Farewell to Thailand!

Hello hello,
I'm about to catch a taxi to the airport! In about 5 hours, I'll be on a plane heading for...Taiwan! And then on another plane heading for...Hong Kong! And then finally I will board a plane heading for California! Last night I started to come down with some sort of head cold, which is not feeling very great right now. It is making me even less excited about traveling for 20 hours to get home. Hopefully I can just sleep on the plane!

I would upload some pictures from my last days here, but this computer is unbelievably slow, like usual. I hope you all are well, and I will be seeing most of you very soon!

To any Thai or Japanese :) friends who read this, thank you so much everything!!!!!!!! I will miss you so much and I hope to see you again soon! You are all welcome in my home in Chico, or wherever life takes me.

Much love,
Katie

Chiang Mai

I'm back in Chiang Mai! I survived the motorbike trip from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City, just made my flight to Bangkok, and the next day flew up to Chiang Mai. I have been here almost 4 days and it has been so lovely to see everyone! I have spent a lot of time on my feet exploring parts of the city, and Doi Suthep, that I didn't get the chance to see before. I have also been spending time with the students when they are not too busy working on their thesis projects. Since we left last time, Art and Fang have planted some black sticky rice that they are working with for their projects, and the other students are all quite busy too, but I'm not sure what they are studying specifically. Tonight we will have a last dinner and going away celebration, at Riverside, a restaurant on the river, as the name suggests. Or at least thats what I think will happen. As I've mentioned before, I miss a lot of the details and back-and-forth that happens. We are doing something tonight though, this I know. Moe came into Chiang Mai last night. She has been in a village near Mae Chaem, where she is doing her research on subsistence farming. We walked around the Sunday Walking Street, where Moe unfortunately had her camera stolen out of her bag :( Then we ate some delicious foods and she stayed at my hotel with me. Today we got up early, had some more delicious foods, and came to the MCC (Multiple Cropping Center). We went to lunch with the students at a buffet that was having its grand opening. It was very very delicious and very unlike American buffets :) Also, it cost less than a dollar, which is amazing, as always.
Since then we've been hanging around, drinking coffee, talking to Dr. Sakda, etc. Soon we are going to go play badminton, which I'm very excited about. They are serious about it here. When I arrived last week, I went and watched them play but wasn't wearing good clothes to participate, but today I am prepared!
Tomorrow, I fly back to Bangkok in the morning and then the next day it is back to California!!! I am very excited and sad all at the same time. I have greatly enjoyed my time traveling, especially Chiang Mai! I will miss the new friends I have made, but am also very happy to have had this experience!

And now I am going to go play badminton, see you so soon!!!

Much love,
Katie

Dalat, Vietnam

It has been a long 48 hours. Yesterday at 6 pm we boarded a bus in Hoi An bound for Nha Trang, where we would transfer to another bus to Dalat. We'd have loved to see Nha Trang but we are really running out of time! We have to be in Saigon on the 9th for our flight (still not sure why we booked our tickets so early, but its a good lesson). 12 hours later we reached Dalat. Throughout the night, we were treated with excessive honking, loud conversations among the drivers, the air conditioning being turned off for a while, and a nice stop around 1 am to fix....something. I awoke to loud noises like an air pump or generator and pounding and grinding. I looked outside to see an autoshop and guys down below doing something to our bus. Still not sure what happened, but this Australian guy stepped out after about 20 minutes of this and tried to find out what was happening and get them to turn on the air conditioning at least since this bus's windows could not be opened and we were all dripping sweat by then. A couple minutes later, everyone was back on the bus and we were moving. I am so often confused here, but I am mostly used to not really knowing what is going on. It also seemed that we took a few detours down very bumpy dirt roads. I'm not sure whether that was the road or the driver's short cut.

