Paul's Oriental Travelogue

Roadwork

It's too cruel that these hours and hours on a rattley bus barely move that orange line far enough to make room for another red dot. I'm in Nha Trang now because it's where the "open tour" buses from Dalat...
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Oh yeah...

My passport showed up, with lots of crazy stories to tell....
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A Dalat in the Life

In Saigon I had achieved my goal of buying a poorly counterfeited Nike baseball cap. The swoosh isn't quite the right shape and the stitching is unusually shoddy; for 60 cents, I support the little guy instead of The Man....
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Remember America?

Jesse found a fun web site where you can map out all the states you've been to. This should be about right for me: Cheating a bit because Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico all come from visiting the Four Corners....
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All That You Can't Leave Behind

Those dopey-eyed dope fiends in Saigon hijacked my passport but were too stoned to tell me the ransom. An hour out of town this morning, in a Hyundai minibus, we were pointed over by the cops for a bribe or...
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Cà Phé

Just when I think I'm ready to master even the most obscure or outrageous dining custom thrown my way, I'm served another mystery. Check out how they serve good coffee in Vietnam. First of all I don't quite know what...
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Great Firewall

Every internet shop in this city seems to be behind the same caching internet proxy. This confounds me a bit when it seems like my front page isn't being updated even though it is. I don't know why it's so...
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Reportage from the front

I've uploaded a lot of words and pictures. Here are some shots of Saigon. They include the border crossing, Ho Chi Minh City Museum, Cu Chi Tunnels, other buildings and scenes. One of the most interesting places was the Reunification...
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Commie Rats

The Cu Chi tunnels are a surprisingly nightmarish experience for a mainstream tourist attraction. Cu Chi is a suburb of Saigon near a former American military base, which was actually built there to combat the tunnels that already existed, having...
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Book Learning

It seems I should be able to tell something about a place by the number of book stores it can support. Saigon has a lot of large, nice, Vietnamese bookstores and soundly trounces the other big cities I've seen so...
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Some Food

It's been mentioned that I haven't written much about food. I suppose that's true; maybe food doesn't seem to fit in elegantly with surrounding tales, but all is not spiders and insects. I'm still alive and food has been there...
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Where To

Saigon's rushing rivers of motorbikes are ok for a while but I must not become bogged down; this is a big country! My vague plan now is to take a tourist ghetto bus to Dalat on Tuesday Wednesday morning. It...
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