Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh, Phu Quoc, and an unfortunate incident in Kuala Lumpur

This entry is a little delayed.  Sorry about that.  No excuses – just a little too lazy to write.  Catch-up time!

Around three weeks ago we left the city of Hanoi to head south towards Hoi An. We boarded a sleeper bus for an overnight ride. It turned out to be a very difficult way to spend the night.  The “beds” on the us were basically little pods that were definitely not designed for someone who is 6’4”, and to top it all of the bus driver insisted on honking his horn every 30 seconds so there was no sleep that night. We eventually arrived in Hoi An in the midst of a rain-storm so we headed into the first hotel we were brought to and spent the night there catching up on some sleep. The hotel was much too far out of town, so the next morning we explored a little and found a nice place to stay in a more central location. 

Hoi An is a great place to spend a few days.  It’s a smaller town, with a “old” section that is quite touristy and great for walking around and visiting great restaurants and cafes.  The city is popular for its clothes-making shops. Many people come here to get custom-made clothing.  Everywhere you walked, shopkeepers would attempt to get you into their stores to order some clothes to be made.   Due to our travelling style, we really didn’t have any room in our backpacks to be carrying extra clothes, so we passed on them, and just enjoyed the atmosphere and the local food instead. Unfortunately it rained quite a lot while we were in Hoi An, so we didn’t have a ton of time to spend walking around exploring the area.  On the one really nice day we had, we headed down the road to go to the beach.  The beach is quite huge and the waves were really high that day, so it was fun to do a bit of swimming, and we also spend some time sitting around enjoying the sights at a little restaurant/bar right on the beach.

As I mentioned, we got a lot of rain while we were here, so we spent a lot of time indoors reading and watching movies (thank goodness for bit torrent). After a week we were well rested and sick of waiting for better weather so we decided to move on.  However, the morning we needed to leave to go to the airport (we weren’t about to jump on another sleeper bus) we woke up to massive flooding in the streets.  There was more than 4 or 5 feet of water covering the entire area.  The bottom floor of the hotel was under water, and the street was basically a river.  We had to hire a local boat to get up the street to higher ground. Fortunately, a taxi was waiting for us on a higher street, so we made it out of town and out to the airport without and further problems.

We flew south to the biggest city in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon). The city is populated by over 9 million people, so it was very big and very busy.  There are also more than 5 million motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh, so the streets were absolutely nuts.  We headed down to District One, which we were informed was the “backpacker district”.  We spent around 5 days in the area exploring the city and hanging out eating more pho and drinking really cheap beer.  It was a nice place to stay and hang out for a while. The hotel was really great too. They were super friendly and provided free breakfast and dinner.  The free meals and the cheap food and drinks out in the streets made for an extremely economical way to travel.  It took us around 3 or 4 days to get through one day of spending based on our travel budget.  If we wanted to elongate our trip a bit, it would be the perfect place to hang out.  You could retire here with less than $50,000 and spend a pretty comfortable 10 years or so if you were so inclined.

One day when we were there we took a day trip out of the city to the Cu Chi tunnels.  These tunnels were the underground hiding places for the Vietnamese soldiers during the war.  The tunnels were extremely small, so it was difficult to move around a lot and quite a bit claustrophobic.  In the area they also had some museums with displays of the things they used during the war including a lot of mean-looking traps, and a lot of guns.  If you paid them enough, you could even shoot one of the guns yourself.  You had the option of shooting an AK-47, or a M16, or M60. It would have been pretty cool, but the price was a bit too steep for our budget.

After a few days in Ho Chi Minh City, it can get a bit overwhelming, what with all the noise and pollution and the general craziness, so we decided to head out to the beach for a week.   Based on a recommendation, we went to Phu Quoc Island, which is just a short (3/4 hour) flight south-west from Ho Chi Minh.  The island had all kinds of nice beaches  and lots of decently-priced resorts and hotels.  We stayed at a pretty decent place – it was a lot like a beach resort, only not quite so fancy.  We had a small bungalow just a stones-throw away from the water, and we proceeded to spend a week there enjoying the beaches and the great warm weather.  After all the rain we had in Hoi An and Ho Chi Minh, the weather Phu Quoc turned out to be a lot nicer.  It was usually hot and sunny all day and then in the evening it would rain for an hour or so and then return back to good weather in no time.

