My travel memoir of a year of slow travel in India, Thailand, Tokyo, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam is now out!

Tags

a year of travel, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Slow travel, spiritual memoir, Thailand, Tokyo, Travel, Travel memoir, Vietnam

I fell in love with you and I cried is a spiritual, personal and travel memoir of a year in India and Southeast Asia.
In April 2017 my husband and I asked ourselves, what would we do if we could do anything?
We decided to sell up, leave our jobs and go travelling, along the way unpicking the conditioning of property, career and security and exploring what a life with less stuff would look like.
We gave away most of our possessions and in March 2018 we went to India, where we spent seven months in all, then Thailand, Tokyo, Nepal, Cambodia and Vietnam.
My book documents the trip through the eyes of a relatively inexperienced traveller. The sights, sounds and colours of India and Southeast Asia as well as the physical and emotional challenges.

This was a pre Covid19 trip of a lifetime; making connections with local people and fellow travellers and putting beliefs about minimalism into practice by living out of a small backpack for a year.

It is available as a paperback from Amazon, as an ebook from Amazon, Google Play, and hopefully wherever you buy your ebooks.

Thank you to the wonderful WordPress community who read along, commented, encouraged me, and published their own blogs which kept me company throughout the year, on long train journeys and in all the many rooms we stayed in. Thank you.

Connect on Instagram @always_evolving_ever_real

Lord give me a song that I can sing: Part Two

Tags

Cosmic ordering, Ho Chi Minh City, Law of Attraction, love, marriage, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Traveling, Travelling, Vietnam

Draft extract from the final chapter of my travel memoir

Lord give me a song that I can sing* Ho Chi Minh City

It can be hard to get a dentist in the UK, an NHS one anyway plus we’d have other things to do and might not get around to it for a while, so we’d decided to get check ups before we left. Anthony had booked the dentist when we were in DaLat. It was a private practice, very smart; the decor was leaf green, with green lockers where we put our outdoor shoes and green Crocs to wear. When it was our turn a member of staff took us up in the lift to the dentists. We were seen at the same time in separate rooms. We were struck by how many staff there were and how much attention we got, at one point I had three members of staff with me. Apparently lots of Australians come to Vietnam for dental treatment, even with insurance it is cheaper to fly to Vietnam.

We went to the army surplus market, it wasn’t as cheap as we’d hoped, the stall holders were good at the hard sell and it wasn’t at all easy to bargain. I bought army boots; Anthony bought army trousers and a long green coat. I liked the enamelled rice bowls supposedly used by the Vietnamese soldiers and considered getting them for presents. It was an indoor market and so incredibly hot we had to leave for a break.

We found a cafe where we drank freezing iced water, Red Bull and coffee. There was a waving cat on the counter, the man in the cafe told us about waving cats, businesses have them, he said, rather than waving, they are beckoning customers in. We asked him about whether the stuff in the market was real, given all the years which had passed. He said that some may be fake, but you’d ‘have to be expert to know.’ In the end we bought engraved US Army lighters for presents. Unfortunately these were confiscated at Air China check in. Every other airline we went on let us carry one lighter in hand luggage, Air China, none at all. At the counter there was a huge plastic sweetie jar half filled with cheap lighters, and our special ones were added in, sadly.

We went to the area popular with tourists, where there were narrow alleyways, lots of massage places, street food stalls, packed little shops selling everything and nice little bars and restaurants. We stopped at one and I ordered a mojito…

(We met *Geography of the Moon who we met here and went to see play, you can read about that here)

…I had only had only two cocktails, one mojito, and one cinnamon one called ‘The Struggle,’ invented by a previous bar tender, ‘She was going through something,’ the bar tender said, and one beer, with lots of space in between. But I got a contact high. Such a high of happiness. Later I lay there loved up, him asleep or resting, me thinking, appreciating him, thinking he may die, what would I be like. The next day I said, ‘I thought Oh my God what if you die, I’ll scream and I won’t be able to stop.’ I’d had a dream like that, like being out of body, trying to get a hold of myself and stop screaming. Anthony’s face was a mixture of horrified and sad. ‘No you won’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll say to yourself, ‘we had a great time together, and now it’s time to get on with the next phase of your life.’’

With two days left, I did my ‘Words are spells’ action plan/wish list. Interesting that post success life looks the same as what we are/have been doing… I imagined what I’d want, how it could start, someone could approach me about the blog… And they did. What next?

Jim Carey, ‘You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.’ The alternative is what we’d do anyway, get ordinary jobs, not suicide.

What is being a failure anyway? Leaving with nothing? You can’t take anything with you anyway.

In the coffee shop we had a conversation about The Future; Anthony saying I must finish the book and that he would support me, over coffee and iced peach tea and more free iced tea, so much liquid. Anthony said, ‘It’s funny how you get a free drink when you order a drink.’ And that at least in the case of coffee the free drink is often much bigger than the ordered and paid for one (a last metaphor!)