We arrived in Nha Trang at about 6:30 am and the bus dropped those people staying in Nha Trang at a hostel, along with Kylie and I's bags. As we pulled away, we saw them and Kylie ran up to tell the driver, frantically motioning and telling him to stop. He does not stop and says it will be okay and pulls off around the corner. We continue trying to get an explanation or get him to go back, when we arrive at the traveler bus station. We all get off and of course our bags aren't there to be unloaded. SO they give us directions on how to walk back to the hostel and get our bags. Kindly, they call the hostel to tell them to hold on to them for us. After our amazing nights sleep, this is awesome. So we go get our bags and leave them with other luggage at the bus area and asked 2 girls at the desk if we had time to go grab some coffee and baguettes before our bus to Dalat came. They said yes, just be back by 7:30 and you'll be fine. So we went and came back at about 7:25 and sat down with the group of people who were also waiting. About an hour goes by, and a few other people are asking when the bus will finally arrive, so it seems like we've all got the same idea. So the bus finally arrives at 8:50 and we go to get on and they look at our ticket and tell us this is the bus to Saigon and we missed our bus. We are VERY frustrated by this and are sent to the booking desk where they proceed to tell us how we should have checked in with them and we should have been on our bus and that now we have to wait for the next bus tomorrow night. We tried to explain what had happened, but they were not wanting to deal with us, so we got directions to the bus station and caught a couple motorbike taxis there, where we were promptly loaded onto a van which already had about 20 people on it. Then, they crammed some more people in. It was a large van, like the kind schools have for sports teams or field trips, but they squeezed about 30 people in and there was no air-conditioning. We departed on 5 hour trip and met Tom, who speaks English. We had a nice time talking with him as he asked us all sorts of questions about california, such as how much bigger the buses are and the roads are in california. He did not believe that they were about the same size. He was also surprised that California has mountains. We met another woman on the bus who is Vietnamese but lives in Florida and was visiting friends and family. The trip got better as we gained elevation and the weather cooled off. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant where Tom bought some kind of fruit and shared it with us, we ate some pho bo, or vietnamese beef noodle soup, and chatted with some people. Soon after lunch, we drove past another restaurant where all the tour busses were stopped for lunch, and I thought to myself that this van ride was my favorite experience in Vietnam so far, and also one of our only experience off the Vietnam tour track. We had really gotten lazy about going the easy route and had really not been enjoying ourselves. So actually, missing our bus to Dalat had been a blessing in disguise.

As we climbed through the mountains to Dalat, speeding around corners, everyone laughing and pointing out the best views to us, I was reminded of why I love traveling. Its not about seeing the monuments and taking beautiful pictures, its about meeting real people and making real connections. You need to get away from the guesthouses and standard tours to do that.

Tonight we checked out the central Market in Dalat and were thrilled and surprised to find strawberries, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower and persimmons. We had not seen any of these in markets in this part of the world yet, but the wonderful cool climate up here allows it. Walking around, it feels a little like San Francisco. Its a very hilly little city, with bright colored vertical buildings squeezed together and cool overcast weather.

Tomorrow morning, we will go exploring the area around Dalat with "Easy Riders". They are guides who will take you on a personalized tour on motorbike. They have a great reputation for being very knowledgeable and taking you places not a lot of people go. I am very much hoping that it is great and not like the tours I have grown to dread. We met a couple students from Dalat University tonight who work with a program through the Foreign Languages departments to do similar local motorbike travel or tours. We talked to them for a while and they said they do drives from Dalat to Saigon, with an overnight in Bai Loc. We had been planning on taking a bus, but I am much more interested in the motorbike at this point. I think it would be a much greater adventure and I could experience Vietnam in a way I will totally miss with bus travel. My only concerns are of course, safety, rain, and carrying all my baggage. Right now we're planning on seeing how the motorbike trip goes to tomorrow and then we will contact the students if we are interested in going to Saigon with them, and we will discuss the details.

Alright, I am off to bed! I hope you are enjoying all these long posts! We have been taking some early nights in, so we can get up early, which means I have some time to update.

Only 10 more nights in southeast Asia, and then Chico!!!

Much love,
Katie

Hue, Vietnam

Xin chao from Vietnam! This is our third day in Vietnam, in Hue specifically. We are waiting for a bus right now that will take us to Hoi An. This computer access is FREE in our hotel, and FAST. I am so impressed. There is this wierd chain of service set up for tourists in Vietnam. There's a specific track of cities they take you through and its really easy to travel city to city and do the tours and stay in the hotels. We are kind of taking this path because we are so short on time and would like to see as much as we can in the next few days. It can get old very fast to spend every day being bussed and boated around to look at ANOTHER temple or tomb. So we are also trying to break it up by making as much effort as we can to meet local people. We try to find places to eat where there are only Vietnamese people and make friends if possible. It is hard sometimes because when you ask people about a good local place to go, they usually will first recommend the popular traveler spot. You show up and see only foreigners and everyone speaks English. Its weird that this is frustrating, since in Chico I always like to be places where there are foreigners and we of course speak english, but this is different.

Yesterday, we caught an 8am boat cruise up the perfume river and saw three famous tombs, a pagoda, and a temple. You can see a some in the pictures. I would tell you the names but I do not remember them at the moment. We had lunch on the boat too, which was semi-delicious and cramped. There was a group of girls from Hanoi on the cruise who were taking a holiday after graduating from university, and they were fun to talk to.

