The Lonely Planless

Monday February 22 is Makha Bucha Day, a public holiday in Thailand. This is relevant to my post insomuch as the weekend beginning on Friday February 19 was the start of a long weekend in Thailand, the capital of which I was residing in on the previous Thursday, where this story shall begin. I was a month into my backpacking and so far I'd been surviving despite a consistent supply of plans. This has always been a dream of mine, living life flexibly and free spiritedly, letting present moments dictate future ones. How freeing it was to be able to spend an extra night in Hoi An after seeing how lovely it was, or to visit a Cambodian town I'd never heard of and discover a French ghost town nearby? A plethora of housing and transportation options had kept me satisfied, even if I sometimes had to take my second or third choice. The happy go lucky life had bit me just a couple times, notably when the start of Chinese New Year cancelled many buses and I found myself in a sedan fitting 8 people, on a shared "taxi ride" making the 3 hour journey from Kampot to Phnom Penh.

When in unfamiliar lands, local holidays can ambush you. The consequences of such are that the plethora of available transportation options are suddenly nowhere to be found. This reality manifested when I gave myself a day's notice to search for options from Bangkok to Chiangmai. Buses were sold out or leaving late in the evening during Bangok's dreaded rush hour and next day trains could only be booked in person at the station. 

And so I was informed at the train station counter that the next available seat to Chiang Mai was a 3rd class hard seater leaving 22:00 Friday night and getting in at 08:00 the next day. For a second I cursed my lack of planning and resigned myself to this fate of fitful sleeplessness, when I realized that if a disdain for firm plans had caused this precariousness, this disdain should equally resolve it. I told the ticket seller to hold off a moment.

I pull up "Central Thailand" on Wikitravel and inquire of the wise crowds what else is cool between here and Chiang Mai? There's Lopburi - known for its Khmer temples and crab-eating macaques. Eh, I'd seen a bunch of Khmer temples just last week. There's Nakhon Pathom - Thailand's oldest city and home of the world's largest stupa. That should provide a noteworthy backdrop. I'm convincing myself to head there when I realize it's barely outside Bangkok and kind of in the wrong direction. In fact apparently the Bangkok metropolitan sprawl devours a lion's share of Central Thailand. I peruse Wikitravel's article on Northern Thailand instantly see Phitsanulok - a good overnight stop between Bangkok and Chiang Mai and a gateway to the Sukhothai historical park. Sold. No sooner had I heard of this destination had I an 8:30am ticket purchased.

Friday, I roll into my Phitsanulok inn around 2:00pm and do my research on this Sukhothai Historical Park. There's the city of Sukhothai which is an hour from Phitsanulok, with the park is on its outskirts. Can I fit in a visit today? The timing looks challenging...but it wouldn't be so much easier tomorrow morning either if I wanted to get to Chiang Mai at a reasonable hour. All sorts of options flood my mind - should I get out super early tomorrow, should I skip these ancient temples altogether? Finally I hucked whatever caution I possess into the wind and que sera sera I head out, intent on taking a taxi straight to the park.

The driver wants 800 Baht to make the one way journey, and no discount for a round trip. He shows me the 10 baht per km rule and I fact check that it is indeed 80km to the ancient city. I resignedly ask the driver to take me to the bus station. The bus ticket to Sukhothai is under 60 baht, but stipulations require I wait until 3:20 for such a bus to depart. It's not until 4:40, well off the ETA, that we arrive in Sukhothai bus station. I see a few westerners on the bus and I ask them if they're going straight to the park - they reject me by stating they're heading to their hostel. Staying in Sukhothai - such a well-formulated idea had not occurred to me. At the bus counter, a suspicion is confirmed - the last bus back to Phitsanulok leaves at 6:00pm. Unfazed, I see a 50 baht shuttle to the park as well as a few motorcycles. The shuttle, really a jeepney or songthaew, is empty so I figure it would leave prompt at 5:00 and power straight to the park, allowing a solid half hour of ancient temple exploration. At 4:55 when it's still empty, I look up the Thai word for "now" and implore to the driver "taw nee? taw nee khrap?" However a flurry of passengers arrive after 5:00, and with the songthaew picking up and dropping off several passengers along the way, it's not until 5:30 that I arrive at the park, a nervous time watching wreck. 

