a day in Singapore

I woke up at eight o'clock.

I passed a bundle of laundry to the desk clerk.

I asked for a towel and got one.

I showered and shaved. 

I marched down Kitchener and Serangoon Roads to the Mustafa Centre, where I exchanged 220 Thai baht, 10 U.S. dollars, and 361 Malaysian ringgit for 161 Singapore dollars. 

While I was there, I bought a padlock for my defunct locker back at Tresor Tavern.

All this I accomplished before eleven o'clock. 

I went back to the hostel and sat in the lobby, sweating, updating my journals and letting my parents know I was still alive. I also spent some time writing down the addresses of everything I wanted to see and eat in this town today (Thursday, July 31). 

I went to Chinatown to check out the Heritage Centre and was told it cost $10 SGD to get in. 

I said "Screw that with a pitchfork." 

I went to the foodie street and had some laksa, a spicy noodle soup in greasy orange broth which is central to Peranakan (Chinese-Malay) cuisine and Malaysia's national dish. It consists of rice vermicelli (though this touristy dump used spaghetti) in coconut milk and curry broth. My bowl included hard-boiled eggs, cockles, bean curd puffs, and bean sprouts, and cost $4.50 SGD.

I did not take a food selfie. Too hungry. 

On an impulse I walked across South Bridge Street and caught the open-top sightseeing bus for $25 SGD. We swung out west, down shady, tree-lined Havelock and Zion Roads, curving up to the Botanical Gardens (the one thing in Singapore that I didn't see and wish I had). Then we went dead east on Orchard Road. As clean, bright, and shiny as this city was, dazzlingly clear as it dried from the previous night's rain, there wasn't much to it besides shopping, eating, and authoritarianism. "HAPPY 49th BIRTHDAY, SINGAPORE!" squawked loud orange banners on every lamppost, but on the subway trains were stern admonishments to the citizens to be polite when boarding or exiting, to move to the back or offer your seat to an invalid. Public service announcements printed starkly in black, white, and red urged citizens to perform the vital five-step method to eradicate dengue fever (promptly emptying every container on your property of standing water). 

What was most jarring was seeing so many Occidental franchises. Malaysia and even Cambodia had KFC and Starbucks, and Seoul has Burger King and McDonalds and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but Singapore was just mad—Long John Silver's, California Pizza Kitchen, Coldstone Creamery, Quizno's Subs, and everything else British or American. I was disappointed. Foreign excursions are supposed to be...well, foreign. And I hated to think that the average Singaporean's idea of western culture was a soggy McDonald's sandwich, some limp fries and a syrupy soft drink. 

The Singapore River. Really takes your breath away, doesn't it? 

After a short foray north and east to Sungei Road, the sightseeing bus dumped us out at the Singapore Flyer. Think the London Eye, but bigger—"the world's tallest observation wheel," proclaimed the posters and brochures. That was a blatant falsehood, as the High Roller in Las Vegas is actually taller, but I'm not the quibbling type—not when sweat's soaking my collar and the red bandanna I'd tied around my right hand and wrist for mopping and sopping purposes. 

Pro tip, kids: this is more fashionable than wrapping it around your forehead and more sanitary than sticking it back in your pocket after every wipe. Just be prepared for lots of concerned fellow travelers to ask you how you hurt your wrist. 

I caught the next bus to Clarke Quay and switched to the metro. I went back to the hostel, rested, rehydrated, and wrote some postcards (the fifth of seven batches). At 6:45, a time I judged with a pilot's careful precision, I caught a taxicab back to the Flyer to see the sunset from on high. 

The Flyer isn't very popular with the locals. According to TIME, they gripe that it's too far away from everything and costs too much. I didn't sympathize with the former sentiment but certainly the latter: tickets were $33 SGD. Concordantly, there wasn't much of a crowd. I rolled up at seven o'clock, bought a ticket, hustled through all the supplementary bullshit they put up to make waiting in line more interesting—planetariums and historical placards and whatnot—and got some fantastic views of the downtown area and Marina Bay. 

Then, of course, I went to O'Leary's Sports Bar & Grill—foreigner-owned and foreigner-run, looking like it had sprung from any broad boulevard in the Inland Empire—for a nightcap. What else but a Singapore sling? 

It was weak and sickly-sweet and cost $17 SGD, but what the hell. I can say I've had a Singapore sling in Singapore. 

I'd meant to sample the best that Little India could offer me in the way of eats, but my internal compass was taking a much-deserved rest. I couldn't find my intended destination, Bali Nasi Lemak in Geylang. So I went back to the neighborhood of my hostel and sat down in the same little halal Sri Lankan/Thai cafeteria where that snaggle-toothed Samaritan Singaporean had bought me a bottle of water the previous evening. I had some iced lychee juice and a plate of nasi goreng thai for just $4.50 SGD. For afters I had some sort of fried fish dumpling, also delectable. I couldn't discern the waiter's thick Tamil accent when I asked what it was. Sounded like "kampop." 

