Visiting Vietnam!

I started to write a Facebook post reflecting on our Vietnam trip, and it kind of morphed into a “what you need to know before you go” blog.  I hope that by sharing our journey, you might consider visiting someday. So many American’s memories or basic knowledge about this beautiful country are focused on one decade of history that was so ugly for both countries. I am glad my mom, who once said she would never go back, has had an opportunity to replace the tormented vision of her homeland with new and amazing vision. She told me that often when people found out she was from Vietnam, they would tell her what a beautiful country it was—the men who were there for a war could even recognize the beauty. Even in the midst of the darkness, they could see it.  The thing was, before she went back, she didn’t believe them.  All she saw in her first 23 years of life was Thu Duc Village and Saigon. They had no means to go further than that. She saw no mountains, beaches, lush tropical forests, or waterfalls. She has now. Without a doubt, she now knows her homeland is beautiful!  So, if you find yourself planning a trip, here are some things that can be helpful to know!

When to go – If you can help it, do NOT go in the summer months—it was SO HOT everywhere except in the mountains. I’m talking 100 degrees daily, not including the heat index from oppressive humidity. I’ve heard the best time to go is after Tet (lunar new year), but before summer heat and monsoons start in May.

Costs – The most expensive part is getting the plane tickets, but once you get there, lodging and food can be extremely inexpensive. A 3-star hotel room will run you about $25-$35/night depending on location, but if you are going on the REAL cheap, you can get hostel beds for $5-$7/night. Flights between major cities cost about $100 per flight.

Communication – It can be a little overwhelming with language barriers, cultural differences, currency exchange rates (so many 000s!), but nothing will ultimately stop you in your tracks. I highly recommend getting a $25 SIM card put into an unlocked phone, and you will have pretty good internet throughout the entire country, and be able to check in with loved ones far away with messenger apps. Even without a SIM, there are free internet connections in almost every hotel and business. With internet access and the Google translate app, you can do almost anything! In previous trips, I would get nervous and panic if my mom wasn’t with me to communicate, now I just enter what I wanted to say in Google translate, and they can read it, or you can even play the spoken words. When our Vietnamese tour guide was speaking, we would put it in conversation mode and it would real-time caption and translate what he was talking about. It was only about 75% accurate, but you could get the gist from context. You can also translate signs and menus with Google translate.  It’s really a game changer! If you don’t spring for the SIM card, you can download the Vietnamese dictionary while on wifi. It’s not as accurate without cellular service or wifi, but it will still work. 

Money – There are very few places which will take credit cards. If they do accept cards at all, expect at 3% upcharge to cover their fees. Bring cash to travel. Ask your bank for brand new $100 bills, and then keep them flat and safe until you exchange them. You will get better rates if you exchange $100 bills than smaller bills. You will also get better rates for a bill that looks brand new. You will watch them fully examining the bill before they agree to accept it. If there are any tears at the edges, they will not take it at all, even if the bill is in otherwise pristine condition. Keep them in an envelope and DO NOT fold them!

You need to know the exchange rate and always check around before exchanging money. For example, the rate as of the day I am writing this is 23,584 VND for $1 USD. We got exchange offers of 22,000 – 23,400 VND from exchange services. Since they make money for providing this service by giving you a bit of a lower exchange rate, we didn’t mind, but we still wanted to get the best rate. The lower difference of 1,584 VND is the equivalent of about $0.07, about $7 when you change $100. Pretty standard exchange rate we got was 23,200 VND/USD, which cost us about $1.63 per $100 exchanged.

There are ATMs in most major cities where you can make withdrawals in VND currency. You will be charged withdrawal fees, but they didn’t seem too bad.  I withdrew 2,320,000 VND and the withdrawal from my bank with fees was $101.05.

To do quick math while you are shopping, you can just think of 25,000 VND as $1.  So, if something was 50k VND, that would be about $2. Technically, it’s $2.12, but like I said, it will get you close enough on the fly.  For larger purchases, like 1,000,000+ VND, just divide by 23,500 (about $42.40 USD). The larger the VND price, the more the 25,000 quick math will be off. 

Vietnamese money is all bills, no coins.  The denominations are: 1,000 (a little less than $0.05) to 500,000 (about $21). Since there are so many 000s, it can be confusing which bill you are holding if you don’t look closely. It’s easy to confuse the 10k with 100k and the 20k with 200k. It’s harder to pay with a 500k VND unless you are in a nicer store/restaurant, the vendor may simply not have the change. So, break those bills up whenever you get a chance, and keep the bills organized. I always keep the 500k separate from the spending bills, and only pull them out when I intentionally need them.

Two-dollar bills are considered very lucky in Vietnam, so while you are at the bank getting your perfect $100s, ask for some $2 bills as well. Give them to Vietnamese people you really connect with while traveling. Very lucky!

Accommodations – Most hotels are on Booking.com if you want to shop options and prices. This is the main booking website they seem to recognize in Vietnam. Most times you can only reserve on the website, but you’ll be expected to pay cash at the hotel. Unless it’s a 4-5 star hotel, they likely won’t take credit cards. If they do take plastic, there will be a 3% upcharge to cover fees. There’s probably an exchange location within a block if you’re in the city to get the cash and save the upcharge. Laundry services are often offered by hotels, or there might be a laundry service nearby. We paid about $2/kilo for laundry about halfway through our trip.

AirBnb is in Vietnam, and can be very hit or miss. Our best results with AirBnb were typically hotels renting rooms/multi-rooms through AirBnb. We haven’t had great luck with houses or apartments in major cities. I know this sounds obvious, but you could probably rent great houses on AirBnb if you’re willing to pay much higher-than-average nightly rates. Same with hotels. If you are willing to pay anywhere near US prices per night, you’ll probably be in a lap of luxury!

Bathrooms – In hotels, it can be common to not have a shower door or wall to separate it from the rest of the bathroom—there’s just a drain in the bathroom floor. So, yes, the floors will be wet a lot. Occasionally, you’ll find the toilet behind the shower glass. When you find a weird set-up, you can assume it was changed after-the-fact because Westerners prefer to not hose down their entire bathroom while taking a shower.  Hotels might have shampoo and body wash, but if you are averse to strong-perfumy smells, bring your own or pick up something different at a nearby convenience store.

In many places, especially facilities that Westerners are expected to use, the famed “squat toilet” will have been upgraded to a standard flusher. In public, look for the WC (water closet) signs to find facilities. Restrooms in locations off the beaten path may still have a squat toilet. Essentially, they are a porceline stoop hole in the ground and places to put your feet aside the hole.  In the past, you would fill a small bucket of water if you needed to “flush” anything down. There have been hand-held sprayers installed in many places now. If a squat toilet will be a problem for you, you may need to stay near the cities. If you are headed to a public toilet, check for toilet paper inside the stall first. Sometimes there’s just a dispenser by the entry door, not in the stalls—or no paper at all. If you can carry toilet paper on you, it’s not a bad idea.

Be aware, a lot of public restrooms smell bad. Since the sewer systems in Vietnam are not state-of-the-art, many places expect used toilet paper to be put in the trash bin instead of flushing it. Many Vietnamese people will still use the bin whether there’s signs asking you to do that or not. I would say, it’s best to just lower your standards for public restrooms immediately. Sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised though.

Cultural differences with people/traffic – the people and traffic operate about the same—just keep moving. If you are not moving, you don’t exist.  If you are waiting in line for something, your culturally-American urge to wait your turn will get you left behind.  Waiting in line for the bathroom, or anywhere else for that matter, you must be moving the second you hear a door open and don’t leave a gap, or someone behind you will just go in front of you. They are not intending to be rude, it’s just a country in motion.

Traffic works the same, keep moving, and don’t hit anything. Yield to larger vehicles. If you waited for a clearing to walk across the street, you likely will never cross.  Move slowly and steadily, and the motor bikes will go around you.  Do not stop suddenly or change speeds, and you’ll be fine. For as crowded as the streets are, they have way fewer traffic jams because they just keep moving. Traffic lights are merely a suggestion in most areas except the largest, busiest city intersections. They seem to have way fewer stoplights than we do in the states. Honking the horn there is a cautious courtesy that means “I am near you, and I am proceeding” way more than it would ever mean “get out of my way”.  The horns are constant in the city—they get used more and mean more than turn signals.

Getting around – Every major city has tour packages to get transportation to other areas nearby, just compare prices. You can 100% book a tour for the following day, so no need for advance reservations online—they will typically cost a lot more. Same day bookings are likely possible as well if you try early in the day. Sometimes your hotel will offer discounted tours for staying there. There’s a tourist office on every block as well. As I mentioned earlier, flying domestically when you are taking a big jump from one city to another is about $100. It’s well-worth saving your vacation time by flying instead of driving.

Make sure you get the Grab app if you are needing in-city transportation.  They have Uber there, but Grab is the go-to in Vietnam.  One of the oldest scams in Vietnam is a bait and switch with taxi fees, so with Grab, you will know the cost of the ride before it’s booked, and can pay completely through the app linked to your credit card. As soon as you enter a larger city, you will see the unmistakable green jackets and helmets of Grab Bike drivers.  They also have cars and vans like Uber.  In Hanoi, we took several Grab Bike rides—(1) because whipping through the streets of Vietnam on the back of a bike is a ton of fun, and (2) it’s really cheap!  We took Grab bikes in Hanoi to get 1-2 miles from our hotel and the standard rate was 16,000 VND ($0.68).  The app will give you the option to tip on top of it, or you can just hand your driver a 5k or 10k VND bill depending on service. It’s not expected, but seriously, 5k is only $0.21. The whole ride with tip just cost $0.89 USD! Your driver may or may not speak English, but regardless, they will call you when they arrive, if anything to just make sure they are picking up the correct person. The messaging portion of the app has built-in translators, so that part is much easier for communication when you and your driver aren’t connecting for whatever reason. Make sure you look at the driver’s phone app to verify the right location is showing before you get on. Grab is so widely used that it could be easy to pick up the wrong person if everything isn’t verified. They will hand you a helmet, and off you go! 

Food and drink – Of course, a huge part of travel is finding local eats! The flavors and primary dishes can be different depending on whether you are in the north, central or south. There are regional specialties, but you can find good phở (noodle soup with rare beef—pronounced fuuh, please do not say foe!) in all the places. If you like your phở with hoisin sauce, you won’t find hoisin up north. It’s still good though!  Fresh tropical fruit is literally for sale on every street corner for a buck or two–ask the price and be willing to walk away if it seems too high—there’s going to be another vendor nearby. If you find a street café with only one thing on the menu, you can bet they do it well! Tipping at restaurants is not normal or expected, although more places are getting used to the idea and might have a tip jar on the counter.

You are now able to find so many nationalities of food in Vietnam. You can easily find a lot of American food, along with Indian, Japanese, and Korean as well. We felt the need for “comfort” food from time-to-time, and pizza or burgers and fries is likely nearby. Of course, major fast-food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Dominos, and KFC are in the cities. It’s kind of interesting to go to see the menu differences, but expect to pay near US prices.

Coffee – it’s everywhere—the Vietnamese take their coffee seriously, and we rate it on a “jet fuel” scale. If you’re used to hot, black American coffee, it gets a little harder to find something that resembles a typical cup. You may need to dilute with hot water unless you enjoy a very strong espresso. Beware of caffeine jitters! The Vietnamese coffee standard, especially if it’s warm out, is going to be over ice—either black or with sweetened condensed milk. If you wait for the ice to melt a bit, the super-strong coffee will dilute to a reasonable level of strong. It’s quite yummy! You can get coconut coffee in many places, but it’s more like a coconut milkshake coffee dessert. So good!  I highly recommend them, especially if they put toasted coconut on top, too.

In Hanoi, they offer egg coffee. I know it sounds gross on the surface, but think of it more like French meringue desserts—whipped egg with sugar. Due to a milk shortage during the war, they replaced milk creamers with egg. It’s delicious, but beware of getting it after you leave the Hanoi area unless it’s from a full-blown, nice coffee café (still iffy).  It will NOT be right (ask my sister-in-law who essentially received an egg put in hot coffee).

If you don’t drink coffee and prefer your caffeine in soda form, Coca-Cola and Fanta are the go-to flavors you’ll find in most places. You will be hard-pressed to find diet soda. Some places will carry a Coca-Cola “light”, but they really don’t have a word for diet like we do in the states. You can find the best selections of beverages from a 7-11 or most other mini-marts. Stick to bottled water, it can be found nearly everywhere. While improvements have been made in infrastructure, I still wouldn’t trust drinking tap water. Any refillable bottles of water you receive in hotel rooms are expected they will be heated to make tea or coffee. Most ice served by businesses is bagged-ice, so no need to worry about issues there.

You’ll rarely find a COLD drink in Vietnam. You may get to a slightly chilled level—even for beer. If you need anything colder, get a glass with ice.

Where to go – it’s hard to narrow down what to do because there really is a lot to see and do!  Do some Googling and pick some favorites to plan your trip around. Tourism is a huge industry in Vietnam now, and growing daily due to Instagram “perfect” photo spots which seem to be everywhere. Just know that Instagram influencers are making it seem as if they are secluded and off the beaten path by going at day break or some other magic. Most known tourist spots are very crowded by tourists and Vietnamese alike. Tour buses are everywhere. Other well-known tourist attractions (like the Golden Bridge) are up in the mountains and can often be socked in with clouds. You may want to try to time these excursions based on current weather by staying flexible with your plans.

Tours groups can be great, but they can also be overwhelming with timelines and moving as a group. They are great in that they help you get somewhere and see things without you needing to find out ALL the details of getting there and back. Tours might include any associated tickets fees, or maybe not, so make sure you know what all it includes. Multi-day tours like we took, may not be for you. It wasn’t exactly what we would have come up with for ourselves (way too much moving and bus time), but this is what the rest of our family was doing, and part of this vacation for me was to spend time with people we don’t get to see on the regular anymore. 

What I would have done is picked 2-4 cities as a “home base” and some tours to places nearby, depending on how much time you have.  Part of the fun of exploring another country is organic exploring that you do from your hotel room just by walking around and seeing what’s there. Each thing doesn’t need to be a full-blown tourist attraction for me. For much of our tour group time, we didn’t stay in one hotel for more than 2 nights. This is why we left the tour group in the middle for 4 days on our own. We extended the stay in Sa Pa by a day (we probably could have done two or more days; we loved it so much!) and then Hanoi for 3 days. It helped us learn the areas, know where we could get coffee that we like (it can be wildly different in VN), and get familiar with some people, food, and the area around the home base. It helps you not feel as crazy while in a foreign country.  If I did something like this again, we’d spend 4-6 days each in Sa Pa, Hue, Hoi An, and Saigon/delta area. I loved Ninh Binh and Ha Long Bay, but they could be a day trip out of Hanoi instead. Or if you want more time to explore one of the places, I’d recommend staying there as a home base.  Ha Long Bay has boat tours that last 2+ days and you can stay in boat cabins. We did that last time, and it was great. Tour booking offices are available on nearly every block in cities which will get you to what you want to see.  You can book private transportation or tickets for a bus/train ride.

