I’m not in Saigon anymore, by the way, and I haven’t really written much about that little adventure, but it was amazing even though I got into a fight on a bus which I’ll tell you all about later. I’m in this dreamy little town called Hoi An that’s halfway up the coast and almost feels more like the south of France than Vietnam except for the old ladies and dopey looking tourists in pointy hats. Apparently it was a big deal back in the day because of its port and much outside influence worked its way into the buildings.

It’s on this sweet river, or is it called a channel if it’s connected to the ocean? Anyway, it pretty much floods the streets every night at around 5:00 p.m. The town is famous for its cloth lanterns so it’s all lit up and romantic at night, and it has the best food that I’ve put in my mouth yet on this trip. And I’ve put of lot in there. And it all cost a dollar.

Lots of tasty seafood and wonton type things, and meat cooked in banana leaves, and a different tailor or shoe-making shop every five feet. And the coffee – I don’t even drink coffee but it’s basically a shot of really good espresso with sweetened condensed milk in it. Sweetened condensed milk – what is the deal with that stuff? You could put sweetened condensed milk on a turd and it would taste great.

I arrived the night before New Years Eve which I spent at a talent show. I think. There were a couple tables of judge-type-looking people set up in front of a big stage complete with smoke machines, a live band and a tarp thrown on the ground to much applause anytime anyone felt like busting out their break dancing moves. Then various groups of people would take the stage and do The Worm, rap, sing, high five the crowd, etc., and even though it was all in Vietnamese, I couldn’t help feeling that, like most things in touristy towns, it was mostly for the benefit of Whitey. Not only is the Vietnamese New Year in February, but we were treated to a group of women in traditional kimono/headgear type outfits doing a line dance to what sounded like a Garth Brooks song.

It was rill weird. Especially since when the clock struck twelve, there was no countdown, only a stage full of pubescent boys grinding their hips to house music, leaving patches of confused tourists to count back from ten themselves, lamely throwing their ripped-up hotel receipts in the air for confetti. Woo hoo.

I got back to my locked up hotel at around 2 a.m. and had to wake up the poor lady who runs the place and was sleeping in the lobby on a stretcher. These people NEVER stop working. It’s staggering. And a lot of them start when they’re little kids selling stuff in the streets. I’ve gone into countless places where the shopkeepers are all dressed up and crashed out on a bench or the floor and spring to action the second that they sense you walking in, all cheerful and ready to go. Next time you’re feeling overworked and sorry for yourself, come to Vietnam. You’ll feel like a total boob.

I just have to talk about my ride from the airport into this town because it could have been totally hairball but wasn’t. So now instead of it being one of those stories I can’t tell without banging my head against the wall, it’s a very good wakeup call.

Every time I get somewhere new at night I stalk the airport for people to share a cab with so I don’t have to wander the streets alone. When I landed in Danang, the site of the airport 30 minutes from Hoi An, the lucky victims were a European couple named Elena and Mathias, who, incidentally were totally not the ”type” of people I would normally stalk because… I don’t know why. Well, for one, they didn’t look like they spoke English. She also looked very serious. Because she had glasses on? Meanwhile, they’re two of the loveliest (and fun) people I’ve ever met. My first-impression radar is totally off these days. Several times I’ve tried to avoid people on this trip who I’ve wound up tearfully clawing good-bye days later.

Anyway we were outside the airport receiving the usual onslaught of cabbies trying to coax us into riding with them and our bags were literally thrown in the back of cab after cab before we agreed to even go with them. We finally met one driver who was game for not ripping us off, and he hurriedly piled us in his car and took off out of town. About ten minutes into the ride it occurred to me that I never checked to see if my bag had made it into his trunk. There was so much chaos and screaming and yelling and pressure to choose that it completely slipped my mind.

My bag, the only thing other than my body that I have to keep track of, and it slipped my mind.

This is what can happen when faced with chaos and people waving their arms around in your face. And lots of time this is done precisely SO you will lose track of one of the two things you’re attempting to hold onto.

