First Months Abroad

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia

What a time it’s been! My traveling has steadily slowed from a lightning pace in Vietnam (excepting the days resting my ankle injury) with 17 separate lodgings, to a crawl in Cambodia with seven separate lodgings, to founding a proper home base in Indonesia, where I’m two weeks into a stay at a hotel in Bali. The reasons for this are less practical (everything I own can be packed up easily in five minutes, and transportation can be booked quickly at a little travel agency booth) and more personal. I’ve found that the wanderlust and motivation to push onward is hard to maintain when my time abroad is effectively endless (how I suffer!). For now, I’ve set aside the idea of a breakneck world tour to see it all for “slow travel,” which is very trendy on the travel blogs right now.

Additionally, even though jobless and free from responsibilities, I can’t help but subconsciously seek out routine and a project to dive into. What started as playing around with the game engine Godot to dust off my coding skills has turned into an obsessive game development project, and I met a pixel artist online to partner with on a prototype. I have no expectations for this becoming anything but a fun pastime, but it’s been a blast. I expect the rest of my sabbatical will be balanced between travel and exploring new places and investing my time in this project (or others!).

My trip with Vinny

I still owe a dedicated blog post about my time traveling with Vinny, and this is not that post, just the CliffsNotes. My feelings are conflicted about Vinny and my overall experience with him. He did deliver on showing me the “real Vietnam,” as he put it, some incredible scenery in a less popular area of the country (the central highlands), and a number of powerful war museums and memorials. The logistics of the trip itself were frictionless: every route, meal, accommodation, attraction, and drink stop was organized and planned by him, who knew this area of the country like the back of his hand. He had friends in every city or village and knew the best place to get fried chicken in Da Nang or a banh mi in Hoi An. All the food we ate was from local spots I never would have found without him. Overall, Vinny was a charismatic, funny, and energetic person who took great pleasure in showing off his homeland.

Vinny and I at a bar on day 1. Vinny always asked for restaurant staff to bring towels and an ice bucket to cool our heads.

Vinny at a stop for photos with his trademark cigarette in hand.

One of the many beautiful views riding in the central mountains.

Memorial site of the DMZ that split Vietnam during the war.

However, Vinny and I were clearly from two different worlds with very different personalities. His idea of relaxing after 12 hours traveling in 100-degree heat was drinking for hours long into the night. It took some effort to convince him that no, I’m not going back to the room because I dislike him, I'm going back to the room because two beers is my limit and I need to sleep before another 6 am start. Vinny’s casual attitude towards “girls” (i.e., prostitutes) was quite a shock, and I declined an offer from a woman who I thought was our waitress at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant before I shut down the idea for good. This baffled Vinny: “Why? I don’t understand. You like women, yes?”

It was only as I was leaving Vietnam that I realized, far too late, that my naïveté and trusting nature blinded me to one of the oldest tricks played on tourists: inflated currency conversion. Vinny and I agreed on a fair all-inclusive daily price in USD, but I paid him Vietnamese dong (VND). His quoted conversion from USD to VND was extremely inaccurate, way more than the actual exchange rate. How did I not catch such a simple scam? Obviously, I could have and should have done the math myself! Well, the answer is my previously mentioned naïveté and the fact that Vinny switched two numbers in the amount of dong to pay, from X.Y million VND to Y.X million VND. In the moment, the math lined up because the numbers sounded right. This was far from ruinous for me, but it did put me over my monthly budget and taught me a valuable travel lesson.

Getting ripped off has not turned me into a cynic, far from it, and I don’t regret the six days I spent traveling with him, but the dishonestly left me with sour taste in my mouth. Still—I had fun and made some great memories!

Cambodia

Getting from Vietnam to Cambodia by land was easy and fun. For $15, I booked a bus ride from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh with “full visa service.” We got off the bus at the border but didn’t have to fill out any paperwork or get screened by security. We just walked over the border on foot and got back on the bus! 10 minutes later, everyone got their passport returned with an appropriate visa.

