Northern/Central Vietnam and the Road Ahead

It's currently 10:04pm and I am writing this post on a sleeper bus winding its way down the coast of Vietnam from Hoi An to Nah Trang.  Vietnam thus far has been a bit of a disappointment, with the terrible weather interfering with my visits to Halong Bay and Hue, both of which I had heard wonderful things about in advance.  An overnight cruise in Halong Bay, with its thousand karsts rising languidly from the water, left me aching for both the landscape I could see and that which might have been visible had the cold, overcast skies cleared to permit some sunlight sooner than 20 minutes before our return to port.  Hue, a city in central Vietnam, was even worse, with 3 days of constant rain constraining me and my companions to our hotel and the restaurants and bars within a 2-block radius for the entirety of our stay.

I guess it hasn't all been bad though.  Starting off in Hanoi was a double-shot of adrenaline, especially having arrived via a brutal 24-hour bus trip from Vientienne.  The two cities could not be more different.  Vientienne, is the slowest capital city you can imagine, where tuk-tuk drivers regularly nap in their vehicles and shop owners and street merchants are only half-heartedly persistent in their bids for your attention.  Hanoi, on the other hand, reminds me of New York in general and Chinatown in particular, except for massive amounts of motorbikes and a complete disregard for traffic laws of any kind.  Crossing the streets there was nerve-wracking to say the least, even for this native New Yorker.

My most recent stop, Hoi An, "the suit city", was a step in the right direction after the disappointment of Hue and Halong Bay.  Though the sun made only occasional brief appearances, it remained warm and dry enough to enjoy leisurely bike rides around the old city and along the river two out of the three days in town.  And how about that third day, you ask?  Let's just say that it was spent absorbing the lesson of what happens to this American when he is deluded enough to think he can keep pace with a group of Brits over the course of two football games and a post-midnight trip to the disco club/beach bar (though to be fair, none of them ended up in such great shape either).

My day-'o-recovery wasn't a complete waste though.  When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I went across the street and visited one of the city's hundred or so tailor shops, where I had my measurements taken for the suit, dress shoes, belt, 2 pairs of jeans, 3 shirts, 3 ties, and 3 pairs of socks that I would come back to have adjusted and wrapped up the next day for a grand total of $225.  Yep, pretty ridiculous.  I mostly just needed the suit and other dress clothes for the wedding I'll be attending in India next month, but at $20 per pair for jeans that actually fit, I just couldn't resist.

Wait, back up... wedding in India?  Ok, time for an update on my travel plans.  I'm currently traveling with the Brits on an open bus ticket from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City which allows me to stop at about five cities along the way and pick up the next segment whenever I feel like it (though, as I learned yesterday, it helps to confirm your spot a couple days in advance so the once-daily bus doesn't fill up).  I have a flight booked from Ho Chi Minh City to Mumbai on December 4th, where I will be meeting up with one of my best friends from college, Erica, and accompanying her to the wedding of one of her best friends, Anisha.  After Anisha's wedding, I will be traveling with Erica and a couple of her friends to Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi until December 29th, at which point I have a flight booked to Singapore where I had tentative plans to spend New Years with various friends from college and DC.  It's now sounding like many of them can't make it, so I'm considering trying to cancel that flight and just stay in India, since my flight to Tanzania on January 6th leaves from Mumbai.

Wait... Tanzania?  Wasn't I supposed to visit China, Australia, and New Zealand before heading to Africa?  (To be fair, I doubt many people beyond my parents and grandmother even knew/remembered that was my original plan.)  I've decided to put those destinations on hold for now and spend a couple months in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where I will be volunteering with KickStart, a fantastic nonprofit organization that develops, launches and promotes simple money-making tools that poor entrepreneurs can use to create their own profitable businesses.  While in Dar, I will be staying with KickStart's Country Director (and former-President of Community Wealth Ventures, who I worked with my first year at the firm), Alfred, his wife, Hillary (Country Director for TechnoServe, another nonprofit I have long admired), their 4-year-old son, Bodie (who I remember as one of the happiest, most precocious 2-year-olds I have ever met), and two rather large dogs.  I'm very excited by the prospect of starting off in Africa in such an incredible situation, staying with such wonderful people and volunteering for a such great organization.  I think I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I was finding it harder than I expected to pull myself away from the tourist trail and get involved in volunteer opportunities, so I'm looking forward to the chance to really dig in and try to make a meaningful contribution to a community.  If all goes well, I'm thinking of potentially extending my stay in Africa with other potential volunteer or employment opportunities in Kenya or Uganda.  For now though, knowing that I have that solid chunk of time set aside for changemaking has lifted a bit of weight from my shoulders, and I know it will now be easier to really let myself relax and enjoy the next month and a half of traveling.

