If you look deep, deep into my center of my American soul, you will find that it’s not composed of car owning or monolingualism or even rock n roll.
It’s filled with peanut butter.
Australians have their Vegemite and the Swedes have their Muesli and the whole of Europe has their Nutella. But I am American, and my heart pumps, not red blood like yours but thick, chunky, light-brown swirls of peanut butter.
In previous posts, I’ve claimed that this love of the ground peanut is my number one American qualifier. I’ve gone so far as to consider a peanut butter tattoo, which I envision coming complete with a traditional-style banner that reads: “From my cold dead hands.” I effing love the stuff, and I miss it dearly when I travel. Usually, when homesickness and the craving for healthy fat gets the better of me, I search and search for a jar to no avail.
So imagine my sheer delight when I found this little gem of patriotism staring out from the shelf at me:
Not only is it delicious and nutritious, it comes with a prominent display of national pride. Now that’s what I call proper marketing.
“Tuk-tuk la-dee?” “La-dee, moto-bike!” “Where you go?” “La-dee, la-dee—you need moto-bike!”
This is the chorus you hear, endlessly, walking through central Phnom Penh. It’s like birds chattering, only more jarring, less song-like. It comes accompanied with a raised arm, two fingers extended—more of a summons than an offering of service.
By the touristy riverside, the touts can be pushy, but for the most part they’re just guys trying to make an honest(ish) buck. At first I tried to respond to all of them—Lisa ran a tuk-tuk company in Phnom Penh, given as part of her dowry, before the Khmer Rouge—so I feel a special responsibility to be respectful. I smiled politely and said “no” or “ot te.”
Eventually it got to be too much to respond to each other them, perched on their bikes at every street corner, crying out to you when you’re half-way down the block. I began to just shake my head, and soon stopped making eye contact. I started feeling like a bobble-head toy, my neck hurting from the constant swinging. Now I barely respond at all.
But I suppose that’s not so unusual, the constant barrage—being a Westerner in a city like Phnom Penh, where you stand out, gleaming of privilege and sweat and thin layer of sun screen. You take it in stride, a small price to pay for the relative welcoming warmness of the Cambodian people.
But here’s what is so unusual: most of these tuk-tuk and motorbike drivers have no idea how to navigate the city. A city, I should add, that’s laid out in a neat grid. And not just a grid, a numbered grid, where even numbered streets intersect the odd.
It is perhaps the easiest city I’ve ever learned. And I don’t make my living by driving its streets. So what, what, what is going on here?
It took me a few days to clue into it. I did a lot of walking at first, and when I did finally take a motorbike, chalked the confusion up to language barriers and my hotel’s offbeat location.
On Friday night, I was headed from a party back to my hotel. “Street 141 at 232,” I told the driver. The glassy gleam of incomprehension stared back at me, followed by a vague nod. This did not produce a feeling of confidence in me.
Must not know his English numbers yet, I thought and whipped out a piece of paper. I wrote the street numbers as largely and legibily as I could. I showed him. He nodded a little more vigoriously; we negotiated the price and I hopped on.
We slid down the wide Norodom Boulevard, nearly empty of its honking, and I felt the breeze of the night on my arms, my legs. I closed my eyes and let it kiss me.
I’d been in the city four days by that point—so I knew when we were making a wrong turn.
“Um, no,” I said and pointed back to Norodom. He shot me a confused glance. I pointed to the street sign. “This is only 156. We go to 232.” I waved my hand down the road.
A series of slow circlings and U-Turns ensued, me growing ever crankier on the back of the bike. It devolved to me leading the motorbike driver street-by-street back to the hotel.
He must be new at this, I thought as I finally hopped off.
But the phenomenon repeated itself: the glassy look, the vague nods, the wrong turns and aimless meandering. Another characteristic element to the typical un-joy-ride, I soon discovered, comes when you stop every couple blocks for the driver to discuss with other drivers the intended destination of the passenger, locked in some sort of secret code no one is able to decipher. Lots of pointing and shrugging ensues. This is apt to repeat two-to-four times before one finally arrives.
At first, I blamed it on my own inability to say Khmer numbers, and took to only writing locations, following it up with a big, you-get-it? grin.
The answer you always get is “okay, okay.” The ride you get is not always “okay, okay.”
I was utterly confused and out of ideas. Maybe they were guys from the countryside, who’d only just come to Phnom Penh. Maybe they didn’t know the city that well yet—but come on, how long does it take to learn a city? A numbered grid of a city at that?
No, no, there was something more going on here—some kind of deeper divide than just language or location familiarity. There was so kind of vast cultural chasm, a disconnect.