After my long trip with Vinny, I wanted to relax in one place for a few days. My first five days in Cambodia were spent in the Phnom Penh riverside district, which sounded like a quaint historical district when I booked it without research. Wrong! It’s the heart of the girly bar sector and a destination for old foreign men to overspend on beer to sit next to scantily dressed women, most of whom looked like teens. The scene was both disturbing and comical. There were at least 50 bars in the area, and the girls sit outside shouting “Hellooooooo!” to every man that walks by. To stand out and get more attention, sometimes a girl would scream, “HELLO! AHHHHH!” and they’d all laugh. It was bizarre.

View from my hotel balcony in Phnom Penh Riverside.

Luckily, there were some fantastic restaurants and cafes on the outskirts of the district. This first week I went to two of the famous (and dark) historical sites in Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former high school converted into Security Prison 21, or S-21, by the Khmer Rouge; and Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, an orchard used as a massive grave for genocide victims between 1975 and 1979. Both museums were disturbing, and I recommend them if you’re ever in Phnom Penh.

View of part of the S-21 complex.

The ground floor of a building was filled with pictures of S-21 victims. The Khmer Rouge documented every prisoner.

Bullets were too expensive for executions. This is the "baby killing tree" at Choeung Ek.

After Phnom Penh, I made my way to Siem Reap, which I loved. It has a great vibe, and of course the Angkor temple complex did not disappoint. It’s worth going to Cambodia just for this. I traveled to Siem Reap thinking Angkor Wat stood alone as a forgotten ruin, but the temples and palaces of the Angkor empire are everywhere! I spent most of a day going from one massive temple to another. Interestingly, the temples are split between Hindu and Buddhist based on the time period, so you can see how the empire grew and changed over time.

Angkor Wat at sunrise. Hundreds of people were there before 6am for the view.

Inside Angkor Wat just after 6am.

The famous root-covered doorway in Ta Prohm.

I met someone at Bayon Temple who knew the perfect spot for a panorama.

Pictures do not do Preah Palilay justice. The temple is isolated away from the rest of the Angkor complex, and the view was magical.

Indonesia

And here I am now in Indonesia! Jakarta, unfortunately, disappointed. It’s a massive city (33 million people in the metro!) and very modern, but despite my exploration it didn’t have much charm. Perhaps I was looking in the wrong place, but it had a generic “modern megacity” vibe and was the first place during my travels where I felt real culture shock. I still can’t put my finger on what it was exactly, but I didn’t feel welcome. In the cities I visited in Vietnam and Cambodia, it was easy to walk up to a restaurant and get a table; in Jakarta, it felt like an imposition. I left after two nights.

Despite the overall disappointment, the view from the roof of my hotel in Jakarta was awesome.

To Bali! Also in Indonesia, but with a different history and cultural background and much bigger focus on tourists. It’s funny-before I left the U.S., I was determined to avoid the touristy areas and seek out the hidden gems and less popular cities. I suppose I have a threshold of touristy-ness that needs to be met for longer stays in cities.

Bali is beautiful. During my stay at this hotel, I’ve developed a daily routine:

1 - Wake up and have a mixed fruit bowl and coffee for breakfast.

Look at the size of this fruit bowl for $3!

2 - Work on my project for a couple hours.

3 - Head to the beach to swim and read for a few hours.

View of the beach before noon.

A few dogs roam the Kuta beach. Sometimes this guy comes to sit next to me.

4 - Relax and work on my project until dinner.

5 - Find a new restaurant. Bali is full of amazing places to eat.

It’s heaven. I also tried surfing! It was less about balance and more about strength than I expected, and I will definitely do it again.

It took the better part of an hour, but I was riding waves near the end! (with a lot of help)

My stay at this hotel is coming to an end and I’m planning to explore again. Indonesia has many famous national parks, and now that my foot is 100% healed (8 weeks of healing done!) I’m anxious to get back to running and hiking.

I will post more pictures soon!