Shopping – Compared to past trips we’ve made to Vietnam, more shop owners in cities speak English pretty well now. It’s likely a job necessity. You won’t have a lot of problems communicating. Street sellers can be persistent, and if you aren’t interested, it’s best to ignore them and move on. We found this more common in Sa Pa, where some of the sellers followed our group for very long distances if you showed even a tiny bit of interest, or if they see you buy from someone else. If you stay in the same place for days, you’ll likely see the same sellers, and they WILL remember you. If you really want something, you might consider waiting until your last day to buy it so you’re not marked as a buyer.

Unless you are in a store with marked prices, the first price you are given is likely to be a starting point—inflated a little, or sometimes a LOT. Sales people in markets can be aggressive, so prepare for it.  Many understand “just looking” and might leave you to browse. However, a majority will start shoving items in your face and asking you what you are looking for. If you are prepared for it, just hold strong because you can get really cool items at reasonable prices. If you are told a price, and are willing to pay that price, just do it. It’s likely pretty good compared to US prices. What’s a couple dollars to you? It means a lot more to them. But if you feel it’s high, and hate the haggle, just let them know you are going to check other shops too—most items are repeated in many shops. Ninety percent of the time, you’re going to hear a lower price as you’re attempting to walk away. We were told 280k for a skirt at one store (about $12 USD), then as I changed my mind on it because I didn’t LOVE it, the price lowered to 200K. And then as I exited the store, she was saying any skirt in the shop was 100K (now about $4.25 each—big discount!).

If you enjoy the haggle, go for it! It’s pretty much expected at a lot of places, and not considered rude. However, if you don’t love it, the walk-away method is a great way to get a more accurate selling price, and you don’t feel like a jerk since they are offering it up to you. Remember, if prices are marked already, they are likely set prices and not likely to be reduced.

Knock-offs of many brands like North Face, Patagonia, Under Armor, Nike, Gucci, Chanel, etc. are offered for sale everywhere.  If you see them, assume it’s probably a knock-off, even if there are legit tags on it. Most of these brands have factories in Vietnam, and people learn how to copy the items. Sometimes, they are amazing copies, and you can’t tell the difference when looking very thoroughly at all the details—stitching, tags, zippers, etc. Then there are others which are laughable—hint: brand names spelled incorrectly are a sure sign of a knock-off! If you want something with a name brand, don’t buy it thinking it will be authentic, just buy it because you want that particular item.  Just keep in mind, knowingly buying and bringing fakes back in the US is illegal. You can be ignorant as to whether they are legit or not, but don’t be the idiot that wants to buy something to sell and make money in the states. It’s just a jerk move to resell probable fakes, and maybe you’ll find yourself in some legal trouble too.

Final thoughts – If you choose to visit Vietnam, know that it’s pretty safe in tourist areas. The most common crime tourists may be subjected to are petty thefts and pick-pockets. If you keep your valuables on you and in a safe location (front pockets and front waist packs), you shouldn’t have any issues. I had no fear for my safety when walking around after dark. You will encounter some beggars, just know that if you give to one, you might be surrounded by many in very short order.

The people overall seem happy and welcoming of Western travelers. Westerners mean money. If you attempt to learn a few key phrases, like “thank you”, Cảm ơn (cahm uhn – soften the k-sound, with a distinct stop/separation of words), they will appreciate your attempt at their language.

You’ll need a standard travel visa, which is good for 30 days. You can apply online from the Vietnam Embassy, and receive a visa by mail or an e-visa by email. It’s about $25 USD, but you can pay extra for a service that will meet you at the airport and walk you through customs (another $75-ish per person). You probably won’t need the service, but if you think you might be overwhelmed on arrival, someone waiting for you who speaks English and can show you where to go might be worth it to you.

Good luck! Navigating in a foreign country can be overwhelming! Turn on your sense of adventure and go with the flow. You’ll need it! 

Things to do in Buena Vista, Colorado

The first time I set foot in Buena Vista (pronounced BYOO-nah VISS-tuh) by the locals, or byooney, or easier, just BV) was July 2001. My father-in-law’s family had been coming here from Ohio since the 1950s and were peak-baggers before it was a thing, or before there was much in the way of trails. Just grab a topo map and head up! In their older age, and scattered all about the country, they decided to have a biannual family reunion in the place they had made so many memories growing up, at their favorite campground, Collegiate Peaks Campground. I had never heard of the place, but had been to Colorado enough times that when my wife said “want to go camping in Colorado”? My immediate answer was DUH! Of course I do.

I still remember the first time I saw the Arkansas River Valley where this sleepy little mountain town lies. As we drove down the final stretch of 285 where it enters the valley, nothing quite prepared me for the scene in front of me. Sure, you see mountains on the way here, Pikes Peak at Colorado Springs, the low hills along U.S. 24 thru the front range, Badger Mountain at Wilkerson Pass, South Park and the ring of majestic peaks circling that massive basin, Many of the peaks you see as you cross south park are actually IN the Arkansas River Valley, but they just look like average mountains sticking above the horizon. The valley is actually two thousand feet LOWER than the elevation of South Park if that gives a clue. As we wind our way down, down, down thru the twisting, turning, rock-choked valley of Trout Creek Pass, we begin to see the top of Mount Princeton, revealing more and more of its depth, breadth, and girth with each turn in the road. The final mile we emerge from the cut and the valley opens up, running perpendicular to the highway.

And then, there it is. A jaw-dropping floor of incredible peaks, reeling to the horizon in both directions. A broad flat plain undulates at the base, which serves to give full view of these mountains. The foothills are few in this part of the valley, and it is all the more sublime for it. In the center of the valley lies the Arkansas river, it’s headwaters about 40 miles north. A sparkling ribbon snaking it’s way thru rock and field and hill and dale and glade and plain, it is the life of the valley. The Arkansas is a Gold Medal trout stream, a special designation that signifies the ability to produce 60 pounds of trout per acre, and at least twelve 14″ or larger trout per acre. Translation? The fishing, and the view, is phenomenal here. As my fly fishing friend Brian says, “Trout don’t live in ugly places, man”.

The river also draws adventurers from all over the world for it’s world class whitewater rafting, kayaking, bird and animal watching, hiking, or just taking in an incredible sunset.
To me, Mount Princeton is the anchor of this valley. It is absolutely massive, and one of the most recognizable mountains in the valley, and I daresay the entire state.
Rising nearly 7000 feet above the valley floor and nestling hot springs, cabins, trails, mines, cliffs, waterfalls, streams, cabins, homes, and a dizzying array of flora and fauna in it’s shadows, it is truly an icon of Colorado.

Needless to say, this place made an impression on me. As we returned every other year to camp and spend time with our far flung family members, it slowly revealed more and more of it’s secrets, and my love affair grew and grew. This is my happy place. I have a few, but this one is in my top two!

Buena Vista lies in Chaffee County Colorado and is a veritable mecca of outdoor recreation. If you have a passion for outdoor sports or relaxation, chances are, we have it here. A list of activities within a a half hour drive or less from downtown:

Whitewater Rafting, Kayaking, Canoeing and SUP (Stand Up Paddleboarding)
Along with the miles of river, BV also has a whitewater PARK (I didn’t know this was a thing!), along with many lakes and creeks and streams from calm and placid to absolute class V/VI death defying, fast dropping, snow runoff streams for any skill level. There are tons of outfitters to choose from, and Browns Canyon is THE destination for family rafting trips. With many named rapids and my favorite in the whole valley, ZOOM FLUME! It’s a bit like diving down a roller coaster hill in a raft with water crashing in on all sides. Intense, and AWESOME! There is enough slow water to enjoy the scenery of Brown’s Canyon mixed with class III and IV rapids. For the more adventurous, run the Numbers. A stretch of over a dozen class IV and V rapids, this will really get your heart pounding! Oh yeah… tip your river guides!!! Many if not all of them live in tents & outdoors for the entire season for near minimum wage and they dedicate themselves to making sure you have a safe and fun adventure.

Rock climbing & bouldering. Visit the bouldering park in South Main!
Along with some great traditional rock climbing & rapelling areas, there is a newly created Bouldering park near South Main to test & develop your skills. There are even slacklines at the park! If you’re here in winter or just want something different, check out BV Rocks Climbing Gym for year round action!

Mountain Biking, Gravel Rides, or Road Cycling
Right against the rocky cliffs against the east side of town and less than a quarter mile from Main Street is the entrance to the Midland Trail Complex. From bomber downhills and technical climbs & descents to smooth flowy single track, this is an amazing resource for Mountain Bikers. This area extends into the massive Fourmile Recreation area with endless opportunity for biking, camping, four wheeling or just relaxing at the amazing overlooks. There are enough gravel in the area to tax the most demanding gravel riders as well and the elevation will own you, if you want it! The latest in high tech bikes can be rented at Boneshaker Cycles downtown.

Hiking
This one almost goes without saying but if you want world class views and hikes of every type and variety, this is your place. From rivers edge to snowy peak, canyon walls to hidden aspen shaded lakes, we have it all!
Try your legs on Mount Yale or take the family for an easier stroll and picnic at Ptarmigan Lake. Stop by the visitors center for local intel on the vast array of trails, hikes and driving directions. Hiking is a year round venture here, so don’t think if you’re here in the winter you can’t take a hike. Hit the visitors center in town to check out options for winter hikes.

Trail Running
The same can be said for trail running as hiking here, we have it all, and a lot of pro athletes make this valley their summer training camp. The high altitude and plentiful sunshine make an ideal training environment. Many epic races are held here in the valley from the famous Leadville 100, Cycling & Gravel races, Triathlons, Marathons & Ultras. There’s something here for everyone.

Camping
For many families, camping is a cheap and fun way to reconnect with nature and enjoy the great outdoors. There are many beautiful develop campgrounds in the surrounding mountains, as well as RV parks in town, a rustic KOA with cabins & RV hookups, plus primitive sites. There are also lots of free campgrounds if you know where to look. Turtle Rock in Fourmile Recreation Area, Clear Creek Resevoir are a couple that come to mind. There are many others and so much public land that as long as you follow local regulations, you can find a pristine spot for free if you’re a little more adventurous.
Pro Tip: Clear Creek Reservoir has free spots along the creek and you’ll get an amazing show if you come during the Salmon run!

Fly Fishing & Angling the rivers, streams and lakes

As I already alluded to above, we really have fantastic trout fishing here. There is also great bass & other game fishing in the local lakes & streams. There is a very nice fishing easement for this very purpose about 2 miles west on CR 306. Head west from the stop light, turn right at the big water tank that says Buena Vista on it, and the parking area is about 100 yards on your right. This is very near our house and is a great spot to wildlife watch as well. You can also ice fish if you’re here in the winter time, check out Ark Anglers in BV to get the skinny on some fat trout!

Shooting
For those who like to shoot clays, rifles or train pistol skills, there is a nice free shooting range, Chaffee County Shooting range 16 miles south on 285, right next to the landfill.

Golfing
For those who love to hit the links, Collegiate Peaks may be one of the prettiest courses in the country and is just 1.3 miles west of the stoplight on Main.

Skateboard Park
My son cut his skating teeth in the bowl off Main St in town but is a little sad that they took the old wood ramps out and built a brand new concrete park. It is very nicely designed and is definitely a hit with local skaters.

Mountain Climbing
This is the big one. We have the biggest concentration of “14ers” (Mountains over 14,000 feet tall) in the entire state right here in Chaffee County. This is your premier Colorado destination if you’re a peak bagger, or just want to give it a try. From lung busting technical ascents to easy (relatively speaking!) walk ups, we have it all!

My unofficial name for the Arkansas River Valley is “The Parade of 14ers”. Starting from Leadville 40 miles to the north all the way down to Salida 25 miles south, it’s an endless chain of massive, jaw dropping peaks. There are 12 14ers in Chaffee County and two more in Lake County. If you want to climb, you will not be disappointed!

The tallest mountain in the State is Mount Elbert at 14,439 feet, and is approximately 20 miles north of town.

Mount Yale is a personal favorite and the trailhead is less than five miles west up CR 306 from the stoplight on Main.

Keys to climbing a 14er:
Start early, preferably before daylight or close to it. Many peaks see monsoonal lightning in early afternoon so it’s good to summit early and start heading down before then. Wear solid hiking shoes, take lots of water and snacks, use hiking poles, and take it slow if you’re a beginner. Almost anyone can do it with some determination. Many compare the satisfaction of climbing a 14er to completing a marathon. You WILL be worn out at the end of the day and it’s a perfect time to hit one of the bars or restaurants on South Main to celebrate and re-hydrate!

Gold Panning
Colorado’s history is rife with mining, the activity that opened so much of the west, and many abandoned mines dot the area, giving rise to towns that popped up overnight, and eventually went bust with the mines. There are still active mines throughout the state and gold panning is a fun activity to try with the kids or just to get some sun and river time. Check out Cache Creek nearby or hit the Rock Doc in Nathrop just a few miles south of town.

Ghost Towns
With the rise and fall of the mines, dozens of towns were abandoned or left to those few hardy mountain people who stayed and made their living off the land. There are several ‘ghost towns’ in the area that tell the stories of the miners and the families who lived and worked there. Some have become famous for their historic buildings and picturesque settings. St. Elmo is probably the most famous with an iconic main street, old mining equipment, and nowadays, a general store, ATV rentals, chipmunk feeding and more. This is a great spot to take the kids for an afternoon. The drive up is beautiful with some great waterfalls along the road, as well as passing right by Mt. Princeton Hot Springs and Resort with swimming, hot springs, food, and more. Highly recommended!

Shopping, Bars & Restaurants on Main & South Main
South Main is a premier, planned development that really helped put BV on the map. To quote their website:

“Built around a world class white water park The South Main Neighborhood is all about connecting walkable, sustainable urbanism to the outdoor lifestyle while designing and building a great place to live.”

Free concerts, bouldering park, great restaurants, hotels, shops, and located right on the river. It’s a fantastic spot to chill out after a day in the hills!

Photography
I love photography, and there is hardly a spot in the valley that doesn’t make you want to whip out your camera. Sunrises are special here, a slow creeping of color that makes it’s way over the hills, painting the valley in every shade of cream, mauve, reds and golds as clouds twist and climb in the thermals and microclimes of the Rocky Mountains, while swaths of gold prairie dance and sway in the morning breeze. Utterly enchanting.

