Vietnam Part 4: Da Nang

A fabulous beach. Not for swimming. 

Da Nang is an up and coming city in the South of Vietnam. Having recently suffered enough via slower methods of transport, I flew there from Hanoi to meet up with Eric. Da Nang appears to have recently been discovered for its potential as a prime tourist destination. It is currently exploding with construction projects for resorts and hotels. Like a puppy with massive paws, there was way more infrastructure than what was required by the current residents (take note, Auckland).

The darker side of tourism. Workers operate in shifts so construction of this massive hotel can continue 24/7. The rusted green shacks beneath the building were built to house the workers during the project. 

As I sat on the hotel bed, wallowing in air conditioning and shamelessly eating my way through an entire family packet of gummy candy, I started to notice incessant bird noises. I went into the hall where the 'caws' were echoing but...no birds. I stuck my head out the window and realized the noises were sounding right across the city, but still I could see no birds. Odd. I thought about it and decided the only bird big enough to make such a loud, continuous noise would probably have to be a pterodactyl - definitely extinct. Maybe the noises were fake? When I shared these ideas with Eric, he became concerned that I was going crazy, so we both set about looking for birds to prove our own theories. It turns out that littered around the city, on top of tall buildings, are large speakers that blast non-stop bird sounds (and I am not crazy). After dark, and when you focus on the sounds too much, it gets a bit annoying, but during the day it does make the city feel more "nature-y". 

The view from the roof of our hotel. There are bird speakers out there somewhere. 

We had two nights and one day to spend in Da Nang. In consulting The Oracle (TripAdvisor) for things to do, we came across Asia Park. Asia Park is a large theme park that is (obviously) built to represent the different regions of Asia. It is well staffed and has all the things you would expect from a theme park including mascots, manicured lawns, fountains, background music and cool rides.  It was deserted - there were more staff than guests.  Walking around an empty theme park at night is one of the most bizarre things I have experienced. It feels like going back to a level of Spyro the Dragon after you have completed it and collected all the crystals. Every now and then we came across another small group of people and exchanged "can you believe this?!" looks.

Eric and I outside an abandoned Angkor Watt replica at Asia Park.
Half excited, half "wtf is going on"...

My main concern was that because the park was empty, we would not be allowed to go on the rides. On the contrary, when we walked up to rides, the attendants would stand up, look embarrassed for slacking off, strap Eric and I into the opposite side of whatever ride it was (so as not to throw the gigantic contraption off balance) then turn it on. I highly doubt our $12 entry fee would have come close to covering the costs of our near-private visit. Clearly, this park was built under the expectation that Da Nang will soon be inundated with tourists.

This picture really captures the creepy-ness of the empty amusement park. We went around that Sun Wheel twice because we had been told there would be fireworks for Guy Fawkes. There weren't.

View from the Sun Wheel: one half of empty Asia Park.

One of the best things you can do during the day in Asia is book a tour. They are social, super cheap, and enable you to see way more than you would be able to adventuring on your own. We signed up for a tour that visited the Lady Buddha and Marble Mountain. Marble Mountain (a big hill by NZ standards) contains two large caves titled Heaven Cave and Hell Cave. I did not so much like Hell Cave, which was full of sadistic models of mostly women being tortured for exclusively female evils such as lying and prostitution. (Un-fun Fact: According to our guide in Hanoi, in practice women do not inherit property in Vietnam - a concept I am only vaguely familiar with due to Downton Abbey.) There is progress to be made.

The mystical entrance to Heaven Cave.

Here, Eric poses for the cover of his next Christian Rock album.

Our guide, Snail, was very friendly, informed us in great detail of his love life, and even had a hand-sign for our group. At the end of our tour, Snail took us to a marble factory and insisted we buy something to support the local community. I cannot think of a more ridiculous thing to try and sell backpackers than marble statues. Sure, the statues were cool, but nobody in their right mind would carry around a marble statue whilst travelling. The tour company was very optimistic in thinking backpackers would ship home 7ft statues of Buddha. According to reviews, most tours in Da Nang end this way.

