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50 year Bachpacker – Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, a guide for independent travellers in their 40s, 50s & beyond – Vietnam War era memorials, great food, Vipassana meditation (in Australia), Eurovision in Vienna, and getting across the street (in Vietnam) Pt 38

My 50 year travel blog has taken a few years to write so far. I don’t seem to be in any hurry to finish it in homage to one of my favourite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor, especially his trilogy recounting his walking trip across Europe in the 1930s.

I still haven’t gotten out of Asia yet in terms of blog posts. I’ve already travelled back to Mexico since that 50 year trip and next month, and will be travelling there again. This time visiting Oaxaca for the first time! Hoping that next year we can travel over to Europe to watch Eurovision and visit some little villages and towns along the way. I’ve got so excited I’ve already booked some accommodation in Wien (Vienna).

Probably should save more money towards a house being aged in my 50s. But, Eurovision, in Wien. Gonna be awesome. Better investment than a house for sure.

Since my last post I, and after around 24 years, I went back and took another 10-day Vipassana meditation course, as taught by the now dead Vipassana teacher Goenkaji. Just to clarify my last sentence, I hadn’t done a Vipassana course for around 24 years, my last post was sometime earlier this year. We’ll get there, I think I can knock off Vietnam today and then head off to Cambodia for the final leg of my wife and my 50 year backpacker trip

First the Vipassana meditation. I’ve written about this meditation before, especially in the Adventures of Kosio and Juanito (and Corinne). It was set in the 1990s, and the only character from the title I’m still in contact with is Juanito. That’s me.

At the meditation course, which I did up in Pomona in Queensland, I learnt a lot about myself. Vipassana meditation is called insight meditation, so if you do it right you should learn more about yourself. You get 10 days, mostly in silence, not talking to fellow meditators,meditating on your breath, or sati patna meditation,  (for around 3 days) and your bodily sensations, or vipassana meditation (for around 7 days). No visualisations. No new age music. Just your breath and bodily sensations. It’s not that fun. But it is definitely insightful.

It’s a long time to do ‘nothing’. Not nothing. Observing. Equanimously. In the process, I learnt I’m an anxious man, a nervous man, a reactive person, sometimes angry, sometimes lustful, sometimes difficult to describe. I’m hooked on playing games on my computer. I like thinking about sex. I love food. I adore travelling and Eurovision.

I’m impermanent. Changing every moment. My mug I bought from Harry Potter world at Universal Studios that says ‘free the house elves’ on it and has a picture of Dobby with a sock is also impermanent. I was clutching it this morning thinking I never want to part with it. Maybe it will break one day. It will. Even if that day is not for a millennia, like the terracotta warriors of Xian, China. 

What may not last so long is me. This ‘me’ I’m so attached to. This Juanito character developed over the last half a century or so who likes food, travelling, Eurovision and sex. Plus Danish crime dramas and Danish/ Scandinavian dramas in general. And games like Civilization VI on the laptop. I hate Civilization VII. Hate it. I love stuff and I hate stuff. I’m indifferent to a great deal. I like bacon and egg rolls with runny yolks on white sesame bread rolls from Coles or Woolies and barbecue and tomato sauce on top.

That’s Vipassana. You observe your attachments. You observe the impermanence. You wish the ten days would go faster, especially around days 6,7 and 8. They often feel like an eternity after meditating from 4/4.3am to 9/9.30pm. And on those days the meditations after lunch and before the evening sessions are the worst, sitting from around 1pm to 4pm in a few different sessions. 

I’m in no hurry to go back. I have been meditating each morning. Almost every morning. It helps. It helps a lot. That’s why I did it. Even though it’s super boring at times and I’m not in a hurry to go back. Perhaps in another 25 years, let’s see.

The desire to go back to meditating, which I used to do more of before my kids, now in their 20s, came along. Good dad I am insinuating that my children were to blame for me stopping mediation. Where it was me of course. I just stopped.

I love my kids. But not as much as I love myself. That’s just an insight from meditation.

I don’t love anyone as much as myself. I think we’re all like that. Even if we’re trying not to be like that.

I’m improving though. I do metta, or loving-kindness, meditation at the end of my sati patna meditation/ vipassana meditation. It’s where I send good thoughts to all the people of the world in a hope of promoting peace and happiness. Even that woman who was bullying me at work last year, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Plus many more people I’m much more fond of than those people.

And that is my little segue to Vietnam. I’d go back there. It’s much more fun than meditating. But having gone back to meditation I would certainly enjoy it more there. Being less attached to things really does help with my anxieties, my anger, my cravings. It helps me to enjoy life more. Until I die. I’m not so worried about that. Death is just a phase of life.

Ho Chi Minh!

Well. Ho Chi Minh city is a modern bustling metropolis on the Mekong River which we’d last seen in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, a week earlier. That is we saw the Mekong River in Vientiane as opposed to the city of Ho Chi Minh, or Ho Chi Minh’s (the man) ghost in Vientiane.

In our few days in Ho Chi Minh we visited some Vietnam (AKA American) War memorials. My wife and I met up with Fyyaz in Ho Chi Minh as well. 

He’s a friend of mine from my days as a public servant graduate in Canberra, which goes back a few decades now – coming up to 20 years actually. In a bit. At the start of the year after next to be precise.

Fyyaz was accompanying us for a few days on the 50 Year Backpacker journey – together but separate I had stipulated when he invited himself along for the trip.

He was staying at some dodgy part of Ho Chi Minh I think, near some brothels. Or was that when he was in Phom Pehn in Cambodia. I can’t remember.

My wife and I weren’t staying anywhere particularly fancy. It was down a little alleyway tucked in behind some buildings on a main road across from a shopping centre (mall) which had a Uniqlo.

As we’d been in South-East Asia around 32 days by that stage – according to my Google Sheets itinerary which comes in handy when I’m renewing my security clearance for work as I need to always update the security people on all the places we’ve visited since I last did a security check, this 50-year trip accounted for many entries towards that – we were pretty acclimatised to the heat and humidity of Vietnam, which was nowhere near as intense as Thailand and Laos had been.

I’m meant to mention blogs and things for that security check as well. Not sure I mentioned this one. But I don’t think anyone reads it so it hardly counts.

Fyyaz was certainly not acclimatised to the South-East Asian heat. He could barely step out of his hotel to be accosted by sex workers before wanting to retreat again – without a sex worker I must stress if his wife is ever reading this – to his airconditioned room. He was constantly wanting to eat at the mall food courts just so he didn’t have to be outside too much, while Jan and I were always on the look out for local street foods, which were mostly to be found on the street, out in the open.

We did get Fyyaz out a few times though, firstly to a market style eatery not far from our hotel which wasn’t super cheap as it seemed more targeted at tourists but it was delicious and had some music. The days were hot, and the mornings and evenings were warm. 

It was nice to sit outside when the sun wasn’t around that much early in the day and in the evening, having a coffee and breakfast or beer, soft drinks and delightful Vietnamese noodles and the like.

We only had one full day in Ho Chi Minh so we limited our sightseeing to just two places. The War Remnants Museum, which mainly showed the human impact of decades of war with the French, Americans, Australians and the various factions of the opposing Vietnamese forces. They also had some of the machinery of war displayed out front and a I think a prison, or replica of a prison outside which some bats were having a rest in. The prison included a ‘tiger cage’ which was one of the more horrendous tortures that I think the French invented which was a cage made of barbed wire where prisoners, barely clothed, or perhaps naked, were put in. Which were placed in the scorching sun and which had no room to lie down or stand up in. How sad.

The War Remnants Museum has a few floors of images and artifacts from the conflicts that took place in the country from the days of French colonialism to days when the USA and allies, including Australia, committed hundreds of thousands of soldiers to try and keep Vietnam separated between the communist north and the anti-communist south.

It’s quite the museum to get through and has a great deal of graphic detail that shows the devastation that war brings to a country. Something that is missing in my home country’s war memorial in Canberra Australia which has a sanitised slightly divorced from reality depiction of conflicts that skips most of the heartache that war causes, except for the many names of fallen soldiers that line the sacred flame near the tomb of the unknown soldier. 

At one stage my wife and I decided to split up and explore separate sides of one floor of the museum. When we met up again outside we’d both had enough of the museum and we headed to the gift shop to get some souvenirs.

I bought a mug that said ‘War Remnants Museum’ which is one of my favourite mugs along with my Dobby ‘free the house elves’ mug from Universal studios.