I made the guy pull over and, to my great relief it was there, but I would like to just put this little note to self in here: in the face of chaos, sit down. You do not have to participate in other people’s mayhem just because they’ve created it. Stop what you’re doing, pull back, get it together, and then move forward. Just today I was trying to buy a train ticket from this maniac who was talking a mile a minute and screaming at me to buy because time was running out, and did I want it or not, and I literally had to put my hands over my ears and stare him down until he shut the hell up.

Then I bought a ticket.

I’m in Hoi An for a couple more days, heading off to the beach and some ruins south of town tomorrow, and then taking an overnight train north along the coast to Hanoi on my way to the mountain village of Sapa. I hear that a good stretch of the train ride is along a sheer cliff. I mean right along the cliff, so you look out the window and see nothing but the waves crashing beneath you. Can’t wait! I think!

The post Cheerful Disorientation in Vietnam appeared first on The Faster Times.

I was waiting for my flight to Vietnam after spending a week on the island of Koh Tao which I will describe in a moment but the scene around me right now at this sidewalk cafe is so incredible it demands a comment. I’m in Ho Chi Minh, drinking a dollar Saigon Beer, staring at what looks to be a cross between Bladerunner and a Motocross event. Motorcycles and scooters line up at the stoplight in front of me, waiting impatiently for it to turn green before they scream through it as a solid mass. I’ve never seen so many motorbikes in one place in my life. Or face masks. They apparently take their masks rill seriously here in Vietnam. I don’t know if it’s the swine or the bird or if it’s a religious thing, like a frontal beanie of sorts, but they’re all over the place and today I saw a woman who’d strapped one on that matched her black floral pants. That’s like blowing your nose in something that matches your purse! I wonder how many of those things she owns.

Anyway, Koh Tao. One of the top ten diving destinations in the world and even though I stuck to snorkeling I have to say that I have never had my mind so blown by Underwaterworld before. It was like swimming through a cartoon – rocks with bright blue and purple glittery lips that open and close when you swim by, big black fish with bright orange feather type things flowing off their fins, schools of neon blue, bugeyes, needlenoses, flatheads – it was right up there with the drag show I saw the next night (Queens Cabaret, Koh Tao, Thailand, definitely go if you’re in town).

I have to mention how on the way to Koh Tao, when I was all grouchy and irritated, feeling like I was trapped in some sort of Spring Break Gone Wild nightmare (because I was), I was on the ferry sitting behind this guy who was coughing up his insides. I decided to move in an attempt to not catch whatever was slowly killing him, and the only place I could find to sit was out on the deck with about eight guys, all of whom were busy drinking themselves into oblivion while they bragged about how many times they’d been taken to the emergency room to get their stomachs pumped. They were mostly Irish, all loud, half naked and ultimately broke out into a series of Irish drinking songs and pissing over the side of the boat.

I stuck it out for a bit, hating to seem like the craggy old lady that I was, but ended up sitting behind The Lung of Death downstairs again when I couldn’t take it anymore.

So we get off the boat and are herded into the Thai version of cabs which are pick up trucks with benches in the back and who am I crammed in there with but Animal House. And this nice quiet Swedish family who got soaked with beer alongside me when the boys decided it was time for a beer fight.

Then, because what you focus on you will absolutely get, when we got off at the station and all walked off to our respective buses, I was once again treated to my favorite travel mates. They were so wasted by the time we got on the bus that the driver pulled over several times and threatened to kick them off while waving his flip flop over his head.

Then it finally ended. The beer-soaked Swedes and I herded off to the overnight boat to Koh Tao without them. I have never seen anything like this boat – it’s basically got two long rows of mattresses lining the walls on the top level and engines, bathrooms, cargo and Thai men running around in their undies on the bottom. It’s a floating slumber party and there’s no saying who you’ll end up spooning in the middle of the night. Hello!

But back to the drunks who, in hindsight, I would like to thank. It was just too much of an onslaught not to mean something in my grouchy state. And this is what it meant to me: Nothing forces you to get over yourself more than being stuck face to face, beer burp to beer burp, with the very thing you are trying to avoid. It forces you to surrender, to stop trying to impose your will where it’s unimposable and instead see what the situation has to offer (and why you attracted it to yourself in the first place). I was sooo over being surrounded by drunken twenty somethings that I wound up with them sitting in my lap, slurring the words to American Girl in my face. It wasn’t until I high fived them back and shared a warm beer with them that I started meeting the kind of people I wanted to meet on my trip. Not sure if one had anything to do with the other, but I’ll thank them for it anyway because as much as I hate to admit it, they did kind of crack me up once I stopped wanting to kill them.