Later we ate dinner at this popular local place near the old city, on the edge of the citadel. There were a lot of older men ordering whole cases of beer which we unfortunately did not take pictures of. We ate some very delicious grilled squid and spring rolls as well as some sort of soup with egg and crab. Today, we went to the citadel and the Forbidden Purple City. No longer forbidden of course, and mostly destroyed in the Vietnam/American War. Here it is called the American War (or the American War of Aggression depending on who you talk to).

Something interesting here is that you can use American dollars everywhere. Many prices will be quoted in dollars and then they convert into dong since thats all we are carrying. People sometimes give us weird looks when we say we don't have any dollars. Next time I come to Vietnam, I'll remember this...

Here are a few pictures from our last night in Savannakhet with our friend Yah and his friend Mr. Lee. Yah calls everyone Mr. and Ms. I think it is translated from how you address people in Laos. We are Ms. Katie and Ms. Kiley. We went to their favorite restaurant and they ordered us eel. It was all chopped up and in a stir fry that tasted similar to a lot of Thai dishes. Eel is good, but it had the vertebrae and little bones in it which was kind of weird. The next morning, we were off on our bus to Hue, and lastly, there is a picture of the border crossing into Vietnam, where it seemed like every single official needed to check out our passports and then spend a few minutes looking at every stamp and detail. It really seemed more like it was for personal interest than any sort of security reason.

Our bus is coming soon, so I'm off, I hope you are all well and I will be seeing you soon!

Much love,

Katie

Savannakhet

Sabai dee from Savannakhet, Laos! This is our 3rd day here, and our last. We're boarding a 10 am bus to Hue, Vietnam tomorrow morning. We ended up having a very easy time getting our Vietnamese Visas when we arrived (it only took about 15 minutes, instead of the 4 days we had been told it would be), but the next bus to Vietnam from here was Wednesday, so here we are. It's been nice staying here though. We've actually made a good friend named Yah. We met him the first night when we went to The Rose Garden. He works there and asked if he could practice his English with us. We of course said yes. He's been doing that with all of the travelers that come through apparently, and speaks english quite well for just learning from customers at the restaurant. He taught us some Laos and we talked for a while, and he even played us one of his band's song. They could only afford to record the one, and its quite good, but we haven't been able to get a copy of it yet. Maybe before we leave. He sings with the band, who's name is "By Myself" and actually likes to sing all the time. His favorite song is "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias, and he can sing it almost exactly like Enrique, which is interesting because he doesn't actually know the meaning of the words, he's just memorized it.

The next day, we were eating dinner at "Seven" and he pulled up on his motorbike and told us the Rose Garden was closed for the week to train a new manager or something, so he hung out with us to practice his english. He took us to a place called "We All Love" where different bands played and people sang, not karaoke style, but just went up and sang with the band. Yah sang "Right Here Waiting for You" and a Laos song. Everyone cheered a lot and seemed to like it. We met a group of students at that place who are from Savannakhet but go to school in Hue. They had drank a lot of BeerLao and were all trying to practice their English with us and tell us about Hue and talk us into going dancing with them. We might have gone, but our guesthouse has an 11:00 curfew, so no late nights for us here.

Today Kiley and I walked around the city some more, which we're getting to know quite well. Its right on the Mekong, and there is a beautiful view across the river is Thailand. We ate Laos baguette sandwiches for breakfast which were quite delicious. It was strange to eat a sandwich though! Bread is not so popular in this part of the world. We also got "traditional Lao massages" today, just to compare to Thai massage, research you know :) I think it was the most intense massage I've had yet. A lot of stretching and bending and kneading. In a good way though. After that, we finally found a place to buy Laos Cotton that I'd heard about. It was a really neat business that makes all natural, handmade cotton clothes, accesories, pillows, etc. The cotton is from all local farms in the province, with about 400 families participating. It is then spun into yarn in another village and brought to Sannakhet where they do the dying. I took a few pictures of that. Then, the dyed yarn goes to another nearby village to be woven into cloth, and it returns to Savannakhet to be sewn into different items. They had a lot of beautiful things to buy, but could only accept cash, which I was low on, so I got a very pretty cotton scarf. Its always nice to buy from something like that that is actually really helping local people.

After that, Yah found us again, we're probably easy to spot around here... And we made plans to meet him at four. We will go to dinner and then to meet some of his friends.

I'm glad we've gotten the chance to spend a few days here since we're too low on time and money to see more of Laos and need to head towards Ho Chi Minh city since we already have tickets to fly from there to Bangkok. I have seen many eyeopening things here, some of which are very hard to see. It seems like everyday I am traveling in southeast Asia, my perspective changes at least a little. I am so thankful that I am able to be having this experience.

Here are a few pictures. At the present I seem to have misplaced my other memory card for my camera, which I am very much hoping I will find back in our room. Cross your fingers!!

Much love,

Katie