The musings of a traveling couple

Almost two months ago now, we went to Sri Lanka for Christmas and Malaysia for New Years.  Jaime’s dad selected Sri Lanka because he likes to write articles for his local newspaper and he was looking for something somewhat exotic.  We decided to add on another country since we had some extra time.  We looked into India and the Maldives, but Malaysia won out for cheapest flight and no visa required.  Here is the journal I created from my daily notes.

Day 1

This was actually more like a couple of days but I’m combining all of our travel there into a single, long, day.  We got off to a rough start.  At soon as we get to the airport, we found ourselves standing in line behind two very large abandoned suitcases.  About two minutes go by when a lady asks if they are ours, and when we said “no,” she practically tackled the bags.  Right as backup was arriving, the owner comes back with two more large bags looking confused by all the commotion.  Crisis averted.  Next, when we were getting our boarding passes, we overhear a guy that skipped his Milwaukee to Chicago leg and thought he could just continue his trip as is.  He was as confused as the first guy when told that the rest of his trip had been cancelled.  Is this a heavy time of year for first-time fliers?!  Next, we get to security and Jaime and I made a pact to opt-out of the backscatter x-ray scanners, but after watching 30 people in front of us get redirected through the good ole metal detectors we thought we would be scot-free.  Jaime gets the silent point to the metal detector, but then I get the hand wave over to the dreaded x-ray machine.  I ask if I can opt-out and the guy’s response was “if you insist.”  I quickly say “I insist” and he radios for a “male opt-out”.  The new “enhanced” pat-down wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but it was certainly much more thorough than the old pat-down/wand method.

Our itinerary was Chicago-Paris-Bahrain-Colombo, Sri Lanka.  The first flight went off without a hitch, but that trend didn’t continue.  London had been having weather delays, but we hoped that Paris wasn’t affected.  While we got on the plane right away, we were stuck on the runway for a total of 2.5 hours.  We only had a 55 minute layover in Bahrain, so we knew our chances of catching the connecting flight were slim to none.  I’ve never missed a connection before but I assumed that they would just put you on the next available flight.  Well when we get to Bahrain at around 10:30pm, we were told there were no more flights to Sri Lanka for two days!  They had no idea what to do with us and just said to come back in two hours.  We went to the lounge area and found a free internet kiosk (where gmail was blocked).  I looked up possible flights and saw a flight going through Doha, Qatar within the next hour.  We head back to the transfer desk and find that there are five others in the same situation; three from France, and two Canadians of Sri Lankan descent.  They refused to give us a time or a flight and just had us wait off to the side.  After about an hour and a half, the French woman is visibly upset and tracks down the last person we heard from.  He gave us all a free dinner in the lounge to shut us up.  While eating dinner, I notice a 1:45am flight to Doha and tell Jaime we should go for it.  It’s around 1:15am when we sneak out of dinner and race to the transfer desk.  We get a new person who quickly agrees to put us on that flight and prints our boarding passes just as the rest of the group arrives.  We let him know that they also needed to get to Doha, but his boss shows up and says we were all supposed to get on a 5am flight and not to give out any more boarding passes.  We run to the gate, which looked more like a crowded office full of cubicles where I tell Jaime “don’t pay attention to the fact that we’re in some crappy terminal going to the wrong country.”

We make it to Doha on a quick 50 minute flight.  Since we had to switch airlines, the transfer desk that got us there couldn’t give us the boarding passes for the final leg of the trip, but he said there was a note in the computer that we were supposed to get them.  We go to the transfer desk in Doha and tell the woman that we needed to get to Colombo.  She asks for our tickets and our hearts sank, we didn’t have any.  She looks us up in the computer and sure enough, the note was there, and she checked the next flight out at 8:50am, found us seats, and printed out our boarding passes.  Because we had checked in more than five hours early, we also got vouchers for free drinks from the airport restaurant.  The airport was a ghost town until around 6am.  We see that the 5am flight from Bahrain arrived and waited for the rest of our group to get off the airport shuttle and join us.  We see them at 6:45am in the now massive line at the transfer desk, but they never made the flight.  We can only assume that the Doha-Colombo flight ran out of space in between our two flights.  While it was really stressful at the time, we look back on it now as an Amazing Race moment that made the trip possible.  It would have been a much different trip if we were any later than we were.

Our flight arrives in Colombo, Sri Lanka at 4:05pm, about 12 hours behind our original schedule.  Not bad considering all we had been through.  Jaime’s parents had arrived two days earlier and met us at the airport.  They were at the Abans Tours booth, one of many different agencies vying for tourists’ business.  The presumed owner had gone through my rough itinerary and made a few changes to route us through two new cities where he had hotels already planned for us.  The Lonely Planet guidebook had warned me several times that people like to change your itinerary as soon as you arrive to send you to places where they get a cut of your bill.  Our first hotel had even called me before we left and told me not to let anyone change our plans.  I was very wary of the proposed changes, and made him change it a bit so only one of our days was affected.  He called the hotel I had booked for two nights in Galle and changed it to one night.  Then he booked us a night at a hotel in Tissamaharama because he said it was too far to drive from Kandy to Galle in one day.  Sounded reasonable at the time, but it would come back to bite us later.  We also booked a driver of his for $60/day, but that ended up being great, so it all evened out in the end.

