Southeast Asia

In November 2016 Karen and I traveled for three weeks with her brother Fraser and his wife Fiona through Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore.

(You can tap on the photos to see them full-sized.)

Hong KongGetting There

Getting to the airport on shorter trips is straightforward—hop in the car, drive to a long term lot, then take their shuttle to the terminal—but for longer trips a taxi starts making sense. We've learned through bitter experience that cab drivers have trouble finding our house, so this time we hired a service and it was definitely nice, guy texting us twice with status reports then showing up 30 minutes early (!), "just in case". A nice new option, then.

The flight from Seattle to Hong Kong takes about 14 hours, but it's direct and ends up not screwing with your circadian rhythm too badly. We'll see about the return flight. I was going to include a photo of the Hong Kong International Airport's main terminal, designed by Sir Norman Foster of London Gherkin fame (and soon of Apple's headquarters fame), but we breezed through that place so quickly I didn't manage a good shot. Maybe when we leave Hong Kong on Tuesday.

Hong KongKowloon

Though Kowloon occupies the northern shore of Hong Kong's harbor, part of the metropolis but not the part, simple geography forever consigning its ambitions to a supporting role, you suspect that, like New York's Brooklyn, the city's vitality gains as much as it suffers in that role. There's a curious blend of not-quite-splendor and not-quite-squalor, the streets and the people in them all looking healthily workaday if slightly tattered, more than anything simply getting on with things, which for a visitor is a welcome invitation to explore and sample.

We visited the local markets, each street dedicated to a particular theme, flowers along this street, fish and animals along the next, sneakers along another. It's 1000 Hong Kong Dollars to 150 USD, so translating prices is part of the fun, especially when, after translating, you see bargains before you.

Hot and humid with occasional squalls. You savor blasts of air conditioning when you can and keep in mind where you are relative to the excellent metro stops you've discovered so far. The metro is cheap, barely more than a dollar; taxis are cheap too, though harder to find at times. But neither of those take you past stalls of bagged goldfish and turtles, incomprehensible nostrums, and lotus-positioned denizens of this wonderful place.

Hong KongHong Kong Island

On Sunday we took the Star Ferry south from Kowloon across the harbor to Hong Kong Island where we met Karen's niece Mhairi and family for dim sum. Afterwards our plan was to head up together to Victoria Peak via a funicular for the view of the city and harbor, but the line was so long we took two cabs up instead, then spent 30 minutes finding each other again. Once reunited we strolled for several kilometers along a path that circumnavigates the peak, lovely views all around.

We decided to return to the city on foot along a path that was so steep everyone's legs were screaming by the time we made it back down the 3000'. The only sensible thing to do was to collapse into a pub immediately afterwards.

Because we were in the city on Sunday we witnessed a curious thing. There is a thriving domestic service industry in Hong Kong for women from the Philippines who serve as nannies and housekeepers. Sunday is their one day off and they congregate on the streets of the city by the hundreds to swap stories and reconnect, so you see them clustering everywhere.

HSBC'S global headquarters is an impressive skyscraper, coincidentally designed by the aforementioned Sir Norman Foster. Today's second photo shows that building along with some of the many socializing nannies and housekeepers.

Hong KongThe Big Buddha

Consult any text or ask anyone even semi-informed and you'll learn that, time permitting, you really should make the pilgrimage to Lantau Island to see the Buddha, a towering bronze figure atop an enormous lotus blossom perched high on a mountaintop.

The pilgrimage begins with a 25-minute aerial cable-car ride dipping from peak to peak, plenty of time to view the sights including an ambitious bridge to the hour-distant island of Macau whose gambling houses are presumably footing the bill. Another swoop over a peak and now you see the international airport and fishing and shipping vessels and—there it is, a magnificent head coming into view, then the shoulders, enough to provide scale of the thing. It's clear the Buddha is Big.

Once off the cable-car you proceed through first a literal gift shop then a more stylized one in the form of a reproduction monastery village, that gargantuan bronze head hiding behind shops then bursting back into view between lush vegetation until at last you stand at the bottom of the 200-odd steps leading upwards.