Bird & Animal Watching
From Sand Crane to Buffalo, the valley is a treasure trove of american wildlife species. Bighorn Sheep and mountain goats live in the rocky cliffs on the east side of the river, while the valley floor hosts herds of Antelope and Elk. The high elevations are home to marmots and weasels, and the lucky visitor can glimpse Moose, Black Bear, or the elusive mountain lion. Other common residents are fox, coyote, prairie dogs, mule deer, bobcat, beaver, eagles, hawks, great horned owl, osprey, and Towhees, grosbeaks, tanagers, hummingbirds, wrens, creepers, and nuthatches. There are bison at a few managed ranches around the valley as well. If you visit in the fall, check the local streams for the salmon run. It’s awesome to see these freshwater beauties making their way in the streams and creeks.

Hot Springs & Resorts
The valley has been home to volcanic activity for time immemorial, and the upside is fantastic hot springs to soak after a hard days hike. Check out Cottonwood Hot Springs just a few minutes west of town, or head over to Mt Princeton Hot Springs & Resort. 25 miles south you can visit Salida Hot Springs Aquatic Center. All are open year round.

4×4 Off Roading & ATV rentals
If you have a four wheel drive, there are hundreds of miles of back country roads, mountain passes and trails to explore, and if you’re geared up for challenging terrain, Carnage Canyon is famous for it’s epic course. You can also rent ATV’s at St Elmo and explore the surrounding mountains or drive up to Tin Cup pass for a great day trip.

Dog Park & Sledding
If you’re traveling with sparky, fido, or fluffy, there’s a nice dog park in town to let them run and do ‘dog stuff’. Many of the bars and restaurants in Colorado are dog friendly, in fact Colorado is one of the dog friendliest state’s I’ve ever visited. Always inquire ahead but expect plenty of opportunity to hang with your canine.
If you’re here in winter check out Monarch Dog Sled rides for a truly unique experience and to learn about the sport that opened the last frontier. Great for kids!

Stargazing
Something often overlooked, the high and dry climate, lack of pollution and low population in this area makes for heavenly stargazing. Visit one of the overlooks or head up into the fourmile recreation area to get some truly fantastic dark sky experiences. There’s nothing quite like watching shooting stars around a campfire in a mountain pine forest near a gurgling stream at 10,000 feet. This is heaven. This is what memories are made of.

Horseback Riding
Dotted with equestrian trails and plenty of stables to hook you up, there is year round offerings to ride the mountains. I always say the best way to see a mountain is from the back of the horse. You can spend all your time enjoying the scenery, and letting the big guy do all the work for you. Check at the visitor center for a list of stables in the area.

Geocaching
Another overlooked activity, geocaching. These days you can download an app on your phone and get out into areas you otherwise never would have discovered. This is how I found some of my favorite places in the valley in my early days of exploring here. If you don’t know what geocaching is, waste no time in checking it out on the google. This is a great family activity!!!

Cannabis
It’s a fact, lots of people are curious or even come to Colorado to check out legal cannabis. Our town has voted against recreational dispensaries (unless you have a medical card) but there are affordable and friendly places down the road in Salida, or upstream in Leadville. Everything from flowers to gummies and candies to drinks and salves, you can find what you’re looking for. Colorado was first to legalize and hence has some of the best prices and variety in the country. The budtenders are always friendly and helpful, and the vibe is always fun. And remember, if you’re a newbie, start low and go slow!!!

Royal Gorge Bridge and Park
Royal Gorge Bridge is an easy 1.5 hour drive south from BV. Visit one of the highest suspension bridges in the world and take in amazing panoramic views of the canyon or hike in the gorge. This one will certainly get your heart rate up if you’re squeamish about heights, but no worries. It’s safe and well guard railed for walkers and the view is awe inspiring.

Zip Lining
Zip lining has become very popular in the last 10 years and we have some of the best. Check out Brown’s Canyon adventure park for a playground in the sky featuring zip lines, ropes courses, giant swings and more, right on rivers edge. You can also get day trips that combine the adventure park plus a half day of whitewater rafting. This makes for an adrenaline packed day of family fun and adventure and is an unforgettable combination.

Fall Foliage
The mountains come alight in fall with blazes of fiery yellow quaking aspen, stark white ghostly faces in the bark, drawn by claw and beak and sun and peak, Golden cottonwoods scrape canyon wall and riverbank aglow with the approaching winter sun, while the raven sits aloft gifting his sermon to those who have ears. Look! Listen! Marvel in silence and fading footprints…

Winter Activities
And of course, what would Colorado be without it’s number one sport, skiing. There are several resorts within an hours drive of town. The closest is Monarch Mountain near Salida. The locals call it a glorified bunny hill, but I guarantee you can get your share of thrills here and for a fraction of the costs you’d see at the big places up north. Ski Cooper, the 6th oldest ski hill in Colorado, is located about 45 minutes northwest of town and offers awesome views and lots of history of the 10th Mountain Division’s World War II training camp. Of course there’s always Vail or Breck, but if you want that stuff you’d stay up there right? And take out a second mortgage for a lift ticket…
Leadville has a fantastic trail system for cross country skiing if that’s your vibe, and of course you can cross country ski just about ANYWHERE in the valley in the winter. You can also book guided back country tours and guides use snowmobiles to take you into untouched powder in pristine bowls and chutes for an unforgettable experience. Snowshoeing is another option for the snow junkies, and several places rent machines in the area and can direct you to great places to ride. We also have sledding for tamer winter fun, and the visitors center downtown can guide you to nearby hills for some free family fun.

History
In the late 1800s, the Chaffee county seat was located in the tiny settlement of Granite, 20 miles to the north. After a vote in 1880 to move the county seat to BV, Granite residents refused to allow the records to be moved. Late one evening, some local BV teenagers got drunk, stole a steam engine and flat car, drove up to Granite where they kicked in the courthouse door and stole all of the county records as well as everything that wasn’t nailed down and spirited it back to BV, where it was all hidden in local safes until the new courthouse was built on Main. Visit The Buena Vista Heritage Museum in the old Court house on Main, check out Leadville’s mining museum or check out the interpretive signage in nearby ghost towns. History is fun!

After compiling this list, even I was surprised at some of the things I discovered while researching for this article. The question arises what CAN’T you do here? Well, if you’re looking for a sandy beach you’re in the wrong place, though there are great places to hang out on the rivers and lakes and sun yourself. Most towns in the valley are relatively small places so there is not a ton of nightlife though each town does have some offerings and lots of great concerts and goings on in the summer. What else don’t we have? Urban decay, traffic jams, smog (although the occasional wildfire makes things interesting), air pollution or noise. What else can I say, Come and see, come and see!

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
– Edward Abbey

Protected: Triple B Calendar

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Tales of a Retired Adventuring Musician

December 21, 2018.

I quit my job of 17 years and my career of over 20 years in the IT business.

In dramatic fashion.

I told my boss I was taking the rest of my life off, deleted 20 gigs of files from the mainframe that I had built over my career, deleted the config files from the firewall and routers, changed all the admin passwords, logged in as admin to the email system and told the entire leadership of my place of employment to stick it via mass email and walked out of the building.

An hour later I was informed via text message by my old boss that charges were being pressed and a police report would be filed. No matter. I would be on a plane to Southeast Asia 3 days later and unreachable for the foreseeable future. The best part was I still had access to the email system via several dummy accounts and was able to read the entire reaction via internal email. The panic was delightful. The cost in time to fix my little bit of mischief would be significant.

The bridge was burned with napalm.

I changed my mailing address to Colorado and spent the entirety of 2019 traveling and free lancing here and there for extra spending money, and to keep a lawyer on retainer, the one item I had not budgeted for…

Sometimes when you’re log jammed in life, the best way to break a log jam is a grenade. I understood that I could get in trouble for my actions, but understand this:
Every word of this is true, except for everything I’ve written up to HERE.

Well, the date I left my job is accurate. And the part about the travel and free lance.
Truth is, I actually liked my job for the most part. It enabled everything that comes after. I liked many of the people, the problem solving, the camaraderie, and especially having good health insurance! But early retirement was my goal for many years, and it was time.
2019 in many ways was the best year of my life. I did not stay at my job long enough to reach full pension benefits, which I could have gotten by staying 3 more years. But it was not my priority. My priority is to try and squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of life possible for me without bankrupting myself.

I’ve been asked by a few people, why? Why didn’t you stay a paltry three years? And the answer is, it wasn’t absolutely necessary for me to survive and having watched a few people near and far retire and die soon after I was determined not to go that route, God willing.

I wouldn’t trade the experiences of my ‘gap year’ for anything, especially a little extra ‘security’, which is not a real thing honestly.

The story of how I got here financially is not what I wanted to talk about here, though I may discuss that in another post about ‘money’ and ‘early retirement’.

My goal was to find a way to write about my experiences last year and not come off as humble bragging, or attempting to paint a picture of a ‘perfect life’. Some may see it that way anyway, and they are free to interpret as they see fit, or not read any of this. No matter. You’ll be judged regardless so you might as well do you.

The end of 2017 and a lot of 2018 was not necessarily great times for me. I struggled with some things and had to face some hard truths about my future playing music. Many of you may know that music has been the overarching passion in my life since I was a child. In 2017 after a particularly loud gig, I went home with terribly ringing ears and that ringing did not subside for days. I was alarmed and got hearing tested. I’ve known I have hearing loss for a long time, and it runs in the family. My dad is down to maybe 25 or 30% of his hearing, so I knew that day could come.

Testing confirmed some hearing loss and a diagnosis of Tinnitus was handed over. Well… duh.

I took the opportunity to have some custom ear plugs made and purchase in ear monitors, things I should have done a LONG time ago.

It’s a bit of an irony with musicians that doing the thing you love the most, potentially screws up your ability to do the thing you love the most. I really struggled with the tinnitus for the better part of the year, and I know a lot of people near me who didn’t know what I was going thru started calling me ‘grumpy’ during this time. Almost certainly I was dealing with depression. Without going into a long ramble about all of this, suffice to say at some point I accepted the fact of tinnitus and started learning to cope with it as well as possible and above all, protect my hearing at all costs as well as possible.

This means that the guys in my band have to put up with low volume rehearsals and always thinking about volume issues. They have been great for the most part and most of them have tinnitus as well, so it’s in their best interest whether they like it or not!

In fact it was talking to so many fellow musicians who have the same issues that helped me through. Be that as it may, I took the opportunity to pursue other creative passions and think about a life not totally encompassed by performing loud music.

Along with my love for all kinds of creative pursuits, music, art, photography, film etc I’ve also discovered a true enjoyment for writing, and I’m going to try and hone that craft on this blog and who knows, maybe other places. The feedback I received from writing about my travels in Vietnam and other places is truly gratifying, and directly inspired me to start trying to write more seriously.

If you’ve come this far with me and you’re willing, come a little further.

I had to go thru my google calendar for 2019 to remember but here it is:

• December 26-Jan 15 Vietnam & Cambodia
• March 24 -31 New Orleans
• June 9-16 Dinosaur National Monument Utah/Colorado
• July 8-13 Canoeing Arkansas Buffalo National River
• July 14-21 Colorado Hiking with the B’s
• August 4-8 Mexico
• Aug 15-18 Canoeing Driftless Wisconsin
• Aug 29 – Sept 3 – Denver Wedding
• October 9-12 Colorado Home Inspection
• Oct 18-27 California – Work trip remodeling my sisters house in Fortuna
• Oct 28-30 Colorado – fixes for house
• Nov 24 – Chicago Bears game
• Nov 26- Dec 4 – Colorado Remodel
• Dec 26-Jan 4 Colorado remodel

I also managed a couple large construction projects in Springfield, played a dozen gigs, worked half a dozen studio gigs as well as all the regular family goings on. I suppose it would be unfair to say I am retired. I work almost everyday that I don’t have something else going on.

The irony is I left a decent paying job in the construction industry 22 years ago because I was absolutely miserable, and now the majority of my work is construction / remodeling projects. The difference is, I actually enjoy it now. I like remodeling things, and I get to pick when I’m outdoors or in. And it was that base of knowledge that got me started in the rental business, which has definitely helped us towards our retirement goals. It has in fact become, my job after ‘retirement’.

I have to thank my wife, for letting me run all over like a crazy person last year. She was supposed to leave her job last June and for complicated reasons that have little to do with us, she did not. The upside of this situation is this allowed us to purchase a home in Colorado in our favorite mountain town, Buena Vista. We have both agreed that this year I (we) will tone down the travel a bit. For one, we will not leave the lower 48. The Colorado house we bought is definitely a ‘fixer upper’ and is going to take significant time and resources to get going. But it also means we’ll get to spend a lot of time in one of our favorite places in the world, and the surrounding area.

Life is good, but things can change in a heartbeat. I am just trying to enjoy every minute for the moment, and I hope all who read this are doing the same.

Life is also short. Don’t wait to do the things you want to do, do them sooner rather than later, you never know when the day will come when you can’t.

If you could take a year and do anything you wanted, what would you do? Where would you go? Leave a comment below!