It’s another one of my attachments that I have to stuff that is impermanent. I’m sure I thought about that trip and those mugs during my Vipassana meditation course. I think at least in part I was inspired to go back to meditating because of that trip to Ho Chi Minh.

Outside our hotel there was a little cafe with little chairs that had delicious coffee. The barista there was reading a book by Thich Nhat Han called No Death, No Fear. Thich Nhat Han was a Buddhist and peace activist. The guy looked chilled so I thought the book would be good and I ordered it once I’d finally made my way around the world and back to Australia. It took a bit longer to actually sign up to do another course, but that was something of a precursor event which led me along the path to the noble truth again. That and having done a lot of meditation in my 20s, especially in the 1990s.

Speaking of Buddhists, while in Ho Chi Minh I was inspired to visit a memorial to Thich Quảng Đức, a buddhist monk who burnt himself alive on a then Saigon busy intersection. The internet helped guide me and after the War Remnants Museum, where we lost Fyyaz who was now back at his hotel enjoying the air conditioning, Jan and I got a Grab over to the Thich Quảng Đức memorial. 

The image of Thich Quảng Đức was one iconic one of the Vietnam War era. He sat there meditating as he burnt himself alive in protest at the treatment that Buddhists were receiving from the South Vietnamese government. It’s a shocking site. A bit extreme. It was one of the mother of all protests and one of the most moving historical sites I have ever visited. After lighting some incense and exploring the memorial a little we headed back to our hotel.

I messaged Fyyaz and we organised to meet up to go to the mall and do some shopping at Uniqlo while Jan had a nap. A lot of clothes from Uniqlo are made in Vietnam so I felt I was shopping locally.

Fyyaz and I then headed for a nice cold beer, before messaging Jan to come and meet us for more beer. It must have been happy hour, which is not a Buddhist concept. Their idea of fun is to sit meditating without moving for an hour in what is known as Adhiṭṭhāna, or strong determination, which is another reason I didn’t enjoy some days of my Vippassan meditation as we had Adhiṭṭhāna session three times per day. It felt like tourture noting the real torture and sufferign described above is another level.

And the final thing – crossing the road!

There’s not much in the way of zebra crossings in Ho Chi Minh.Jan, Fyyaz and I got trapped for a while down a walkway by the Mekong River. With the river on one side and what looked like 20 lanes of traffic on the other side with no obvious way to get through that traffic, we enlisted the help of a local guy who was walking along with his partner. 

The secret is to make eye contact and just nudge your way forward with obvious intent. Doing this allows one to gradually and progressively make your way through the sea of scooters and cars to the other side without having to walk 5 kilometres to the only designated street crossing.

It was pretty easy actually, you just have to suck it up and be confident in your movements with no sudden movements and anticipating the oncoming traffic as much as possible. 

We made it and went for another cold beer and some more Vietnamese food I suspect.

The next day Jan and I got on a bus and headed to Cambodia, our last Asian country before heading to Europe.

Fyyaz, after ignoring the great street food on offer and instead going to the 7-11 to buy an ancient hot dog, had some tummy troubles and decided not to risk the long mini-bus trip and instead hopped on a place to meet us again in Phom Penn.

Which will be the next post.

Whenever that might be. 

Probably before we head to Vienna for Eurovision.

I hope.

As Hoi An is so popular I’m probably not going to tell you too much about the place than you may already know.

Honestly, if you’re looking at going to Vietnam as an independent traveller, or on an organised tour ,and you haven’t looked into, or heard about Hoi An, then you probably haven’t been looking close enough. It’s one of the most popular places to visit in Vietnam. It’ll be one of the number one places on the Lonely Planet suggested itineraries and guaranteed to be one of the places on any organised tour you’ll get onto, along with Ha Long Bay.

Hoi An is what they call in Mexico, a Pueblo Mágico, a ‘magical’ town, enchanting, lovely, all those things. 

It certainly is just that. The old town is full of very walkable streets, of course with mopeds and motorbikes weaving in and out of the crowds, it is Vietnam still!

We had seen the pictures of all the lovely lanterns and things there in Hoi An, and had the Lonely Planet suggestion to go there, and I’d suggested to my wife it’d be a nice quiet, romantic, not too crowded, place to spend a few days. And it is. Or is most of the time.

However when you decide to visit around a national Vietnamese holiday, as we did, you’ll find the place super crowded. We arrived just round the Unification Day holiday, on 30 April, which marks the end of the American (or Vietnam) War in 1975 and the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). It marks the end of the war even though the Americans had left a few years earlier in 1973 after bombing the living daylights out of Hanoi around the Christmas/ New Year period in 1972 and 1973. I was born just 2 days before what they called Operation Linebacker II, also known as the “Christmas Bombing”, commenced, when more than 20,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the region. Once South Vietnam lost the direct support of the USA it was only a matter of time before Vietnam joined up as one.

Those days were luckily long gone.

To commemorate the occasion it seemed like half of Vietnam had decided to come to Hoi An for a few days R&R. It was more hectic than the fall of Saigon in 1975 that the holiday commemorated. Though not nearly as hectic as the bus terminal in Hanoi we’d been at a few days earlier to try and retrieve my knife that had been sent with a bus driver from Luang Prabang to Hanoi (see my earlier posts for more on that).

In retrospect, I realise that many of those thousands of people boarding buses in Hanoi had probably ended up there in Hoi An, bringing with them the same chaotic energy that you feel there in Hanoi to the cute little tourist brochure town of Hoi An. We arrived in Hoi An just the day after Unification Day. At the time I hadn’t clicked that the crowds were boosted by the Vietnamese holiday makers and when we made our way through the thronging crowds I just thought it was always like that. I thought, how can people say this place is a nice quiet and romantic Pueblo Mágico?

I realise the irony of mentioning the crowds of local Vietnamese on the day the Vietnamese were celebrating Vietnam’s unification and finally having rid themselves of the Americans (though like I wrote they’d been gone a few years) and decades earlier the French. It is their country, as the likes of Ho Chi Minh pointed out during decades of French and US interference, so of course Vietnamese should be the ones enjoying towns like Hoi An, and tough luck to us foreigners! I really mean that by the way! I don’t like it when foreigners like myself feel they should have places to themselves. Vietnam is for the Vietnamese and tourism, whilst beneficial, should primarily benefit Vietnam and, whilst Im grateful us foreigners can enjoy the country as well, no place in the world should be given over to tourists at the expense of local people!

The crowds made it a bit more exciting as well, the streets of Hoi An were bustling and crowded – as crowds often make places. The city folk from Hanoi, and I assume other places in Vietnam, brought a bit of the big city vibe with them. We, my wife and I (because, yes, it’s all about us jajaja/ haha) were still able to enjoy the local restaurants and the beautiful sites of the old streets and all with the rest of the mass of humanity.

To get to Hoi An, we’d flown from Hanoi to Da Nang. We had some travelling companions, turned friends, who were doing a similar trip to us and had gone from Thailand, down the Mekong on the slow boat, and from Luang Prabang over to Vietnam. They had been in Da Nang a few days before us but, I think, by the time we got there they had already headed back to Tucson in the US of A.

Speaking of Unification Day, Da Nang was also the city where both the French and the United States had invaded Vietnam, though the latter might claim they were there on the invitation of the South Vietnamese government. The French were pretty clear they just wanted a South-East Asian colony like their European rival Great Britain who had taken over Burma.

Yes, as you may have noticed I am a keen historian and I’m very interested in modern Vietnam’s struggle for independence, as much as I am in the pretty lanterns and delicious food you find in Hoi An. 

We didn’t hang around Da Nang, we just jumped off the plane and headed straight to Hoi An. 

That is after we had an encounter with a fake Grab (rideshare) driver.

My wife had ordered us a Grab from the airport and had the travel phone (the one we had the Vietnamese SIM card in) in her hand looking around for the Grab as I managed most of our luggage – the yellow big backpack, a smaller yellow mochilla (backpack) and a small grey suitcase on wheels. That last part of the sentence probably looks like a report to an insurance agency describing all the things we’d lost – luckily we never had to fill out such a report on our entire trip. We did, however, encounter a few small-time scammers along the way, which we were mostly prepared for. I being a return traveller to South-East Asia first back in 1995 when I was scammed out of thousands of dollars in Bangkok (though this was my first time in Vietnam), and my wife being Mexican, so always on the guard for dodgy types.