All along the beach were ladies selling massages for only 3 dollars an hour, so we took advantage of that a few times.  We also went out on a boat for a day trip around some of the smaller islands south of the main island to do some snorkeling.  The boat brought us to a few small reefs and we were able to snorkel around for a few hours.  It was really beautiful under the water.  There was a lot of pretty coral and brightly colored fish all around.  We also went fishing for a little bit and some people from our boat caught a bunch – although neither of us caught anything.  We had the fish for lunch along with a bunch of other seafood and that was really good, especially since snorkeling builds up your appetite quite a bit.

While staying in Phu Quoc we had no idea where we were going to go from there, so we spent a lot of time researching where to go next.  Unfortunately, the rainy season is in full effect in this part of the world so a lot of options were not really feasible.  We debated on a lot of other places, but eventually we decided on Malaysia.  So, yesterday we headed back to Ho Chi Minh to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur.  We hope to spend a month or so exploring Malaysia, with hopefully a lengthy stay somewhere. We’ve been going at a good pace for the last 2 months, staying a week or so at a time in 9 different places, and so we’re hoping to settle down somewhere for a while soon.  We’ve been staying in hostels, eating out 3 times a day, and never really unpacking anywhere, so it we’re thinking it will be nice to have our own place for a while, unpack, cook our own meals, and work on a few projects or something.  We haven’t decided where yet, but we’re hopeful that an opportunity will present itself soon somewhere here in Malaysia.

We’ll be writing about Kuala Lumpur soon, but I couldn’t let you go without filling you in on our day today. We already had a pretty eventful day here. After walking around Chinatown, and the Central Market, and the City Centre with the Patronas Towers and the KL Tower we were walking back to our hostel, when we had an unfortunate incident with a mugger.  We were walking down the sidewalk when a motorbike approached us from behind, and grabbed onto the strap of Joh’s purse and ripped it off of her.  Joh had the purse securely over her shoulder and across her torso and it was a tough leather strap so the purse didn’t give way very easily.  Joh was dragged by the guy on the bike for a good 10 meters or so before the purse strap finally gave way and they guy took off.  Joh was a little banged up but OK - just a few scrapes and bruises, although it was a pretty frightening thing to have happen.  There wasn’t anything either of us could have done, the guy was going quite fast on the bike so there was no way I could do anything other than watch as Joh was dragged down the street.  He took off fast, and all I could do was yell a few choice words and throw my water bottle at him (I missed…).  Joh was able to collect herself pretty quickly and we surveyed the damage.  We went to a pharmacy to get some antiseptic cream for her scrapes and cleaned them up as best we could.   The purse had been taken and with it our camera.  Nothing else of value was in the purse.  The camera had a lot of photos on it, and so we lost all our photos from our time spent on the island of Phu Quoc and from our first day here in Kuala Lumpur.  Joh typically backs up her photos off the camera every week or so, so we still have all the other photos from Vietnam.  It’s a real shame to lose the photos but there isn’t anything we can do about it.  As for the camera, we filed a police report to send to our travel insurance company, so hopefully the insurance will come through and we’ll be reimbursed. 

So we’ll have to go shopping for a new camera and purse. This will be our 4^th camera purchased in just over a year.  The first one we bought last year before our trip, and it got stolen in Bolivia.  The second was just a temporary one for the last part of our first part of this trip, and then while we were home Joh bought a really nice one for this part of our trip, and now that one is stolen too.  Hopefully the forth one will last us a little longer.

Anyways, sorry to end off on such bad news.  Hopefully things will get better and we’ll be taking more photos soon. In the meantime, I assure you we’ll be extra cautious and be as safe as we can be.

Hoi An

Ho Chi Minh and Cu Chi Tunnels

Hanoi and Sapa

We’ve spent the last two weeks travelling around northern Vietnam.  Vietnam is a fantastic country.  As most of you know, I have been here before – back in 2007 on solo trip, where I visited Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand over a span of 5 weeks.  It is really good to return to a place you’ve visited before, and to do it now together as a couple, it’s really neat to show Joh some of the interesting things I experienced last time.  We plan on visiting quite a few of the places I saw last time, but now that we’ve got some additional time, we can explore them more slowly and go to a few new places along the way.

We started our travels in Vietnam in the capital city Hanoi, which is in the northern part of the country.  Hanoi was one of my favorite cities I visited last time, so I was really looking forward to returning.  The city is quite large, but the main interesting area is the old town which surrounds a small lake in the middle of the city. The area is really nice, you can walk along the pathways and gardens surrounding the lake, visit old shops, restaurants, and cafes scattered around the old town, and walk around in the markets checking out all kinds of cool stuff. 