Ok thanks for the photo, I should probably run now

The thought of staying on the songthaew and returning to the bus station flickered across the mind. Instead I boldly plunged into the park like cannon fodder into an onslaught of poor time management. Maybe I don't make that 6:00 bus and I hadn't seen any taxis in this town, but I figure with cunning, guile and 800 baht I could convince someone that they want to drive me to Phitsanulok.

I sprint into the first complex of Stupas. With the sun glowing red low on the horizon, the ancient bricks radiate a healthy orange hue and the scene dazzles.  The individual ruins were not imbued with the majestic grandeur Angkor Wat nor does the site as a whole provide a sense of the visible enormity of Bagan. The park actually feels like a park, your-run-of-the-mill grassy knolls and pleasant meandering paths, except that every so often there'd be a collection of 800 year old stupas, columns and statues. The park is also huge, with the ruins spanning 70 square kilometers, and the city wall center still a couple kilometers wide. You really need a bicycle to properly explore it.

At that first set of ruins, I snap some photographs that satisfy me. I stare out into the reaches of the park and consider the long walks to further ruins. At this point I notice it is still 5:45, and observing the physical and temporal formations present, I call an audible. Let's try to make the bus. I sprint back to the gate and ask a songthaew driver if he can take me back to the bus station in 10 minutes. He agrees for 200 baht. With absolutely zero bargaining power, I jump on and we speed down the Thai roads. I resist the urge to obsessively check the time and the map, and lie back and enjoy the brisk headwinds. We reach the station at 6:02 and I hurriedly hand the driver a 1000 Baht note and run to see if the bus is still there. It is. Thank goodness for Thai promptness. The driver yells that he does not have change. I run to and fro different bus station counters asking for change, but finding instead unhelpful employees about to end their shifts. It's not until the 5th counter that someone opens the cashier and hands me a bunch of notes. I sprint to deliver the 200 baht to the driver, then cut back to the bus.

Except there is no bus. I utter a brief scream: "Phitsanulok!" A motorbike driver gets up and points to the road, and I turn and see the bus pulling out onto the main street. The driver says, "motorbike?" I respond, "how much?" not sure exactly all that his question implies. Does he mean to drive me the 80km to town? "50 Baht!" he responds. Clearly not going to town for such a pittance. "OK!" I yell back, and run to his motorbike, still in the dark about this man's intentions.

He hits the accelerator immediately and we must be up over 30 km/h by the time he hits a speed bump still accelerating. The bump knocks my heartbeat into my throat and I grip the bottom of the seat for dear life. I wonder if it's not too late to give up on this stupid bus and take my chances with a private ride, but it is clearly too late. This bus will be my Moby Dick and it might just kill me. We're on a two lane speedway and my driver swerves in and out of slower cars for the next half mile, hitting the left shoulder to pass a double decker bus before cutting right and pointing at the white minibus. I give him confirmation and he chases after it, pulling up on its right on a red light. He yells into the bus window in Thai, and the bus driver apparently tells him to try the other bus. He points backward at the double decker we passed, which had also left the bus station at the same time, and tells me to go to it. I hand him a 50, suspended in a state of disbelief, and walk in the middle of a major two lane road to this double decker bus parked in traffic. I knock on the door and fortuitously it opens. "Phitsanulok?" "Ok ok, come in."

Final tally: one minibus, two songthaews, one frantic motorcycle ride, one double decker bus, about $350 baht spent on transportation, 15 minutes at UNESCO World Heritage site.

All for this photo

P.S. if we are to continue comparing ancient religious ruins in Southeast Asia, Sukhothai does not have the ancient mysterious vibes of the Myson Ruins in Vietnam, but is more aesthetically amazing. 

x-axis: Your Country, y-axis: The World

If you follow US politics, you might have heard a lot about income inequality recently. The dreaded 1% possess 40% of the country's wealth. Barack Obama has called it "the defining challenge of our time," and Bernie Sanders has essentially built his entire campaign on this issue. I've heard the talking points many times: wages are stagnant, student loans are oppressive, jobs are moving overseas, the wealthiest individuals and corporations are buying politicians and rigging the rules to the profit of their upper management.

