain has five in total.  The best route is to go West, then down and over to South, which is the tallest, then down across a valley and up to the East - from here everything else is downhill, and the North peak, where you take the second cable car down, is 600m further down a series of several thousand steep stairs cut into the mountain.  Most of the time you are within a few feet of a sheer 2000m drop on either side, but for some reason it doesn't feel dangerous at all and you're far more likely to topple down the stairs then over the side.  

Once you're up the mountain you notice a peculiar weather effect probably unique to China - there's a thin band of blue sky in between where the smog ends and the clouds begin, and it's very beautiful.  It would be even more beautiful without the smog I'm sure, but apparently that's somewhat rare.  Either way, it's a breathtaking view and I'd rate Hua Shan up there with the Grand Canyon and other wonders of the world - it's an absolute must see if you are going to be in the area, and if you only have a few days in Xi'An, skip the warriors for it.

After we got back we planned to go to Chengdu via a few towns, but the plans began to fall apart because Jose was stuck in Xi'An waiting for his visa extension for 10 days, and it's hard to travel in China without ID (not to mention that he'd have to come back to pick it up), and since it is ever slowly getting towards Chinese New Year, all the trains were sold out for several days anyway. It was looking a bit like we'd be stuck there for a bit, but I logged into Facebook through my VPN and saw that my Filipino-American friend Matt was in the Philippines with his family, and that was that.  After a brief conversation I bought a flight for Manila the next day, Enrique caught a bus to a historical village on the way to Chengdu, and Jose settled in for the wait.

Christmas in Luoyang:

After the debacle of Pingyao I just wanted to get anywhere else.  That place turned out to be Luoyang, a pretty big city of ~6.5 million.  It is home to the famous Longmen Grottoes, White Horse Temple, and the base for getting to the famous Shaolin Temple on Song Mountain.  Both Enrique and I got bad sinus infections from the day we'd spent in Pingyao, so we were feeling pretty crappy and ended up getting late starts several days in a row, which threw us off and ended up extending our stay.  We found a great noodle shop directly next to the hostel where you could get a massive bowl of La Mien (ramen) for 8RMB, which is ~1.2USD.  This is the way I'd always expected ramen to be - a super cheap super filling lunch for people on the go.  China delivers where the US, Japan, and Korea fail (with average prices ranging more like 8-10USD).  They also pull the noodles by hand from a giant block of dough, which is an intricate and interesting process to watch - I still have no idea how they make it happen even after seeing it dozens of times. 

We spent a whole day at Longmen grotto, an ancient buddhist site where thousands of buddhas were carved into holes in a mountainside.  Of course there were a million stairs and everything is miles away from everything else, and it stretches along both sides of a river for a long way.  It was really beautiful and made for stunning views, but I was exhausted and sick and it made for miserable hiking.  That said, Luoyang is a pretty often missed stop on the Beijing-Chengdu route and I'd recommend that people hit it up, because everything there is pretty cool and there's ~0~ westerners.

After the Grottos we went to Song Mountain, to visit the Shaolin Temple.  When you get to the train/bus station at Luoyang there's a million people standing outside yelling at you trying to get you to hire them to drive you there, but it's a few hours away and it would be really expensive.  The public bus is super cheap, but difficult to buy a ticket for if you don't read or speak Chinese (as I mentioned in my Beijing post, but fortunately Enrique is fluent).  In the bus station they told us that the busses to the temple had already left for the day, and we were out of luck.  As we were dejectedly walking away she yelled out that we could take a bus to the nearest city and then a cheap shuttle to the temple.  We did this, which turned out to be totally ridiculous because the shuttle was like 5 minutes tops from the temple - I'm not sure why they would even bother telling people the busses are done for the day when it's that close to do the alternate route.

The temple is an active training school and we saw several groups of teenagers marching around and practicing, and also saw a show where they demonstrate shaolin techniques (which is clearly aimed at tourists, but was pretty cool).  They asked for volunteers and a Chinese guy and French girl both got up to try their hand at some routines.  The routines turned out to be basically impossible and both of them tried admirably to follow along, with predictably hilarious results.

Later we decided to take the cable car up to the top of Song mountain, but it was closed, so we decided to hike it instead.  We got up about 150 stairs before someone started yelling for us to come back because it would get dark soon, which we were happy to comply with because stairs are THE WORST and we were already incredibly winded.  It turned out to be an older monk and he chatted with Enrique while we headed back.  Did I mention that this was Christmas?  When I got back to the hostel there was nothing going on because they don't celebrate it and regardless of that I think we were the only guests at the time, so I had a gin and milk and we went to bed.  At around 6AM I Skyped the family while they were at dinner for a bit and all was well.

