Noise Torture

I write to you from an overcrowded youth hostel with really loud Jack Johnson music playing 18 hours a day, and a steady stream of buzzed Austrailians constantly floating in and out of the lobby. It seems that I can't escape noise wherever I go, lately. I am currently longing for silence ... the next paragraphs will explain why.

Finally, we're on the move! I'm so grateful for this, especially after a slow start due to the yucky weather in Hanoi. We wanted to wait out the drizzle a couple days until we set out for Halong Bay, a gorgegous area off the coast known for all of its thousands rocky limestone peaks jutting out of the water. We were so ready to leave Hanoi (especially me, having been there nearly a week!), and we clamoured into a van filled with odd sorts of tourists. Jones and I had to sit together on the front seat, and I felt a bit like an excited kid who got to sit in the front seat of a semi-truck. It was interesting to watch the landscape fly past us, getting increasingly more rural. There were constant signs, though, that we were nowhere near being off the so-called "beaten track" - the entire tour bus stopped on the side of the road, all its participants having gotten out to snap photos of people working in the rice paddies, for instance. Sigh. Sometimes being a tourist is highly embarassing.

When we got to Halong Bay - which I later heard someone refer to as the "Wisconsin Dells of Vietnam" - we got aboard our lovely little house boat, which would take us around the bay for the next day. Dells or not, it was a beautiful setting, and I really enjoyed the trip. We had a good time talking to our fellow passengers - the newlyweds from Israel, the intellectual brother and sister from Germany who were enjoying the surplus of vacation time that Europeans are privy to, the grad students from Austrailia ... The afternoon passed lazily, and we layed on top of the deck enjoying the first sunshine of the trip. However, the most memorable part of the excursion was most definitely the post-dinner entertainment. As we all sat around enjoying good conversation with the Germans (the man was just about to start a job working for Google), we were interrupted by our squirrely guide, who suggested that now it was time to start karaoke. But, I don't want to do karaoke ... I want to continue talking about the German health care system. Unfortunately, no one asked me - or anyone else on board, for that matter - and we were then subjected to a full two and a half hours of what could actually be considered noise torture. Within 15 minutes, the party had effectively been killed, with all its members having disappeared into their cabins to seek solace from the unbearable skreeching coming from the 1980's sound system. Within 20 minutes, I was ready to volunteer any amount of information pertaining to national security to make it stop, disclosing all of America's secrets to absolutely anyone who wanted to know.

Finally, it did stop (the two crew members who had been enjoying their favorite Vietnamese hits must have finally decided to call it a night), and I had a decent night's sleep, gearing up for our next day's stop, Cat Ba Island. Cat Ba Island is a really scenic spot, and we had a couple hours to make a hike up one of its hills prior to lunch. There was really no warning that this would be a rather strenuous hike, and I was frankly quite grateful that I'm in at least decent shape, or I really would have been out of luck. It was hard, and back home it never would have flown to just let any ole person hike up all that way, without any sort of nod to the fact that they could slip on the mud and fracture valuable appendages. (Something that I have learned is that in Asia, everything must be undertaken "at your own risk.") Me and my trusty Tevas made it through the trek, but I've definitely done easier things in my life.

In the afternoon, Jones and I decided it would be worth our while to take a short boat trip out to the nearby Monkey Island, a deserted place with (get this) lots of monkeys living there. (The eccentric older Israeli in our group was disappointed with this, saying that he would have rather gone to "Woman Island. I want an island filled with women, not monkeys." Our tour guide was confused.) At this point in my travels, monkeys have very little power to captivate me for more than 20 seconds, and I mostly dislike them actually, finding them to be disgusting, flea-bitten little creatures. So, we lazed away on some rocks near the shore, reading. Until we realized that the boat was pulling away. And that we were not on it. We had to quickly hustle down the beach, and found that our Israeli friend had also been left behind. The boat had to turn around and get us all. Whoops. I wouldn't have liked to be left on Monkey Island for a night! That sounds like a bad horror movie.

From Halong Bay, we had to make it back to Hanoi, from where we had to board an overnight, sleeper bus that took us to our current location. This was an experience worthy of its own blog post, but I'll summarize it by saying this: Imagine the Knight Bus of Harry Potter, and take away any and all romantic elements within. Imagine instead a regular-sized bus, with three rows of bunk beds stacked two high, and about ten beds per row. Imagine that the beds are about 30 inches across, and that they don't lay back completely, so as to make room for whose-ever feet are behind you. Your own feet fit into a small cubicle, which isn't tall enough for your feet to fit in straight up and down (even if your feet are only a women's size 8, at the most...). Imagine that even if you're only 5'4", you don't have enough space to lay completely back without scrunching up your legs. And then imagine that you are laying directly next to two other strangers, having been shoved in the back of the bus and escorted to your crappy seat, because you're just a crappy foreigner. To top it off, try and hear the painfully loud dialogue of shockingly awful local movies, alternating with equally loud mariachi music that turns on and off in conjunction with the blindingly bright lights at sporadic intervals throughout the middle of the night and harshly wake you from your slumber - if that's what you can call whatever semi-conscious state you're in.  If you can picture this, you can picture my situation.

There's little that I won't do for cheap transportation, but this might be one of those things that won't be eagerly revisited.

Well, I should go. I actually have to go catch a bus ... Hopefully they'll play good music on it.