I got an A&W root beer for dessert (you don't see those every day in Asia) and returned to the hostel to update my journals. My time in Singapore was at an end. The next morning I would mail postcards, check out of the Tresor Tavern at noon, and catch the metro for Changi Airport. 

If you'd like to find out why I hate Singapore, come back tomorrow. 

Butterworth to Singapore (the worst bus ride ever)

Long story short: 

I was forced to ride a bus from Butterworth to Johor Bahru in southern Malaysia, and thence to Singapore. Thanks to Hari Raya, the end of Ramadan, all the trains were booked up. It was a rumbling, clattering misery machine a bus to Singapore or nothing at all. 

I woke up at 5:45 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, July 30, slipped downstairs in the predawn darkness, gave my postcards and 10 ringgit to the night clerk and asked him to mail them for me, and caught the first ferry to the mainland at 7:00 sharp, crossing a calm strait under the pale light of dawn.

What little information I could find online suggested that express buses to Singapore (Woodlands) would be readily available. Apparently those were all booked up too. The best I could do was catch an express bus to the border town of Johor Bahru at 8:30 and figure things out from there. It was a nice bus, at least. It was plentifully air-conditioned, clean, and had seats which reclined fully. I settled in for a long ride and was just getting comfortable when...

...bam, we were in Kuala Lumpur. 

Not my photo. 

A skinny shrimp of a 2nd-generation Chinese-Malay woman kicked everybody going to Gelang and Johor Bahru off the bus. With her hectoring voice, baseball cap pulled low over her eyes, and flicking ballpoint pen, she herded us out of KL Sentral Station and across the street to a pair of considerably older, dirtier, hotter, and less comfortable green buses. A pair of creased, loud-voiced fellows in polo shirts and jeans with walkie-talkies clipped to their back pockets shouted as us to load our luggage and get aboard, and be quick about it. 

Then the agony began. We'd already been on the road five or six hours, but we happy few going to Johor Bahru would remain for a further 8.5 aboard that boiling, filthy bus with precious few rest stops, no food, and shock absorbers that amplified every bump in the road. 

You can't imagine how glad I was to stumble off that accursed machine at Larkin Sentral Station in Johor Bahru, wobbly-legged, sweat-grimed, weak-stomached, bleary-eyed, and foul-tempered. For my trials were not yet over: I thereupon boarded another bus, the 170 for Queen Street in Singapore. I got on and off that bus three freaking times—once to exit Malaysia (and get my exit stamp from a callous-looking woman in a black hijab), once to enter Singapore at Woodlands (which necessitated waiting in line for 40 minutes, and I had to go back to the end of the line once because I forgot to fill out a damn entry card), and finally to go through customs inspection. Each time I stepped off the bus into the steamy night air, my glasses fogged up and my pores began oozing sweat. It crusted my hair, soaked my skin and clothes, and soured my mood. I hate sweating and I hate climates like what they've got down in Southeast Asia, irresponsibly warm and humid. Furry mammals—particularly clothed human beings—have no business living in places like that. It's better if we leave the whole cockamamie place to the reptiles.

At nearly eleven o'clock, 17 hours after waking up, 14.5 hours after leaving Butterworth, and three hours after arriving in Johor Bahru, the 170 bus dumped me out on Queen Street. I had to walk another five or six blocks (and ask a kindly cabbie for directions) but I made it to my hostel, the Tresor Tavern on Jalan Besar in Little India near Farrer Park. Before entering I tried to buy a much-needed 1.5-liter bottle of water with my debit card, but the Sri Lankan shopkeeper didn't have a card reader. That's when a random Singaporean, a tottering old fellow with a shock of gray hair, bulging eyes, and a broad mouth filled with crooked teeth lurched up to the counter to buy a pack of gum. He and a friend had been sitting and eating and boozing it up for who knew how long before I'd walked in. This elderly Samaritan grokked the situation in a blink. Without hesitation he bought the 1.5 liters of water for me, and handed me ten Singapore dollars on top of that. Then he lurched away without waiting for a thank-you. I honestly didn't know what to do, say, or think, and that combination's rare for me. You hear a lot about the kindness of strangers when you're out traveling the world, but the reality of it really hits you in the old heartstrings. That first drink was the coolest and sweetest gulp of water I've ever had.  

My rehydrated corpse hit the rock-hard mattress of the Tresor Tavern's third-floor mixed dormitory at almost midnight. The room had twelve beds, bunked and curtained, the frames bare metal and the rings squeaky. The floor was concrete, the walls bare, the ceiling choked with exposed pipes—"Like a jail," said my elderly Indian roommate. Garbage was stacked atop every locker, none of which actually locked. The wireless Internet only worked on the ground floor, none of the upper floors. It seemed I would have to physically place an order for a towel. Two things did work, however: the air conditioner and the light switch. 

