Ethan Dylan Siegel's Website

July 21. We have been back in Bangkok for a couple of days after about one month in Vietnam and Cambodia. We are posting some Vietnam photos today and will have the Cambodia photos up in a few days. We were in Vietnam for three weeks, and this might be a little long-winded. Vietnam was a really cool experience for us. The culture was like nothing we have ever been exposed to. We arrived in Vietnam on June 25th, and we traveled from north to south, mostly down the coast of the country.

We spent our first few days in Hanoi, the second biggest city in the country. For a big city, Hanoi was pretty undeveloped. There were really no stores in the normal sense of the word, the streets were lined mostly with open-air stalls selling everything from souvenirs to food. There were way more bikes and motorbikes than cars, and even quite a few ox and water buffalo on the roads. Hanoi was a great city for walking around, and that is pretty much how we occupied our time. We were staying in the "Old Quarter" and the streets all around our hotel were lined with merchants. The people there were absolutely desperate for business, athough every souvenir or handicraft shop sold exactly the same merchandise. We saw very few westerners, and no other Americans. Aside from the Old Quarter, we ventured to other parts of the city to see a few pagodas and, as they say, the tomb of our great father, Ho Chi Minh. From Hanoi, we took a three day trip to Halong Bay, which is a World Heritage preservation area. It's basically a large, beautiful bay with 3,000 limestone islands and rock formations. We spent the first day of the tour on a vintage Vietnamese boat just traveling around the bay. We slept on the boat with about 10 other travelers, in very hot, small quarters. We actually spent most of the night talking with everyone on the top of the boat, staring up at the stars, so the sleeping arrangements were fine. The next day, we continued on the boat further up the bay, passing fishing villages and pearl farms. The fishing villages and pearl farms consist of a few basic huts floating on large log rafts in the middle of the bay. The people's lives exist entirely on the water. After that, we changed to a small, sketchy rowboat and visited Viethai village, which was about a 45 minute walk through the jungle. The people there have no electricity or running water and lived in mostly mud and wood houses. We ended the day at Cat Ba Island, one of the largest islands in the bay. We stayed with our fellow travelers in a small, hotel. The electricity only went out two or three times during the evening, which we're told is not so bad. Random, frequent blackouts were common throughout our time in Vietnam. Halong Bay was really a trip, it was our first encounter with parts of the society that were living, in many respects, the same way they lived 50 or 100 years ago. And our tour guide, Rose, was apparently used to living in an authoritarian state, and was quite a taskmistress. She had us up at 7 a.m. every day, and tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to enforce strict rules on when we could shower, use the bathroom, eat, take pictures, etc. After Halong Bay, we returned to Hanoi for a day to collect our belongings. When we were checking out of our hotel, we told them that we had not taken anything from the excessively overpriced minibar. The person at the front desk made a quick phone call, and three minutes later we were confronted with an empty water bottle that they had found when the searched our garbage! We explained that we had bought the water outside the hotel (which we had done, as demonstrated by the three remaining full bottles that we showed them). It worked out in the end, but there aren't too many countries where the hotels search your garbage before you checkout. We suppose the people there have been raised that way and are used to such heavy-handed behavior, but it seemed a little like the Twilight Zone to us.

From Hanoi, we traveled to Hue, a small city a few hundred miles south of Hanoi. We saw the town citadel, which was the old walled city, and it was pretty interesting. It had been attacked in the "American War," as they call it, and we were shown the bomb holes in the outer wall. Now, the citadel is full of blasted out American tanks that have various propaganda signs posted on them stating where they were captured, etc. Our next stop was Hoi An, an amazing, beautiful river town in the north-central part of the country, and also quite close to the coast and the South China Sea. The road from Hue to Hoi An is good by Vietnamese standards, but it still takes triple the time that it should take, as the road at times was covered in boulders, fallen trees, and other debris, and was always crowded with bikes, motorbikes and livestock fighting for their fair share of the road. The people were noticeably friendlier as we worked our way south. Hoi An is known for it's expert tailoring, and we took advantage of the opportunity. The shops employ so many tailors, and they were able to make our clothing in just a few hours, except for suits, which they needed to do overnight. In our five days there, we strolled around town, road bicycles a couple of times to an absolutely beautiful and mostly deserted beach and sweated our brains out trying on wool winter coats in the 95 degree, sticky heat. The town and people were absolutely charming.

