The Time to Wander
Our Trip
Hello! Our travels will take us from New Zealand to Australia. Through Indonesia and Singapore before venturing across to Thailand, Vietnam and Laos. We then continue our exploring in India. In Africa we will visit Ethiopia and Safari in Tanzania. We will be exploring Turkey and meeting up with family in the Greek Isles, before heading to Morocco followed by Portugal and the Azores. Finally, we are off to South America to visit Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. We are excited to share our adventures with you!
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We were met at a very modern and empty Noi Bai airport just outside of Hanoi by our hostel driver who shuttled us to our hotel in the heart of the Old Quarter in downtown Hanoi. Arriving at our hotel, we were in awe at the total chaos of traffic, shops, powerlines and people overflowing and mingling into one organism.
Our first walk about the neighborhood seemed like a march into a bees nest of humanity but magically we were unscathed. As we walked down the street, the locals were incessantly offering their wares and services and at the same time scooters and cars were honking at us obsessively. Adding to the frenzy, nobody was stopping for traffic lights or obeying the few pedestrian crossing signals. We thought we’d be road kill within minutes, but we soon started to enjoy the challenge of staying alive and treated crossing the road like a real life game of Frogger. The best technique for crossing the street was to first walk briskly into the middle of the road in front of onrushing traffic and then slowly inch the rest of way while allowing the alpha drivers time to whiz by on both sides of you. Scary as shit for the first day but then we just got used to it. To our amazement, we only saw one minor accident and experienced no close call brushes with traffic during our few days in Hanoi.
Traffic in Old Quarter Hanoi
The sidewalks of Hanoi were apparently meant for everything except walking pedestrians. Packed either with parked scooters or street food vendors, who descend on Hanoi to provide amazingly tasty and cheap ($1-2 per person) meals based on secret family recipes, the sidewalks were just another layer of the city. Full service slaughter houses, kitchens, and dish washing operations were setup right out in the open.
A high-light of the first couple days in Hanoi was finally finding an open post office and being able to ship home 8 pounds of souvenirs and other non-essential gear. Included in this package was a half dozen bottles of beach sand that Campbell and Kim had collected from every beach we’ve visited in NZ, AUS, Indo, and Thailand.
One evening we signed up for a street food tour of Hanoi. Our guide, Thrung, was a 22 year old student who had been leading street food tours for six years. She led us on an amazing, three hour, back alley tour of many great local Old Quarter eateries. The first stop was a delicious chicken pho for a warm-up dish. We then darted off to the next stop for some fried banana cake at a busy intersection. Now we were picking up the pace and quickly ducked through some alleys to get some Bahn Trang Trun which was a taste sensation of squid, dried beef, and deconstructed salad. Next on the agenda was a small side room offering a sweet and savory BBQ pork soup known as Bun Cha. Our food stamina was getting seriously tested but there was more. The fifth stopped was for authentic fried spring rolls and pillow cake. It was at this point that Gunnar went into a food coma and jumped on his dada’s back for the rest of the trip. The sixth course was at another busy street corner for a bean, coconut, and jelly ice drink. We were over the big meals and now just in the sampling stage of some local street fruit. It was 10 pm and we were starting to hit the wall, so Thrung had us duck in for egg coffee which became our favorite coffee drink of the trip. Made with egg, condensed milk, cheese, and other secret ingredients, the establishment that sells this drink is world famous. The ninth and final stop was for a tasty fruit dessert with sweetened coconut milk. By now we had covered 6.5 km (Gil’s GPS verified) and were ready relax the rest of the night hoping that our stomachs would handle the unique but with questionable hygiene taste explosion that we had just experienced. This whole 3 hour / 9 stop meal excursion cost $24/person.