Good night! 

Siem Reap to Bangkok

I was a bit delayed getting out of Siem Reap. I'd asked the front desk of the King Boutique Hotel to book me a ticket with Nattakan, the bus company which ran the direct Siem Reap-to-Bangkok route (and for just $30!). 

Well, the price was right. Nobody showed up to get me at eight o'clock, so the hotel manager made a call. Twenty minutes later a tuk-tuk showed up to get me to the bus, and a harried-looking young Cambodian woman in business casual took my name and money and helped me stick my luggage in the cargo compartment. The seat I'd reserved was taken, so I sat in the very back of the bus near the lavatory, which suited me just fine. We pulled out of Siem Reap at 8:20 (twenty minutes late). "Looks like this company couldn't find its ass with two hands and a flashlight," I wrote in my journal. 

Matters improved by 10:45, when we hit Poipet. The Thai-Cambodian border was one of the few things about the trip I'd been dreading. I'd heard that Poipet was about as seedy as Cambodia gets, with scammers and four-flushers and pickpockets on every street and around every corner. Worse yet were the rumored passport scams and false visa sellers. Our faithful bus crew spared us that hassle. They steered us dauntlessly through the milling crowd of Thais, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and Chinese at the border, lined us all up in neat rows in front of the actual, factual visa office, and then led us down a kilometer of dusty road, through a series of impressive gates, and over a bridge (which the Brits had paid for and the Thais had built) and into Thailand proper. I was one of the first of the bus passengers through, so I had to wait around in the hot, breezy, overcast day on the much cleaner Thai side for everyone else to pass through. I remember having to pee very badly as I watched heavy trucks loaded with manufactured goods and timber lumber to and fro along the unpaved road and across the border. 

After a microwave lunch aboard the bus, I began to nod off. We breezed through eastern Thailand, which was far cleaner, better kept, and spacier than Cambodia had been. Landscaped medians lined the highways and there wasn't a single piece of garbage in sight. The skinny Brahman cows had disappeared, as had the hammocks; now we saw neat condominiums and farmhouses with green and well-tended rice fields beside them. The only evidence of the coup was the occasional roadblock, where a uniformed military policeman with a crisp camouflage uniform and a pistol at his hip would clamber aboard, give us all a hard look, and then wave the bus onward. I have no idea what the purpose of these roadblocks was. Security? Searching for fugitive insurgents? Keeping tabs on the movements of people around the countryside? I suppose I'll never know, because I was soon distracted by our arrival in Bangkok. 

The place was huge. It took us 30-40 minutes to get from the city's eastern limits to the northern bus terminal. On a highway. The skyline was quite impressive, too: whereas most cities are just a cluster of skyscrapers surrounded by squatter suburbs, Bangkok seemed to be an unending sea of four- and five-story buildings with the occasional impressive spire of a high-rise thrusting up out of it, some of them so far away from the center of town that they were barely visible in the thin blue haze. 

At the northern terminal I leaped off the bus, grabbed my pack out of the storage compartment, and tried to get ahead of the press for taxicabs. Fortunately there were enough hot pink cabs outside the station gates to ferry a convention downtown. One brown, skinny, middle-aged gent with a baseball cap and a polo shirt, whose license card proclaimed him to be a Mr. Senkham, snatched me up and led me to his car. I could barely understand his friendly questions ("You from Rob Angelit?"). I dumped my stuff in the back seat and climbed into the front. With his crooked teeth showing, Senkham handed me his rate card. Yep, Thailand was definitely a richer country than Vietnam or Cambodia: a simple ride into town would be 1200 baht, or nearly $40 American. My jaw hit the floor. Even the Skyliner from Narita Airport to Ueno Station in Tokyo didn't cost that much. My hand clamped down on the door handle and I was about to bail out when Mr. Senkham said "No better rate, boss. All standard." 

It didn't even occur to me to argue or haggle. Tired and bedraggled and just wanting to get to Bangkok already, I closed the door and nodded my head in defeat. Off we went. Forty minutes and forty dollars later, I was standing outside of my hostel, Boxpackers. Mr. Senkham happily took my money and rocketed off. I didn't have enough Thai baht, so I gave him forty U.S. dollars. I didn't tip him, but since 1200 baht was $38.72 in July of 2014, he got a tip and he knew it. 

I had to fill out some silly questionnaire and a thousand other forms at the front desk, but then I got my key and headed upstairs. 

I climbed into my surprisingly spacious cubicle, closed the curtain, updated my journals, remembered that I was thirsty and hungry and went back downstairs and around the corner to the 7-11 for some water and snacks, and then came back upstairs and went to bed. 

The next day would prove to be a very aggravating day...with an unexpected reward at the end. Stay tuned. 

to Phnom Penh by bus

Travel Truth #3: Happy accidents do happen. Especially at dinnertime. 

