Eric Stahl

Asia Wrap Up

It's been about three weeks since we got back from SE Asia. We spent Christmas and New Years with family and friends, then drove up to the family pad in Tahoe to ski and start the job search. Tahoe sure feels a world away from Bangkok or the beaches of Cambodia...

Here's our final travel log;

Northern Thailand
October 3- 6: Bangkok
October 6-8: Ayutthaya
October 8-9: Chiang Mai
October 10-19: Pai
October 19-20: Chiang Mai
October 20-21: Chiang Kong

Laos
October 21-22: Slow boat down the Meikong River
October 23-27: Luang Prabang
October 28: Nong Khiaw
October 29: Moung Ngoi Neva
October 30-31: Nong Khieaw
October 31- November 1: Luang Prabang

Vietnam
November 1-5: Hanoi
November 5-7: Halong Bay
November 7-8: Ning Binh
November 8-11: Hue
November 11-12: Hoi An
November 12-17: Ho Chi Minh City

Cambodia
November 17-19: Phnom Pehn
November 19-22: Siem Riep
November 22-25: Phnom Pehn
November 25- December 4: Sihanoukville
December 4-5: Phnom Pehn

Southern Thailand
December 5-6: Krabi
December 6-8: Ko Lanta
December 8-12: Ko Phi Phi
December 12-19: Ko Pha Ngan
December 19-20: Suratani
December 20-22: Bangkok

Book Recommendations

Vietnam Now: A Reporter Returns by David Lamb

This is a great read while traveling in Vietnam. David Lamb was a war reporter in the 60s and 70s. He returned to Hanoi 30 years later and wrote this book about post-American war Vietnam. It is fascinating.

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Robert McNamara

I wasn't around during the Vietnam war so it has always been an abstract piece of history that we learned about in class or by watching movies. This book is a detailed chronology of the events that led up to the war and its escalation from the perspective of Robert McNamara, who was the Secretary of Defense for Kennedy and Johnson. Not only is it a great account of the events, it is refreshingly honest. He openly admits the many mistakes that were made by himself and the administrations he worked for. The last two chapters are the best part of the book. Rather than focusing on Vietnam he gives his perspective on the proper role of US military force going forward (which is 180 degrees from how we've approached Iraq and Afghanistan). The final chapter is on returning to as close to a non-nuclear world as possible. This is a must read if you want to understand the Vietnam war or if you are interested in how these situations come about.

Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land by Henry Kamm

Kamm is an former Southeast Asia Correspondent from the NY Times. He walks through the unbelievably convoluted history of Cambodia from the French colonization, through the American/Vietnam war, the Khmer Rouges, the Vietnamese occupation, the U.N.'s failed attempt to prop up a democracy and the current Kingdom. It's a great backdrop when traveling in the country.


Interesting sights and experiences

• families of six plus a TV riding a scooter
  
• signs telling people to not stand on the seat of a western toilet (because they are used to a hole in the ground)
• signs in every hotel saying no prostitutes or weapons
• pigs and buffalo walking around everywhere
• taking shoes off to go into shops, hotels and homes
• little respect for intellectual property- copied books, music, movies, fake 7/11s and Burger Kings
• "Friends" reruns running everywhere
• living out of a backpack for months on end
• driving on the left side of the road (Thailand)
• constant currency calculations
• 31.6 Thai Baht/USD
• 16,021 Vietnamese Dong/USD
• 3,964 Cambodian Riel/USD
• 9,266 Lao Kip/USD)
• being flooded out of our hotel (Vietnam)
  
• pictures of the King everywhere (Thailand/Cambodia)
• monkeys hanging out in the streets

Exotic food sightings (that I didn't necessarily try)

• embryonic duck eggs (Vietnam)
• fried cockroaches
• dog meat dishes
• durrian (a fruit that smells so bad that it is banned from some hotels and airlines)
  
• happy pizza and shakes
• fish sauce in everything
• giant pigs strapped to a scooter heading to market
  

Depressing or just really annoying things (in no particular order)

