Teich.Net :: All In

Oren has been slaving away the last few days to get more than 1000 photos from our trip organized, geo-tagged, and generally cleaned up. He collapsed crossing the finish line, so I get the fun of telling you about them. A more manageable subset are now posted, twice!

Depending on your viewing preference, you can see our favorites on Smugmug (where our photos have traditionally lived) or view them on flickr, where you can partake in all the community goodness. You can also browse the extended set of all the decent or interesting shots on flickr.

We’re home safe and sound.  Look for photos from the trip in the next day or two, as well as some posts that really needed some photos to make any sense.

10 years ago I read Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light.  An amazing landscape photographer, Galen wrote a serious of books on both photography and the process and people behind it.  One section of Mountain Light in particular has stuck with me.   After he’s traveled and photographed a new area,  he’ll show the locals his work and almost always get the same response: “no, that’s not quite what it looks like”.  Flipping through his photos, when the nee plus ultra photo comes up, the idylic, beyond perfection photo, THAT’s the one that looks right!  Yes, he captured it correctly!

Barring philosophical discussion on the real world, it appears we all walk around with idealized models of our world.  Yes, that mountain is pretty, but these average photos aren’t the real mountain  It’s only when we see the most spectacular and perfect images possible to capture that they align with our mental model.  Galen constantly ran into this.  One of the best photographers of the late 20th century, and only occasionally could he capture something that came close the idealized picture we all carry around.

I’ve found this concept – that we carry around in our head only the best of the best, the real world not always living up – one that constantly pops up during travel.  It’s impossible for me NOT to compare each and everything I see, do, eat, experience with the best elsewhere.  Photographs are always a pale representation of the place itself.  Drivers honk 3x more in India vs. Vietnam.  Cambodian ruins are young compared with Egyptian temples.  This street market is tiny vs that one in Shanghai.  etc. 

It’s hard not to digress into some odd places – why do we take vacation?  What are we looking for that spending thousands of dollars in far flung places provides?  As a great photographer like Galen did, or a mediocre one such as myself attempts, I keep trying to see what’s in front of me, appreciate the light I’m seeing now, capture and lock away the best of the best for reflection and enjoyment later. 

My travel packing arrangements have fallen into a very regular pattern: wait until <12 hours before my flight, and throw random crumpled up items of clothing into a carry-on sized bag.  Push if necessary.  I survive, through I forget something and bring the wrong things 100% of the time.

This will come as no surprise to anyone, but Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are hot.  “Africa Hot”.  And humid.  Basically, it’s my mom’s hell on earth.  (The ubiquity of cilantro here seals the deal.  I can officially think of no worse place on the planet for her.  We even had a thunderstorm here this morning!)  I have limited experience with nasty hot weather, having totally blotted all memory of summers growing up in New Jersey, so I needed to know how to minimize the temperature related humidity.  My usual packing methodology would not work here.  Instead, I spent a month reading, thinking and trying stuff out.

Perusing the internet, “loose cotton clothing” constantly comes up as the thing to wear.  “Boat pants”, those loose bag like things of cotton you tie on, are spoken of in reverence and revulsion, for their comfort and looks respectively.  Long pants are suggested by all out of respect: for the culture, and for the sun.  Armed with this knowledge, and the awareness that the stuff in my closet would bake me, I moved on to the next stage: Procurement.

As any good bureaucrat is well aware, the simple purchase of items is not procurement.  Proposals must be submitted.  Alternatives must be solicited.  Guarantees and contracts are required.  In my case, this boiled down to a simple, if stupidly time consuming process:

1. purchase EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE of “hot weather” clothing from BOTH the local REI stores, sierratradingpost.com and Patagonia.  Something like 40 articles of clothing in all.
2. Try on for obvious fit and duplication.  amazing when you buy from 4 places how many identical item you end up with.
3. Evaluate cloth for how it’s going to wear.  This is a made up process, in which I wore something, and stood around thinking about being hot. 
4. The important part – see what Olivia thinks.  It turns out, once I’ve settled on a piece of clothing being “good”, I seem to lose sight of anything that matters, like how it looks. 

