The flight from SF to Hong Kong was thirteen and a half hours in nearly constant night. The flight attendants woke us up once in a while to give us food. We had requested vegetarian meals, but that seemed to mean that we weren't allowed bread, coffee, tea or dessert either. When we arrived, it was a day later.
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is completely nuts. The guide book says there are eight million people and three million motorbikes in Saigon, but I don't believe it. There seems to be at least one motorbike for every man, woman and child. The taxi from the airport was engulfed in scooters going in all directions on all sides of the street and carrying all sorts of outsized cargo. In a rational world, we would have seen at least ten catastrophic accidents, but there were none.
Our hotel is in district one, where all the big tourist attractions are. Even though communists seem to like grand plazas and boulevards, the streets in the nicest parts of Saigon are mostly narrow and always clogged with motorbikes. To cross the street, one just wades out into traffic and hopes, unless there is a traffic signal. The traffic signals are often ignored and hard to spot. We walked into traffic against a light several times.
We got to our hotel at 11:30 and slept till 1:30 - 11:30 PM in SF - before heading out into a tropical thunderstorm. The deluge didn't slow the motorbikes at all.
There was a covered market near our hotel. It's like the chinese market in Budapest or the grand bazaar in Istanbul, but the salespeople are less pushy than the latter. The market seemed set up for tourists, with prices to match, but there aren't really enough tourists to justify the inventory.
The rain let up, and we wandered along to a coffee place and sat and waited for the inevitable motorbike pile-up, but it never came. We walked around the Ho Chi Minh shopping district and down to the river, which was busy with strange water traffic, floating vines and dirty swimmers.
By then, the jet lag had begun to hurt, so we made our way towards the spot we'd picked for dinner. It was at the super-swanky temple club. The Temple Club is across the street from a real temple that had a riot of colorful figures clambering on top of its pagoda. The food was great, but pricey, and we ended up spending a whole thirty dollars on dinner.
We returned on foot. After dark, the Saigon streets are just as chaotic. Motorbike repair continues apace on the sidewalk. They use little fire pits to seal leaks in inner tubes, so every so often there was an open fire underfoot. A motorbike rental guy offered me some women from a wrinkled snapshot.
Day 2:
Still massively jet-lagged, we rose around 5:30. At six, I went downstairs to see when breakfast was served and I managed to startle the hotel's proprietor awake from the bench in the lobby where he sleeps.
After breakfast, we caught a cab to the Emperor Jade pagoda. We learned that a thirty minute cab ride only costs three dollars, so we resolved to use them more often.
The Jade Emperor pagoda is an island of Taoist tranquility and spookiness in the sea of motorbike bedlam. In front, there are a few buddhist elements - a shrine, a bodhi tree and a write-a-note-on-a-turtle pond, but these are just fronts meant to keep the authorities from realizing that it is a chinese Taoist temple. That means dark warrens filled with countless gods, some quite angry looking. The temple was filled with incense smoke that was cut through by light from slits in the roof.
From there, we walked to the war remnants museum. It was sunny out and becoming blisteringly hot. I can't imagine why anyone would want to invade a country that's so hot and sweaty. I also came up with a winning tourist attraction: the air conditioner museum. I would definitely liked to have spent some time there.
The war remnants museum is a collection of captured American military hardware (how'd they get a whole f-5 fighter jet?) and pictures of deformed babies and torture. It's an odd mix of anti-war rhetoric and military hardware as objects of desire. It made me feel especially soft and fleshy and exposed to too much metal that might suddenly explode. I felt uncomfortable. Jill felt uncomfortable. It was sort of like Auschwitz without a consistent message.
From there, we walked a short way to the reunification palace, which was the white house for South Vietnam. Lots of history and some very non-communist opulence. Sadly, there was no exhibit about Diem's prized air-conditioner collection, but one room in the basement with a framed AK-47 was air conditioned.
For lunch, we went to a place that specializes in street-style cooking. It's in a courtyard that's filled with smoke from all of the cooking stations along the wall. We had a feast there. It was the best food we had in Saigon.
The afternoon was mostly lost to jet lag, but we went out to a very fancy restaurant that gave my stomach enough problems to require that I start a course of cipro.
Day 3:
We were picked up at 7:30 the next morning by our tour guide and a driver for our trip to the Mekong delta. I expected the city to fade to rural countryside, but that's not how it works. There are 20 million people living in the delta region, and there is an enormous amount of activity and construction.
