Better late than never...

Hello! Really sorry it's taken me this long to write on here, but this whole travelling malarkey is very... time-eat-y. Consuming, one might say. Yes. So that would be one reason why I haven't updated the blog yet; the other being that the heat and humidity has robbed me of my command of words, as I have just demonstrated. :P

So! (Or 'Hwaet!' for my mediaevalist friends). We're in Vietnam! As of today, we have been on the road for 3 weeks and so far visited three countries: Thailand (Bangkok); Cambodia (Siem Reap, Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville); and Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City; Dalat).

We're in Hoi An now, just chilling at our hotel waiting for our room to become available. It's been a bit of a mish getting here. We survived the 14 and a half hour overnight bus journey from Dalat to Danang, despite the fact that Tom was squished into the top far left corner of the bus, unable to sit up without banging his head on the A/C, and I was next to the Von Trapp family singers. (I'll get to that in a minute.)

When we boarded the double-decker bus (which had three aisles of single sleeper seats - one aisle against each window and one in the middle), we weren't sure where our seats were, so we shuffled down the very narrow aisle, feeling like fat turtles, trying not to get wedged in with our rucksacks on, until we got to the back. The driver gestured to the top deck where there were 5 seats all in a row - ours were apparently the two on the right-hand side. I looked up. All 5 seats were already occupied - by a Vietnamese lady and her 4 children. Err.... The bus driver told them to squish up, which they did. I looked at Tom. 'Aw man,' I said, under my breath, already envisaging a worst-case scenario of flailing arms and legs and screaming for the next 14 hours.

In all honesty though, it wasn't so bad. The kids were quite cute and very well-behaved, and thankfully slept most of the time. But there was a bit of a shaky moment at about 10pm, when the whole family, newly energised from napping and dinner, burst into a repertoire of songs that included 'Happy Birthday', 'The Alphabet Song', and the Vietnamese version of 'Frère Jacques'. These songs were repeated more than once. Tom was cocooned in his own little world, courtesy of his mp3 player, and didn't seem to notice, but I was praying it wouldn't last too long, not relishing the thought of being serenaded by loud, interminable nursery rhymes in the dark while everyone else was trying to sleep.

After about 15 minutes, the singing tailed off. Alleluia! The only other minor annoyance was that the little boy who was sleeping next to me sometimes ended up whacking me with a stray leg in the middle of the night - his knee would sort of splay out and either rest on or rebound off my ass. :P Awkward...

We finally arrived into Danang at about 6.30am, and from there, took a minibus to Hoi An, where the bus people shamelessly overcharged us ('foreigner tax', still trying to get used to it). I wasn't happy about being fleeced, as I rarely am, but the driver was in on it and these other two guys were quite insistent/aggressive, so we quickly got the idea that we either had to pay 3 times what we were supposed to or get off. I wasn't really in the mood for an argument - which, in any case, due to the whole 'face' thing in Asia, is not really advised - and Tom, less so. As soon as Tom capitulated and handed over his monies (while I gritted my teeth and looked out the window so as to avoid glaring), the guys turned to the other shaggy-haired, whitey foreigner and motioned he hand over the same amount of cash, but he wasn't having any of it. He held out and waved his one note (10,000 dong, the actual fare) and, once he realised it wasn't going to be accepted, grabbed his bag and made for the door; he was 'helped' off the bus by a not so friendly push and a shove from the two afore-mentioned guys. So there you go. In this case, unfortunately, it seemed that sticking to your principles literally got you nowhere.

Which neatly leads me onto a mini side-note/rant, which is that the whole scamming/fleecing/overcharging/commission-based crap is probably the thing I like least about travelling round SE Asia. I mean, it's not the first time I've had to deal with stuff like that, but I guess when you've not been exposed to it for a while, the shameless and blatant lying can get a bit wearing. For example, moments before we got on the bus, a taxi driver tried to make us get a taxi, which would cost about $17. He was wearing a uniform and his taxi was branded 'VinaSun', a legitimate and well-known company, plus he said he would use his meter; I had no reason not to trust him, and the fare he quoted was probably correct, but when we said we'd try and get the bus (50 cents; 1 hr), he said 'No buses', shaking his head. This was in the middle of a bus station. 'No buses'? Really?