Sampling some Bahn Trang Trun
Trying Bun C
Other high-lights of Hanoi were Gil’s early morning runs around the city. He quickly found that thousands of local residents descend on the local parks in town at 6:00 am every morning to exercise. There were hordes of people playing soccer, badminton, and many other unrecognized sports. Some groups were doing Ti Chi, Yoga, or ball room dancing. Then there were the rest of the crowd who were just walking or jogging. It was a pretty cool scene. On the advice from our friends Rob and Jen, we spent an enjoyable hour at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater, which was a captivating demonstration of the traditional music and art.
The Water Puppet Theater
After a few days in Hanoi we were ready to get out of the big town and head for a three day homestay and cruise around the waters of Ha Long Bay – it was time to get rural again.
From the moment we landed, it was immediately evident that we had left Indonesia behind us. Our taxi sailed along at high speeds along an 8 lane highway with hardly a scooter to be seen.
Upon arrival at the Marriott in the Sukhumvitneighborhood of Bangkok, we felt at home and eagerly looking forward to soft beds and fast, reliable internet for the next few days. Arriving on a Friday evening,
we decided to jump right into things and took the sky train and metro across town to a popular night market with the BKK hipster crowd. Selecting and ordering among the bountiful food options was a bit daunting but we managed to procure a meal of satay, tom yum soup and some macaroons for dessert. While detouring to a nearby mall to use the restroom, we happened upon a lip sync completion. Dozens of local youth dance teams were performing choreographed routines to the delight of hundreds of screaming fans – screaming akin to fans at a One Direction concert. Well, one of Gunnar’s secret talents is his ability is to produce an impressive, high pitched scream. Gunnar had found his people. We enjoyed several routines with Gunnar adding his voice to the cacophony of the other teenage girls that night.
The following morning was Easter Sunday and to our delight the Easter Bunny managed to locate us even up on the 38th floor to leave some baskets behind. It wasn’t exactly like being home, but after a delicious brunch, it was a close second. Later we ventured out to spend a few hours exploring the grounds around Wat Pho, a 16th century Buddhist temple
that contains a 43 meter long statue of recumbent Buddha as he prepares to enter nirvana. Procuring a knowledgeable local guide was once again helpful making the history come alive during our time there.
Our first big lesson of the trip was soon to follow. Returning from the temple that afternoon our cab driver offered to take us 1.5 hour each way to a floating market outside of Bangkok for the US equivalent of around $15. This low price should have triggered our internal alarms, but we failed to pick up the signals…
The photographs in his cab looked like it would be an authentic adventure and we agreed to meet again early the next morning to travel to the market. Upon arrival, the long boat tour operators were asking the shocking equivalent of $200 for a 1.5 hour tour through the canals of the market. For just $50 we could add on an elephant ride at the adjacent elephant farm, but we couldn’t even bear thinking about the horrible conditions those animals must be subjected too as part of such a shady operation. The market tour alone was such an outrageous price that we were prepared to leave, eat the cab fare and the 3 hours of car travel.
Seeking council from our driver, he told us that $135 would be the best we could do, advice that in retrospect was being fueled by the commission that he was no doubt receiving for bringing us out to such a racket. Rather than even try to bargain, we conferred as a family and decided to offer them a single firm price that we were willing to pay for the floating market. We were in unanimous agreement if they wouldn’t accept, we were leaving. Our offer of ~$63 USD was accepted in the end – still a ridiculous sum, but what we felt the experience would be worth to us. The market operator told us as we were boarding the boat that this was the “best price ever” and not to share this information with the other guests milling about in similar sticker shock. 
Once upon a time, I am sure the market served many of the residents of the surrounding mangrove islands and resembled the pictures we were shown the day before. Today, the Damneon Saduak Market serves nearly exclusively to sell overpriced trinkets and food items to gullible tourists. Upon returning home and reading the Trip Advisor comments that evening, something we will ALWAYS DO in advance in the future, we were appalled to learn how many tourist pay the full asking price. In the end, our lesson wasn’t too painfully expensive and we are much the wiser for it…
We left Bangkok ready for new adventures on the Island of Koh Tao.
