Hanoi, our last stop!

Hi all,
Well we've arrived in Hanoi and our tour of Vietnam has officially ended. Not only that, this is the last stop on this grand adventure before we go back to the NZ!! But the blogging won't stop here!! please keep up with us as there are tons more pictures and vids to put up plus more travel stories to tell.

Some quick thoughts on The Trip...
While on a snorkelling excursion in Cambodia I was talking about our grand adventure to a Dutch girl and she asked "Voot you ever do dish again?" Although I've never asked myself that question, without hesitation I answered "No". While 7 months travelling has left me with experiences I will never forget, has taught me things about myself, has brought me closer to Gay in ways that only stressful travelling can, had hands on learning experiences with exotic cultures and religions, got fat on great food, got great pictures and stories and bought some cool silk wall hangings and a tailor made jacket....I will never do it again. Truly a once in a lifetime experience for me. Exhausting to say the least and I'll be glad to be back not only on familiar soils but also amongst familiar people. The next time we travel it will be for a shorter duration, maybe only 5 months ;-)

Thoughts on our Vietnam organized tour...
Our Intrepid tour was great in the sense that it was exactly what Gay and I needed which was to have all the difficult parts of traveling handled for us. Of course it wasn't all stressless; there are minor things that pop up (mostly regarding money and tipping) and also you're not sheilded in any sense from the ever present people in your face selling you crap and trying to rip you off. Now that we're at the end of the tour I get the feeling that we didn't experience the country in the down and dirty way that we would have if we were to have planned it ourselves. I think it's because we weren't travelling the way a local would travel, we didn't have a lot of time to explore areas, plus we were definitly on a well traversed tourist trail. Would I do an organized tour again? Yeah, I probably will eventually because it does have major benefits, first and foremost is that you get a guide which can answer any question at any point of the trip. But you trade that for not being able to experience a place by finding your own way through.

Whats Next...
A flight to NZ on Dec 3rd, so a couple more days here to hang around and do some last minute shopping..anyone need some cheap silk, some fine bamboo products or some dog meat? We'll spend a couple weeks in NZ and then meet up with Gay's family for 5 days in Tahati!! We've been talking and thinking about Tahiti for longer than we care to admit. In fact, at one point in India, we made a pledge to ourselves not to talk about Tahiti until we were back in NZ. After that we still talked about it but just referred to it as "that which should not be mentioned". After Tahiti it's back to US, not sure when though.

Communism in Vietnam

Hi All,
We're well on our way in Vietnam and the tour has been going very well despite some rain. This is definitly travelling in style as far as Gay and I are concerned. Private air-con bus, fancy hotels with welcome drinks and the farthest we carry our backpacks is from our room to the bus. It's been raining a lot here and there are rumours that our next destination, Hoi An, is truly underwater. We talked to a couple of tourists who had just come from the city and they said they had to get a boat to take them out of thier hotel. Needless to say our tour guide is scrambling but he doesn't seem too concerned.

Communism?
Over here they call the Vietnam War the American War even though the Americans were fighting not only with the South Vietnamese but also Australians, New Zealanders and soldiers from a lot of other near by countries. In the beginning of the tour we saw 2 sights that concentrated on the Vietnam war; the War Remanents Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Both of these I felt were decidedly anit-American. The Remanants museum becuase it had a lot of gruesome pictures with captions like "Americans brutily tortured the Vietnamese" or "Americans killed innocent civilians". At the Cu Chi Tunnels we watched a video that was obviously made recently but looked as if it was actual war footage. The voice said things like "..here is Kim, she bravely fought the Americans and won an award for the most Americans killed in a single battle." Kim is shown waving with her gun with fake machine gun fire effects in the background. I felt pretty offended at these things, and when our tour guide started using the same rhetoric I talked with him. He's a young guy, only 2 years younger than myself and he has as much first hand war experience as me; none.

After that, I read some more about the history of the Vietnam War and I realized that it actually was the Americans doing most of the killing and planning and I also got a good explaination of why we went to Vietnam in the first place; and that was Communism, or really, the fear of it. Yes, the Communist North Vietnamese beat us and as a result the government turned Communist and has been ever since, even today. I'm glad I've gotten a chance to see, first hand, Vietnam and China, probably the 2 big Communist governments today. The truth is that modern Communism is nothing more than capitalism with the government having a tighter control of the people. The markets are wide open and people can go out and buy fancy clothes and bling-bling motorbikes and our tour guide said you can even buy a Rolls Royce for 1.5 million USD. The difference between us and them is that we can say publicly that our government sucks, they can't. Now the anti-American talk doesn't bother me, but what's more frustrating is thinking about what all the fighting and killing and Napalm use was for. We killed to erradicate communism but now it's not too different from how we live. If we would have know what modern Communism would look like I think we would have just said "yeah fine go for it".

Vietnam Update

Hi All,

We left Cambodia on Nov. 4th which makes it 7 countries in as many months. We made it safely to Vietnam and this will most likely be our last country on this tour before heading back to New Zealand. As Gay mentioned in her last post we have joined a tour from the Intrepid company and I'm really glad we did as it's really nice to not have to worry about where to stay, where to go, and how to get there. Although we've been in Ho Chi Minh city for about 2 days already today was officially our first day of the tour and we started it off with an enjoyable bike-taxi ride around the city. So far so good, we have a good mix of ages and nationalities in the group.

More on India; I can't seem to shake it

Even though Gay and I have been out of India for quite awhile I still can't stop thinking about it. Cambodia and SE Asia are great places to travel but I miss the depth and awe-value of seemingly everyday experiences with thos of India. A couple of posts ago I put up a video of Gay getting blessed by an elephant. Unfortunatly, what that video doesn't show is the temple behind the elephant and the bizarre and ancient ceremony that was taking place. Brahmins (priests) in white loin cloths with thier faces painted in the symbols of Shiva pouring milk and other liquids over a lingum, a Hindu phaillic symbol that looks like a penis coming out of cup. Meanwhile the congration holds incense sticks and chants mantras and a trio of musicians bangs out rhythms and runs through scales that are uniquly Indian. Just outside old and skinny religious pilgrims, people who have been walking around for days, with thier bright oprange loin cloths and scraggly beards are begging for money and Gay is getting bopped on the head by a painted elephant. And that's just the usual afternoon service.

Whats Next

We're going to spend the next 20 days with the Intrepid group touring Vietnam from south to north. We end up in Hanoi and if all goes according to plan (which is easier said than done; we've been dealing with some ticket home dramas for the past 2 weeks) we'll be back in New Zealand by the Dec. 4th.

Pictures

Sad news about pictures and video. I seem to have contracted a virus or viruses on our camera data cards. I wanted to post heaps of pics today but I just spent a half hour freaking out with a poorly written anti-virus program that decided to delete 3 months worth of pictures from my card. So instead of going through that again we decided to wait until we get back to NZ to deal with it and post some pictures when it's all sorted.