Looking Back

The year end provides a good opportunity for me to reflect on what has been an active, fun, and far reaching year. This journal is about travel, and travel to places near and far was a big part of my year.

 I counted up something like 36 separate flights taken, and I rested my head in more than 30 places over 110 days on the road. I danced in the Arctic Ocean, swam with sea lions, and overcame a fear of kayaks in Alaska and Baja. I touched gray whales, smelled their breath, and listened to chants echoing in Buddhist temples in Cambodia.  I hiked tropical jungles, lava flows and tundra. I pitched tents on desert islands aand on permafrost. I learned to say hello and thank you in some new languages and met nice people eeverywhere I went.  I ccelebrated family birthdays, and reconnected with friends from boarding school, college and cub scouts. I felt like I covered a lot of ground, but the funny thing is that I probably saw some teeny fraction of 1 percent of all there is to see in the world. Makes you think.

Oh, and one more thing - I am thankful for the guides who made all of these trips fun, educational, and safe. They are characters one and all - I think it takes a special soul to be a guide. These are pics of some of the guides I traveled with this year:

Cambodia - Chor and Yut / Alaska Kenai - Charlie and Kim / Mono Lake - Michael / Vietnam - Hung
Baja Kayaking - Jorge and Celia / Baja Whale Watching - Armando / Alaska Arctic - Steve and Jeff

Pieceing it Together

Well, it was bound to happen. Arriving in Cambodia pushed me past my saturation point, and all that I learned in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam are now scrambled together in a cultural, architectural, historical, political, religious blender. Histories and destinies are woven together and each country has a slightly different recollection of the region's history. Invasions from Siam, Kemer, Cham and China in earlier days and recently China (again), France, United States Russia, and Vietnam played, and continue to play their parts. Hinduism, Buddhism, communism, capitalism, Confusionism, royalism, imperialism. We traveled with a guide whose grandaddy was a North Vietnamese official during the war, and another guide whose dad was a South Vietnamese soldier who stayed in the country to face two years in a "re-education" camp after the war. We traveled with two guides in two different countries who had been Buddhist monks before they were guides. We traveled with one guide whose dad avoided death in the killing fields of Cambodia by having dark skin, like a peasant, not an intelectual. We met young girls who cherish light complexions.
Culenary school, land mine museum, village kindergarten, POW museum, Cambodian circus, typhoon, Buddhist shrine, old market shopping, slick shopping center.  Bus, van, plane, taxi, skytrain,  tuk tuk, boat and bicycle. All fitting together into a puzzle.

 

Ha Long Bay

The remains of the largest typhoon in recorded history is headed towards us in Hanoi, but we are scheduled to leave before it arrives. The last two days on Ha Long Bay were fabulous, but with an undercurrent of concern as news of the devastation in the Philippines reached us. Our guide, Hung, kept a happy face as he gave us updates and discussed alternate plans if the typhoon were to hit Hoi An, where we were to head next. Happy face, but concern on the inside.

The bay is home to multiple small floating fishing villages, pearl farms, and thousands of tourists. For much of the time, we are happy that our boat avoids the other boats. Sometimes, however, there is an attraction that draws the tour boats into a wet traffic jam and the experience is diminished. The landscape is eye-popping and carved into thousands of small islands; formed by the thrashing of the tail of a giant dragon - a long, long time ago.  Of course!

Now, we are in the boarding area for our 5pm flight to Da Nang and our hotel in Hoi An. At this moment, it seems that fortune is smiling on us.

 

One day in Hanoi

I am on line to visit Ho Chi Minh. His body lies preserved in a mausoleum in central Hanoi,  near the simple stilt house that served his modest presidential palace. The line snakes along a covered walkway, under the watchful eyes of the honor guards whose elaborate white uniforms look à little baggy to me. They remind us to take off hats and sunglasses and hold gloved fingers to lips to politely shush us. The line moves quickly and in twenty minutes we reach "Uncle Ho" who lies in a dimly lit large central room but his body glows in the illumination of his glass chamber. Hard not to get goosebumps. We visit Ho's house which is remarkable for its simplicity  and the simple French colonial style furniture. In his study, a lone bust of Lenin catches my eye.
There are very few reminders of  "The American War" in Hanoi now; most of the seven million Hanoi residents have only read about it in schoolbooks. Our young guide says Vietnamese people say let bygones be bygones and I believe him and that the country has eyes very much on the future. We do see some reminders of the war - some wreckage of a B-52 bomber lies in a small lake in a busy old part of town, ignored by locals and commerated only by a small plaque on a nearby building. We also visit the prison (the "Hanoi Hilton") that housed American pilots, captured down during the war. Significantly, most of the prison has been torn down for the construction of a slick new shopping center. The propaganda in the museum is pretty understated, but still makes me uncomfortable. The prison gates must have seen horrible things, but I must take photos for my door hardware portfolio.
With the war behind us, we visit the central confusions temple and are swallowed by a crowd of young students who have come to take graduation photos. The women are all fabulously pretty and stylish,  the men are trying to look cool in dark suits; there is an exhausting energy of laughing an posing for pictures. I much prefer this memory of Hanoi.