The Cabin

Nostalgia.
When I was about 9 years old, our family’s best friends moved to Arkansas. It was hard. We were close and I didn’t have many other friends. We made trips to see them several times over the next few years, and this was essentially our family vacation. Just to visit for a week and stay with our friends. It was all we could afford really.
To me, Arkansas was a deep, dark, mysterious place. Endless forests, swamps, rivers, venomous snakes, and the kids there casually called me ‘yankee’. I had zero understanding of what that meant at the time, and was thoroughly confused. Was I supposed to be insulted? I didn’t know! That aside, the people were friendly enough there.
We spent all of our time riding motorcycles, 3 wheelers, fishing, hunting, and shooting guns. I guess it was a kind of heaven for a country kid.
One of the highlights for me was a stay at ‘the cabin’. That’s what we called it. It was a friend of the friends place, out on the Saline river. It was always an adventure even getting there. You had to ‘winch in’. The road was dirt and ran through the swamps along the river. You had to have a 4WD and a winch and you would get stuck multiple times on the way. You would see multiple snakes as well, and often we would stop and take target practice on them. Copperheads, Cottonmouths, Rattlers. Going in at night added some creepiness to the adventure.
Being a kid and having no sense of distance, it just felt like it was FAR out in the woods and I always had an element of nervousness that should I become lost out there… well, that would be the end of me. There were numerous trails that branched out from the cabin, and we would walk around or ride motorcycles. We were told, if you get lost…. it’s 50 miles to the nearest road. That never left my mind.
I now know it’s maybe half a mile to the road in any direction. LOL. They just didn’t want us to get lost.
My dad and I would stay at the cabin with our friends and hunt deer. The mosquitoes were as big as fireflies, it was dark as a cave at night, and weird sounds would come out of the woods after dark. It was certainly an adventure for a young boy. I caught a huge Northern Pike on the river right behind the cabin and they cleaned it and we ate it for dinner. Usually someone would kill a deer, and I would watch fascinated as they’d hang it from the tree beside the cabin and gut it.
We did this regularly for a few years, until ultimately the friends had a falling out with the cabin owner, and we stopped going. The trips to Arkansas became less frequent as well as we got older and eventually we just kind of outgrew it I guess. Life is funny that way. Our friends were far away, and we saw them less and less. Yet our friendship endured, as friendships like that often do. There was never any question that should I darken the doorstep of central Arkansas, I would be welcomed, hugged, fussed over and given a place to stay. I made it a point to stop by there a couple of times over the last twenty years, and see our friends.
And then 10 or 15 years ago, I started thinking about ‘the cabin’. I wanted to see it again. I NEEDED to see it again. Was it really that far in the wilderness? A magical place where childhood spun adventures into memories and thoughts of ‘the good old days’ lived.
I started reaching out to our friends in Arkansas. I asked about the cabin. Some of them thought it was gone, burned down, others said it may still be there. This just added to the mystery. The owner had died, and ownership had passed on to someone my friends didn’t know. But their cousin still owned another cabin nearby in the woods.
I made a trip to Arkansas with my dad about 5 years ago and attempted to see it. Our friend took us down to the river where the road thru the woods started, but there was a gate, and about 100 yards of mud and swamp that there was no way our car would go thru. We could have walked I suppose, but we didn’t have permission to be back there, and people can be funny about trespassing on their deer hunting camps. I left disappointed but vowed to return.
And then another opportunity arose.
My wife and daughter were leaving town for a week and I had nothing better to do, so I figured it was time to try again.
I contacted my friends, and they reached out to their cousin who now owned the property next to the old cabin. She managed to get me permission and arranged for us to get a key to the gate.
The day arrived and my friend hauled us out there, with a 4 wheeler and ‘side by side’ in tow. We planned to leave the truck wherever it became necessary and then ride those in. We arrived at the gate, and went thru. Another 100 yards and we came to a second gate… and it was locked. And no key. And it was about 105 degrees with the heat index.
I didn’t drive all the way here to be defeated, so we made the decision to walk.
I wasn’t sure how far it was but I was able to use google maps and could see it was about a mile to the river. We got busy walking and tried to ignore the heat. It was interesting walking and even though it had been 40 years since I’d been here, it still looked familiar to me. I walked along with a silly grin, sweating and looking out for snakes. Locusts sang loudly in the heat, and the occasional mosquito harassed us.
A grunting sound came out of the woods and some faint squealing… Deliverance? Nah. Wild hogs. Arkansas Razorbacks to be precise. If they were close I’d be a little more worried as they are dangerous in groups and aggressive, but we could tell they were a ways off, likely across the river.
Finally the river came into view. It was beautiful. Clear water & a gravel bottom made it possible to see into the holes and valleys of the river bottom and I could see fish, and a large turtle swimming under the water.
Sunlight shimmered and danced on the surface and a gentle sigh sang in the trees, while the tips of their branches stirred the water. Lovely.

We made a right turn and started walking towards the cabin. About a 1/4 mile in we came to a clearing with a cabin standing in it. This was the cousins cabin. They were redoing the flooring and had almost everything in the cabin sitting outside. I vaguely remembered this place but had never stayed here or spent any time here so I was anxious to go on. I got back on the road and started hiking. The road got muddier and had some big holes and puddles in it, but it seems they had improved the road a lot since the old days of needing a winch to get in. I could see light coming thru the trees ahead and I knew I was close, as the old cabin sat in a clearing in the woods, allowing plenty of grass and sunshine.
I picked up my pace and the trees opened up, and there it was. Sitting in the clearing just as it had since I was a boy. It looked exactly as I remembered. The clearing was overgrown and it was clear nobody had been out here in awhile, or mowed. The trails and roads we used to follow were completely overgrown. I walked around, taking it all in, snapping pictures, and letting the memories replay and flow in my mind. It was beautiful.
I smiled to myself in the heat, sweating in the sun, absently swatting gnats and mosquitoes away. Mission accomplished.
I felt a real sense of satisfaction in making it back out here, of reliving some moments from my childhood, but there was no magic, no wormhole, no time machine.
Only the glistening shine of happy memories, dulled by distance but polished by time.
I thanked the good lord for giving me the opportunity to get back out here, took one last look and started the long walk back to forever.

“Arkansas are your rivers still flowing
Is your cotton growing white as snow
Do the young men still piddle with the thought of growing rich
And slowly turn the old folks sittin’ whittling on a stick
Arkansas Arkansas”

Cambodia

(Temples and TukTuks and Landmines, Oh My!)

Ahhh, Cambodia. Or Kampuchia, as it was known in ancient times. I first became aware of Cambodia and the temples there as a kid of 8 or 9 years old. Before the days of the internet, we had these things known as ‘Encyclopedias’ and one of my favorite things to do was to leaf thru a set of late 50’s era encyclopedias that we had around the house. I remember seeing pictures of Angkor Wat and being fascinated by them as a kid and thinking “I need to see that someday!”. One of my earliest ‘bucket list’ items, established.
When the trip to Vietnam came up, my sister suggested a stop in Cambodia after Vietnam and I thought it was an excellent idea. It made no sense NOT to go as we would be half an hour away, I’d always wanted to see Angkor Wat, and I recently left my day job, making a long trip possible for me.

We flew into Siem Reap from Hanoi and the flight was less than an hour. After the fun of clearing customs in Saigon, we were prepared for anything, but were very pleasantly surprised at how quick and efficiently we procured visas & cleared customs. Probably less than 15 minutes passed before we were standing outside the airport looking for a taxi.
Task 1, we threw away our Vietnamese SIM cards & purchased Cambodian SIMs for our phones, spending approximately 6 dollars apiece for unlimited data & calls for 15 days.
Next up was a ride to our hotel. We had read that taxi drivers could be aggressive in Cambodian airports but we experienced nothing of the sort at Siem Reap. We actually had to go to the taxi stand and ask for someone. A smiling, smallish, middle aged guy approached and said hello, he’d be taking us to our hotel. He directed us to his vehicle and helped load up our bags. His name was ‘Moni’ (Rhymes with Pony). He immediately launched into a tour guide persona, telling us it would take about 15 minutes to get to the hotel and that he would tell us all about the area on the way. His english was excellent, and I was immediately drawn to his soft spoken demeanor and kind, polite persona.
I spent the ride to the hotel listening to Moni, and observing what I could of the Cambodian country side. I was struck by how little traffic there was, and how many cars there were, in comparison to Vietnam. Still, the roadsides were dotted with small stands selling various things, motorbikes were everywhere, and people were still out late enjoying the evening. Still very much in the ‘Southeast Asia’ vibe.

A quick aside about Siem Reap:
Siem is another word for Siam, as in “Siamese” and is a reference to the ancient country of Siam, now known as Thailand. Siem Reap translates to ‘victory over the Thai’ as an important battle was won here in the past. I was surprised to learn later that the Cambodian people (Khmer’s technically) are directly related to the Thai and can even understand much of each other’s language and their alphabets are similar.

Within a couple minutes of giving basic info about Siem Reap, Moni pulled out a map of the angkor complex and made his pitch to offer tour guide services.
For 80$ a day he would provide a car and guide services to the temples and other interesting sites nearby. This seemed very reasonable to me and after our experience with a Vietnamese guide who barely spoke english, I was excited to run into someone so fluent in English, as well as just enjoying his personality. I was ready to hire him on the spot, but my sister asked for a card and told him we would settle in first, and then contact him if we decided we wanted a guide. As we neared the hotel, Moni let us know, that we could find guides anywhere around town, including the hotel and as a bonus for us, he would knock 10$ a day off his usual price. After checking in the hotel and getting luggage put away, we quickly agreed to call Moni and hire him for the 3 day tour.
My sister and I were both a little tired of the tight schedule we’d been on in Vietnam and were ready for a more relaxed week so we agreed to get a nice hotel and go slower over the week and just enjoy ourselves. Lucky for me, my sister Mindy is an expert traveller, and a travel hacker as well, so she’s always researching, gathering credit card points & airline miles to use on her adventures. She happened to have status with an extremely nice hotel chain called Le Meridian and procurred us the entire week on some points she had with the chain. That became our home base for the week.
Our room came with an amazing, free breakfast buffet every morning, and free drinks and appetizers / snacks in the bar every night. I was thrilled to have a big pot of regular old western coffee to drink every morning, and there was a great pool and nice bar as well.
We contacted Moni to setup a meeting time for the morning, had a couple of free drinks in the bar, and turned in for the night.
The next morning we got up and had a nice long breakfast and then prepared for our 1st day. I was surprised at how much hotter and drier it was here compared to North Vietnam. Everything was extremely dry and the temps were in the high 80s even at 8 in the morning.
Moni arrived and I was immediately struck by how much older he was than I had thought in the evening. We loaded up and headed to the ticket offices for the temple complexes & purchased our 3 day passes. Passes were $72 for 3 days. Tourism is hugely important in Cambodia, it’s estimated to be 30% of the entire economy, and I was happy to pay the fees. Cambodia is still very poor, and it feels good to spread some dollars around.
Finally, we cleared town and started heading towards our 1st temple of the day. Now I could check out the country side for real. We quickly turned off on to dirt roads and encountered a checkpoint. The roads to all of the famous temples are guarded by tourism police. Basically they just check your tickets and make sure you’re legit. It has to be a pain in the butt for locals who use some of these roads though, and in fact I later learned that if you need to get somewhere within the confines of the park boundaries, you have to go around on country roads and take 5 times as long to get where you’re going. Maybe there is a different rule for locals only? But I never found out otherwise.
The countryside was brown & dry, hardly any water anywhere. It’s the dry season in winter and it sure is dry. It very much reminded me of parts of eastern New Mexico. One thing I began seeing regularly, little ‘houses’ on stilts, with what appeared to be liquor in them. It turned out to be gasoline, in Johhny Walker bottles. Locals purchase gas somewhere, split it down into liters and sell it for a small markup. These little cambodian gas stations were all over the country side, and my mischevous self couldn’t help thinking how fun it would be to light some of them up with a little bit of tannerite and a 30/30 round… =).

Cambodian Gas Station

Cruising down the road, day dreaming, enjoying the ride when we slow down for some traffic ahead and I glance out the window and my jaw drops, we are at the first temple of our tour, Pre Rup. It looks HUGE from the roadside. I look back at my sister and a big goofy grin spreads over my face. This is what I came for.

We parked the car and I grabbed my camera and practically leapt out of the car and scrambles across the road. I couldn’t WAIT to check this place out.
As I stepped across the threshold through the outer gate, a cambodian police officer held up his badge and said ‘Hey, you want a souvenir? You want to buy my badge? 15$’ I just grinned and him and kept walking but in my head I was thinking… WTF? Moni whispered to me “I’ll tell you about that guy in a bit”.
Back to the temple – Pre Rup means ‘turn the body’ and it is believed that this site was used for cremating the kings body. Moni pointed out a building that had ventialtion holes in it that may have been used for this purpose. This is a small temple as they go in the Angkor Complex, but my first one and so we spent a bit more time than normal climbing around, taking pictures, and absorbing the vibe of walking around on a 1000 year old holy site. The view was great from on top, and it made me excited about the bigger ones we would be visiting later on. Moni pointed out all of the key features of the temple, particularly interesting bas relief carvings or a statue, and also the coolest photo spots as well.

Our guide Moni, teaching us about the insriptions

He really knew his stuff, and I was impressed with his knowledge of english architecture words. I later learned that all working guides in the Angkor park / complex must go to school for a full year to become a guide. It costs 500$ which is no small feat to raise in Cambodia but obviously, the opportunities are really good once you have that license. They also have to get updated every two years on recent discoveries or changes in thought on certain aspects of the history, etc. Like I said, tourism is vital here and the government has decided that amateurs are not allowed to relay their history, professionals only!
We headed down and to the car, and as I passed the front gate, I could see the local cop still trying to pawn his badge to tourists…
When we got back in the car I reminded Moni about the cop. Apparently, he sits out there in his spare time and sells badges to tourists when someone wil buy one. He told the guides a long time ago that he access to extra badges at work so… that’s his side hustle. I thought maybe they were fakes, but no. Legitimate Siem Reap PD badges, 15$. I should have made a citizens arrest but… I didn’t know the culture so I let it slide.

Rather than going into detail about all of the temples we visisted, I’ll just give you my impression of the complex overall, and list the names for you as you can find way more complete information on Wikipedia about each individual temple.
On Day 1 we visited Pre Rup , Banteay Samre. Banteay Srei, East Mebon, Ta Som, Neak Pean, Preah Khan, and ended the day by stopping at the moat at Angkor for sunset. There were hundreds if not thousands of people in the area and locals were everywhere selling food, toys, or whatever they could make a buck off of.
Angkor is surrounded by a giant square moat, and there are ancient steps leading down to the water all around, making for a grand spot to watch the sunset. We picked a likely spot with a view of the 5 towers and relaxed.
As the sun and the temperature dropped, the bats came out and began their daily ritual, diving and fluttering about, wreaking havoc on the local insect population. It was a downright wonderful and a bit surreal end to an exciting day.

A Cambodian girl enjoys the sunset at Angkor Wat

My head was filled, and spinning with facts and figures about the temples, and my phone and camera were filled as well. Very satisfying.
Moni was doing a great job of educating us on the history of the area, the current culture and politics in the country, and we were getting to know him at the same time. He drove and older model SUV, and told us that due to taxes, the price of cars in Cambodia is roughly three times what they are in the US. So that old $5000 beater? 15K! I wondered how an average Cambodian family could pull it off. He was married with two young children, and lived in a traditional Cambodian home, on stilts. The average family tends to spend most of their time under the house in the shade during the day, and retire upstairs to sleep.
Moni is a devout Buddhist as well. He paid his respects to the Buddhas at every temple we visited, and his knowledge of the traditional Buddhist stories and the temples was astounding. So many details…
Most of the temples tend to follow a similar design. They are generally square, and there tends to be a moat surrounding the temple, followed by multiple enclosure walls. The temples often sport lotus shaped towers, and the inner space is usually elevated above the rest, as home for the gods. So in a way, they are all the same, but different.
My initial impression was one of awe at the size, and scope of the overall area. Dozens of temples, and the detail work… bas reliefs carved into sandstone, often over vast swaths of stone, not a square inch left untouched. The intricacy of relief carving solid rock with ancient tools is really hard to comprehend once you’ve seen it in person.

Stone was quarried miles away at a nearby mountain and the latest research supports the theory that it was gathered 22 miles away, and floated on a series of canals to the individual sites. Some of the rocks weigh over 3000 pounds… Angkor Wat alone has over 3 million pieces of stone assembled. It is believed that nearly 300,000 people were working on these temples. Many of them slave labor. I tried to imagine how much food had to be supplied to feed this workforce… Incredible.
Each temple tends to have an inscription in Sanskrit on the main gate entrance through the outer enclosure, which generally tells what year it was finished, whom it was dedicated too, and other vital information.