Lady Buddha. Serene. Definitely not a liar or a prostitute. Several strangers took photos of Eric and I here, we must look like celebrities. 

Da Nang was worth visiting, though one day and one night would have been enough. I imagine it will be a very different place in a couple of years when all the hotels and resorts are complete.

Next stop: Hoi An <3

Bonus pic! I could not find the entrance to this ride, but it looked awesome. Maybe a small world replica? 

Vietnam Part 3: Halong Bay

It is not easy travelling around Vietnam as a team of two chicks. It became apparent very quickly that Liv and I basically had "target" stamped on our foreheads (this was a not an issue in Laos or Thailand, or when I was travelling in Vietnam with Eric). On two occasions we found ourselves being yelled at and physically trapped/blocked by men demanding money for things that didn't make sense. In a separate incident, we had to make a quick exit as we were surrounded by a group of guys in a public pavilion in the middle of the day. Take note female future Vietnam travelers. Constantly being on guard and being yelled at really wears you down after a while. As we arrived back to the Hanoi airport, our guard was not up to where it should have been. For some context, the airport is about 40 mins drive out of the city.

Liv and I negotiated a taxi fare with what we thought was a friendly young taxi driver outside the international terminal. He led us to a fancy car in the airport car park, where there was  an older driver waiting in the car. In what was perhaps the most brainless decision of our trip, we got into the car. The guy we negotiated the fare with got in too. Uh oh. Not getting out of the car was the second most brainless decision of the trip. As we drove along, Liv and I exchanged messages and decided this was sketchy. I vaguely recalled some statistic that if you allow yourself to be moved by a kidnapper your chances of ending up dead increase to 90%. Full blown panic mode ensued.  For inspiration, I thought back on all the ways I had seen people murdered on CSI,  then scanned my backpack for potential weapons. I identified a plug for stabbing and a cellphone charger cord for strangling. Faking a stretch, I not-so-sneakily handed over the plug to Liv so we were both equipped. As I was mentally preparing to garrote the driver in the seemingly inevitable event he took us down a dodgy back road, the passenger guy sensed something was off and and handed over some sort of identification card. Anyone could laminate a photo. I wouldn't have been able to pronounce his name, let alone remember it, not that it would matter if we were murdered. I was not reassured. I pretended to be reassured and handed it back. It was a long, unpleasant and stressful car ride. When we were miraculously dropped at our hotel, Liv and I reflected on our poor decisions.

Still alive! At the top of a cave in Halong Bay. 

On a positive note, the final part of our girls trip consisted of a two-day-one-night cruise on Halong Bay. This meant not having to worry about anything except what to drink as we were chaperoned onto a boat and fed copious amounts for the remainder of our trip. Halong Bay cruises are a staple tourist attraction in Hanoi. There are multiple agencies through which you can book the exact same thing, with varying degrees of boat fanciness: you get picked up at your hotel in Hanoi, driven for 3.5 hours to the marina, board the boat, eat lunch while sailing to an island, climb the island, kayak, have dinner and fish for squid (it was not squid season, so no squid, just the crew laughing at us, but this would have been awesome had it been the right time of year). The next morning, you visit a cave, sail back to the marina over a cooking class and lunch, then get driven the 3.5 hours back to Hanoi.

Ahhhhhhh - mostly for decoration, we had about 45 mins to sit in these fabulous chairs.

The cruises are incredibly slick operations. They have their processes down to a tee. The fact that so many other people are doing the exact same thing as you at the same time definitely removes some of the potential "magic" but adds an interesting element to the trip. It feels like being part of some great movement, sailing to Halong Bay with 200 other boats. Sharing a cave with 1000 people, on the other hand, is less romantic.

A large island cave, cleverly made to look more interesting, and a little Disney-esque, with coloured light.

