Here’s the second, and last, post summarizing my travels over in Asia. It’s basically consists of stories/interesting places from three of my favorite countries.
Vietnam
Vietnam was probably my favorite country of the lot. I got to travel with 7 other friends I met in Hong Kong (3 French, a Korean, an Austrian, and a Chilean), and they all made the trip even more fun. It’s a huge place, and although I took a 3 weeks there, I could have easily spent more.
Overall, the best location we went to had to be Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park, which has the biggest caves in the world. My friends and I stayed in a small rural town with some of the freshest Asian food I’ve ever tasted. In the two days we stayed there we rode all over the park on motorbikes (and even raced a little bit on small countryside roads!). The fields outside the park were filled with beautiful karst mountains and layers of rice paddies. In the park, however, mountains opened up into jungle with some of the largest caves I’ll ever see.
The best cave, in my opinion, was the dark cave, which, as a Portuguese man we met told us, had a “special surprise”. Wondering what the surprise was, my friends and I wandered into this completely pitch black cave, following our guide. We walked through for about ten minutes until something started to squish under our feet and before long, we all realized what the surprise was: a mud cavern!!
After washing off in one of the underground pools, we swam in the river for a bit, then took off to the next spot: Paradise Cave (not before being completely dumped on by a passing rainstorm).
Despite the downpour, Paradise Cave was totally worth it. For all you LOTR fans out there, imagine Moria filled with Vietnamese tourists instead of goblins. This cave was HUGE. Cavern after cavern, each the size of an aircraft hanger. I was in love.
The next day, my friends and I rented bikes again, and, after forty five minutes of gunning it down small roads, we found ourselves lost in the rainforest...oops.
Eventually, we struggled our way back to the main road, just in time to rush to the local town and catch an 11 hour train to Hanoi. While the train wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected, there was an entire Vietnamese family who had taken our beds. Getting them out was awkward...but I was so tired I just didn’t care anymore.
Laos
Laos was the most beautiful country we went to. It’s a place filled with villages, temples, farms, and rainforest. This was where my friends and I truly took a turn off of the tourist path and visited a guesthouse we heard about from a friendly Welsh guy in Vietnam (never learned his real name, but his nickname was “Ladyboy”). To get to this guesthouse, we had to take a 5 hour bus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng and ask the driver to drop us off in a small town called Kasi. From there, through hand signals and a bit of mandarin, my friends and I hired a random shop owner to drive us into a small village outside the town. After that, we walked about 3 km and finally found Nola Guesthouse.
The Guesthouse was run by a friendly Lao family and an awesome Italian named Michele. The head of the family, Capitan, was a sweet, but tough Lao man who had been a nurse during the Secret War with Laos and the US. Me, being the only American there, heard some of the most interesting war stories from Capitan (he fought for the US side). Later that night, we ate some beans, squash, and delicious sticky rice for dinner, then chased a few roaches and a spider the size of my hand out of our room before we went to bed.
The next day, Capitan, along with his nephews and their uncle, took us out on a trek through the rainforest. We spent most of the 6 hour hike bushwacking our way down a river, wearing flip flops and holding onto our walking sticks for dear life, trying not to slip into the water. A few of us got leeches on the way to the falls (those things cling on HARD), and Capitan pointed out different things for us to eat in the jungle. Here’s a few of the pictures from the hike:
By the time we made it back to the farming village we were all exhausted and after we had munched on our dinner of lima beans and sticky rice, all of us passed out in the hammocks along a muddy river.
Myanmar
Myanmar itself was an incredibly interesting country. Filled with cultural strife and an unfortunate drug trade, it just recently opened up its borders to tourists. The people were fascinating to talk to, and many of them will walk up to you just to say hi and learn about western culture. Restrictions on freedom of speech have also slowly been eased back, so many locals were eager to talk with us about government issues (something that probably never would have happened a year or so ago).
Anyway, my last story deals with a small incident that I had in Mandalay. My friend, Antoine, and I (we were the only two left traveling out of the original 7 or so), were taking a 10 hour sleeper bus to the city from a small town called Kalaw. It had been our third 10 hour bus in the last week, and it was the last stop of the entire trip, so we were pretty sick of traveling and ready to get to our guesthouse. Finally, at around 3:30AM Mandalay time, our bus pulled up in the city center.
As soon as my friend and I walked outside, the usual barrage of taxi drivers started harassing us. “Taxi, taxi, where you going?”. Too tired to deal with this, we looked up the first hotel in our guidebook, saw it was about a fifteen minute walk, and decided to go. Knowing the taxis would rip us off, we grabbed our backpacks under the bus and shooed the drivers away.
Quietly and briskly, Antoine and I strode down the street. As in typical Myanmar fashion, there was little/no street lighting, and open manholes dotted the sidewalks. Stray dogs darted off in the sides of the streets and occasional barks could be heard. This was all usual for us, as many places in asia have stray dogs, but then we got to the main road, and we realized just how many dogs there were in the streets at 3:30AM. From every alleyway there seemed be at least 3-4 dogs barking back at us.
At the moment, I wasn’t too nervous, and cared more about dog diseases than dog attacks, but nonetheless, Antoine and I found ourselves crisscrossing the road, trying to avoid some of the packs. Eventually though, as we grew closer to the hotel location, the size of the street, just like the amount lighting that went with them, got smaller and smaller. A few times, several dogs would stand in the middle of the road, barking at us, but we would just dip off to the sidewalk and walk past them.
Finally, however, we reached an alleyway the hotel was meant to be down. Turning into it, we walked down the dark, building encased street until we had reached the end. But when we hit it, I realized our hotel wasn’t there, and as I turned back to start exiting the alleyway, there was barking. Looking up, I saw six stray dogs blocking our way.
That’s when I really started to panic. As the dogs growled, they began to slowly approach us. When they began to gain speed, I backed up quickly, then turned to run.
However, before I could take off, I felt Antoine’s hand grab my shoulder. “No, no, we’ve got to show them we’re the boss!” he said to me. And with that, he turned towards the dogs, and ran at them. Immediately, they all stopped approaching us and took several steps back. Following in suit, I stepped hard at the dogs, and they went back even farther.
After several more rounds of this, we were able to force the dogs out of the alleyway. Then, ten more minutes later, we found ourselves banging on the locked gate of our hotel, several more streets down from the alleyway. Breathing heavily, I looked around at the fading lobby and passed out from exhaustion on the couch, happy to have made it.
Conclusion
This post officially wraps up the end of my study abroad blogging experience (though of course I’ll continue with my jumbo blog). I’ll definitely miss the times I had in Asia, and although it truly was unbelievable, I will refuse to throw out the cliche “my study abroad experience changed my life” line.
Instead, I’ll end my post encouraging all Tufts students to take the experience abroad. No matter the constraint, financial, academic (looking at YOU, engineers), whatever, just find at least a few months where you can live in a different country. School and classes aren’t forever, and I personally think both living and traveling in Asia gave me much more real world experience than any class has or would have. And while that certainly does not apply to everybody, it does apply to some. So for all of you current and future Jumbos, if you ever find yourself completely engrossed by not only the Tufts, but the college experience, look out beyond that, and remember that there’s a whole “real” world out there just waiting for you to take the leap.