Just before we left we went back to the mojito place where we’d met Geography of the Moon. We ordered Anthony breakfast, me, Americano, a great big coffee. We had one last thing to buy, incense, we thought we’d have to go to China town but we were fed up with shopping. Like everywhere the restaurant-bar had a shrine with incense burning. We asked the woman where we could buy some. ‘Are you Buddhist?’ she asked. ‘Well we meditate, we use incense,’ we said. ‘Easy,’ she said, and told us to just go out of the restaurant down the alleyway and to ask at any shop, and wrote us down the Vietnamese word for incense on a piece of paper. Sure enough, at the first shop we came to, we were shown a big box full of packs and tubes of incense, perfect for presents and for us.

Lord give me a song that I can sing/Sing for me my lord, a song that I can sing (GOTM). Much as the mournful request is hardwired into me to love, I know really you can sing the song yourself. You can write the song yourself. You can write yourself the song you want to sing. 

‘Your life is your life, go all the way’ Bukowski

Thank you very much for reading

For more photographs of HCMC see previous blog

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and finishing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appeared regularly on this blog, and I am returning to India 31/12/19!

Lord give me a song that I can sing: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Tags

Backpacking, Cosmic ordering, escape the matrix, HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Law of Attraction, Mid life, Minimalism, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel writing, Vietnam, Voluntary simplicity

Draft extract from the final chapter of my travel memoir

Lord give me a song that I can sing* Ho Chi Minh City

*Geography of the Moon who you can read about here

The man at the bus stop in Da Lat asked us if we lived in Ho Chi Minh City. We marvelled at the possibility. There are ex pats. There are digital nomads. There are retirees. There are people with all sorts of businesses. It’s not that strange but at the same time, the thought that it could be us seemed somehow hard to believe. And yet he thought it. And yet, of course, it’s possible.

In Nha Trang we’d sat in a restaurant and checked the booking for HCMC. We realised we’d booked somewhere with no WiFi- since almost everywhere has WiFi, it was easy to forget to check. It was quite hard to find cheap places in HCMC and certainly they all seemed pretty small- I wondered was it a dense population, like Tokyo, with space at a premium? Anyway after quite a while of searching we re-booked a small but nice looking room.

When we arrived in HCMC we realised we’d forgotten something again and not got our own bathroom; we hadn’t always had our own bathroom on the trip, but it is nice to have, plus we thought, it was our last place. Not only that, the place was very hostel-y; and our room was actually one of two small private rooms off the main dorm, which meant we had to go through the dorm, right to the back, and through a door on the right to enter.

A balcony ran along the back of the dorm and past our window too. Our room had looked grey in the photographs, in real life it was unfinished with bare concrete floors, albeit with a nice rug and a comfy futon bed, a clothes rail and a desk. It didn’t help that the key to our room stuck and didn’t work so that we had to go in and out via the balcony doors. So we were a bit disappointed, and thought about moving, especially as the first night was very loud outside; below the hostel was a restaurant bar with people outside late.

But it turned out okay, as always. There’s a sense of having to bed in to a new place. We got used to the room and stopped being bothered about the lock, and the staff were really friendly.

I had been anxious about the shared loos, only three toilets for all those people but there was hardly ever anyone else in the bathroom area. Sometimes there were young women in there playing music, I wondered if it was a privacy thing, like in Japan? And later we even enjoyed the noise outside or at least appreciated it.

The dorm room had eighteen beds in it, you could even stay as a couple sharing one, occasionally walking through I caught glimpses through slightly open curtains, people had made like nests with food etc, like hutches, could one live like that all the time, I wondered?

Inside we had AC as powerful as we wanted, outside on the balcony it was hot hot hot and dusty. From the fridge downstairs I bought ‘big water,’ Sprite and beer and took them upstairs and onto the balcony. Such a pleasure, those things, and looking out, smoking, and watching the people below and passing by.

Again, breakfast was included, I only went down a couple of times, huge chunks of French bread, and black coffee. Anthony said that one of the biggest differences between when he went travelling twenty years ago and now, was the phones. We had a smart phone, Anthony did the booking of accommodation, trains and buses etc, and it was very useful. But at breakfast, in the open area at reception, we looked around, no one talking to each other, everyone on their phones. So when a man walked in, looking around for somewhere to sit, it was us who made eye contact and ended up sitting and chatting with him, as we were the only ones not looking down at a phone. He was tall, which confused me at first, as I hadn’t thought of Chinese people being tall, and casually dressed in shorts and a faded pale blue t shirt, the other Chinese people I’d seen had been smartly dressed. Plus, he was on his own, and the others had been in big groups. He was the first and only Chinese person we met. He said he had made his money already and now came for several months of the year to Vietnam to eat the healthy food; he often went to the market and bought a kind of vegetable/fruit that looked like a potato, he cut me a slice of it, I wasn’t that impressed, it tasted similar to raw potato to me. He explained that the food in China is poisoned; the air is polluted. He told us about a Chinese dissident, now living in the US, who is on YouTube, who speaks the truth about China, and who he believed would be the one to change everything. You can’t say anything against the government, maybe nothing happens then, but it is noted, and one day it comes back to you. He said it used to be hard for Chinese citizens to get a passport, now it is much easier, hence the huge rise of Chinese tourists.