When one thinks of a boat cruise, one would assume that much of the time would be spent sunbathing on the deck and relaxing. Not so. Our cruise was so jam packed with activities that we did not have much of an opportunity to lie still. One of these activities included kayaking. We're pretty sure the primary purpose of this activity was to wear out the guests so we were too tired to stay up partying on the boat. Donning broken life jackets, our guide led us out to an island, then further out to another island, then just out into the middle of nowhere. Some of our cruise buddies had no experience kayaking and so slowly tailed the rest of us going in circles. By the time we returned to the boat it was dark and four people were missing. Our guide had to hop back in his kayak and go and find them between the other cruise boats.

Here, we prepare to break an important boat rule by kayaking just before sunset. 

Dusk falls. How romantic!

We sail back to the marina as part of the envoy :(

After 12 days, our girl trip had come to an end. Liv and I parted ways - Liv to pick up her tailored clothes then head back to NZ and me to the airport to continue my SE Asia adventure.

Next stop: Da Nang - a beach city in South Vietnam!

Laos: Vientiane

A pretty fountain in the CBD. 

Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a relaxed, low key city located on the banks on the Mekong River. Shattered from our "earthy" Vang Vieng adventures, Liv and I were ecstatic to find our hotel in Vientiane had a pool, a marble staircase and a turtle in the lobby pond. As dedicated explorers, we never did use the pool, but it was nice to know it was there. [Sitting in my Toronto apartment looking out at the snow, I now feel like I wasted the opportunity.]

Liv and I only had one night and a day to spend in Vientiane. We started off by wandering into the city centre to check out the sprawling night markets and the Mekong. The Mekong is an essential source of life for many people throughout South East Asia. It is big, it is impressive, but it is not so nice. Unfortunately, due to people and various organisations using it in an unrestrained manner, it is very polluted. It smells bad and rubbish can be seen on the banks. For me, it ranks alongside polar bears as a symbol of the negative environmental impact of current human activity. (Here is a sad article about the environmental degradation of South East Asia, featuring the Mekong River).

Basing our dinner decision on how many people were sitting at the restaurant, we were led to the best meal of our trip - BBQ fish. So good! Probably caught in the Mekong.  

The TripAdvisor app is your best possible travel companion in Asia. I used it everyday to figure out where to go, what to do and what to eat. Vendors have cottoned on to this. As you walk around, you will see stores with massive TripAdvisor signs and stickers on their windows. Of course, being Asia, some of these are real and others are likely fake, but the beauty of the app is you don't need to rely on advertising to make decisions.  In consulting The Oracle (aka TripAdvisor), Liv and I were led to a place called "Buddah Park", a well manicured grass field covered in huge statues about an hour out of town. We decided to take a public bus to get there.

You need to know exactly what you want when you leave your hotel in Asia, because as soon as you are in public, people are going to aggressively try and convince you to do things that will benefit them. Liv and I were beeped at by tuk tuks and taxis frequently on the way to the bus station (very normal). We were told to buy all sorts of things including live toads (less normal). When we eventually found the bus, a group of taxi drivers even tried to convince us we could not catch the bus, and should go with them instead. Nice try! We were feeling pretty clever by the time we made it to and from Buddha Park by bus.

Buddha Park - Statues, everywhere.

Buddha Park - An inviting giant head to crawl into. 

Buddha Park - The structure behind the giant head! It contained four levels, accessible via small, steep and windy "stairs". Each level was full of statues depicting events I did not understand. One eventually emerges onto the roof through a tiny hole.

For the sake of being informed global citizens, Liv and I decided to spend our last few hours in Laos visiting the COPE Visitor Centre (the other major tourist attraction is a giant gold temple - next time!). This is a hall a few minutes out of the CBD, set up as a museum to document the impacts of cluster bombs, the journey to clearing them and providing treatment to victims. The USA  dropped 270 million cluster bombs throughout Laos during the Vietnam war, attempting to hit Vietnamese communists using Laotian jungle trails. Many of these bombs did not detonate, so even now, villagers are coming into contact with these bombs and getting maimed/killed. Fortunately, the government and various charities have set up a project to locate and remove the remaining bombs, access victims in remote villages and provide them with medical care and prosthetic limbs.

A wall of prosthetic limbs crafted by villagers. These were donated to the COPE Centre by villagers who had been fitted with a proper prosthetic.