We stopped at a buddhist temple on the way, and it was fascinating to see one of the monks praying and ringing a giant bell while the other monks ate lunch. Our guide gave us a thorough explanation of vietnamese religion down to the dogmatic differences between Thai and Vietnamese Buddhism. A large fraction of Vietnamese are Buddhist. There are lots of Taoist and Confucians. There is also a religion invented in 1920 and referred to in "The Quiet American" that is sort of like a Vietnamese Unitarianism - Buddha, Jesus, Lenin and Victor Hugo are among their prophets. Our guide said, "Two million people are members of the communist party and 100% of Vietnamese practice ancestor worship." There was some confusion about what religion to check off on official forms until the government removed ancestor worship as a given.
Our first stop in the delta was a rice noodle factory. The term 'factory' is a little odd, because it was just an extended family of nine sons and countless grandchildren carrying on the father's tradition in a complex of small houses.
After that, we left the car and got on a long wooden motor boat which took us to a candy factory. All that's missing in that story are OompaLoompas, right? The factory was as primitive as the noodle factory, but the candy was delicious. There was a table set for us with tea and samples of all of their candy.
The waterways of the Mekong Delta are no less crowded than the streets of the city. Every kind of boat plies its waters, though most are wood and have demon eyes painted on their prows to scare away evil.
After the candy factory, we were on the boat for about an hour, crossing some channels that were about half a mile wide and slowly navigating along other, tiny winding channels. There were small concrete bridges that seemed as if they could barely support the motorbikes that were on them.
Deep in one of the small channels, we stopped for lunch. Down a short trail through the jungle was a restaurant that had an eden-like garden full of butterflies the size of birds. Waiting at our table was a fire-breathing deep fried fish, the fire made from a carved red pepper.
The hostess showed us how to carve the fish and wrap it with heavy rice paper to make spring rolls. Plate after plate of food, all of it exotic and much of it staring back at us arrived at our table.
After eating too much, I spent a few lovely minutes relaxing in a hammock beside the restaurant's caged python. A french couple were sitting nearby and she was clearly horrified by all of the strange food.
From there, we were rowed up the channel in a sampan, an open canoe with forward stroke oars in the back. Sadly, the woman rowing did no sing, but the trip continued to be idyllic.
From the sampan, we transfered to another motorized longboat and travelled via that through a light afternoon rain to a fruit tree nursery. There, there was a plate of exotic fruit to sample and more tea.
Then it was back to the car and across the river via a ferry that was jammed full of motorbikes to the town of Can Tho and our hotel. Once again, I was amazed that something like the Victoria hotel had survived the communists. The Victoria chain is a series of colonial-era hotels, and it is the sort of four star place where every ten seconds sees a person carrying one's luggage or passing out hand towels dipped in rose water. The hotel surrounded a large pool and faced out onto the river. It was one of the most luxurious places I've ever stayed. Jill and I both got massages.
Day 4:
In the morning, we were treated to the most sumptuous breakfast buffet that I have ever seen. The fruit selection alone was overwhelming. There was pomelo, which is like a large, sweet grape fruit, dragon fruit, which looks like chocolate chip ice cream, some sort of spiny lychee, Vietnamese oranges, which are green all the time and jack fruit, which tastes like watermelon bubble gum. We feasted and watched the heavy traffic out on the Mekong junction that our hotel presided over.
If I keep referring to our guide without his name, it's because his name is an utterly unpronounceable single syllable. I tried several times to learn it, but I could not manage the syllable's subtlety and promptly forgot it each time.
Our guide took us by boat from the hotel's dock to the floating market. The floating market is where wholesale produce is sold. Traders live on their boats, selling one cargo and buying another to take to the next location. What each boat is selling is advertised by attaching a sample to a bamboo pole over the boat. We saw a lot of jicama, pumpkin, cabbage and watermelon. There were also catfish barges with mesh hulls floating heavily.
From there, we travelled a narrow channel to a combination fruit, fish and frog farm for some more fruit tasting. There was a red faced monkey chained up nearby, and he screamed until he was tossed lychees, which he deftly unpeeled and ate before screaming again.
We had thought that our flight to Da Nang was at 6, but we looked at our paperwork while eating dollar noodles for lunch and realized it wasn't till eight. Luckily, our guide was willing to call the airline and arrange to move it earlier. He was really helpful, but taciturn to the point that we couldn't tell if he resented us or not. It didn't matter, we had an incredible time and learned more about Vietnam than I had expected.