After Uluwatu, it was time to bid Bali farewell and hopped onto a quick flight up to Yogyakarta in central Java. Without delay we were enroute to the Manohara Hotel at Borobudur which is situated inside the UNESCO World Heritage grounds and does a special sunrise tour for guests. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world. It was constructed during the 9th Century and was only “rediscovered” in 1814. Since that time, the temple and grounds have seen several stages of restoration with the last round concluding in the 1980s – today the temple and grounds are spectacular.
After settling in, we wandered across the grounds to explore Borobudur with a local guide and spent several hours learning about the story of the Buddha depicted on some of the temples 2,500 stone, relief panels. Our guide also was incredibly knowledgeable about the numeric symbolism and geometry of the temple.
During the time of our visit, we were at the tail of the rainy season and tourists still far and few between. There were periods of time where it was just the four of us and the guide alone on the temple. However, when we were ready to leave the temple and return to the hotel, we were directed to the “exit” where we were the lone targets of no fewer than hundreds of vendors all selling the same awful tourist wares. Literally the alleys went on for over a kilometer and it was exhausting to say “no thank you” so many times. Exhausting and puzzling – this seemed to us the most inefficient marketplace we could imagine: how can so many sellers, all with the same merchandise, exist to serve so few customers? We all agreed it would make a great Planet Money segment if you are reading this David Kestenbaum…
That night it was early to bed for our 4:00am wake up. In the dark of the pre-dawn we quietly climbed to the top of the temple and were all rewarded an hour later with a spectacular show. Our expectations for this event were dangerously high as one of the adages we have adopted for this trip is low expectations are the key to happiness. In this instance however, it did not disappoint.
Sunrise on the stupas
Later that afternoon, we left the relatively expensive Manohara Hotel and found the craziest guest/art house nearby. Art house is really the more apropos name for it as nearly every surface of the hotel has been hand painted in quite amazing murals. We were their only quests that night and spent a quiet evening searching for good street food. We were rewarded with the most delicious fried “Twinkie and jam loaf” for our dessert.
The roof of the Eloprogo Art House common space.
C and G chillin.
The next morning we rented two scooters which meant Kim had to join in the scooter driving melee. Luckily, the back roads of Borobodur’s quiet village and open rice paddy fields were the perfect Asian scooter training grounds. Campbell even took a turn scootering around, much to her delight as her first real motorized driving experience. We spent several hours truly exploring with no agenda, and as I write this nearly two weeks later, it remains our favorite afternoon of the trip so far.
Next up on our itinerary was some time in Yogyakarta which is only an hour taxi from Borobudur. Our intention was to explore the nearby Hindu temple of Prambanan but after nearly two weeks in Indonesia with just a shower or two, the skies opened up to an unbelievable deluge and our plans for a sunset tour on our second evening were jettisoned. Campbell and Kim were caught out in the rain and made it home by fording the ankle deep rivers that had only minutes before been city streets. The current was so strong that Campbell’s flip flop was a casualty of the weather.
The rain was the perfect excuse for a family swim in the hotel pool and we swam alone in the monsoon rains until the lightning strikes and thunder were just seconds apart overhead.
Other highlights from our time in Yogya include our tuk tuk rides through the city to watch the local batik and shadow puppet artisans practice their centuries old trades. We also ventured to the city’s Bird Market to view the thousands of birds, fish, bats, cats, squirrels and other animals for sale or trade. We desperately wanted to purchase one of the beautiful handmade bird cages being made on site for our pet Thor, and while the cages were a bargain at only $5 USD, the logistics of shipping them home were too daunting. Especially since Gil’s contact lenses never made it through the Indonesian gauntlet of customs – we are still trying to get them shipped home…
As we depart Indonesia for our time in Thailand, we carry with us a lasting impression of how kind the Indonesian people were during our travels. We never sensed the tourist fatigue, sometimes rightly so, that is an undercurrent in some places. Everywhere the people were patient and always genuinely happy to share a small bit of their country with us. And above all they drive like maniacs and don’t have a scratch or any feelings of road rage.
Terima Kasih for the memories Indonesia!