I write this paragraph from a minibus, rolling through rural Cambodia, and I agree that those are all problems. But outside my window are symptoms of other problems. I've long suspected that in a world where I'm typing on my iPhone 6s driving past wooden bungalows with thatched or corrugated metal roofs that fat cat CEOs can't be the source of all these problems. Regrettably I didn't study a ton of economics and the mysteries of poverty escaped me. So I printed out some research papers before I left work and brought them along on this trip. I've read a bunch of Branko Milanovic, including his paper on the history of wealth inequality, Peter's paper on the winners and losers of globalization, and Gini's inaugural paper introducing his coefficient in the original Italian. I've also been influenced by Klein's "This Changes Everything" book on climate change that is extremely critical of globalization. And I think I have a few more answers now. (All are recommended reading except Gini, that was just for fun)

Inequality has gotten far worse in the age of globalization. Milanovic estimates that the Global Gini was 0.55 in the 1820's and 0.65 in 2002. Inequality overall fell somewhat since 1980, but almost entirely because China emerged from stifling communist economic policies into a world power, with hundreds of millions lifted, or perhaps dragged, out from extreme poverty, many into a legitimate middle class. Additionally, income inequality between countries is greater, far greater, than inequality within countries. In many ways, this latter fact is obvious, if so rarely addressed. Furthermore, while globalization has created some jobs in developing nations, it mostly has increased global consumption. Corporations keep retreating to areas where labor and environmental standards are more and more reduced, saving costs and keeping the savings largely to their own upper management (and shareholders).  The rich get to buy more things and the majority of that money goes to the even richer. As nearly all the richest multinational corporations and their boards are from the richest countries, this has aggravated global inequality.

The status quo amongst nations remains largely because our world of nations is not set up to address other people's problems. I think we can identify these problems - the largest seem to be infrastructure, whether physical or intangible. There aren't good enough roads, pipes or wires. There aren't good enough schools, doctors, understanding of contraception, financial knowledge etc. And the governments are too corrupt. So even if you have the best intentions and know-how, when you send $100 million into a country to build roads and realize that you've actually increased income inequality because $80 million disappeared into a few pockets, it's easy to throw your hands up and back away. It's true, it's not your problem that Vietnamese officials are corrupt or don't prioritize the education in this region. With our current system setup, it's much easier for people to focus on their own problems, of which there always plenty. There is no accountability for someone else's poverty, even if you are unwittingly complicit in exacerbating it.

Superstar economist Jeffrey Sachs describes the situation in another way: it's not just that there are billions of people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, it's that billions of people are not even on the ladder. Try as they might, bright as they might be, without external assistance they will never escape from poverty because the markets are working against them. The way I like to picture this situation is if you made a graph with every individuals salary on the y-axis and individual people on the x-axis and then tracked where every dollar they spent went, you'd see that a lot of the money that the rich spend goes to other rich people. Some of it trickles down, but as rich people go out to expensive restaurants and buy expensive apartments and cars, a lot of that money circulates among the rich. Similarly, down at the bottom of the graph, poor people sell goods or provide services to other poor people, very rarely getting any monetary input from the people above them.

So I thought I had an idea. If I travel to these places, I could identify the people not on the ladder, those circulating meager savings amongst themselves, and buy stuff from them, or even just give them money. In Hong Kong I'd tried to put this into practice. Whenever I could, I'd get my groceries at the wet market, where old people who didn't go to high school cut the day's meat and leave it out on tables without refrigeration. I'd eat street food or at local restaurants and buy simple items like water and socks from stall vendors instead of from a corporation. None of this was particularly onerous. However, the vast majority of my money went to rent, more expensive restaurants, bars, movie theatres etc. I estimate I spent less than 1% of my money to people "off the ladder," as identified by them running businesses with very low capital costs.