Our flight over the south revealed a peculiarity of Vietnamese urban planning. In the Us, flying over the mountains reveals that the lumber companies have left trees standing only beside the road so that travelers can't tell that the forest has been clear cut out of sight. In Vietnam, people cram their buildings along the road so that one thinks one is driving through an endless megacity when most of the land is actually farmland. The illusion is complete. The Mekong Delta is home to 20 million people, but it feels like 50.
In Da Nang, we were picked up by a maniacal taxi driver who took us past construction sites for giant beach hotels. In ten or perhaps five years, the country will be unaffordable for us impoverished Americans.
The Hotel in Hoi An was luxurious as well, with a pebble-floored shower and roses everywhere. We were getting spoiled with hotels.
Day 5:
Hoi An is know for its made-to-order tailor shops, and we set out through the frenzy of the river-side produce market to shop for work clothes for Jill and, if possible, a checkerboard suit with racing flames for me. The tailoring process was fascinating. There was a sales floor with fitting rooms an bolts of fabric and fifty sales girls in traditional garb who swarm new arrivals. There are binders full of pictures of outfits from fashion magazines. One points at a picture and then negotiates changes and picks fabric. They then take measurements and tell the customer to return for a fitting eight hours later. Typically, it seems to take two fittings before the outfit is finished. There are a lot of Australian tourists in Vietnam who are quite large. It's comical to see a 6'5" Australian being fitted by a 4'7" seamstress.
Hoi An looks like an old west china town movie set. Because of its position on the mouth of a river, it was a major mediaeval trading post, and there are lots of Chinese and Japanese influences in the architecture. The old Chinese houses are really cool, with many open chambers surrounding a courtyard. They're made of nearly black wood and have a spooky elegance.
It was very hot. Officially, it was 95, but in the direct sunlight, it felt like 105. I had to take several trips back to the hotel room to cool off in the air conditioning and hose some of the sweat off in the shower. In between showers, we explored the narrow alleys, pursued always by the plaintive call of "hey you! You buy something please?"
For dinner, we had a great prix fix four course vegetarian dinner served by an enthusiastic man old enough to speak some french. I think it ended up costing 12 dollars.
Day 6:
We woke up early and went down to the market before breakfast so we could catch some of the fish action. The market is adjacent to a river, and boatloads of fish arrive in the morning. There are all sorts of crazy looking things for sale: squid, octopus, long eel-like fish with needle noses and bright red perch-like fish that are about 5 inches long. My guess is that most food in Vietnam is eaten fresh, as there doesn't seem to be a way to store or transport food on a large scale.
We had run into a woman who had been in Jill's class in Budapest while doing a fitting at Yaly. We'd arranged to meet the night before, but we were confused about the hotel she was in. However, Hoi An is too small for me to be surprised to run into her again at the morning's fitting.
The day was overcast and much cooler than the previous one, only about 85. We had some iced coffee, which in Vietnam can be delicious and comes with condensed milk. After another lunch siesta, I left Jill at the hotel and took one of the hotel's marginally functional bikes to the beach. Jill had a completely logical fear of riding a bike on the open road.
The road to the beach was short, only 2-km, and mostly built up. There are some nice stretches along the river though, and I saw my first water buffalo. I had no real desire to stay on the beach. With weather like Vietnam's, the idea of baking on the sand is less than enticing. However, I was impressed with the hammer and sickle banners that were hanging from the palm trees. On my return, it poured. Jill was glad she wasn't with me, but I'm happy I can now say I've ridden my bike in the rain in Vietnam.
Tourists can buy a multi-pass ticket to historic sites, which grants access to one from each of the museums, meeting halls and historic houses. It was raining, so it was a perfect time to go get some culture. In the case of the first historic house, an ancestor worship temple, the culture came combined with several opportunities to buy souvenirs of our visit, often of our visit to a particular room. The guide explained that the house wasn't for living, just for ancestor worship, then tried to sell us some old coins and so on. If one accepts that real life in this town comes with advertisements just like daytime TV, then one can learn to tune them out and enjoy the show.
We also went to a history museum. This was more interesting to me for being in a wealthy Chinese merchant's house than for the actual history lessons. We also went to a shop that uses an exhibit about silk production to lure customers in. We petted some silkworms and bought a trinket. Everyone won.
That evening, we met Amanda (the woman from CEU via Columbia) and her friend Anna t the Tam tan, one of those sorts of places that tourist college students get together to experiment with the international transmission of venereal diseases. We drank and chatted for a while, and then a group of fifty Japanese and Vietnamese tourists arrived and began to holler and do shots. Suddenly, it was birthday time, and a techno version of the happy birthday song began to play on infinite loop. The Japanese - Vietnamese crowd hollered even more loudly. A bat flitted around the room, flirting with death among the blades of the ceiling fans.