After much good-hearted arguing about “imperialist styling”, and being mistaken at a glance for a good colonist, I settled on just a few articles:

• North face short sleeve shirt.  100% synthetic.  Crazy light.  It has a tight weave that blocks the sun, but is so light and airy that I hardly notice I’m wearing anything.  Favorite shirt.
• Patagonio Sol Patrol shirt.  Good long sleeve shirt.  Fits great.  Very cool in 35c weather.  Nylon blocks the sun, has a great color that can protect your neck.
• Exofficio Air Strip shirt.  Even lighter long sleeve shirt, but it fits a poorly, with sleeves that are too short and a big boxy body.  Was dirt cheap though, so what the heck.
• Exofficio lightweight zippy pants.  Never once zipped the legs off.  Insanely thin and lightweight, these are awesome.  Olivia tried to veto based on the fit, I ignored her and I’m glad I did.

I sprayed my long sleeve shirts with permathrin – a scary chemical that prevents buggies from getting you.  It’s been surprisingly bug free, so I have no idea if it’s effective, but for $7 for 3 articles of clothing, what the hell.

Besides the above, I brought a pair of travel slacks and khacki pants, plus 2 pairs of shorts and some underwear, a bathing suit and a lightweight fleece.  I threw into the bag 1 Abecrombie polo – my daily shirt back home.  It’s way too warm for any non-airconditioned space – I wore it one night in Bangkok, and have only worn it for plane since.  My 22” carry-on bag is less than half full of clothing.  We used the rest of the space for the odds and ends we’ve picked up along the way.

With this little clothing, I planned on doing a wash every few days.  The synthetic stuff is great – wash it at 7pm, and it’s usually dry the next morning.  Any cotton clothing takes at least 2 days in this humid weather to dry.  Heck, my kahkis are hanging up next to me right now still trying to dry after 3 days.

Final words – if you’re going to buy clothing, hunt around, especially with sierratradingpost.com.  Some of this stuff retails for $80/item or more, but can often be found on sale for $25.

Hoi An is a town of tailors. Their shops, lining every street, are filled with little women in flowing ao dai (the traditional dress over pantaloons that, aptly quipped, “covers everything, but hides nothing"), all ready to bat their lashes and convince you to order more than you intended. Every day, in shops all over town, the ao dai change colors: Sunday is pink, Monday white, Tuesday gray… Our tailor just shrugged when we asked the origin of the local tradition.

The choices for clothing here are overwhelming. There may well be a hundred or more tailors in and around town and every shop proudly displays the same styles in the same colors out front, none seeming to aspire higher than mid-tier catalog garb. How they all chose to make that particular apple green jacket with the hood and offset closure I do not know. A few of the popular "rack" styles are cute and very on trend. Others look like prom or bad bridesmaid dresses that would be more at home under fluorescent lights in a soulless department store basement. Looking only at the sidewalk showings, I wouldn’t have ordered a thing. Only the relative success stories of friends at home carried me inside.

There are three stores that advertise on billboards in the Danang airport and along the road leading into town: Yaly, Thu Thuy, and A-Dong Silk. The first two were most often recommended in our pre-trip research. A very stylish friend had told us about the shop Queen Margaret of Spain visited in 2002—if it’s good enough for an actual queen!—so we went first to Thu Thuy.

I had brought two items with me to guide the tailors: a favorite wrap shirt ruined in dry cleaning and my most flattering but now too big slacks. Thu Thuy had a fairly broad selection of fabrics and colors, with and without stretch, in patterns and solids. No perfect matches, but good choices. We had been warned that impostor fabrics are common and to ignore the labels on the fronts of the swatch books. The names stitched into the bolt edging seem to me more likely to be the real deal, but who knows. 

I went back for a fitting on day two. Shirt: perfect copy. Pants: needed some adjustment, but close enough to order another, more casual pair. And another color of my favorite casual dress. And shift dress I had started to fantasize about—just in case round one went well.