I've found this even more difficult to implement when traveling. The people off the ladder are mostly offering me things I don't want. There are lots of useless souvenir trinkets, and there are the groceries and then there are the items catering to locals that I don't even understand. The language barrier hurts. Old women in Vietnam were often selling bottles of some yellow tonic. I never figured out what it was, and never shelled out $2 for it. I do eat my fair share of local meals, but it starts to feel like a burden, trying to constantly pick out which restaurant looks the shabbiest. And I can't ensure that the guesthouse I stay in is Mom and Pop run - in fact most of these aren't on booking.com or hostelworld. Lastly, I just don't have that much money. I double my pay as a tip to people I think need it, but this usually amounts to an extra $2.50. Certainly not a life changing amount. I can't even afford to give $10 to every person who needs it much less $100. Maybe the effort is there but the effect isn't.

As we approach Siem Reap, I realize that a lot of the people on this bus aren't really going to Siem Reap. I'm the only foreigner here and while we are still about 50km away, the bus has already made two stops. It's dark but it appears the homes on the side of the road here are of better quality than before, some made of plaster with glass windows. How well educated are the people sitting next to me? Are they middle class? There are smart phones and casual brand clothing. But they didn't have their own cars to make this 6 hour trip, and it's quite possible they will never leave the country. And what sort of industry is out here? It's too far from the temples to get any tourism revenue. Even when it's right in front of you, there are a lot of pieces to an economy hidden to you.

And even when poverty is right in front of you, it's not simple to contextualize it. Are these "poor" people happy? Are they more satisfied with what they have than I am? Is it better to make $2/day in a village where that's average, or $100/day in a city where everyone else has so much more? In these philosophical debates where it becomes clear that there's no equation for happiness and so much is relative, a lot of people shy away and instead focus on poverty-related issues like health and education. We can't tell if people are sadder, but they're definitely dying earlier. I won't discount these measurable metrics, but I find plenty of other issues that poverty breeds. Poverty breeds hopelessness - when you don't see any way out of poverty because no one around you has ever created a blueprint for escaping poverty, it's easy to give up. Poverty breeds boredom - many jobs I see are monotonous and involve waiting on events outside your control. Poverty leads to distorted decision making - when you can't find a way out of your boring job in your tiny village that produces nothing and someone comes along with a promised escape, you might give up your better instincts and take this risk. It's how you have thousands of laborers signing 5 year contracts to work in deathly construction sites in the Middle East. It's how people get lured into sex trafficking, or recruited into drug gangs. Distortions like these are sprawling problems with many branches but poverty right at their root.

When you are traveling to developing countries, you often come face to face with these distortions. You get harrassed by tuk-tuk drivers desperate for your service. You come across begging children repeating the word "school" but who very often have to hand over your money to pimps. You come across hardworking people with life savings totalling less than the emergency money in the bottom of my bag. You walk around with so much power and respect simply because of where you are from.

I believe there actually is a solution here. Paradoxically, it's tied into the same source of the problem: globalization. While the hard effects of globalization may have worsened inequality, the soft effects of globalization may eventually alleviate it. When multinational corporations enter a new country looking to cooperate rather than exploit, to share knowledge and provide new opportunities rather than extract value and leave, then we have a chance. Globalization's benefits - creating more multicultural people, increasing awareness of international issues, making it easier for people from opposite of the globe to not just do business together but simply interact - all need to be magnified. We need Americans to better understand what life is actually like in a Cambodian village, and we need Cambodian villagers to learn what's going on in New York. I think we need more people traveling to developing countries and spending a few extra dollars at the street fruit stall. Even if those few dollars don't make that much difference, collectively having more globally aware people can only help. Individual travellers as an agent of change can't solve global inequality on their own, but I think they are a critical part of the solution. Hopefully some of these travellers may run a multinational corporation, and others may become players within the government. Hopefully all these people will take their experiences and refuse to be indifferent anymore.  It takes the political will of the people to stand together and say that we shouldn't be living in a world where some people are developing a hyperloop and others don't have paved roads.

Where are the rest of the photos?

