Da Tou

Meet Da Tou, Wei's 6-month-old french bulldog with a foot fetish.

Malaysia

We spent some quality time with Weifer in Kuala Lumpur. I came down with a mild case of H1N1 the minute we landed. We must not have been great house guests: I was coughing, sneezing, blowing my nose all week and Amar was holed up in a coffee shop most days studying for his exam. But nevertheless, we had a great time. Wei introduced Amar to the wonders of roti canai and me to the miracle that are charcoal tablets.



Here is Amar faux kissing a fish head at dinner one night. Apparently non-Chinese people are fascinated by fish heads.



Me imitating Wei tweeting



That's better



feeding elephants at the elephant sanctuary outside of KL. There was a group of smart ass little boys next to us throwing junk food wrappers and peanuts at an elephant. We applauded when the same elephant gathered up a heap of dirt with his trunk and flung it at the group of boys.

Hanoi

Whoah Hanoi is really crazy. It's hot, crowded and chaotic. Every time I crossed the street I whispered to myself, "i'mgoingtodie i'mgoingtodie." We would just step off the curb and hope for the best. Mircaculously, we always made it to the other side alive. Motorbikes out number cars about 5 to 1 and nobody seems to adhere to traffic lights. It's amazing what can be strapped onto the back of one motorbike: we saw a guy with two huge dead and gutted pigs, a family of five and a lady with about 10 chickens in separate metal coops.

I came to Vietnam to eat and Hanoi did not disappoint.

These ladies are making a dessert drink with cubes of coconut milk, jelly, water chestnuts and crunchy green beans or peas

fresh shrimp rolls

my favorite, steamed rice flour pancakes with pork and mushroom stuffing, with dried fish flakes on top and mint on the side

Hanoi's signature dish, cha ca aka fried fish. We tried the dish at Cha Ca La Vong restaurant, which only serves cha ca. The fish comes to the table in a sizzling saucepan. Fennel and other leafy greens are added to the pan and everything cooks slowly in the oil, which has a slight citrus flavor and unidentifiable sweet fragrance. Allegedly the oil contains essence from a beetle. The fish is served on top of rice noodles, with a handful of crushed peanuts and chopped mint.

Hanoi was overall pretty overwhelming and after three days I was ready to leave. But, we both enjoyed exploring the Old Quarter and gorging on good food. Our hotel, Hanoi Serenity, also made our time in the city infinitely better. Clean and spacious room, free wifi, free breakfast and helpful staff, all for less than $25/night.

A few more of Halong Bay

Halong Bay, 'Nam

It's been a while since the last update.. mostly because we've been chillaxing so deep. I really did just say that. Anyway now we have a stable internet connection (for a few hours at least)-- here are some pics from Halong Bay, which is an incredible collection of limestone karsts (look under karst topography on wikipedia). I'm no geologist, but what I learned was that an incomprehensible number of years ago, the whole area was underwater, and a thick layer of limestone formed on the ocean floor. Eventually the water receded, and rain falling through the atmosphere became acidic (acid rain) and ate through the layer of limestone... that, combined with bioerosion and erosion from water, created the bizarre landscape pictured below:

It's hard to get to / around halong bay, so we went with an organized tour that also took us to some pretty ridiculous caves... which were great to be in, because it was 100 degrees and humid with no air conditioning anywhere

Finally, below are pictures of Meng and I relaxing on the boat (note the strange ways in which Meng chooses to relax)

More Sapa: Drinking and Driving

Awesome Vietnamese spring rolls and Ha Noi beer in our favorite restaurant in Sapa:

After lunch, we rented a motorbike from some guy outside our hotel and took off into the mountains.  It's a beautiful ride, going up into the the clouds its cool and drizzly and you cant see 10 feet ahead of you, though once in a while the clouds break and you can see into the valley.  As you go lower it gets really hot but the view gets much better. 

Me and my ride- note the mud in the background. This would soon be caked on to my shoes / legs after I tried to take the bike through a muddy mountain pass and got stuck.