Next fitting the evening of day two. A few finished items, a few with earlier fixes missing, and one disaster. The shift dress was a mess, completely unwearable, nothing like the pictures I had given them. Broken lines, the omission of key seams, etc. made us think they were trying to copy without understanding design fundamentals.They had to summon the tailor in person to figure out what to do about it. (Usually customer interaction is managed by people other than the ones doing the sewing.) Some of what they had done was fixable. A big part of the dress had to be scrapped completely. They were good sports about it though, some frustrated looks, but no argument. I still left expecting to write off the finished product. They continued to suggest that I should order more clothes though. I conceded that if they managed to get the shift dress perfect the next day—fat chance!—I would get another.

Morning of our last day: completely redone dress! Huge improvements! Very close. Enough that between the excitement and the reminder of my offhand agreement, I was back in the swatches, ordering another in a very different fabric. That second dress missed some of the changes we had made to the first. Do they copy before they fix? In this case, different is not bad. I like both versions.

I didn’t negotiate the price at all. I don’t know whether you’re supposed to, but my salesgirl/fitter, Hai, knocked down the price for me a little on my second order. I picked the most expensive materials (which make up most of the cost), and my clothes ranged in price from $35 for the cotton wrap shirt to $150 for dress of Dolce & Gabbana wool with silk lining. Not cheap, but relative bargains for the quality and fit.

Meanwhile, to hedge our bets at Thu Thuy, Oren decided on day one to get a dress shirt made at Yaly. Their fabrics weren’t up to his usual standards, but were fully passable. (They had a drastically smaller selection of fabrics for women’s clothes; no stretch wools and only a handful of patterned wools other than pinstripes.) The fit was close on his second visit, very good on pickup. Using their most expensive cotton, his shirt came to $43 and turned out pretty well. At three times the price but with Borelli and Brioni fabrics, he still prefers his Hong Kong tailor (MyTailor.com).

We didn’t get anything made at A-Dong Silk, but the mid-twenties Australian couple we met on the flight in had things made at all three of these shops and said they liked A-Dong the best, though it was by far the most expensive.

Here’s what I learned from all of this. If I was to do it again, for any nice items, I would bring an example of what I wanted to copy, or at least a close pattern. Bringing magazine photos of what you want will do in a pinch, just don’t expect details like seam placement and finishing touches to come close. I don’t think they see a lot of designer apparel so they have trouble understanding or envisioning more advanced designs without seeing a concept applied. Being picky about fabric quality and usually having a particular look in mind, I would also bring my own fabric. The selection at Britex in San Francisco dwarfs all the shops in Hoi An combined. Even going in without these insights though, I’m so far happy with what I got, and the experience was mostly fun. Hopefully the satisfaction lasts.

You know how to cross the street, right?  You learned how years ago – look both ways, wait for no cars, only cross at crosswalks, walk quickly across, wait for green lights, etc. 

What happens when everyone ignores the lights, there are ALWAYS vehicles, and cross walks may only be there to make it easier to hit pedestrians?  In Hanoi at least, the simple answer – just do it.  No matter how crazy the traffic, everyone is driving quite slow here – max of maybe 25mph, and often slower.  Perhaps because the stakes aren’t as high (15mph moto vs 60mph car), pedestrian here have a different approach.  Wade on in. 

There do seem to be a few key rules to wading into traffic.  First, move slowly.  Second, look both ways all the time. Even on a one way street, cars and motos may choose to go the wrong way.  Third, move slowly.

On the busiest streets, with hundreds of motobikes wizzing by, it works like this: put a foot into the road.  Walk about 0.5-1mph across the street.  Stop mid pace if it gets totally crazy.  Let the traffic part around you.  Slowly keep walking to the other side.  DO NOT make any sudden movements, speed up, or jerk to a stop.  Smooth.  And voila, you’re on the other side.

Until we learned this, it was taking us a while to get across.  We’ve seen multiple other white folks stranded by the side of the road for minutes until we’ve walked across very slowly.  They immediately follow up and seem relieved to have made it.

It is easy to spend a lot on food in Hoi An. While many places there offer wonderful settings, Mango Rooms and Thi Nhan were by far our best—and most expensive—meals. 