• water/food that will make you sick
• smoke from the burning of trash and crops
  
• creepy sex tourists
• amputees from war, land mines, snake bites and the general lack of modern health care in many places
• people wearing surgical masks because of pollution and disease
• cars, buses and scooters honking their horns nonstop
  
• roosters waking you up at 4:00am
• stray dogs
• mosquitoes, mosquito nets and having to put on repellent
• taking malaria medication that makes you nauseous
  
• squat toilets with a water scooper
• aggressive touts trying to get you to stay at their hotel or go on their tour
• "Spring Breakers" (20-something backpackers who are drunk and annoying to us old folks)
• long, loud, bumpy, smoky bus rides
• dirty and/or loud bungalows/hotel rooms
• wet bathroom floors
• cockroaches
  
• foreigners not respecting local traditions
• trash everywhere (Cambodia)
• cold showers
• Nescafe instant coffee
• tuk tuk drivers constantly hassling people

Non obvious things I would recommend to anyone going on an extended trip

Get on electronic bill pay. I've been using Paytrust for many years and couldn't live without it.

Have someone receive and open your mail if you are going away for several months. Aside from bills and the usual mail, you can get time sensitive notices. While we were gone I received a notice from the IRS that they disagreed with my 2005 mortgage deduction and that I had a few weeks to reply or they would close the case and send me a bill for $4,000. Fortunately I was able to email my accountant and have him straighten them out. We also got Jury Duty and DMV car registration notices that needed to be dealt with while we were gone. If my father wasn't opening our mail we would have missed all of these things and would have had to untangle them when we got home.

Travel insurance is important. We saw many tourists who had fallen off scooters (by far the main mode of transportation in SE Asia), been bitten my wild monkeys (!) and had other random health care related issues. Get a travelers insurance policy that covers emergency evacuation back to the US and will cover visits to the hospital while you are traveling. Make sure your policy covers scooter/motorcycle accidents. Some don't.

Make sure you have secure access to your online bank, broker, bill pay service, etc. Internet cafes are everywhere but they are littered with viruses and key logging software that can steal your passwords. There are a number of tricks you can use to lessen your odds of having a problem, but I will do everything possible to do a better job with this next time I travel. For example, ETrade offers a random password generating token that I wish I had before this trip.

On a similar note, tell your online broker, bank, etc. where you are going. I had huge problems transferring money from my brokerage account to my checking account because they could tell I was logging in from Cambodia which seemed suspicious to them. I had to make a 45 minute call to unlock my account from Siem Riep. When we finally resolved it they agreed to credit my account for the cost of the call, but it was still very aggravating.

Set up, fund and test your Skype account in advance. I tried to set mine up while we were traveling and am still having problems. Skype is an amazing way to make cheap calls but forget it if you are stuck in the endless/useless loop of their Customer Service department.

If you are going away for several months see if you can turn off or minimize as many monthly bills as possible. For example, get your cell phone and cable TV service down to the minimal monthly plan, tell your cleaners you will be gone and see if you can suspend your gym membership.

If you want to have a cell phone while you travel, bring or buy a phone that has a removable SIM card. You can buy local pre-paid ones in every country. We didn't do this but met a lot of people who did.

Research malaria before you go. There is a massive amount of conflicting information out there. Go to the CDC web site, see if the area you are visiting is malarial, get your meds from a travel nurse and take them while you are traveling. This sounds obvious but we met many travelers who had malaria meds but weren't taking them because they had their own kooky theories about the area, the disease, etc. Malaria can be a lifelong problem so take your meds!

Put your contact information (email and phone #) on anything valuable that you may loose. Many people will try to return things if you give them an easy way to contact you. Make sure your bags, camera, passport, etc. all have obvious ways for people to reach you if they find them. I had a hotel manager show me a box full of digital cameras and other stuff that people had left behind. He said he would be happy to return them if he knew how to reach their owners.

This is part of a bigger decision, but consider getting LASIK before you travel if you wear glasses or contacts. I can't tell you how nice it was not hauling that stuff around. Dealing with contacts would be a nightmare when staying at some remote hill tribe village, going to the beach, etc. I got it a year ago and I LOVE IT.