We rode out to this waterfall

Later on, went back to that great outdoor restauraunt for more beer and spring rolls

Proof that I am an artist-- try to find Meng in the picture below....

View from our $15 / night hotel:

Sapa

Finally made it to Vietnam. We started our journey in Kunming, where we boarded a sleeper bus bound for Hekou, a town on the China-Vietnam border.  Sleeper bus sounds cute but as we quickly learned it is not a hygenic way to travel, and is it is far more popular with the locals than with tourists.  When we planned the trip we expected to be able to sleep on the bus, but after getting on, it looked unlikely. Not only were the beds built for people 5'3 or below and made of metal, but we were traveling on dirt/rock roads across mountain ranges with no guard rails, and the air was hard to breathe because people smoked throughout the night. 

Surprisingly, I think we both managed to get more sleep on this 12 hour bus ride than on our flight to Hong Kong. 

This is a picture of the border between Hekou and Lao Cai, Vietnam- we had to wait from 7-8AM in a very depressing chinese town for the crossing to open for the day. Although we did get a chance to have an interesting conversation about the price of Berkshire Hathaway stock with a local who knew more about it than us..??!!

After getting to Sapa, we spent our first full day doing a 'trek' of local terraced rice paddies, which are incredible.  I've seen other terraced rice paddies in China, but these are much more impressive because they are perfectly built, the hills are very high and are not too rocky so they are completely covered, and the constant fog makes everything look like a dream.  

1999 World Horticultural Expo - Kunming

IN 1999, Kunming, a city in Yunnan province in China, hosted a world's fair themed "Man and nature, marching into the 21st century".  The city now uses this area as a tourist attraction- it's only sort of in disrepair.  The most interesting part about it was that many countries had their own exhibition areas (including Israel and Palestine), and each province in China had its own area (including Taiwan).  

The government paved over a huge area of the city to create this expo:

But some of the exhibits were quite well maintained, especially the Chinese ones:

We found the Pakistan garden.. it was one of the few gardens that was unstaffed, so I took up the post for a while.. charged people 10RMB to take a picture with a live pakistani

Do the Doggy Bounce

Amar made a new friend at our hostel in Dali. The hostel, by the way, was amazing. Less than $15 per night, really clean, free wi-fi and laundry, outdoor courtyard/lounge area, koi pond and pool table. I could have stayed there for a whole week.


His first encounter with Harry, or Hally as the hostel staff pronounced it, when he followed us to our room.


Sleepy puppy at dinner


Eyeing our kung pao chicken


Tired after a long day of being cute

Lush Dali

Dali is cool. 

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Day trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge from Lijiang. The weather was perfect and the scenery was beautiful. The bus ride up to the gorge was a little scary...Amar had already come up with a couple of escape plans in the event that our bus tipped over and fell off the edge of the mountain.


There I am with my gimp leg and sun bonnet!

Lijiang

Lijiang: our first stop in Yunnan. We had a great four days here. Ate lots of Yunnan rice noodles, hiked some gorges, rode a couple of smelly horses and learned about Naxi culture.

View of the Lijiang old town from our hotel

Early morning in Lijiang old town

Naxi women hanging out in the forest

Lijiang old town at night

Amar playing Mahjong like a pro with some new friends at our hotel

Finally Unblocked

We're in Vietnam and finally away from those pesky Chinese internetz censors. We've got lots of backlogged posts to upload. But first, a snapshot of the breakfast cart right outside my aunt's apartment. It's an egg crepe with a crunchy fried square wrapped inside, topped with scallions, cilantro and spicy bean paste. 

798 Art District

A few shots in and around 798 Art District, a huge maze of contempory chinese art galleries housed in old Soviet-era factories located on the outskirts of central Beijing. Google just told me that 798 factory was a part of six factories that formed the first electronic components production base in Beijing during the 1950s. 798 is also, as Amar wistfully noted, the first and last place we've found since we left NYC that sells bagels.