There was the feeling of things to do, a kind of anxiety. In Nha Trang we were low, in DaLat we were high, here, it was more balanced, about practical things, shopping for warm clothes and presents. ‘Just do what’s in front of you’ (method of dealing with anxiety). It felt still, in the eye of the storm, it (home) upon us, surreal…

We walked to the night market, past very expensive looking creatively decorated hotels, everywhere lively, busy, vibrant. On the way back we walked through a public park, there were huge fallen leaves on the ground. A crystal meth addict stumbled around near a bench. There was music in a pavilion, with formal dancing lessons going on, young people, then in the next pavilion, older people doing dancing lessons. In the streets there were people of all ages out late, eating cheap food, drinking cheap beer. It seemed easy for people to be out having fun, socialising and enjoying themselves in the evening. Of course, being somewhere where it is dry and warm late into the night helps to make this possible.  HCMC had a nice vibe, people seemed happy. ‘We could live here for two weeks a year,’ we said; ‘Phnom Penh for a month, India and the UK for the rest of the time.’

For more photographs of HCMC see previous blog

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and finishing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appeared regularly on this blog.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Tags

Backpacking, Cities of South East Asia, Geography of the moon, HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Mid life, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Vegan travel Vietnam, Vietnam, writing

I am still working on the HCMC chapter, so in the meantime here is another photo blog post!

(Above) The tourist area where I drank mojitos and where we met Geography of the Moon

(Above) Dusk near the night market

(Above) Our hostel was above this bar

(Above) The amazing all vegan design your own hotpot place complete with fake eggs!

(Above x2) A very cool cafe we went to after visiting the dentist!

All photographs by my husband Anthony John Hill

Thank you for visiting!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Currently in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Da Lat Vietnam Part Two

Tags

Dalat, Enlightenment, Minimalism, Spiritual experience, The matrix, Travel writing, Vegan travel Vietnam, Vietnam, Voluntary simplicity

For more photographs of Da Lat see a previous blog here

There were little dogs everywhere. One of the guesthouse dogs, a small whitish pug like dog, was, ‘Not friendly, she will bite you, she already lost one owner and is scared she will be taken away again,’ the hotel woman told me. The other dog was like a small brown poodle with curly chocolate fur, it looked like a cuddly toy and was very friendly. It was young and too bouncy for the other dog, always wanting to play; the woman told me that each day for a few hours it went to her friend at another hotel to give the older dog a break.

During our stay it had a haircut, we thought at first it was a different dog, not only was all its curly fur gone but it was huddled in its bed not greeting anyone. Apparently it was traumatised as she hates having a haircut. ‘She won’t speak to me, tomorrow she’ll be okay.’ The woman said. By the time we left she had began getting back to normal.

Again we had an An Chay restaurant right opposite our guesthouse, the woman who ran it was friendly with a tiny bit of English, and there was a woman assistant who had no English. We were confused by the menu, she showed us a small piece of paper which someone had hand written a translation on. It turned out it was all fake meat but we didn’t realise that at first. I ate rice, tofu and veg, it was very cheap, and beer. Once there was a big ginger cat, like a big cat from home, the size of a small dog, who let me stroke it. Another time I went in by myself to eat and to do my blog, there was a chatty American man there, he told me he had a Vietnamese girlfriend and planned to retire here, apparently there were lots of ex pats in Da Lat.

In Vietnam there are people who are totally vegan or vegetarian all the time and many other people have one day each month where they don’t eat meat. Although generally Vietnam is very meaty, where there are all vegan restaurants, they are superb. In DaLat we found an incredible place, again thanks to Happy Cow. It had signs up saying no meat, no eggs, no fish. At the front it had a Banh Mi stall, these were wetter with different flavours and sauces to the ones in Nha Trang, and inside was a big restaurant. There were lots of tables, and often big family parties would eat there. There were poster menus on the wall and big laminated book menus on the tables. They did a lot of fake meat; it’s not something I’m into per se, having never missed meat but it was nice to have a variety of food and plenty of protein. Everything was vegan. We ate lovely sausages, fake chicken wings, fake shrimp, tofu fake meat, fresh stir fried veg, and my favourite, the most lovely dumplings, dense like pie crust or short crust pastry. And glasses of warm soya milk, delicious and healthy, which I missed so much when I couldn’t get it.

I went to the hairdresser to get my unfortunate orange henna from Kerala dyed over (dying over henna isn’t usually possible which I knew but I tried anyway.) I was very excited about going to the hairdressers. ‘Make brown,’ I said. The hairdresser tried hard and looked far more disappointed than me when it didn’t work. She called a man over who spoke some English to ask if I was happy with my hair which was possibly ever so slightly less orange but I might have been kidding myself. Anthony had made me take his phone for the translation app, ‘Just in case.’ I used it to try to explain that it was henna, it wasn’t her fault, but they didn’t understand.

In a reverse to the waving cats aromatherapy thing, which I’d seen first on Atypical on Netflix and then seen in real life; we saw a cockroach in the room, and then cockroaches were mentioned on Atypical. We couldn’t catch it and so ended up living with it in the room which I was very proud of myself about. We never saw it again; they stay on the floor, they like the dark, they avoid humans. That’s what I said to myself anyway.

We found our way back to the area we’d seen from the taxi; a street full of small vintage and original fashion shops. We bought little cakes at a small bakery which also sold small waving cats, white or gold, in plastic boxes. Near the second hand/fashion street was a yellow wall where we watched countless tourists take photographs of themselves against its backdrop.