[Added on 2/17/08] Do yourself a huge favor and back up your photos at least once a week. I spent a lot of time dealing with this. After you meet a few people who lost all of their pics (or you briefly think you lost yours) you get highly motivated to spend some time on this. One cheap and easy way to do this is to back them up to CDs at Internet Cafes as you go. You can do it while you are checking your email. You should keep the CDs in a different place than your camera in case your whole bag gets ripped off or lost. Even better is to mail the CDs back home from time to time. I was so paranoid about this that I was making CDs and uploading our pics to Ofoto along the way (uploading is not too bad in Thailand but everywhere else had pretty slow internet connections). You can also get huge memory cards for almost nothing so you don't have to delete your pictures from your camera, which gives you another copy. I just saw 4 gig cards at Costco for $35 (one 4 gig card can hold 800 pictures if they are 5 mb each). Another way to do this is to back up your pics to your iPod if you get a special cable. Finally, put your email address and phone number on your camera. This will be your only hope for getting it back if you loose it.

[Added on 2/18/08] Try to stay healthy. Being tethered to a hotel room/bathroom for a week is a terrible way to spend your travel days. Only drink bottled or purified water. Steer away from uncooked food. We bought a Steripen for about $100 that uses UV light to kill all of the bacteria and viruses in your water. It can sterilize a liter of liquid in about 60 (or 90?) seconds. We used it as much as possible to cut down on the number of plastic bottles we were throwing away.

[Added on 2/22/08] Always try to know what is socially acceptable and appropriate for local customs. It's painful to watch clueless Westerners not respecting local traditions and values. Most of it is common sense, like don't make out with your partner in a religious building, dress modestly when visiting religious or other important sites, don't yell at people (even if you are frustrated) and don't take pictures of people who are trying to meditate (especially with a flash). I saw people doing all of these things on a regular basis along the way. Some things are less obvious, like not pointing the bottom of your feet at any Buddha statue. Have a little respect (and a little class) and be a good global citizen. Every country is different so read your guide book before you get there.

The last thing is obvious- pack wisely. There are many packing websites so I won't go into much detail here. Aside from the obvious, here are a few other random thoughts...

• travel guides are your lifeline. For a multi country trip I would recommend bringing a SE Asia travel guide plus the guide for the first country I was visiting. I would then trade/buy the guide for each of the other countries as I enter them and give away/sell/trade the guides you are done with.
• guides + other books are really heavy to carry around. Bring one or two and buy the rest as you go. Some cities have great used book stores so get them while you can and get ride of the ones you are done with.
• bring ear plugs. I've never been an ear plug person but I came around on this trip. Some hotel rooms are loud and some bus rides involve honking and other noise that you want to filter out. I like the waxy ones, not the foam ones.
• bring a sleep sheet. Some rooms don't have a top sheet so you sleeping directly under a blanket that you know hasn't been washed in a long time...if ever. We got prefab sleep sheets, which is like a sheet that has been folded in half and sewn down one side. You can throw it in with your laundry a few times a week (it also makes a great laundry bag).
  
• bring a good locking system for your bag
• have personal cards with your email on them printed (they are much easier to hand out to other travelers/locals you meet along the way)
• pack your clothes in those big zip lock bags that you can roll the air out of, like these. They are GREAT for packing up and keeping your clothes dry.
  
• bring rechargeable batteries, a flashlight, a small notepad that will fit in your pocket, a watch that has a reliable alarm on it and other gadgets.
• bring iPod speakers for your hotel room if you have room

Margaret carried all of our pharmaceuticals including first aid, antibiotics and all kinds of other stuff that we either used or gave to fellow travels who needed them.

As I wrap up this blog I can't help but notice how little it does to communicate the deeper, more philosophical aspects of the trip. Let me know if you are interested in that and we'll talk about it over a beer some time...

Labels: SE Asia travel tips

posted by Eric Stahl @ 11:26 AM