So, my wife, phone in hand and the other on the little grey, or maybe black, I can’t remember, suitcase in hand is looking around for our Grab and there is this Vietnamese guy is waving and saying something like, ‘you order Grab?’, ‘I your driver’ and my wife starts heading over to him as I trudge along behind her with the rest of the pieces of luggage, and then the Vietnamese guy is like ‘where you go?’ or something like that, which was odd given he should have known if he was indeed our Grab driver.

Of course my wife, being a cautious Mexican as I mentioned, wants to check this supposed Grab driver’s credentials so she looks at her phone to check the car he is near is the correct one. But when my wife, now within arms reach of the Vietnamese driver, looks at the phone to check the details of the Grab, the Vietnamese ‘Grab’ driver tries to cover the phone and pretty much tries to grab it off of her insisting she didn’t need to check that he WAS definitely our Grab, even though he didn’t know who we were or where we’re going. He was practically grabbing the phone with the Grab details out of her hands, and she of course is like, ‘don’t touch the phone’ and all that. And I say the same thing. And he keeps insisting that we don’t need to look at the phone and that he is definitely the Grab guy we ordered and not some dodgy scammer. 

Then we notice another guy in the carpark and by this stage Jan, my wife, has been able to look at the number plate and yeah, the dodgy guy insisting that we don’t look at the phone is, surprise, surprise, actually dodgy and not our Grab driver – if it smells like a fart and looks like a fart, it probably is a fart. So we walk towards the other guy who is standing next to a car which actually has the right number plates while the dodgy guy keeps insisting he’s not dodgy and we keep ignoring him as we walk towards our real, legit, Grab guy.

So, once we get into the actual correct Grab, we then have quite a nice drive from Da Nang to Hoi An. I always love that name Da Nang, it reminds me of the classic American focussed TV series of the American War, like Tour of Duty and movies like Good Morning Vietnam, where the late Robin Williams (R.I.P) plays an army disk jockey who says something like ‘da nang me, da nang me why don’t you take a rope and hang me’ – though according to some AI thing that I asked about that, that may not be a quote from the actual film, perhaps I heard it from the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack, which I don’t remember owning, but I may have. I definitely had the Tour of Duty soundtrack which has the only song of the Rolling Stones I actually like, why don’t you paint it black? (possibly also a misquote I can’t even bother looking that one up).

Anyway, we get the Grab from Da Nang to Hoi An. I really can’t get enough of saying/ writing Da Nang, it is such a cool name. So, da nang me, da nang me why don’t you take a rope and hang me?

In Hoi An we arrive at what we, well at least I as I was the main organiser of the trip,I think is going to be one the best bargains of the 50 Year Backpacker trip. It was a well reviewed place for only like $25 AUD (that’s Aussie dollars if you don’t know). But, like our earlier disappointment in Hanoi (see earlier blog post) we were again to be disappointed. This time the place wasn’t shit like our first hotel in Hanoi. This time the hotel room didn’t exist. Well it existed, but when we arrived at the place we discovered that the hotel we had booked for such a bargain price had somehow been cancelled that morning and that they’d sent us a message a few hours earlier to tell us that it was cancelled. The hotel people kindly offered to take us to another hotel run by their cousin or brother or something. Of course, super dodgy sounding. My wife was like, ‘if you knew you were cancelling the room why did you just tell us this morning’. And the hotel people come up with some cock and bull story. So, tired after getting up in the very early hours of the morning and travelling from Hanoi to Hoi An, via my favourite named city – DA NANG, da nang me – we are a bit tired and not wanting to screw around with what is obviously another scam.

But anyway, rather than just abandoning the place immediately, I agree to at least look at the other hotel option owned by the cousin or brother or whatever. So, I leave my wife in the lobby of the hotel conducting the scam listing and jump on the back of a motorcycle and go to this other place. It’s not that far away. I take a quick look, and, of course, the other place is a bit shit, so I get back on the motorbike and come back to the hotel and tell my wife it is shit and then we tell the manager the other place is a bit shit and that we know they are just trying to scam us, so you know what, we’re going to go find us another place. So we walk off and find a little cafe where we can get something to eat and start searching for a new place.

If you’re thinking this is not a scam, it is. It often happens that people advertise super good deals for great hotels on Booking.com then cancel them at the last moment (like the morning of the booking) and offer you some other place which isn’t on Booking.com and more expensive and not as nice. They make up some story as to why this occurs, but, to be clear, IT IS A SCAM,  and Booking.com does absolutely nothing to monitor this or try and protect unsuspecting customers. As an independent traveller you can’t afford to be naive, see earlier comment on fart. And, when faced with scammers, and just generally as an independent traveller, be distrustful, be suspicious, be firm and be sure to not fall into scammers traps.

You have to just take care of yourselves as an independent traveller and when faced with such situations take appropriate actions. Firstly, I recommend looking at the WORST review for every place you stay at booked through Booking.com as many, perhaps most, or the 5-star ratings, are fraudulent in places like Vietnam. Trust me, I have read hundreds and hundred of reviews of 5-star rated places and there’s more often than not hundreds and hundreds who basically write, ‘WTF?’ ‘How can this place possibly have 5-stars? It is so shit’. Or words to that effect.

As an independent traveller, it is important to be prepared, and circumstances like this one with dodgy listings/ operators, is why you most certainly should have a phone with a local SIM card, so you can have options to search for other options quickly. Never give these guys money! Find something else and spread the word. 

So, prepared as we were, and while getting some coffee and something to eat at a little Vietnamese cafe with some wifi, we start searching for other hotel options in the area. Being around the Unification Day holiday, there’s slim pickings, but we find a few options not too far away, that also look like they’re within walking distance of the old town area where all the touristy action is. Of course looking at the worst reviews of each place.

We were a bit confused by the layout of Hoi An area, it’s kind of spread out between the old town and the ocean. But the old town is likely to be where you want to be – though the beach area is also quite a nice option and not a huge trip to take to get to the old town.

So, we find a few fairly economical accommodation options in the vicinity and once we short list them I go off on foot to check them out before committing to lugging all the luggage about. There’s one place that’s just a 5-minute walk away, and once I find the place, and I find the owner, I ask to look at the available room, which all looks pretty good and I negotiate a price, which isn’t too bad, actually on my spreadsheet it says around $38AUD, so, if that’s trued, great for what we got.

The owner tells me though, ‘you pay straight to me, no booking.com ok?’ and I agree, I, by this stage, don’t want to give any commission to them, given how crap they are in policing dodgy reviews. So I go back to Jan, give her the thumbs up and we walk to our new hotel to start off our Hoi An stay in earnest!

You probably wanted to hear about all the lanterns and all the Pueblo Mágico stuff, well there certainly is all of that too. I’m just getting to that, even though this post was meant to be ‘short and sweet’. Trust me though, I can’t stress enough, when you’re an independent traveller you need to be able to be agile and flexible and looking out for the scams and finding alternatives and all that. So these bits about booking and seeing the signs of scams are important. It’s not all about getting a photo with a lantern.

So we finally settle into our room in Hoi An, change our clothes, and then we work out where the old town of Hoi An is, and we make our way there for some lunch. We’d achieved our immediate requirements, a roof over our head.

As I said, Hoi An is a bit spread out. We stayed out of the old town area a bit, but not too far. That’s another little independent traveller tip, find that sort of ‘Goldilocks zone’ we’re you’re close to the action, close enough to walk where you want ago, but you’re not paying those centre of town prices you often get. It took us about 30 minutes to walk into the old town. A trip we had to take a bit easy during the day as it was stinking hot in early May. Because of the heat, we mostly ended up going into town in the late afternoon/ early evening, or first thing in the morning. It was nowhere near as hot as Thailand and Laos though where we’d been travelling the previous weeks. But, still very hot.

Hoi An is really such a touristy place and everyone I’ve known who has visited there has loved it, with its beautiful lanterns, walkable streets, markets and river views.

As I’ve said, there were crowds in the old town area the first days we were there. Way too crowded and a bit difficult to see anything for us. 

We were still able to explore pretty effectively though. 

We got ourselves some passes where we could visit a few different museums and places of interest. You can buy them somewhere there in the ‘centre’ of the old town from the tourist office. I think we could visit like 4-5 museums and historic sites around town, an old bridge, an old merchant’s home and some other areas on the one ticket.

The food scene in Hoi An is really, really, really good. Almost goes without saying, but still, it’s really flipping good. Plenty of street eats and less formal places to get some authentic Vietnamese dishes at some very reasonable prices. There’s also much fancier places where you can have the same options for a higher price if you want to spend more to get pretty much the same thing. We tried a few sort of medium-level places which we enjoyed. 

