Winter Break be damned!

And I'm back!

Sorry about the delay everyone, its Winter Break at my school, but that's really a paradox.  In Korea when the public schools are on break the private schools (like mine) work harder and longer.  I've been pulling 10-13 hour days for the better part of 3 weeks now.  Its finally over but I'm in dire need of a break just to cure myself from the Winter Break I was just on.

Anyway, I'm going to tell you all about the rest of my time in Saigon, before I headed to the beach for New Years.  Enjoy.

The last thing I talked about was my day of tunnel crawling and my night of dancing with my new friends.  The rest of the story is more solitary, but that's the way I like to travel.  You experience so much more when you're all alone, plus it makes meeting people a hell of a lot easier.

These two on the right are Quinn (American studying abroad in Singapore) and Yael (an Israeli backpacker on her way to China).

The day after dancing the night away with the lovely Dutch ladies (Berber and Ivira, pictured on the left) I decided to do some exploring/shopping in the area of my hostel.  The area I was in, Pham Ngu Lao, is famous as a backpackers haven and there are shops throughout that cater to a backpacker's every whim and desire.  Me personally, I always desire books so I went out in search of my treasure.  However, by the time I woke up I noticed something weird...there weren't any lights on in my hostel.

As it turned out, all of Pham Ngu Lao was in a total blackout.  Luckily for me though, capitalism continues even when electricity does not and all the shops remained open.  The bad side was that none of the fans, air conditioners, or even lights were working anywhere and the insides of these places were stifling.  Considering I had been surviving sub-freezing temperatures in Korea just 3 days before I was dying from the heat and humidity.  Within 15 minutes I had sweat through my shirt and was literally dripping.  Every time I went into a new store one of the patrons would walk over with napkins and a flashlight.  A part of me wonders if they did it out of courtesy or the desire to make a sale and get me the hell out of there.  Neither would surprise me.

Now, one of the bad things about living abroad is the lack of any real Christmas/birthday presents sent by anyone.  My mom and sister will usually get me something but no one else has in 3 years.  I was expecting this when I left for China, but it still sucks.  So this time, I decided to make up for it by buying myself a bunch of gifts.

Somewhere Santa Claus is upset with me...well screw you fat man, you didn't bring me anything either!


Here's the entire spread (above).  I ended up getting a huge backpack (80 liters), a swiss army knife, a multi-tool, sunglasses, a flashlight, and over 30 books (on the right and below).  About 15 of these were novels that they sell all around Saigon.  Most of them are non-fiction and pertain to topics about Vietnamese history and culture.  The rest of the books through are traveler's bibles...Lonely Planet guides.

Now when I decided to go to China I wanted to take with me a reference that could take me anywhere in the country...I couldn't find one of those, so I settled for Lonely Planet's China guide.

However that was a great decision.  The guide got me out of many scrapes in China and helped me with some great finds in a host of places.  I swear by them now and don't even bother with any other brand.  Whenever I go to a new country I always take my LP along.

Here are all the LPs I bought in Vietnam.

Before you ask, hell yes, I'm going to all of these countries; just don't ask me when.

But the best part of that day was when I opened my new Vietnam guide.  The last time I was in Vietnam I found an awesome bookstore in a city called Hoi An.  It wasn't listed in the book I used so I e-mailed Lonely Planet and told them about it.  Well, they included the bookstore in their new edition and cited me saying thank you.


I know its a really bad copy, but you wouldn't believe how hard it is to take good photograph of a book page.  Here's what it says though:

                            OUR READERS
Many thanks to the travelers who used the last 
edition and wrote to us with helpful hints, useful
advice and interesting anecdotes:


The list of names goes on for a while but my name is listed right there near the top right of the photograph, its underlined in red in case you have trouble seeing.

That makes it official, another thing taken off the Life's To-Do List: Get my name in Lonely Planet.  And all this time I was afraid it was going to be from one of those horror stories about the idiot backpacker who falls off a cliff while trying to impress a girl.

I spent all day shopping and that night I met a whole new group of travel buddies and I talked them into truly experiencing one of the many gastronomical delights that Saigon has to offer...Snake and Scorpion Wine.

Yes, those are real, and yes I've tried it before.  I have never seen a Vietnamese person try it, but I've seen plenty of Chinese men drink themselves stupid off of stuff that looked a lot like this, so I don't dis-believe it.  As it was though, some buddies and I decided to try it and we spent most of the night trying to slowly finish a small bottle of the stuff.

It was horrible, and I swear to you that I actually tasted the venom in addition to the alcohol.  It made for a fun evening of everyone taking a small sip and passing it on in hopes that someone else would drink the rest of it.  Finally after we'd finished off about half of it we decided to call it a night and just go have dinner.  Its probably still sitting in our hostel, everyone else who saw it was afraid to even touch it.

Over the next few days more people came and went but nothing memorable really happened.  I spent most of my days in Saigon exploring pretty much everything, hanging out with new people, sharing stories, and relaxing.  I hadn't been to the beach yet and I really wanted to hang out poolside for a while so I decided to say goodbye to Saigon (temporarily) and headed to Mui Ne Beach Resort.

That, however, is another story.

Anyone miss me?

Well I've been back in Gumi for the past week and I've finally gotten around to updating this blog.  Sorry for the delay but its been a hellish week.  On Monday (Jan. 5th) Korea was hit by a massive snowstorm.  You have to understand, in 2 years in this country I've only counted 2 days worth of snow, and both were only dustings that were gone within a couple of hours.  On Monday Seoul got 28 centimeters (11 inches) of snow.  This was actually the most Seoul has ever gotten, ever since they started recording snowfall back in the 1930s.  The city was shut down for 2 days as they tried to deal with it all.  Gumi only received 4 inches or so (just guessing) but it was enough for my classes to be cancelled Monday and Tuesday.