Sanskrit inscription on the threshold entry to a temple

Each temple also includes two library buildings on site, where all the history of the temple was recorded and stored. Writing and records were kept on animal skins. So, the reason we know so much about the temples construction, names, etc, is because they kept great records!
Another interesting factoid, many of the temples were started for, or dedicated to Shiva, but along the way many of the Cambodian kings became Buddhists, so the temples were converted to Buddhist temples, or even changed midstream of construction. So there are statues from both major religions all over the area.
Where they have not been stolen, or destroyed that is. The vast majority of the heads from the complex were stolen or destroyed over the years, but eventually many of them ended up in the Museum at Phnom Penn. These days, there are many replica heads at the temples, and security guards live and sleep at the temples 24/7. I saw a few of their dwellings around the premises.

Eventually we drifted back to the car and headed back to the hotel for the evening. We got there just in time to hit the free drinks & barfood “Happy Hour”. My sis and I ended up trying about every drink on the menu and gorging ourselves on the bar food, which was quite good. So good in fact, that we decided it qualified as dinner and went and crashed for the evening.

Day Two:
Temples visited today:

Banteay Kdei, Ta Prohm, Ta Keo, Stone bridge – Spean Thma, Angkor Thom, Bayon, Elephant terrace, & Angkor Wat.
The first temple of the day proved to be some of the best photography light I’d had so far and I was really happy with some of my phone & camera shots. Next up was Ta Phrom. This is likely the 2nd most famous, due to the giant tree roots left in place, and it’s use in the movie Tomb Raider. When the temples were rediscovered in the early 1800’s, the french deliberately left the trees standing at this temple because of their picturesque appearance. Apparently that was a good move, as the place was so crowded with tourists standing in line to take “THE” picture with the tree rooted door that we were able to roam about some of the other parts of the complex in relative peace. Nowadays the trees are removed as they are a threat to the structures.

Ta Keo was next, and this one was interesting to me just because the foundation was so massive, and also because there were monkees hanging out on the grounds, the first we’d seen in the country.

Spean Thma was next (Stone bridge) and was more of a curiosity than anything.
Angkor Thom – This is technically the name of the temple ‘city’. This may be my favorite spot of all I visited. It features “South Gate’ which is a bridge over a moat that features the ‘faces’ of angkor, and a row of beings on each side playing tug of war with a 7 headed snake. It is an extrememly pretty spot, and a great spot for pictures as well.

The central temple is Bayon and has lots of the famous ‘faces’ and there are tons of great photo ops here.

Next up was the elephant terrace, a giant wall overlooking a courtyard featuring massive carvings of elephants and other elements.
After the elephant terrace our guide hooked us up with a ‘tuktuk’ a motorbike with a wheeled cart behind it and we took a ride over to a different area, and eventually headed to our final stop for the day, Angkor Wat.

At this point, having seen so many other temples, I was maybe not as impressed as I thought I’d be. Angkor is so famous mostly because of it’s scale, and also how well preserved it is. One neat feature were the ‘elephant gates’ on the outside, with doors big enough to allow elephants to pass thru.
The walls are covered in extremely cleanly preserved bas relief carvings, buddhist stories, and stories of the builders, etc. We made our way to the central square and towers, and joined the long line waiting to climb to the top. As we approacged the stairs the lady behind me was denied entry due to her shirt being sleeveless, even though she had a shawl over it. Religious code, but it seemed to be enforced randomly. We climbed to the top and admired the view, and i felt a bit of satisfaction standing at the spot I’d dreamt of for so long. Looooong way from home folks!

• 

  Elephant Gate

• 

  Angkor Wat

• 

  Buddhist Legends in Stone

• 

  Angkor Wat

• 

  Bakan

• 

  Girls in traditional dress

• 

  Buddhist monks

We took our time at the Bakan (inner gallery at the top) and then slowly drifted back down the steep stairs and our tour guide waiting with the other guides at the bottom.
Moni had a weird thing about his knees. I noticed on the first days if there were steeps stairs, he often told us to go on and he would wait for us. Later on, he told me he was ‘saving’ his knees. I was like… what’s wrong with your knees? ‘oh, they get sore sometimes after a day of climbing stairs’. He mentioned several times about his knees. Finally I was like dude, if you don’t have a family history of bad knees, you’ll be fine! He takes his tour guide job seriously, to the point of planning ahead with his knees…
But I digress.
After finishing up at Angkor Wat we started slow walking back towards the front of the complex. People were gathering for sunset but honestly I felt like we’d seen enough and let Moni know we could just finish up for the day.
On the way back, Moni told us he was taking us someplace before we went back to the hotel. He kind of let us know it was an art gallery, his friend owned and there would be no obligation to buy anything, but he got a free entry into some kind of lottery for bringing us there regardless. It turned out to be an exotic art & goods dealer. Art, Rugs, Statues, etc. The owner was middle eastern but traveled the world collecting things and then sold them from here in Siem Reap. We looked politely but I quickly let the owner know I was a collector of experiences, not things. I told him if I collected all the beautiful things that caught my eye in his store I would never be able to travel again. He smiled and seemed to appreciate my quip, and we quickly and politely extricated ourselves.
We headed back to the bar and again hit the free drinks and bar food, and again, crashed early. Walking in the heat all day long does you in.

Day Three
After two full days of temples, we were looking forward to a change of pace. Today we’d be visiting Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Cambodia.
We headed out of town and stopped to get our tickets for our boatride. $50 dropped and we headed over to the boats in an extremely small, muddy canal. There barely seemed enough room to turn the boat around. The captain of our boat looked to be no more than 12 years old. His first mate, the same. They smiled and welcomed us aboard with a gesture. Kids mature at a completely different rate in Southeast Asia. I’d seen this all over Vietnam as well. 6 or 7 year old kids wander around on their own and no one thinks twice about it. I guess they don’t have cable news telling them they’ll be kidnapped 24/7…
Kids often start working in the family business as soon as they are capable as well. These guys seemed happy enough to be doing something though, and the whole operation was clearly old hat to them. THey worked together to get the boat started (one at the engine, one at the helm) and the engine fired up with a cough and a roar. We backed out, and with a bit of maneuvering, headed down the canal. It was interesting passing other boats in the skinny canal, and the breeze felt good on this 90 some degree day. I kicked back and let the scenery roll by. Along the bank, people were fishing, repairing nets, swimming, and just going about life. Soon the canal opened up a bit and we started making some turns. After a couple of turns I could see some homes across the way. As we rounded the corner I was surprised to see the houses were on stilts, and looked to be 25 to 30 feet in the air! The bank had disguised this from me on the river. Now an entire village of homes on stilts came into view, and it was amazing to witness. The entire thing was built out of scavenged wood, with very tall and sketchy looking ladders from the ground to the top. There were different levels where things were stored, such as wood, fishing gear, nets, and then at the top, all of the household goods. There were also boats at ground level that were clearly homes in themselves. Most had a semi-circular roof over the top, and a couple of hatches. Most of the day to day living items were stored under the roof, and things that could take the weather were tied on the outside somewhere. Hard to imagine a family of 5 living in such a small space but again, I had seen this all over Vietnam, and now here as well.
It was interesting observing life in the village, watching kids run about, a few adults worked on repairing homes, boats or fishing gear. A young girl bathed her little brother on a floating dock in the muddy water, a mangy mutt lounged nearby, and another young boy stood on the canal edge peeing into the water and watching us go by with a big smile on his face. Party on dude!

We passed the local temple and police headquarters (Labeled Gendarmarie) and that was the edge of the village. Now we entered a mangrove forest and I could see people among the mangroves fishing, or tied up selling things. Ahead I could see the canal open up and sure enough, we arrived at the lake. It was not at all what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected… It was a giant expanse of muddy water. So big that it was like looking at a freshwater ocean, as if the Mississippi had turned into a lake. It was hot, and haze came off the water in the distance. A couple of large buildings floated at the mouth of the river, and we headed there and tied up. This was the equivalent of a welcome center and included a restaurant, a small store selling various fishing equipment, taxidermied animals including the worst example of a crocodile I’d ever seen (you could see the cut and stiching from 10 feet away) and also a pen filled with live, hungry crocodiles. I’ve seen crocs quite a few times in my life, but something about the environment felt really unpleasant to me. The market was selling live or dead chickens for people to buy and pitch into the pen. There were roughly 12-15 crocs of various size present in the muddy water. I stood at the railing checking it out and realizing that it would be incredibly easy for a person to disappear out here. If someone managed to push you over the railing… or you just needed to dispose of a body….

• 

• 

• 

There was an observation deck on top and we went up top and looked around. Nothing but muddy water as far as the eye could see, and the mangrove forest behind us. We lingered a moment and headed down. Moni informed us it was time to move on. We got back on the boat and to our surprise headed back up the canal. Well… that didn’t take long. LOL. Fastest $50 boat ride ever!
Whatever. This entire area reeked of poverty, from the canal, to the boats, to the village, to the lake, there was a palpable sense of it in the air. I just hoped our 12 year old boat pilots got a piece of the ticket price. I carrried some hard candy around in my pocket and both of them accepted some with a smile when I offered and I could see the small smiles on their faces as they sucked on their butterscotch, and drove us up the canal. Soon we were back at the boat parking area and I managed to drop my camera lens cover under the floor in the boat. Both these guys gave it their all to retrieve it for me and I believe they would have deconstructed the floor if necessary. Luckily they got it and I handed them each a few bucks. Big smiles. Thumbs up dudes.

We headed back to the van and off we went with Moni. We had no idea what was next but soon enough, we pulled up to a temple. Ah. More temples. LOL. I say this with a twinge of humor, I was fine with seeing some more temples, but I was also perhaps reaching ‘temple burnout’.
Temples visited today:
Preah Ko, Bakong, Chau Srei Vibol, and Phnom Bok.
Preah Ko was a very old, smaller temple built by the Chams and looked exactly like some temples I’d seen in Vietnam (built by the same people)
Bakong was more of the same.
We moved on and headed out into a more back country area. Eventually we stopped and parked. I couldn’t see anything so apparently we’d be hiking a bit. We headed up a hill towards a modern looking Buddhist temple. We arrived at the temple, which had an interesting painting on it. Moni explained the painting a bit, and we move towards the entry in back. Though this temple was modern, it was one of the most interesting I’d seen. Inside, the entire walls and ceilings were covered with paintings of scenes of various lessons of the faith, and buddhist history. Extremely colorful and I could have spent quite a while lingering here, taking it all in.

• 

• 

Behind this temple, were the ruins of Chau Srei Vibol. Most of this temple has fallen and it’s really just a pile of rubble. A party was going on in the distance and we could hear the usual chanting and music that seems to permeate the cambodian countryside, and it added a cool vibe to where we were. This was an out of the way place. Not a soul around other than ourselves. Moni guided us down a hill and we cam to another set of buildings, which were the libraries and galleries that went with the older temple. In this case it was separated from the temple which was unusual. There was also a dry pool nearby which has water in it in the wet season. On our way back to the car we passed a mom sleeping in the afternoon heat in a hammock while her 6 or 7 month baby played nearby on the ground in the jungle, completely unattended. Again… confidence. LOL.
Chau Srei was not impressive in any way compared to the temples we had seen in the last two days, yet I absolutely loved visiting it. It’s location made it nearly unvisited, and it was really nice to get away from the crowds, into the woods, and relax in peace and quiet. It had a bit of a mysterious vibe. I told Moni this and he said almost every tourist he brought here said the same thing. He said he had not visited this area in 8 months. Apparently not many hire him for an entire three days.
The afternoon heat was now starting to letup a bit and we headed off thru the countryside again. Moni pointed at a large mountain in the distance and said ‘that’s where we’re going next, last one!’. It was dramatic, as everywhere around us was perfectly flat, so any deviation really stood out. As we spun down the dusty backroads kids started pouring into the road on bicycles. Apparently school was letting out. I rolled the window down and we yelled at some of them. They road their bikes up and laughed at the foreigners with the cameras. We spoke english to them and some of them yelled back in whatever english they knew. It was fun for all of us.

• 

• 

• 

Kids leaving school for the day

We continued on and I could see the mountain ahead. We rolled up and parked, and hit the toilets at the bottom before heading up. This was going to be a heck of a hike. We started up the hill on a gravel trail and soon came to a set of concrete stairs that went up, apparently forever from the looks of it. Several women were cleaning the stairs with brooms and repairing a stair at the bottom. They eyed us curiously as we passed and the climb began.
If you ever want to test your cardio, climb some stairs. Nothing will raise your heartrate faster than stair climbing. I quickly found myself pulling away from Mindy & Moni, and Moni yelled for me to go on at my pace. I climbed for a few minutes and stopped to catch my breath. My heart pounded and sweat poured in the heat. I turned to look around and could see the view becoming more amazing by the moment. Being on the only hill for miles really made for a dramatic view. It reminded my of climbing on the front range in Colorado, looking back east towards the plains. Grass as far as the eye can see. My heart rate settled a bit and I continued on. After a few minutes, my breathing and running muscles settled in, and I made steady progress. 634 stairs… 2/3 of the way up, my legs were starting to complain a bit. Ha. Not today. No rest for the wicked! I put my head down and kept going.

• 

• 

The long climb up

I soon reached the top and encountered an interesting cooking shack and cistern. Makes sense. It’s a LONG way up here. Water would be really tough to haul up and down. There was no water in the cistern. I wandered on and came to another modern buddhist temple. Modern design anyway. It was clearly old and in disrepair and I could see that the roof was looking pretty rough. I could see a trail leading around the temple thru the trees so I followed it. I emerged from the trees into another ancient temple complex, surrounded by walls. Phnom Bok. Wow. This place was so cool. The old temple structures were again crumbling or even fallen, but many of them had trees growing from various places and it had that cool vibe with the trees like Ta Phrom. Something about the long hike up and it’s location gave this place a really interesting vibe and again, I could hear a buddhist cereMoni going on somewhere below as the music and chanting drifted up from a PA system somewhere. I was struck with the feeling of discovery I had being alone and sat down and shot a quick video with my phone.

Soon enough, Moni and my sister appeared and we chatted a bit about the place. After a bit we moved to outside the walled enclosure an began strolling back towards the way down. We came upon a hammock with a mosquito net, and a tarp overheard. Some dishes sat nearby. What is this? I asked Moni. “Guard sleep up here every night”. Whoa. That’s a heck of a walk to get up there. Bet it’s interesting in a lightning storm too!

Moni led me over to some trees and started pointing. Almost every tree on the mountain top was some form of fruit tree. At least 5 different varieties of fruit trees. By design obviously. Of course it made sense to have food growing up here, again, it’s a LONG way down. A small buddhist cemetary stood in the edge of the trees near the way down and I went over to check it out and take a couple pics. The names of monks who had lived on this mountain were honored here.