I can’t remember the names of the different food we ate, nor the restaurants, but there’s a few photos of different dishes on the blog to give you an idea of what we had. Just keep trying everything! Unless you’re allergic to a bunch of stuff, especially peanuts and prawns (shrimps, camarones), which is found in a bunch of Vietnamese cuisine. Be careful of that stuff of course. There’s also a few micro-breweries where you can get a decent cold beer (without ice even, like we had to contend with in Laos!). Hoi An is just a really lovely place to walk around and gaze at things, and see other stuff, and look at shops and eat stuff and then eat some more and then eat some more!

The river in Hoi An at night is pretty amazing, and lit up with more lanterns and boats taking tourists up and down the place. All very romantic, however, there’s also a darker side, there’s a fair bit of rubbish and pollution in the area.

On our walks in and out of the old town we also got to see some local farming activity which still goes on around the place despite its tourism focus. The rice harvest was in full swing it seemed and across many of the pavements outside of the old town area people were drying rice on blankets. Somehow I managed to not get a photo of any of that, perhaps I was just taking in the scenery for once.

But another good thing about being in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone where you see a bit of local action.

In Hoi An old town there’s some fruit and veggie markets that are worth exploring. Some nice enough non edible stuff to buy there as well. Not sure we got anything non edible at all in the Hoi An, as we didn’t have much space in the luggage so we weren’t that focussed on buying things we needed to carry around the rest of the world. We did have a few more continents and countries to get through at that stage, some more of Vietnam, then Cambodia then off to Europe, Vienna, Italy, Greece and Türkiye, then off to Mexico and back to Australia, which was still a few months ago at that stage.

Because of the crowds and heat we decided after heading into the old town a few times that we’d head to the beach for a day. After having some breaky in the old town area one morning we got a Grab out to the Cua Dai Beach/ Hidden Beach area. About a 15 minute drive.

On the way to the beach we passed some rice fields and a few water buffalo. Some enigmatic Vietnamese scenes which I hope aren’t erased by the continuing focus on tourism in the area. Keep that overall Goldilocks zone please! Where tourists don’t just takeover and we all destroy what we came to see!

Once we got down to the beach we negotiated some beach lounges and shade with one of the restaurants lining the beach. We found one that let you use their beach and bathroom facilities as long as we ordered food and drinks from them. I think it’s better value than ones where you hire the space for the day. That’s another very boring 50-year old thing to write, but hey, this is the 50 year backpacker blog, and I’m in my 50s, so you should expect stuff like this!

Plus, as an independent traveller who wants the same, or similar, experiences to those giving themselves over to expensive package deals where everything is organised, you wanna be thinking about how to save a few hundred thousand Dong here and there.

In short, don’t be scared to organise your own independent itineraries in places like Vietnam. Apart from the few potential, and probably likely, hotel and taxi scams you have to watch out for, it’s pretty bloody easy to independently organise things in these areas, so you don’t have to pay millions of Dong to have someone tell you where to go and where to be and how you only have 30 minutes to be there to get a quick selfie because you have to be back on the tour bus to go to some other place. 

Chill, spend as long as you want in a spot and go to the spots you want to go to when you want to go to them. Have a beach day like we did. Spend a few more nights to get to know a place better. Skip some places and spend more time in others. We ended up spending 4 nights in Hoi An, and probably could have easily spent a few more nights relaxing in the area, eating great food, enjoying the vibe. Plus, if you spend a bit more time in a place you can factor in things like bad weather, and Vietnamese national holidays where the crowds swell – a little more on that further along.

I liked the set up down the beach as we didn’t have to go anywhere, the waiters would come to us, plus other vendors walking up and down the beach. The Vietnamese flag waved proudly in the background, perhaps always, there but I like to think also to commemorate the nations’ unification. Noting the very rocky road and massive suffering and sacrifices people on all sides made to get to that point.

With the beach, as mentioned in my previous post, we live on Queensland’s Gold Coast and the beaches are pretty awesome there. So I’m pretty fussy when it comes to beaches. The ones around Hoi An, at least when we were there, were pretty good though. 

Fairly clean, the water was warm, but not the jacuzzi like temperatures we had when in Thailand, on Koh Chang Island (noting it was in April when we were in Thailand which is one of the hottest months!). Unlike Thailand though I don’t think there was much in the way of beach massages on offer. Although there may have been, I just might not remember. WHo knows.

We dined on some great fish, oysters, beer, soft drinks, and probably snacky foods as well, though I can’t remember any particular ones. We kept up a steady supply of food and beverages to make it worth the restaurant’s while.

I later got a bit sick from something. Probably the oysters as I’m sure the fish was fine. Actually the fish was amazing! They keep all the seafood in plastic basins in the back alleys to keep it fresh, but you know, oysters can be a bit hit and miss. I wasn’t majorly sick though, just an upset tummy with more toilet visits than usual. You don’t want too many more details than that I’m sure. But again, be prepared for those sort of things, they will happen on your journeys whether you’re an independent traveller or not.

I spent a few hours in the water. The waves were a little big, but it was fairly shallow so you could go a little beyond the breaks. I chatted with a fellow traveller in the surf for ages and got distracted so ended up drifting a fair way down the beach and losing my wife. 

After realising this had happened I, and reorientating myself, I managed to find my way back to a worried wife who realised, after a bit, I was also not to be seen. Probably something to be mindful of if you’re not a competent swimmer, as there also didn’t appear to be much in the way of surf life saving options in the area.

At the end of the day there was a mass exodus of people heading back from the beach. When we were there this was overwhelmingly Vietnamese families enjoying the holidays, and they all seemed to pretty much leave at once. I think that night we decided to not even venture into the old town of Hoi An as we’d found it too crowded the night before. We’d already been there two or three nights by that stage, and plus my tummy wasn’t going that great either.

On our last night in Hoi An we decided, however, that we should give the old town crowds another go. To our surprise, the crowd numbers had suddenly plummeted. The mass exodus from the beach seemed indicative of the end of the Vietnamese national holiday and many had also exited the Hoi An area. The place was transformed into the relatively quiet romantic place you see in all the tourist brochures. We were able to fully admire all the lights and lanterns and activity on the river. 

We organised a boat trip down on the river and it was really, really quite lovely. Hopi An is a really, really, lovely place.

We again had nice food, nice beer and nice street desserts. It really is a lovely spot. What more can I say?

The next day we headed to our last Vietnamese city starting with ‘H’, Ho Chi Min, where we were meeting up with our friend Fyyaz.

So in the morning, it was back to Da Nang airport for another flight, this time down to Ho Chi Minh city.

50 year Backpacker – side post #2 – K’gari formerly known as Fraser Island formerly known as K’gari, Queensland, Australia.

If you’ve read all of my 50 year Backpacker posts – which I doubt and I really don’t blame you if you haven’t – you would remember that originally I was blogging about my wife and my trip around the world to celebrate both my 50th birthday year and the fact that I love travelling.

I’ve numbered this post side post #2 to go along with my last post, side post #1, as they aren’t necessarily ‘canon’ (a term I’ve never quite fully understood which therefore may not be appropriately used here, who knows – probably the ‘canon’ police) to the overall 50 Year Backpacker story. Both side posts #1 and #2 are just, as the names suggest, just little side posts.

This post is just about a trip my wife and I did over the Easter long-weekend, after this I’m likely to go back to blogging about the round-the-world trip my wife and I did, which is currently stuck in Vietnam around the time of Vietnamese Independence Day celebrations, which, coincidentally, have also had a 50 year anniversary celebration (it could be the 500th year celebration by the time you read this). 

We, my wife and I – we’re back on topic now and NOT talking about Vietnamese independence but our trip a few weeks ago – took a trip up to Hervey Bay in Queensland.

We live in Queensland at the moment. Down on the Gold Coast, with our beautiful beaches – which have been a bit washed away recently with a cyclone. Thanks to decades of climate change inaction this is probably not going to be an usual occurrence in the coming years. 

Australia is wonderful. Queensland is wonderful. Both places have many wonderfully amazing places to visit. And if you visit Queensland, you’ll be visiting both those wonderful places.

The beaches around South-East Queensland are amazing, especially just up the street from us where I walk most evenings and sometimes in the morning. It’s left me very spoilt, and so far, I haven’t been overly impressed with any of the beaches I’ve seen in my journeys outside of Australia. Even on the Greek Islands of Samos and Ikaria, where I thought the beaches might be nice. Although they do like a bit of nude sunbathing on some of these islands which I’m rather fond of.