Snake Feast!

My last night in New York before leaving for Thailand, I wandered into a small discount book shop and discovered a box full of mini Rough Guides.  I picked up a few that were relevant for the regions I planned to visit and tossed them in my bag, figuring they might come in handy for inspiration.  I promptly forgot about them, until my immanent arrival in Hanoi triggered a recollection of item #20 from "25 Ultimate World Food Experiences": Snake Feast.

Now, a snake feast certainly seemed like one of those experiences better done in a group, so I raised the idea to the Nathan, Alastair, Martin and Alex, the British guys I've been traveling with since the slow boat to Luang Prabang.  Nathan was immediately into the idea, Martin and Alex weren't enthusiastic but thought it would be interesting, and Alastair was hesitant but eventually agreed to join us.  Book in hand, I went to the front desk of our hostel and told Moon, our gracious and helpful host, that we wanted to have a snake feast, preferably at the restaurant suggested in our guide.  Fifteen minutes of semi-intelligible English later, we were riding in a cab under the impression that we would be taken to some snake restaurant of Moon's suggestion, being that the one in the book was too far away.

As the taxi meter ticked closer to the fixed price Moon had negotiated with driver, we found ourselves on a dark but busy street, clearly away from the main commercial center.   A young man on a motor bike tapped on one of the windows and began a conversation with our driver.  Soon, our driver turned and followed him down a very dark, very sketchy alley.  A couple turns later, we pulled up next to him and he handed the driver a laminated business card with the image of a snake.  The driver communicated that he wanted to take us to some alternative location, but we waved him off and told him that we wanted to go to the place we had originally agreed upon.  He nodded and we continued on down the darkened alley for another minute, before coming to a stop in front of a building with a sign for Cuoq Trieu, the restaurant from our book!

At the entrance of the restaurant, we were greeted by jars of liquid, filled with coiled, preserved snakes.

Venturing inside, we came to zoo-like cages, the first of which contained a gigantic python (easily 20 feet or longer) and some short, strange looking birds with long, thin legs and puffy feathers, which one of our hosts informed us would not be harmed by the python.  A bit further down, we came to some porcupines, ducks, and, finally, cobras.  A well-dressed gentleman with speckled hair greeted us and used a hook to rouse the cobras in the cage.  He showed us his right hand, fingers gnarled and apparently useless from a cobra bite some 30 years earlier.  After we delivered the requisite gasps, we were directed upstairs and asked how we found the restaurant--not an unreasonable question, given its well-off-the-beaten-path location.  I produced the guidebook and handed it over, watching as it quickly made the rounds through the staff, who pointed excitedly to see their restaurant mentioned specifically as one of 25 ultimate food experiences.  I'm not sure if they understood the precise title of the book or got just how impressive their inclusion is, or if they just enjoyed seeing the name of their restaurant mentioned in glossy little book.

We were led to a table in a massive, beautiful outdoor courtyard, filled with plants and caged birds and given the option of paying 200,000 dong (roughly $11) each for a meal made from the snake of our choosing, or 1,300,000 for all five of us if we wanted a cobra.  $3 extra each to eat the king of snakes?  Easy choice.  The hard part was deciding who would eat the heart, but with only Nathan and I feeling adventurous enough to want to give it a try, a quick flip of a two-quid coin determined that I would get to do the honors.

A few minutes later, this was dropped 5 feet from our table:

The snake handler picked up the cobra and with the help of an assistant, slit its throat and squeezed its blood into five shot glasses and its bile into five more.