My Vietnam-Cambodia hop went off without a hitch. I awoke, dressed, went downstairs, and paid $20 for my laundry, a bottle of water and a ticket to Cambodia. Now that's my kind of trip, right there. The receptionist arranged for a shuttle ride to get me to the bus terminal and before I knew it I was in a tiny, rollicking minivan with half a dozen other would-be passengers, including a sweet old Thai gentleman whose name I shall never be able to pronounce, let alone spell. We boarded our bus at the station, handed over $25 apiece and our passports to be stamped with Cambodian visas, and took off for the border. 

We were on Cambodian soil by 11:20. We made three stops at the border: one to get our entry forms, one to get our visas, and the third for lunch—a spacious open-ended warehouse of a building with a corrugated tin roof and orange tile floors, so cool that a couple of lazy dogs were sprawled down and napping upon it, flies buzzing about their noses. I had chicken and green beans over rice, which I was somehow able to pay for with Vietnamese money (only $2 American). I sat with the nice Thai gentleman and his bent, wrinkled, sleepy friend, who didn't speak a word of English and was wearing a Saigon souvenir baseball cap with the price tag still on it. 

While we chatted, there came a noise like an oncoming freight train. A mild hiss became a rattle, and the rattle an earth-shaking roar. The monsoon rains were pounding down on the tin roof, each drop as big as a .50-caliber bullet, and you could hardly hear yourself think. The Thai gent and I finished our conversation at a yell and then boarded the bus to continue our journey. 

My impressions of Cambodia weren't that different from Vietnam—the two countries looked pretty similar. But the countryside here was dustier, flatter, trashier, poorer, and the people were decidedly more Indian-looking. I saw hump-backed, cud-chewing Brahman cattle, houses on stilts, wells with tin-roofed cupolas, ponds covered with lily pads and filled with garbage, and locals napping in hammocks—hammocks strung between stanchions, between stilts, between fence posts and walls, even between trees at the side of the road. Hammocks everywhere. 

About a half hour before we made Phnom Penh, the bus nosed its ponderous way onto a car ferry and we crossed the broad, rambunctious, muddy Mekong. 

We reached the city at about 3:30 in the afternoon. The outskirts of the town were dirty and dingy, with more of the hollow, crumbling buildings and skewed thoroughfares as Hanoi had possessed—but the Cambodian roads were mostly unpaved and the rotting buildings even dustier and more decrepit-looking. Even the highway from Saigon had been gravel for miles at a stretch. 

I jumped off the bus and nabbed the first tuk-tuk driver I could find. I forked over $5 for a ride across the north-central part of town to my hotel. Five bucks was a bit steep—I overheard other foreigners getting rides for $3—but I acquiesced, as it was the same price I'd have paid for a cab in HCMC. 

My room at the Amber House near Wat Langka wasn't ready for me when I arrived, so I was bowed into a gigantic room with two double beds across the hall. 

The funniest thing was that they had Korean comedy/variety shows on TV. With English subtitles. And as one of my coworkers from Sejong pointed out, they still weren't funny. 

I showered to get the sweat and travel grime off me, rested up for a couple of hours, and then walked to the Independence Monument and the king's memorial and snapped some shots of each. 

I had dinner at the Herb Cafe, a tourist trap of a restaurant and bar just a couple of doors down from my hotel, right across the T-intersection from Wat Langka. I hated myself for even setting foot in it. There was nobody else there but for a young, bespectacled, alarmingly skinny French hipster (perusing a tiny notebook and sipping a cocktail); a tubby, neck-bearded tourist in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts; and an elderly business traveler with a pressed blue cotton shirt and black slacks. I glanced over the menu and picked the first dish that looked good—Khmer amok—plus a whiskey sour. A full meal and an aperitif all for the low-low price of seven U.S. dollars. Zounds. I began to take a (brief) shine to Cambodia. 

I found out later that, quite by accident, I had ordered the country's national dish. Amok is a curry steam-cooked in banana leaves, with thick coconut cream and galangal being integral ingredients. Khmer amok with fish is one of Cambodia's core culinary traditions, though amok can be made with everything from chicken eggs to bamboo shoots to algae. All I can tell you is that the Khmer amok I had at the Herb Cafe near Wat Langka was spellbinding in its spicy savoriness, though (true to my code), I did not take any pictures of it. You'll just have to imagine it. Or better yet, make it yourself and try it. 

Because I had nothing to do when I'd finished my meal (but not my second whiskey sour), I struck up a conversation with the French hipster. As I'd suspected, the tiny notebook in his hands was a handmade Khmer primer. The fellow was trying to teach himself the alphabet while he sat and waited for his Buddhist friends to stop meditating in the nearby Wat Langka. His name was Erwin and he'd been working in financial administration at a local French school for the past eight months. We chatted for a few minutes until I drove him away with my questions, and he packed up and went in search of his friends. I stepped across the road into Samaky, another trendy open-air saloon with liquor bottles arranged on illuminated glass shelves along the back wall. I had a few glasses of Angkor Draft (75 cents each) and stared at the laughing clump of Cambodian ladies in the corner booth and the brooding old white dude with the natty, gnarled dreadlocks hanging down his sunburned, tank-topped back. Then I felt lonely and bored and went back to my deliciously cool room to plan tomorrow's escapades. 