And Hervey Bay, and nearby K’gari island, are some of the most beautiful parts of Queensland. I last went to Hervey Bay and K’gari in 1994, you can read parts of that trip in The Adventure of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) – a novel of sorts about fishing, love and life.

K’gari was then known as Fraser Island, however the Butchulla people, the Traditional Owners of K’gari, lived on the island for at least 5,000 years, and potentially as long as 50,000 years, so I think it’s much more respectful to now call the island the name K’gari, again!

To pronounce K’gari you apparently drop the ‘K’ and just call it ’gari.

On my last visit to K’gari my travel companion and I hitched around the Island. I think we may be some of the only people to ever have hitchhiked around K’gari Island. Certainly don’t attempt to hitchhike around the island. I don’t know what we were thinking! But we did it because on the way to the island I saw an eagle and I knew it would be fine. I really believe in the power of eagles, but still, don’t hitchhike around K’gari. For one, probably no one will give you a lift anymore and aslo, like back when we did it, there’s a bunch of permits and things you need to have to stay and camp on the island, so if you just rock up there and camp like we did you will probably get in trouble.

My wife and I, 31 years after my last trip, did a much more sensible option of going on a day trip to K’gari departing from Hervey Bay.

Initially I thought a day visit to K’gari might not do it justice, but both my wife and I were quite happy and comfortable with our day trip. We got to swim in Mckenzie Lake, also known as Boorangoora, and, in reference to naming K’gari, K’gari, rather than the European name, we should probably also just call Boorangoora Boorangoora.

Boorangoora lake is one of the most amazing places I have seen in my entire life. The water is so blue and clear, nice and warm, soft on the skin, fresh, the sand on the shores so white, the surrounding forest so pristine, apart from all the 4 wheel drives and tour buses (like ours) parked in the car park, which was rather full over the Easter long weekend we were there.

K’gari is certainly pristine, wild and wonderfully beautiful. It is, however, like many places in the world, including Australia, lucky to still be there in such good condition.

It survived decades of logging, proposals to mine it for its minerals and other such environmental vandalism. Culturally, the Butchulla Aboriginal people were dispossessed of the island and the traditional custodians stripped of all say over the island for many, many years. Too long.

I had no idea when I travelled there back in 1994, when I knew it as Fraser Island, and I’m happy as an Australian that the name the local people gave it has been reinstated – hence the title of this blog ‘K’gari formerly known as Fraser Island formerly known as K’gari’.

But back to this day trip. We organised it when we were sitting in a cafe in Hervey Bay on Good Friday. My wife was fasting for the morning, and watched on as I ordered a bacon and egg roll and a flat white with almond milk. She picked up a brochure on the bench, scanned the QR code, which we are all so adept at now post-COVID, and organised the trip for Sunday. It was a few hundred bucks each but included the ferry across from River Heads over to the Kingfisher Bay Resort where we got into a big tour bus with great big tyres on it which are needed to navigate the sand roads that run across the island.

Being Good Friday we’d decided to get fish and chips that evening, which resulted in my wife fasting for a bit longer than she had expected as they took about 1.30-2 hours to get our order in. I think we finally got it around 8pm and quickly scoffed down the red emperor and whiting, potato scallops, crumbed prawns (for me, my wife is allergic to them), and a crumbed pineapple ring.

We ate them down by Urangan Pier, which is another beautiful spot around there. We’d walked the pier the night before. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the end. As you imagine, it’s very long. Unless you were thinking we are really, really slow walkers.

As mentioned, the K’gari island went to Boorangoora lake first, which is a short walk from the carpark. We veered left at a fork in the path when we saw most people were going right and were glad to take the path less travelled as we landed a little bit away from the Easter crowds lounging around on the beach.

Some local park rangers, Indigenous mob, were keeping an eye on things around the lake, trying to find whoever was sending up drones for example, and they came down to where we were sitting.

‘You got the best spot here!’ said one of the rangers.

‘I know!’ I said.

After Boorangoora lake we headed off for a nice little rainforest walk with our bus driver and tour guide, then headed across to the Eastern side of the island to another resort where we had a nice buffet lunch, including, for me, lashings of cottage pie. There’s also a little store in that area so we were able to quickly rush in after lunch and grab a few fridge magnets, something I was too snobby and pretentious to buy back in 1994. And possibly also too poor to get, I was mostly just on the dole and had only come on that trip with a few weeks worth of money that I’d earned working on the farm of Bev and Peter Brock down in Nutfield Victoria where I had met Corinne, my Swiss travelling companion. 

It was a far cry from what my travel companion and I had when we were camping on the island back in 1994, right on Eli Creek. Back then I think we might of just had some bread, a few apples and eggs, some cans of beans, and maybe some tea, and sugar, or something like that.

I’m sure we also had some melted chocolate bars, as Corinne was Swiss and always had a bit of chocolate bars in her backpack, most likely Cadbury or something as back in 1994 Lindt and other Swiss chocolates weren’t as readily available as they are now.

Back in 94 we also had some campers who were camping near us who shared some fish, or something, with us that they had cooked up on their campfire. 

We didn’t even have that much water with us back then and ended up drinking water from Eli Creek for a few nights. Supposedly it is fresh enough to drink. But I wouldn’t rely on it if I were you as critters still probably poop in it and I’m sure there’d potentially be a few parasites in there, especially in the lower reaches of the creek where it heads out to sea and more people bathe in it.

We survived though, so the water must have been good enough. 

Corinne, my Swiss friend, did get sick one night and the next day we had to head off to Hervey Bay to get her checked out. It may have been the water, but it could have been the lack of food, or sunstroke or something. She thought it also may have been a recurrence of some malaria she’d picked up in South America on a trip with her husband years earlier. She thought she might also be pregnant but a later test in Hervey Bay ruled that out.

Yes, she was married, and yes the possibility that she was pregnant would not have involved her husband.

If you want the chismes (gossip) go read a fictionalised version of the trip. Well most of it is roughly true: The Adventure of Kosio & Juanito (& Corinne) – a novel of sorts about fishing, love and life.

The day trip my wife and I were on that day, stopped for a bit at Eli Creek. It was a bit rushed, but sufficient to allow us to go down the creek a bit and swim down towards the ocean two times. If you do go to the island it is worth staying at least for a couple of nights so you don’t have to rush such things. You’d also get to be there at night when the beach highway closes and you’re just left with the stars, sounds of the ocean and crackle of the campfire. But still, our day trip was great and really recharged the batteries.

On the way to Eli Creek we saw a couple of dingoes, one was cooling off a bit in the surf, which is quite rough on the Eastern, ocean facing side of the K’gari. We also saw a dingo jogging along in between the 4-wheel drives which race up and down the beach on that side of the island. It didn’t seem too concerned.

Back in 1994 I think I only saw one dingo in the few nights we were there. There was some sort of sand drift near our camp which I was exploring and I think I saw it in the distance. I’m sure I saw one somewhere. But it’s a long time ago now.

Eli Creek is so beautiful. It’s a freshwater creek where pristine water, filtered for decades through the sand and trees, runs through the forest and out into the ocean. Back in 1994 we managed to walk a couple of kilometres up the creek exploring one day.

After Eli Creek, the tour bus headed across to the West side of the island again, through the narrow forest roads that traverse the island and back to our ferry at Kingfisher Bay Resort, where we were just in time for the sunset followed by a nice calm ferry ride back to River Heads.

And that’s it, side post #2 is done. I might try and do a few more of these ones on short trips we do in Australia, just to spice things up a bit. Next post, I plan to get back to the Vietnam leg of the 50 Year Backpacker trip! Though the comfort level has changed, I’m still backpacking after all these years!

I’m taking a little pause from the 50 year backpacker journey that my wife and I took around the world, to reflect on my wife’s home country of Mexico.

One thing we’ve found whilst travelling is the impacts of over tourism. While Mexico certainly does suffer from over-tourism in parts, especially around Cancún, Sayulita and Puerto Vallarta, and sites like Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán, to name a few, it also offers the independent traveler a wealth of less touristy experiences.

I’ve been travelling independently in Mexico since 2013, where I first did a Lonely Planet itinerary of some of the top twenty sites, like Mexico City, Teotihuacán, Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas.

