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. 

Vietnamese Ground Services

On Saturday morning, January 23, 2016, I woke up staring at a white plaster ceiling that I could nearly touch. Momentarily confused, I realized that I was on the top bunk of my hostel in Hue, central Vietnam. I'd slept clutching my water bottle. The previous night was spent entirely with western backpackers, devolving from trivia night into shots night into dance night, and I immediately downed the rest of my water bottle.

Heavy drizzle created a miserable morning mood at the hostel. Guests who just eight hours earlier had been joyously conversing with strangers had reverted to the groups they had arrived in. I followed suit, eating the complimentary pancakes alone. Hue has a lot to offer, including an Imperial City, many impressive tombs, and a cool bridge but I had seen none of those yesterday, opting instead to fulfill my social wants. Today obligatorily, I tightened my raincoat and headed out to the Imperial City.

The Imperial City is heavily influenced by the Forbidden City and actually quite impressive despite taking wartime damage. But this post isn't about centuries-old palaces - it's about something much more epic.

My friend O'Neal Qin works for Cathay Pacific, and after 2 years in Hong Kong they put him in charge of their Vietnam team and sent him to Hanoi. I met up with him in Hanoi and he told me that he'd be in Da Nang that weekend for a team event. His team there drank a lot - would I care to join? I was going to be in the vicinity then, so I decided why not, I'd join. In fact, I'd flown into Da Nang before spending 2+ hours on a sleeper bus to Hue. After returning from my rainy sojourn to the Imperial City, I was pretty to keen to escape and return to Da Nang. The hostel staff informed me that public buses left every hour and called me a taxi to the station.

Immediately upon alighting from the taxi, I was harassed by motorbike drivers. It seems that a significant portion of the Vietnamese economy is just offering people rides on their motorbikes, clearly without any sort of license required. The near constant unsolicited drive-bys yelling "Taxi?" are probably as close as a male can get to experiencing catcalling. In this occasion, I was particularly pissed, because it was raining and I was literally just dropped off from a taxi at my destination. No one in the bus station speaks any English, but after sufficient grunting I get on a rusty minibus to Da Nang. The bus is nothing like the double deck sleeper bus I had arrived on, but there are only 2 passengers on board, so I take my two huge bags and hop on. I put my bags next to me and occupy two seats. The bus sits there for another 15 minutes and slowly fills up and I start to feel guilty for occupying two seats - still there's some empty seats. Then these seats vanish, and an employee roughly comes over and takes my bigger bag away. Half my worldly possessions are inside, so I watch it with concern, but apparently there is a trunk to this thing. I put the other bag on top of my lap and another woman with a facemask and a bamboo hat gets on next to me, then 3 people squish into the seats behind me, and the bus takes off.

But it stops almost right away. Periodically along the path, people on the roadside just keep getting on and suddenly there are stools down the aisle of the bus with people sitting uncomfortably on them. My position is so cramped that it literally takes me a full minute of shifting around and zigzagging my arm to reach my phone in my left pocket. This is unbelievably less comfortable than the previous bus ride which had reclining beds and wifi, and only $1 cheaper. I'm digging the experience though - this is how a lot of Vietnamese people get around. At one point one of the people in the chicken coop that is the backseat is the first to disembark, and he literally climbs over every man woman and child in the minibus aisle.

When the bus finally gets to the Da Nang bus station, it takes me about 3 minutes to get out because I have to wait for blood to circulate to my legs. I get pestered by motorbike taxi people again. One guy follows me for 200m, at which point I went on a 30 second rant to him in Cantonese, after which he meekly replies, "Moto bike?" I eventually do grab a taxi, but get held up by an old man chatting to my driver for several minutes. Then inexplicably the old man gets into the taxi with me. I'm astounded - how rude? I try my best not to get offended - if the driver goes straight to my stop first, what difference does it make?

Next thing I know the a valet opens my door and picks up my bags. I bemusedly step into the 4 star hotel and am offered a complimentary glass of fruit juice. It's the first time I've encountered good service in Vietnam and the contrast to the minibus, the motorbike harassment and the impromptu car pool ride could not be more stark. O'Neal arrives a few minutes later - Cathay is putting him up in the hotel - and he takes me into a room larger than the one I stayed in the previous night, but with one more fridge and eight fewer people. O'Neal informs me that the event tonight is actually a gala which Cathay is just a participant, and that it's fairly casual. I ask him, "Are you sure it's ok if I go?" and he reassures me it's ok. The party starts at 5:30.