“Oh no, no, no,” Mathilde told me. “They don’t know street names, only landmarks. It’s better to say ‘near to Independence Monument,’ or ‘Royal Palace.’ These they know. But sometimes even then…”
I’ve worked that into my repertoire, a long, drawn-out process in which I use every means I can fathom to communicate my destination. “Sihanouk, near Independence Monument,” I told the driver yesterday.
We got closer this time, but just before the up-lit monument—positioned handsomely at the crossroads of two main thoroughfares and surrounded by the massive honking roundabout—we took a turn down a random sidestreet. I sighed. We U-Turned.
I reported my failure back to Mathilde. “They will always say ‘okay,’ even if they don’t know.”
“So, how do they work? How do they live and get around a city they don’t know at all?”
She shrugged, and I guess that’s all you can do. Because they must know it—there must be some way they know it, some entirely different way of interacting with a city and a landscape that doesn’t even occur to me, that I can’t even fathom—as foreign as another language, as mysterious as an alien scribble, written all over this city in a way I can’t read, can’t decipher—in a way that I can’t even see.
Perhaps I’ll figure out the mystery. But for now I’ll keep circling, keep ambling, keep pointing to a destination I can’t communicate, hidden somewhere in the gap between cultures—foreign, mystified and helmetless on the back of a Phnom Penh motorbike.
That’s all I kept thinking last night, as I stood sweating and stomach-sore in the crowd. I’d dragged myself out to a show, what was described to me as an all-girl indie rock band that sang in Khmer. Killer. No traveler’s flu would make me miss this.
It was a funny mix—local men in dress shirts and slacks, women in those super foofy sparkly dresses; kids, some just in the crowd, others wearing matching shirts for some organization I couldn’t quite make out.
And there were your typical expats—Western, mostly white. Some of them were extremely well-groomed, reeking of cologne and hair spray and kissing their friends on both cheeks. Some of them wore that aren’t-I-so-cool-for-being-here look. Some tried to dance along or move to the beat, and it was sad and cute in the way it’s always sad and cute. And others just seemed to be there, watching, enjoying the show, because that’s what there was to do that night.
But the kids putting on the show—the kids on stage and holding the cameras and checking the sound—they were not your normal expats.
Your typical expat does not drop their “to be” verb (“She crazy”), doesn’t say “y’all” or “aight.” They don’t wear baggy jeans and puffy sneakers. They don’t start NGOs called Tiny Toones or hip-hop groups called Klap Ya Handz, written in Godfather font. They don’t breakdance or freestyle or bust—and they don’t do it in the language native to their new homes.
I’d heard about the show from Bel, a girl I’d found on Couchsurfing. We had plans to meet up for coffee and even though my stomach was already getting wonky, something told me not to flake.
She was a cool girl and we talked for awhile. Her boyfriend was a Khmer-American who’d moved back to Cambodia, with no intention of ever leaving again. “He’s the most patriotic Khmer you’ll ever meet,” she said, and later he showed me the tattoo of a famous Wat across his back.
“There’s a lot of foreign-born Khmers moving back,” Bel told me. “Lots of artists and young people. And they’re really motivated to do something here.”
I wanted to see this; I wanted to glimpse what this was. Sure, I knew of people going back to their parents’ countries for a visit, but to live? To give up everything they know to fight for something better in a country they hadn’t grown up in? This was something different.
And it was. The show place was buried deep inside the maze of a mall, shuttered shops and a blinking arcade, bowling alley and bumper cars. I got there earlyish, paid a $10 cover—normal for the US, but exorbitant for here.
On stage was a DJ, two turntables and a MacBook glowing. Two artists were on stage, doing ad hoc graffiti art on a make-shift wall. “Empire State of Mind” came on. It was like being at any hip-hop show at home—except a hell of a lot hotter.
The first act was a hip-hop group called Klap Ya Handz. They spoke in a working-class English, like kids that grow up in Oakland. But in the songs, they flowed in Khmer. For one song, they brought out traditional Khmer drummers that were, well, bad-ass. During another song, the lead girl did what she later called “Khmer hands,” a hip-hop take-off on the hand movements of traditional Khmer dancers.
Cambodia lost a whole generation of artists during the Khmer Rouge. Traditional dance was virtually erased and, after Pol Pot, there wasn’t anyone left to pass it on. I’d read accounts of the few survivors left trying to teach the next generation, and it being hard—they were more interested, as teenagers usually are, in contemporary things. Like hip-hop.
The headliner was Laura Mam and the Like Me’s. They’re a bluesy, all-girl rock band from San Jose, California (local love). They’re Khmer-American and sing in Khmer. The crowd obviously loved them, singing along and snapping photos and waving their arms. I was told that they came to play in Cambodia relatively often. Either way, they showed the same kind of passionate pride in their Khmer culture that the kids in Klap Ya Handz did.
They played a song called “Diaspora”: “for all the refugees living in diaspora around the world—and missing Cambodia.” The crowd went crazy.
