Yes We Kathmandu

Nepal was always the center piece of this whole shebang. The genesis of what eventually became two and a half months of living out of a backpack was when Chris told me he wanted to go back to Nepal, and I didn't have anything better to do. The time we spent there formed the zenith temporally also- it had been about four weeks since we left the US, and after we left it'd be about four weeks until we got back. Nepal was also the only place we spent more than about eight days, and the only place where we did anything of particular use. So when we flew into Kathmandu International Airport (the only international airport in the Kingdom of Nepal), it was with a certain sense of anticipation. This would be the pinnacle of our trip, followed by a long downhill slide through Europe.

The airport itself can be best described as charming and quaint. There is no terminal- you step off the jetliner onto the tarmac, then take a shuttle bus the fifty yards to the actual airport building. There are two luggage claims, one of which was broken, and a middle aged man sleeping next to a metal detector which is not on. The visa process was equally relaxed- there is a row of computer kiosks which you use to fill out your information and take a picture. Due to technical difficulties, the best picture I got was of the top of my head, which I was assured was plenty good by a Nepalese border agent who I'm pretty sure was trying hard to stifle his laughter. He gave us a stamp after we gave him forty bucks, and after that, you're outside in Nepal.

Kathmandu is really pretty and really confusing and really dirty, depending on what perspective you currently have. Confusing was the primary one on the night we arrived. The city was built long before the idea of urban planning, and still hasn't really caught up to urban infrastructure, so it is primarily composed of narrow, winding, unpaved streets traversed by the cattle and copacetic feral dogs that are the mark of a Hindu country (turns out that the same cultural practices that lead to cows wandering the streets also applies to dogs and, excitingly enough, snakes). We had been accepted by a volunteer organization called All Hands to do work in the aftermath of the two earthquakes that devastated Nepal earlier this year, but arrived too late that night to meet up, so we found a hostel (easy enough in a tourism dominated economy when all the white people are scared off by seismology) and crashed out.

The only straight road in the whole city

Early the next morning (ten thirty) we shouldered our packs and wandered to the hostel building that All Hands had commandeered for a headquarters in the wake of the disaster. All Hands' model is to immediately head to the scene of a major natural disaster, set up food and housing and use free labor to attack the most prominent physical challenges- we spent a lot of time clearing rubble in Nepal, but they also dredged flooded buildings in Brooklyn and helped demo destroyed buildings in the Philippines. The up shot is that you end up with a large group of people (a hundred in the hostel, with 2500 on the waiting list) who have flown thousands of miles to voluntarily work sixty hour weeks doing hard labor for food and shelter. Add to this the enterprising Nepali man who had set up a beer and chips shop ten yards from our hostel, and you have a pretty entertaining scene.

The down shot is, even though I was here for most of a month, my Nepali experience was pretty monotonous. If you don't count the day I spent wrestling with the Indian visa and the two days I spent deliriously ill (it is possible to become so sick that all solids and liquids you consume leave immediately, unchanged, through the same exit), I only had three days off there. Which was fine by me- I love doing hard labor for no money (see my resume for examples), but you dear reader may have a poorer read for it.

The days start at seven, with breakfast from six til. Then we gather our tools, find our teams according to the whiteboard we filled out the day before, and hop in our transport. Like everything else, our transport was re-purposed tourist gear- we hired vans and suvs from trekking (Nepalese for all outdoors pursuits), so you either got to ride in a posh ten passenger or the back of a Scorpid. The back was more fun- they never let you bring beer in the vans. We then stop at a little chai shop to pick up local volunteers and people who didn't want to stay in the commune, and head out to site- between a half hour and a hour and a half commute, depending. The two big projects were either clearing rubble so people could start on another house, or erecting (hehe) temporary shelters for the monsoon season.

See if you can guess which is which

Rubble was mainly clay, since most people out in the rural areas use bricks of pressed, unfired clay coated in plaster as a primary building material. The temporary shelters are sheets of woven bamboo wired to a frame of bamboo poles, and cost about 80$ a pop, because guess what Nepal has a lot of. 

Lunch is an on site affair- the homeowners are paid per person to cook, and we don't have to bring our own meals this way. The only food the Nepalese ever seem to eat is called dal bhat, which translates as lentils and rice. It also generally includes some potatoes and a couple of hot peppers, and you will be gently mocked if you fail to eat less then two huge plates of it at a sitting. They will keep serving you until you force them to stop, sometimes by hiding your plate. It's a beautiful culture.

We'd make it back to base by five, have dinner and drinks (that guy with the beer stand is a fucking genius) and a nightly meeting, then head to the bunks. It was kind of great.

Kathmandu is basically a wizard city- full of tall, multihued buildings set against a backdrop of breathtaking mountains, with ravens and hawks constantly circling by the hundreds. Every other street is filled with ancient temples and monuments, and it always smells like nag champa. Well, among other things.