We left and went to a much cheesier ex-pat bar with giant painting of U2's Bono over the bar. The place was a meat market for Australians, which is good for the women as Australian men tend to be large and rugged. Australian women are also large and rugged. A large rugged man with a bandana around his neck came over and did some sort of man ritual with me to determine which of the three cute girls I was with could be honorably peeled away. We settled on him taking Amanda and Anna and Jill and I decided to go back to our hotel. In front of the bar, we saw our first motorbike crash. A bike with two girls on it was crossing an intersection when a man came down the street much too fast in the perpendicular direction and slammed into them. It was quite scare, but everyone involved eventually staggered to their feet. I wouldn't bet my medical license on no-one having lingering injuries though. We also saw two cops on one motorbike chasing a single guy on another motorbike over the bridge.
Day 7:
Jill woke up very sick, with vomiting and diarrhea. I ran to the store to get her final dress and brought her what tea, water and bread I could find, but not much helped. She's tough though, and managed to survive our cab ride to the airport, where our plane was delayed four hours. Because of that delay, we had to find our own transportation in Ha Noi, which came in the form of a nice man who was returning from delivering some executives to the airport in the company car. He pointed out some neat things along the way, like the Red River and Ho's mausoleum (now that we've become familiar with Vietnam, I feel like I can call him Ho). The driver also recommended a restaurant.
The hotel, which was called the Ha Noi Elegance III is overwrought and gaudy to a hilarious extreme. The toilet, for example, was covered with gold trim. At the front desk, they recommended the same restaurant as the driver. They swore that it wasn't the same as the street food restaurant in Saigon, but there were wrong. The experience was just as good the second time around. I annoyed an Australian next to me by suggesting that one should always drink the beer named after the place one is visiting. He seemed not to appreciate Ha Noi beer. The menu said that extra swan, snail or sparrow could be purchased on the side.
After a morning of vomiting, Jill was tired, so we went to bed early.
Day 8:
We were staying in the old section of Ha Noi, a medieval warren of alleys that branches to the north of the lake. The streets were once dominated by guilds, so they are named for the product that was sold there. Today, they should be renamed, since most streets still carry only one type of product. Some good names would be: packing tape street, bamboo street, Chinese mushroom street and open flame street.
It's a hodgepodge of stores and shacks, with buildings built around banyan trees and on top of older buildings. Nearly every block has an ornate temple or guild house. The motorbike traffic is typically crazed, but we're used to the honking by now.
Down the watch / belt street, I totally scored and found a Rolex watch for sale. I'm sure it's real. The lady wanted 450,000 Dong for it, but I got it for 350,000. I've been looking for a Rolex on the streets of NYC for years, but I've never seen one for sale there.
We ate lunch at a tiny cafeteria that has only one dish. The Vietnamese really give new meaning to the term 'hole in the wall.' This place was eight feet wide and about six and a half feet tall. Customers sat along a table on foot-high benches that stretch to the back of the space.
In the afternoon, we went shopping along the silk street until a saleswoman told Jill, "You need larger size. I think you have the baby." Ha ha.
While having a coffee, I found this Hilarious article in the English-language Vietnam Paper.
We went to see the water puppet show, which is a big tourist draw but pretty cool anyway. It consists of a bunch of wooden puppets manipulated by puppeteers behind a screen. There's a lot of frenzied splashing around set to traditional music performed live. For dinner, I was hoping for a taste of colonialism, so we went to a fancy French restaurant, which was only OK.
Day 9:
We were picked up at 8:30 by a van to take us the three hours to Ha Long Bay. We were accompanied by a likable Australian named Dominic. Half way along the route, the driver stopped at a store that sold extremely marked-up gifts and giant stone carvings. I think some of the crafts were made by crippled children. I suppose the idea is to alleviate their suffering with long hours of manual labor.
We arrived at Ha Long Bay and found a crowded port full of wooden hotel junks. The junks were romantic, many of them sporting a dragon on the prow and some junk-style sails. Ours was medium-sized and had five cabins.
Ha Long Bay is indescribably beautiful. Thousands of limestone towers rise from the green waters, some with caves beneath or improbable overhangs. The fleet of wooden junks only adds to the beauty. Giant jellyfish could occasionally be seen gliding beneath us. Like anywhere else in Vietnam, there is a lot of trash floating on the water, which is too bad.
We were fed a lunch of several different sorts of scary-looking creatures from the deep and were given a briefing by our guide. After lunch, the boat stopped and we all climbed into kayaks. Besides Dominic, there were there other Australians on board. We took the kayaks over to a beach and swam. There were stairs up to a small gazebo on top of that island that had a glorious view.