And then we asked our bus driver how much a ticket for the bus would cost and he said 10,000 dong. But we were charged 30,000. In monetary terms, the difference isn't huge - you're talking £1.50 versus $0.50 - but it's the principle, goddammit! If you're white or dark-skinned or in any way obviously not local, then you have to pay more, because I guess it's assumed that, as a foreigner, you can. But just because you can, should you?

We experienced worse iterations of this kind of scamming and overcharging in Cambodia; turns out borders and stations are hotspots for 'foreigner tax'. Anyway, it got me thinking. Is it wrong of me to whine about it? On the one hand, the principled part of me really rankles at this kind of thing, because it's blatant discrimination, and I just don't like things that aren't fair. But on the other hand, I am a privileged Westerner, and the very fact that I am here shows that I have money to spare, and it's not as if I'm returning to a shack where I have to toil in the fields for 12-14 hours a day to earn enough money to eat. Not to say that everyone in SE Asia lives in a shack, but you know what I mean. The fact is, there are almost certainly people who need that additional $1 way more than I'll miss it.

I think, in Sihanoukville, I experienced what I shall term as 'traveller's guilt'. Please tell me if this sounds at all familiar. Sitting on the beach, listening to the gentle lapping of the waves and sipping on a tasty cocktail, we were approached by hawkers - women selling manicures and massages, children selling sunglasses and beaded bracelets, men jumping at the chance to inspect your shoes and offer to repair them. They came in droves, sometimes maybe one a minute, so that I started to become tired of always smiling and saying 'No, thank you' and just wishing I could be left alone to enjoy my drink and my sunset in peace. When they approached our table it was like a fly landing on me - a minor annoyance that just got more annoying with every successive visitation. I would swat them away with my hand. Every time I started to feel annoyed though, I would try to check myself by reminding myself that they're only trying to earn a living. And also that this was not my country and that I was here on the goodwill of its people, however much I wanted to enjoy 'my' drink and 'my' sunset.

Still, nowhere was this feeling of discomfort or discrepancy more pronounced than when I was approached, not by hawkers, but beggars. The general rule seems to be not to give money to beggars because it only encourages begging. But it's difficult sometimes. It's not often that someone approaches you slowly because they are dragging themselves along through the sand with their hands because they have no legs.

One evening, a young girl was wheeling an elderly man along a sort of stretcher, past the populated bars and restaurants along the waterfront. You had gaggles of Westerners, sitting around, sharing buckets of dirt-cheap beer and cocktails, getting merry and loud and raucous and sharing stories of how wasted they got the night before and how smashed they were going to get tonight, and in the midst of all of that high-spirited, drunken debauchery, was this Cambodian man. He looked physically weak and emaciated, possibly in a lot of pain. How do you ignore that?

I didn't give him money though, nor did I to the man with no legs on the beach, nor to the other amputee in Phnom Penh who was selling books from his bicycle with a broad smile on his face. I kind of regret that now. Cambodia's history, like so many of the other SE Asian nations, is violent and shocking. In 4 years alone, 1 in 5 people died under the Khmer Rouge rule (headed by Pol Pot a.k.a genocidal maniac), and the country remains one of the most heavily landmined countries in the world. Even 30 years on, people are still at risk of injury or death just from walking out of their village into the neighbouring field. Is that fair?

[A side side note: learning more about Cambodia's history through visiting the Killing Fields and S-21 prison, and then subsequently reading up more about it, has actually been one of the highlights of the trip so far - in equal parts humbling and terrifying. Perhaps more on that later.]

So sometimes I get annoyed at being overcharged just because I'm a foreigner. But then I think, on a much broader scale, the levels of inequality are so, so much worse than that.

Hm. Not really sure where I'm going with this, or if there are any easy answers. I'm just grateful to be here!

Sigh. Trust me to go off on a rant, eh? :P Next time, I'll try to write more about Dalat, which I recently described on Facebook as a 'Vietnamese alpine Blackpool'. Trust me, I think I can qualify that one!

Dalat is a puzzling, strange place. Here, Tom and I had one of the best and most satisfyingly authentic days touring round the region on motorbikes and visiting a family from one of the minority hill tribes. But we also rode around a lake (hm, two in fact) in a giant swan boat to the forlorn tones of Vietnamese love songs while couples all around posed for pictures in front of giant love hearts, or rode around on ponies escorted by Vietnamese dudes in cowboy hats. So bizarre! So utterly kitsch!

Here's me inside a mushroom:

Next time, folks!