Good Evening Vietnam It’s our last day in Hanoi and the weather continues to be overcast and a tad chilly (50s), which is not do bad for touring, but might not be the best Chamber of Commerce conditions to make you love a place and put it on a must-return list. This trip has not rocked my world like Egypt and Jordan did last year, but since I am most inspired by antiquities, I should…
The Heart of Darkness 125 years ago, William Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness about a voyage up the Congo River (not named, but assumed) to meet up with a trader, Kurtz, who had gone native. It is the story of colonial rule in the darkest sense. The story was adapted during the Vietnam War and made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola into the quintessential war movie called Apocalypse Now. What made these…
Good Morning Vietnam Good morning, Vietnam (with fond remembrances of Robin Williams). Before heading off to a long 3-hour bus ride to Ha Long Bay, on the northern part of Haiphong Harbor, in the Gulf of Tonkin, (all names that invoke 1960s newsreels), Mike and I went out to find an ATM. The streets of Hanoi in daylight are every bit as ragged as they seemed last night. Suddenly, this trip has changed from a…
Better Call Jane and John While on this trip it is impressive that we have big flatscreen TVs in every room, but the evening movie selection is not always so broad. Good thing I loaded up my iPad with the 5-seasonal series that represents a prequel to Breaking Bad, called Better Call Saul. It is a finely crafted story about a lawyer’s (actually two lawyers’) slippery ethical path and the unrequited love that accompanies it…
Landlocked in Laos The country of Laos sits right in the middle of the southeast Asia peninsula. To the north is China and Myanmar to the south is Thailand and Cambodia and to the east is Vietnam. This is a landlocked country that is not really an organically grown entity, but is rather the construct of the French colonialists who decided that in between all of those countries there was still room for one more…
Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh Today we are leaving the fun-loving, R&R haven of Bangkok and heading back into the jungle of my youth. No, I did not fight in the Vietnam War, I was just young enough to avoid that nightmare, but not so young that the draft and all that it meant in its life-changing transition did not touch me. While Jim Morrison was telling everyone to “Come on, come on, come on…
Bangin’ Out Bangkok Today was our day to spend an entire tour bangin’ out the sites of Bangkok. Unlike the last time I was here, many years ago, Tuk-Tuks and mopeds no longer dominate the streets the way they used to. There are still two types of Tuk-Tuks in Bangkok, the kind that the common working people of Bangkok might use as an economical way to get places where public transportation can’t get them, and…
Good & Plenty Today was a big day for me on this trip. We had booked a full day tour out to the far western region of Thailand, some 3-4 hours drive from our hotel in Bangkok. That is only 115 miles, and the roads were decent, but Bangkok traffic is always an issue. We had a young lady named Angela (her Anglicized name for our convenience) who was our tour guide today. Her partner…
2% Off Chimps On a grand tour of SE Asia like we are currently on, there is always more down time than one expects. Sometimes it has to do with sleeplessness due to lingering jet lag, and sometimes its just the group dynamics of letting everyone have their space to carry on with their daily needs. In addition, travel delays in places that are unfamiliar are also to be expected. Yesterday we arrived in Bangkok…
Braving the Batu Cave I’ve mentioned already that Mike booked this entire trip for the six of us. He is literally answering his phone as “Brower Travel Services” at this point. Well, for Kuala Lumpur, which was a fill-in stop between our adjustment days in Singapore and hitting one of our main event stops in Bangkok, he just booked us to see the Petronas Towers, which are literally steps away from our Mandarin Oriental Hotel…