Vagabonding

I wake up 3am, then 3:15am, then 3:30am, then 3:45am, etc until it is 8am.  There is this damned rooster 10 feet from my hotel room that keeps going off.  It was the most annoying thing.  It wasn’t necessarily the fact that I jumped each time that rooster went off.  The most difficult thing was the anticipation that I felt just waiting for the rooster to crow.  Sometimes, it would be 5 seconds between crows.  Sometimes it would be 15 minutes between crows.  The asynchronicity of the entire ordeal drove me crazy.  And really, is there anything as useless in the world than a rooster.  What do they really do other than annoy the hell out of you? My friends and I go on a boating/fishing tour of the bay.  The tour was nice, but as usual, I caught no fish (not even a nibble).  The Bolan curse strikes again.  At 2pm, I take off on my motorcycle for a relatively short 120km ride to Hue.  The view on the first part of t...

The cool thing about having a motorcycle is the freedom that you have to ride around the city and just explore.  I take a friend on the back of my bike and we just go aimlessly around the city.  We come across a group of Vietnamese playing volleyball.  I’m not sure if we were invited or we just imposed, but we decided to join their volleyball game.  The Vietnamese love volleyball, but not as much as soccer.  One young lady strikes up a conversation with me.  She was pretty friendly and talkative, which I find kind of refreshing, because most Vietnamese women that talk to you want something in the form of money.  It’s nice to talk to someone simply because they are curious about you.  Besides, she said that I was funny, which was a great compliment.  The “you so handsome” thing gets old after awhile. ;)  OK, maybe that never gets old, but I much prefer the “you so funny” compliment.  Then she goes “My name is Pham and I just g...

I wake up early, and as usual I skip breakfast and head for the road.  I decide to take a little different route than what googlemaps tells me, since it seems much simpler than the googlemaps route, and besides, I’ve already traveled part of the googlemaps route a few times already when I was trying to go through Quy Nhon to get to the 1 highway.  I guess I wasn’t as lost as I thought I was the previous day.  Anyway, before I take off, I study the map a bit harder than usual for landmarks and such, as I have learned that I can no longer rely on names of roads and road signs.  Sure enough I get to fork in the road with no signs or names, and I just take the right fork as it is going in the general direction.  I remember that the correct road also goes by a big lake to the right, and I do see that a few kilometers down the road, so I’m on the right track.  The 1 highway cuts inland for quite awhile, so it gets especially hot and I’m sweating like crazy...

I wake up about 8am, check out, and get on my way.  I find the way to the 1 Highway, which is the main highway going up the east coast of Vietnam.  I decide not to mapquest it, because people say that you would have to be completely retarded to get lost on it.  I only got lost once at the end near Quy Nhon, so I think I passed that test with flying colors.  I decide not to buy a helmet, and take my chances.  I’ve been driving around with a bottle of Bailey’s, so I figured that I can just bribe the police if I am pulled over.  I’m not exactly risk-adverse at this point anyway, and like the freedom of not having a helmet strapped to your head, especially when these helmets are not going to protect you in a crash anyway.  Also, non-vietnamese are not supposed to drive anything because Vietnam does not acknowledge foreign driver’s licenses, so that adds an additional element of concern.  I guess they can technically throw you jail if they wanted to,...

Before I talk about my trip from Da Lat to Nha Trang, I forgot to mention one other difference between Hanoi and Saigon.  To put it bluntly, prostitution in Hanoi is more underground than in Saigon.  You will only find prostitutes in Karoke Bars and night clubs, where it is more subtle.  In Saigon, you can be walking down the street, and you will get propositioned.  I got propositioned twice within 100 feet.  The first prostitute asked me if I wanted a massage.  This is not out of the ordinary because there are a lot of legitimate massage places in Vietnam, and they are always outside handing out fliers.  I’ve been to a couple of them, and you can get a 2-hour massage for less than 10 bucks.  I don’t need a happy ending to be happy about that.  The massages are not that great, but even if they do that chop suey and slapping nonsense, it is still worth it.  So back to the prostitute.  She continues and says that she has a hotel r...