No, this wasn’t your normal expat scene.
Your typical expat is someone of relative priviledge; they have, say, a university degree and the social mobility to pick up and move around the world. Maybe they studied abroad, or spent time backpacking around. In any event, it occurred to them to leave their home countries in the first place and they had the means, however meager, to do it. The ones I encounter are largely middle-class; the uber wealthy ones exist on another plane, and I only see them in passing—the immaculate girls on the streets of Hong Kong.
These kids were categorically Not That. They’re the kind of kids, in the kind of scene, that I miss when I leave the US; when I think about moving abroad, I think, “Man, there’s so much shit I’d be missing” and this is part of what I mean.
And they bring their Americanness—their very, very Americanness—back here. But they’re making something new with it; there’s that frenetic energy, that spark you feel when cultures collide and you see people that are so intensely passionate about what they’re doing, you can’t help but feel it too.
Of course, not all of them are coming back by choice. The US opted to deport foreign-born convicts, regardless of whether they’d served their time, and nearly 200 people who were, for all intents and purposes, American were sent “back” to Cambodia. They brought their culture, a street culture, and they brought their art. And they’re doing shit; they’re bringing this to the kids of Cambodia, the next generation (ie: Tiny Toones).
So basically, watch the fuck out for these kids.
There was a shirt I kept seeing in the crowd, tons of kids wearing it. Its design was a take-off on the Star Wars logo, and it read: “The Khmer Empire Strikes Back.”
This was my first glimpse into this, my looking-through-the-peep-hole into this. I fully intend on investigating this more during my time here. But last night, sickness was calling, and I had to head back to the hotel.
Long stalks of flowers and twisted plumes of incense burning. Nodding, bowing, chanting with their eyes closed. Trays of food—peeled fruit, shrink-wrapped cookie packages, an entire plucked chicken—held atop people’s heads as they murmur. Candles and coconuts, red glowing altars (to what, to what?).
Children and hunched-up old people, a constant bumping, bustling, brushing against—the Asian conception of personal space, or lack thereof, exemplified. Announcements on a loudspeaker (what, what?).
Smoking a cigarette while he prays. Sweeping rubbish out from under the feet of the worshippers—playing cards with footprints on the floor.
Photocopied money in buckets being carried, to be burned—tossed into a pit outside that shoots scraps of burnt paper all over, raining ash in the night wind. Smoke rising (to where, to where?). Calling to children—“Em oi! Em oi!” Some kind of urgency, some kind of plead—nothing Christian about this piety. Nothing solemn; everything sacred.
Security guard siddles up to me, glances at the furious scribbling in my notebook (for what, for what?).
A Buddha-looking diety looking down on it all—a halo of neon, flashing in technicolor.
——–
This was perhaps one of the biggest What The Fuck moments of my travels. I had no idea where I was, what was going on, what any of it was for—just that I was suddenly immersed in it, plunged into a cloud of incense smoke and chanting and riotous fervor. These were the notes I made in the middle of the madness.
The motorbike driver didn’t speak any English. We were coming back from another site outside of Chau Doc, a town along the Cambodian border in the Mekong Delta. The roads became cluttered, lined with food stalls and carts and bodies, bodies. They filled like a clogged pipe until they choked and he had to pedal the bike through the crowd.
He stopped in front of a temple adorned with blinking Christmas lights. He pointed. I went in.
It was a funny thing, to be wrapped up in the zeal and fervor of it all without having the slightest clue what any of it was—an entirely sensory experience, a ritual out of context, a girl out of context, cultured-shocked.
When I got back to the hotel, I asked the English-speaking desk clerk, “I just went to some temple, up the road and—”
“You saw thousands of people,” she finished me, nodding.
“Yeah! What was that?”
She told me that they’re city-folk; they come to Lady Temple after the new year to ask for good luck. On weekends in February, March, even up through April, the otherwise sleepy town of Chau Doc swells with these Vietnamese travelers.
“Pilgrims, pilgrims,” the other clerk told me the next day. He’s younger than the girl, I thought, but he only seems it—he later told me that he’s almost 40. I wondered where the years went, behind his boyish smile.
“Other times, not so many people in Chau Doc. It very good for the business.” He looked out the glass lobby windows onto the town’s main market, overflowing into the street with tourists—not so many of them Western.
Snapped a couple of jostled photos before I saw the "No Camera" signs...
He slows the motorbike, pulling over to the skinny shoulder of the highway that wraps seductively around the lush green mountain. He points. “Photo.” It’s more of a command than a suggestion. I snap of shot of the vista—pretty, with rice paddies and a cloak of fog. But I couldn’t tell you any more about it.
That’s because Mr. Loc isn’t having it. He’s shown us the goddamn vista, his posture seems to say, what more do we want?