We set off for Kandy in the center of the country, stopping at a roadside restaurant along the way.  Once we get to Kandy, it took a good 30 minutes to find our hotel.  The roads zig-zag a lot in the hills and the numbers don’t always make sense.  After stopping for directions a handful of times and calling the hotel twice, we finally arrive at Blinkbonnie Tourist Inn.  A guest had decided to extend his stay in our rooms, so we got free upgrades to the rooms on the main level, rather than two floors down.  The rooms were very nice, and they all had balconies overlooking the surrounding hills.  We had grand plans to go out to dinner but we were all exhausted so we just went to sleep.
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Saturday

11:10am – SFO

We just finished our first flight leg and are waiting to head to Seoul, the longest flight on the way there (14-15 hours).  The first flight was an interesting experience.  Since we had to leave my house by 3:30am, we only had about 90 minutes for a power nap.  We were, and are, completely exhausted.  The plane ride itself was uneventful, but I had a strange thought while en route.  As I lean back trying to sleep and staring at a large projected screen without headphones, I hear people opening bags, sipping drinks, and the occasional cough.  This is when I realized this is what it must have been like when silent movies first began playing in theaters.  I ran with that thought and looked over the audience for that sense of wonderment as the pictures came to life in front of their eyes.  The pilot interuppted my fantasy with an announcement and I snapped back to reality.  It was 5am.  I didn’t have any sleep.  I closed my eyes.

We arrived in Hanoi at around 11pm Saturday.  The driver was waiting for us and had a sign with my name on it and the hotel name.  I pointed at him and he gestured for us to wait while he literally ran to get his car.  During the drive, everything was pitch black most of the way so we had no idea what was in store for us.  The occasional building came and went out of the shadows.  The drive was about 45 minutes, including a stop for gas.  We check in and Jaime’s parents welcomed us.  We were exhausted from all of the travel time so we promptly went to bed, after walking up four flights of stairs.

Sunday

Jaime’s parents had booked a city tour that was privately guided by Son.  This was our first experience with Hanoi city traffic.  It was organized chaos.  There were no lights, no traffic signals of any type.  There was an abundance of motorbikes that went anywhere and everywhere they could fit, at any speed.  Cars were no different and even oncoming “lanes” were fair game.  The one prevailing rule was to just avoid hitting others.  Someone cut you off?  It’s your job to adjust to not hit them, and following distance is nonexistent.  We made several u-turns on our trip and there was no waiting and no hesitation; just do it and people have a responsibility to not hit you in the process.  This all made for one hell of an experience, and I haven’t even mentioned walking in this traffic.  One FAQ I found online had the best advice: walk with a purpose.  If you walk/cross with confidence and determination, the traffic can predict your movements and swerve around you.  This doesn’t just apply to crossing the street.  A vast majority of sidewalk space is filled with motorbikes and/or shops with the occasional impromtu food stand.  The sidewalks that did exist would be full of people trying to sell you their wares.  Because of all this, you end up walking in the street, with those motorbikes and cars whizzing all around you.  After one day of getting used to the chaos, I came to appreciate the simple beauty of it all.  Hanoi was a living, breathing organism.

Back to the tour.  It started with a visit to Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum.  This exemplified what I thought all of Vietnam would look like.  It was a large Communist-style blocky building with two very large Vietnamese signs on both sides of it.  There were police everywhere and checkpoints to gain access to each area.  Since it was a weekend, there were thousands upon thousands of locals paying their respects.  Surrounding the mausoleum, there is a large area with several other attractions, including a botanical garden, a one-pillared pagoda, a museum, and Ho Chi Minh’s small humble home, all of which we visited.  Next, we went to a very large school complex that is no longer used but is well preserved.  We ate lunch, a traditional pho ga (chicken and noodles), at Vietnam’s version of a chain restaurant.  We finished the day with a visit to the Museum of Ethnology where they presented all of the different cultures and heritages of the Vietnamese people, including a well-done outdoor exhibit displaying various house styles and the tools used in rural life.  Lastly we walked around part of the famous Hoem Kiem lake and across the red bridge into what’s left of an old prison.

We ate dinner at a place down the street from our hotel called Fives.  To finish off the night we went to a 5-6 block long street market that runs from 8pm to 11pm, three days a week.  At the cross streets, there would be three or four police officers sitting around with their shirts untucked.  This is when it really hit me that Vietnam is not the Communist police-state I was expecting.  These police were the first I’d seen since the mausoleum 12 hours earlier, and I’d continue to see very few over the next several days.

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