I may be sharing some stories soon where you'll want some photo evidence, which unfortunately I cannot provide. This is the post explaining why.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:20am in Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam. Hoi An is a beautiful city with roots as a centuries-old trading port, with well-established Chinese and Japanese trading colonies. Their architectural legacies are remarkably well-perserved. As a major port in olden times but its modern position usurped by Da Nang, Hoi An has much of the same feel as Malacca in Malaysia. Though the shophouses have long been converted to cater their services (souvenirs and beer) to tourists, the old town center is kept motorcycle and car free, which is a HUGE relief. Vietnamese streets can be hectic and loud, with extremely liberal horn use making me ask the question whether cars and motorcycles should be designed without horns.

The port of Hoi An was likely settled over a millenium ago by the Cham people, who ruled the region before the modern Vietnamese (Kinh) people came around the 14th century. The Cham people were related to modern Malay and Indonesian people and practiced Hinduism, the region's first major religion. They built a ton of temples in their spiritual capital called My Son about an hour from Hoi An up the mountains. This was where I was heading to at 5 o'clock in the morning.

I was taking a bus to Buon Ma Thuot at 3pm, and the sunrise temple visit would be back by 10, so I figured why not. The My Son visit was a morning well spent, and the sturdy stupas of unknown construction methodology were fascinating. I was more moved though by a bomb crater caused by Americans with poor judgment that destroyed a major temple.

I got back to my hotel at 2:40 and I figured I had some time, so why not grab another Banh Mi. I was back 10 minutes later baguette in hand and was told that my ride was here. Early, but I don't see any bus? A rough-looking man tells me "I take you" and grabbed my luggage and threw them over his lap in the same motion he jumped on his scooter. Ah...I was hoping to not do a motorbike ride with all my luggage on me, but he ensured me this was just going down the street. And indeed a block later he jumped off in front of his travel company, only for someone else to take over and take me the rest of the way to the bus station. A much younger man got on and with one hand gripping the back of the seat and my other hand gripping the Banh Mi, I went on for a ride. And this ride was not just down the street. We weaved through traffic into the countryside, passing slow trucks and bikers while getting passed by cars. At one point a massive tour bus honks right behind us and my heart skipped three beats. Though my driver was going at a pace typical for what I'd seen in Vietnam, it was still absolutely terrifying. I'd driven my own scooter for a day in Sapa, and it was significantly scarier being behind someone else, completely out of control, than it was driving myself. I'd been on the back of a motorbike in Burma once, but that was in an empty countryside and felt very chill. This ride through the streets of Hoi An was the opposite of very chill. Now outside of the city going through rice paddies and sparse developments, I was barely able to appreciate the views around me. I spent more time thinking about which body parts I'd want to protect more in a fall - I really wanted to keep my teeth.

Finally mercifully the driver slowed down. I jumped off the scooter and gathered my belongings. In my pure terror I had morphed my Banh Mi into a panini. Looking around, I realized there was no bus station. I was at the side of the highway with a few people who seemed to work for the bus company, who I realized were basically helping me hitchhike onto the 16 hour bus ride. While I broke out my Kindle and tried to displace myself from this spot into storyland, this crew opened up a durian-looking plant and called me over. "You!" A guy peeled off a piece of this tropical fruit - it's rind was guava-colored and the fruit a bit more orange like - and mimed what parts to throw away and what to eat. It was a pretty delicious fruit and about as much of a connection as I could make at that time.

The bus did arrive and quickly my bags were thrown underboard and I was taking off my shoes and stepping aboard. Apparently you take your shoes off when you enter these sort of overnight buses and place them in a plastic bag. The bus has two aisles between three columns of double bunk leather chairs that can recline into a nearly flat position. I had taken one for a couple hours on the way up from Da Nang to Hue, and that one had been full of backpackers. This time I was the only non-Vietnamese person in sight. But there was wifi. I settled into my seat and dove into my Kindle.