Even the most skilled and adept of independent travelers (and I’m certainly far from one of them) falls for an imitator sometimes. It happens: we’re tired, we’re rushed, our guard is down, it seems like a good idea. We wind up paying top dollar for a half-assed adventure.
I’d heard about the Hue Riders one night in Hanoi. Instead of a boring old tour bus, they take you on motorbikes from Hue to Hoi An, an historic trail that stops at waterfalls and pagodas and old American bunkers. “It’s supposed to be brillant,” one of Jacob’s friends told me, hunched on our plastic stools over the billow of BBQ smoke.
Killer. Sign me up.
I asked my hotel in Hue if they’d heard of the Hue Riders and they nodded enthusiastically, leading me over to the dude posted at the cafe next door. He thumbed through his photo album—him with smiling white girls, him with white dudes giving the thumbs up sign. He showed me an entry in his customer comment notebook from a girl who was “from your country!”
I couldn’t tell if it was cause to be suspicious, or if he was just that certain kind of proud that third-world tourism workers sometimes are. He showed me his business card: “FIFTEEN YEARS Experienced, All’s for your satisfaction.” But hey, it said “Hue Riders” under his name.
It was only later, after I’d paid and signed up, that the real suspicion began to mount. I googled Hue Riders. And holy shit, there was an actual, legit website. For the real Hue Riders. Of which Mr. Loc was not one.
Oh well, I told myself. Chalk another up to experience. Sometimes the DIY, hustling tour guides can be just as good as the bona fide ones your LP recommends.
Which is true. But Mr. Loc, I’m discovering, isn’t one of them.
He isn’t terrible; he’s just monumentally not into it. Fifteen years of experience has translated to boredom.
Our first stop was a fishing village off the highway: a dirt road strewn with debris; a couple of kids playing soccer; a clutter of wooden boats, docked and sleeping; nets laid out like the vacated skins of snakes.
“Fishing village,” was the extent of explaination given.
Joe, the upbeat and friendly male half of an American couple who’d also gotten roped into the tour, attempted to ask some questions. “Do they go out in the morning?” We got a sort of unintelligble, one-word answer.
Now at a mountain pass—but was it the first or the second pass?—I attempt to eavesdrop on the tour guide next to us. Something important about these cables, this view, something about Americans? I try to ask Mr. Loc. “Was this something important during the war?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Tourists at a former bunker
We move along. It’s a foggy, white-wrapped day, and all the sights we stop at are equally shrouded in hazy incomprehension. We stop by bunkers used during “the American War” (now a tourist trap—more on that in a later post). We stop off for overpriced coffee at a cheesy resort. We pull over at the roadside operation for a kind of cosmetic oil made from a local leaf. We stand around awkwardly as Mr. Loc tells us the prices of the different sized oils.
“Not much of an oil type myself,” Joe declares good-naturedly. He’s pathologically cheerful, in that particular American way, with his buzz cut and beaming cheeks. “When do we get to the waterfall?”
“No waterfall today,” Mr. Loc declares. “The weather,” he gestures around us, “road too slippery.” He makes a skid-and-crash motion with his hands. We nod solemnly, disappointed.
We stop at Marble Mountains, thrust from the flat earth near China Beach like a glittering rock of crystal. Pagodas and temples abound. Joe maintains his positivity, reading aloud from his Lonely Planet to make up for our lack of tour guide. I’m grateful for his unrelenting optimism.
Holy light
We wander into a cave that feels like a cathedral—a carved Buddha in the stone, incense like breath, sunlight filtering through the ceiling like the fingers of gods. There’s the hush of a holy place there; Joe reads that during the War, it was used as a VC hospital.
In a corner, a bat with a broken wing arches and flops. He squeaks intermittenly, and it sounds like a very small prayer, echoing against the rock.
We descend the mountain and find Mr. Loc waiting for us, leaned against the motorbike. “Okay, we go.”
I realize the thing about Mr. Loc isn’t that he’s rude or unknowledgable or even a shitty tour guide. It’s that he’s supremely Vietnamese. It’s this certain way, this certain attitude, that I’ve begun to understand, the same as in the nail shops at home—matter-of-fact, blunt, nothing sugar-coated or said sweetly. Here’s your tour. There’s a sight. Good? Okay.
“Vietnamese people aren’t very nice,” other travelers have told me. I understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s a simple matter of not being nice; I think it’s a profound cultural difference. (“You want pedicure? Okay, you pick a color.”) Brusk and brash—jarring as the chorus of honks from the motorbikes.
We arrive in Hoi An wind-blown and dirt-covered. My eyes well from the thousand particles of crap swimming around my contacts; my hair’s matted to my head from too many hours wearing a helmet.
Mr. Loc drops me at my hotel. “Happy?” It’s a business-like question.