On a main road with lots of shops with big signs and hoardings, a little like Triplicane High Street in Chennai where Broadlands was, we were suddenly caught up in two schools pouring out, a crazy log jam of bikes. The uniform of one school was traditional trousers with long skirt overlay with a side split all in white silk, the other was sporty navy blue. Opposite a temple we stopped at a shop to buy water, the man in the shop encouraged two school girls who were in there to speak to us to practice or show off their English. We had a short chat and the shop man looked pleased.

Near the indoor clothes market area, big wide flights of stone steps led down to an outdoor market area with fruit, including tall perfect piles of strawberries in baskets, built one by one in an expanding wall, fascinating to watch, beyond the fruit endless cheap clothes. We bought grapes and satsumas.

We sat on the steps with our thin blue carrier bag of satsumas with the leaves on, and relaxed. It was good to just look. Behind us was yet another hotel called Dream something. Nice Dream, maybe. It’s like we’re being told, ‘It’s a dream!’ And just like that, everything felt trippy and shiny again; the two of us feeling high, feeling like it’s a matrix or an illusion.

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Waving Cats and Dream Hotels: Da Lat, Vietnam

Tags

anxiety, Atypical, Dalat, death, Enlightenment, meditation, Netflix, spiritual awakening, Vietnam, waking up

For more photographs of Da Lat see a previous blog here

Straightaway we loved DaLat. All of a sudden there were old buildings, full of character, old shops and old flats above shops. Apparently there was a tacit agreement from both sides not to bomb Da Lat during the American/Vietnam War hence all the old buildings. It made us realise the contrast with where we’d been before, that all the new, boxy, functional buildings were new buildings built after the war.

There were street food stalls with great big pans of eggs, some looked like chicken eggs, some were small like quail eggs, and big pans of stew or noodle soup. There were grills with tortillas on, with egg poured on to cook omelettes on top of the tortillas. In the street were stalls with piles of scarves, and furry hats with ears on and ear flaps with long furry scarves attached, like kids hats. It was a big change of temperature, again.

From the window of the taxi we saw lots of hair dressers and shops selling cool looking vintage clothes, and tried to remember where we were relative to our guesthouse. It was such a relief to be in DaLat, it was as if we’d left the bad behind in Nha Trang, immediately we both felt better even just driving through.

Ours was a family run hotel, we tried the wrong one at first, we knew it was wrong as it looked too posh, but both had similar names something like My Dream and Dream Hotel both with dream in the name anyway. Ours was a small homely guesthouse run by a well dressed woman with nice waved hair. In the reception were two little dogs.

 

Our room was in some ways old fashioned with a big wooden wardrobe and a sideboard, and in some ways modern with black and silver flock wallpaper. In the room we were aware of the change in climate; the room smelled very slightly damp, and a bit of mildew when we opened the wardrobe. In the wardrobe, and in a neat folded pile at the bottom of the stairs, were the thick synthetic blankets that were so popular in Nepal and which we’d seen elsewhere too, in Pushkar. I always like to know there’s another blanket, just in case.

Again we were reminded of the difference in tolerance for noise between us from the UK and people in South East Asia generally. Across the road from our guesthouse was a van parked outside which beeped all day, apparently no one complained.

I continued watching Atypical on Netflix which I’d started on the train to Nha Trang. The show is about a teen with autism, in one of the episodes I saw in DaLat he goes to stay at a friend’s house for the first time. His friend has done his best but we see the unfamiliar environment through the main character’s eyes; there’s a waving cat, (the gold cats originally from Japan and China with beckoning paws), an aromatherapy diffuser glowing a colour and puffing out visible scent, and a gold and noisy halogen heater. All these things loom large and become too much for him to cope with.

The next day I saw a waving cat just like the one in Atypical. And on the stairs of our guesthouse was the very same aromatherapy diffuser, the same style but in a different colour…

Mind you, as it turned out, there were waving cats everywhere. One day we sat at an Italian vegetarian cafe, we had vegan cookies and tea. On the sofa next to me sat a real small orange cat, who let me stroke them and purred. In the window of a shop across the road was a waving cat positioned at such an angle that we were facing each other both at matching angles, me turned slightly towards the real cat, the waving cat turned slightly towards me, so that it seemed to be waving directly at me.

I can’t remember if we meditated in Nha Trang or not but we did in Hue and we did in DaLat. In DaLat I found that meditation was helpful for my anxiety. In meditation I felt my anxiety change to excitement, or maybe I was able to reinterpret the anxiety as excitement and to change fear into possibility or excitement; rather than fear of the future, excitement about life’s unknown possibilities. In meditation I was distracted by wanting to think about to my do list. With great effort I dragged myself away from that and asked myself, Why do I want to do this? The answer: because I’m anxious. But beyond anxiety, there was calm, and in meditation I was able to access that, the calm that is always with us.

For every meditation in DaLat I sat on the end of the bed facing the window with my eyes open. There was a pair of silvery white curtains, a net curtain, and a slight gap where I could see out unhindered. Outside the window wasn’t much of a view. I could see two electricity wires. In meditation these represented free will and fate, or free will and possibilities, or ‘you’ and ‘environment.’ I thought about how molecules bond. About how if you raise your frequency you attract ‘better’ things or at least you attract a match.