Our timing was both fortunate in the way the sun shone from directly behind the Buddha's head like an ethereal halo, and unfortunate for the challenges this represented for good photos. At any rate, the Pilgrims were Pleased.

VietnamHanoi

Hanoi streets are a blast. Japanese motor scooters everywhere moving in chaotic paths with what at first you might interpret as disregard for safety until you appreciate the awesome efficiency of it all, everyone just missing everyone else and getting maximum utility from the roads, slowing to avoid you as you cross first tentatively then less tentatively until you too have absorbed and have been absorbed by that rhythm. You are never blasé about crossing and remain hyper-aware of others, but that's entirely the trick of the experience. Exhilarating and a kick to realize that just crossing the road can be so fun.

We visited Ho Chi Minh's tomb and a museum celebrating his years spent bringing Communism and independence to Vietnam, the veneration of the man rising to hagiographic levels at times. The "American" war is told with an understandably nationalistic perspective, none more so than in the white-washed accounts in the Hanoi Hilton tour of smiling American POWs playing basketball, etc. We saw where John McCain and others were confined, along with photographs of his return visit in 2000 to reclaim the remains of less fortunate soldiers. A somber visit all around.

We also visited a 1000-year-old Chinese temple built in the Confucianist style, its five sections arrayed in a line you passed through successively to get to the inner sanctum. In previous times the temple served as Vietnam's first university, and tradition still brings graduating classes throughout the city to the temple to honor that history.

These historical perspectives were interesting, but the living city of Hanoi is far more so, more vibrant than expected, an energy at once both crazy and calm, like those scooters hurtling through intersections without a nick. Speaking of crazy, the electrical wiring was wild.

We've enjoyed our share of the local cuisine and local sights, the highlight probably being the Old Quarter, whose beautiful lake presented a lovely setting for an evening stroll of real-life Frogger thrills.

VietnamHalong Bay

Our guide met us early in the morning with the mini-bus and we left Hanoi, heading east to the coast where we would spend the night onboard a ship in Halong Bay. The view once we'd gotten out of Hanoi changed quite a bit, most signage now in Vietnamese only and more evidence of inefficient central planning. The road at one point was long and straight for many miles and undergoing the sort of long-term half-construction you see throughout Mexico, buildings framed then clearly abandoned, the road's foundation a mess but with a median already elaborately planted-then-ignored, tall poles lining the road alternately waving the Vietnam flag and a Communist hammer-and-sicle. Nothing captured the sorry picture better than the bronze artworks installed at regular intervals along the verge, incongruous abstract tree shapes meant to liven and perhaps ennoble but now simply aging in the rubble of perpetual construction.

Midway to the coast our driver stopped to deposit us in a curious waystop of large plaster figures of dragons, Japanese shrines, and many other yard ornaments you dearly hope your neighbor never fancies. A central building housed acres of similarly tourist-aimed wares including silk woven images, clothing, housewares, and foodstuffs. Sales staff immediately attached themselves to you—would you like this? how about this?—and followed close behind. In all we were there for maybe an hour when ten minutes would have sufficed. We wondered why. My personal theory was that it was further evidence of central planning, the waystop situated midway to the coast along an obvious tourist route with instructions to tour guides and the like to stop in order to capture more foreign currency, a theory bolstered by yet another stop at a similar place further up the road, and again on the road back the following day.

No matter, for Halong Bay was glorious indeed. We boarded our ship to find our stateroom and were delighted to find a little lanai facing aft with enough room for two chairs and a table. Once under weigh we headed for the top deck to enjoy the sight of the large stones everywhere creating different passageways of promise and adventure.

We kayaked through a 100m low cave, bats on the ceiling shrieking, and then through another much darker cave of sharp turns and sharp rocks. Fun.

Karen did great on the boat, though the Bonine she took made her drowsy. When we finally retired for the night, sleep came quickly, the gentle rumble of the ship's engine notwithstanding.

In the morning we climbed up into Surprise Cave, which turned to be a real surprise. Huge!

Once back in Hanoi, we headed to the airport for the quiet city of Hue.

VietnamHue

The city of Hue straddles the Perfume River near the center of Vietnam, not far from the line that once divided the country into North and South. Compared to Hanoi the pace is relaxed with only 15% of the population.