Clinging hands behind me to the metal rack, I try to suppress the involuntary flinching—a circumstantial case of Tourette’s. It’s Saturday morning, and my first ride aback a motorbike through the frenetic traffic of Hanoi.
If you want to see the word “clusterfuck” defined, acted out in an exquisite charade, snap on a spare helmet, straddle the seat of your friend’s motorbike and take a ride through the streets of Hanoi. Feel the blanket of exhaust haze whip up around you; feel your legs naked to the risk of a thousand near collisions; feel the breeze of your own mortality and the queasy cocktail of sweetened coffee, cigarettes and exhaust churn in your stomach.
See towers of Tet trees and blossom branches balanced aback bikes; see jugs of water and housewares, bundles of mysterious somethings tied on in impossible precariousness. See families of four smooshed onto a single bike; see the eyes of children placidly blinking in the madness. See drivers texting, pulling out without looking, barely slowly, pedestrians stepping out into the chaos of it all—women walking with baskets balanced on a piece of wood across their shoulders, liked Lady Justice, except it’s their mouths that are masked; their eyes remain wide open.
Hear the horns beep and squawk like a million hungry birds—seven million, to be exact, and every damn one of em has a motorbike and is riding their motorbike, lanes just vague suggestions, right-of-way a nonexistent notion.
See this all this because you’re in this, suddenly a part of this: a passenger in the strange dance that feels more like a riot or a mosh pit—but no, no, must be a dance because you keep skirting disaster, skirting death, and you keep wanting to clamp your eyes shut but can’t, can’t.
Riding aback a motorbike through Hanoi isn’t exactly a near-death experience. It feels more like being on an airplane with really bad turbulence: you trust the pilot but not the skies. You know you’re not actually going to die, but you really can’t wait for the whole damn thing to be over. You get off feeling like you’ve just stepped off a rickety old rollercoaster that’s safety permits are supremely suspect.
“The sidewalks in Hanoi aren’t really for walking,” Jacob throws over his shoulder. “They’re more for commerce. If you want to walk, you’ve pretty much gotta do it in the street.”
It’s not a walking town, he says, and it’s true—at times I don’t see a single pedestrian, just a weaving, wheezing sea of traffic. How do you get to know a place without walking it? How do you get a feel for feel for a place without your feet on its streets?
It gets easier. I tell myself to trust, to put faith in the fact no one seems to be crashing. It begins to feel like we’re moving along this barely perceptible tightrope that weaves in and out of other people’s tightropes, maybe like telephone wires—like our own personal orbit, the miracle of chance that we don’t collide, such a miracle that it can’t be chance at all, but driven by some other force I can only suspect, can feel at times in the smoggy breeze, but can’t come close to naming.
Nighttime is different. It’s as though someone flips a giant switch. By 11, the streets have cleared, suddenly swept of everything but a faint whisper, the asthmatic glow of the headlight. The streets seem smaller in the dark, emptied of their madness—they don’t seem like the same streets at all, but an entirely different place, a different city. An incredible stillness settles over the buildings, the pavement, the wires stretching and branches drooping and the shapes of shadows in the dim drizzle—as if none of it were real, all the daylight mania just a waking dream, a reverse nightmare.
By Sunday I’m able to hang on with only one hand and snap photos with the other. I’m comfortable enough to carry on a conversation as we drive. Jacob points out landmarks and tell little stories; I tell him how my parents were revolutionaries when they were young, how the met in a Communist meeting. He quizzes me Vietnamese numbers, phrases; we laugh about the universal asshole-ness of SUV drivers. We weave through the manic chaos of daytime, and I tell him Hanoi feels like a bipolar city.
Rain comes that night, along with a cold wind; we move more slowly through the vacant streets. I blink against the lashings of wet and my hands turn frigid. Slowly, I loosen my grip on the metal grating, and place both my hands in my pockets.
I’ve learned how to trust the gods of traffic and chaos. I’ve learned how to ride a motorbike in Hanoi.
If ever there was a place to wander around in a jet-lagged, head-cold haze with nothing more than a tourist bureau map, Hong Kong is it.
The 11-hour lay-over is actually what made me choose this flight to Hanoi (aside from the fact that it was the cheapest). I love long layovers; it’s like a two-for, a bonus. You get to extend the half-here-ness of transit onto a place—walk through its streets like it were a video game, or bumpy camcorder images from someone else’s vacation, or someone else’s dream, exuding a kind of impermenance that makes you impervious, imperceptible, a kind of illusion, a walking ghost in a half-here city.
Or it could just be the jet-lag talking.
Either way, Hong Kong is a trippy city to spend 11 hours sleepwalking through. Everything is clean, clear and predetermined: signs telling you where to go, signs reminding you to hold the handrailings, signs designating exactly where you should walk and where you should stand and which direction you should look for traffic and when you should be mindful of bicyclists.
