After coming back from a motorcycle trip through the Indonesian Islands of Lombok, Sumbawa and Flores, (a very long ride punctuated with brief bouts of chaos and insanity) we flew out of Denpasar and arrived in Saigon, Vietnam.
The first thing we found out as we walked out of the airport and onto the busy streets is that the rules are oh-so-very different here. There is no intermingling with random people. There is no bargaining for goods and services. Vendors expect the full tourist price. When we would attempt to initiate a bargain, they'd give us that "Are you kidding me?!" look and walk off, leaving us slack-jawed and blinking in disbelief.
This is modern day Saigon from our perspective. We feel like tourists with red flagging taped to our earlobes.
The city was built up and destroyed so many times in the last 500 years. The indigenous style of living has been completely trampled over by an incredible number of hostile occupations. We find it too claustrophobic being tourists in Saigon and plan to leave the next day.
On the way up the coast, my traveling companion, Eivin, and I must have been seen as the leper twins. Eivin was picking away at a tropical lesion that had burrowed down into his shoulder, oozing pus madly like some sort of epidermal volcano, while I nursed a muffler burn that I got on my calf during our epic motor scooter ride in Flores.
No one would sit next to our scabs, and we get away with it for the whole 12-hour ride up to Nha Trang.
Nha Trang is by no means culturally stimulating. This tourist beach town has all the personality of a pile of sawdust. We came here because it has been days since we have been in the ocean, and none of us have tasted the South China Sea before.
On the way through the back streets one night, we came across an old hunched over woman selling fresh grilled lobster. She talked a mile a minute and everything came out in pidgin English.
All we could understand was that she was willing to grill us up three of the biggest lobsters we have ever seen for about five dollars. She not only grilled us lobster, she put on some different crabs and assorted manta shrimp for a whole seafood platter effect.
We sat on ankle-high plastic stools by her side and waited like begging pets. We were so hungry by the time the food came. The lobster had no chance. We tore those shellfish apart in seconds flat.
To top the evening off, later that night a guy passed us sitting on the sidewalk, pulling a draught beer cart. One glass of Saigon beer cost us around 12 cents.
After our third round, the beer guy realized the potential money well that he was nursing. He deployed his retractable keg stabilizers, pumped up the tap, and set up a plastic stool campsite alongside us for the remainder of our night. Oh, we had all sorts of fun that night.
We all woke up the next morning feeling very cramped and shaky. Was it the beer or the seafood? It felt like a volatile marriage of both. The beach wasn't as nice at Nha Trang as we had hoped, and since the sky kept encoring its overcast haze, we decided to keep moving up the coast. It was a well-fought 14 hours of bouncing and lurching in a tightly packed, speeding excuse for a bus all the way up the coast. It was a ride we decided to try and forget forever.
We settled into our hotel in Hoi An, a French colonial town just south of the former DMZ, and Eivin decided to treat his growing tropical lesion with high doses of garlic. He ate five entire cloves that evening while I extracted the juice from between two spoons.
I used one of the syringes I travel with to suck up the garlic juice while our friend, Chris, got the camera ready. This was definitely going to be postcard material. With one slow motion, Eivin pushed the needle down into the heart of the tumor. Right when he told me it was in far enough, I reached over and squeezed down the plunger, injecting 1 cc of essence of garlic into his open wound.
The camera flashed. His eyes bulged. His lips quivered. He even let out a little whimper, but he handled it extremely well. It took the garlic about a day to work on the infection. That was it. After that, the hole in his arm closed up and healed faster than anything I'd ever seen.
Hoi An is one of the more untouched places in Vietnam that the war never got around to. When the Marines stormed Danang, nothing was left of the town after the battle, and all resistance forces in Hoi An, just to the south, were moved out before the bombs could be called in.
The architecture around this riverside town is a surprising mix of colonial French and traditional Chinese. The people here are no better than anywhere else we have been.
While we walked down the street, random boys on mopeds coasted alongside us, asking us all sorts of questions and trying hard to get us to gravitate toward their shop or restaurant.
We had three days until Christmas, and we were planning to spend it in Hanoi, so we decided to make the long trip up the coast the next morning. After some naturally horrible bus rides, we stepped out into the chilly air in Hanoi's Old Quarter. Hanoi surprised us immediately. It is beautiful.
The city had been developed into separate quarters during the French occupation. Now, the streets radiate through the old quarters, with shops along the streets and high walls behind them. Behind those walls, whole communities of people live and conduct most of their business.
We spent Christmas walking around the cobbled roads and eating some of the finest food we'd ever tasted. That night, we walked into a local bar and drank dark imported beer with salted herring. Across the street, a huge freshly painted sign of a missile smashing through an American B-52 bomber loomed over the intersection.
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