Next up: the first and only full day in Phnom Penh. Prawn shooters are involved. 

Ho Chi Minh City, day three

By prior agreement, nobody in our little clique stirred before noon. We recuperated separately at our respective rooms and convened at 12:30 to revisit the Hungry Pig for some more of their cracking bacon sandwiches. They weren't chintzy with the HP Sauce this time around, either. I went the whole hog, so to speak, and got a fried egg on mine this time. 

Then we split up for the day. Jeff went off with Adam for a foodie crawl across Saigon's underbelly while Jenn and I caught a cab to Notre Dame. 

I also managed to sneak into the big colonial post office and send off some postcards to friends and family. 

I was in a bad way. My cheap Airwalk flip-flops were already three months old by the time I took them on this trip, and all the tread had been worn off the soles. This left me with zero traction on the rain-slicked Saigon sidewalks. I was slipping and sliding all over the place. I came damn near to breaking a leg (or a neck) half a dozen times. It was as if every inch of the ubiquitous square-cut cement tiles with which sidewalks in Southeast Asia are paved was covered with black ice. I prayed to Our Lady of Surface Tension to save my hide as Jenn and I marched to the national history museum, shabby but informative. 

We had a nice nap and then met with Jeff and Adam at 5:30. Jeff clung to the back of Adam's sleek black scooter like a terrified limpet. We caught a cab to the Bitexco Financial Tower, rode an express elevator to the 52nd floor, and drank Manhattans and Long Island iced teas for 290,000 VND apiece (fifteen U.S. dollars!).

The invisible sun sank down behind the murky overcast and Uncle Ho's damp, water-stained namesake city grew dark. The high-rises and spiderweb streets lit up and Saigon was suddenly indistinguishable from any other 21st-century metropolis. Jeff, Jenn, and Adam schmoozed about how fun the place was, but as I sat there with them and stared out the rain-streaked window, I felt nothing but disgust. I was fed up with the garbage piles in the streets, the homicidal scooter drivers, the persistent hawkers, the mawkish artificiality of modernized Asian culture, the pervading sense of cultural smugness about the outcome of an old war, and a thousand other things. I wasn't ready to part company with my pals just yet, but I was eager to get on with my trip and get out of this benighted country. 

I did get a consolation prize that evening, though. Stacey showed up with a friend, Danielle, and we all got a cab to May, a very upscale restaurant in Ward Dakao, District 1. We walked through a dark alley for a few dozen meters until the imposing facade of a restored colonial villa emerged seductively from behind a veil of arica palms like a forgotten but welcoming mistress. Smiling, skinny waiters in light cotton shirts ushered us inside, past the steamy kitchen with its enormous glass windows and up a narrow mahogany staircase to a parlor-like dining room decorated in the vintage French style. Billing itself as one of the healthiest and tastiest restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City ("NO MSG!" screamed the mission statement on the menu's first page), May employs top-shelf ingredients and French-trained chefs to craft a staggering array of delectable fusion dishes. I had the chicken soup, the stuffed squid, the prawns in tamarind sauce, and even a dollop of choco-coffee ice cream. The portion sizes were generous and yet my end of the bill came to just 260,000 dong, not quite $15—the price of a single cocktail on the 52nd floor of the Bitexco Financial Tower. 

After that scrumptious meal (in fine company) there was nothing to do but go back to Green Suites and pack up my things. I'd be leaving on the bus for Phnom Penh the next day at eight o'clock sharp. During our Skype chat that evening, Miss H and I came to a rather momentous decision—one whose repercussions I feel even as I sit here typing this post. We agreed that she would quit her job at Gangnam SLP and return home to the Mojave, while I would stay in Korea only as long as it would take to finish up the fall semester at Sejong University. My thoughts that night were full of the task ahead. As I noted in my journal, "I need to find a place to live..."

Ha-ha. Wait until I tell you about how all that fell out. But it'll have to wait until this travel tale is done. Next up: the first Cambodia post. 

Ho Chi Minh City, day two

As mentioned priorly, Jeff, Jenn, and I had booked tours at a small streetside stall across the road from 23 September Park on Wednesday, July 16. It was one of those charming little tour-booking stands that pop up in the touristy areas of Asian cities. This one did double-duty—it moonlighted as a laundromat. A pair of whirring washing machines stood behind the two clerks as they took our names and our cash and put Jeff and me down for a half-day trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, and Jenn down for a full day. 