Again, I was struck by the vibe of these last two temples. While having very little left of the details or the actual buildings, they nonetheless had a great vibe for any who would make the journey. There were no other people on the mountain, and again I really enjoyed that sense of mystery, of being alone, and just having the silence and space to wonder about what was before me.

Side Note: There is a great drone video on YouTube HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXK3kpAWLM0
It shows exactly what we climbed, what it was like at the top, and various structures at the top. Awesome!
We started making our way down, and I was a little sad, realizing this was our last day with Moni, whom I had come to like and appreciate.
My sister and I would make sure he got a little something extra for his troubles.
On the way home, we happened to pass Pre Rup, our 1st temple of the trip, and it was maybe 15 minutes before sunset. The moment was there, so we stopped and decided to check out sunset from Pre Rup. I grabbed my camera and rushed inside. Sister moved a bit more slowly. I quickly climbed Pre Rup, and realized I was one, of about 500 people on top for sunset. Excitement quickly turned to ‘Absolutely No Thanks’. I climbed down and drifted over to a corner of the temple that was unoccupied and sat down alone and watched the sun drop for a few minutes. Not wanting to encounter the crowd, I walked out, and ran into my sister on the outside. “The religous police wouldn’t let me in because my sleeves were too short”. But you just climbed Bakan… at Angkor Wat…?
Weird.
We drove back to the hotel and Moni offered his last bits of advice on some places to visit around town. We paid & tipped Moni, said our goodbyes, and again rushed for the free drinks and food at the bar.

Day 4.
Today we had no real plans other than to relax, eat local & check out some local attractions. We decided to hit the Angkor National Museum. It was interesting in that half of the building was a mall, owned by a chinese company, and the other half was the national museum. We avoided the mall. The museum was nice but we had already experience it all in person. We spent less time here than maybe we should have. We’d had our share of temple information!
We decided to grab a tuktuk and go visit the war museum. We flagged one down and headed out. It was a couple miles away and we enjoyed cruising in the tuktuk and checking out the traffic. We arrived at the war museum and paid the $5 entry fee. A young man approached and asked if we wanted a guide for a small tip. We said ‘sure’ and I’m glad we did. He appeared to be about 18 years old, but man did he know his stuff. He proceeded to walk us around the grounds and started describing the military hardware arrayed before us, as well as laying out the timeline of their use.

One of the more interesting things he told us, was that he had heard a lot of propaganda in his life, and how important it was for the next generation to learn to recognize and exercise skepticism about the information they are told. The lessons of the Khmer Rouge was not lost on the people here, and I sensed a determination by the people here to never let that happen again. It was pretty cool to hear this message at the war museum.
Another topic of interest to me, landmines. I had been told to hit the landmine museum in Siem Reap and even though I’d seen it a few times while touring the temples, I never mentioned it to Moni. I had told him this on the way home yesterday and he’d told me to come here and I’d get all the same info.
They had a great landmine display here, that showed the various types of mines that were routinely used here, and which kind were left by the Khmer Rouge. Landmines are a huge problem in Cambodia. There are over 40,000 amputees here, one of the highest rates in the world, and it is estimated that there are potentialy 4-6 million more landmines and pieces of unexploded ordinance out there.
The most likely victims are children, who’s curiosity gets them in trouble, and farmers. The govt designed flyers and placed them in schools that help children learn about the mines, what they look like when encountered, and what to do about them. Siem Reap is very safe but there are other areas of the country that are very bad. There are currently demining efforts underway and hopefully they can continue to make progress.

After the war museum we grabbed lunch and then headed back to the hotel. We thought we should go down to pub street for the evening and shop a bit, since we’d basically avoided it while we were there, as it’s a huge tourist area (generally not my thing)
We grabbed a tuktuk and went down there after cleaning up. It was chaos, which I’m sure is normal Thousands of people shopping eating and partying it up. I bought a T-shirt, my one purchase other than food on this entire trip. Three dollars. It was gloriously nice out though, and we noticed a couple places offering ‘fish pedicure’, where you stick your feet in a fish tank and the fish eat the dead skin off your feet. I knew my daughter had tried this in Mexico and I thought it would be fun to try. Plus they give you a beer during your ‘pedicure’… So we went for it. OMG. I’m ticklish and it took every bit of my will power not to jerk my feet out and just call it a night. The tickling sensation was very intense but I stuck it out and it became more tolerable after 5 or 10 minutes. Maybe the beer helped… It was fun to sit there and people watch though and we ended up staying for probably 45 minutes. Enough to have a few beers. We flagged down our tuktuk and called it a night. Flying out tomorrow. When I got back to the hotel and took my socks off, I was blown away by how soft my feet felt. That fish thing was totally legit!!! I think some of the nail shops around town should try this…

Fish Pedicure

Day 5
Last day in Cambodia. We had planned to take a bus to Phnom Penh, but changed our mind. A 6 hour bus ride just did not feel appealing on our last day, and we wanted to visit the genocide museum so we were concerned with timing. We did some research and decided to take a flight. A 39 minute flight vs a 6 hour bus ride… no brainer. There are few airlines in country and we either had to use the established airline (Angkor Air) or go with a brand new airline, only operating a few months, Cambodia Airways. Cambodia Airways was significantly cheaper, and Angkor Air has a crappy reputation, service wise. We rolled the dice and booked with Cambodia Airways. Before booking I got online and checked out their fleet and saw they were flying Airbus 319s, average age 10 years old. I was satisfied that we’d be a lot safer flying than riding a bus in Cambodia. We had our concerns given the age of the airline, but our worries were unfounded. The planes were spotless, the service was excellent, and the flight was just fine.
Only one issue left to solve… what to do with all of our luggage for the day while we messed around. We could not check in to our flight until a few hours before and it was over 12 hours until then, and there were no lockers or storage at the airport. Damn.
We had no choice but to drag our luggage with us. This was going to be a pain in the ass but it would be better than sitting in the airport for 12 hours. So we grabbed a cab and headed for the genocide museum. It was maybe a 15 minute drive, thru the city. We pulled over on an unlikely street in the middle of a residential neighborhood and the driver said, here you are. I looked around and saw nothing that might resemble a museum. There was a wall across the street with barbed wire on top so maybe that was it? Weird.
We got our, grabbed our luggage and started walking back to the corner. Sure enough, this was it. The genocide museum is actually an old school, on which the grounds were used to run the infamous TS21, or Tuol Sleng 21. TS21 was a “security prison”, translation, a torture and execution center. There is a dearth of information online about Tuol Sleng, so I won’t go into much detail, but I will tell you this. There are some things that aren’t always easy to unsee, and images of the people, the rooms where they were imprisoned in, and some of the structures used to torture and execute people are burned in my brain, and I doubt that I will ever forget them. I knew before I ever set foot here that this may not be a ‘pleasant’ experience, but I feel that understanding such events is essential to preventing them in the future, however unpleasant it may be to face them.

• 

• 

• 

• 

TS21

The ‘museum’ is a virtual tour, they give you an ipod type device and headphones, and it guides you thru the grounds and explains everything in great detail. It is a very effective way to handle the large crowds of people who come here. We spent a couple hours on the grounds, listening to the stories, and looking everything over. Only 12 people are known to have survived, and at least 20,000 were imprisoned and murdered on the grounds. One of the survivors was actually on the grounds, selling his book. I cannot begin to imagine what he saw and how he has come to live with it. He is mostly deaf due to being beaten about the ears, but he smiled a lot and seems to have figured out how to move on.
After getting our fill of negative vibes, we grabbed our luggage and went off to find lunch. There were restaurants all around the block so we just walked down to a likely looking one and sat down. The lady was super nice and looked a bit surprised to see us. She didn’t have half the things on the menu but we still ended up with a tasty lunch, and had some small conversation with her. I asked her if it was strange having her restaurant 50 feet from TS21, which you can clearly see from her restaurant (also their home) and she glanced over at it for a moment and then gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “Ahh.. it’s just a building”.
We finished lunch and grabbed a tuktuk, and just asked the driver to take us to an area we could see on the map that appeared to be a nice park next to the mekong river. We were getting sick of dragging our luggage around but were not ready to just sit in the airport.
It turned out to be a good move. The park was packed with people out for sunday relaxing, had a view of the river, and presidential palace, and after the horrors of TS21, it was a nice contrast.

• 

  Tired of dragging luggage around!

• 

  Presidential Palace

We did some googling and figured out there were boats selling cheap cruises just across the way, so again we grabbed a tuktuk and went down to the area where the boats were. Some quick negotiating got us a ‘private cruise’ on a nice boat on the mekong river. It was growing dark at this point and the city was beautiful from the river. We jumped on the boat, grabbed beers, and went up on the top deck to chill. The cruise was uneventful but it was interesting observing the many families living on their fishing boats along the edge of the river. I could see them casting nets and fishing, even in the dark, or cooking in the cramped quarters of their boats. What different lives we lead…

• 

  Tour Boats

• 

  Phnom Penh from the Mekong

And that basically wrapped our tour of Phnom Penh. We grabbed a ride back to the airport and basically sat around for several hours waiting for our check in to become available. It was long and boring but… what airport wait isn’t?
Overall thoughts on Cambodia…
The people here are almost painfully polite. I came to appreciate their traditional greeting that you get everywhere you go, they clasp their hands together and bow their heads to you. It it both deferential and uber polite, and you can’t help but feel honored when people greet you in this way. The historical treasures here are worthy of a trip to any world traveler, and cannot be quantified in text, they must be observed, touched, and smelled in person. Cambodia’s economy and foreign investment list is growing very fast right now, and I hope and pray for prosperous times ahead for the Cambodian people. They seemed as a rule friendly, hard working, and overall, happy. It is strange but it seems the overall attitude of people in poorer countries I have visited is more positive and happy than the relative wealthy countries. I got the idea that people here were very aware of what they had survived, and an underlying attitude of determination to move past it, and onward into an ever brighter, and more happy, healthy, and prosperous future. I wish them all the best.

• 

• 

• 

  Wedding Party

• 

• 

  Photo shoots are popular in the temples

• 

• 

  Linga

• 

  Stone Gate

• 

  Dogs have rough lives here

• 

• 

  Stegosaurus?

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Ninh Binh Province

Hang Mua, Tam Coc Vietnam

Part VI Ninh Binh Province Vietnam

Hello again. After writing the last 5 parts, I needed a break. Writing is hard for me, I have TONS of pics from this part of the trip, and this was my favorite part of Vietnam. I wanted to take some time to try and remember the high points.

We had arranged a tour to take us to Ninh Binh province after the rest of my family left. We had walked in one of the many tourism shops off the street in Hanoi and setup a 3 day, 2 night tour in the areas we wanted to go. They bent over backwards to work with us and custom built a tour for us.
The tour included:
A driver and vehicle to take us to all of our destinations, a “speaking english” guide, included 3 buffet lunches and 2 breakfasts, and a room at a homestay in Tam Coc, the nearest town to where we would be visiting. All of this for $134 apiece. Try that in the states!
A very nice van picked us up with driver, and guide. The guide said little other than helping load our luggage. He did confirm he was our guide… sorta.
This was our first clue that our guides English may not be ‘tour guide’ ready. He spoke English to us, but I understood about 1 out of every 3 or 4 words. As an aid to us, anytime he encountered a word he wasn’t sure about, he would repeat it lightning fast about 6 times in a row. I found myself attempting to translate his terrible English to my sisters. After 20 years of listening to bad Asian accents, I like to think I’m an expert. This guy tested every bit of experience I had, and then some. My sisters and I looked at each other. This was going to be… interesting. At least between my Vietnamese, and his English, we were able to get the basics. Other than not understanding him, he seemed like a nice guy. LOL. I ask him his name and he tells me ‘Oxen’. I laugh and say, OK, what’s your Vietnamese name and he says something that sounds like ‘Zyum’. Got it.

Ninh Binh Province is about 2 hours south of Hanoi. The drive is easy, and the scenery is a mix of rice field / farm country and massive construction projects. Take your pick!
Soon we turned off the highway and started winding our way thru rural roads and the scenery became… incredible. Jaw dropping. Massive limestone outcroppings emerge from the ground and the perfectly flat rice fields, creating an unbelievable, Dr. Seuss effect. I remembered seeing pictures of Asia like this when I was kid in Encyclopedias, and not believing such a place existed. Here it was before me, as proof. We rolled thru a small village along a beautiful river and the van pulled over. Our guide told us we were getting out here.
We crossed the road and onto a bridge over the river and a temple gate. We were at the citadel of Hoa Lu, the very first capital of Vietnam. We crossed thru the gate and were presented with a mural showing battles, and history of the citadel. Our guide attempted to explain it… we got the idea if not the exact details. The area was chosen because it was impossible to approach it in any other way than the river due to the mountainous terrain. One only had to guard the river to protect the entire citadel. Very cool. The temples and structures here were very old, and interesting, if not particularly ornate.

Another quick note on our guide, he apparently did not understand a casual way to address us, so every time he spoke to us as a group, he would preface it with ‘and now…. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!’ Or ‘at this time…. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!’ I had to try not to snicker when he did this. It was would have been hilarious if not for the fact that it was such a struggle to understand whatever would follow that.
We moved on from Hoa Lu and came to a parking area amongst the limestone & rice fields. We were in a very beautiful area but I had no idea what we were doing, the guide never told us what we were doing. We would show up somewhere and he would point us in a direction and then say 45 MINUTES! Or 30 MINUTES!
It turned out we were at Hang Mua (Dancing Caves). This was the place I had been dying to visit, the pics that got me to put this on my trip schedule, the iconic ‘Ha Long Bay in the Mountains’ viewpoint. The caves are apparently superfluous to the viewpoint, as we did not even visit them, and they are apparently fairly small and uninteresting. Go figure.
We began climbing the 500 steps to the top of the mountain, and were immediately rewarded with amazing views of Tam Coc in the distance. Of all the places I visited in Vietnam, this was the most iconic scenery I had seen, and I won’t soon forget it. We got to the top and spent the next half hour jostling for pics with the other few dozen people at the top, but it was worth it. I only wished we had had a clear, non-foggy day to take pics. It was still absolutely gorgeous.