In the morning we took a regular city bus (1RMB, or <.20USD) an hour and a half to White Horse Temple, the first Buddhist temple in China.  It also contains Buddhist temples of several other countries donated in cooperation, so there's also Thai, Indian, and Myanmar style temples to check out.  It was pretty cool but as with all old temples/palaces there's not actually that much to see or do really so we wandered around for a while and then left.  At some point I posed for a picture with a random Chinese guy because that's a thing that happens a lot.

When all that was done we caught a train to Xi'an, a pretty cool city.

Let me tell you about a place you never need to go:  Pingyao

I'd gotten in contact with Byeong-uk (who I am going to refer to in the future as Enrique, because that's what his traveler business card says as he's going to South America and people can't pronounce his name) who was also in China and we'd decided to meet up for a while to travel together.  He was going to be in Pingyao, so I told him I'd meet there.  Easier said than done, Adrian.

Lets talk a little bit about the Chinese train system.  If you speak and read Chinese, then you can go online and buy a ticket directly from their website.  As there is no English website and all Google products are non-functional, you will be using a travel agency to buy your tickets.  Fortunately  C-trip, one of the bigger Chinese sites, has an English page, is very reasonably priced, and also gives you airline points for each purchase.  Not bad!  Unfortunately though, buying a ticket on C-trip doesn't ensure that you actually get the ticket, because once you pay for it, they have to buy it through a third party.  This can lead to a situation where you pay for a ticket, and then wait two hours only to find out that it wasn't available.  At which point nothing else may be available.  This didn't happen to me here, but it DID happen a bit later.  Anyway, it's not that easy to buy tickets.

Once you have a train ticket purchased, you can pick it up at the station.  There is a ticketing hall with a large english sign that says ENTRANCE outside, so you know how to get in.  Once inside (passing through the same bullshit security theater they have all over the place where they pat you with metal detectors that beep and then ignore it* anyway) there are approximately 5,000 people standing in various lines, all of which are marked only in Chinese and have different purposes.  You pick a line, hopefully the right line, and then wait your turn.  You present your passport and E-Ticket number, and then get yelled at in Chinese for a minute and directed to a different line.  At the conclusion of the second line, you get your ticket.  In order to find your train, you then leave the ticket hall, and wander around for approximately 30 minutes trying in vain to find out how to actually get into the station (no nice big ENTRANCE sign).  Eventually you get frustrated and wave your ticket around in a random person's face, and they point you to a mysterious set of ticketing window where people seem to be disappearing.  You go to the window, you also disappear.  You find yourself in a large room with countless hordes of people, and a bunch of numbers.  You pick a number that seems to correspond generally with something, and find yourself in a different room with even more people all waiting around for something.  Around the time your train is supposed to leave, a mad rush makes for a different door, you wave your ticket in someone's face and say PINGYAO? and they nod and wave, so you follow.  You get on the train, the conductor takes your ticket and hands you a plastic card.  You fall asleep, and a while later the conductor takes your plastic card and hands you your ticket.  This is the cue that your stop is next - it could be in five minutes or an hour.  You wait anxiously all dressed up and packed for 45 minutes until the train stops, and then finally get off.  It's 2:30AM, it's dark, you're sweating a lot and the air is so thick with smog you can only see about 5 feet ahead of you.  Eventually you find the exit, and they won't let you out without showing your ticket.  Where's your ticket?  If you want the real-ass China experience, go to the DMV.  

When I did arrive in Pingyao, it was pretty late and there was exactly one guy waiting for taxi service (just a guy and a car, not a real taxi, but that's pretty common).  I tried to haggle but it doesn't work when you have no leverage, so I paid twice what the normal rate is, but it was still something like 3USD.  Pingyao is an ancient walled city and has super narrow streets with no lights at night - the driver honked every time we approached an intersection so any pedestrians, cycles, or other cars would know we were coming.  When we got to the hostel, there was no indication of any activity, no lights, just a dark street.  We banged on the door for a while and eventually an old guy who was sleeping on a cot in the living room opened the door.  He didn't speak any English, and the reception wasn't open, so he directed me to the bench of one of the dining room tables, where I slept for a few hours until reception opened.  I had been furiously calling Enrique on WeChat because he had already arrived and could rescue me, but he's a heavy sleeper and I couldn't wake him.  

