Lin’s Final Post

Lin on the Star Ferry

Thursday, December 9

We are in Saigon now, with only one week before Sarah takes off for Prague and I remain in Southeast Asia a while longer. When we think of the many thousands of miles, the countries, and the climates we’ve covered since St. Petersburg in September, it’s no wonder we’re getting ready to stay put, somewhere, for a while.

Hong Kong

Tuesday, 24 November

Sarah and I had both been to Hong Kong before and were eager to see how it had changed after being returned to China. We arrived early in the morning on November 18 and got ourselves situated in Tom’s Guesthouse in the old Chung King Mansions on the Kowloon side, a huge old building containing dozens of guesthouses, shops, and offices. Unfortunately, it had lost some of its pizzaz from the past and seemed a bit shabbier.

As we walked around the streets we noticed fewer foreigners than before; we later learned that foreigners made up about 13% of the population under British rule, but now only 5%. The other thing that immediately struck us was the smog that now pervades Victoria Harbor. In the 1970s and 80s the air was clear and the glorious skyline of Hong Kong Island breathtaking; now, pollution from all the factories in Guangzhou cast a haze over the view, but Hong Kong is still one of the most magnificent natural harbors in the world.

Shop in Hong Kong: Who says we didn't see the Terra Cotta Warriors?

We took a boat tour of the harbor and then the Star Ferry across to the island, and marveled at the magnitude of new highrises and sleek wharves and malls. Gone were the old stair-step streets flanked with food vendors and small shops – they’ve been replaced by mall after shiny mall, and the old floating restaruants are also gone. We did find some of the old character in the markets and a few pockets of side streets, but everything seemed more uniform, the goods more mass-produced. We both preferred the Hong Kong of the past.

We spent a wonderful evening with an old colleague of Sarah from the Prague Post, Kevin Drew, who now works at CNN’s Asia Pacific bureau based in Hong Kong. We first had beers at a Belgian bar, then dinner at a wonderful Indian restaurant.

The train to Kunming

We originally had planned on taking the train to Nanning and then into Vietnam, but we heard so many good things about Yunnan province, in China’s southwest, that we decided to spend some time there instead. So we bought tickets for what was to be our last train journey of this trip, a 2-hour train to Guangzhou, then a connecting 26-hour overnight train to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. The lady at the China Railways office assured us that the train leaving Hong Kong at 10:30 am would leave plenty of time to get across Guangzhou to a different station and make our connection.

Well, the first train was (uncharacteristically for China) late, and by the time we got through immigration in Guangzhou we were afraid we’d miss our connection! We ran to the first taxi we could find and were willing to pay a premium in this emergency – luckily, we got one of the best drivers imaginable who whisked us helter-skelter through the huge city and then, when the approach to the train station was in gridlock traffic, pointed at the entrance and told us to RUN!!! We did, pushing our way through the swarms of people, and found our train with just minutes to spare.

The third-class equivalent on Chinese long-haul trains is not as open as the Russian cars we so enjoyed, and instead of four berths on one side and two on the other, here there were two stacks of three berths each in cabins, and just an aisle on the other side. Our compartment-mates were nice, but there very little sitting room during the days and with three berths no ability to sit up in the beds except for the bottom ones (we were on the top).

On the Train to Kunming

After riding through the coastal region of Guangzhou, the world’s factory, the landscape was a beautiful successsion of mountains, gorges, rivers, rice paddies. But it also contained one thing we weren’t expecting – snow! It turned out that parts of China, including Yunnan province, were having a freak cold snap, and when we arrived in Kunming we were dismayed that our guesthouse did not have heat! It so rarely gets cold here that most places don’t – I went in search of another hotel but no heat was to be found, so we wrapped ourselves up and made a decision not to spend time in Yunnan after all.

The flights to Hanoi for the next few days were full, so we took the closest other warm country and soon were meandering down the pleasant lanes of Vientiane, Laos, in summer weather at last. The choruses of”Lady lady looka looka” that accompanied us throughout China now became the “Madame, madame, you buy?” of the former French-occupied lands.

Buddhist Temple in Vientiane

Laos was a gentle, graceful haven between behemoth China and crowded, intense Vietnam. With only 6.5 million people and 75% of its territory unmanaged vegetation, the landscape is gorgeous with wild mountains, karsts, jungle, waterfalls, rivers. After a few days in delightful Vientiane we took the bus north to Luang Prabang, a UNESCO site that’s proclaimed to be one of the most beautiful cities in Southeast Asia, where the Mekong and Khan rivers converge.

Monday, 14 December

From there we flew to Hanoi and were at first overwhelmed by the crowding and nonstop waves of motorbikes filling the streets to within an inch of each other and us, but by the second day I began to enjoy the mad energy of the place.

Rules for American Prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton

Although I was never inside Vietnam before, I had strange emotions about visiting the places where so many of my generation had fought – and it was deeply moving to visit Hoa Lo Prison, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” But I encountered absolutely no animosity toward Americans anywhere in Vietnam, only friendly people who seemed to sincerely welcome us.

Bride and Groom being photographed at Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi

Ha Long Bay

From Hanoi we took a side trip to Ha Long Bay, where thousands of islands jut steeply out of the Gulf of Tonkin like giant fingers, and then proceeded down the coast on an open-ticket bus to Saigon that let us stop off along the way. We explored the former imperial city of Hue, the old trading port of Hoi An, and enjoyed the beach at Nha Trang before heading inland to Saigon. Only called Ho Chi Minh City officially, Saigon is far more cosmopolitan than Hanoi and (despite Vietnam’s communist mantle) a lot of fun.

Imperial City at Hue

Santa's everywhere- including in the trees in Saigon!

The Finale

Now Sarah and I are in Cambodia, where we will spend our last day together tomorrow! We took a boat up the Mekong and today we visited the temples of Angkor, and tomorrow we return to Phnom Pehn for Sarah to catch her flight first to Bangkok, then home to Prague. I, on the other hand, am not through with Indochina and will return to Vietnam and stay put for a while on the coast, with Nha Trang as a base to explore other beaches and the central highlands.

Temple at Angkor

Lin at Royal Palace in Phnom Penh

On this day, in northern Cambodia, in the heat of the jungle, it is hard to conjure up in memory the wintry cold that greeted Sarah and me when we met in St. Petersburg to begin our travels. Now, many thousands of miles and many cultures later, it is as always for me: encountering unfamiliar lands and peoples fosters inner growth in even greater measure. I will always be grateful for our adventures and learnings, for all the new friends we made, and especially to Sarah for proposing this trip in the first place and for her extraordinary breadth of knowledge and insights that made it so much richer.

Last Dinner of our Journey Together, in Phnom Penh