The post Boys Gone Wild appeared first on The Faster Times.

Nothing reminds you that you’re not in Kansas anymore like crashing through the ocean in a hollowed-out tree trunk powered by a deafening, cranky engine spewing black soot, driven by a Thai Mad Max who’s probably 35 but looks 17, and whose only entertainment after making this trip eight bazillion times is seeing how wet he can get every single person on his boat.

I realize this as I sit on a plank under a blue tarp with 15 other sopping wet tourists for whom it’s also obvious that if anything should go awry during our endeavor, we’ll quickly trade in the pleasantries (about where we’re from and how long we’ve been traveling, etc.) for kicking each other in the head, trying to get at the only three life vests on board.

It always strikes me how reckless it is Out There whenever I leave home. The United States is like an overprotective mother in comparison to most places I’ve been, with our seat belt laws and health codes and our Like Hell, You’re Smoking That In Here attitudes. Meanwhile the rest of the world is having one big ole party.

Sure, I know things like pollution, food poisoning, and splitting your head open on the road are lame, but… come on: I really like riding in the back of a pick up truck with eight other people while eating some strange meat thing on a stick and watching a family of five ride by on a motorcycle. It’s so much more fun!

I’ve left dear old Bangkok for the island of Koh Phi Phi, and I will say right now that I have never seen beaches so beautiful in my life (so beautiful that it’s actually not cliche to use “beautiful” in travel writing). Soft white sand; bright green, warm water; giant strange rocks jutting out from the ocean floor; mountains covered in jungles; endless coral reefs; balmy breezes. It’s like the supermodel of beaches. I’m even staying in a bamboo hut, on stilts, five feet from the sand, and I drink milk out of a coconut through a straw every morning. It’s embarrassing.

You see, at first, I was planning to visit Vietnam during these dates, but somehow I mentally lumped the country in with all the other places I’m headed in Southeast Asia that allow you to get your visa at the border. So now I have to wait for a guy at some government office to look over my paperwork. And it was either: wait it out in Bangkok or head down here. But back to my three-hour tour of Phi Phi and its surrounding islands.

So I’m on this boat-thing, and we’re being literally herded around: “Here, Monkey Island!” says the guide — at which point, we all pile off as told and take pictures of (yes) monkeys like the 10 other boatloads of tourists who’ve pulled up alongside us. Then it’s off to Bamboo Island. Then we pull out to sea — 0kay, you snorkel here! — and all 80 of us in The Tourist Caravan jump off to snorkel. Next, Maya Bay, here — one hour! Our guide hands us a thing of rice and kicks us off the boat again.

Of course, at this point it’s been five hours on this trip, and none of us actually want to get off the boat even though it’s a serious tear-jerker of a beach (the actual site of the movie The Beach if you’ve ever seen it). But our guide’s not leaving for an hour, so we all shlep to a beach packed with fellow tourists who I can’t help but notice don’t seem quite as wet as we are.

Yes, I sound complain-y, and I’m not proud, but it’s like sitting at The Best Restaurant in The Entire World eating The Most Amazing Meal in the Entire World with The Funnest People in the Entire World on the Amalfi Coast, stoned, and an entire kindergarten class with noisemakers suddenly sits at the table right next to you. You can’t tell the story without the kindergarten class part, complainy-sounding or not.

And in general, that’s how I’m finding Thailand so far. So much Incredible Incredibleness but so overrun with tourists that it’s hard to tell what Thailand is actually like. I have, however, only hit the tourist spots and it’s high season, so I’m going to see if I can’t shut up and dig a little deeper. Right after I hit a couple more beaches — because if they’re anything like this place, I don’t care if an entire elementary school makes it their class project to follow me around.

The post If Charlize Theron Were a Beach appeared first on The Faster Times.

I’m writing this at 3 a.m., fan blasting in my face, my giant, frizzy fro taking up half the room while Bangkok pants and sweats all over me like the dirty old man that it is.