In the morning I finally got to the room and was able to take a nap - the hostel itself was like all the other buildings there and ancient Chinese construction with a central courtyard, and to get to your room you went outside into the courtyard and up an extremely steep and narrow wooden staircase.  Since it was an old wooden building you could hear anything from anywhere and it wasn't airtight so the smog got inside.  I'd been coughing since I arrived, but it got significantly worse.  The smog is pretty bad most places in China but the city walls kept all the coal smoke from every house's fires contained, and no breeze could blow it away, so it was much worse here.  We met up with Jose and Javier, two Spaniards who Enrique had met in Mongolia before I arrived (see this trend?) and we got some lunch and then spent the day wandering around the city and on the city wall.  It's pretty small, and you can walk the whole thing in a day, which was good because our coughs kept getting worse.  By the evening we were already done with the whole place and our coughs had progressed to strong retching, even while wearing masks.  I told Enrique that if we didn't get out soon I was going to need to go to the hospital and get oxygen because I was literally on the verge of passing out.  We got train tickets and took a miserable tricycle taxi ride in the dark to the station where the air was so thick you could practically write your name in it.  The air in the station was a bit better and we were able to relax a bit, and I ended up trading most of the change I had from every country (since money changers don't take change) with one of the police officers there who collects coins - it was a pretty amusing spectacle and all the people in the station crowded around as he picked through my coins and we calculated exchange rates etc.)  When it was time to leave just the five minutes or so standing on the platform were enough that both of us were back to retching and I can honestly say that I've never been more glad to be out of a place than I have leaving Pingyao. 

Beijing, China:

I took a late train from UB to Beijing.  It was 25 hours or something, I don't remember.  There was a Chilean guy in my carriage and we hung out for a while.  I should note that the fact that I keep ending up with other foreigners on trains has nothing to do with the fact that there are a lot of foreigners on the trains (there aren't), it's that the conductors usually re-arrange peoples seats beforehand to put the foreigners together.  Makes it easier for everyone.  There was also a Mongolian guy in our carriage and he was very nice and kept offering me food, but I had to decline because I had suddenly come down with a bad case of food poisoning.  I should say that a train is one of the worse places in the world to have food poisoning, because every time they stop at a station, they lock the bathrooms.  Some of the stops, including immigration, and changing the wheels* were hours long.  I thought I was going to die and/or poop all over myself.  Fortunately I was able to avoid both, but only barely.

*Russian/Mongolian rail gauge is different than that of China, which one of them did for defensive purposes a million years ago.  So to keep the trains running on different size tracks, they swap the wheels out at the border by disassembling the entire train, lifting each car, swapping the wheel sets out, then re-assembling the train, which takes 2-3 hours.

When we arrived in Beijing it turned out that both of us were staying at the same hostel, so we walked there together.  It took about an hour to find a bank where our cards worked in the atm, but we got money and got to the hostel eventually, before parting ways and somehow never seeing each other again (it was a pretty big hostel).  I checked out the next morning to visit some internet friends (Steve and Della, who co-incidentally are both from Michigan) living in western Beijing, right near the Summer Palace.  We visited that, [photos 1-3], then watched Futurama for like 5 hours.  Honestly it was awesome.  Steve and I drank most of a liter of Baiju, a pretty nasty 50%+ alcoholic beverage that's very popular in China, and then went to sleep.  I then watched over the next 6 or 7 hours as he vomited about 50 times.  You should have told me you don't really drink, man.

Anyway that conspicuous consumption must have reactivated my food poisoning or something because after Steve got better I spent the next 4 days losing most of my bodyweight (although I never puked) - I considered going to the ER or taking antibiotics but their mysterious benefactor Mr. Yao when consulted by phone said that it was fine and as long as I didn't have a high fever it would pass after a few days, and it did.  To celebrate while Steve was at work Della and I took the subway two and a half hours across the city to visit Jenny Lou's, a western grocery store, where we bought 10 boxes of Kraft Shells and Cheese, and consumed half of it for dinner that evening.  The taste of American Freedom.

In the morning I visited them both at work in a bio lab at the China Agricultural University and got lunch in the enormous cafeteria, before heading back to central Beijing to the hostel, where I took a tour to the Great Wall.  

The Great Wall has a lot of stairs, and I really hate stairs.  After walking up several hundred of those stairs my body decided that it wasn't going to cooperate and if I didn't get to a bathroom in the next 2 minutes I was going to have heart palpitations and fall over (because that happens to me).  In desperation I found a secluded spot and ~pooped off the great wall~. Oddly enough by the remains I discovered that I hadn't been the first.  The views were beautiful though!

Later after getting back to the city I met a group of French guys and Swedish couple in the hostel bar, and we spent the next several days touring around together.  We were very amused to find at Tiananman Square signs posted everywhere that apparently showed that you weren't allowed to blow up your car there.  Ok, I guess I'll do it somewhere else!  We checked out Mao's body at the Maosoleum (heh) and went to the Forbidden city and ate a bunch of good food.

Everybody was really pumped about gin and milk and the Swedes swore to introduce it back home.

Before leaving I met up with Steve and Della again and we had some ridiculously good spicy thing at a mall where you just choose a bunch of ingredients from a list and then they stir fry it in a bowl with a Szechuan chili/pepper sauce.  I want to eat that every day for the rest of my life seriously it was amazing.