The most beautiful point of the trip was the evening as the sun set and we became surrounded by the colorful lights of the boats in our ring of towering limestone karsts. Small boats came alongside and old ladies on them tried to sell us snacks. A concrete boat hauling barrels of fresh water refilled our tank. The crimson clouds towered above the spires of rock and then faded to black. The moon came up.
Day 10:
In the morning, we took the main boat over to a giant cave. Even though it was cool in the cave, it was unbelievably damp and I was soon sweating profusely. Luckily, the next stop was swimming in a lagoon. As soon as we were certain there were no jellyfish in the water, we jumped from the boat, sometimes from the top deck, fifteen feet into the exceptionally salty water. After a while, a jellyfish did come on the attack, so we ended our swim. Jill used a fat girl as a shield.
The ride back to Ha Noi was long and very bumpy. The driver was unsure of himself and swerved a log. We stopped again at a warehouse full of over-priced tourist junk made by crippled children. We had seen a lot of stuff for sale to tourists, but the prices at these warehouses were shocking. A typical example of a rip-off price would be two dollars for a silk lantern. In these warehouses though, an embroidered panel depicting a rice paddy would sell for $200.
Back in Ha Noi, the hotel upgraded us to a suite. Jill suspected trickery because the suites are in the font of the hotel and are almost as loud as the street, which is about as loud as times square during the apocalypse.
We went out to dinner over by Lenin's Ho Chi Minh's tomb. After dinner, we strolled past the tomb and various government offices. A guard at the Canadian embassy tried to wave us into its garden party because we were white. We tried to catch a cab back to the hotel, but his meter was spinning much too quickly so we jumped out halfway through the old town. When we had arrived in Vietnam, our guide explained that the autumn festival was coming. There had been special red cake shops set up all over the country for the occasion. Well, when we arrived in the labyrinthian center of the old town that Friday night, that festival was at its culmination. It seems a little like halloween in that it is geared towards children and many of them were in costume. The old district was jam packed with people, children, lights and open cooking fires. It was the most frenzied we'd yet seen anything be in Vietnam. Amazingly, motorbikes continued to attempt to push through the throng. We were lost and had several people point and yell wildly as we looked at our map like fat, stupid foreigners. Everyone was very helpful to us through our whole trip. Unfortunately, all the pointing and pantomimes didn't really help, but we did eventually stumble onto an intersection that was on the map. From there, it was only half an hour's wild mosh-pit ride home. The whole experience was a great, romantic finale to our stay in this beautiful but bewildering country.
Day 11:
Why is the US the only country that doesn't do passport control when people leave? It's just "good riddance," but try to re-enter the country and they treat you as if you're some virulent bacteria. If they don't check passports when people leave, they can't possibly claim to know anything about the state of immigration. It seems really stupid.
This is NOT the case at the Ha Noi airport, where I am writing this after having efficiently cleared all of the normal checkpoints. They also don't make one remove one's shoes during security screenings, unlike more hysterical countries. We're going to Hong Kong on a morning flight, which is better than the 9 PM flight we had originally booked.
The hotel in Hong Kong was a major disappointment. Billed as a four-star hotel, it wasn't worth the price. A shuttle bus that took us to the hotel after a lot of confusion ended up costing 25 dollars, even though the hotel website seemed to indicate it was complimentary. The room was dirty, the bed had springs poking out of it and was dirty and they charge for potable water. Isn't Hong Kong supposed to be in the first world? Even in our hostel in Vietnam they gave us some water for free.
The only good thing about the hotel was that there was a free shuttle bus away from it, which we took to the shopping district in the Kowloon side of the city City side of Kowloon. We wandered around the night market, where vendors hawked fake handbags and watches from brightly lit stalls. Above us, ragged, hulking apartment blocks crowded against one another. We ate some expensive street food and walked over to the high-end mall to use the bathrooms, which were the fanciest mall bathrooms I've ever seen. We hope to cancel the booking we have for our next night in Hong Kong when we return from Bali and to stay in the heart of the city instead of out in the suburbs where the Gold Coast Hotel is. Besides being unpleasant, the Gold Coast is a beach resort and far away from everything. There's a train that goes from the airport to downtown for only 10 dollars.
Hong Kong was crowded and full of neon lights, but it still seems calm and restrained in comparison to Ha Noi or Saigon.
Day 12:
Flight to Denpesar with lots of Germans. It was delayed by 1.5 hours.