I was reading "River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze" by Peter Hessler, one of the diamonds in the China expat literature.  Hessler is a well known China writer amongst China Watchers, and I'd heard him first in Sinica. I'd resisted reading this book because a) I don't really like hearing white people tell me what China is all about and b) I was worried he'd have a lot of great insights on China and that I'd really like. I think any person who ever dives deep into a very different culture, especially westerners in China, like to think that they're having unique experiences. To read lessons you learned the hard way written onto paper a decade earlier can be quite humbling. And that's precisely what happened. Hessler joined the Peace Corps volunteers in 1996 and was part of the first group sent to Fuling, China (now part of the massive Chongqing metropolis). My friend Devon had joined the Peace Corps in 2011 and sent to Guiyang. Because I had visited him there, I had some picture of the life of the volunteers - very budget, many personal relationships with English students, and very often being the first foreigner someone has ever spoken to. But every year China becomes easier and easier to live in - tracing backward to 1996, Hessler's experience is particularly impressive. As he writes about traveling multiple nights by boat down the Yangtze and waking up to find a rat crawling on him, I stopped feeling sorry for myself being on this 16 hour bus ride. Hessler also very cleverly showed his Chinese improving through this two years with more fleshed out conversation excerpts.

I snapped back into my decidedly less adventurous Vietnamese trip. The sun was dropping and we were still rolling down the coast, no sign of turning westward into the mountains. I had no control over anything - when you're on these local buses, it seems like everyone else knows what's going on except you. I could only stick to what I knew, and the wifi was slow - one of my podcasts took over four hours to download. Towards the end of the night we made a pitstop. Sometimes these stops are to stretch and pee, and sometimes they are to eat and I needed to guess what this one was. Other people seemed to sit down to eat, and I awkwardly looked around for a menu. No one was helping me and I was thinking of just saying "pho bo" (beef pho noodles) before I was invited into a table with five or six dishes. Very graciously we all shared rice, vegetables, eggs and meat in a comfortable and delicious meal. I regretted that my Vietnamese wasn't anywhere as good as Hessler's Mandarin and could only muster out thank you numerous times.

In the middle of the night, I awoke sweating, having fallen asleep with my jacket on. I was emerging for a deep sleep haze and in taking off my jacket I think my phone may have fallen off. My earbuds were still on me, but when I pulled on them, they returned unanchored. Well my phone must have dropped onto my seat somewhere. I reach this way and that, check my jacket pockets and come up with nothing. I resignedly get up out of my seat and in alarm I see that the phone isn't anywhere on my seat, nor clearly on the ground. I start grasping at the cracks and crevices at the sides of the leather seat and as the minutes pass I get more and more alarmed. The guy next to me stirs from his slumber and looks at me, clearly understanding that I've lost something. "iPhone six," I say. "iPhone sao" using the Vietnamese word for 6.  The lighting is very dim though and I don't have much of a chance to look carefully. I'm exhausted and resignedly go back to sleep in an anxious state.

I need to use Find My iPhone. I can get my laptop in my backpack and access the wifi. We make another stop, to let a passenger off I deduce, and I go up and ask the driver if I can get my bag. He doesn't understand me and gestures at me to get back at my seat. I plead "iPhone sao iPhone sao" but he doesn't understand. I give an agitated sigh and go back to my seat. The rest of the ride was a bunch of frustrated searching in vain. My phone was just there in my hands, and now it's gone.

When we reach our destination, I angrily scramble and get my luggage and come back onto the bus. "I need to find something....I need to find something." Mutual comprehension starts to spread throughout the bus, and people start helping me search with flashlights. There are numerous hard to reach places on the back of the bus, and I get down on the ground to reach in behind the seats. These are some filthy places but I was desperate.  One of the people on the bus gave me his phone and I made an international call, but the engine was still on and I couldn't hear anything. It took some shouting but eventually they turned the engine off. This time I heard buzzing! It seemed like maybe my phone had shifted all the way over to the other side of the bus, but I couldn't pinpoint it. We searched for maybe 20 minutes there before they told me we had to go. I pleaded with them, but they told I could stay on the bus. We had stopped some place outside Buon Ma Thuot and they would continue driving to their bus services spot inside the city and I could search there for a longer time. At least that's what I deduced after the fact - at the time, I was kinda freaking out and just nodding along.