We took a dragon boat tour on the river, then walked through the Forbidden Purple City, a near-replica of China's at 1/10 the scale, which was still 10 kilometers in circumference. We also stopped at an ancient pagoda with an attached monetary and watched the monks sit down to lunch with a strike of a gong and a bit of droning monody.

Fiona wasn't feeling well and skipped the tour but recovered enough by lunch to join in on a visit to the local market. The bottom of the two market floors was mostly food, the top textiles. Fraser and I dickered a pair of shirts from $20 for the pair down to $10. Our guide laughed and said we could have gotten the pair for $3.

We enjoyed a perfectly picturesque dinner along the Perfume River where we "blagged" (got for free) a Huda beer mug, then strolled afterwards along the waterfront to see the booths and artists. On the walk back to the hotel we stopped for coffee and were easily the oldest faces in the house, perhaps by double. Both Hanoi and Hue so far have certainly belonged to the young.

A lovely evening.

VietnamHoi An

The road south led through rice fields. When we had seen them on the drive to Halong Bay, they were dry squares fifty feet across as far as you could see, their edges raised with natural earth berms marked with poles tied with cloth identifiers. The previous night and following morning had brought heavy rain, so now we saw water barely punctuated by those berms, the poles alone telling you where the squares were. Add in some lush low hills with heavy cloud and that giant punctuated mirror became a gorgeous blend of nature and man.

We traveled over a mountain pass where a derelict outpost was the only remaining indicator of a long-gone Imperial gate separating the Hue province from the Denang province we were now entering. Seeing these derelicts led to reflections on Ozymandias. Back in Hue the streets are in disrepair and the Emperor is no more, his descendants living in France and the U.S., but the government is rebuilding the Imperial palace razed during the French war.

We descended from the mountain pass into the city of Denang, whose excellent harbor visible from high made it clear why the U.S. established a base there. The city's pretty big now, no doubt helped by the G.I.s. For me the name Denang, pronounced with perhaps a hint of Texas twang, more than any other evokes the war I remember from my youth. When we return I'll have to learn more about that period and the decisions leading to the U.S. involvement.

Hoi An is a small city south of Denang, known for its tailors and lanterns. The Old Town was full of colorful lanterns, and, crossing a bridge, we stopped to launch a lit lantern on the river, wishing all well

VietnamA Free Day in Hoi An

Today we had no plane flights, no bus trips, no tour guide, so we rented two scooters from the nice woman across the street from our hotel who had missed out yesterday on laundering a few things for us, losing to her neighbor two spaces over. Instead, she rolled out two well-used scooters which she and her husband promptly fueled up, tipping a two-liter soda bottle upside down into a second cut-off bottle placed upside down into the gas tank's mouth. I hopped on one, Fraser hopped on the other, our biker-babes Karen and Fiona hopped on the back, and away we went with perilously little knowledge of local geography or the rules-of-the-road.

Actually, we had observed many of those rules over the past week in Vietnam but they were hazy at best: there are stop lights, but people often blow right through them; no one drives very fast, but some people drive much faster than others; honking the horn means look out, hello, thanks, see you, and more things than we could count; if you're making a left turn (Vietnam drives on the right side of the road), it's common to hug the left curb. You end up following the Prime Rule—fear everyone—and it just somehow works, with regular hair-raisingly close scrapes.

The geography part was true, though—we had no idea where we were going. Aside from a glance at a map to see the larger contours of the land and its relation to a nearby estuary, we rode blindly out of town and were soon cruising Rice Paddy Lane, any tourist signs long gone. We saw many family shrines, elaborate porcelain and marble mini-temples where families revere their ancestors. We saw more Communist Party propaganda banners with happy workers, the language indecipherable but clearly along the lines of "Together we are Strong" and "Work for a Better Tomorrow", the graphic style taken from the Russian or Chinese book with strong line and simple two- or four-color palettes.

Fiona had read earlier about egg coffee, a local drink born of a wartime shortage of milk, but we hadn't yet managed to find anyone who offered it. Surprising then to spot an unassuming little sign on the road, EGG COFFEE. A quick stop and, yes, it was worth seeking out.