We got to Bali, were confused by the visa / passport process and the car rental people immediately tried to change the price on us. After a little arguing, we got out to the lot and noticed that they drive on the wrong side of the road here, something that lonely planet had failed to mention.
The drive to our hotel, which was 30 km inland, was terrible. The maps we had were useless, street signs were rare and conflicting and the driving was crazy. We got lost in Denpesar for at least an hour, and when we finally made it to Ubud, it was three hours later and dark. Then I got the car stuck in a gaping chasm in the road and had to have a bunch of men come over to lift us out. It took another 45 minutes of driving a few hundred feet and stopping for directions to finally find our hotel, which was hidden behind the monkey forest.
Oh, but the hotel made up for the drive! Our room was palatial, with a wicker ceiling, ceiling fan and a comfy bed. We had a huge bathroom with a tub and a porch with a day bed. Every little thing was made of ornate carved wood or stone. There was an infinity pool and there lamp lit statues of animals or gods everywhere with Hindu offerings of fruit, flowers and incense placed before each one. It was like staying at a temple.
Day 13:
Monkeys! Monkeys, monkeys monkeys! The town of Ubud is home to a monkey temple and our hotel is hidden from the tourist mayhem of the main town by the monkey forest. Walking along the road, I was fretting that the monkeys might be tied up or caged when a wrinkled face suddenly poked up over the fence by the road and stared at Jill. A baby monkey! Inside the forest and the temple grounds there were hundreds of monkeys. The adults were about the size of large cats and there were lots of young monkeys, the youngest hitching a ride on their mother's belly or back.
With the ornate temple, which was wrapped in the roots of banyan trees as a backdrop, one would be hard pressed to find a more appropriate setting for the Jungle Book or an Indiana Jones movie. The monkeys are greedy and fed well by tourists. They are too canny to hide food from, and I saw several tourists who were trying to hide food be deftly robbed. The monkeys are never boring, and we were both fascinated by them as the leapt from trees, swam, played, squabbled and even tried to climb on my lap.
After the exhausting work of monkey watching, we took a swim in the hotel's infinity pool, which looks out into dense jungle. Jill had a pedicure appointment, and I tried to buy a sim card for my cell phone. The card didn't work, but the non-English negotiations were entertaining. I went back to the monkey forest as well for some more important monkey research.
Our hotel includes an afternoon tea for the price, which means a big piece of fresh cake as well as a pot of coffee or tea, so we took that poolside and watched the handsome, giant butterflies flit overhead. In short, it was a day of hard work.
Day 14:
We took a cooking class at the open air restaurant across from our hotel after eating a big breakfast. In retrospect, the breakfast wasn't such a good idea because of all the food we were supposed to eat later. The class was fascinating. I especially enjoyed learning to make peanut sauce from scratch. The only downside was that we were supposed to sit down at 11:30 and eat all six dishes that we'd made, each one enough for two people!
In the afternoon, Jill went off to get scrubbed with sand and yogurt and bathed in flower petals and I went to the monkey forest armed with a sliced apple with which to lure monkeys. I needn't have bothered with the apple. The monkeys are spoiled to the point of disinterest by tourists bearing bananas. (note: monkeys seem especially fond of climbing on Russians - and only Russians) Upon my return to our hotel, there was a band of monkeys in the driveway, more than happy to play games with me and my apples. Later, as I was lying by the pool, a large monkey walked by, jumped on the shrine to take the offering and headed back from whence he came.
I looked at the news online and noticed that the US economy had essentially collapsed. I bet the Hong Kong exchange rate will be even worse when we return.
Day 15:
We had spent enough time away from our car to try driving again. Our goal was an ancient temple 18 Km north (and uphill) from Ubud. As usual, we got lost, were confidently pointed in the wrong direction by locals and cursed our odd maps, but we made it to the temple in under an hour, driving through some picturesque rice fields along the way.
The temple entrance was past a gauntlet of hawkers selling sarongs. They all claimed that we needed a sarong to enter the temple, but we didn't really need anything but a belt that they were loaning out further down. We couldn't be certain, so we got sarongs anyway.
The temple was in a cleft between terraced rice paddies and it featured 7m high statues carved into a rock wall. It was magical. I walked along a path between paddies to a waterfall, where several women were bathing naked and rubbing themselves with small logs. I didn't want to disturb their sense of propriety so I took a picture an went back to the main temple.
The terraced rice fields are an engineering marvel. The water's path has been carefully planned so that every paddy gets some. The step between paddies can be as much as 7 feet high, yet the walls seem sturdy despite seeming to be made only of dirt.