Wizards!

Kathmandu, and Nepal in general, is also working with the same level of infrastructure as the mages of yore. As a true third world country (they were apparently just on the cusp of developing before the earthquake) everything takes longer to deal with. There is no national emergency number- if you need help, you flag down a car and have them take you to the local hospital or the tourist hospital, depending on what your passport says. A grocery trip involves a dozen different shops, and if you break a pick or a hoe, you gotta talk to a blacksmith. We actually had a major problem getting handles to fit our tool heads, because there's no supply of function-made handles- all of our picks had handles carved or lathed from studs or branches by a guy in a shed somewhere.

The Nepalese are a famously nice people, and while that's not untrue I think they would be more accurately described as endlessly benignly bemused. The home owners seemed mildly amazed that a bunch of white people would show up and do free work, but not so much that they didn't try to gently manipulate as much labor out of us as they could, from expanding their farmland to child care services. Shopkeepers would cheerfully gouge you, and would have no bitterness or remorse when called on it. The Nepalese sense of humor seems to revolve around saying something ridiculous with a straight face, and then laughing about how ridiculous the statement is. Chris has described it as surrealism without sarcasm. I call it confusing yet endearing. 

All countries have something of a two tiered economy- one for the tourists and one for the locals- but Nepal has the most extreme example I have yet to encounter. What my supervisor at All Hands refers to as the blanc tax was between 500% and a thousand percent. When one of the Nepalis helping us went for supplies, they got it at first offer for a fifth of what the Americans haggled hard for. A co volunteer from England would regularly get stuff for a fraction of what I could because his parents are from Hong Kong. I once got a copy printed for forty percent less than Chris in the same shop, which he puts down to my tan.

Alcohol is by far the most extreme example of this, with a tall beer coming in at 180 rupies (at a hundred to one exchange rate to the dollar, the math is pretty easy) at the corner store. That's not much in the grand scheme, but mind that a cup of milk tea is fifteen. One of the big reasons for this though is that beer is really just for tourists- locals have their own ways. 

Not that it's without its charms

The two popular drinks for the Nepalese are chang (no relation) and roxy, both made from rice. Chang is fermented, and costs about twenty rupies for a cereal bowl in the back room of some guy's house, and roxy is distilled and costs about 150 for a liter water bottle filled up at the local corner store. Both taste like water rice has been boiled in, and neither one makes for an early start the next morning.

Chris spent the first week with me, and then headed up the mountains to find Buddha. On July fifth, we both headed to the airport to carry on to India. The preference, obviously, would have been to overland, but here's the thing about India's visa system- it's really dumb (you heard me India). The standard visa takes two weeks for approval, two trips to the Indian consulate, an exact itinerary of your trip (bwahahahahahahahahaha) and a hundred and forty dollars. They have, in recognition that they'd like some people to actually visit, created an expedited version that takes a day to get online and costs sixty. The catch is that it's only applicable at certain international airports. So it was with heavy hearts that we headed back to Kathmandu Int'l for the one hour flight into New Delhi.

Fallin' into Saigon

So there are a few different options for transit between Siem Reap and Ho Chi Minh. We're still trying to overland as much as possible, so flying's right out. You can hire a cab for an amount that would be amazingly small in the states, but since we're here because we're too poor to live in America all summer, that one was also rejected. This left us with buses. Specifically, night bus or day bus. And while this sounds like little difference to the western ear, google searching Cambodian night bus (Mom- don't google search Cambodian night bus) highlights certain discrepancies in the experience. Specifically, apparently everyone who's ever taken a night bus died immediately.

The net is just full of people strongly cautioning against taking a night bus. A lot of the reasons sound pretty, well, racist to be frank- many many sites warned that, since they all get up so early, Cambodians fall asleep as soon as the sun goes down, like when you put the cover on a bird cage. There are also, in fairness, a grip of articles on horrific night bus crashes where everyone died. In the end, Chris and I opted to go with a night bus in spite of everything because, well, we wanted to. There are approximately forty five thousand bus companies running that route, so we could at least shop around. We immediately discounted the four bus companies which had recently been censured by the government for killing to many people, and the ranked the remaining ones inversely by amount of hits returned on the google news search for the phrase “X bus company fatal crash”. After carefully drinking about it for a few hours, we purchased our tickets and settled into our bunk for the trip.

That's right, bunk. The bus has bunk beds

Suck it, American mass transit. You don't have bunk *anything*

On what is referred to as a hotel bus such as this, you are assigned to a bed with another person. If you are traveling with another person, the two of you are paired. If you are traveling with an odd number of people (such as one), you get to make friends.

