A Very Malaysian Christmas

Dear Internet,

While I'd like to pretend that these posts are semi-regular, I have come to accept the fact that monthly is about my limit. This past month has been an especially busy season at the plant - one that is scheduled to end soon, but you never know how a startup will go - and outside of work, I seem to have accumulated friends enough to keep me busy on nights & weekends (a fate I did not imagine for myself, I must be honest).

Anyway, since my last post, my adventures have been somewhat more limited, consisting of visiting a few islands in Malaysia for Christmas, and then hosting my sister and father for New Year's week. I planned my trip to Malaysia on little more than a whim: having heard a coworker elaborate on his tropical adventures in Langkawi, I bought plane tickets for  a 5 day trip, and planned nothing else until 1 week before I left. I must admit, this is not my typical method of planning vacations, but I'm trying to be more spontaneous, having learned that sometimes the best discoveries cannot be made on Lonely Planet top-10 lists; I appreciate the freedom more than I regret the lack of forethought plans.

So, Malaysia: I visited Kuala Lumpur before and returned thoroughly unimpressed, but my Christmas destinations - the islands of Langkawi and Penang - proved far worthier of my attention. I spent most of my time in Langkawi, a small island with a moderate amount of tourism and a lot of adventure. I saw advertised everything from horseback riding to bumper cars to ziplines; my own choices were dictated unfortunately by time constraints, though I was quite pleased with my 4 days there.

I stayed in a hostel, which is my favorite choice when traveling alone - I met lots of other solo travelers there, and we formed a little band of explorers: 1 American, 1 Canadian, 1 Argentinian, 1 Swede, 1 Australian, 1 German. In our first few days we hiked up to the 7 Wells Waterfalls, which was rather disappointing as hikes go (despite my copious sweating), but which rewarded us with fantastic, inviting pools of fresh water at the top.  Water cascades from pool to pool on fairly flat terrain, then unexpectedly drops off 100 feet or more to the bottom of the waterfall.  Being 6 responsible adults, we decided to spend most of our time in the pool on the edge of the dropoff.

Below: a true infinity pool swim - what I almost fell off of - new hostel friends

This adventure was followed by eating...lots and lots of eating. Our taxi driver pointed out a strip of road which contained, she said, the best street food in the area. Being literally next to the airport runway did not dispel these vendors, who worked among airplane takeoff noises every day. We feasted on fish soup, roast chicken, and coconut rice, before going home to nap and head back out to the night market for dinner.

The night market changes its location every day, ultimately covering the entire island; we found it that night close to our hostel, and went with the goal to try everything. We didn't even come close. We saw dozens of vendors, selling pots of noodles, fresh fruit, friend chicken (KFC spinoff "MFC" was my personal favorite), unusual sticky rice patties filled with chicken, and so much more. The best part? Everything was <$1. No wonder southeast Asia is a backpacker haven.

Below: street food - carnage post eating

We had tried to rent motorcycles, but every self-respecting motorcycle rental place we found denied us on the basis that we had 0 experience driving motorcycles - criminally unfair, if you ask me. When we met another backpacker who had managed to rent a motorcycle, we learned that the skill really needed to rent a motorcycle is not experience, but lying about said experience. Ah well, next time.

The next day I set off on my own to go jetskiing, an experience I had signed up for with no little trepidation, but having already paid, was determined to follow through with. I was paired with a family visiting from India and Hong Kong; the guide showed us the basics and let us loop around the ocean before we started our tour of the small islands off the Langkawi coast. I soon discovered that, unbeknownst to me, I have a little speed demon residing inside of me. I did not let go of the accelerator; while this surprisingly made the ride smoother, it also made me leave my group behind...multiple times. My paired family was lovely, but understandably nervous about the activity, so the guide and I would zoom ahead and leave them a half-mile behind before realizing we needed to stop and wait. By the end of the tour, I'd stall behind and let them get ahead so I could go top speed guilt-free. My biggest achievement, though, was standing up while riding the jetski at top speed (something the guide allowed me to do only after promising him I wouldn't sue him if I crashed).