We eventually wandered back down and back to the van and headed back toward town.
Next stop was lunch. A quick note about food in Vietnam:
Vietnam is a culinary wonderland. The food is amazing here, and meal after meal we were blown away by the layers, textures, sauces, and presentation of the food. And it’s unbelievably cheap, as well. I ate like a king the entire time I was here. HOWEVER… on this day we discovered what we came to call ‘The Golden Corral of Vietnam’ – The Buffet Restaurant.
Different parts of the country have different specialties. This area is known for goat meat, and a special rice cake they make in that area.
We were ushered into a buffet style spot called ‘The Long Hotel’. The buffet had a few american items as well as Vietnamese food. It looked ‘somewhat’ clean, and somewhat appetizing. Boy… were we wrong. Goat skewers and prawn crackers were the highlight of our food. The food was bland, half warm, and it seemed the people running the place had no interest in serving anyone. We just wracked it up to ‘one bad place in a land of fantastic places’. More on this place in a moment…
After lunch, we crossed the street and were surprised to learn we’d be taking a boat ride. We were split into two boats and off we went. We all enjoyed our Vietnamese rowers, who powered the boats entirely with their bare feet. I struck up a conversation with my rower, He wore a green pith helmet, a popular hat that civilians wear in North Vietnam and seemed a jovial fellow. The route took us down the Tam Coc river and we were delighted when the river passed thru 3 different caves, going into near darkness and emerging on the other side. At the end of our route were several women in boats selling fruit, beer and snacks. My niece Emma decided to buy some fruit and pulled out some money. Sensing an easy mark, the fruit seller spotted her large bill and immediate bagged up a bunch of fruit, handed some to our boat rower, some to Emma, and took the whole bill from her. No bartering. Emma looked confused and got her first lesson in overseas negotiations… never show your hand before bartering!!!

I purchased a beer for the return trip and sat back to enjoy the view. As we neared the end we were cutoff by a guy who had nabbed pictures of us on the way out and was doing his best to sell them to us… I held up my camera and said ‘I made my own postcards’. He ignored me with a smile and kept trying to sell his wares. My sis ended up paying something for pictures that we’ll probably throw away, just to get him to stop trying to sell us something.

Camera guy pimping his wares

After the boat ride we went back to our homestay. They handed us menus and told us to let them know what we’d like for dinner. We put our orders in and went off to relax for a bit.
Dinner turned out to be fantastic, and the family that prepared it were awesome. After dinner I drifted back towards the kitchen / work area our homestay lived and worked in. They were surprised to see me and leapt up to see what I wanted. I asked for a beer and somebody ran to get one, they pulled out a chair and asked if I’d like to sit with them and drink my beer. I said yes and sat down.
Our driver and guide are here as well. They all seemed thrilled to have me in their area. I just sat and listened to them talk, and engaged in some small talk with them. I smile as I hear our homestay family ask our guide his name and he tells them ‘Oxen’ to which I reply… Zyum! He laughs and say yes, that is his Vietnamese name. I was offered some rice wine, and a hookah pipe, and accepted both. A little girl came back and I asked her name and how old she was. She ended up sitting on my lap, and her grandma told me her parents were divorced and were elsewhere and that she was raising her with her aunts and uncles. She was super cute. Soon I noticed some people yawning and took my leave. I knew if I stayed they would stay until I left and these people work HARD.

Later on we go for a walk and had one of my favorite moments in Vietnam. Its dark and foggy and the rock formations look spooky and surreal in the darkness. We hear an eerie chanting coming out of the fog and follow it to a little house a few blocks away. Not sure what it was about but i record a bit with my phone. So cool…

The next day we went to Cuc Phuong, Vietnam’s first national park.
They have an endangered monkey rescue there, which is incredible. I got a little emotional hearing the monkeys ‘talking’ to each other. The guy in charge informs us just how endangered they are… less than 400 left on earth. They also rescue rare turtles. They have one of the last 3 known to exist of a particular soft shell water turtle. Very cool what they’re doing, but also depressing.

After the rescue, we hiked a jungle trail to see a tree that is over a thousand years old. The hiking was pretty tough going, lots and lots of up and down in semi-muddy conditions. 6 miles worth. Came away feeling like it was a bit of a waste of time. If you’ve hiked a mile in a triple canopy jungle, you’ve hiked a hundred. You can’t see much of anything!
We headed back towards town as it was near lunch time, and as we grow nearer to town, we start to realize, we may be returning to the famed goat skewer restaurant… My sister grows concerned and they attempt to ask the driver if we’re going to the same place for lunch… YES. We ask if we can go elsewhere… he says, ‘Food already cooked, too late’. But he makes a phone call and tells us we will eat elsewhere tomorrow. So back to ‘The Long Restaurant’ for more goat skewers and prawn crackers… it was even worse today!!!!
At this point it becomes a joke to us, and on a whim we decide to look online to see if there are any reviews of this place and sure enough, there are PLENTY. Of the 308 reviews left, 176 are rated “terrible”, 50 are “poor” and 39 are “average”…
I will provide some samples from Trip advisor here…

“OH GOD NO PLEASE NO
This “hotel” was hands down the worst place I have ever stayed. The moment I walked into my room, a strong whiff of musky uncleaned bathroom smell overwhelmed my senses. This smell resonated during my entire stay there and I resorted to basically never going to the bathroom until absolutely necessary.”

“Disgusting food
Had the expensive special: goat with garlic and lemongrass for 150.000 vnd. The goat tasted like rubber and the flavour was mostly just old garlic. Definitely microwaved. We felt like lured into a tourist trap “

“I recommend you to stay here in the dorms if no better choice is available but for the sake of your health and taste buds, don’t even think to order food here… “

“Staff was rude despite me and my friends continuously trying to be nice to them. They have mold all over the bathrooms, they overcharge by the the extreme for tours. FOR YOUR SAKE: FIND ANOTHER HOTEL!!!”

“Would really recommend not going anywhere near this place. The hotel is filthy and the rooms are even worse. There was a massive hole in the bathroom and you could see straight up to the filthy attic. There was bugs all over the room as well. We didn’t even stay the night we packed our bags and moved to another hotel.
AVOID!!!!!”

“The most horrendous hostel I have ever stayed in! I had a mouse in my shower, my bed was FILLED with bed bugs and the staff were so rude!! The facilities were very poor and covered in mold. Literally stay anywhere else but here!! It doesn’t even deserve one star!”

“AVOID AVOID AVOID
I can not speak any lower of this place. It is horrible, the staff are hideous, rude and arrogant- especially the awful counter staff, who thought nothing of screaming at me. I rented a bike here, no left brake, no mirrors and no kick start, which was not handy when it broke down in the middle of nowhere. I had to pay for a whole new battery which they refused to compensate me for but happily screamed at me for having it put in. I’m not sure how it is still in business. Avoid this place at all costs and it’s awful staff.”

OK. You get the idea. We forced enough calories down to qualify as ‘lunch’ and met our guide out front. We now realize we are going on a bike ride. OK, sounds fun! The downside… the bikes are being provided by The Long Restaurant & Hotel. Any guesses on the quality of those bikes? The fact that I survived this day does not attest to just how terrible these bikes were… felt like I was riding a bike setup for a 3rd grader who was 7 feet tall and had their knees removed. Possibly the worst bicycles in all of Vietnam. The person handing out the bikes was also rude and just shoved a bike at me and waved us away. We stopped a few blocks down the road and I used all of my mechanical knowledge and no tools to make adjustments to my and my sisters bikes.

We continue on and soon turn off the main road and are immediately transformed into an utterly delightful Southeast Asian wonderland. Riding along dikes in colorful rice fields among the limestone outcroppings and checking out life for the locals is just beautiful, and quickly overcomes our crappy bikes and turns into an unforgettable afternoon. We spend some time on the trails and eventually head back on to the roads and ride on a little further. I spot a temple gate across the way and it turns out our guide is leading us to a parking area for our bikes. The person ‘parking’ bikes is rude and I see him arguing with people about the price to park their bikes (I discovered a lot of comments on this part of the tour on Trip Advisor as well!). The nice thing about having a guide in a foreign country is they handle these type of interactions leaving us unmolested, and un-ripped off.
We park and head towards the field and temple gate, and pass a group of the usual ‘salesmen’ sitting on the path to the temple gate. Inexplicably, a women is sitting there with little wooden cages with SQUIRRELS in them, apparently selling squirrels? WTF. My sister asks me in a whisper: “was that women selling squirrels?!?!” I said I have no idea.
We move on to the temple gate, which is very old and beautiful and in a very picturesque place. We take pics and stroll on towards the apparent temple behind it. Again, we have NO IDEA what we’re doing because the guide doesn’t tell us… The temple is really old and pretty cool. I wander behind it to check out a couple statues and spy a set of stairs heading up, so follow. Another temple, this one a bit more interesting than the first one. More stairs…. up we go. ANOTHER temple, this one built into a cave in the cliff face… we keep going up and keep encountering more and more temples each one a bit cooler than the next. I am in ‘explorer heaven’ at this point. This place was really astounding and completely hidden from view. I’m often a bit blown away at how hard it had to be to build some of these places, and haul the materials and prerequisite Buddha statues up. Labor of love I suppose.
I later learned this place was called Bich Dong Pagoda.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

This kind of wraps our day and we head back to the trail head. As we approach the squirrel cage lady, we all notice the cages are now empty… Apparently she had some buyers? Who knows…
We mount our untrusty steeds and pedal back to town. All in all, an interesting and unique day.
After returning the bikes we walk by a restaurant with some nice looking smoothies and decide to grab one. It is amazing. Delectable. Wonderful. Delightful. Exquisite. Tasty!
I remark… if their smoothies are that good, what must their food be like? We decide to return for dinner.
My sisters went out to find a massage and happened to walk by the same place and notice it’s packed with locals. Suspicion confirmed. Great food. When they return from their massage we walk downtown to the place, only to see the lights off and the family that runs it singing karaoke. But when they spy us standing there, they wave us in and tell us to sit down. Open at a moments notice! The karaoke singer waves at us, and motions for us to join him and I’ve been waiting for such a moment… I have a few Vietnamese songs nailed down and have been waiting for the chance to hit karaoke in VN. So I go over and he offers me the mic, and the search function of the karaoke machine. I dial up a song and he looks at me and goes… ‘But that’s a Vietnamese song?’ I say yes and motion him to play it. I launch into my spotless rendition (it’s my story I can tell it how I like) of “Go Cua Trai Tim” (knock on the door of my heart) in Vietnamese.
They are blown away and people are coming out of the woodwork to see who this crazy american is… when it’s over the kid says to me, you work in Vietnam, don’t you? I say no, I live in the USA. He responds… I don’t believe you!
My sisters then take turns butchering some american songs (again, my story…)
Fun times. As suspected, the food was phenomenal at this place. We have a few beers and head back. Only one day left.
When we get back to the homestay we are relaxing in our room when I hear a knock on our door. It’s our guide. Something is wrong, I can see it on his face. He tells me he needs to talk to Miss Mindy. I tell him she’s in the shower. He then tells me something is wrong at home and he has to leave us. He has a new baby at home (in Hanoi 2 hours away) and something is wrong and he needs to go, but we will have the same driver tomorrow, who will take us where we need to go, buy all of our tickets, etc. I tell him I understand and am sorry he has to leave and hope that everything is ok. I wish him well and tip him and go to break the news to my sisters. We all agree, not much will be lost without him. He was nice, but not real good with information.
When we arise the next morning and get our breakfast, the entire family at our homestay assembles, and the grandma makes a little speech about how much they enjoyed having us there, and then gifts us with hand sewn bags for us to remember them by. It was a great moment and I get a tiny bit emotional at the show of gratitude and friendship. This is what I love about traveling.

We head out to Bai Dinh Pagoda (our driver actually tells us where we’re going, and he doesn’t speak English!).
As we’re driving down the road, our driver suddenly pulls over and a man walks over, opens the door and climbs in our van. Ummm… wtf?
He sits down and says (in excellent English) Hi Guys! I’m Tony. I’m the one you talked to when you booked the tour! We all laugh and Tony apologizes for the snafu with our guide. We are thrilled. Tony speaks great English and is college educated, we can ask questions and learn things today. We carry on to our destination. Bai Dinh is a brand new pagoda complex being built by the Vietnamese government. It is MASSIVE. It is not yet finished but already, it is the biggest pagoda in all of Asia. Tony tells me the Vietnamese government believes this pagoda will really ‘put them on the map’. We spend some time visiting and I find myself almost bored. The pagoda is big, and beautifully built, but it’s BRAND NEW. I prefer old churches at home too. No offense Vietnam. It does have a tower that is hundreds of feet tall with various levels of shrines inside and an amazing view from the top, but it’s quite foggy and hardly worth the look on this day. We finish up and head to our last spot on our tour, Trang An. Trang An is an eco-tourism complex. Famous for it’s caves and the fact that “Kong – Skull Island” was filmed there. We are taking another boat ride. This time we notice paddles in the boats along with our rower. We can help the rower! Once again we head down the river and again are rowing thru caves, and also see various wildlife along the river, pigs & goats & such. It is beautiful.

We approach Kong Island but do not stop. Basically we all grab paddles and row the entire time as we are now eyeing our watches and doing mental math on reaching the airport in Hanoi at our goal time. It was a beautiful ride, and a beautiful area, and we probably spent less time than we should have due to thinking about flight. We came off the river and are taken to a different restaurant near Trang An. Turns out to be another buffet. It is clean and looks great. Well…
Looks can be deceiving. It was tasteless, bland, and had even less choices than the crap hole in Tam coc. It was like they made Vietnamese food, but left out all of the flavoring that makes the food taste good. Very weird. Lesson, NEVER EAT AT A BUFFET IN VN!!!!! There are millions of great restaurants in the country and there is no reason to ever set foot in a buffet joint in that country!
It was still a great day. Tony was very conversant in English, and I asked him a million questions. We even talked politics and religion a bit and he was very willing to engage on any subject about his country.
We let Tony know what we thought of the buffets on his tour… hopefully he takes that into account in the future. And that basically wraps it folks. This part turned out to be my favorite part of Vietnamese and would have been AMAZING had we had Tony from the get go. If you hire a tour in a foreign country, be sure and converse a bit with your potential guide. It could be the difference between a fun trip, and a phenomenal one.
The last two hours were spent driving to the airport at just under death-warp speed, as we had expressed a desire to reach it by 4 o’clock and our driver was doing EVERYTHING in his power to make it happen. When we pulled into the airport he looked at his watch and exclaimed ‘EXACTLY 4 O’Clock!’.
It’s hard for me to quantify just how much fun this trip has been, with all it’s ups and downs. Travel is the spice of life for sure. And I still had a week to go in Cambodia!
Thanks all who are reading this. I was encouraged by the people who told me how much they were enjoying reading about my adventures, and I basically wrote this last bit with all of you in mind.
Peace, Love & tạm biệt, Vietnam.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Hanoi Rocks

Part V Hanoi Vietnam

Since a big part of our Hanoi time was spent in Ha Long bay, we only ended up with about a days worth of time here.
For some reason I did not carry my big camera around so I only have phone pics from this part of the trip. First night was at an airbnb, which was really nice and in a super interesting little alleyway / neighborhood with a very cute top floor balcony porch & interesting views. We were only there one night before we took off for Ha Long bay.
We had enough time to check out Hoan Kiem Lake in the middle of the city (famous legend of a turtle god loaning his sword to the Emperor to fight the Chinese is based here – Wikipedia has it if you care) which is the center of the walking scene downtown and the Old French Quarter of Hanoi. That area is famous with tourists because of it’s quaint houses & endless shopping & eating opportunities.