After a refreshing night's sleep, the three of us met up at that same streetside stall at half-past dawn on Thursday, July 17, clutching a few limpid banh mi in our hands and looking bleary-eyed and exhausted. We clambered aboard our air-conditioned buses (and Jenn aboard hers) and off we went. I was too fuddled to make much sense of the countryside in between HCMC and the Cu Chi tunnels, but I remember a lot of rice paddies, banana trees, and water buffalo. We made a pit stop along the way—a rather political one, a warehouse-type compound where Vietnam's disabled and handicapped crafted pottery and decorative tiles for tourists to shell out way too much money for. I used the word "shell" intentionally: it was made clear to us that this organization had got started as a way to prevent Vietnamese civilians who'd been injured by U.S. bombs in the war from starving to death in the aftermath. 

Our stop was mercifully brief. We did bump into Jenn, and said hello at her. Then it was off to the tunnels. Our tour guide Mr. Ly wasn't young by any means, but he was short and lean and wiry and there wasn't a grey hair on his head. He had big, calculating eyes, a wide mouth full of white teeth, a baseball cap perched cockily on his head, a grey polo shirt and frayed jeans. His voice was loud and resonant and his accent almost impenetrable. (He pronounced "Cu Chi" like "Goji.") He was a crafty old devil, too. Right from the get-go he set himself to tugging our heartstrings and fostering indignity on behalf of the righteous socialist republic of Vietnam. He claimed to have been born in 1977, a few years after the war's end, in a one-room shack in the countryside with no running water or electricity, and to a maimed mother. Pulled himself up by his bootstraps, he did, moving to Saigon and becoming a tour guide. Well, he'd certainly been at this job a while, and it was evident in the foreigner-aimed jokes he made and the expert showmanship he displayed. Under his supervision, we disembarked from the buses and made our way along neat sidewalks through the jungle to a series of recessed barracks and makeshift bunkers, where we were treated to a propaganda film detailing the V.C.'s use of the tunnels to fight American incursion. 

Then it was time for a little preview. Ly led us to a unremarkable clearing and asked us to hunt for one of the "Goji tunnels." We were unable to locate it. Ly kicked aside some leaves and unveiled a trapdoor the size of your average breakfast tray there in the muddy, silty soil. He knocked the lid off with the toe of his Nike trainers and dared one of us to step forward and insert ourselves into it. The tunnel had been expanded to accommodate our Western...generousness-ness, he assured us. Moreover the tunnel beneath was only twenty yards long and the exit was close at hand, a couple of right turns away from the exit. (He did issue us a dire warning not to head left, or "you be in Cambodia before sunset." 

And then this happened:

And, about 45-60 seconds later, this:

I didn't hear much about how the experience went, as the sap in question was too busy explaining it to his friends in low tones as Ly herded us to the next teaser (a V.C. spike trap). But I did hear him mention bats. Icky. 

And so we made our way through the tamed, trimmed, and somewhat-less-than-virgin Vietnamese jungle, moving from exhibit to exhibit. We saw a lineup of diabolical V.C. spike traps (you can research those if you want; they're a bit too horrific for this blog). We saw a wrecked, gutted American tank, destroyed by the patriotic yahoos from the cover of their tunnels. 

There were also several conspicuously-labeled B-52 bomb craters lying about: 

Then it was time for the kicker, the climax, the reason we'd all come along: a hundred-meter stretch of tunnel (widened for our convenience, but not our comfort) which Ly dared us to brave. Half the tour group took him up on it, including Jeff and me. There we all were, hot, sweaty, greasy, and gritty from the dirt of the floors and walls scraping against us, in a long line, strung out through a hundred meters of four-foot tall, three-foot wide passageway. It took about 10-15 minutes to traverse those hundred meters, especially due to some unexpected dips and ledges that foiled the less adventurous among us. There were escape hatches for the pansies if we got too claustrophobic or came near to asphyxiating, but nobody used them as far as I could tell. The hot jungle air and bright afternoon sun were welcome changes from those stifling tunnels when Jeff and I finally emerged, dirt-smeared and soaked to the bone. 

Ly stood at the exit, hands behind his back, a smug smile on his face, bobbing back and forth on the balls of his feet. As we emerged, coughing and blinking and stretching, he ominously hinted that the tunnels had originally been three feet high, and that V.C. fighters progressed through them at a running squat, which he demonstrated a few moments later at the exit to the park. He openly ridiculed us for our inability to mimic him; everyone who tried to imitate his peculiar Asian squat fell on their backside, save for one female English hipster with dreadlocks.  

Then we took a relaxing bus ride back to HCMC, sucking greedily at our two-liter bottles of water. We got back to our hotels, cleaned up, and met Adam at around 4:30 for a pregame snack of Saigon beef pho and beer along Nguyen Cu Trinh. Then we walked around the corner to a big open-air eatery on Ho Hao Hon and had more beer, plus some curried eel and blackened frog legs. We got slightly drunk and hotly debated whether the United States truly lost the Vietnam War or not. (You can guess which side of that debate I was on.) 

