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March 10, 2005
Coming Home
It's 6:00 PM here in Saigon. In an hour we leave for our final dinner with the Kids First group (riders & non-riders) at the Sheraton Hotel in the center of Saigon and right down the street from our more modestly-priced Asia Hotel.
We leave at 9:30 tomorrow morning for the airport and the grueling 24 hour transfer from Saigon to Hong Kong to Vancouver BC to Seattle.
Our reentry into life from the cycling trip has been interesting: We cycled into Dong Ha a couple of days ago and then bused to Hue, an incredible city, the next day. It was in Hue that I saw the first Westerners I'd seen in a week. Some seemed to be Vietnam vets, here with their wives and touring the Citadel; the site of one of the hardest fought battles of the war. There were lots of French people and lots of Lonely Planet backpack travelers in the bars. I wanted to pretend they weren't there and avoided any contact with them. Still to raw from the bike trip and wanting to extend my fantasy that I and my friends were the only non-Vietnamese in the country.
Then we flew to Saigon, which sees more like lower Manhattan than rural Vietnam. Lots of big banks, multinationals, and designer boutiques. Last night we sat on the roof of the Majestic Hotel in the tropical night nursing our expensive drinks and listening to incredibly bad Vietnamese pop music (they'd advertised a jazz band).
I feel peeled. The past two weeks have been such a revelation; our schedule has been full, our contacts with the Vietnamese non-stop, we have had the support of incredible guides and interpreters. What all this means to me is going to take some time to figure out. As I said earlier my hope is to spend time over the weekend writing about things in a more or less chronological fashion. I know this trip has worked some big change in me. I have made some new friends, whom I have come to care as much for as people I have known for a long time. I have seen parts of this country that no Lonely Planet guide will ever help people access.
More to come...
Posted by ed at March 10, 2005 02:51 AM