There Will Be Blood

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It’s early afternoon in the peaceful village of Hoi An, Vietnam. Small houses and nondescript storefronts stretch along the balmy beach town’s handful of main roads. To the west is the town center, a maze of tailors and higher-end restaurants, and to the east lie acres of flooded farmland abutting a series of restaurant-bars and hostels.

It is to that eastern wonder that Matt makes his soggy way now, melting in the heat under the weight of his backpack and expectations. He’s heading to find his hostel, booked online last night. The trudge from the bus station has already taken him almost three miles across town. And several restaurants for quick jumps of WiFi to get his bearings.

“How did anyone ever manage to get by before WiFi?” Matt asks the air. He’s toying with the idea of saying his thoughts out loud, so he can write about it in his blog.

“Is this crazy? This talking?” He pauses. “I think… the important part is that I’m asking the question.” He gazes out past the clay-tiled sidewalk into the fields beyond.

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It’s Just Paper

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Gerry Schiller doesn’t regret his decision in the least, at least not yet.

He’s in the bathroom sitting on the toilet and facing the tank, one hand swiping his brown hair out of his eyes and the other hand groping around on the sink for the next test subject.

His hand knocks a small plum and it starts to roll towards the edge. He turns and just as it starts to fall he catches it. He needs the plum to be in one piece, not smushed, or it would invalidate his results.

He waits for the gentle hissing of the reservoir tank to finish, indicating that the toilet is fully reloaded. He tosses the plum into the water with a satisfying plop! He pulls the lever and watches. It swirls and swirls and swirls… and goes down!

He leans over to the top of the tank and makes a note on his pad: Plum flushes. He’s running an experiment to see which fruits would and would not flush down the toilet.

It’s 1962 and Gerry is four years old.

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Savages

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Mist hangs in the air, thickening into the distance. Ferns the size of streetlamps loom up and hang down in the mountain jungle. Green, waxy leaves bigger than elephant ears obscure what the fog cannot. The light drizzle falling through the sky is filtered by the canopy into slower, fatter drops that drip into puddles, ripple, and disappear. Drip. Drip. Drip. It is the only sound. Nothing stirs.

A swishing of leaves interrupts the stillness. It’s coming from deeper in the valley and is growing steadily louder. The swishing sound is overtaken by the thudding of footfalls on stone. Two pairs, three pairs, more pairs. Louder still. Soon they’re so close that a great huffing and puffing can be heard. The wheezing and thumping crashes through the underbrush, knocking fern and leaf aside.

“I should’ve brought my inhaler,” Matt mumbles.

Omar leads in front of him, the tico having no problem with the temperature or the hike up the mountain. Thibault and Wallis bring up the rear as the group treks up Cat Ba Island in the south of Halong Bay. Matt is the only one breathing heavily.

“It’s like Jurassic Park out here,” Wallis observes, her voice as awestruck as if she had seen real dinosaurs.

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Hashtag Swag

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This is the first bowl of phở Matt’s had since arriving in Hanoi. On the cusp of too-spicy, but well into the savory-as-hell zone, it’s an enjoyable experience trying the soup at Phở 10. The patrons scoop and slurp their noodles, rated among the best the city has to offer. And for only fifty-thousand dong (~$2.50 USD), it would be a crime not to eat here. The American is breaking off a leaf of basil before downing his own spoonful and– Hey, is that guy wearing a ‘pura vida’ shirt?

“Pura vida!” Matt calls out from the patio to the young man on the sidewalk.

Distracted even before the outcry, the man turns his searching gaze towards the noodle shop. He’s wearing a tanktop bearing the unofficially official slogan of Costa Rica, pura vida. His gently-curled dark hair fades down into a close-cropped beard, which perhaps was once well-kempt, but is now well past the start of backpacker stubble. It gives the tico (slang for citizens of Costa Rica) a rugged polish. This is all aided by the matte black camera slung around his neck. Olé.