Mango Rooms has gotten plenty of well-deserved accolades and guide book endorsements. It’s far from traditional food, which can be a welcome break on a long trip. And, it’s just plain tasty. The view from the bar on the second floor balcony doesn’t hurt either. The ever-so-light vegetable tempura—including squash blossoms!–and cocktails with fresh mango and passion fruit, ginger and lemongrass were the standouts. The fish of the day was also very good. The crystal rolls, forgettable. Chef Duc stars (and double stars) "favorites/sexy/yummy" (each page has a different footnote) that did end up being the best of our choices. If in doubt, go with those. Mango Mango, Duc’s other lounge restaurant across the river, facing the Japanese bridge, has a different menu but similar food. We ended up there on our last night when searching for the best vantage point to watch the full moon festival that had darkened the center of town. I was devastated when they didn’t have the tempura on the menu. They must had read my mind: we got two tempura squash blossoms as an amuse.

We biked to Thi Nhan (formerly the Quan Nhan restaurant described by New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser–it seems the former co-owner is now out of the picture) for lunch on the way to the beach our second day. We would not have found it without our hotel’s instructions to look for Full Moon across the street and the printout of the NY Times review tacked to the door. We were the only customers but didn’t mind. We had the choice between a $30 menu for two and a $50 menu, both five courses of fresh local seafood, the difference being "bigger crab." We went with the smaller portions, which we still couldn’t quite finish (though the crab was indeed tiny). The crab with the ginger-tamarind-lemongrass sauce, the shrimp with fried garlic, and the clams with I don’t know what (I usually don’t even like clams!) were outstanding, the fish and calamari also good if ordinary. Thankfully, Thi Nhan also shelled the crab for us at the table.

As for the rest of our meals: Hoi An Cargo Club was decent but not memorable aside from the particularly pungent fish. We tried the local specialties cau lau,, the white rose, and another noodle dish, as well as spicy eggplant, at Brother’s Cafe and found them all rather bland, but it’s possible that’s the style. We haven’t found much heat in the food in Vietnam, despite our best efforts. (Oren also got eaten alive by bugs at Brother’s, so we cut short our lingering there.) The beachfront restaurant we visited (the fifth one north of where the main road hits the beach, I believe) was passable, but nothing special.

Mango Rooms
111 Nguyen Thai Hoc
On the street that runs along the north side of the river, just east of the bridge that’s towards the center of town. Mango Mango is across the river, facing the Japanese bridge.

Ti Nhan
128 Cua Dai – Cam Chau
3 km from Hoi An, 1 km from Cua Dai beach, on the north side of the main road connecting the two, close to Full Moon (which is on the south side of the street)

Several other restaurants came up as recommended in our research. Of those, here are the ones we wish we had had a chance to try:

• Cua Dai Restaurant, at the Hoi An Beach Resort, recommended in the book of travel essays, To Asia With Love.
• Dung, 38 Phan Chu Trinh Street, towards the East end of the old part of town. We did walk by on our last night, but the neon lighting was not what we were looking for during the moon festival.
• The Mermaid (Nhu Y) Restaurant, where the spring rolls and white eggplant are recommended by Frommers. 02 Tran Phu St.
• The bun gio cha nam nhieu rau at an area up an alley off Phan Cho Trinh St. (about 100 yards west of Le Loi St.). Recommended by Duc of Mango Rooms, via a post on Chowhound. You have to go between 3:30 and 4 in the afternoon because that’s the only time the dish is available—we kept missing the window.

Hoi An was a late addition to our itinerary. Sure, we had seen the UNESCO World Heritage former port listed in our guide books and referenced in some articles as a good day trip from Da Nang. I had read much more about the former capital city of Hue, a few hours north. Hoi An registered in my research as little more than a good stopping point to book-end a journey between Hue and Da Nang along the coast and over the Hai Van pass. Then I got an email full of SE Asia tips from an old friend who used to live in Hong Kong. Her words: "Get clothes made in Bangkok, unless you are gong to Hoi An. Then get clothes made there." I was intrigued.

Our trip had already ballooned to nearly four weeks and it still felt like we would be rushing too much from place to place. Something had to go. We read more. We debated. We looked at flickr. In the end, we cut Hue and the journey along the coast in favor of a relaxed four nights in Hoi An. I am so glad we did.