We zoomed around the open ocean for awhile until reaching an archipelago that we explored up-close - we saw monkeys, limestone caves, fantastical rock formations.  I'm also pretty sure I was stung by jellyfish a few times during one of the rounds of swimming, but I kept mum so I could keep going. Afterwards I decided to extend my adventure via parasailing, which was cool, but could not compare to jetskiing.

Below: jetskiing - our excellent guide - parasailing

I returned from jetskiing with far more confidence than when I left, and met up with my hostel group for a trip to the beach. We rented chairs from a fancy resort and spent the late afternoon basking in the sun and drinking cocktails out of coconuts. We were rewarded with the most fantastic sunset I have ever seen, or will likely ever see again.

My last morning in Langkawi was spent at the aquarium, which was acclaimed but sadly could not compare with Boston's. I did, though, see a species new to me: mermaid!

I then boarded a ferry to Penang, a nearby island straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean.  My 3 hour ferry turned into 6 hours after the engine quit no less than 3 times, leaving us crawling to Penang (swear I could have swum faster), so my time in Georgetown was sadly limited. I spent only one night there, but was able to tour around the city a bit at night, and see the city awaken the morning I left.

 Below: 12 hours in Penang

I then returned on Christmas day, braved the hellish immigration and visa lines to get my second visa, and spent Christmas night with the wonderful Gabby, who moved all her plans around to accommodate me and make sure I wasn't alone on Christmas :-)

Below: Lauren/Gabby selfie montage

After this whirlwind of a Christmas, I had a 3 day break before my dad and sister Helen came to visit for New Years. While I unfortunately couldn't take the whole week off for their visit, I sent them on tours around the city and joined a few myself.

The first few hours consisted of my family adjusting to the Vietnam temperatures. Having just arrived from sub-freezing Boston, Helen informed me it is "criminal" to keep the A/C at 25 C (77F), and promptly turned it down, leaving me shivering in my own apartment. Over this past week I think they've started to adjust, but alas have just returned to Boston with only a taste of this wonderful weather.

We spent a fair amount of time exploring the city, including visiting the War Museum, various restaurants, cafes, and outdoor markets. I won't bore you with the details, save to detail a few specific incidents.

Now, Helen and Daddy had arrived over New Years' Eve, which is the second, lesser NYE in Vietnam. The real New Years' is called Tet, and is an 8 day celebration in late January. In spite of its secondary status, NYE in Ho Chi Minh was no disappointment. We spent the night walking down the aptly named Walking Street, which was filled with locals and tourists alike, and boasted several stages for live music. The highlight of the night was when Son Tung M-TP - the biggest star in the Vietnamese music scene - took the stage, and all tens of thousands of people on the street screamed his name. Every successive song was accompanied by the din of 10,000 teenagers singing along - exactly how I imagine a K-Pop concert. Surprisingly, even my dad liked the music; we are now V-Pop fans.

Below: NYE crowds in HCM - obligatory fireworks pic

The night ended in fireworks and streams of people clambering over each other to get out of the walking street. My favorite moment was when walking past 2 teenagers posing for a photo, 1 inch from kissing. Upon passing the boy, I gave him a tiny shove on the back, which resulted in the kiss fulfillment, cheers from the bystanders and a huge smile of thanks from him. It was all extremely cute.

New Year's Day saw us up rather late, ready to take a speedboat tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels. Driving to the Cu Chi area, given the tremendous HCM traffic, takes 2 hours or more - but only 1 hour by speedboat up a tidal river. We sped through the river, learned that crocodiles had been exterminated from the river due to their propensity to eat people, and arrived in time to tour the famous tunnels.