Suddenly feeling a bit squeamish, we quickly ordered a round of beer chasers.  As we waited for our beer, the shot glasses were brought to the table, along with the cobra's heart on a small dish.  As you can see in this video, the heart was still beating:

By the time our beers arrived, I'll admit, there was a bit of adrenaline rushing through my veins.  I poured myself a glass of beer to be ready as a chaser, and then... well, why don't you watch the video:

Yeah, that felt pretty bad-ass.  Honestly, you can mostly just taste the rice whiskey that the blood and bile are mixed with, but it's quite the head trip.

The meal itself was actually quite tasty, featuring no less than seven dishes made from our cobra, including a cobra soup (sort of like a Japanese mushroom soup), grilled cobra pieces (not unlike teriyaki pork), fried cobra skin (similar to pork rinds), cobra wrapped in dried seaweed (a bit like unagi yaki), cobra stir fry (quite tasty, like port stir fry), and cobra spring rolls (just delicious):

In sum, the snake feast was an unforgettable culinary experience, made even better by the wonderful company:

Tomorrow, we're off on a 2-day/1-night trip to Halong Bay, where we'll be crossing our fingers for good weather and a clear view of the Leonid meteor shower, supposedly the brightest in Asia in 25 years.  Life is good!

Making new friends

So much has happened since I last wrote.  Over my first three days in Chiang Mai, I walked around a lot, explored the temples and night bazaar, went to a Muay Thai (kickboxing) fight, and took a cooking class.  I ended up staying in Chiang Mai an extra two nights after that (for five nights total) before leaving on my trek.  I hadn't intended to stay so long, but the night before my trek was scheduled to begin, I started having a sore throat, and the next morning, my breakfast threatened to reverse my digestive system's standard mouth-to-stomach route, so I thought it wise to hold off until I was at least sure I wasn't going to get any worse.

After two days spent mostly in bed, drinking water and watching Mad Men on my laptop, I went on a three-day trek into the hills around Chiang Mai.  It was a fantastic experience, including 3-5 hours of hiking each day, bathing in waterfalls, riding elephants, floating on a bamboo raft, sleeping in bamboo huts, singing Eric Clapton songs (poorly) by campfire while accompanied on guitar by one of the guides (whose singing was just as bad as mine), and eating meat from a cow that had been walking around earlier that day.  My ten companions were two guides from the Karen hill tribe, a recently-engaged Polish couple, middle-aged British and German couples, and a pair of German girls about my age.  They were a great group to trek with, and for the first time on this trip, I felt like I really connected with other travelers.  I guess three days of forced contact is good for building bonds and getting past the standard "where are you from/where are you going/where have you been/how long do you have" questions everybody asks each other when they meet.

We returned from the trek to Chiang Mai on the second night of a huge three-day festival.  Janina and Carola, the German girls from the trek, invited me to join them in venturing to the waterfront to explore the festivities.  While I can't tell you the name of the festival or its meaning, I can report that I have never experienced anything remotely like it: thousands of lanterns flying into the sky, fireworks everywhere, and candles floating down the river in small boats made from banana leafs.  I'm trying to upload some photos and video, but the connection at this cafe is extremely slow, so I'll probably just go back and add them to this post when I get somewhere with a speedier connection.

The next morning, I took a bus to the Laos border and spent the night in Huay Xai.  The next morning, I crossed the border and boarded a slowboat to Luang Prabang.  The two days on the boat and the night in Pak Beng not only gave me the opportunity to see some spectacular scenery along the Mekong, it also provided the opportunity to learn some new card games and meet up with plenty of like-minded backpackers from the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere.  Upon arriving in Luang Prabang last night, 14 of us (mostly from the UK) decided to all check into a guest house together.  Trying to make decisions and coordinate plans with a group that size is certainly quite different from the "Do I feel like doing this? Yes!" process I'd been following up until now, but so far I'm really enjoying their company and plan to stick with them for at least another day or two.  This trip has been great at teaching me how get along by myself without any significant social interaction for days/weeks at a time, but it has also reminded me that--for me--being able to share my experiences with others, whether old friends or new acquaintances, is often the ingredient that makes those experiences truly special and memorable.