The trip was uneventful. It is hard to sleep well on a vinyl mattress, especially with the particularly swervy style of driving favored by the Cambodians, but otherwise it was largely without hardship. We arrived in Phnom Phen, the capitol of Cambodia, in the morning and switched to a more orthodox bus, i.e. one with chairs, for the remainder of the trip.

*sigh* orthodoxy

The border crossing was much like the first, with the exception that the bus attendant collected the passports of all the passengers. After we disembarked and, in observance of ancient mysterious ritual, walked across the border, our passports were returned stamped and visa'd, which on the scale of “result of handing your passports in a stack to a stranger”, which starts at “get your passport back” and goes to “become a victim of human trafficking”, is the best possible result.

A few hours later we came to port in scenic downtown Ho Chi Minh City, which Imma keep calling Saigon because I want to. After elbowing our way through the pack of feral taxi drivers who were dead set on convincing us that two kilometers is way too far to walk, we strolled through Bui Vien, the backpackers' district, to our first hostel.

Bui Vien, natural habitat of people who are convinced you want a shoe shine

The place is called 3 La, and is primarily a moderately upscale vegetarian restaurant. Two floors above the restaurant they had decided to install a hostel, which consists in its entirety of a large room with six double mattresses and an adjacent bathroom. The beds are separated by about two feet of walking space, which leads to the unsettling experience of waking up looking into the face of a complete stranger one bed over.

Mid range hostel or high class cult quarters?

After getting settled, I set off to meet an old college friend of mine, who has become a semi-professional DJ in Saigon because life is weird. Chris took a nap. After dinner and a couple drinks, my friend dropped me back off at the hostel at about eleven, where the wi-fi (we don't buy sim cards, just to make it sporting) informed me that Chris had, in fact, found an expat bar in Bui Vien and was drinking on the sidewalk out front of a little store owned by an intimidating middle aged Vietnamese lady.

This is what good choices look like

After a certain amount of local networking, we came back to 3 La and discovered that, should you return to this particular hostel after the restaurant closes (I'm not sure when that is, but it is definitely before four am), to gain entry you are required to wake the young man who sleeps on a cot just inside the door, have him unchain the security gate, and then walk through his makeshift bedroom. We switched hostels after that.

Saigon is, as is the rule with South Asian major cities, enormous (twelve million people), loud, polluted, and operating under a driving system which seems to mimic Darwinian selection. It is also incredibly beautiful. It's the only place I've been on this continent that has so many trees flourishing in it. There are also little parks everywhere, block or half block green spaces scattered across the city, with public use exercise equipment.

Told ya

There's a river that runs through the southern portion, with a waterfront market and a vegetarian district. While it lacks Bangkok's incredible street food culture (which I'm pretty sure is unrivaled in this universe), the eats in Saigon are taaasty, and goddam cheap. A plate is a dollar or two, a banh mi from a cart is about fifty cents. We found this outstanding vegan joint that has seventy five cents fake pulled pork banh mis (called floss here, because translation is funny) that are basically all I ever want to eat. I once ordered seven of them.

Once we didn't show up for three days. The waitress got worried

As with every other stop on our madcap whirlwind tour, Vietnam has a signature economy beer, here called Saigon. It comes in two varieties, Red or Export Quality, and Green or We Know You're Broke quality. Red's a little better, but Green's about eight ounces bigger, so that choice was easy. Saigon Green's fifty or seventy five cents in a bar (or on the sidewalk out front a bottle shop), or over a dollar from the corner store, and there's a reason for that. All across south Asia, beer bottles are reused by breweries. To insure the bottles make it back, there's a deposit on them. This deposit changes between countries, but in Vietnam it's about fifty cents, or roughly the cost of the beer inside. As a result, bars can charge less since they get the deposit. This is an awesome system that I wish was way more widespread- the only downside was the one time I got a bottle that was missing a chunk and had a few glass shards in the beer. Otherwise, great system.

So we kicked around Saigon for a few days, taking in the sights. My friend invited us to a show of his at one of the many many rooftop clubs downtown Saigon brags, which was pretty cool. There are so many of the clubs that, on a friday night from the roof of our hostel (the new one where nobody lives in the foyer), you can see and usually hear a half dozen different dance parties. The laser lights from the clubs travel the entirety of downtown, and are really confusing when you're walking around and haven't figured out the source yet.

Saigon's nightlife appears to be primarily rooftop centric

After being inducted to the Saigon club scene, we decided to get out of the city for a bit and caught a bus to Mui Ne, a coastal resort town a few hours to the east. Several people had told us how scenic and relaxing it was, and it cost eight bucks, so we thought we'd give it a try. In its quest to never let us experience the same kind of bus twice, South Asia provided for this trip a bus that has three rows of bunks, left right and center, that are built much like beach chairs- the back reclines to about forty five degrees, and your legs go straight forward under the seat back of the chair in front of you.