Curried eel and blackened frog legs, Saigon-style. 

I felt so free and easy that I bought a cigar off a street vendor and smoked it as we walked through District 1's narrow, darkened thoroughfares—staggered, really—to meet Jenn at Baba's Kitchen, an Indian restaurant on Bui Vien Street. I'm not big on Indian grub, but that place was astoundingly good. We feasted on three different types of curry (Northern and Southern Indian), kebab, naan bread, long-grain rice, and a host of delicious side dishes. 

We went to a rooftop bar across the road that was supposed to be having a pub quiz, but due to there being some kind of school holiday, half the foreigners in Saigon had bugged out for parts unknown, and the bar was all but deserted. Undaunted, we made up our own pub quiz, sitting and swilling beers and watching the world go by in the streets and alleys below, grilling each other on nebulous topics like "famous figures of the Cold War" and "dinosaurs." 

Jeff and Adam doing their trivia thing. 

The makings of a mighty good pub crawl were in the air, but I was done. Before we slid out of that place and on to another den of venial sin, I begged off. It was past midnight in Saigon but well after two in Seoul, and my body clock was screaming at me to shut down. I lurched straight back to Green Suites and collapsed into bed.

Tomorrow: the last day in Saigon. After that it's on to Cambodia. You coming? 

Hokkaido diary: a weekend in Busan

2/8: 

11:30 a.m. This'll be the last entry. Meant to write it last night, but a lot of stuff happened.

Landing and disembarking [from the New Camellia] were a breeze. I'm getting to be an old pro at this. Out the hatch, down the ramp, along the skyways, through immigration and customs, out the doors to the ₩1000 Busan Station bus, and through traffic to the station. I stashed my stuff in lockers, grabbed a snack (odeng and ddeokbokki, ₩4000) and spent the next three hours flailing around the area of Nampo, Jungang and the station trying to find a hotel. Busan Tourist Hotel was cheap, but the rooms were old and shabby and reeked of secondhand smoke. Tower Hill Inn, a hundred yards away (so named because it sits at the foot of Busan Tower in Nampo-dong) was way too expensive—₩220,000 per night. I settled on the Tokoyo Inn—cheaper, cleaner, brighter, and near the station. Then I met Adam and his girlfriend Stacey for wang galbi and beer and soju. Adam is reading my novel manuscript. He described it to Stacey and it was like watching a machine I'd built start up and go for the first time. It was wonderful. Stacey expressed interest, and Adam did nothing but praise me (he always does that). I walked out of there with my head the size of a Buick. 

Then I grabbed Miss H at the station, took her to the hotel, and we both passed out. Now we're up and around, getting ready to see the tower, the park beneath it, Nampo Shopping Street, and just make a day of it. Postie out. 

THE END

And so it came to pass that Miss H and I enjoyed a wonderful weekend in Busan. On Saturday we shopped, ate and drank to our hearts' content, toured Yongdusan Park and Busan Tower (pictured above), had dinner with our lovely friend Jenn (congratulations on your recent engagement!) and sped home on the KTX on Sunday happy and fulfilled. 

The view south from Busan Tower, looking over the fishing fleets in the portion of the harbor west of Mount Bongrae.

And now I'm back in Seoul, taking walks, exploring the city, reading, writing, and frantically trying to extend my visa, switch my status from E-2 (foreign instructor) to E-1 (foreign professor), notify the immigration authorities of my impending change of address, head to the Driver's License Authority to get a temporary international driver's license so Miss H and I can rent a car and move our stuff from our apartment in Gwangnaru to our new two-bedroom apartment in...

...drum roll, please...

...GANGNAM!

Hokkaido diary: Mount Moiwa, the Sapporo Beer Museum, and Susukino

2/4:

• 12:45 p.m. After I finished last night's entry, I spoke with Miss H on the phone. Turns out Adam—the friend I was supposed to meet in Busan, got his dates mixed up. He will be in Seoul on the 7, 8, and 9. Darn. Oh well.
  
  I turned on the TV and Cool Runnings was on. Yay! I left it on and took a glorious hot bath that washed away the aches and travel grime. Then I read a few more chapters of The Terror, turned out the light and slept like the dead.
  
  I awoke to bright sunshine, feeling amazingly refreshed. I washed up, dressed, ate the rest of my snacks, and strode into the cold air, bound south for Odori Park and the streetcar station.

• I was crossing over the pedestrian bridge by Sapporo Bus Terminal when I looked over and spotted a scruffy, tanned foreigner emerge from its Stygian gloom. The first thing I noticed was his huge grin. He raised both his hands into the air in a gesture of triumph. Then he spotted me.
  
  
  Far from being embarrassed, his grin grew wider.
  
  "Good morning!" I called.
  
  "Morning!" he called back.
  
  
  "It's cold, mate!"
  
  His accent was Australian.
  
  "Yeah, I love it," I crooned.
  
