Thursday, November 22, 2012

Two Sweaty Weeks in Vietnam - Part 2

A misleading title, as soon after the previous installment we moved on to Cambodia, where the temperature was about 2 degrees celsius hotter than anywhere in Vietnam, for a few blistering days at Angkor Wat, followed by the long, long trip home to the blessed relief of frost on the windshield and ice on the buckets.
I have to say that one of the high points of this trip was the hotels. While it's true the promotional material describing the trip clearly implied that we could expect clean sheets and private bathrooms, the reality was that the places were pretty near palatial. There were spa services in some like exercise equipment and massages of various sorts. Our Vietnam guide coyly opined that “massage with a happy ending” would probably not be offered on site.
Most of them had people posted at the front door so that the guest could sweep through like crowned royalty, without having to break stride. In our first place, this job was taken by two gorgeous girls dressed in white ao dais, the national dress of Vietnam, and conceivably the most graceful and beautiful national costume on earth, especially when worn by the willowy young things who opened our doors and brought our orange juice.
I was commenting on the terrible heat to one such girl, marveling that people could live in this sweltering environment. She giggled charmingly and explained that this is is the cool season which is why there were so many tourists jostling through the scenic attractions. And what temperature might it be back where I lived, she asked. I thought about what you might guess for Vermont in the end of October, made a quick conversion to celsius, and suggested “Around zero, I think.” She blinked, considered this, and tried to decide whether I was teasing her, badly mistaken, misunderstood the question, or outright lying since she remembered from some nearly forgotten lesson at school that zero was where things turned to ice, so clearly nobody could live in such a place. The mangoes would freeze right on the tree, wouldn't they? She smiled uncertainly and went off to tend other customers.
I was especially keen to go to Angkor Wat because I remembered an article in Life magazine when I was young and impressionable showing massive ornate buildings peeking out from under jungly tendrils and massive gnarled roots. Images are still widespread in travel guides, websites, encyclopedias showing the same or very similar scenes of lavishly ornamented columns and walls, towers and archways. I wanted to see this for myself, smell the pervasive tropical leaf mold, listen for the rustle of tiny arboreal creatures, commune with the ghosts of long-dead monks and generals and concubines, stone masons and weavers, fishermen and mahouts.
The first intimation that there was disappointment in my future was when our bus approached the ticket booth in an area clogged with other buses, all patiently waiting for their turn to buy a busload-worth of tickets for Cambodia's most popular tourist attraction. When we finally got our tickets, a colorful card that we were to wear around our necks like a luggage tag, we parked in an area with a thousand other buses, and walked the rest of the way to the causeway into the temple grounds in the rapidly gathering heat at 10 AM.
Our guide cautioned us to keep together and to come back here (he pointed to the ground next to a statue of a 5-headed snake) should we get lost, which we were strongly encouraged not to do. Then we set off across the causeway, shoulder to shoulder with dense clumps of other tour groups from France, America, Germany, past a group of Japanese tourists photographing one another next to statues of dead generals. And then there we were inside the temple grounds, our guide shouting instructional material over the clamor of other guides doing the same in various languages, continually jostled along by tour groups coming along behind through the narrow passageways, struggling up steep stairways, a simple passage made surprisingly difficult by our sweat-soaked clothes glued to our legs. Then at the top we were each allowed a quick glimpse of The View, and maybe 15 seconds for a couple of snapshots. Then down another set of stairs to another photo op chosen by our guide who was not sympathetic to pictures from other locations.
Any tiny arboreal creatures that might once have made their homes among these historic stones had long since moved out and any ghosts of the long-past glory days were not doing any communing with the tumultuous throngs shoving their sweaty way through their old stamping grounds.
Meanwhile, my travelling companion had come down with some croupy infirmity, and I was feeling the first faint tentacles of the same, so I skipped the afternoon outing to some other heavily visited site in the Angkor complex so that I could muster the energy to go to Angkor Thom the following day. This site, one of the many secondary attractions in the Angkor region devoted to the glorification of one king or another, was constructed by a Khmer king named Jayavarman who, among other things, was a narcissist of the first water. At the center of the complex is the state temple called the Bayon which The Great King caused to be built with his face emblazoned 216 times on all sides of every one of the numerous (OK, 54) towers in the place.
We stumbled in and out of ruined terraces, passageways, chapels, and audience chambers, taking photographs when instructed to do so, pausing when possible in the blessed shade, trying to keep track of one another in the mobs of other red-faced, sweaty tour groups, and finally assembling at the front gate to wait for the stragglers in the broiling sun, always the same ones, whose need for yet another picture of something or other always superseded the need of the rest of us to get onto the air-conditioned bus.
But all things end, and finally it was time to make for home, first on Korean Airlines, which is the last vestige of what air travel once was. We were stripped of our water bottles at security, of course, because America declared that it must be so, but were spared that stupid x-ray machine, taking off our shoes, unpacking computers. 3 hours later we were in Seoul where we had a little nap in preparation for the 12-hour slog to Chicago in a clean, well-maintained, comfortable (well, as comfortable as a seat in steerage can be) aircraft whose bathrooms were as clean after 12 hours as they were when we left Seoul. And as an added bonus, the cabin attendants were exceptionally beautiful young women who, throughout the trip, were courteous, competent, and able to fix the entertainment modules embedded in the seat backs.
The final miracle was made manifest as we were beginning to descend for Chicago. One of the gorgeous cabin attendants sought me out way back there in steerage and explained that since I had a pretty tight connection in Chicago, and we were going to be a bit late getting in, they were going to move me up to first class right at the end so that I could get off the plane first and hustle right along to all the immigration and customs lines, and a good thing too since the lines were endless for both immigration and customs, my onward flight left from the other end of O'Hare, I just missed the shuttle train, security was a frustrating chaotic time waster including a false positive alarm from that stupid x-ray machine, and I barely got to my gate in time to catch my breath before boarding began onto the crowded, decrepit derelict that was to complete the journey. There was trash in the seat pocket from some previous traveler, we were late getting away because they were having trouble pumping out the toilets, and the cabin attendant was a bored middle-aged man who probably had karate skills, or could throw a knife with deadly accuracy, but had little discernible interest in attending cabins.
As for the croupy thing my traveling companion generously shared, it trumpeted its arrival on that last horrible leg of the trip and I spent most of the ensuing week blowing my nose, napping, and not unpacking. When I finally got to it, sorted sweaty laundry from fans and trinkets, it felt like Christmas. I could barely remember buying this stuff. I could barely remember the heat. I had forgotten the names of half the people we had spent two weeks with.
In a month's time will I be wondering if I went at all?