With the weak wifi, it took me 20 minutes or so to get onto icloud. I buzzed and could hear a faint sound, and the laptop told me the phone was still on the bus. Try as I did though, I really couldn't figure out where the phone was. The other people kept calling it nonstop, even though I told them please stop, the Find My iPhone beep was louder. I google translated the word "unscrew" and got them to understand to take off some of the seats. They eventually unscrewed my seat and another seat, and with a flashlight I looked everywhere. Everywhere. Could not find it. They kept calling it until I must've run out of battery. The Find My iPhone showed a dead phone. Nothing. I was on the verge of tears the entire time. I'd been looking for it for over an hour and it was still not even 7am, and I'd barely slept on this 16 hour bus ride. It's among the lower moments I can recall feeling. Ultimately I believe the phone had fallen into some mysterious hole in the floorboards and was bouncing around underneath my feet. The vibrations and rings were echoing all over the place, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint. Anyway, it wasn't really possible to remove the floor boards on that operational bus.

I eventually left in anguish, taking their business card, looked up my guesthouse address on my laptop and showed it to a taxi driver. Then I put my laptop in my backpack and the trunk and sat back in defeat. The driver drove a block or two, started going really slowly in search of the address, then gestured for a map or something. I replied in frustration, "I don't have a phone...." Man I relied on that thing for everything. He said something that clearly meant I have no f***ing clue where I'm going. I couldn't have been more frustrated. Eventually I got out, opened the trunk and took my laptop out again. I opened up the email with the address again, and he took a harder look then backed up a block. He rolled down his window and asked someone on the street to throw him a lifeline, then eventually he turned down into the right street. Turns out my guesthouse was literally a block away from where the bus had ended, and where my phone was presumably hiding from me. The guesthouse was closed, but I knocked very loudly on the door in some desperation. It took minutes for a blurry-eyed man to open the door. "Sorry we don't have any open rooms right now," he said in great English, the first spoken English I'd heard in a day. I plead in response, "I'm booked here tonight! Sorry I'm early, but please let me in. I just lost my phone." He relents and informs me my room will be ready at 9am. He's a nice guy but I think he resents me for the rest of my trip for waking him up. I eventually brought him along to the bus people and told them I'd offer $100 if they found the phone, but this was actually laughed off.

So I had a terrible time in Buon Ma Thuot. The coffee was great, but not really that much better than everywhere else in Vietnam. While it was freeing in some ways walking around without a smart phone, like we all did pre 2010 or whatnot, I'll leave with this story of just how reliant I'd become. I stayed in town only one night, getting a ticket for the 9am bus to Ho Chi Minh City the next day. I couldn't set an alarm, because I used my phone for that, but I went to sleep before midnight and figured I'd be ok. I woke up peacefully the next morning and leisurely yawning out of bed, I checked what time it was on my computer. 8:54am. Holy crap. I hurriedly threw my laptop into my bag, grabbed all my stuff, double checked my valuables and ran downstairs. The guesthouse people see me and say "oh your bus is leaving soon!" Thanks guys, great help. They help me into a cab, take my money and luckily I do make it onto the bus. It's 8 hours to HCMC and I'm meant to stay at my friend Sam Axelrod's US state department housing. He had left me good instructions for how to get there, but unfortunately they were via Whatsapp, and I couldn't access that now. I had meant to wake up that morning and contact him, but alas I'd left without enough time. Luckily the bus did have wifi and I did have a kindle, which I had never previously used to access the browser. I managed to figure it out and send Sam a facebook message, and got his apartment name in English. However when I arrived the people I spoke to had no idea where this place was. I had to lug my stuff across a super busy Vietnamese horror show of a 4 lane street, and find a cafe with wifi. I found the address on google maps and wrote it out with the proper Vietnamese accents and finally hailed down a cab.

What's the morale of this story? Keep track of your phone while you sleep? (Yes) Be less reliant on technology? (Maybe) Don't worry so much about material objects? (Sure) I don't know. I bought a new phone in Ho Chi Minh City. I'm most upset about the loss of photos - everything in Da Nang and Hoi An were on that phone - and the cash I had to shelve out, which is still more than I've spent on everything else thus far on the month-long trip. Ultimately though it hasn't been too much of a setback, nothing like bodily injury or the loss of a passport. Life goes on.