I only have a short sleeve collar shirt, but I throw a sweater over it and you can't tell. With jeans and sneakers, this is literally the most formal my backpacker self can get. The banquet hall is called "For You Palace" (don't ask), and we're early. There's apparently no assigned seating so we have our pick of tables, each of which are adorned with a bottle of Macallan's. Everyone seems to know O'Neal and treat him with pleasantries, and are confused when I am introduced as "just a friend." When O'Neal leaves for a minute to attend to some business, a woman who seems to be running things approaches me. "Do you work for Cathay or DragonAir?" she asks me. "No," I answer honestly. "I'm just O'Neal's friend traveling through Da Nang." "So you don't have connection to aviation industry." "Uh, no," "Hmph." She hovers next to me awkwardly for a few judgey moments, possibly my most uncomfortable moments of a long day full of them.

Despite a lack of connection to Vietnam aviation, I see a dozen business cards before I see any food. The event is sponsored by the Saigon Ground Services (SAGS), and I now know their CEO's email address. While I am in fact looking for a job, I don't try very hard to network this night. Da Nang is a city of 1 million, and Cathay have just four staff members permanently here. At some point, O'Neal says I should pretend to work for Cathay. "You can be a Hong Kong based Strategy Director." I'm glad for the instant promotion and start practicing for my role before I realize I've actually worked in Aviation before - with the Airport Authority Hong Kong as a consultant designing a runway expansion.  I quickly jump to the client side and rebrand myself as an AAHK Project Manager.

The whole event feels very much like a Hong Kong wedding, and so there's a lot of ceremony before we get to the food. For this gala, the show includes a song and dance number with about a dozen performers. By now there's over 150 of us but it feels like a bit of an overkill - this ain't the Academy Awards. After the applause, two Emcees come onstage, one speaking Vietnamese, the other speaking halting English. I'm surprised the event is even bilingual - O'Neal and I are almost certainly the only non-Vietnamese here. At some point we hear the name "O'Neal" called and his Vietnamese coworkers tell him in slight horror that he's supposed to go onstage now. We knew it was in the program that he would present some gifts to the best performers of the year, but apparently it wasn't supposed to be this early. O'Neal rides with it though and I'm greeted with the surreal sight of seeing my friend give a speech and then presenting gifts that are teddy bears to excited staff members. And the evening had just begun.

As I mentioned, every table had a bottle of Macallan's. Other tables were coming over cheers-ing us, aggressively forcing us to all down whiskey. I do a shot with the CEO of SAGS and try to keep track of how many drinks in I am. 3...4...5... now it's our turn to do the rounds and we stroll across the room. "Who are you!?" "Hi I'm Cal, I'm from Hong Kong Airport!" "Cool! Mot Hai Ba Yo!!" The last phrase means "1, 2, 3, Cheers" and while I may forget most of the Vietnamese words I learn on this trip, I think that phrase will stick. The meal gets more interesting because between every course, there is another dance and song performance. I return to my seat about 6 drinks deep to watch a male singer crooning in Vietnamese. O'Neal leans towards me and remarks, "It's only 7 o'clock."  I marvel at the chain of events that led to my semi-inebriated state at a Vietnamese Aviation Annual Gala. I'm not sure what was more amazing: that 4 hours before, I'd been cramped into the side of a minibus, that 20 hours before I'd been in a hostel with 40 backpackers, that 3 weeks before I'd been at a desk job in Hong Kong, that 6 years before I'd been in an American university.

The next couple hours get pretty hazy. I give a blurred glance around the room - I don't think anyone else on my minibus is here. I see a girl who reminds me of my ex, and it dawns on me that I once dated a Vietnamese woman. Could this have been my life? Someone asks me about my job and I tell him that I'm working on the Third Runway Expansion, but his English is terrible and he just pats me on the back and moves on. I meet a cute girl who tells me her name is "Mya" not "Mia." Suddenly I'm dragged onstage and I'm dancing among a huge crowd. A guy in ripped jeans goes to the edge of the stage and proceeds to do a backflip off of it. I back away from the edge just in case anyone pressures me to attempt a backflip. A bathroom stop reveals a bent over man puking into a urinal, with a For You Palace staff member patting him on the back and holding his head up. When we head out around 9:20pm, Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire comes on and I sneak a peak back at the stage, now a crazy Indo-Viet dance floor underneath corporate sponsorship banners. If there are delays at Da Nang airport tomorrow, you know why.

The rest of the night included a club with similar dimensions to a football pitch, and a smaller karaoke club, because of course it did. I woke up the next morning in a 4 star hotel clutching my water bottle with a bunch of business cards in my back pocket.