The tunnels are famous - or infamous, depending - for their use during the American/Vietnam War. The Viet Cong hid out in these tunnels, which were built in 3 layers anywhere from 6 to 15m underground, in total over 150 miles long - stretching all the way to Cambodia - and fought a guerilla war from them. The tunnel entrances (and indeed, the tunnels themselves) were tiny and impossible to find - and even when found, were filled with internal booby traps and dead ends to confuse the enemy. Rather reminds me of the defense schemes of the pyramids. Anyway, the Vietnamese soldiers managed to run through these tunnels, plan war operations, and beat the US from this base (after crawling through those tunnels for 2 minutes, the running part is the most impressive to me).

In addition to the tunnels, there were also demonstrations of the various booby traps implemented to wound American soldiers. The goal was not to kill the soldiers, but rather to maim them - because a wounded soldier takes 3 or more other soldiers out of battle (2 others to carry the wounded member, and at least 1 medic). The traps were ingeniously designed, incredibly effective, and very cheap - made out of recycled bomb casings and natural materials.

After seeing the Cu Chi Tunnels, combined with the war museum, I'm thoroughly impressed with the Vietnamese war effort, and found myself rather on their side. (hopefully this doesn't get me Twitter attacked by my own president anytime soon...)

Below: speedboat tour - entering the tunnel - dirty knees after a quick tunnel crawl - booby traps

Helen's and Daddy's last few days in Ho Chi Minh were filled with more city explorations, including one lovely afternoon where Helen and I decided we wanted to take nice Instagram-worthy pictures. We dragged poor Daddy along - he was thrilled, as you can see below. In spite of his efforts, we managed to get a good picture of him in his element - reading.

Their final night, we signed up for a street food tour by motorbike. My guide started by asking where I had taken them to eat - and promptly groaning at every place I mentioned. Apparently I have a tendency towards the touristy, which I was very ashamed of and vowed to improve. Our tour group consisted of us 3 and 3 other tourists from the UK - we had a grand time, visiting in total 5 street food stalls over the course of 5 hours, and eating (and drinking) as much as we could stomach.

We started out with a ban xeo stop - colloquially known as a Vietnamese pancake - which I had eaten before but not properly. There are far more steps in eating Vietnamese food than I had realized, including adding all sorts of herbs, peanuts, sauces, pickled veggies, more leaves, and then rolling everything up into a neat bun. The rolling-up part proved too difficult for my uncoordinated self, but regardless it tasted fantastic - so fresh and good!

We made a few more stops, but our hands-down favorite was the seafood place. Now, the last time I had street food shellfish in Ho Chi Minh, I became violently ill the next day, so I eyed the dishes with suspicion...but couldn't resist the scallops. Once I tried the scallops, all resistance was gone. We ate dozens of scallops, snails, bread with buttery dip, and more scallops. I've never had such fresh seafood, and added all stops to my Google maps to aid my eventual return. My driver, too, proved to be a kindred spirit - we're both speed demons!

And of course, no extended time with Helen can end without some Bollywood watching :-)

Helen and Daddy left this morning, but it was so nice having them here - especially right after the holidays. I'll miss them these next few days, but am excited when the next round of family comes - February!

Rice is Wife, Noodle is Mistress

Dear blog followers,

I've fallen into a trap: the more I do, the more I have to write about, and the more daunting this blog post becomes. Thus I have procrastinated myself to a state where I will either a frustratingly short post, outlining the bare-bones details, or write a post so long even the most dedicated reader will give up, exhausted. I'm not sure yet which approach I shall take.

Tonight I shall cover 3 main adventures:
1. Weekend in Ninh Binh, home of King Kong
2. Weekend in Phu Quoc, beachy resort island
3. Thanksgiving in Saigon

Let's have at it.