In the afternoon we took coffee and cake by the pool and admired the golden ants, plump skinks and fat Gernans.
Day 16:
Instead of driving to Amed today, as we had originally planned, we
had booked an overnight package with two dives on Gili Trawangan Island, one of three flyspeck islands off the northwest coast of Lombok.
We were picked up and driven an hour to the dock, where we got on a submarine-shaped speedboat. The ride lasted an hour and a half and it was very choppy. Several french people looked a little green. When we arrived, we were unloaded via an open wood boat and put into a donkey cart to our hotel. The islands don't allow cars or motorbikes. The waters are brilliantly blue.
Our hotel was not worth $180, but the dive that day was really cool. We drifted along a coral wall at about 20m and we saw a turtle that was about 6 feet across.
The island was set up for the college party scene, which would have been annoying if we weren't staying away from it. The really strange thing was that all of the restaurants were selling psilocybin mushrooms. Drugs are VERY illegal in Indonesia. There are signs in the airport announcing that drug smugglers will be executed. We asked the dive shop guy, a friendly German named Olf, about it and he said, "trust no-one. There are no police on this island, but there are many spies." It's not as if the idea of taking mushrooms on a strange and often unsettling archipelago appeals to me anyway, but it's another thing that lonely planet might have mentioned, rather than just taking bribes for good write-ups.
We walked out past the light after dinner and we could see the stars of the southern hemisphere. I'm guessing here that we saw Draco and the southern cross but the milky way was so close and bright that it looked like a jungle on a nearby hillside.
Day 17:
Our morning dive was also really cool and well planned. We both appreciated the dive operators for working out good routes. The location was called shark point, and we were supposed to see lots of sharks, but Jill and the guide were the only ones that spotted a shark. That's two sharks Jill has seen to my zero. However, we saw a lot of other stuff including a small school of bump-head parrot fish, which I hadn't realized were five ft long and three feet high. Also, I had never seen clown fish in the wild before.
Our return boat was scheduled forward because the waves were forecast to be too high. I hate to think what that would be like, because it was a miserable, two hour, vomit-inducing ride. The boat slammed mercilessly against the six to eight foot swells and it leaked water from all sides and the roof so that we were drenched as well. A French girl in the front sat weeping in her boyfriend's arms and even the boisterous, overweight Americans began to look sick.
However, the reward was our hotel back in Ubud. We moved down the road from Alam Indah to Alam Jiwah, to an absolutely palatial room with four sides of windows looking out on the merry scare-crow flags of an adjacent rice paddy. They brought us our coffee and cake in our room and Jill took a bath in the room with views all around while I drank coffee and watched ducks waddling comically along the paths between rice paddies.
I've stayed in some fancy hotels, including rooms in NYC that cost twenty times the $60 we were paying for this one, and I've stayed in picturesque hotels in places like Mexico and the Bahamas, but I have to say that these two hotels are the best hotels I've stayed at in my life,even if a large gecko did poop on our bed.
Day 18:
There is a rip in the fabric of space and time near Ubud. We went for a drive with the goal of gaining some altitude on the side of one of the mountains and got totally lost. After an hour and a half of driving, realizing that we were in a town that our map showed as unconnected to any roads, we decided we should turn back. Fifteen minutes later we were back home, very confused.
We did more of the same blissful nothing: considered buying a painting, said hello to the monkeys and swam. In the evening, Jill and I got a massage with body scrub that ended with us both in a tub full of flower petals. It cost $15 each! For dinner, we went back to the restaurant where we'd had the cooking class and took in a brief dance performance put on by local children.
Day 19:
Goodby Ubud! We said goodbye to the monkeys with great regret and headed down to the airport. As always, the return journey took a third of the time. It's as if the island doesn't want to let anyone in but will align all the roads if one is leaving.
The speedboat ride to Nusa Lembogan was neither as bumpy nor as long as the one to the Gilis. Our hotel was a disappointment after Alam Indah. Actually, all hotels will be forever. Still, it was another example of Lonely Planet's uselessness. It was a perfectly fine $13 hotel, but it was not "one of the nicest places to stay on the island." The nicest place to stay on the island cost $260 a night and is a palace. There are many other nice places to stay, but Lonely Planet doesn't even mention them. We walked up the beach looking for a hotel for the next two nights and kept seeing the same bald guy everywhere. Ultimately, he invited us for a drink and we sat on the beach and chatted for a while. He was from PA and probably ex-military, since his travels seemed to coincide with places where the US has a military presence.
