Hanoi Proper, Vietnam

...and still diarrhea-free!

This city has a lot of rules, and a lot of signs. Big, red, Vietnamese signs. In most cases, the signs instruct you not to proceed forward. Chances are, if you're close enough to read the signs, you're already dong something wrong.

The multitude of guardsmen with automatic rifles and banana clips serve as a friendly reminder that there are repercussions for legal infractions.

The best-guarded national treasure is the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, or as the children of Hanoi address him, "Uncle Ho". His body is embalmed and openly displayed in glass within his mausoleum. He looked peaceful - as we walked along the velvet ropes surrounding his glass casket, he seemed to move his hand!

Well, actually, this was only due to accidental flaws in the thickness of the glass, changing the index of refraction. Guess you had to be there. No pictures allowed; x-ray scanners, metal detectors, and armed guardsmen yelling at you to keep your hands in plain sight made it nigh impossible to get a candid snapshot of Uncle Ho.

We also attended a traditional Vietnamese water-puppet-show. Yeah, we paid to watch an aquatic puppetry performance - you got a problem with that? What a gas. The live music to which the puppets danced was well-composed and performed, and the puppets were maneuvered in whimsical, munchkin-like gestures (they even included some simple pyrotechnics) that had us laughing the majority of the performance. The rest of the audience chuckled too, so we weren't blatantly mocking their traditional culture.

On our last Vietnamese morning, we dined at a joint that served Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup, a popular winter dish in our household), which completed our Vietnamese cuisine experience, in our opinion.

Now we jet off to Laos with the Axners in a propeller jet - no napping here.

'Nam

Our guide, Mr. Tinh ("Ting") met us at the Hanoi airport to expedite our visa service. The fifteen minutes we spent separated from our passports seemed an eternity, but we really appreciated having a native to help us through the immigration bureaucracy, for a change.

We ran into two bums in our hotel that looked and smelled a lot like the Axners from Minneapolis, so we agreed to travel with them for the next twelve nights. We walked through the "Old Quarter," a district full of native markets, motor scooters, and colorful refuse in the gutters.

The next morning, we drove three hours with Tinh through rice fields to Ha Long Bay, stopping at an embroidery factory to see the craft in action. Of course, we walked out with some lovely examples of the artwork, too.

Ha Long Ba looks like some "Lost World," with densely-forested peaks jutting out of the saltwater into the foggy, cool, air.

We're spending three days on a "junk boat" - it can house twelve passengers, but for three days, it's just the four of us and five attendants (three cooks, a navigator, and an English-speaking guide).

Each meal is several courses of rich, fried, seafood, artfully-presented cucumbers, and some of the freshest rice we've ever had. Thus far, we've kayaked to a floating school and to a quiet bay, and we've crawled through two seaside caves. In these mountainous islands, they predict that there are over 140 undiscovered caverns.

The coffee is not to be missed - rich and almost chocolaty, with dollops of condensed milk lumped at the bottom of the mug. Stir vigorously and enjoy the tastiest eye-opener in Southeast Asia.

The weather for the entirety of our cruise has been a bit overcast, but it only adds to the mystical ambiance of the Ha Long region.

Wrapping up in Cambodia

We'll miss Siem Reap.

We spent our last day sampling Cambodian massage and beer - both are a bit rougher around the edges than their Thai counterparts.

The Cambodian (Khmer) traditional massages were only $6/hour, but ended with a "full-nelson" hold, and getting pulled back with our spines against an authentic Cambodian knee. Yee-ouch.

Angkor

We left Siem Reap early in the morning; we hired a private driver for the whole day (only $25) to tow us northward to Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and the surrounding temples of Preah Khan, Ta Prohm, and Phnom Bakheng.

Wow. We'd do the sites little justince with a wordy, qualitative description. So take a look at a few of the photos we've included.

The majority of the stone is sandstone, which allows for intricate detail in the bas reliefs that adorn the temple walls. The region started as Hindu temples, but the Buddhists came to own it and built atop the existing walls with new imagery. We really struggled to see everything in a day - even now, it's the largest collection of religious structures in the world (it's also nominated as a New Wonder of the World).

The entire Angkor region (including the temples we traversed) was rigged with landmines in the last few decades. When you ask a Cambodian if the temple grounds are mine-free, they nod and smile with gritted teeth - "Yes, is safe."

Nevertheless, as you stand at one temple and gaze at another, you start to walk towards it, and you find yourself about to cut through a grassy, rocky, terrain - off the dirt path. As convincing as the toothy smiles and Cambodian assurance may be, think twice. Stay on the path.

We stayed in Northern Angkor until sunset (we watched it from atop Phnom Bakheng).

