I wake up early in my hotel in Quy Nhon.
5:10
I'm TRAPPED. The very sparse clouds in the EAST are turning pink. The sun is about to rise over the ocean, one of my favourite spectacles in Vietnam. For at least half an hour, dozens and dozens of Vietnamese have been walking by my balcony towards the beach.
But I can't get out ! This time it's not that I'm afraid of waking the receptionist sleeping in the lobby. NO. The entrance door has been closed with a roller shutter/blind. How VERY infuriating !
Blame this feeling of being trapped, which reminds me of life in Vancouver, for choosing THIS particular time to do IT AGAIN. OK, there is another reason ;-)
Zulema is fighting fires in central BC while her parents have been evacuated TWICE now, first to Williams Lake, but then that town needed to be evacuated too. I can tell by Zu's e-mails that she needs a break badly. I can't provide her with a break, but I can help her with something to look forward to.
So I do it. Vancouver - Taipei - Bangkok and return with a travel itinerary that includes Vietnam. January 2018.
5:45
So I can open the roller shutter from the inside, but I can close neither the shutter nor the door from the outside ;-(. Well, I could jump out when the roller shutter is coming down from the top, but then I don't know when these people open it again and I might be locked out for who knows how long ;-(
I finally get out at 6:30 am. Too late for the sunrise, but not too late to walk along the beach to get my feet wet.
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| 6:30 am (LOL) |
NO it's NOT. It's FRIGGIN PERFECT !
9:30
I'm walking over to Barbara's Kiwi Connection & Backpackers Hostel for some breakfast. A man can't live on yogurt and red wine alone, LOL.
I order a coffee and an egg sandwich. I ask for black&hot coffee. OMG, this is brilliant. I'm getting REAL VIETNAMESE COFFEE ! And she already pre-guessed that THIS coffee will be too STRONG for me to drink without sugar so she brought some anyway. And she's right. The coffee is GREAT but it does need a LOT of sugar ;-)
The second surprise is that the laptop I have with me to finish my translation has remembered the internet connection from last November.
I do have to interrupt the translating a short while later to head home because I notice that the Viet coffee has an eerie effect.
WTF? There should be a rotor-rooter symbol on those coffee cups.
10:30
Time to start thinking about checking-out and moving to the new place.
11:25 am
I’m a bit stressed.
That bloody still unfinished translation is weighing on my mind.
I’ve checked out and am walking towards Seagull Hotel
because I’m willing to bet that there will be tons of taxis waiting. And I’m correct.
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| Not my pic, not my taxi |
The scenery is not at all what I expected. What looks on a map like a ride along the
coast is actually a ride through mountains.
MUST take pictures of this when/if I ever have a scooter here and can
stop wherever I want.
The taxi stops by a tiny side road that heads downhill into a village. He stops RIGHT IN FONT of a sign that says “Life’s A Beach 5KM”. WTF? My GPS tells me that I am where I am supposed to be, so I pay the man. 152,000 VND for the 20-minute ride, that’s less than US$ 7. NOT a bad price. When I give him 13,000 VND extra (50 cents) as a tip, he beams at me and says Cam On Nhieu. By now I know that the Nhieu means ‘very much’.
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| THIS is it? |
When the narrow road ends at a T-divide and I don’t know
which way to turn, an older Vietnamese man sitting right there noticest, emits
a grunt, and uses his chin to indicate the right direction.
But I’m still not convinced.
Is this right? Is this where I’m
supposed to be? There are other
backpacker hostels around here, maybe that nod just sent me to the wrong one?
The road comes to an end at a beach. A REAL Viet beach with the typical blue Viet
fishing boats in a bay in front of an island. The wall on the right side of the
road says “Life’s a beach”.
 |
| Am I ever in the right place, LOL |
OMG, I didn’t think it would be THIS nice.
My room (actually a whole bamboo-structured and -thatched
2-level ‘Villa’) is ready.
Only one problem. My
cell phone connects to the internet but my laptop doesn’t. WHAT kinds of morons is Microsoft employing
all over the world????? If a simple
Android phone can get WiFi, WHY can a modern PC with the world’s ‘most
advanced’ (LOL) operating system NOT do the same?????
Oh SCREW it and MS at the same time. I came here to get away from all that BULLSHIT.
Only one solution to this problem:
Put on the LOUD new swim trunks, only take smokes and a camera,
and forget about all those 'civilized world' problems for a while.
And that is surprisingly easy here, LOL.
The water is perfect and the bay is still authentic (on first glance). I’ve only been here for one hour but I’m already guessing that I might never get back to Koh Rong again. It’s THAT nice here ;-)
There: isn't that just a tiny bit better than dealing with the intrinsic flaws of a retarded operating system?
Time to check in back to reality (or is what we think of reality actually just a bad dream?)
The internet still doesn’t work. No problem.
I’ll eat something, drink something, and hop on the scooter to ride into
town to the Kiwi Cafe to e-mail away my translation.
1) Eat.
My seafood pizza arrives.
It’s HUGE, LOL. Good thing it’s
only sparsely topped with prawns and squid.
That way I can concentrate the toppings on HALF the pizza and not be
bloated senseless for the rest of the day.
2) Ride to Internet Country
I jokingly told Bao, one of the bar guys, that I need one of two things NOW, either a scooter or internet. He gave me a scooter, although it took him a while to figure out how to lift the seat to get to the gas tank.
I jokingly told Bao, one of the bar guys, that I need one of two things NOW, either a scooter or internet. He gave me a scooter, although it took him a while to figure out how to lift the seat to get to the gas tank.
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| As if these roads aren't dangerous enough already: Bovine Hazard Conditions |
At Barbara's Kiwi Cafe, right after I've e-mailed my translation, another one of life's miracles is revealed to me.
I've ordered some white wine (She understood my ruou vang trang !) and chocolate ice cream. The white Dalat wine is warm. So just to avoid drinking warm white wine, I pour it over the chocolate ice cream and OMG.
The fruity Dalat white goes PERFECTLY with the chocolate ice cream. From now on I'll order these two together ALL THE TIME ;-)
After the ice cream & wine extravaganza I find the gas
station without problems. Fill the tank
and I should be good for a major part of the week.
Back in my hotel, the internet works for 5 minutes and cuts out again. Oy vei, this is going to cost me nerves if it keeps going ;-)
Ah well, a ruou vang trang should calm those nerves ;-)
5:30 pm
It looks like rain.
Sipping wine and looking over the bay while the Viets dragged a giant
speaker onto the beach to play Viet music is TIRING.
OMG OMG OMG. I only just realized that the speaker they brought down to the beach is part of a KARAOKE system. These guys must be GOOD, or maybe Viet music just sounds so strange to my ears that I didn’t even realize that it’s the guys on the beach singing and not a recording !
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| Somewhere else. The Viets are sitting down and singing happily |
OMG OMG OMG. I only just realized that the speaker they brought down to the beach is part of a KARAOKE system. These guys must be GOOD, or maybe Viet music just sounds so strange to my ears that I didn’t even realize that it’s the guys on the beach singing and not a recording !
And I notice that I'm still in North American mode, even after 2 weeks. I'm worrying about things. There is no fridge in my room and no hot water kettle. So, cold instant coffee and warm red wine? What time is breakfast? Should I even buy more wine if the glass of Dalat white wine here in the bar costs me 40,000 Dong (CAD$ 2.22). Am I going to be as exhausted in the morning after sleeping under my mosquito net as in Koh Rong?
NEED to UNSTRESS !
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