Hoan Kiem Lake

I had read, and been told that Hanoi was very different from South Vietnam, from the demeanor of the people to well… basically everything.
“people aren’t as friendly” was something I’d been told. I actually had a twinge of nervousness about visiting this city that had been our arch nemesis in the war.
Physically the city has a very different vibe than Saigon, it seemed more affluent to me right off the bat, which big tall skinny houses dominating the skyline every which way. The main highway thru the city features what we took to calling ‘the mile of tile’. What it is is actually a giant ceramic tile mural that lines the dike system of the red river in Hanoi.
It’s 6.5 Kilometers long (4 miles) and is really cool. It has a huge variety of artwork that reflect different periods in Vietnam’s history.
The main highway thru town is big and modern, but you’ll still fight a million motorbikes to get anywhere.
And yes, there IS a different vibe here. People are much more quiet and reserved than in Saigon. In Saigon you can’t walk anywhere without someone yelling at you for your business, and the endless eating & drinking shops on the sidewalks are loud & gregarious.
It is cooler here as well. People dress like it’s winter time! (It was) I got none of the friendly smiles from groups of people I got in Saigon. It felt a lot more like well… an American big city. People chat quietly, the men sit about with hookah pipes and kind of keep to themselves. When touring the shops, there were no aggressive sales tactics, they were much more laid back and let you look around and leave if you wanted. A lot of them had their heads in phones…. just like home.
However, should you actually happen to engage anyone, they were just as friendly as ever, and appreciated my language skills just as much if not more than in the south.

I happened upon a couple of older gentleman in the park (old enough to remember the war) playing a banjo and singing thru a battery powered amp, and took the opportunity to stop and exchange some pleasantries. He spoke to me in french initially… (I don’t look french damnit), when I didn’t understand he asked where I was from in English, and I responded ‘american’ in Vietnamese. He smiled and hollered to his banjo playing friend… Oh, our man is american here, play some song name I have no idea of. I
assume it was something I should know. It sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. They were kind of hilarious. I grinned and took my leave.

At a clothes store shopping for North Face gear, I tried to barter a bit with the owner and he told me, “I already give you best price because you the only people come in my store all day long. If you not show up, maybe I not eat breakfast tomorrow”. I got a kick out of that. I paid $15 for a North Face rain slicker and got out of there.

The day we returned from Ha Long we were back in the city and came back to the same park & the old quarter to eat and walk about. They had closed all the roads around the park since it was Sunday and it was beautiful outside, and there was a carnival vibe in the air. Street vendors everywhere and the opportunity to walk about with no worry of traffic was FANTASTIC.
When we returned we had decided to book a room at the Sheraton in Hanoi so we could store everyone’s baggage there, since all but 4 of use were flying out that night.
Apparently there was diplomat or famous politician staying there because security was on high alert and they were actually Scanning baggage to get in the hotel. We had to explain that only a few of us were staying there but we were just storing baggage for the day. They started scanning our bags and promptly broke the scanner. No one seemed to know what to do… So they just checked our bags manually and let us thru.
After a long day we all went back to the hotel to rest and see the groups off for the flight home. I definitely had some anxiety happening, my wife, daughter, and Vietnamese mother in law were all leaving, along with all the other native Vietnamese speakers. We would be on our own with no translators from here on out. We eventually saw them all off and crashed for the night, looking forward to the next phase of our adventure, Ninh Binh Province.

Read Part VI here

• 

• 

• 

• 

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

On deck for our cruise in HaLong Bay

Part IV Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay has been on my ‘todo’ list since the first time I went to Vietnam. Very famous spot for limestone outcroppings in a beautiful ocean setting. I was not going to return to Vietnam without actually going there this time and I’m glad I did. It’s idyllic and beautiful. I could have spent a few days here I’m sure.
The trip started out excellent. We had booked a cruise ahead of time and they provided transportation, and we were all a bit surprised when a full sized luxury bus showed up to haul us. Extremely nice ride. It’s almost a 3 hour drive from Hanoi to Ha Long so we were glad to have such a comfy ride, and it was possible to nap, or scenery watch.
Many napped, and I spent my time staring at the scenery and observing farm life, Vietnamese cemeteries, rivers & bridges as well as the endless construction areas along the way. About halfway in my daughter had to use the bathroom so we asked the driver if we could stop. He said we were on a busy highway and there wasn’t really anywhere but we’d have a chance in about 15 minutes.
Eventually he pulled of and we stopped near a gas station / store. There was a bathroom and the “store” was selling all sorts of things from the usual fruit & food items, to wood carvings, jewelry etc. One display had some questionable looking carvings in it, and cousin Jessica asked what it was. “Elephant” they replied. Ugh. Ivory. She turned up her nose and I stood there staring. Hard to believe in this day & age this is still an acceptable thing. My mother in law was looking and we told her what it was. “That’s illegal in the USA” I said to her. Really? she said. One of the clerks understood me and started trying to say it was no problem to buy and I interrupted him and said, “you cannot take this into the US, it’s illegal”. They looked a little baffled.. or maybe disappointed. I couldn’t tell which. Anyway… some things you cannot change… at least not on a short visit.
Back on the bus and we soon arrived at our drop-off spot for the cruise. We were quickly loaded up and hauled over to our boats which looked very nice. Halfway down the gangway I was startled by the entire crew yelling ‘WELCOME ABOARD!’ as a group, and then ‘XIN CHAO!’ (This is a polite hello in Vietnamese). They must have counted it off together. I’m trying to imagine this happening on an american cruise. I can’t.
We all loaded up, were shown to our rooms, and the boat pulled out.
Lunch was quite nice with a good buffet and lots of americano coffee for me (yay).
It was misty and overcast and a bit cool, but I had read that that was typical this time of year so I wasn’t real shocked. There were games in the bar later on and enough drinks to make some of our crew tired REAL early… We went up on top and enjoyed the drive out to our overnight spot. The bay is absolutely beautiful and unique, but pollution is a problem here, and there are a lot of commercial ships & freighters nearby spoiling the vibe a bit. Luckily that was just on the way out and it was nice and quiet once we got deeper into the bay.
First stop was Cua Van (Ancient Village) a floating fishing village. You could choose to row around the village with a local resident or kayak. Most of us chose the rowing (to stay dry) but my sister took my daughter and a couple cousins in kayaks and they promptly rowed out of sight causing no small amount of stress for my sister, and my mother in law, until they returned.

Kayaking near the fishing village

The village itself has been here for hundreds of years. The people build little simple houses on floating platforms, and tie them all together to make little villages, and they’ve been living this way as long as anyone remembers. They are traditionally fisherman, but nowadays, things are complicated. Pollution is a big problem here for the health of the bay, which is a UNESCO world heritage site. The villages have no way to get rid of their waste, human & otherwise other than to dump it in the bay. Between that & the huge influx of tourists, things are looking sketchy for the future. Large numbers of shellfish have died off and their way of life is threatened. For the sake of tourism (and the money) the government has stepped in and is forcing the issue. they want the people to leave their traditional homes and move inland. They govt has offered them a little land and money to relocate if they will, but most have no interest in leaving the places they’ve lived their entire lives. The government even sent out a negotiator, to go there everyday and talk to them and try to convince them they’d be better off. Some have agreed and they have an agreement that they can go back and forth and visit as much as they like, but once they leave they are not allowed to construct any new floating homes or resume traditional activities. They are given some money, but when the money runs out, many of them try to return.
There are some bright spots, as tourism has brought money, and they are now taking up ‘aquaculture’ raising fish farms in nets near their houses. This is very profitable work but again, the pollution threatens the success there as well.
As I listened to all of this, I was reminded of our own native people, whom were asked to give up their traditional way of life and take up farming, etc etc. The same old story plays out again and again and again… but I digress.
We returned to the boat and cruised over to another area and were informed we could swim if we wanted to. A little cold for my taste, but a few of the kids were game, as well as a dude from the Netherlands who’d obviously had a few. The kids didn’t last long, but the the Netherlander guy swam all the way around the little ship. I salute you dude.
Dinner was served and we all turned in for the evening.
The next morning we cruised over and visited a cave that has evidence of human use from 10,000 years ago. They’ve excavated a few spots in the cave and found large deposits of clams etc that were placed there by people. The caves are cool but not real impressive by US standards, the cave we visited appears dry so not much formation going on. Back to the boat for lunch and it was time to start heading back. Luckily the sun came out and we ended our trip with a nice cruise in the sun, and the bay was absolutely beautiful.
I definitely recommend a cruise like this if you visit, but I would also recommend visiting during the summer months for weather purposes.

Read Part V: Hanoi Rocks

Cave in HaLong Bay

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

HaLong Bay, Vietnam

DaNang Me, Danang Me

Why don’t they get a rope and hang me?

Part III:
Da Nang Vietnam

In the last bit I talked about how my day got a lot worse. Well…here’s how it happened.
First off, I can never read, or hear the word Da Nang without hearing Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam singing
‘danang me, danang me, why don’t they get a rope and hang me’ to the tune of Dang Me by Elvis.
Da Nang is pretty well known by westerners because of it’s high use during the war due to it’s easily accessible deep water port. So it was the site of a big military base during the war. It’s a big city nowadays for sure with skyscrapers & urbanization aplenty.
We had big plans to visit the Bana Hills which is a newly constructed french villa / entertainment park on the side of a mountain and features one of instagrams new favorites, the golden hands bridge, which is a foot bridge on the side of the
mountain supported by two giant human hands, which make nice pictures and a great view towards the sea. That did not happen.
After hiring a 10 passenger van to pick us up at our hotel in Hoi An and take us to Da Nang we were off late morning-ish.
The drive is not long between and it is gorgeous. Beautiful rice fields and cemeteries dot the side of the road and it’s a fascinating drive. Our first task was to locate two airbnb’s that were booked separately for our large group. This is where things went south. Our driver was not from Da Nang, and the mapping services in Vietnam are still a bit sketchy… google needs to get on this! Like most Vietnamese cities, the road system is an utter maze and bewildering complex, with no plan or reasoning other than avoiding waterways and such. Most of the cities are hundreds if not thousands of years old so the idea of cars was not imagined. We gave our driver the first address and started drilling down side roads trying to locate it… eventually he stopped and said he thought we were there but we were on some sketchy dirt roads in a residential area
that just… did… not… look… right. So.. we sent him to the next address. I could tell he was growing a bit frustrated. As he followed his phone down ever smaller and more crowded roads things got sketchier and sketchier. We could not located the 2nd address and now got stuck behind a large truck doing construction and a million motorcycles behind us.
He had to get out and beg them to move the truck because we were STUCK. The 2nd address was even worse. There was no way this was the correct place. We were all growing a bit tense and I was gathering a sense of dread at the idea of this guy dumping us in some random residential area with no address, 10 people, and 20 pieces of luggage. So we sent him back to the 1st area. Now he was REALLY getting annoyed. Eventually we located what looked like the right address (still did not look right) and he basically said you’re here. So much to our chagrin he stopped and started unloading our bags.
Some curious people started drifting out of their houses to watch what was going on with this huge group of people unloading luggage in the middle of nowhere.
We were at the wrong house. Luckily, the lady who did the cleaning for our airbnb saw us, walked over and showed us the correct place. It was only across the street and two houses down. Wheew. It was good to at least locate the place. There were other stressors as well. The lady who rented us the place pulled a switcheroo at the last second and said there was a problem with mold at one we initially booked and then sent us to this one. Then she refused to give us any discount and we were not happy because it split us far from the other half of our group which is why we booked initially. My sister fought with her via email for the better part of the day over it and in the end, she did not budge.
The house was ok, functional, but not very nice and we just had to make the best of it. In the end, we just abandoned the other spot and we all stayed at this one house so we could remain together. Again the house was ok, but kind of had a ‘vibe’ that felt a little negative to me. The beds were basically plywood, and the top floor was missing part of the roof
so rain just fell right in on the floor (not all that unusual in Vietnam but not what you expect to rent these days either). I have since read that this exact scenario is playing out all over the world in AirBnB’s at home and abroad. It’s a boilerplate scam to make money off terrible properties. Buyer beware.
At this point we were all hungry and a chunk of our day was gone so we just grouped up and walked over towards the beach. We found a nice restaurant nearby serving western food and I was actually jonesing for something ‘homelike’ so we ordered
stuff like burgers spaghetti and garlic bread. It was expensive but to our surprise quite good! This was the place with the famously misspelled menu. They also had ‘sppetizer and rumstick’!

We then headed over to the beach where some giant waves were smashing about eliminating any possibility of getting in the water, but there were some surfers out there enjoying it. I could see a massive temple and Buddha statue a few miles away on the side of a mountain from the beach and noted it to try and visit before leaving. We gave up on Bana hills given the short period of time we had left and just decided to check out a few local attractions. Da Nang has a ‘dragon bridge’ over it’s river and it’s kind of popular with tourists so we grabbed a couple cabs and decided to head that way. Our cab drivers were smart though, and suggested hey, why don’t we take you up to the giant Buddha & temple first and you can take some pics then we’ll drop you off at the dragon bridge? Boom. Got me. So we ended up visiting the temple first, which I did not regret at all. It was beautiful, the views were amazing of the city and it was a nice diversion. I was still feeling a little stressed out from the airbnb situation and it was good to get out in nature and relax a bit.
We ended up walking across the dragon bridge, grabbing some ice cream, walking around a bit, and then just heading back to crash. We all slept like crap on the plywood beds and the next day I think we were all happy to clear out of that place. It left a bad taste in my mouth and when I woke up the next morning I had my first and only real bout of homesickness. When I woke up I just had this feeling of ‘I want to go home’. I want familiarity and comfort food and my nice bed and coffee I’m used to. I want to feel relaxed for a day!
I knew I still had almost half my time left in SEA though and was not about to let one bad day ruin it. I gave myself an attitude adjustment… after all, I wanted an adventure and sometimes that comes with a bit of diversity.
We called a cab and headed for the airport to fly to our next destination, Hanoi.
It’s not fair to judge Da Nang on one bad day and I think it has a ton to offer someone willing to spend a little more time there and get to know it a bit. It has a beautiful beach, colorful boats in the harbor, and there is lots of stuff to do up in the hills.
But overall, this had been my worst day of the vacation. I didn’t eve take any pics with my nice camera that day. I’m happy to report that although I still had a few moments of
‘I’m ready to go home’ the rest of my time turned out to be everything I had hoped for. I did learn a few lessons overall about slowing down, and not trying to do EVERYTHING every time I go somewhere. I will work on this!

Read Part IV

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•