It’s a subdued city, a city on Vicodin. Everyone talks in a low, pleasant voice; they smile slightly when they exchange words with you. Skyscrapers rise up to be swallowed in a white fog. Municipal workers sweep sidewalks, trim hedges, wear blue face masks and walk with their hands clasped behind their backs, or piously under their bellies. People walk with the self-possessed composure of business people on their lunch breaks. Shoes click, crosswalk signs hum, the gentle clatter of endless construction (what more could they be building?) echoes. Nothing is loud or jarring or overwhelming. Yes, it’s crowded, but there’s an order to everything—an organized insanity, a colonized chaos.
You could almost begin to suspect that you were in some George-Orwell-esque alternate reality, where everything seems real, resembles real, but really isn’t—just some placated approximation of a real place. Rolex, Prada, Couch, Ralph Lauren, Espirit, Starbucks, 711, Pret A Manger, Citibank, Geox—buildings that stack as neatly as Leggos and fish markets that don’t reek of fish, don’t reek of anything. The thinnest layer of soot covers the awnings, as if to remind you that it’s real—the slightest twinge of exhaust tickles your nose.
It doesn’t feel theme-parky or like a tourist charade, but rather like the city has in fact become this—a large, outdoor office park.
None of which is to say I didn’t enjoy my time wandering around Hong Kong—just that it felt more like one of the alternative realities from Inception than a real place. Which could have been the cocktail of jet lag and DayQuil and caffiene and bad airplane food swimming around inside me. It could have been the pork dumplings and Ramen noodles that tasted like childhood.
It’s happening again. I’m busily getting my life in order—writing post-dated rent checks and filing my taxes (before Feb 1!) and generally preparing my life at home to cruise on autopilot while I go travel—someone will eye me narrowly, a half-slit of suspicion, and ask, “So, how do you get to travel so much?”
Which is actually a question within a question—an implicit way of asking, “Where the hell do you get the money?” Which, given that I work as a waitress, is also to ask, “Who’s giving you the money to travel?”
They initially don’t believe me when I answer, “I save a lot.” Which is to say, “I budget like crazy.” Which is to say, “No one’s giving me money; every penny I have I earn.”
I’ve found myself breaking it down, taking it further, explaining my budgeting technique and demonstrating iPhone apps as Exhibit A in the No, I’m Not Secretly Rich defense trial. Which isn’t so much an effort to prove myself to other people (okay, maybe it’s a little that), but really to answer the question for myself. Because honestly, I don’t know how I afford it all either.
Through this recent round of explaining, I’ve begun to see more clearly that I’m a bit peculiar when it comes to money. I’m not sure where that comes from either. My family was pretty poor when I was growing up, and money was always a stressful issue, so it might grow out of that. Or it might just be who I am.
Either way, I’ve always been a budgeter. I’ve always kept meticulous track of my finances, my expenditures and income. I’ve never paid a bill late. I can always tell you exactly how much I have in my checking account. This is not normal. There weren’t any other 19-year-old punk kids who drew charts in their organizers with savings schedules and projected income based on the averaged income from the previous months. (Where there any other punk kids with organizers to begin with?)
So it’s not a new development, not solely a product of having a goal, something I love, to work towards and save for. Nor is this meticulous budgeting necessarily a product of not having anything but my own ability to work to fall back on. My background is purely working-class; there’s no trust funds, no investments or money market accounts, no heirlooms, no looming inheritances, nothing to pass along the generations but a propensity towards denial and socialism. My parents have done everything they can for me, given me everything they could give me, so it’s not like I’ve never had help. But I work for everything I have. Here’s how I do it.
Exhibit A: Realistic Budgeting
I live comfortably on $2,000 a month. This includes everything from necessities like rent and health insurance to indulgences like lattes and dinners out. It’s really important for me to work in modest indulgences, and to hold myself to them, to not try to “work harder, push more, save more.” Because it’s important for me to not feel like I’m constantly scrimping and saving for some future goal (and thus living in the future), but also allowing myself to enjoy today (and thus live in the present).
I long ago figured out how much I need to live comfortably and happily, to not feel like I’m depriving myself—a budgetary form of crash dieting. The number has slowly crept up the older I’ve gotten, because adult life is expensive; but my income has also crept up. Which brings us to…
Exhibit B: Knowing How Much I Earn
This sounds pretty basic, but when you work in a cash-based industry, it’s really easy to lose track—to wind up with a drawer full of twenties and no real idea how much you’re actually earning. A lot of people I’ve worked with over the years have no clue how much they make, and no idea where the hell the money all goes.
I currently take home between $2,500 and $3,000 a month. Which means I’m earning $500-1,000 more than my expenses. There’s a fuck of a lot you can do with that kind of money. Such as travel. And get tattooed.