1. Ninh Binh

Ninh Binh is the ancient capital city of Vietnam, located in the northern region of the country. Ninh Binh was a stronghold for Vietnam - tucked away between stone pillars and mountains, it was difficult to find, and easy to defend. The current capital is Hanoi, some miles away; legend has it that the move was precipitated by a marriage.  One of the first kings of Vietnam died, and his widow needed to find a strong man to protect the kingdom (cue groans), and she chose the main general in the country. She remarried him, and he began the move to Hanoi, which was far less easy to defend, but much better for commerce as it was on a river and was a better environment for roads. Thus the capital was moved, and legend has it that when the caravan arrived in Hanoi, they saw a dragon flying - thus the new capital city was blessed.

I went to Ninh Binh with 2 coworkers: Vy, a Vietnam native, and Ollie, a fellow 6-month traveler from the UK. We booked a late Friday night flight to Hanoi, and were picked up by our tour company early Saturday morning.

We were greeted by a very chipper tour guide, who proceeded to greet us with personalized compliments; by the time he reached us in the back of the bus, the only female compliment left for me was that I'm "cute." Ollie, though, was told that he had a complexion "all the girls wanted" - basically, that he's a pasty office rat.  We were quite amused. Then our guide serenade us with what he called karaoke, but was in fact him singing You Are My Sunshine into a microphone without any background music at all. 

I filled the two hour ride to Ninh Binh by extracting information from Vy about the most random and morbid topics you could imagine. The topics below will likely give you pause and have you reconsider your acquaintance with me, but so be it.

First we talked about burials. In the northern, more traditional part of the country, there are 2 burial stages: in the first part, the body is buried in a coffin in a small ceremony. These graves are not elaborate, and often close to unmarked - because this isn't the final resting place, oh no no. After 3 years, the body is dug back up, the bones are cleaned off (I shudder to think about this), and the bones are reburied in a large ceremony and in a final, highly decorated grave. Legend has it that if the second stage is skipped - the bones are left unceremoniously in the coffin - that the ghost of the person returns to haunt the family until he or she is properly laid to rest. Families in southern Vietnam risk haunting quite often, or so I'm told: here, the body is buried just once, in a coffin, in an official resting place.

After this fascinatingly morbid conversation, we moved to my next chosen topic: war. Vy related history that I was shamefully unaware of - who knew that the Mongols invaded Vietnam, and Vietnam won? Vietnamese history is littered with examples of their defeat of foreign powers: the Mongols, French, Americans. It might take a while, but they do manage to kick out the invaders eventually.

In the case of the Mongols, Vy told me a story of one battle where the Vietnamese were able to fight them off. The Mongols had many horses, which were fast, easy to control, and good for battle, but didn't swim well. The Vietnamese had buffalo used for farming, which were...none of those things, except they could swim. Oh, and these buffalo could only be controlled by small children, who used them for farming with their families.

The Vietnamese army added spears to the buffalo, and had the buffalo (with their child masters) chase the horses and the riding army into a swamp, where their horses were slow; the Vietnamese army quickly overtook the larger, more powerful Mongol army and won the battle. Defeating them took awhile longer, but with the help of smart tactics like these, it was finally possible.

Anyway, after arriving in Ninh Binh, we were shuttled to various different tourist activities, with a lot of other tourists. We visited the ancient capital ("meh"), the Mua Cave lookout (amazing), and took a few boat tours as well. The Trang An spot was the filming location for the latest King Kong movie, and I recognized it! At the time I definitely thought the scenery was purely a result of CGI, but now I know that Vietnam defies all my expectations.

 I've put pictures of most of these below, but I will mention that Mua Cave seemed to be the hot spot for wedding photography. We saw at least 3-4 sets of newlyweds posing over the view of the river, and 2 more brides huffing up the many stairs in full blown wedding attire, desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to keep from sweating through their makeup.

Below: Mua Caves feat. bridal photo shoot

Below: Trang An and Tam Coc feat. foot rowing

Overnight we stayed in a bungalow which was cozy for exactly 3 hours - the amount of time we were there before the karaoke started. After 9pm, karaoke blared through the complex until the wee hours of the morning; thankfully my ear plugs kept most of it out, but my glaring at the culprits the next morning was not successful in eliciting the least show of remorse.