I ended up in Mexico because I had travelled over with my niece to the USA as she was going over there to study in Nashville for 6 months. My sister used to work for Virgin airlines so the immediate family could get some pretty good discounts on tickets. Originally my sister  had planned to travel with my niece and I over there, flying to LA and then driving across to Nashville. But in the end my sister ‘piked out’ leaving just me and my niece to take the trip together (by the way I basically repeat this story somewhere else on the Juanito’s Travels  site, but I can’t exactly remember where, as I have added heaps of pages and posts over the years). My niece couldn’t get the discount on the airfares that my sister or I could get unless she travelled with one of us – short explanation they had ‘tiers’ of discounts, immediate family got super good discounts and anyone who was travelling with us could get a pretty decent discount, like premium economy for the price of economy.

So, in the end I was pretty much committed to going as we had promised my niece she’d get these mad discounts and all. I didn’t have to go, but I like to keep my promises.

So my niece and I go over the USA. But by now the plans to drive from LA to Nashville have been ditched. And my niece and I were pretty much just going to part ways when we got to LA, apart from going together to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game that I invited her along to. When I thought about what I’d like to do in the USA, apart from just looking around Hollywood and going to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game, I thought, go to Mexico!

I know Mexico is not in the USA – but much of the USA used to be part of Mexico, pretty much all those places with Spanish sounding names like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego et cetera have Spanish sounding names for a reason!

My original plans for Mexico were quite simple and based a little around my extensive knowledge of the country through watching the Herbie Goes Bananas movie. Herbie is a VW beetle car with a personality – he has kind of a ‘spirit’ and gets up to all sorts of antics like fighting bulls and stuff. Part of Herbie Goes Bananas is set in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico.

So based on Herbie Goes Bananas I thought I’d go down to Puerto Vallarta and have a drink of tequila, which I also knew was Mexican, have a taco and then come back to Australia again via the USA.

As an independent traveller, then just 40 years old, I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Mexico and started to flick through it. And then I started to discover that there was much more to Mexico than what I had learnt from Herbie Goes Bananas and other classics like Speedy Gonzales, fastest mouse in all of México!! I pretty much learnt from Speedy Gonzales that Mexicans wore big sombreros.

The Lonely Planet said Mexico had lots of archaeological sites, like Teotihuacán, the Mayan archaeological site of Palenque and the ruins of the Aztec main temple, the Templo Mayor (‘great temple’). I must admit on my first visit to Mexico, as you may have gathered by now, I didn’t have a great deal of knowledge about Mexico! In this case, thanks Lonely Planet for giving me a better idea! For instance, I thought Teotihuacán was an Aztec site (whilst it was an important site for the Aztecs it pre-dated their civilisation by a few hundred years and was built by the Teotihuacanos – as the name suggests).

So, now with Lonely Planet in hand I started stretching my itinerary beyond Puerto Vallarta, with planned visits to Mexico City, Teotihuacán (close to Mexico City), Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas. Puerto Vallarta seemed like a bit of a detour so I ditched the idea of visiting there.

Sorry Herbie.

My friend Kurt had also been to Mexico so he was able to recommend a few places for me to go – including Palenque, which he had missed out on as he was sick and had just stayed in San Cristobal de las Casas, which is actually not that close to Palenque which I was later to find out! 

So my wife-to-be and I met up a few times and immediately hit it off. It was a short affair, just a few days in the end as I had to get back to Australia to look after my kids in Canberra as my ex-wife-to-be had to go to Sydney for some training for a new job she had started.

On that first trip I first arrived in Mexico City where I was soon to discover nobody wears big sombreros about. But they did have tequila and tacos, and many, many Herbies – that is many VW beetles, which they call Vochos. Makes sense as they manufactured VW Vochos there in Mexico for many years. And that, of course, is why Herbie was there.

On that first trip I fell in absolute love with Mexico! I loved the sites. I loved the people. I loved the food – though I did have a few mishaps like getting sick from some very cheap canasta style tacos in Mexico City. I loved the nature, the city, the art, the history. It was, and still is, all amazing!

Well that first trip started it all! My now lifelong love of Mexico had begun. Often the first time you do something can lead to a second, third, forth et cetera time.

Like smoking weed, meditation, eating and having sex. Often we do these things more than once in our lives.

So, that first trip under my belt, some years later, again using my sister’s Virgin airline discounts, I travelled again to Mexico via Los Angeles, this time with my friend Kurt, and this time going business class rather than premium economy.

That was 2015, that was the year I went to Mexico to experience the Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – which is at the start of November. We had been planning to go to Mexico City or Puebla to experience Dia de Muertos but Kurt’s back was playing up and he knew a doctor in Guadalajara who was good at fixing backs and so we modified our plans to go to Guadalajara instead. You can read more about that here, it also involved being delayed a few days in LA because a big Hurricane had hit around Puerto Vallarta – from Herbie Goes Bananas fame.

I was like, whatever, as long as we were in Mexico around Day of the Dead, it was all good. Kurt’s bad back changed my life in a rather major way. Now on this occasion it was definitely what I would consider a kind of ‘fate’ situation.

Mainly because when Kurt was off in Guadalajara getting his back looked at, I was meeting a Mexican woman online for the first time, someone who was later to become my wife.

So in the end I didn’t quite make it to the Day of the Dead, leaving, I think on the morning of 1 November. As it happens there’s quite a bit of activity leading up to Day of the Dead anyway so you don’t necessarily have to be there on the actual day. You can read more about that here.

And that was 2015. My-wife-to-be kept in touch for a bit and then stopped communicating for a bit at all, and I sorted out my separation arrangements with my first wife, which pretty much started the day I got back Canberra.

So, now officially single, I spent some time kind of alone, though still living with my ex due to financial restraints, and hey, my wife-to-be and I weren’t together at that stage anyway. 

So the following year, my kids and my mum go to Japan, and I kept thinking about my wife-to-be and even bought her a little Snoopy notepad from Tokyo thinking optimistically that perhaps one day I would see her again. And then later in 2016 I started sending messages to my wife-to-be as I had started to plan another trip to Mexico to visit the Mayan archaeological site of Calakmul and was wondering whether perhaps she’d want to see me again for a coffee.

Well, that ‘coffee’ ended up starting with plans for us to meet up in Guadalajara, once I’d been to Mérida, and then to Calakmul. From those humble beginnings the ‘coffee’ turned into plans to visit Guanajuato, then Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City. After, of course, meeting up in Guadalajara.

By the end of that trip I had met my wife-to-be’s (let’s just call her ‘Jan’ from now on) family, one of her cousins, and some of her friends. After that we were more officially together and I soon started planning another trip to Mexico.

I’ll continue this Mexico focus in my next blog post as we maybe finally get to visit the city Herbie made famous (for me) – Puerto Vallarta.

But it’s worth mentioning that Guanajuato, Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City were all amazing experiences. Guanajuato was like a real life Disney experience with beautiful, medieval inspired buildings, and a full on romantic vibe.

Guanajuato, Morelia and Querétaro have what I’ve discovered to be a central Mexican charm, especially in their city centres. They are all bustling with good restaurants, cafes, street food, lively entertainment, often free in the town squares. You’ll see a lot of similarities in design for these smaller Mexican cities, with a central square, with a church at one end and restaurants and shops on the edges.

You also see this repeated in the big cities, like Guadalajara and the granddaddy of Mexican cities, Mexico City! Except on a much grander scale. Guadalajara’s centro area hosts a grand and beautiful Catedral (cathedral as you may have guessed if you don’t know Spanish) and large public spaces. While in Mexico city there’s an even bigger Catedral and an even bigger public space, The Zócalo, which I encountered on my very first visit to, which is also the site on which the Aztecs (also known as the Mexica) founded their capital Tenochtitlan, not to be confused with the grand site of Teotihuacán with it’s massive pyramids of the sun and the moon, which  was built by the Teotihuacanos – not the Aztecs!

All of the places I have mentioned so far are pretty easy to navigate (if you stay in a central area) and to get to for the independent traveller. You don’t need an organised tour guide to take you around and, in my opinion, you won’t get to spend enough time and some of these amazing places if you go on an organised tour.

What I would recommend instead is to organise your own airfares and bus fares between places and then maybe organise day tours in some of these areas.

I’ve put in links in this post to posts and pages I’ve already done about some of these places, but in future posts I will add some more detail on some of the areas and some recommendations for the independent traveller.

I have been travelling to Mexico for over 12 years, and I have never had any particualarly bad experiences at all! I have travelled to many, many places in Mexico and all have been amazing. I will keep giving recommendations on places to stay, where to visit and what to eat in Mexico when you travel there.