This used to be a rice paddy.

Me personally, I love snow, always have, and my students were absolutely thrilled to see it all, for most of them its the only real snowfall they've ever seen.  One of my fellow teachers said this was the first time she'd seen snow EVER.  She lived in Egypt for the past 13 years though.

But anyway, enough about cold and snowy Korea, you all want to hear about warm and sunny Vietnam huh.  Well there's too much for one post so I'll do this over a couple of days.  For today I'll talk about just the first couple days of the trip itself.

My flight left at 10:30 on Saturday morning (Dec. 26th).  A fast bus ride (I slept the entire 4 hours) starting at 3:30 got me to the airport with plenty of time to spare.  However, going through customs (to leave, not come in, which makes no sense to me at all) dragged me into some bureaucratic BS.  Apparently if I wanted to come back to Korea I had to pay for an entry visa, about 40 bucks.  It was early and I was upset at the idiocy of the situation so a part of me really wanted to just leave for good and never come back.  However, the part of my brain that was still asleep (lazy bastard) finally woke up and I just paid the money and left.  Oh well, its another stamp in my passport so its not a total loss.

For some reason I couldn't sleep on the flight but the lady next to me (who didn't say a word when I said hello) decided to use my shoulder as a pillow for the 5 hour flight.  She didn't even say "thank you" when she woke.  All she did was give me a dirty look like I had fallen asleep on her shoulder.  Seriously, what the hell?

But my day was rapidly improving because when I stepped off the plane it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon in Saigon and it was already 37 degrees C (98 degrees F) and the sun was shining right into my eyes, it was like walking into a wall but it felt great.  My mood must have been infectious because my taxi driver was awesome.  It was a 20 minute ride to my hostel but we talked the whole way.  Apparently he'd been taught English by US soldiers before the fall of Saigon back in 1975.  He kept talking about how much he loved America and even turned down my tip when I gave him a few extra bucks.  Definitely a good omen.

Walking around downtown Saigon reminded me so much of China.  The touts were everywhere, selling me everything from books to hammocks.  One guy offered to string up his hammock right next to the main street to demonstrate how great it was.  That's a hell of a salesman right there.

Most of the rest of the first day I just met people in my hostel and did some shopping.  One of the biggest reasons I went to Vietnam was because they have books everywhere for cheap.  Gumi doesn't have any English-language bookstores so I needed to stock up.  As it is, I bought about 40 books total (getting them to Korea was a pain in the neck and the back).  I won't be needing anymore for a while.

The next day I took an all day tour of the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi tunnels with a new friend from India named Vikas, that I met in the hostel.

The temple is actually a convent for monks of the Cao Dai faith.  The weird part is the Cao Dai isn't really one faith.  The tenet of Cao Dai is to find a way to God through many different faiths.  While inside the temple I saw features of Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, ancient Chinese Gods and even some Greek Gods.  I was intrigued but the impression I got was that they couldn't make up their minds more then they actually believed different parts of each thing.  I tried to talk to a monk about this but he didn't seem interested in talking to me.  I don't blame him, there were hundreds of tourists there and I probably wasn't the first to stop him.

After that we headed to the Cu Chi Tunnels.

During the American-Vietnamese War the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists) were so outnumbered and outgunned by US forces that they had to build extremely elaborate tunnel systems underground in order to survive.  Most of the tunnels were destroyed after the war when there was no longer a need but the Cu Chi system right outside Siagon has survived.  I didn't get a chance to see this last time so I wanted to check it out.

As you can see from the mock-up the tunnel system was huge.  And the weird part is that it was set up within 5 miles of a major US base.  They never found it, during the entire war.

During the day, I got to crawl through the tunnels.

Inside the tunnels is so hot and so poorly ventilated that even a 5 minute crawl was enough to soak me thoroughly.

I also got to fire an AK-47 at their rifle range.

The gun was rigged though.  I couldn't aim and the barrel was broken to make it louder.  It was a complete waste of money.

Now I love traveling through Vietnam, its one of my favorite places to visit, but there is one thing in particular that I hate.  After the fall of Saigon in 1975 a lot of tourist places were set up, just like Cu Chi.  However when they were set up I don't think they were expecting any Americans to ever see them.  Almost all of the old war sites are absolutely laced with propaganda.  At Cu Chi it was no different, we actually had to sit through a 20 minute video from 1968 where they basically blast America and all Americans with some severe, rhetorical nonsense.  I was the only American in our group (that I knew of) so everyone was asking me what I thought of it.  Honestly, I've seen plenty of anti-American propaganda both in Vietnam and China (and some in the US, but that's a different story) so as much as I hate it, I'm used to it.

The part that I really hated is how almost none of them will talk about their own faults and won't even acknowledge that both sides were guilty of a great many sins.  At least in America we acknowledge when we've done some rather f-ed up things in the past.  Yeah it takes us a while to own up but we do.  North Vietnam was guilty of quite a few war crimes but they're all swept under the rug.

Now I'm not saying the US has never committed any atrocities in its past, we've committed many.  I'm a military historian, I know first hand some of the things we've done.  But that's just it, I KNOW about them.  So many young Vietnamese don't have any idea about the things the North did to the South (and to the Americans and their allies) during the war.  Its insulting to me, my country, all the countries that fought with us (there were quite a few actually), and to all the Vietnamese people.  I've always hated it when countries try to cover up the messy stuff from their own histories.

Sorry, had to rant a bit, its a sore subject for me.

Anyway, after Cu Chi we headed back and I spent most of the night drinking and dancing with some other backpackers.  All in all it was a great day, and a great start of my trip.

That's all for today, tomorrow I'll talk about the next few days.