It’s fully hot and smarmy and this is the cool season!

I would spend my days lying in the street screaming for help if I was here during their summer.

I can’t believe that I’ve only been here for four days because I think I’ve seen every square inch of this not so small city. Much of it by accident. Thanks to the king (Bhumibol Adulyade), and the festivities surrounding his existence. Not to mention the fact that I’m Braindeadus Senseofdirectionless Maximus.

Holy crap. It’s been epic. But fun and mighty tasty and a little… frustrating.

I feel like I’d love Bangkok, that there’s something super bizarre about this place. But I… Just. Can’t. Crack. It. Somehow.

That somehow, I think, relates to the fact that I haven’t been awake very much. I don’t know if it’s the heat or the jetlag, but yesterday at about 3:00 p.m., I found myself thinking that I’ll just have me a little lie down. I woke up 12 hours later. And this keeps happening to me! It’s so bad that I’ve gotten to the point where I’m scared to stop moving. For real.

Here are some observations I’ve made in my narcoleptic stupor:

Bangkok is a city full of smiley people who are really into the blues. Every bar seems to boast that they’ve got a blues band showing up to play. 7-11 is big here, too. And you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an older white guy with a hot young Thai girl.

Bangkok’s part-super-slick, modern city with the cleanest most efficient skytrain that I’ve ever ridden and part-ramshackle town, full of ancient temples, traditions, monks, and these boats shaped like old tea houses that float by like hallucinations.

I’m staying in a great neighborhood by the river called Banglamphu in a sweet little teak

guesthouse that I love because it’s tucked away from the pub crawl of 23-year-old backpackers a few blocks away. Villa Guesthouse. Ask for Chewey.

For a while, I was sort of bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t get out from Whiteyville — that everywhere I went was still tourist central, and then lo and behold, I got what I asked for.

I woke up one morning and took the river taxi — these crazy boats that fly up and down the Chao Phraya River, barely pulling up to the dock so you can jump on — to go see an ancient temple housing the biggest reclining Buddah in the country.

Then I jumped back on the taxi and went downtown to see the fancy hotels and skyscrapers, and to catch the Skytrain to go to Nana, the neighborhood where all the tranny prostitutes hang out. I’m not sure what I was expecting but it ended up being just really dirty and full of weird bars playing loud heavy metal music. The Horny White Dude was everywhere as was The Hot Young Thai Girl. I thought there’d be, I don’t know, a bit more of a circus going on? Better music? A drag show or two? Ping pong balls?

By this time I’d been walking around nonstop for about six hours in flip flops, and my feet were purple throbbing things, so I decided to head home because I wanted to hit this huge open market the next day and would need my energy. So I hopped back on the skytrain, all proud of myself that I’d mastered the public transportation system, to take it to the bus that would drop me off a couple blocks from my guesthouse.

What happened instead, though, was that I took the skytrain to the bus that dropped me off several miles from my guesthouse because, unbeknownst to me, the entire country was out in the streets celebrating the king’s birthday. The streets were lit up for countless blocks with Christmas lights, a live concert was blaring over giant TV screens, and people in bright pink shirts packed together for miles to celebrate.

I had no idea how far away I was, but at least I’d be walking home in the middle of a party! I figured I’d just keep walking in the direction that the bus had been headed and stick close to my map, which wound up being way more challenging than I had thought due to traffic circles everywhere, very few street signs, and the fact that my map seemed to only put names to streets when it felt like it.

I’d say that within, oh, 15 minutes, I was completely lost. I couldn’t for the life of me find where I was on my map, and neither could any of the enthusiastically helpful people I asked along the way.

After about two hours of this nonsense, I was out of my mind, desperate, sweaty, and crashing through the streets like Godzilla, flinging people out of my path. I’d get to every new intersection with the hope that some sort of information would be presented to me only to find more chaos — and more streets named things like Ratchadamnern Rd. By the time I looked from the sign to my lame map, I’d forgotten the second half of the word, which is not okay because “Ratchadamnern Rd.” is very different from “Ratchasrima Rd.,” and they all change names every block anyway, and I want my mommy.