These were also in bunks

A short bus later, we arrived in Muy Ne. It is literally right along the beach, and consists of a long, single road parallel to the ocean, lined on both sides with board shops, travel companies, restaurants, bars, hostels and hotels and scooter rentals.

The beach itself was accessed primarily through whatever place of business you were at- since everything was built right up to the water, you went down to the piece of beach your hostel owned, or the bar you were at owned. There is a public beach, but it s at the end of the strip a solid few miles down.

Still purdy though

This being the off season, there were more hotels than tourists which gave the whole place kind of a ghost town vibe. To add to the general twilight zone sensation, a lot of signage was in russian. Like, most things were vietnamese, english, and russian, but if there were only two languages, it was vietnamese and russian. Eventually, we got a bar tender to explain that, after the war (you know, that one), the only country that Vietnam had open trade and travel with was Russia, so the coast became a popular Russian tourist destination. Apparently, starting at Mui Ne, the further north one travels the more Russian the coast gets.

On the brightside, I'm pretty sure I can order a banh mi and beer in russian now

After spending a day orienting ourselves and purchasing sandals, we came back around to that scooter rental shop because they are the best thing that's ever happened ever.

WWWEEEEEEEHHHEEEEEEehheheheheeeheeheeeeee

There are three things in Mui Ne that are billed as major tourist attractions off the beach, and those are the Fairy Stream, the White Sand Dunes and the Red Sand Dunes. We rode to the stream, which to be frank seemed much more stream than fairy, and which was experienced by walking down the center of for a couple miles.

Like, 90% stream

Afterwards, we headed out to the park where the sand dunes are, and decided that driving past them was all the dunage we required. We spent the rest of the day tooling around on the bikes, getting lost and driving through peoples' yards and finding enormous buddhist statues in the middle of no where. Also, we learned that vietnamese gas is about four dollars a gallon, so there's that.

It, uh, it looks a lot more impressive closer up

After spending one extra night in Mui Ne because Eco Hostel, the second place we stayed in Saigon and which I shall carry forever in my heart, didn't have two open beds, we bussed back to the big city. We had originally intended to overland all the way through Asia, but after sitting down figuring that a) it would take a solid three weeks to work through indonesia, laos, etc. and b) we had in fact been going east the whole time, we resigned ourselves to flying from Saigon to Kathmandu. In the couple days we had left until our flight, we buckled down and did something I had been avoiding the entire trip. We hit the Vietnam War Museum, originally called the Exhibition House for the War Crimes of the American and Puppet Governments. So, that's fun.

The Elephant in the Room.

So here's the things about spending time in South East Asia. America's left a pretty large boot print over here. Like, Thailand seems pretty neutral on us, but you go a little further east and you realize how recent the seventies were. In the states, we tend to think of the Vietnam war as history- someone who was eighteen and in the war in 1975 when it ended would be fifty eight now, and most of the American vets are old enough that we feel we can safely ignore them. In Vietnam though, everyone was a veteran due to our policy of liberally bombing the entire country and several of its neighbors. So people in their forties have clear memories of American military actions. People are nice enough about it- there doesn't seem to be any residual bitterness or anger, but more than once when I said the word America some one saluted me with the stump of where a hand used to be.

So it was this as context that Chris and I walked into the four story building housing the record of all the horrible shit our country did (to this one specific area during a discreet time period).

The first floor is mainly a demonstration of world outrage at the war- letters from governments across the globe condemning it at the time, pictures and write ups of protests on five continents. There's also a case for letters from American veterans and medals and war memorabilia they've sent to Vietnam as reconciliation. After that, things went down hill some. The second floor starts with panels taken from various pertinent treatise, including the Geneva convention, which the US broke during the war, and then heads into a detailed, illustrated history of the war, the damage done by it, the equipment used, and the lasting effects.

On the bright side, the Vietnamese have mastered situational irony

 A good part of the last floor was just Agent Orange legacy, which to summarize is millions of birth defects a year still. There are videos of children suffering from severe mental and physical disabilities, pictures of cancers and deformities, and even tanks full of fetuses stillborn from the chemical effects. Also, a few more pertinent passages from international law outlining the illegality of chemical warfare.

Not an uplifting room

The most surreal part of the entire experience? This at a shop just outside the building

Just...like...who?

After that, we headed to the much more easily digestible, but much smaller, natural history museum. It was an informative day.

Finally, we caught a flight over to Kathmandu. Our original plan was to overland it across asia, but after reassessing we determined that busing through laos, indonesia, et al would be prohibitively expensive in time. Also, we'd been going the wrong way the whole time. So we got the cheapest flight to Nepal we could on Asia Air, which is *not* the line that keeps losing planes, but *is* owned by the same company, and for the first time crossed borders heading west.