I wish we had more time to spend in Vientiane. There were plenty of good places to eat, good night markets, good massages and interesting tourist attractions to check out. It felt safe which made exploring more enjoyable.

Next stop: back to Vietnam for a Halong Bay cruise!

Christmas in Portland, Michigan

In this post, I take a break from writing about Asia to detail Christmas in the USA (because no one wants to hear about Christmas months after the fact).

Context for those not familiar with Portland (which until recently, included me). Source for map.

The last time I traveled to the USA was for a school band trip in 2013 when I went to LA with 40 other excited teenagers. This trip was (thankfully, now I am not a teenager) very different. Eric and I headed to a town called Portland in the state of Michigan (shaped like a mitten), to spend Christmas with his family. We traveled from Toronto by bus through sleep-inducing, snowy Canadian fields, arriving at a border processing centre in a city called Windsor (where Americans cross the border to drink on their 19^th birthdays). 

Immigration is never a fun experience but it is an especially un-fun experience when you are trying to enter a country which is under constant threat. I focused on holding on to the philosophy that it is a privilege to be allowed into another country as we were aggressively instructed by agents wearing bullet-proof vests, in an underground tunnel facility, to place our bags against one wall and line up against a separate wall for inspection.  

Burr. 

Coming from NZ, I had never in my life really imagined spending any time in a bus station in Detroit. Especially the night before Christmas eve… but that is where we ended up for a short time. If I had put my mind to it, the experience would have been in line with what I had expected. Not great. On the plus side, we did not become a crime statistic. On the minus side, there was no sight of Eminem and the actual peanut M&M’s were in a vending machine that did not work (it was dinner time – the timeless mystery meat sandwiches within the “warm” vending machine did not appeal).  After a few more hours of busing through snowy darkness, we were picked up by Eric’s dad, Bill, at a bus stop in a town called Lansing for the final part of our journey to Portland.

Spot the deer blind - a comfortable box equipped with carpet and a heater, used for hunting deer.

Arriving in the States after the successful election of the Western World’s most questionable leader (in my lifetime), I partly expected to be greeted by some chaotic, post-apocalyptic scenario in which I was immediately identified as a foreigner and deported. Instead, I was greeted by friendly faces, offers of cinnamon rolls, and the most comprehensive collection of Christmas decorations I have ever seen, including a shiny green pickle ornament. Bill generously hosted us for the week, providing every snack, meat and condiment available (heads up to my NZ friends: check out cheese dip). 

Eric, Christmas Grinch, attempts to steal the only pavlova in Portland. 

It was too cold to go out much so most of our time was spent indoors eating, napping, watching childhood home videos and, in my case, losing at cards. During short adventures (we could survive approximately 1 hour a day in the wilderness before losing all feeling in our noses, fingers and toes), Eric and I set about to smash as much ice as possible. With two rivers running through it, Portland has the best and the most ice. As a person who hasn't seen much ice, this was the ultimate playground (smashing ice and stomping through snow piles gave away my non-local status).

The best ice. 

One of the greatest things about Michigan is that everything is available. Kiwifruit from New Zealand, strawberries, mangoes, 2L bottles of vodka (in supermarkets!), red velvet beer (?!), 8 billion types of cereal and of course, peanut butter candy. Anything one could want to consume is readily available (accessible and affordable).  The down side of this is of course the negative environmental impact of procuring and consuming all this awesome stuff. Fortunately for those in the USA, there is so much usable space that environmental impacts of this consumption have a minimal impact on most people’s daily lives. Michigan is so vast you can hide rubbish anywhere and transport an infinite amount of goods without noticing a build-up of exhaust. (Compare this with Phnom Penh, where people live in piles of their own rubbish because there is nowhere to put it, or Bangkok, where the air is awful due in part to the exhaust of millions in a small space.) When you can't see the environmental impacts of driving a truck the size of two elephants, buying out of season fruit imported from the other side of the world (guilty), or a bag of individually wrapped mini Reese's peanut butter Christmas trees (guilty), how can anyone say no?

Next stop (actually a previous stop), Vientiane, the capital city of Laos.