Nusa Lembogan's main industry is seaweed farming. It's where we get all our lovely, thickening carageenen gum. There are acres and acres of mats of drying seaweed in the interior, and hundreds of little boats that are used to bring in the harvest from just offshore.
We slept OK, but when the tide came up in the middle of the night, my confused mind was convinced it was smashing the whole seaweed fleet to splinters.
Day 20:
We went diving with the scuba shop associated with our hotel. They were a little slow moving, but nice enough. On board our boat were a lot of divers. Diverse divers, you might say. There were some surly German women and a degenerate old German man whose clothes hung off him like rags and who smoked between dives, two fat beginning divers, a plump french girl, a near-midget Welshman and his Australian girlfriend and a fantastically wealthy British couple on permanent holiday who were wearing dive shirts from the Four Seasons Maldives.
We commiserated with the French girl and the rich British about the uselessness of Lonely Planet Guides. The brits said they'd read a glowing review of a resort in their guide and had discovered that it had yet to be built!
The dives were both drift dives along a coral wall that dropped to great depths. The advanced divers descended to 30m, but we stayed around 20m. The current was really fast, and we had a hard time pausing to look at any of the plentiful life along the wall, although we did se a lot: lion fish, giant anemones, a moray, clownfish and the fish that walk along on front leg-like fins. The schooling fish drifted with us and were every color of the rainbow.
The real goal was to see a mola mola, the giant sunfish that sometimes drift in from the deep sea. Sadly, we didn't see any, but I did finally see a shark. He was small, about 1.5m long and dark gray / brown. With all the divers hassling him, he scurried away like an irritated cat.
On the second dive, Jill started with a low tank, so our dive master, sort of strangely, decided that he would share his emergency regulator with her, which made me think something was wrong. I figured it out, but it was a little disturbing.
After the dive, we got two dive masters to take us and all our luggage over to the other side of the island on their motor bikes. It was only mildly harrowing. Our new hotel was resort-like but we had a nice bedroom up on stilts with air conditioning and a warm shower. It was on a small bay called mushroom bay with a nice, soft, white sand beach. We could hear all the night sounds and see the bright forest of stars above. By the way, children's books lie: roosters have no idea what time it is.
Day 21:
Deciding not to go diving, we tried to walk down the road to a place called "dream beach." The tiny island's interior is parched, with hedgerows of prickly pear and dusty trails leading through the trees. We walked for half an hour in the scorching heat, but we found the wrong beach, so we decided to be daring and rent a motorbike.
With Jill on the back, we spent an hour exploring the island. We went to the extremely dodgy suspension bridge to a bigger island, which is wide enough for one motorbike to cross at a time. We meandered through the woods, occasionally catching a glimpse of the mangrove swamps that crowd into the island's leeward side. From there, we drove to Dream Beach, which is really quite dreamy. Our way back to the hotel went through a cemetery that was guarded by strange halloween-like statues.
At the hotel, we swam in the pool and watched boorish Russians try to hump one another by the water. We had a massage and I went for a little walk and found a hidden beach. We had a lovely dinner at a fancy hotel overlooking our beach. It was a pleasant night and the Russians seemed a little less boorish and the Germans seemed a little less ungainly than usual. We dragged a mat out onto a clearing and lay and watched the southern sky one more time. Fruit bats sometimes flew overhead, their passing marked by ripples of darkness in front of the shimmering backdrop.
Day 22:
Our speedboat back to Bali didn't leave till 11:30, so we lounged around and explored the hidden side of mushroom bay. However, the time that our transport to the boat was supposed to leave coincided with the arrival of the cruise ship that is allied with our hotel. The fast boat transport came and went, promising to return, but a half hour passed and there was no sign of it. Jill tried to get the hotel clerk to call them, but he ignored her and was swamped with new hordes of Russians and Germans. In desperation, we paid some man way too much to take us down to the boat landing in his truck. We got their just in time, and it turned out that the boat company's car had broken down. Whew!
Our flight back to Hong Kong was unremarkable, except for a nice view of the volcanos on Bali. This time, we took the express train straight to the city, which was fast and easy, and took a cheap cab to the hotel. It was much better that way. It turns out one can even check luggage in at the train station when going to the airport. Pretty efficient.
Day 23:
The next day, we spent two hours exploring Hong Kong, which was entertaining but nothing super special. I admired the way they use bamboo for even the tallest scaffolding around buildings, and I kept half an eye out for a replacement fake rolex, since I seemed to have tragically lost mine. Too bad! Around noon we caught a train back to our airport and the honeymoon was over.