If you find yourself here in Southeast Asia (and hopefully you didn't wind up here by mistake or against your will), you need to visit Angkor. We'll even pay for your admission ticket.

We're due for a night of good sleep.

P.S. - Pay for your own admission ticket, cheapskate.

Siem Reap

Welcome to Cambodia. Please adhere to the same rules as Thailand, but we have another rule:

No public displays of affection; not even hand-holding.

Showing affection is condiered vulgar in public, and should only be exercised privately. We weren't aware how natural it is for us to hold hands while walking, and we spent the day with one person reaching for the hand, and the other swatting it away. Nobody gave us any dirty looks.

Siem Reap is fantastic. We've not encountered any of the duplicity we found in the Bangkok urbanites, the weather is outstanding (85 F) and the town is situated on either side of the quite, muddy, Siem Reap river (it's more of a stream). Our hotel is right on the shore.

Some other interesting episodes here on the first day:

• A man driving a motorbike with four (four!) pigs tethered belly-up to the back of the bike. The pigs were still scurrying.
• A shopowner in the market tells her un-diabered toddler son to to pee. He stands at the threshold, facing out of the shop door, and urinates onto the dusty public sidewalk. A man walks by, watching, and treads directly through the resulting puddle.
• Adolescents bathe in public, in the stagnant, muddy, brown, Siem Reap river.
• We helped the boy at the reception desk with his resume cover letter; he was applying for a reception position at another Siem Reap hotel.

We ended the night with a dinner performance and a few local Angkor (American Standard Lager-style) beers. $.50 apiece. Jackpot!

Sunburnt in Bangkok

Welcome to our home country of Thailand. We have a few simple rules we'd like you to follow during your stay:

• Don't speak poorly of the president or the ruling party. Don't mock the imagery of him that we've hung on every lamppost - if it helps, just avoid looking at the lampposts altogether.
• Don't point the soles of your feet at people, or at images of the Buddha.
• Bow out of respect with your hands in prayer at your neck. Bow win entering and leaving. On second thought, just keep bowing - especially when you're not sure whether or not to bow.

We followed these rules in an effort to appear respectful, and we think it worked quite well for us.

Bangkok is a zoo. To expand this metaphor: zoos are smelly, crowded, somewhat flashy, and of course, packed with more sights than you can see in a single day. Zoos also have cheap unnecessarily expensive food, and zoos have people leaning against lampposts lying to you that an exhibit "doesn't open until 2 PM" and offering to drive you somehwere else in a three-wheeled open-air taxi and charge you a handful of dough for his services. Well, zoos don't really have that last part, but Bangkok sure does. Even if we hadn't read about that scam beforehand, we'd have known better.

The grand palace and "wats" (temples) we visitedin Bangkok were gold-tiled and quite garish. Inside the Wat Phra Kaeo (the holiest Thai temple) sits the Emerald Buddha. Well, it's technically Jade, but the monk who unearthed it mistook it for a more precious stone - thus, the moniker. They change the Buddha's clothes thrice a year to comply with the seasons. It was still dressed for the wet season, so the statue wore a golden gown. I think it was inconsiderate of them not to throw in a wee little golden umbrella. I suppose it's hard to pray to a dude holding an umbrella, though. O' the plight of the Buddha!

The hilight of our morning was our authentic Thai herbal massages - an hour of pressure-point full-body massage with some scattered rub-downs with hot, menthol-soaked rags. Ours for only $16 apiece!

We had some beers with an Australian chiropractor and another American traveler. Chiang Mai and its neighboring village "Pie" (sp?) in Northern Thailand came very highly reocommended. We may have to alter our itinerary accordingly once we return to Thailand in two weeks.

We spent an hour at an off-the-map temple/graveyard, where a man sold us a plate of banana segments and two long sticks ($.10 total) and we fed dozens of turtles in the temple's ponds! We did this until our bananas ran out; it was more fun than we'd like to admit.

After walking the markets and climbing the Golden Mount to get a high-altitude view of the sprawling city. We didn't appreciate the city any further, but it did satisfy our innate urge to climb things. We actually discovered that we had these innate urges as we made the climb. The delights of self-discovery! Ahem.

We hit the hay early that night after a Bangkok canal ride and a dirt-cheap five-course Thai dinner. Let's go to Cambodia.

So-Long, Japan

We spent the last morning in Japan visiting the Ueno Zoo (oldest existing Japanese zoo) and hitting the Tokyo districts we loved best - the sushi market and Asakusa. We decided to do it all by foot - a morning cross-town jaunt across Tokyo.

Our flight to Bangkok featured "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" - a splendid movie date over our boxed curried chicken and complementary Bailey's Irish Creme. Way-to-go, United!