I am on a Jetstar flight now, Da Nang behind me, trading Hoi An for Ha Noi. Excited for what’s next, but a little sad to be leaving Hoi An. Setting aside the distance, I would come back here in a heartbeat.

The town doesn’t put its age on display. On first impression, it’s a little bit Epcot Center, with its clean streets, colorful buildings, Japanese bridge over a lazy river, and abundant paper lanterns sporting the flag colors and names of countries half way round the world. The town is bigger than I expected–perhaps twenty leisurely minutes to walk across in any direction. There are no cars allowed on the streets at the heart of the town, but most of the traffic even in surrounding areas has only two wheels anyway: for every car, I counted roughly a dozen bicycles and twenty motorbikes. 

There is a constant cacophony of horns as drivers indicate their intention to pass. Honks last just long enough to cross from a friendly "Hi there!" to a gruff "Watch it!" Necessarily so when the right of way belongs to the group with the highest mass, the rules of the road being "don’t hit anyone, don’t get hit." Most traffic does pause at the four stop lights in town, fluid schools of motorbikes, bicycles, cars, and pedestrians vibrating tension for the light to change, the occasional breakout who just ignores the color entirely. People careen out from sidewalks, alleys, and around corners with a honk, then continue the wrong way down the side of the road until they can work their way across traffic. Groups of people ride in parallel and carry on their conversations, being passed by someone(s) veering into the the theoretical other lane. Perhaps half the bikes carried more than one rider: another perched on the back, feet on the pedals moving with the driver. Motorbikes frequently carried three, sometimes four: mom, dad, two little girls, and a tiny dog. Even the local cops rode two to a bike, the guy in back lazily thumping his bully stick against his leg as they rode along.

But then, there is the complete peace of the beaches just a few miles away: Cua Dai and, just to the north, China Beach. We had miles of perfect sand nearly to ourselves.

The streets of town are lined with tailor shops and art galleries, the sidewalks full of bikes and motorbikes for rent ($1 and $5 a day for us) and little food stands roasting corn on the cob, grilling skewered meats, or dishing up noodles. I had marked the location of a recommended snack spot on our map with a reminder to look for the tiny red plastic stools. Useless! The ten inch high seats are everywhere, people eating with knees almost to noses. Everyone calls out "You buy  something!" (what an odd phrase to have converged on) but here, No actually seems to mean No. Only rarely did a pitch carry on after politely declining.

The people we met were friendly, helpful, and curious, to the point that we often questioned whether they were selling something we didn’t yet know about. Riding a motorbike down the highway that parallels the coast to Da Nang, two women pulled up on a bike next to us. The one in her late twenties struck up a conversation, wanting to know where we were from, our names, where we were heading, how long we had been in town. The forty-something driver introduced herself as Lee, chiming in that she lives in Marble Mountain and we should stop there before the beach. We passed them a little later; they zoomed back by so that they could signal for us to turn when we got to Marble Mountain. We kept right on going, never finding out whether they had something to sell us in town.

Leaving the international terminal at Bangkok’s airport and arriving in Ho Chi Minh City’s delivers the jarring contrast and other-world feel we expected upon our arrival in Southeast Asia. A short hop on a little plane takes us away from the Guccis, Tod’s, people-movers, and abundant overpriced airport restaurant selections bearing a surprising resemblance to Charles de Gaulle International and into the drabbly-painted, aging bunker of an immigration area where our visas bought in the US are no good and there is no reasoning. The plane-load of people feels like a tiny handful in the huge space and there are no lines. The hall echoes. A fifty gets us two shiny new visas from the barely twenty-something in military green behind the expansive glass. The humid heat outside is stifling. We shuffle through to the one-room terminal. There is a snack stand on one side stocked with Oreos, Coke, Pringles, garish under the fluorescents. It is exactly the clicheed scene you would put in a movie to encapsulate communism today, except perhaps for the half-dozen iPhones in the hands of Vietnamese families around us. Is this a look at our next 9 days?

It took us over 30 hours to get to Bangkok. We have now been here for a little over twice as long. And it’s time to go.