Five hours later I have discussed directions with well over 30 people and finally, somehow, praise the lord, am stumbling up to the door to my guesthouse. BUT, I am still determined not to fall asleep and to go get me some Bangkok nightlife. So I take a shower, wash my hair to ensure that I stay up at the very least until it dries, lie down for just a teeny tiny second to give my legs a little rest here, and wake up the next day, fully clothed. With a fro.

Even though the lower half of my body is no longer speaking to me, the next morning I head out to the weekend Chatuchak Market that has over 15,000 stalls of mind bogglingly excellent and cheap stuff from clothes to fabric to food to kittens to… I’m there for six straight heavenly hours and barely make it through half of it. I have never seen anything like this place. It’s like an entire city dedicated to shopping.

So there I am with my hewge bag of stuff, happy, exhausted, heading on home, figuring out what I’m going to do that night when IT HAPPENS AGAIN. Mr. When I’m King of Thailand I’m Going To Celebrate My Birthday For 12 Days Straight has once again caused major chaos, and I’m once again dropped of miles from my place.

I am pleased to report that four foot-throbbing hours later I was showered, awake and having several beers in a bar down the street with a German chef, listening to a band with some guy wearing what looked like a toilet seat cover on his head, singing the most inspiring version of “Let the Good Times Roll” that I’ve ever heard.

The post Bangkok: More than Just a Dirty Old Man? appeared first on The Faster Times.

I wondered if it could be due to pressure from the airplane. Maybe flying somehow squeezes all your blood to your most extreme extremities? Then I remembered this guy I met in India confessing that it was the first thing he noticed about me when we met and this was weeks after I’d landed in Delhi. Apparently I walked into a restaurant, headlights blaring – hello India! Table for me and my breasts please! He nearly knocked over a chair in his hurry to come talk to me, and as pleasantly surprised I was by my instant popularity, I do believe I’ll put some band aids on the situation before heading out this morning. Bangkok has enough bizarre sexual undertones of its own without me putting in my two cents. Plus it kind of hurts when I walk.

Other than that, my trip is off to a great start even with the crying in the airport part which I’ll get to in a minute. I didn’t miss my plane which was a small miracle because I left uncharacteristically late for someone as uptight as I am when it comes to getting to airports on time, but I was staying with a dear friend who I hadn’t seen in over ten years and who wants to leave that just to catch a stupid plane?

It rained nonstop the night before my flight and I left way too late, during rush hour, with flooded roads and zero time to fill up my rental car and return it. This reality hit me about halfway to the airport when I realized how frikken lucky I was that it was traffic-free (going my direction anyway) even though my friend, and everyone on the radio, guaranteed it would be fully ugly. I arrived just in time, with no lines, to discover they’d given my seat away which resulted in, when I got to the gate, getting bumped up to first class. Hello! 13 hour flight! Complimentary slippers! Handed to me just like that! And my nipples weren’t even hard yet.

Alrighty, now to the crying part. So the reason I was on the east coast was for a two day seminar with my coaching mentor, ass kicker at large, David Neagle, who I pay lots of money to to make me a better coach as well as force me to look at why certain things in my life are not the way I want them to be and to help me get off my butt to change them. All the crap that I’ve kept buried miles beneath the deep dark slimy bottom of my soul for decades was suddenly drudged up, dragged to the surface dripping with seaweed and mud and eyeballs and shaken in my face – “See? THIS is why you only date men who can’t afford to buy you a ham sandwich!”

Then I went to the airport. Then I became Exhibit A: Woman sobbing at Gate 35C.

But here’s the weird thing: I felt like opening this Pandora’s box and facing it started making things flow in a whole new, traffic-free, first-class kind of way and I’m bringing it up now, on the kick-off to my big, most excellent adventure, to see if it keeps going. Or rather to see if I can keep it going. Stay tuned.

In the meantime….

Random Traveling Observation #1:

When people drag their bodies around the globe, social conventions go flying out the window. Ladies in fancy clothes lie stretched out and snoring on airport furniture, bleary-eyed men wander the aisles in their socks, strangers pass out on your shoulder and obliviously attempt to spoon you, we strip for security, allow strangers to rifle through the unmentionables in our luggage and I sob openly. It cracks me up.

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