The mind tries everything- the past, the future, guilt, ‘shoulds,’ things to do, but if you step back from that and let it go you realise that in order to have peace that’s all you have to do: Not do anything the mind is telling you to, or not then anyway. Most of it is not practical or possible, you can’t go into past, for example, so just experience peace, without thoughts. Choose not to think about it. Even if it is practical or possible you can’t do when sitting. Deal with stuff in its present moment when the time arises. Or not…

I thought of what someone (Peter Klopp) had said on WordPress, about light and shadow. He had said, ‘The brighter the light the darker the shadow.’ This was different; people say, the darkness lets the light in, know suffering to know happiness etc. But this seemed to be saying that if you have a bright light, you have a dark shadow as well, as a kind of balance or side effect, something that has to be managed, or accepted maybe. It resonated strongly with me and was strangely comforting even though I felt like I didn’t understand it fully.

In meditation I often thought about Atypical, that’s okay I thought, at least I’m not thinking about stuff I’m anxious about. I felt a pain in one arm and the centre of my chest. I thought about heart attacks, and the tarot man in Thailand telling me I needed to look after my heart. Both my granddads died of heart attacks, I hoped that’d be how I went, easy, one in his arm chair, one at the pool side at the swimming pool.

We are animals that have become conscious. We know we’re alive and that we’re going to die. It’s not ‘spiritual’ or new age or complicated. It’s just if you realise, really realise, I’m a being, I’ve got a life, I’m here, wow, it’s going to end, I don’t know when; then that’s so exciting! Is that waking up/enlightenment? And maybe that’s why people in the East seem to enjoy themselves more, because they are okay with death, whereas we in the West tend to push it away. Oasis in Nepal saying matter of factly, ‘So I die, I die, they be sad for a couple of weeks.’ People of all ages in Vietnam and Cambodia dancing and exercising and socialising simply and cheaply, our Thai friend always laughing and joking…

I began to see the benefits of yoga and meditation, after the low period in Nha Trang. Even my arms felt a little different. I used to do loads of yoga and arm exercises at Sea Win in Kerala relative to now or before now although at the time I didn’t think it was that much/very good.

Just like hitting x number of followers, I look forward to it but when it comes it doesn’t actually do anything.  Or when I was one stone lighter, yes I was pleased but I don’t think I ever felt I was there, I always wanted to be thinner, I never felt my body was perfect. Although, I didn’t have a sense of it being wrong, even before that, just kind of neutral. I could wear all these clothes, buy stuff on eBay, anything fitted and felt good, but it didn’t really do anything, I knew it was just a surface thing.

Thank you very much for reading!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Photographs of Da Lat, Vietnam

Tags

Dalat, Life on a narrowboat, Midlife awakening, Minimalism, Minimalist living, Narrowboat, Narrowboat living, spiritual awakening, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel writing, Vietnam, Voluntary simplicity

I’m still working on the Da Lat chapter, in the meantime here is another pictures only post.

All photographs by my husband Anthony John Hill

Thank you for visiting!

About me

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else. Went travelling with my husband for a year, mostly in India. Here are my India highlights. Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Nha Trang, Vietnam

Tags

Nha Trang, Travel, Travel tips, Travel writing, Traveling, Travelling, Vegan, Vegan travel Vietnam, Vietnam

DRAFT book chapter extract

The two of us can be indecisive, and our usual indecisiveness was exacerbated by illness, exhaustion, missing India, and the ever closer end of the trip and return to the UK which triggered fear re what are we doing/what have we done/The Future.* (*now that The Future is here, I don’t feel scared at all, and my everyday life doesn’t seem at all scary)

So we ended up booking a week in Nha Trang, which was super touristy but not with fellow Westerners and provided us with yet another completely different experience. As we’d said right at the start, this trip was about having experiences, and that doesn’t all have to mean good.

As soon as we arrived we knew it wasn’t us at all, a glitzy shiny lit up holiday resort, like a very upmarket Great Yarmouth (link to blog explaining why I love Great Yarmouth so much!) with late night shops, restaurants and lots of ‘ordinary’ tourists rather than backpackers. We watched dazed from the cab, and he dropped us off in amongst it all, at the top of a main street, off which a smaller street, still busy with restaurants, was where our hotel was. As it was so near the end of the trip though it was even easier to just go with it, to say, it doesn’t matter, it’s all experience.

My first impression was how bright everything was, how lit up, hotels, everyone out, lots of busy little street food stands, like a very small version of the Khao San road in Bangkok, everything smart and shiny.

This was very much an ordinary looking hotel, lots of floors, lots of rooms, shiny marble floors but still very cheap, five or six pounds (US$7) a night. The room was again very good quality like Hue, clean and painted white with two double beds, a desk, a fridge, a big wardrobe and a bathroom with a bathtub!

Nha Trang was the site of a Russian naval base, it had been used for R&R by the Russian Navy and had become a tourist destination popular with Russian families. Vietnam generally is affordable plus Nha Trang is hot with a good beach. Russians had opened businesses such as travel agents, jewellers and shops with everything written in Russian.