Exhibit C: Treating Saving Like a Bill
I deposit money into my savings account on the 15th of every month. I treat it like another bill, instead of a if-I-have-money-leftover kind of thing. It’s pretty simple, and that’s all I have to say about it.
Exhibit D: Keeping Track of Everything I Spend
And I mean everything. I like to think of this more as “thorough” than “neurotic” (you say “potato”…). iPhone apps have made this infinitely easier, but I used to do it by hand, in my organizers, with crooked-line charts and bleeding ink.
Exhibit E: Maintaining a “Prudent Reserve”
In addition, or underneath, all my regular saving for travel, there’s a baseline I never dip beneath. I maintain a $2,000 “prudent reserve” for total emergencies—my car explodes, I break my leg and can’t work, etc. So even when I’m coming back from a trip, I’m never completely at zero. If disaster strikes, I’ll have enough to live on for at least a month.
The end result of all this is that I know where all my money is going, and exactly how much is coming in. There’s no murky intransparencies. I don’t have to stress out; I can be comfortable in the fact that there’ll be enough.
I realize this sounds like a lot—when I’m done explaining it all to someone, their eyes have invariable glazed over and they no longer doubt me when I say that I don’t have secret trust fund. They’ll shake their heads and say something to the effect of, “I could never…”
And I realize that this all sounds terribly tedious and like a lot of time and work. But for me, the energy I put into budgeting is far less than the emotional energy of worrying that there won’t be enough, that I won’t be okay. Budgeting for me allows for a kind of freedom—and not just the freedom to travel and do what I love. But that’s nice too.
Yes, travel is exotic and life-altering and profoundly moving. Yes, you encounter new environments, new people, new customs, and in that way, also encounter some new piece of yourself. Yes, you become more cultured, more able to pepper cocktail conversations with ledes like, “Well, when I was learning tango in Buenos Aires…,” and “There’s really no comparison to actual Italian gelato…”
But there’s also the nitty-gritty, the laborious and unglamorous, the tedium of trip planning. It’s not fun, there’s no scene cred, and no one likes to talk about it.
So, with twelve days left until my departure to Southeast Asia, I’m taking a pause in the string of earth-shattering lyrical narratives to discuss the oh-so boring details necessary to Vietnam travel: visas.
The first step to any obligatory activity, whether it’s commuting or house cleaning, is to get yourself a killer soundtrack to lessen the annoyance. For this, I suggest listening to Abner Jay on repeat.
Having to obtain a visa before visiting a country is a strange and confusing process to those of us native to countries of privilege. As an American, you’re more or less used to waltzing up to a customs window, flashing a smile that gleams of tourist dollars, and getting your stamp. Some countries, like Chile and Brazil, charge you of reciprocal entry fee, a kind of fuck-you I can appreciate. But needing to arrange a visa prior to arrival? What kind of criminal do you think I am?
Once you get over the indignity that the majority of the world’s other citizens are subjected to, you’ll need to actually procure the said visa. Here’s what I learned, thanks to research and Thorn Tree, one of my all-time favorite travel resources.
There are no “visas on arrival” for Vietnam.
Other countries in Southeast Asia, yes. Vietnam, no. It’s pretty simple.
There are different types of visas.
For your basic Vietnam tourist visa, there’s a few options. You can go for a one- or three-month visa; you can also opt for single- or multiple-entry. There are no longer six-month tourist or business visas. This means that, if like me, you’re planning on cruising in and out of Vietnam for a period longer than three months, you’ll need to get a visa extension while you’re there. That’s a beast I’ll tackle when the time comes…
Visa costs aren’t fixed.
Figuring out exactly how much a Vietnam visa will cost is an adventure in obscurity. The Embassy and Consulate websites conveniently don’t tell you how much visas cost. Through poking around, I discovered that if you go directly through official channels—that is, the Embassy or Consulate—you can expect to pay anything from $70 for a one-month single-entry, to $150 for a three-month multiple-entry.
There are several companies (like this one) that facilitate visas, and their prices are far from fixed. Discounts apply for groups; the larger the group, the deeper the discount. Prices for these service range from a $20-$50 discount from official prices.
Going through the Embassy or Consulate is expensive, time-consuming and worrisome.
In most situations like this, I’m skeptical of companies with cheesy websites that offer deeply discounted prices on official services. So I’d decided to stick with getting a visa from the Consulate. But this meant handing over my passport. I’d either have to mail my passport to the Embassy and wait for it to be returned (hello anxiety), or get up early one morning and head out to the Vietnam Consulate in San Francisco. Here, I was told I’d need to give them my passport for processing, which would take around 5 days, and then come pick it up again. It sounded like a pain, but preferable to mailing my most sacred of travel possessions.
The night before I was to roust myself and cram onto the train with all the suit-and-ties, I discovered that…
There’s a way around all this. Kind of.