One of the main things that shocks you right away when you get to Hanoi (or any Vietnamese city for that matter) is the motorbikes that clog up the streets.  There are millions of motorbikes in Vietnam, and at any given moment it feels as though they are all swirling around you, honking their horns, and zooming in and out of every square inch of free space.  It is tricky to cross the streets as it feels as though one step off the sidewalk will result in a collision within seconds.   However, if you look around you will notice many of the people crossing without problems.  The key to it apparently is to just have faith.  You need to just step off the sidewalk and confidently just start walking. The drivers will see you and swerve around you.  The first few times you do this it feels incredibly nerve-racking but after a while it starts making sense and it is actually quite a neat feeling to just step out and leave your fate in the hands of others.

As you may have guessed by the content of previous posts in this blog, food was of course a huge part of our decision to come to Vietnam.  Joh and I both love to eat Vietnamese food, and we’ve been to Vietnamese restaurants back home quite often.  Our favorite is Pho.  Pho is basically just a bowl of soup, but the flavors and textures are quite unique.  They make Pho by starting with a really good beef broth and then they add rice noodles.  From there they add thin slices of raw beef to the piping hot broth which lightly cooks it while keeping it nice and tender.  They then give you a plate of crunchy bean sprouts, basil, and other greens and you dunk them in and then add hot chilli sauce to taste, and then you’re good to go.  You eat it with chop sticks, slurping up the noodles and other contents, splashing hot broth all over your table and usually your shirt too – never wear white shirts to Vietnamese restaurants ;).  Other part of the charm is that it is usually served on the sidewalk by little old ladies, to a small crowd of people gathered around on tiny plastic chairs or stools only 4 inches high on makeshift wooded tables.  These small “restaurants” also got a fresh keg of beer available, usually for only 15 cents a glass.  As you can imagine, these places are quite popular all over the city.

Another specialty of Hanoi (and I’m assuming all over Vietnam) is the coffee.  They have great coffee here.  One of the traditional ways it is served (and our usual choice) is poured over ice and a big dollop of sweetened condensed milk.  The strong, thick coffee, thinned out by the ice, and mixed with the caramelly flavor of the condensed milk creates a really delicious treat. It’s also really good hot too.  They serve it to you with a small aluminum contraption on top of the mug.  The contraption is stuffed with fresh ground coffee beans, hot water, and a small metal filter, and you need to sit and wait 5 minutes for the coffee to filter out before you can drink it.  You are well rewarded for your wait however, as the coffee is rich and thick and really really good.

Other than the city itself, there are two big reasons why tourists come to Hanoi.  The trips to Halong Bay and to Sapa.  I had previously been to Halong Bay, so we chose to do the trip to Sapa instead.  Sapa is the province in the north of Vietnam – near the China border.  It is a less developed area where there are small villages surrounded by rice fields and small mountains.  We went on a tour there for two or three days, and hiked through the hills and villages, watching the local people, gazing out over the farms, and checking out the locally made crafts.  Unfortunately our first day there was raining quite a lot so we got quite soaked, and on the second day the weather was better, but the trails were extremely muddy and slippery.  I’m not sure why, but for some reason I had thought it was a good idea to wear flip-flops and so I ended up slipping and sliding all over the place.  One of the old ladies from the village was following us (trying to sell us some of her wares) and I ended up holding her hand pretty much the entire way down the mountain.  If it wasn’t for her I would have fallen down and slipped off the trail over the cliff, so even though I felt like quite a wuss the whole time, I’m glad she was there, because if she wasn’t there I wouldn’t be around to tell the tale.

After Sapa, we spent a day or two in Hanoi relaxing, and then headed south to the city of Hoi An.  We spent a week there, and I’ll write about it soon.  We’ve since moved on to Saigon, and we hope to spend a few days or more here, depending on how it goes.

Hanoi

Sapa

China

Well, it’s been quite a while since we’ve posted here on the blog, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything exciting.  Our last blog post was about our time in Hong Kong, and since then we’ve travelled all around China and have seen and done a lot of cool stuff. We’ve actually just finished our tour of China and we’re now sitting comfortably in Hanoi Vietnam, and we expect to spend the next month or so here exploring Vietnam.