Bangkok is everything we expected and more, and in some ways, less. It is every bit a traffic-packed, polluted, bustling modern metropolis of high rises, luxury brands, and endless eating options. The metro and Skytrain offer outstandingly easy, efficient and clean public transportation for foreigners and the local middle and upper classes to some sectors. The ferries are cheap and great, as long as your route is on the river. For everywhere else, there are taxis, where you can at least enjoy a break from the heat whiile parked in traffic. English is almost as widely spoken as in New York. There are plenty of places where you can also pay almost New York prices. We expected–maybe even hoped for–a stronger sense of disorientation and a feel of foreignness that we have not yet found.

So why travel–at least to cities–when they are fast becoming more and more the same? We have been asking ourselves that a lot. I don’t have a great answer. Fun, sure. Even without really falling through the rabbit hole, there are clearly things to gain from new experiences.

It is often the little things that make us laugh or go “huh.” Some miscellaneous observations from our time here:

• The direction of passing in a crowd seems to switch indiscriminately between left and right, even in the orientation of escalators from one floor to the next.
• There aren’t many Americans around. Most of the white people we see are Australian, with a sprinkling of French, Israeli, and northern European.
• I really don’t know what you do if you don’t speak the native language or English. We met a few people really struggling.
• Even in this land of cheap knockoffs, every luxury brand, from Hermes to Paul Smith, has multiple stores in town. It’s not clear who’s buying.
• The taxis are all the colors of Skittles.
• Everything seems shiny and new. The cars are overwhelmingly late models. There are many more sparkling pickups than the average big city, and fewer luxury cars. Construction is hot and heavy. Even along the highways on the outskirts of town the buildings looked very liveable.
• I don’t get how the tuk tuk drivers make a living. We had offers to drive us around for 3 hours for less than the price of noodles on the street (just over $1).
• The subway ticket machines are oddly persnickety about 1 baht coins: we watched one woman feed the same 5 coins through a dozen times (with the long line growing behind her) before the 3 she needed finally “stuck.” We had earlier given up on our small coins after way fewer tries.
• Street food is the thing to eat, and can be delicious, but without a guide or understanding of the language, it’s still scary.
• There is a very loose understanding of “vegetarian.” Out of one discussion, we ended up with morning glories with Thai bacon. I still don’t know how you get vegetarian lamb curry. (No, it was not a faux-meat kind of place.)
• I always thought the rather odd assortment of vegetables used in curries at Thai restaurants in the US was cost-driven, but they use the same carrots, cabbage, peas, broccoli, etc. most places here. Those veggies also made up the bulk of the rather uninspiring selection at the Aor Tor Cor (MOF) farmer’s market. With a few notable exceptions (perhaps more on this later), the food overall has been closer to what we get down the street at home than I expected. Most has been good but not great.
• Ice with holes in it is “generally safe to drink:” the holes are supposed to show that it wasn’t made on site.
• We haven’t found anything I’d call spicy since the green papaya salad that kicked my ass the first night, even with our protestations that we like it hot.
• There really are a lot of unattractive middle-aged white men out and about with hot young Thai women.
• There actually seems to be a pet culture here. Husky pups were disturbingly common in 95+ degree heat of the Chattachuck Market’s huge domestic animal section. (By the way, about a quarter of Chattachuck was open when we went on Thursday morning to see the orchids and other plans sold on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and it was a downright peaceful way to explore.)
• Bare knees and shoulders and toes are everywhere.
• There are also people in coats in the 95+ degree heat. If you’re going to go running, doing so mid-day in a parka and full-face ski mask seems to be a thing, at least for some people. Ick!
• Only maybe 1 of 10 Thai women had painted toenails.
• There were girls in what looked like school uniforms everywhere, at all times of day. If they were really students, I don’t know when they go to class, or where all the boys were.
• Several places had Thai prices and foreigner prices. I can’t bring myself to bargain over a buck though when it clearly makes more difference to them than it does to me, even I am perpetuating the expectation that foreigners are suckers.

With this brief glimpse of Bangkok, off we go to the small world heritage port town of Hoi An, Vietnam!