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Haggling in Hanoi: Part I

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Matt keeps his backpack company in the lobby of his hostel waiting for the bus, gently rocking to the slow cadence of the oscillating air-con unit. He looks back to the elevator further inside, the one that leads to his now-former residence. It’s much too early for other travelers to be awake. The only reason he’s even up is to catch a bus. He’s going to Halong Bay today, a four hour drive east of Hanoi, Vietnam, the city he’s in, but this next step in his journey is bittersweet.

With this bus, he leaves his most recent backpacker group. Though he’s been traveling for weeks through Thailand and now Vietnam, this had been the first group of people that he’s had the opportunity to adventure with on a repeated and sustained basis. They’ve shared the same hostel dorm, waited out the mid-afternoon heat on the same balcony, and explored the largest fraction of the city’s culture that they could in their brief time together. It’s been awesome.

It will not, however, be the attractions they visited together that will stick in his memory, but the (sometimes terrifying, sometimes frustrating, always interesting) experiences that they’ve shared. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of his time at all in the city that didn’t feature one or more of these crazy Brits.

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Haggling in Hanoi: Part II

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“You’re not finished with Hanoi, are you?” Hannah asks.

Matt almost jumps out of his seat in the lobby. Hannah usually wakes up at precisely 9:55. At which time she hustles out of bed and stretches the generosity of the breakfast staff who are trying to close up by 10.

Hannah’s breakfast preference is a pair of fried eggs and a toasted baguette, torn into strips and dipped into the runny yolks. She calls this ‘egg and soldiers’. She’s rather particular about her eggs and preens over having finally educated the cooking staff on the proper way to fry them for optimal yolk runnyness. It’s taken her two weeks, but it’s worth it. Two weeks? Maybe it’s been three. She isn’t sure. A frown. What will her bill be like? Maybe she should skip out on it…

“I, uh, yeah, I’m heading to Halong Bay today.”

Hannah’s frown hangs briefly in the sunlight that slants in through the glass front doors and disappears. She nods. “Well, come give me a hug.”  She spreads her arms and flutters her fingers softly as she does so, making her look like a crane or stork coming in for a landing.

She wraps him in an encompassing hug, an honorary member of her crew now. Her original crew is back home in the UK and not perhaps all free to come to Vietnam; they’ve had a history with the London police.

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Poker, Pool, and Prostitutes

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“Are you a time traveler?” Ollie asks the young man sitting in front of him at the train station. “Do you have a TARDIS just hanging out somewhere?”

“Time traveler…?” Matt responds, catching the Doctor Who reference. “Well yeah, I guess so, but I can only go forward and only one day at a time, just like everyone else.” Matt had just folded a set of terriers for Ollie and his friend and it seemed to be going over pretty well. Really well, actually. Time Traveler, he’d never gotten that one before.

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Rumble in the Jungle

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The sun is shining through the wonderfully clean and brand-new windows in Hug Hostel. Matt’s returned to Chiang Mai from his two-day trek and decided to forego another night of terrors at BMP Residence in lieu of cheaper yet more extravagant living arrangements. Separate rooms for showers and toilets? What opulence! But this is the way the Westerner has grown accustomed to living. And for 280 baht a night ($8.64), it’s a tough price point to beat.

He wanders down to the common room to chat with his 11-hour lagged girlfriend back in Washington, DC. It’s 8am, which means it’s just him and his laptop in the gorgeous lounging room (floor to ceiling windows for a 180 degree view of the moat and Old City walls!). Few backpackers leave their beds this early unless otherwise compelled.

“So what’ve you been doing? How was last night with the guys?” Chelsea asks him via video chat.

It’s wonderful to see her face and watch it laugh in time to his jokes and stories. Well, maybe a few seconds delayed. 8,400 miles of separation isn’t exactly down the street and information can only travel so fast.

“Oh man,” Matt feels the familiar surge of energy that comes as he leaps off the first few words and dives into a story. “We saw a real Muay Thai fight!”

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