The menus were in Russian first and sometimes not in English at all. Like in Sihanoukeville, it was a useful reminder that we aren’t the centre of the world. From our Western perspective, it can seem that Western culture and the English language dominates. We’d travelled around India and been spoilt with so many people speaking English. In Sihavoukeville in Cambodia we had realised how many Chinese tourists there are now and how important they are. And that we as Brits are insignificant, numbers wise anyway. We met no other Brits in Nha Trang; we heard only one group of Americans. The other tourists were Russian or Chinese.

‘Things to do in Nha Trang,’ still came up on Anthony’s phone several months after our return to the UK, which always made me smile, as we found very little to do there. We did walk to the Incense Tower (below)

The first time we tried to go to the Incense Tower we walked the wrong way and ended up having a long beach walk, which turned into something else (see next post.) We didn’t give up though and walked back the right way and got to it. We’d started our walk on the beach in the early evening when it was cooler and by the time we’d walked to the tower it was dark with all the neon lights lit up. All around that area were hotels, many with names in lights. ‘Happy Hotel.’ Huge hotels with only small gaps between them. One looked like honeycomb. So many hotel rooms. Really, they were all needed? It was hard to take it in, the numbers, the facilities.

The Vietnamese shop assistants spoke Russian, a few times they spoke to us and we didn’t understand and then they realised we weren’t Russian, ‘Oh you are not Russian!’ A Russian man outside a bar gave us a flier, ‘I thought you were Russian,’ he said. We went out for a meal at an Indian restaurant; the Indian head waiter spoke Russian to the other diners. I was so impressed, maybe he already knew English, maybe not, but certainly he had had to learn Vietnamese, and then learn Russian as well.

It was interesting to observe a different group of tourists. In the evening their (the Russian tourists’) skin was often bright red. This was in sharp contrast to the other tourists who were Chinese, who covered up from the sun with hats and tops and who also wore pollution masks. Walking alongside the beach we saw the Russian style of sunbathing, which was standing, arms outstretched, baking, in bikinis or brief trunks. Although when I reported all this to my cousin back home in the UK she said that she sometimes sunbathes like that too to make sure she gets an all over tan.

 

On the walls of a restaurant on our street were photographs of all the animals they served, before and after, a photograph of the animal alive next to a photograph of it prepared to eat or in a meal. A photograph of a live chicken and then a whole chicken raw and plucked, a photograph of a frog, an alligator, an ostrich, a snake, next to a photograph of the animal cut into chunks in a meal. This became known as ‘the place with all the animals.’ But nowhere was any better. Everywhere was the same.

All the restaurants had tanks, aquariums, at first glance they looked like fish tanks for decoration, then no, it was to eat. And outside almost every place, all along from the corner of our road and all down the main road were bowls, like large plastic washing up bowls, all the same in pale green as if bulk bought, some stacked on top of each other. There were lots of these bowls outside almost every restaurant and in the bowls were what looked like every kind of sea creature. It was as if every sea creature you could imagine had been captured. Crabs with their claws bound with a rubber band, I couldn’t tell if they were alive or dead. Two big fish in a plastic bowl the same size as them who looked almost dead; there was a limit to what they could endure. Lobsters clearly alive. All sorts of small creatures, strange kinds of squid. They changed the water and it spilled out onto the pavement; every day we walked past, through the poor creatures’ water, slippery underfoot. As well as all the sea creatures, shops sold dead baby alligators with pearls in their mouths as ornaments. Heated barbecues on the street cooked lobsters and other creatures.

The Happy Cow app saved us while we were in Nha Trang. A tiny stall, a little cart, run by a woman for twelve years, serving Banh Mi (filled baguettes) with all vegan ingredients; different kinds of seitan meats, sauces and salad, for about twelve pence each. Her cart

Part Two on Sunday

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

 

Hue, Vietnam, Part Two

Tags

Great Yarmouth, Hue, spiritual awakening, spiritual memoir, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Traveling, Travelling, Vietnam, Winter Gardens Yarmouth, writing

Extract from draft chapter: Hue, Vietnam

For more photographs see post Picture of Hue The other touristy thing we did was to visit the abandoned water park. We let the hotel manager book our lift, his relative, to take us there. The water park was officially long closed but the security guard on the gate turned a blind eye to visitors ‘sneaking in’ for a set fee, explained to us in advance by the hotel manager and the driver. The driver asked us how long we wanted and then arranged to pick us up, he wasn’t allowed near the entrance and had to drop us discreetly on the path. We walked down to the gate, paid the security guard, and he pointed us to a track.

It was a bit of a walk through what reminded me of Norfolk, England, where my mum walks her dog, or where the festival we go to is held. Like heath land, dusty paths, heather, bracken, patchy trees and scrub.

The first thing we saw was the big painted dragon at the entrance, faded and distressed but all the better for that. We had brought water with us, and snacks, not expecting there to be anything there, but there was a woman who had set up a little stall with cold drinks and two hammocks under the trees; very enterprising. We bought cans of Red Bull. On the bridge/walkway leading to the dragon there was a Western couple, she had dyed pink hair and tattoos, they looked punky/alternative. They were taking pictures of themselves and seemed kind of impatient for us to pass. ‘What, don’t you want us in it?’ Anthony said. Even the cool people are obsessed with selfies, everyone is.

