Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Going to Cambodia is a lot like going to a strip club – you better arrive with a fat stack of ones. Trip Advisor ranked Siem Reap as the #1 destination in Asia last year. The Khmer new year was just 2 weeks ago and Siem Reap apparently received roughly 300,000 international visitors in addition to 1,000,000 domestic visitors (in that week alone) who all came to take part in the giant party that was being held in Angkor Wat and the surrounding temple complexes.
Hội An was a very important trading post of the old world. It was the opinion of most Chinese and Japanese merchants that Hội An was the best trading post in Southeast Asia, if not Asia at large. However, thanks to a treaty signed with the colonizing French, Đà Nẵng eventually became the port of choice in lieu of Hội An. Also, due to a build up of silt at the mouth of the river, Hội An became all but inaccessible to the large ships that used to frequent its docks. The effect of this was isolation. The ancient town of Hội An was all but forgotten about during Vietnam’s tumultuous next 200 years.
Travel plans! On this trip, we'll be visiting Da Nang, Hoi An (in Vietnam), Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh (in Cambodia). Included in these destinations will be Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia, as well as a legendary lantern lighting festival in the backwaters of central Vietnam.
With the 40-year anniversary of the end of the war between Vietnam and America in a few days, the timing of this was fortuitous. Our story begins with a dinner, as many of my stories do. One of my former students, Linh (pronounced “ling’), had invited me to have dinner with her and her family. Soon they would be leaving for Newfoundland, Canada. They would be living in a small college town on the Eastern coast while her husband, Dzung (pronounced “zoong”), earned his Ph.D. At the end of this dinner they invited us to come to Bac Ninh Province (just North of Hanoi) to have a large dinner with their extended family.
Yeah. Gross, right? Vietnam has a lot to offer to the dark side of the culinary world and I’m doing my best to try all the weird cultural dishes I can whilst I am here. This week’s dish is a beating snake heart. Also included in this post will be snake organs, bones, skin, and poisonous stomach bile.
It was good to get back home so that I could start making money instead of spending it. Spring has come to Hanoi. With summer just around the corner the streets are now littered with the flip-flops of small children and we are receiving more rain than I thought possible. One rainy Tuesday morning around 6am I woke up to my phone ringing.
Thanks to some crafty plane ticket booking strategies, we ended up with a very extended layover in Kuala Lumpur (or KL, as the cool kids call it). I was pretty overwhelmed by all the American food chains that populated the airport. It had been a long time since I’d seen a Johnny Rocket’s. But eventually we found our way out of the airport to the train that would take us into KL.
Our last night in Indonesia was spent in Bali. We had about half a day to spend in Bali and we chose to spend it visiting the magnificent cliffs and precariously placed temples of Uluwatu on the Southern most point of the island. It is also known for it’s gargantuan waves, which were, even in the low season, and even from our high vantage point, quite impressive.
I was disappointed when the original plan for the trip (which was motorbike island hopping from Bali to Flores and back) fell through, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still get some riding in while I was still on Bali. I had been told that I needed to check out a little town called Lovina in the North of Bali. Standing between us and Lovina were some pretty formidable mountains that surrounded Bali’s volcanoes, so it was going to be a fun trip.
It was low season, so the fabled ‘Gili T party scene’ was pretty lackluster. The island is only 3 km long by 2 km wide so there isn’t much to do on land besides eat, drink and relax. Oh, and do drugs. Since the 1980s Gili T has been known as being an easy place to get shrooms. This was sort of a shock to us because drug related offenses carry the death penalty in Indonesia, at least that’s what the immigration cards we had filled out on the plane told us. During the one night that we did go check out the nightlife we were solicited shrooms so openly and frequently you’d have thought they were selling candy.
