“You’re Going WHERE?”

Hello friends!  I had a lot of fun doing my travel blog in 2020 when we first got our motorhome, so I decided to do more travel stories on this trip, and make it an official blog-type thing.  So here goes!  Comments and feedback are appreciated.  Feel free to share with your friends if you think they would enjoy it.

Where are we off to this time?  Well, my husband and I are in Vietnam (!), and we are taking a river cruise up the Mekong (yes, that one from all the Vietnam war movies) to Cambodia.  Then we are flying to Bangkok, gonna spend a couple days there, then back home.  I will share more details of the itinerary soon, but that’s the big sweep.

Yeah, We Are SO Never Going There

“Why Cambodia?”, you ask.  Excellent question. Way back in 2021 (insert squiggly time-travel graphic here) I was on the beach in Akumal (the place we own a condo in Mexico) and I was chatting up this blonde, curly haired woman and it became clear during our chat that she was a very experienced traveler. She had gone to about 50 or so countries in her travels, and when I asked her her favorite place she had been to, she said this - “hands down, no question, Cambodia”.  Why Cambodia?  She said the people were amazing, there was so much history, the countryside was beautiful, everything was inexpensive, etc.  At the time, I said, “yeah, sounds great, but we are SO never going there.  The only way we would even consider going somewhere so exotic and scary is if someone goes there with us who has been there before, plans absolutely everything, and basically leads us around by the nose. So yeah, we’re never going there.  

Fast forward a year or two, and Kerri (the curly girl) becomes a travel agent, and painstakingly plans this elaborate trip to Cambodia, manages to pick a time of year when we have no obligations, and invites us to go along.  I looked at my husband and said “there’s literally no reason not to go, other than being a giant chicken.”  

So here we are! First stop, Vietnam.  Well actually, first stop, the airport.

First Stop, Logan Airport, for the start of the Longest Day Ever recorded in the history of mankind.

There’s no easy way to get to Vietnam or anywhere on this side of the planet - since we haven’t invented teleport machines yet and I can’t “Somewhere in Time” myself into an alternative universe - without a big damn airplane trip.  First flight, Boston to Seoul, Korea.  16 hours. In one airplane seat.  Well, there were two seats, one for each of us.  And we got the middle seat also, which was great because Korean Airlines gives lots of pillows and blankets and stuff so that’s where all that stuff went.  Sixteen hours, and we were woefully unprepared.  It never occurred to me that on a high-end airline on a new-ish 787 airplane and people stuck in seats for 8 movies-worth of hours, and not provide us with any possibility of wifi.  So there was boredom, and some lame attempts at sleeping, and no less than 3 movies and 4 episodes of “Yellowstone” - and lots and LOTS of food.  Two entire meals, and a giant snack consisting of a huge ham and cheese burrito thing AND a huge sandwich thing for each of us, plus drinks and free wine.  Plus all the snacks I panic-packed for myself in case there wasn’t enough food and I might actually starve to death. 

There was a funny South Park episode where something bad happened in the town and Stan’s dad gets stuck in a cave with some other people and they all start to panic and draw straws to see which one will have to die and sacrifice himself so the others could eat.  They’d only been trapped for like 6 hours.  That’s how I pack for plane flights.

But I didn’t think to pack enough stuff to DO, and in our internet-addled short attention span brains this was annoying.  

“Did you get the playing cards?”

“No, I thought you did.”

“No, you said, ‘don’t bring those cards they’re crap, bring these other ones.’ so I thought you’d grabbed them.”

“Shit.” 

So we watched a bunch of TV and slept a bit.  After a very quick turnaround in the Seoul airport (where we spent the whole time in another security line for our flight transfer - be warned if you ever fly through there! They don’t arrive and depart at the same terminal, so our very close connection was stressful.). We were now on the “short” leg of our trip, which was over 5 hours to Ho Chi Minh City.  No wifi, more television, and yet another meal.  

When you have seven full meals and countless snacks in one day you feel like a total pig, even when that day is 60 hours long.  You see, we had decided to jump-start the jet lag adjustment by not going to bed the night before our flight (Vietnam is exactly 12 hours ahead of EST) so Sunday morning before our Monday morning flight was when we had last slept for real.  We hadn’t had more than a few naps until we got to our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, and when we got there at midnight we couldn’t sleep (we were keyed up and our bodies thought it was noon, no matter how tired we were) so if you add it all up our day was approximately 68 hours (and seven meals) long.  Add to that a 12 hour time change - so we woke up Sunday morning and went to sleep in our hotel room at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning.  That’s a long damn day.

We Made It!

It’s weird the sense of accomplishment you get after a really long travel day, which really just consists of sitting, standing around and waiting for the next place to sit, then sitting a bunch more, then walking a little to stand around and wait for the next place to sit, etc. But we felt like we’d just run the Iron Man. We’re here!! We did it! Go us!! Boy, do we know how to sit!!

Most of all, we were tripping about being in Vietnam.  I never ever thought I would be here, in all the times I thought about all the places I would ever go.  Vietnam was the place of communists and war stories and American military failure and the place the boat-people (as we rudely called them in the 70’s - oh wait, I just did it again) risked their lives to escape because it must have been that bad.  Ho Chi Minh City was the place we abandoned in the Fall of Saigon (as HCMC used to be called) and was left to the Bad Guys.  I had no idea what we were going to find.

It’s a City, Not Another Planet

The cool thing is that it’s like every other big city I’ve been to, with some exotic weirdness thrown in, of course.

First, there are about 8 million people, and 4 million motorcycles. I think that’s an actual fact.  There are entire parking garages just for motorcycles.  That’s kinda weird, but cool also.  Although I wonder what they do in the rainy season.  We saw entire families on one motorcycle, like mom, dad, a kid and a baby.  So I’m guessing that’s their only vehicle, and that rain probably doesn’t stop them.  

There are 7-Eleven’s here.  In fact, there are two right across the street from each other in the same block as the hotel.  Not sure why they need two, but ok. We saw Starbucks and McDonalds and Popeyes and a Circle K.  But I’m gonna do a whole blog post about food later on.  

It’s a city. There are big buildings and hotels and taxis and restaurants with rooftop bars and beggars and congregating teenagers and people selling stuff and everything else you’d expect to find in a big city.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but growing up in the 70’s Vietnam always had this scary, communisty, isolate-y vibe to it, but things have changed a lot here in the last 20 years or so.  You can’t help but feel the excitement of the new-ish western capitalistic influence when you walk around.

It’ll be fun to walk around the city more.  It’ll be even more fun to get out of the city and see the countryside of Vietnam, the river culture, the villages, and then to cross the border into Cambodia and see if that feels any different.   Here is where we are going on the river cruise:

If you’re curious about the cruise itself, you can find information here:  https://www.emeraldcruises.com/river-cruises/southeast-asia.  Here is our boat:

I will post more as things of interest strike me, and just to let you know the things we’re up to. I’d love to see your comments and questions too!  I am new to proper blog sites so we’ll see how this one works.  Until next time, love to all of you and thanks for reading this far!

Liane

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