To sum up our time in China is really difficult.  China is huge. There are billions of people, many different cultures, languages, foods, styles, and landscapes.  I’ve heard it said that saying you’ve visited China is like saying you’ve visited planet earth.  You can never see it all, and it is incredibly diverse and impossible to sum up in just a few sentences.  That being said, here is a bit of a recap of our time here in China:

We basically travelled in a loop. First we went north from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, then further up the coast to Beijing, and then back down through the middle visiting Xi’an and Lijiang, before finally exiting the country at the Vietnam border.  All of our travelling has been done by train.  They have a very effective train system here in China.  We spent a total of 108 hours on these trains. They all were sleeper trains so it wasn’t too bad. We could lie around  and relax, read, and sleep the time away. We both managed to get through a lot of books over the past month. Some of the trains were better than others.  The beds we had comfortable enough, but anytime you’re stuck together with 100’s of other people in a confined space for 15 hours, it’s going to get a bit smelly and dirty by the end of the trip. 

Shanghai

Our first stop after Hong Kong was Shanghai.  Shanghai is the most populated city in China and it is very modern and easy to get around and see the city.  We did a lot of walking around, taking the subway from one end of the city to the other, checking out a bunch of different neighborhoods, visited the giant aquarium, walked along the river in the Bund district, through the French Concession, through walking streets, and temples.  We also spent a day in a city two away called Hangzhou. Hangzhou was really cool. It has a lake in the middle of the city with a lot of temples and gardens and everything around, so it was a really nice place to spend the day walking around exploring.  Another great thing about our time in Shanghai was the hostel we stayed at.  It was probably the nicest hostel we’ve ever stayed in, and it was very welcome after the dump we stayed at in Hong Kong.

Shanghai

Beijing

Beijing was really cool.  We walked around the city, saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Olympic buildings (although there was an event going on at the time, so we couldn’t get near them), and we went for a day to the Great Wall of China and walked along the wall for a few hours.

Beijing

Xi’an

After Beijing we took a train to Xi’an. Xi’an is the old capital of China, and not nearly as modern as Shanghai or Beijing.  The city was pretty nice, but our main reason for being there was to see the Terra-cotta warriors.  Years ago, archeologists found some terra-cotta statues of warriors underground, and started digging further and found a huge army of them.  There were thousands of statues buried under the ground along with horses, chariots, and other artifacts.  We visited the site for a day and visited a bunch of museums in the area. It was really cool, but they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them still to finish excavating the area. There are still massive amounts of other artifacts to be dug up still.  I think that this place will be even better to visit 10 or 20 years from now when they’ve unearthed even more.

Xi'an

Lijiang

Lijiang was our favorite city in China.  The old section of Lijiang has been transformed into a beautiful walking area full of old buildings, cobble stone roads, small shops and restaurants, and all in all an amazingly beautiful place to walk around.  The city was always busy and full of life and lights and colors and flowers.  We spent around a week here strolling around the streets and checking out all the nearby sights.

Lijiang

Tiger Leaping Gorge

While we were in Lijiang, we went on a 2 day trip to hike the Tiger Leaping Gorge.  The gorge is a beutifull area around 3 hours away from Lijiang. Mountains, valleys, and the river made for beautiful scenery. We hiked the first day around 6 or 7 hours up into the mountains and along the cliffs through breathtaking scenery. We stayed at a lodge overnight and then the next morning we hiked another 5 hours or so down into the gorge and back up out again.  It was quite a treacherous hike down and up steep cliffs, and rebar ladders set into the stone walls.  The river at the bottom was fast and full of large rapids and was a really cool pay-off after hiking for two days straight.

2 day Trek - Tiger Leaping Gorge

After a few days of recuperation in Lijiang, we made our way out of China via 2 days of trains and train station waiting rooms.  We had a great time in China and saw quite a lot, but now we’re excited for the next part of our journey:  Vietnam.  Now that we’ve got full internet access again, we’ll hopefully be able to blog a little more frequently.

Finally....Photos from San Fran and Hong Kong

Hey everyone,

We are out of China so we can finally upload our photos. Below are the albums from San Fran and Hong Kong. Jack is working on a massive blog for the rest of our time in China. After he is done, we will add the rest of the photos from China.

BLOG San Fran

BLOG Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is classified as one of the world’s great cities along with New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo and a few more, so it was a must see for us and a great place to start the Asian leg of our trip.  Millions of people live here and it considered one of the cutting-edge cities as far as technology goes.  Sure there are areas in the city that are poor and wearing out, but the majority is giant skyscrapers, extravagant shopping malls, and a very streamlined transportation system.  We were quite shocked as to how new and clean everything looked.