So, you can actually negate the visa process, in a way. You can get what’s called a Visa Approval Letter, an official document that allows you to get what is essentially a visa on arrival. The pluses are that it’s much cheaper, your passport doesn’t have to leave your possession, and you can do it from your computer. The two big catches are that you need to be arriving into one of the international airports (Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh), and you need to be ready to pay a $25-$50 “stamping” fee.
I used Vietnam Visa Pro, and while the actual entry into Vietnam remains to be experienced, I’m so far super happy with them. I paid $30 for an approval letter for a three-month multiple-entry. I paid via Paypal, which I liked since I’ve heard horror stories about stolen credit card numbers from shady foreign websites (incidentally, just had my credit card number stolen, but that’s another story). I heard back from the company promptly, and had my approval letter emailed to me in 2 business days. Printed it out, made copies of my passport photo, and am ready to roll!
Now all I’ve got to focus on is amassing some more exotic-sounding stories.
So I bought plane tickets to Southeast Asia. With a knot in my stomach.
It was the first time I didn’t get that rush, that tingle at the tangibility of travel plans—didn’t jump up and do a hop-skip happy dance across my bedroom floor. This is because, I realized, I’m scared shitless.
I figured as much, as I’d been balking on buying the tickets for no discernible reason. I couldn’t really tell you what it was. Yes, it’s gonna be one of the longer trips I’ve been on, just over three months, and it’ll be on a continent I’ve never been to, where my chances of muddling through the local language are next to nil. It’ll be humid as hell and the buses will suck and the roads will be shitty and the mosquitoes will buzz and I won’t be able to drink the water and I’ll have to negotiate the fabled squat toilet again and most likely I’ll get one of the gnarly stomach flus that turns me into a gasping, pale, dehydrated, crusty-lipped caricature of myself.
But I can tell you right away that that wasn’t all that made my stomach clench like a white-knuckled fist.
It’s gonna be a different kind of trip for me, more of a personal journey, a pilgrimage, in the Phil Cousineau sense of the term. It’s a trip I’ve wanted to do for a long time; ever since I started traveling, I knew I wanted to go to Cambodia. My childhood best friend’s parents had escaped and I’d always heard about it—this place and this person, Pol Pot—a presence I felt but didn’t understand. We didn’t learn about Cambodia in school, I didn’t hear about it on TV or in books, and Pol Pot became just another person around her house, like a dead uncle no one dared talk about, except in passing.
I couldn’t tell you exactly why I wanted to go, though, just that I felt this draw, this pull—the difference between a trip you want to take and a trip you need to take. The closest I could come was to say that I wanted to actually see this place I’d felt, to experience it for what it was—a place that, to me, was kind of like Jacob in Jacob’s Room: this big howling empty in the middle of the everything, that everything circled around but no one ever got close to, in to, inside of—like flies around a lightbulb.
“Can I write about it?” I asked Lynda. I was scared then too.
“My life is an open book,” she told me. “You can write about anything.”
“Can we get together and talk sometime, about what you remember?”
She sighed. “Yeah, of course, but to be honest, there’s so much I don’t remember. There’s a lot of blank spaces, you know.”
And it was like a little click. Blank spaces: the things we darken and blur and don’t let ourselves look at—that we push down, down, so far down, but still carry with us, the stories murmuring in our blood. Because I do that too, in my own way, in the way I think we all do—black out the things we can’t bear. But goddamnit if it isn’t all still in there, always; goddamnit if we don’t spend our lives circling around it, crashing our heads into the glowing glass of it.
I never cried when Lynda’s parents died, ten years ago. I realized this just after I’d bought my plane tickets. I was tired and irritated and, like a two year old, had decided to put myself down for a nap. But I didn’t really sleep, just laid there floating in the numb in-between space, a vagrant twitch here and there.
And I thought about the reality of going there, being there, a place that had become tragically mythic in my own mind, but also blurry, unreal—the face of that dead uncle you never met, but reconstructed, from photographs and passing stories, in your own mind. And it wasn’t like I’d finally be looking at that face, seeing it in real life, because it was gone and buried—but, I don’t know, like digging up the bones of what was left? No, that isn’t quite right either.
I had this dim notion that, to me, traveling to Cambodia was akin to traveling into some place inside myself, a blank place where there was nothing but a thick silence, a deathly silence; where everything was white, or maybe black, but in any case obscure; a place that looked empty, but really was full, pregnant with some sort of strange energy I didn’t understand but was somehow scared of.
That place wasn’t necessarily Cambodia, or really Cambodia at all, but a place inside myself. And I was fucking terrified of what I’d find.
I didn’t cry then, not exactly, but I teared up. Which is the closest I’ve come to letting myself really feel any of it—to looking at it and letting it become real.
Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.
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