By following locals we managed to meander right through a fishing village, the four of us quietly putt-putting our way through narrow lanes with strung laundry and sleepy dogs. A treat for us, but not sure about the residents, except for one old guy on the bridge with a broad smile who gave us the Peace sign, a throwback to wartime?

Anyway the ride was great fun.

VietnamSaigon

Officially it's been Ho Chi Minh City for forty years now, but everyone still calls it Saigon, whether from 300 years of habit or because it's a beautiful name shaped by its people more than its recent ideology—or maybe it's just shorter and easier to say.

The city's population has exploded in recent years, hitting 9 million this year. There are so many motorbikes on the road that many of them ride up on the sidewalks too. You'll be walking along and BEEEEEEP! someone's practically nudging you with their front tire and you step aside to see one, two, three, then ten bikes fly along down the sidewalk to the next corner where they bump down off the curb to rejoin the road traffic. At any given traffic corner you might see 30 motorbikes waiting for the green light with a few plunging right through the red, many talking on their cellphones, some texting, some with babies in arm or with toddlers sitting up front. And it all somehow works, the traffic moving porously forward.

I mention the motorbikes again because they and cellphones are clearly integral to the functioning and understanding of the cities and perhaps even the modern identity of the nation. We were told everyone bonds deeply with their honda—motorbikes of whatever make are generically called hondas here after Honda's shrewd early move into the market—and many people wheel them into their homes over little concrete ramps the width of a honda wheel fording the curb or gutter.

We visited a famous weapons cache here in the city, including an underground bunker that lay hidden beneath a sympathizer's shopfront floor for years even after the war was over. The Viet Cong used it as part of the Tet Offensive. We saw a door and standing rolled-up mats that had been hollowed out to conceal weapons. After the guide removed a floor tile we saw a hole barely large enough to drop into, with a few concrete steps leading to the concealed room beneath. The guide said we could drop down for a look, but cautioned us not to touch anything because many of the munitions were still in there and were all still live. So we all dropped in to see a room about 4' wide by maybe 20' long filled with boxes of rifles, grenades, and other lethal-looking weapons. More to read about when I get home.

We also visited a great local market and the large local Chinatown.

CambodiaTa Phrom Temple

Oh my, the Ta Phrom temple! The jungle has simply fused with it, the trees extending massive roots over and through the stone on a magnificent scale. Like nothing I've seen before. The reversion to nature is awesome. More than any of the other temples, thus one captured that adventurer feel. The movie Tomb Raider was filmed here—hope the location scout got a bonus.

CambodiaAngkor Thom Temple

The Angkor Thom temple was completely different and featured large six-foot-tall faces carved into the stone, each one different.

CambodiaAngkor Wat

Angkor Wat is big, the crown jewel of the larger city of Angkor which used more stone than all of the Egyptian pyramids combined. It is a massive temple built exclusively for the king and thus scaled to impress, and elevated to convey godlike stature. You climb up to the base level, then climb a few more times to get to the highest, central chambers where Buddhas and Shivas fill many nooks. The temple was never finished so in some places you see mere sketches in the sandstone among the many wonderful carvings.

It's confusing, taxing, and rather sad to hear about the endless one-upmanship between the Hindu and Buddhist kings who built these temples for one religion only to be defeated by someone else who hauled out and destroyed the statues of the old deities and replaced them with correct gods, who in turn was defeated...replaced the deities...ad infinitum through the centuries. There's a lot of iconographical overlap between the two religions, easing the erasing, but still, you know it wasn't the kings doing the work. The Cambodians have had it rough for more than a millennium and still do—our guide has related stories of his country's troubled past as well as frank stories from his own life and those of his father and other relatives, and he glances around and lowers his voice on sensitive topics.

So hot. Once we got back to the bus the driver gave us cool towels which we all plopped on our heads.

CambodiaSiam Reap

CambodiaAn Oxcart Ride

To better appreciate where and how Cambodians live we traveled to the countryside of Siem Riep. We would move by oxcart through back roads to our hosts' house where lunch would be cooked and enjoyed in their living room. There was a lot that was uncomfortable about this setup going in, the presumptuous and cozily condescending tourists gawking at the natives, but the Cambodians—our guides, the ox drivers, and our hosts—were gracious throughout.