It was very easy to get around in Hong Kong.  From the airport, we caught a bus into the Kowloon area of Hong Kong and it dropped us of quite near our hostel on one of the major roads.  Hotels and hostels in Hong Kong were very expensive, so we had just gone online and booked one of the cheapest ones we could find. We weren’t expecting much, but the place was named Chung King Mansions, so we weren’t quite sure if this was going to literally be a mansion or end up being a bit of a slum.  It ended up being a large, busy building full of small shops and food vendors, with 18 floors of small apartments above it.  Now when I say small, I mean small.  The room was quite literally around 8 feet by 8, with a tiny washroom in the corner that was at the most 2 by 2.  Just big enough to contain a toilet, with a tiny sink that was basically in your lap as you sat on the toilet and a shower that sprinkled down on top of the toilet. The room also had 2 beds around 1 and a half feet wide and around 5 feet long.  There was just enough room to sleep and that was about it. We figured that this was what we get for being cheap, and we made the best of it.  After spending all week sleeping in airports and on airplanes, we were hoping for a nicer place but this would have to do.  We booked in here for 3 nights and resolved to spend the majority of the time exploring the city.

We woke up the following morning and went to start our day with a good breakfast.  Now Hong Kong (and generally most of Asia) doesn’t do breakfast the way our western society does.  There’s no bacon and egg restaurants or cereal or toast or anything like that.  Basically the breakfast menu is the same as the menu for every other meal.  We opted for a bowl of soup with noodles and we didn’t regret it.  You get a huge bowl with rice noodles, delicious broth, some meat (usually pork), and a tiny bit of vegetables. If was a great introduction to the local food, and the bowl of noodles has become quite a staple for us over the last few days. The menus here are very easy to read. Every item on the menu has a picture with it, so it’s pretty easy to see what you’re getting.  After 3 or 4 days we have yet to have a disappointing meal.

We spent our days walking around the city, crossing the harbor on the Star Ferry, visiting both the island of Hong Kong and the area of Kowloon.  The city is very easy to get around in.  Huge sidewalks, a great metro system, ferries, and underground walkways bringing you across streets and under buildings. There is shopping everywhere.  Hong Kong in general is quite a rich area, and the shopping areas reflected that.  Designer clothing, jewelry, electronics, and everything in between was for sale and in grand displays everywhere we went. 

We visited the number one recommended tourist stop – The Peak, which is basically a large hill in Hang Kong that gives you a fantastic view of the city.  It reminded me a lot of going up Corcovado in Rio.  A trolley car ride up to the top and then a great view of the harbor.

The harbor is probably the coolest sight in Hong Kong.  Basically the city is divided by a water way, and on either side are large skyscrapers up and down the waterfront.  At night the buildings are all synchronized to show a cool light show.  Music plays and the buildings all light up with different colors and there are lasers and flashing lights and everything.  It was really cool to see.

One of the other highlights of our time in Hong Kong was visiting a Christian church in Hong Kong on Sunday morning.  It was just down the road from our hostel, and we had seen it the day before and made plans to be there for the service in the morning.  We hadn’t really expected to see Christian churches here, so we jumped at the opportunity to get a service in before we entered China and were unable to do so.  The church was classified as Anglican, but it was nothing like the Anglican church we’re familiar with back home.  It was quite a large congregation, probably half-foreigners and half-locals.  The service was in English, and the pastor was from Australia. There was a lot of singing, bible reading, and prayers, and the pastor had a good message about what it was like to be a Christian in a city like Hong Kong.  After the service there was a social with all the attendees and we drank tea and talked to some of the people we met.  We met a family from Denmark that were living there for a year, and we asked them all sorts of questions about the church-life here.  It was a really enlightening experience and it was great to meet fellow Christians on the other side of the world.

After spending our three days here we felt that it was time to move on.  We enjoyed our time here in Hong Kong, but it was a bit expensive to stay here longer so we’re on the move again.  We booked an overnight train ride to Shanghai, and so we’re off now to visit mainland China. We plan to spend a few days in Shanghai and then probably go further north to Beijing.  From what we’ve read and seen about China were really looking forward to it.  I’m currently writing this blog post on the train, and watching the Chinese countryside go by has been quite a treat.  The country looks really beautiful. Giant cities, rice fields, farmland, lots of activity, and lots of greenery everywhere.  Can’t wait to get off the train and start exploring…