My only fear is that by hopefully making your Mexican experience slightly more accessible is that I don’t aid in promoting the negative aspects of tourism and turn nice, local vibe places into not so nice places overrun by tourists. Like Cancún, Sayulita, and Los Cabos (the last I haven’t visited but I have on my wife’s good authority that it has been spoiled through overtourism. 

Also some very good sites like chichén itzá and Teotihuacán (especially Chichén) have become tourist circuses. A few ways to avoid supporting the over tourism and promote healthy sustainable are to:

•  NOT ONLY GO TO THE MOST FAMOUS SITES. Chichén itzá for example is just one of hundreds of well preserved Mayan archaeological sites. Sure, go visit there with the massive crowds, but perhaps plan to stay a bit longer and go visit some of the lesser known Mayan sites, like Uxmal, Calakmul and many, many others. 
• do a bit of research and get on some locally run days tours where local Indigenous people proudly explain their cultural connection to sites.
• don’t go on package tours lasting for days – they will not give you enough time to explore areas and will only take you to the overly tourist hot spots. For example my kids and I visited a lovely cenote (underground waterhole/ lake/ river) not far from Mérida, Yucatán which was very beautiful but totally overrun by thousands and thousands of tourists. Whereas the day before we had visited a nice rustic cenote run by an Indigenous cooperative where we had a swim with just a dozen people.
• when doing a day trip try and get in a smaller group who can perhaps get into some of these sites a little before the big tour buses roll in. Even better hire your own guide like we did at Teotihuacán where my wife and two kids got up early and visited the site before the big crowds had made their way there.
• avoid Airbnb, especially where people are using local homes that drive up prices for locals, like has been happening in the more popular parts of Spain and Italy. Local homes are for locals. You, as a tourist, should be staying at hotels! Even if that means fewer of us tourists can visit! You have money and options, a lot of places you visit in Mexico do not have the same financial resources, so it is unfair to drive prices up and drive locals out as has happened in Sayulita.
• boycott places like Sayulita altogether! Sorry to pick on you Sayulita but you have become a magnet for gringo (USA) invasion over the last few years. There is hardly any local character to Sayulita anymore and locals are now struggling to be able to accommodate themselves at a reasonable cost in the area as new apartments and the like are practically all targeted at wealthy tourists rather than the hard working locals who support us tourists! Also, when tourism completely takes over prices get driven up and places like Sayulita find themselves with a situation where everything is twice the price of the rest of Mexico. Don’t go there! Don’t support that injustice, demand sustainable and balanced tourist options with a mixed economy that is not only based on tourist dollars!

That’s enough for today I think! I’ll have more tips and tricks on planning your independent travel to Mexico in coming posts before I get back to continuing the 50 Year Backpacker blog – though this is kind of part of that anyway!

We’re still in Hanoi. There I want to finally finish the story about ‘that knife’ I tried to get from Laos to Vietnam, as it did end there in Hanoi.

For those who have read previous Juanito’s Travels posts you may recall that I bought a knife at the Mekong Elephant Centre with the hope of taking it back to Australia.

It was a beautifully rustic, hand-made knife that a nice Laotian man had made from recycled scrap metal there in his little open air workshop at the Mekong Elephant Centre on the Mekong River just next to the little town of Pakbeng (or Pak Beng) which is a kind of stopover town on the Mekong River between Huay Xai, on the Thai/ Laos border, and Luang Prabang.

I thought I could use that knife in the garden to cut branches and the like (it was a pretty decent-sized knife) when I got back to Australia and it’d be all good. And easy. And it was. Initially. I carried that knife down the Mekong on that slow, and very uncomfortable, boat down the Mekong, in the scorching April heat, to Luang Prabang where we chilled out on dry land for a few days. 

The trouble with the knife only came on the next leg of the journey from Luang Prabang to Vientiane where we were taking the very fast new, Chinese-built, train. It was a beautiful, very efficient, train that was only going to take us like 2 hours rather than like 18 hours on the road. I don’t recall if it actually took 2 hours but it was pretty darn quick, less than 3 hours I think, maybe it slowed down a bit in spots. Very nice trip, read past blogs for more on that.

The fast train is super nice. And super fast. But, you can’t bring any sharp items, like knives, on it. There is also no way you can pack the knives and put them in storage as you have to take your bags with you into the carriage and you have to go through a metal detector and everything. There is no separate luggage area like on a plane. So, in short, no knives allowed. At all. Zero knives. Zero.

You’ll have to read my previous posts for more details on how I tried to get around that but the short summary is, after many creative attempts to try and get those knives back to Australia via post and what have you, my very helpful hotel reception guy in Luang Prabang convinced me that we could give the knives to his bus driver friend who could drive them to Hanoi on his regular service there where we could then pick them up from Hanoi bus station. 

I say knives,  plural, for I also had a little Swiss army knife given to me by a married Swiss woman named Corinne who I had been travelling up the east coast of Australia back in the early 1990s (read a fictitious version of that trip here). It was a knife, by the way, that I had been previously allowed to have on my person when I travelled on a Thai airways flight from Australia to Thailand and then onto London in 1995. Boy have times have changed. They won’t let you on with a knitting needle nowadays.

So the knives went one way on the bus towards Hanoi, and my wife and I went another way, on the very cool fast train to Vientiane and then by plane to Hanoi.

As I wrote, we were to collect the knives at a bus station in Hanoi. Sounded like a reasonably easy plan to execute. I’d been keeping in regular contact with my hotel reception guy from Luang Prabang via Whatsapp and he informed me that the knives would be arriving at the bus station in Hanoi one evening when we were there. I was like, good, I will try and go and collect them, and we arranged a time and he gave me the address and all that. It was all going to be rather simple, walk in, meet the bus driver, collect the knives and then head back to the hotel.

So my wife and I head out to the bus station to collect the knives.

Well, as you may now be imagining, it wasn’t that simple. Firstly our Grab couldn’t take us all the way to the bus station as it was a national holiday for Reunification Day and so half of Hanoi was heading to the bus station to get on a bus to go on holidays for a few days. So, we couldn’t get all the way to the bus station and we had to stop a few blocks from there and make our way through all the millions of scooters and cars and the like – it really seems virtually no one in Hanoi walks anywhere and they only ever go anywhere more than 10 metres on their scooter. They seem to have been practically born with two wheels beneath them. 

We managed to eventually get to the bus station at the time our bus driver was meant to be arriving from Luang Prabang. I messaged the hotel guy in Luang Prabang saying we were there and he messaged back saying the bus had been delayed but that it should be there in the next hour. So we decided to wait around a bit.

The station was absolutely chaotic. There were millions of people going everywhere trying to get  onto buses in some system most of us foreigners could not possibly hope to understand, though I did see at least one foreigner who had managed to work it out as she sat on one of these sleeper buses which had rows of mattresses lining the windows with a satisfied smile on her face as she overlooked the chaos below. I can only applaud her for working out whatever system was going on there, she probably had a PhD in Chaos Theory to help her manage.

I think we were there for maybe an hour, walking from place to place, squeezed in amongst this sea of humanity, getting accosted by people trying to sell us stuff, getting told we need to go one place then another, but not understanding any of the directions, or signs or anything about the place really. It was just generally a very, very stressful place to be. 

My wife was certainly not coping with the crowd. But, apparently the bus was coming into the station in a minute, and it was some number bus, which I can’t recall, and we spent a bit more time trying to work out the bus number system on the hundreds of buses parked in this big car park thing, trying to not get run over by incoming and outgoing buses, and what the hell any of it meant before.

After a while I could really see my wife wasn’t coping with this, I suggested after trying to make some sense of things, ‘hey let’s just get out of the station and work out our next move, you’re obviously not coping’. I was barely keeping it together myself but I was a bit more used to it, I’d seen such systems in India when I was there in 1995.

So we decided to make our way out after perhaps an hour, or even an hour and half maybe, in the utter madness of the Hanoi bus station on a national holiday. And I said, ‘hey let’s just ditch these bloody knives, I can see you’re not coping’. My wife, somewhat shell shocked, just kind of nodded her head.

‘Let’s go across the road to that cafe (pointing to a cafe across the street), sit down, have a drink and then order a Grab back to the hotel’. And after that my mind went a bit blank, I’m not sure whether we got our Grab or just grabbed a taxi, but somehow, not too much later, we were in a car heading back to the hotel.