After Hoi An, we flew to Nha Trang, which is a beach town in the center of the country. The water was nice and blue, but unfortunately the Vietnamese do not respect the environment as much as they could, and there was quite a bit of plastic garbage on the beach and floating in the water. The water wasn't dirty, per se, but it had just a little too much junk floating in it for our tastes. Luckily, the water was a lot cleaner away from the coast, and we were able to make use of that fact. Despite swearing at least 10 times that she would never scuba dive in Vietnam, due to the lack of general regulation and care, we came across a dive company operated by Australians, who are known around the world as the strictest and best scuba instructors. So, Lane's "never" turned into a "maybe" and then completely folded, and we took our Open Water Scuba Diving course. We were going to do this in Thailand, but this way we will be able to enjoy the diving in Thailand without worrying about getting certified. Plus, this dive shop gave us two instructors for just the two of us, and most dive shops in Thailand would have 1 instructor for 6 to 12 students. The class was very intensive, but we felt like we learned a lot and are now considerably more confident underwater. We spent a lot of time in the water learning the way to deal with every possible emergency that can ever arise. Basically, the class teaches you skills you hope to never have to use. There is very little instruction actually about diving skills. All of the instructors were really great, though, and we had a good time and are now certified open water scuba divers. In Nha Trang, we also learned that from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. in each city, the government blasts propaganda on loudspeakers all over town. Until Nha Trang, we apparently weren't that close to any speakers. In Nha Trang, however, there was one right outside of our hotel and we awoke every morning at 5 a.m. sharp to a voice shouting in Vietnamese. It's funny, even though we couldn't understand the language, we could tell from the intonation of the speaker that it was definitely propaganda. Also, there are no western brands anywhere in the country. No brands really at all, most goods are hand made or locally manufactured. So, when I ran out of deodorant we were in a bit of a bind...until we stumbled across a small market and I was able to buy some black market Right Guard!

Our last stop in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. The city was way more developed than Hanoi or any other part of Vietnam. We only had a couple of days left on our visa at this point, so we saw a few sights, did some shopping, ate some very authentic vietnamese food, and headed out to Cambodia. The three weeks we had in Vietnam were awesome. We met some interesting people, saw a lot of things that we could never imagine, and enjoyed the complete foreigness of it all. Our friend Josh described parts of Vietnam as the wild west, with cars fighting for space on the road with water buffalo, all traffic rules being ignored, people eating in the streets and sewers, facilities that are from 100 years ago, and a general feeling that if something happened to you, no one would ever hear about it. This was definitely true in some parts of the country, although we found some more tranquil areas as well. Josh also warned us that the airports were all like Wilkens Fruit Farm (a Yorktown apple orchard), with a barn and a guy with a flashlight outside waving at the sky instead of radar, and cows wandering on the runway. It was totally true...you wouldn't even know some of these places were airports if your plane wasn't landing at it. After Vietnam, we stopped in Cambodia for five days before returning to Thailand. Cambodia was truly life-altering for us and we had some once-in-a-lifetime experiences such as seeing poverty like you cannot believe, traveling to small villages to hand out school supplies to the children, meeting and adopting a local family, and being chased by wild monkeys. The people of Cambodia, for the most part, have absolutely nothing and are just in a daily struggle for survival...it made Vietnam -- which a few days earlier seemed shockingly undeveloped to us -- look like Manhattan. Our few days in Cambodia really gave us a new perspective.

We've been pretty busy back in Bangkok the last couple of days, replenishing our supplies and having a rolling good time with Josh and Pookky. So, check out our Vietnam photos, which are again broken up into two pages so they will load better, and the Cambodia photos will be up shortly. We can't believe it, but our six months has turned into something more like six weeks and the end of our trip is approaching quickly. Best regards to everyone, we miss you and hope all is well.