Inside the dragon was a staircase, everything moulded out of fibreglass, cracked, plants growing through, graffiti, the paint colours had become interesting over time, sepia, tea, burnt yellow. The staircase led up to the top and from inside the dragon’s mouth was a view out across the water and the park.

Our guesthouse was on a narrow street with a few small restaurants and bars, including small places with bench seats or plastic tables and chairs, a cabinet selling cigarettes; hotels and hostels and massage places. At the either end were bigger streets, beyond one end was a market area used by locals, the other end had shops selling luggage and back packs and led onto the tourist area.

Hue had lots of massage places, karaoke places and hairdressers. Many women had glamorous hair. Between our place and the market area there were lots of hairdressers; some were tiny with just enough room for two clients and two hairdressers side by side. On the main roads there were formal karaoke places but people also just did it themselves, near our place on the way to the market we passed a front room with a family sitting on a front room floor with food dishes and one person with a microphone belting out songs.

The other end led to the tourist bit past lots of shops, we passed whole shops selling crash helmets- people wear them in Vietnam. In the tourist area we passed a smart clothes shop with women cutting out fabric on the floor, a toddler was wandering around with a cutter in their hand, which worried me, ‘Let it go Rachel,’ Anthony said. I admired a thin young white and brown cat that was just inside the shop, a woman who was just coming out smiled at me, picked it up, and put the cat into my arms in one swift movement. I was transported into a blissful cat cuddling reverie. ‘How long are we going to stay here, just asking,’ Anthony said.

Beyond this area was the riverside tourist area with restaurant boats and people trying to get visitors onto them, a big bar, and a beautifully lit circular building- a restaurant- lit with changing colours green, pink, blue, yellow, so beautiful. It reminded me of the Winter Gardens in Yarmouth, a smarter version, but nonetheless. Link to blog re why I love Yarmouth so much. We sat on a low wall at the edge of the river near the lit up building and people watched. There were glamorous looking tourists; women in traditional clothes, wide leg trousers, long suits with split, matching hairband, and yellow long fitted dresses, a group of three women in beautiful immaculate outfits, perfect hair and makeup, tall and elegant. A boy aged twelve came up to us and asked if he could talk to us and practice his English, he talked to us for a while in excellent English.

Just before we left we walked beyond the market area, we passed what looked like a nail place, the decor bright shocking pink with Astroturf on walls, it looked like a sitting room with bright pink beds close together, giant teddies, a child and two fluffy dogs one white and one brown running around the room and bouncing about on the beds. It looked like the set of a wacky children’s television programme. We walked over the bridge and crossed the river, suddenly a world away, even from the market area, let alone our street or the tourist area. Beside the river on the other side were makeshift dwellings like a tiny shanty town. We carried on down the road where there were a few shops and cafes and restaurants and stopped for tea.

The place we chose had crazy decor, the walls looked like a children’s nursery, painted with giant pink snails, insects, flowers and food, we realised some were probably television characters. We ordered peach iced tea and chips, they also had baguettes, we thought well we could eat here. It’s possible to live on chips and baguettes if not the most healthy option. If people (especially us) were expecting us to come back slim, Vietnam was our undoing with the baguettes and the fries. Of course when we did return, no one was rude enough to say anything though being British.

On the way to the train station from the window of the cab I saw a series of perfect images like art postcards: A woman in black and a conical hat on a shiny bright red brand new looking bicycle. A woman side saddle on the back of a scooter wearing a very short lacy dress, one long leg sticking out with a stiletto shoe. A woman on a bike wearing a black tweed suit jacket and red stilettos. A woman on a bike- bare legs, white stilettos, a hooded top and a pollution mask, she struck me as a perfect example of the Vietnamese style I’d seen. Hue, all legs, flowers and fruit, I said.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.

Hue, Vietnam Part One

Tags

Hue, spirituality, Travel, Travel memoir, Travel writing, Traveling, Travelling, Vietnam, Vietnam train journeys, Vietnamese hospitality, writing

 

For more photographs see previous post

Extract from draft chapter: Hue, Vietnam

There were television screens fixed to the ceiling on both sides every few seats, showing adverts on a loop and some programmes including a nature documentary, everything a bit too loud for my sensitive ears.

It felt refreshingly easy to have a relatively short daytime train journey (from Dong Hoi to Hue.) Travelling just three hours south made such a difference in temperature; when we stepped off the train it was just like stepping off a plane at a holiday sun destination. Hot!

In the cab we saw an chay (vegetarian) restaurant and got excited but then we wheeled away. After a few minutes the cab looped back, down a narrow side street. I who have zero natural sense of direction didn’t see this but Anthony said that we were at the other end of the street to the restaurant and then there it was, right opposite our hotel, a big sign ‘An Chay.’

The hotel looked quite smart with a reception desk and shiny polished wood tables downstairs, with a well dressed looking manager in a white shirt and chinos and smartly dressed female staff in skirts and blouses. Our room was lovely, painted white with a window and a balcony both with wrought ironwork. The standard of accommodation seemed very high. ‘Any complaints, I fix,’ the manager said, meaning the reviews online, which are such an important aspect of hospitality and booking now- he addresses everything they raise. We had our own bathroom, which he apologised for, ‘It will be painted’ but it was just fine, luxurious compared to many places we’d stayed. Everything was clean and there was even a fridge in the room and a wardrobe with hangers. Such luxury, for five or six pounds or seven US dollars a night.