  "I love it too," he said.
  
  "I could have gone to Thailand," I said, "but not me."
  
  He laughed. "Why go to Thailand when you can come here and do this—" he pounded his thickly-swathed hands together—"with your gloves?"
  
  "I forgot mine," I said, showing him my bare hands. "Pockets."
  
  He laughed again. "Want one?"
  
  With his left hand he removed his right glove (revealing another glove beneath that one) and made a mock-throwing gesture. I raised my arms. 
  
  "No, no, that's all right." 
  
  He laughed a final time. 
  
  "Take care," I said.
  
  "You too."
  
  His grin never faded. 

• I made it to Odori Park, turned west (past a bunch of impressive snow sculptures which shall be unveiled tomorrow) and alighted at the streetcar stop. An old, clanking trolley car (just like those in Kyoto and Kumamoto) pulled me to Ropeway Iriguchi Station. 

• I took two cable cars (regular and mini) to the top of Mount Moiwa and had a look at the knee-deep drifts, bare trees, cawing crows, blue skies, and the whole massive sprawl of Sapporo below. 

I would have been able to see the whole valley (and the mountains and Sea of Japan beyond) but a huge snowstorm was rolling off it and blanketing the town in a sea of gray obscurity.

• I made it back down to Earth and took the tram to Susukino (the fun district) when the storm struck in earnest—huge wet flakes sticking to my clothes and socking me in the eyes. It drove me off the street and into a curry house, where I am now munching on a delicious seafood curry and thinking about hitting the Sapporo beer museum next.
   
  
• 2:45 p.m. Best idea I've ever had. The snow is still bucketing down. This beats everything I ever saw. Sapporo is just getting dumped on. Good thing I switched to indoor activities. 

• I'm sitting in the big 1st-floor beer hall at the Sapporo Beer Museum, sampling their classic brew, their black label (also a favorite of mine) and the KAITAKUSHI beer, made to the original recipe of the brewery, back in the late 1860s and early 70s when it was still a government enterprise. There isn't really much to the museum at all—some blurbs about Hisanari Murahashi, the original project leader, and Seibei Nakagawa, the brewmaster, the first Japanese man to learn brewing in Germany, and the history of the company and the idealness of Hokkaido for good beer-making, etc., etc. The real highlight is this tasting you can do afterward. You order your beer (or a sampler of all three for just ¥500, or $5) and sit around and drink 'em in peace. The nuts are excellent. I have no idea what to do after this—catch the 747 Chuo bus back to Sapporo Station and walk, head down and blinking, back to the hotel. Maybe I'll stop by Hokkaido University on the way and check out Clark's bust. 
  P.S. There's a French couple sitting near me, sampling beer. The dude, a slim, gaunt fellow with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, is wearing a GoPro on his head. THAT IS SO STUPID.
  

• 8:40 p.m. Went back to my hotel and read for a couple hours, then began to think about dinner. I researched a couple of seafood places (Hokkaido's famous for it, especially sushi and crab) but found they were hideously expensive—a good crab dinner will run you $200. So I rode 3 stops down the green (Tozai?) line to Susukino and found TK6 in a big shopping arcade. Brant (who was here in December) recommended it to me. Amazing burgers, loads of great beers and a thrilling selection of cocktails. They had a good choice of odd liqueurs (Frangelico, Pimm's, and others whose names I didn't even recognize, plus ouzo). As I ate and drank, a 27-year-old Japanese fellow named Dai (Japanese for "big") started talking to me. He works in translation here in Sapporo, and speaks English, Italian, and Spanish. He asked what I thought of Korean girls (whiny, childish) and I asked him what the best and worst parts of his job were (meeting famous people and pretending to care about what they think, respectively).
  
  I left and rode the Ferris wheel at Norbesu entertainment center, and got a line on eats for tomorrow (Sushizanmai in Susukino and a yakitori place around the corner).
  

Some footnotes: what I referred to as "nuts" above were actually Sapporo Beer Crackers, which are fantastic with any kind of beer.

The Kitaikushi was the name of the committee in charge of setting up a working government after the end of the Boshin War and the beginning of the Meiji Era. The brewery in Sapporo was founded to stimulate agricultural growth in the area, and the brew claims to use only water, malt, hops, and yeast—no fancy additives. It was delicious, and even gave the Black (my favorite Sapporo brew) a run for its money. I bought a pack of Beer Crackers for ¥500 and a souvenir T-shirt for ¥1600.

Yakitori means "fire chicken." Yaki- is the Japanese prefix used to denote that something's been flame-broiled or grilled or barbecued, much like bul- is in Korean. Yakiniku, bulgogi...it all means "fire meat." Yakitori is barbecued chicken on a stick. I was willing to bet it went well with beer, so I staked a place out just around the corner from the Sapporo Clark.

W.S. Clark, or William Smith Clark for short, was...well, you can just read about him here. That's your homework until the next post.