Fore-Tracks

I am getting a computer upgrade today. So  I doubt there will be any more updates today, any maybe not for a few days.  I still seem to be having trouble with the nba pages anyway.

Today was my birth place and what an interesting place to spend it.  it started outat 5am watching the sunrise over the Angkor Wat temple.  Then we went back to the hotel to eat breakfast then went back to Angkor Wat to tour the temple.  I heard someone say it was going to be 104 degrees and it was extremely humid.  I lot count of how much water I drank.  I started out with 2 frozen water bottles, got another one at every stop, had one for lunch and bought 2 more cokes along the way.  Angkor Wat was actually the least interesting og the three places we  went today.  The places have been destroyed any may not last much longer.  Apparently the team that restored it actually destroyed it.  Somehow the chemical they used to clean and restore it all instead is disolving it. The temple is a huge complex made of sandstone.  The second place we went to was Ankor Thom. This is a place that  has trees growing through the sandstone templed giving it an all new look.  They call this the jungle temple.   They said that part of the movie Tomb Raider was filmed here.  I’ll have to go back to watch that.  What is  interesting is that the temple is about 900 years old, the huge trees, almost redwood sized, are about 300 years old. The trees have grown through the temple complex, sometime destroying them in the process, other times holding them other.  But in a way just some weird accident turned it into a magical place.  These temples were buried by  jungle before being refound only around the 1940’s.  Now 95% of the local people’s job is tourism related.  The last place we visited was Bayon.  Which is another amazing temple that they don’t know what it’s purpose was. There are over 100 large stone carved faces.  For these things all I can really do to explain it is to say look
for the pictures when I get them posted.   It was physically miserable because of the weather but what a unique place to be on your birthday. I’m not exactly sure what we are visiting tomorrow, hopefully it will be as interesting as today.  We will go from 8:30 to about 3:30.  that will be the final touring.  Then we take a 5pm flight to Phenom Phem,   stay the night there and have an  early flight from there to Taipei then LA and finally home again. At least the flight is only 12 hours home isntead of 14.

Gettting ready for breakfast.  In about 36 hours I’ll be landing in Chicago.

I’ve been gone for a week now.  It has gone by fairly quickly.  About to go to bed for the 6th night, only 4 more after this one.  But hopefully all of the best things are to come.  Today was spent in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.  We started my going to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum complex.  His body is there for viewing, except not on Mondays.  So we didn’t actually get to see him.  But we did see the presidential building and a couple of the houses he lived in.  He highly respected here and from what they see does seem to have been a good guy.  It wasn’t until after he died that they turned to communism, After that we went to what was called a literary museum.  What is was an old Consufsus school, the first college in Vietnam.  After another meal that was too long we went to the prison where John McCain was held/tortured for a few years, aka The Hanoi Hilton.  Then it was to a water puppet show.  Then it was an hour cyclo tour.  That is where I sit in the carriage and some guy half my size pedals me around the old quarters.  This was cool because it put us out in the street right in the middle of the crazy traffic.  It rained in the morning and during the bike ride so for the most part that kept things cooler, which made the day much easier.

Tomorrow we will start with a 3 hour drive from Hanoi to Halong Bay, where we are going on a 24 hour cruise on an old junk boat.  Not really old and probably not really a junk, just something made to look like one.  Actually it is supposed to be fairly luxorious.  Halong Bay is supposed to be a beautiful place.  We’ll cruise around, stopping at a few caves, do some  swimming and water activities, stay over night on ship.  Then when that 24 hour voyage is over we drive back to Hanoi and fly to Siem Reap in Cambodia to spend the last two days touring Angkor Wat.  Hopefully saving the best for last.    I have taken about 150 pictures so far.  The interest seems fast except when I try to post pictures.  So I will probably wait until I’m home to post more.  I don’t expect to have internet on the boat tomorrow.  So it will probably be at least two days before the next post.

Not really a lot to talk about today.  We stayed at the beach resort in Hoi An until noon.  Walked along the beach, bought some polo shirt knock offs, cooled off in the pool for a while.  I guess you could say I got lucky at lunch.  I sat at a table of 4 where 2 people are scared to try anything other than white rice, and the 3rd doesn’t eat sea food.  So with our meals being mostly seafood I pretty much ate for 4 today.

We stopped at a museum but really the most interesting thing we did today was the 70km drive to Hue.  The first 21km was a drive up and down a steep winding mountain pass with some nice views.  The final 50km was mostly flat with local houses and rice fields the whole way.  It was interesting that even in this generally rural stretch of road there were always motor cycles and bicycles.  We were in a big bus generally driving down the middle of the road because the bikes don’t always just scoot over and let you by.  There were also at least two times where big trucks coming the other direction were passing slow trucks and coming head on towards us only to squeeze back into his own lane at the last second.  But I had never seen rice fields and this drive through rural Vietnam pretty much matched any preconceived images I had.  green fields of rice, small streams/rivers suppling them water, palm trees.

Still haven’t really adjusted to the time difference yet.  Going to bed at 9 every night and getting up somewhere between 4 and 6.  Tomorrow is Easter.  We are taking a boat up a river to the area to the palaces of the the old empires.  Then we have a 9:30pm flight to Hanoi.  Been in bed every night by 9, but now our flight is going to be later than that.