GV 1

It’s a new chapter for the blog. After a brief month of self-reflection and escapism the blog has returned as a travelogue newly baptized in the name of The Innocents Abroad. On a personal note I think the hiatus was mainly induced by the very basic need of R & R. Literally, “Goodmorning Vietnam” is expanding its borders to the greater Asiatic region (The final list: Philippines, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand/Laos, India) . After some contemplation, the blog elected to keep the misleading name in tribute to the early foundations on which the newly baptized blog rests upon. Albeit condensed to GV. Personal note, I’m excited at the virtually limitless amounts of experiences with which to feed the blog. GV’s life feels like a weather forecast: cockfights in Manila, underground river in Puerto Princesa, sea kayaking to hidden lagoons in El Nido. Speaking of cockfights, we had a basement in our college house that could have held dead bodies, and I wouldn’t have known.  I think I went down there once. Anyways, I & the housemates had unrealized dreams of holding a cockfight of our very own in the basement, ideally for my 21^st birthday.  Libby even tried buying a rooster on craigslist.  Thankfully, that idea stayed a dream because it would almost assuredly have turned into an awful idea. Two years later the dream is being realized in a more mature form. I doubt the sight is going to be any less shocking and hopefully I don’t come away from the arena with a mild case of PTSD.

Back to the then and now. It’s only fitting that I write my last blog post in Vietnam in a coffee shop across the street from Libby, who is teaching. I would talk about how bad teaching sounds right now but I can’t even get myself to think about it. I figured as the time teaching was drawing to a close, it would get easier and easier since I’d be so happy it was almost over. Turned out the complete opposite, but oh well. Teaching wasn’t a bad job at all, and overall it was a fantastic experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything; though it’s kinda sorta a grind.

Packing for a four month trip seems impossible. Especially since we’ll theoretically be in the searing heat of Burma/Myanmar in early summer and potentially? Cold weather of the Himalayan foothills in India. I say potentially because I don’t actually know how cold Darjeeling and northern Rajasthan/ Kashmir region but they seem like they’d get cold. That’s also slightly frustrating since I really like planning for things and there’s a lot that’s simply still left in the air. Christine, super traveler who we did our Tesol course with, managed to do like 6-8-10 weeks in a 30-35 liter backpack. That would have been awesome if I could have managed that but I’m filling up like a 60 liter backpack with an 18 liter daypack. I’m blaming it on the weather.  BTW, I have a weird interest in bags and the 18 liter Arc’Teryx is an amazing bag which I would highly recommend for roughly 1,000,000 different things. It’s probably the bag we’ve used/will use the most here and is “bombproof.” Anyways, we were packing a bag to store here in Saigon and Libby & I were faced with a vexing packing question (at least to me). Is it better to fold dry-cleaning clothes over themselves with the hangars on or off the clothes? I’d like to reach out to the audience for some thoughts? Libby of course made the final call and took the hangars off due to a weight decision. I thought the hangars would help make for a perfect fold and make a minimal weight difference. Anyways, it doesn’t matter.

WE SOLD HO PHUC IN LESS THAN TWO HOURS. In a complete shocker Ho Phuc was sold for $150 USD in less than two hours on Facebook. Who would have known that we underpriced our Chinese knockoff at $150. We were ready to just take it on a roadtrip to the Delta and simply leave it wherever we ended. I have to thank Libby for deftly taking the initiative in selling our dear Ho Phuc. Also I can pat myself on the back for a nice buy back in June. Overall it cost us around $130 to drive our moto for our whole time here. Even better than the tiny amount we had to pay for transportation in Vietnam, my favorite part about Ho Phuc was we never had to worry about getting pulled over by the police and extorted or having our moto stolen because our moto was so ghetto we got to pretty much ride around incognito. Because we didn’t realize our moto would be sold so quickly we’ve spent the past two days walking everywhere. We walked the whole city during our first weeks in the city so it wasn’t exactly a new thing getting to do it again. We managed to harbor our bitching temporarily with hopes of getting in walking shape before our trip.

                Well, stay tuned. Next step: Manila!