We let ourselves have the windows open for a bit as it was still early, not yet mosquito time. The balcony was too narrow to stand out on but it had glass doors that opened and it looked out onto houses made pretty with plants on their balconies.

Breakfast was included there the same as in Dong Hoi, at the shiny wooden tables in the dining area in the reception downstairs, a big chunk of baguette with a dish of teeth-tingling super sweet jam and black coffee. The manager was very friendly and talked with us over breakfast and told us his story. He had left home and paid for an English course and then practised and polished his English with an Australian at the same time as working. Like many people he had come from a poor family and had to learn a whole new language to better his financial prospects. There were a few other guests but we didn’t meet people, it seemed like people were all on a busy itinerary/schedule with tours etc. It didn’t have the hang out do nothing languid chatter of some of the places we’d stayed in India or Nepal.

At the an chay restaurant we ate a hot pot, it was a classic dish but we’d been scared to order at other places we’d seen it in case it had meat or meat stock in. The hot pot, a metal saucepan with a lid, comes to the table on a gas burner, very hot and bubbling away, with a separate big white plate with uncooked mushrooms, the long thin white ones, on top of a bed of greens, plus a plate of cold rice noodles and small white bowls. You add the mushrooms and greens into the hotpot, which already has vegetables,and herbs including big sticks of lemongrass and three kinds of tofu, turn it down, wait for a few minutes and serve yourself. You put some of the rice noodles in the bowl, add some of the hot pot on top, which heats the noodles (and also the noodles help cool it as it is so hot) and Voila! It’s a work of art, an activity, a nourishing meal, kind of simple and complex at the same time, a beautiful experience.

If Vietnam had the best fruits of any country we’d been, Hue had the best fruits of Vietnam. Anthony went out alone one day and bought a bag of fruit from women selling fruit on the pavement in the market area. ‘I don’t know what I got,’ he said, ‘she just took control and gave me stuff.’ One looked a bit like a passion fruit or a pomegranate from the outside, inside it was pale pink and fleshy with a white centre and a stone, and the fruit dripped milk. You couldn’t make it up, I couldn’t have imagined something like that. I was enchanted, enraptured by the fruit. Another kind of fruit was dark purple on the outside, inside there was a pink firm and spongy layer which seemed not to be for eating, and inside that were white segments a bit like lychees but arranged in the round in segments like satsumas.

As well as the fantastic fruit, the vegetables were lovely too; we found another place to eat further along our alleyway that did stir fry vegetable dishes with big chunks of vegetables, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower, alongside soft white tofu baked in tiny rounds. At the an chay place one day we asked the woman what the green vegetable was that was sliced with bobby edges, like a circle drawn with a very shaky hand, it tasted strong like pickle. She brought a whole one to show us it looked like a knobbly, spiky cucumber. ‘What is it called in English? She asked. ‘We don’t know,’ we said, ‘we don’t have.’

We did two touristy things. We walked to a small palace, it was very hot, we stopped at a bakery on the way and bought buns and cans of weird drink, strange tea in a can, they let us take two plastic red chairs and sit outside.

Even though the walk was hot and tiring it was good to walk and see the shops, especially the women’s clothes shops with outfits on mannequins and rows of skirts or tops on hangars. Black office skirts or short skirts in black and neutral, with women’s fitted shirts; little denim shorts and t shirts- the women here covered the top half of their bodies from the sun- pinafore dresses with white blouses, and amazing sparkly princess dresses. We passed a shop just selling pyjamas, in the window were mannequins in typical pyjamas, silky button through shirt tops with loose trousers.

In the street we saw women wearing traditional style long dresses and trousers, lacy dresses, jeans or active wear and t shirts, comfy clothes in matching colours, and pyjamas. The Vietnamese men were very handsome and the women were so beautiful. Hue had the least amount of cars we had seen in Vietnam, more scooters, and more use of scooters for everything; we saw a scooter with a flat trailer on the back with a big tree in a pot.

The palace was quite small, and reminded us of an English National Trust house; with vintage/antique wallpaper, gold seats and paintings. There were no ropes or glass for protection, just signs and hardly any restricted areas.

On the walk back we stopped at a coffee place. I ordered coffee and Anthony ordered ginger tea and we both got the standard free iced tea on arrival which had a hint of caramel. Anthony’s ginger tea was a work of art; a ginger tea bag, saucers with salt, sugar, lime, ginger, and balls like hard dried truffles maybe a herb bundle or root of some kind, and an orange slice. Salt and sugar together was quite common in Vietnam, maybe for the hot weather and rehydration like the salt and sugar lemon sodas in India. It was so hot that we were astonished to see women in padded jackets, and one woman go past on a scooter in a padded parka with a fur hood.

Along the streets in amongst the trunks of trees were shrines, on the way back we saw one with dragons, it was made out of concrete and built into the tree. Another had once-lit cigarettes which were now pillars of ash, standing upright alongside the incense. So many people smoked in Vietnam, tailor made cigarettes were cheap and everywhere, as if the health message hadn’t reached yet.

Part Two on Sunday

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left career, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a book about the trip, a spiritual/travel memoir, extracts from which appear regularly on this blog.