The final interesting tidbit I learned from Vy is a common saying, and is the title of this post: "Rice is wife, noodle is mistress." This saying refers to the fact that you eat rice every day, and it gets boring, whereas noodles (and mistresses) are consumed less frequently and are thus more exciting. Committing adultery is therefore known as "eating pho outside." This led to an interesting conversation about adultery in Vietnam and all over the world (apparently, many Vietnamese men do not believe that illicit massage parlors "count"), and Google uncovered horrifying facts (did you know in the US, 45% of women and 60% of men admit to cheating?). That conversation led to an uneasy sleep, but the views of Trang An quieted my fears in the morning.

2. Phu Quoc

The next weekend, I headed off to the resort island of Phu Quoc for some preemptive R&R as I come into a busy season at work. I splurged and booked a bungalow on the beach - and it was, quite literally, on the beach. Waking up to the waves is an experience I'll never forget.

This particular weekend deserves a lot less space in this post, mainly because a) I'm lazy, and b) I spent most of my time lazing around on the beach. While the beach itself was quite nice, the ocean was unfortunately littered with trash; every time I entered the water, I'd exit with plastic bags, water bottles, empty rice sacks. While I am of course educated about the growing problem with plastic and the dreadful practice of dumping bargefuls of litter into the ocean, this firsthand experience was nonetheless horrifying. I could argue that the sheer numbers of fat Russian men in Speedos on the beach was equally horrifying, but I would never trivialize such a significant global issue.

Aside from my beach bum time (which incidentally resulted in a great blistering burn later that week), I managed to get out to the night market Saturday night. I bought too many pearls and too much food, including my first-ever sea urchin (surprisingly tasty!). I also managed to make it to the "longest ever" cable car ride, which connected Phu Quoc to several smaller neighboring islands. As this was the third "longest ever" cable car ride I've been on, I'm a bit skeptical of the claim, but we'll let it stand for now.

3. Thanksgiving

This past weekend was my makeup Thanksgiving weekend. As I'm on the Vietnam holiday schedule now, I worked the whole week, but made up for it with a visit from my cousin and a splendid potluck dinner with coworker friends on the weekend.

My cousin Austin!

The potluck dinner was a new concept for most people, apparently, as after I sent out the invitation, a few invitees mentioned they were excited to taste the potluck! This led to a hasty explanation, and (in my ever-organized way) a signup spreadsheet which was universally ignored. The day before the potluck, the early 20's crowd informed me they were bringing dishes like pizza and beer, while the older crowd brought cheesecake and homemade dumplings. I made a mental note to invite more adults to future potlucks, and began cooking whatever Thanksgiving food I could muster sans oven.

Thankfully,  I made Austin schlep a few bags of stuffing mix all the way from Boston, so that combined with garlic mashed potatoes and an entire bag of rice (did I overdo it?) finished off the feast. Everything was delicious, and I reached new heights of adventure: I tried duck eggs! These are no ordinary duck eggs, however: these eggs are incubated for a period of time, then boiled - so you're eating a developing duck.

This concept did not sit well with my mind or my stomach, but I braved it anyway, and found that the egg did not actually taste half bad. That didn't stop me from gagging every time I thought about what I methodically chewed, but it certainly helped.

Below: Thanksgiving, the feast, the infamous duck egg, waaaaaay too much rice

After the dinner, a subset of the group went for karaoke nearby. Asian karaoke is set up a bit differently than American: rather than 1 big room with strangers judging you as you sing a nasally Beyonce, you reserve a smaller room with your friends, and belt your heart out in relative safety. Favorites for this night included Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, and a bunch of Vietnamese and Chinese songs I didn't know, but still managed to hum for the next 3 days. I snapped a few pictures during the fun, but I'll save the videos for future blackmail material.

Below: Typical karaoke room

Overall, it was a lovely Thanksgiving, full laughter, friends, and fun - I missed my family, but for this year, my Ben Cat family was an excellent substitute :)