First, we stopped at a local market where our guide helped us to buy the food that we'd be eating: chicken and pork, fish, and vegetables, not all of which we could identify. We also purchased two bags of beverages for our hosts, which our guide said they'd appreciate. The outdoor market was only a few stalls, their tables grouped together under tarps to block the heat. In the meat stall a large bowl contained two sheets of flypaper. You could watch as a fly flitted over for a look, landed on the sheet, then tried to take another step, tugging on now-stuck legs. The sheet was black with flies, the meat less so, so clearly the flypaper worked, but the sight and smell of the meat in that heat was something nevertheless.

We had expected to ride together in an ox-drawn wagon but were presented instead with four long carts normally used for plowing but free now with the autumn harvest just completed, each cart a few feet wide with two oxen and a driver perched just behind them, so we rode single-file in our individual carts over hard-packed dirt roads then splashed along narrow muddy trails between rice fields deep with yesterday's rain, past water buffalo wading contentedly in the fields, their heads peeking out above the reeds, turning slowly to watch our passage. As we crossed through clusters of stilted homes among the fields, dogs and children ran out for a look. Throughout, the drivers commanded the oxen with short grunts that sounded remarkably like the oxen themselves.

Our hosts lived in a small clean house on one hectare. They spoke no English, so our guide translated, telling us about their family. We pored over the wedding album of their oldest daughter, married at eighteen with a new baby already. Their wedding lasted three days and included 4000 people. The house was nicer than the traditional models we'd passed but followed the same basic design: a bottom floor without interior walls with a second floor for sleeping. On the walls were scribbled phone numbers and a child's colorful drawing. A 70s-era hifi sat in a corner with a DVD player and small screen. Two ceiling fans kept things mercifully cool.

We ate in a mat laid over the tiled floor, first tea, then chicken soup, rough chunks of chicken-and-bone in broth, and plates of meat and vegetable. No bread. Fruit dessert. An enjoyable experience all around.

SingaporeGetting Around

The last leg of our trip, Singapore is clean, orderly, and surprisingly restrained. In bustling Hong Kong the noisy residents pushed forward at every opportunity, but in Singapore when you stay to the left on the many escalators hardly anyone pushes past; Hong Kong's subways were noisy and hot, Singapore's quiet and cool; Hong Kong gave a strong impression of anything goes, but Singapore will fine you heavily for chewing gum or jaywalking and will hang you by the neck until dead the following Friday for drug infractions. This is not an exaggeration. The result is a civilized, quiet city.

The Gardens by the Sea feature "Supertrees", 50m tree-shaped structures right out of a sci-fi movie with an elevated skyway between them. (They were featured in the movie, Hitman.) They're lovely at night against the backdrop of skyscrapers.

We bought unlimited 3-day metro passes and figure we've already gotten our money's worth on the first day. The metro connects directly to underground malls. We learned why when the torrential rains began, the noise thundering, the breeze enough to thwart even the most adroitly wielded umbrella. When it rains that hard, that loud, you hunker down, and those underground malls let you hunker in comfort.

Later at night Karen and I caught a light show of lasers projected against a spray of water over the harbor. Cheesy, but pretty anyway against all those lights.

SingaporeHeading Home

Singapore doesn't mess around. You want order, you need rules. The Metro is full of signs telling you no eating or drinking or smoking or fire or durian, and take off your shoulder bag when standing on the train, which you'll do after surrendering your seat to anyone old, pregnant, injured, or carrying a toddler, and do it without leaning on the doors or partitions. Other metro systems feature similar signs, but none mounted between large posters earnestly encouraging you to join the police force because it's not a matter of if but when, images of dystopian outbreaks showing that you'll not only help pull frail women from the rubble but stand tall among your smiling peers while doing it.

The system works—people seem happy, no litter or squalor, and myriad sleeping escalators awake from a well-oiled crawl as you approach—but it feels like a system more than any other place I've been. Interesting but sterile in a way that makes you appreciate the imperfections in culture as well as life.

On our last day in the city we visited an M.C.Escher exhibit, a fitting choice perhaps, both artist and city enamored of regularity and precision.

MiscellaneousBeer

The beer was sadly lacking. Huda Gold and Tiger were the best.