I know our phone batteries were practically kaput by that stage so maybe we had to get a taxi, who knows. All I can say is we never want to go back to that bloody bus station there in Hanoi ever again. Though, perhaps it was just extra crazy due to the Reunification Day holiday. Don’t know, and I’m not going to find out. Anway, despite calling this blog the 50 Year Backpacker, It’s fancy trains and planes for us!

But, keep in mind the fact that there is Reunification Day holiday at the end of April as this, as we would soon see, had an impact on our next destination, the usually tranquil touristy town of Hoi An.

I messaged Luang Prabang on the way back from the bus station and said we’d given up on the knives. He tried to convince us it was still a possibility, but I was like, hey, we’re staying at this hotel for one more night. If the guy can get the knives sent there then fine, otherwise the knives are gone and I never want to hear about them again, tell the bus driver he can have them!

And we never heard from those knives again (to date). The Laos knife wasn’t a big deal, as I’d only got it a few days early (though it was pretty expensive for a Laotian knife!) but I still had an attachment to the Swiss army knife that Swiss Corinne gave me. 

Perhaps it was a sign though that, after all those years, I needed to lose my attachment to that knife and that part of my life. Since that time back in the early 90s I had travelled to Ireland, the UK, France and India. Had two kids, raised them in Canberra, Australia. Got married. Traveled to Ireland, India, France a few times, Japan, Iceland, Italy a couple of times, Thailand a couple of times, Germany, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Singapore, Austria, around Australia (where we live at present), Greece, Türkiye, the USA a few times, and Mexico many times. Got divorced. Lost a testicle. Had the kids grow up. Moved to the Gold Coast. Gotten married again, to a Mexican, the lovely, beautiful one who was there now, poor thing, getting overwhelmed by the effort to retrieve some knives from the absolute madness of the Hanoi bus station. 

And now my wife and I were travelling around the world.

We didn’t need those knives hanging around. Those memories, those ghosts.

They were gone.

Move on from those attachments, the Budhha would say, they will only bring misery.

They were just things. The most important thing was we were there together, my wife and I. Nothing else mattered.

I think we had one more night, or maybe two, in Hanoi, and then, very early in the morning we packed our things again and headed to Hanoi airport for our flight to Da Nang and then onto Hoi An.

Part one – the first bit, a bit of background, a bit of colonialism, a bit of communism, a bit of Bánh mi

I started writing this post with the same old boring (well it was certainly not boring when we were there, but retelling the tale can be tedious) detail of what we did in Hanoi and when we did it and in which order we did it, and what we ate in between doing those things – the last being one of my most favourite topics, I LITERALLY live to eat as opposed to eat to live. 

On that topic, we had a fantastic Bánh mì by that cathedral in Hanoi that looks like a mini Notre-Dame cathedral, and some great bún chả that our friends Scottie & Howie recommended from their trip to Hanoi (or maybe it was just Howie who went there and Scottie went to Helsinki – it was around when they were first dating I think), as well fantastic bánh bao, including a cheese hamburger bánh bao, at a place one street over from the second hotel we stayed at in Hanoi having moved there after the first hotel was so terribly disappointing and crappy (more on that further along). Most people probably know what Bánh mì is by now, the Vietnamese baguette with savory meats like pork or chicken, mayonnaise, pâté and fresh herbs. I think bánh bao and bún chả is getting more common to see, in Australia at least.

The former being fluffy, Vietnamese steamed buns, often filled with savory ingredients like ground pork and cheeseburger inspired stuff, the latter a Northern Vietnamese dish consisting of grilled pork (patties and/or belly) served with rice vermicelli noodles, fresh herbs, and a sweet and sour dipping broth. The bún chả I had was accompanied by some crispy crab filled vermicelli spring rolls.

I should mention a great smoothie I had at the juice place next to the bao which had avocado making it quite creamy without the need for cream, me being somewhat lactose intolerant.

But before I get into too many more Lonely Planet type details on food and places to visit, I first I wanted to say why we visited Vietnam and what our general impressions of the place were. 

Well firstly – maybe that’s the second or third time I’ve said (or written) ‘first’ – I was mostly responsible for the itinerary for this round the world backpacker trip, and I was the one who added Vietnam. I did, of course send the Google sheets itinerary to my wife before we set off, but she was mostly just interested in seeing some elephants and the Cambodian temples around Siem Reap.

In the end the Vietnamese leg of our trip consisted of a few nights in Hanoi, then down to Hoi An and then down to Ho Chi Minh (the city not the person). On Ho Chi Minh (the person not the city), or more precisely, Ho’s preserved body which lays in state in a specially built mausoleum, our hotel receptionist, who was a real cack (funny if you don’t know what ‘cack’ is), said he, well his preserved body, wasn’t really worth visiting.

“You go there, spend like 30 minutes or one hour in line, and there is Ho there preserved, and that is it! There are more interesting places to visit. Go to the prison museum. Hoa Lo Prison. Much more fascinating than seeing Ho there.”

The receptionist also said she would call the police if we returned to Hanoi and didn’t stay at her hotel, which was a real cack indeed. But we do plan to go back to the hotel if we ever visit Hanoi again. Just in case.

I better get to that ‘first’ thing I was going to write about before I got distracted by bahn mi, bánh bao and bún chả . I added Vietnam because I was really interested in their history. The American War, their struggle with French colonialists, mostly that stuff. Their modern history. And Ho Chi Minh – whose body is preserved there in Hanoi, and according to the hotel receptionist, not worth the visit – was a huge part of that. 

After visiting Vietnam I ordered a big thick Ho Chi Minh biography by William J. Duiker and read all about him. I view him as a nationalist leader, more than a revolutionary, someone who was out there fighting the French and the USA imperialists. Prior to reading the big thick book I thought Ho was out there fighting with the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese nationalist army that Ho helped form. He did do a bit of that, hiding out in mountains and helping direct some military operations, but throughout his career he mostly went along to boring political meetings and organised all that sort of really boring political and administrative stuff which is necessary to win over the hearts and minds of people to fight for an independent Vietnam.

Mostly what he did was help organise the practical administrative, political and general organisational base for which to achieve Vietnam’s independence. He certainly did end up becoming a national symbol to inspire Vietnamese soldiers and the general population to endure many decades of armed struggle firstly against the French and then by the South Vietnamese government with considerable US support – around 2.7 million US personnel served during the American (AKA Vietnam) War.

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll see I tried to take that knowledge onto the Australian ABC TV show Hard Quiz hosted by Tom Gleeson, but they turned out to be imperialist so and so’s who weren’t interested in hearing how influential a guy Ho was. Well, their loss.

With the desire to learn more about Vietnam’s modern history in mind, beyond the classically one-side pop culture exposure I had growing up which included Good Morning Vietnam, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket, and the TV series Tour of Duty – the last one I had the soundtrack for on an LP record which I used to play on my record player as I went to sleep. The LP had the only Rolling Stones song I really like on it, Paint it Black (Beatles – much better).  With all that in mind, Hanoi, and Vietnam,certainly did deliver on educating us on the Vietnamese struggle for independence. 

The independence movement really took off, in earnest, during the French occupation which began in the mid 1800s and progressed somewhat when the Vietnamese drove the French out in the 1950s, creating North and South Vietnam. The French government, being the imperialist so and so’s they were, could only bring themselves to ‘allow’ half an independent Vietnam, with the more economically prosperous South still being in their sphere of influence, though not under their direct administration.  

This was meant to be a temporary solution which was to be followed by a national vote to determine if all of Vietnam was to be fully independent. When the French, and the USA, realised the vote might lead to the Ho-led – well there were many other leaders, he was just one of the most well known and influential – they decided democracy was about keeping capitalists happy and communists out.

Look, makes some sense, and as I said I would generally not be interested in saying kind words about communism as it’s a pretty shitty system, however, in Vietnam’s case I’m ok with it as I don’t see the extremely ideological and illogical harmful policies of Vietnam’s northern neighbours, China and the the USSR. Plus the South Vietnamese government were not there to support the interests of the people. So, not the type of ‘democracy’ –  if you could even call it that, which I’ve already insinuated by using the quotation marks – that anyone should be supporting. Added onto that there is the total hypocrisy of the land of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, using Vietnam for so many years as their personal fiefdom and then the land of the “free and the home of the brave” ignoring the will of the Vietnamese, and killing many millions of them, in the name of ‘democracy’. Not a good look.

While we’re on about communism, my wife and I found our visit to one of the most communist countries in the world, Cuba, very disappointing, with their shops depressingly empty except for a couple of bottles of shampoo and some cigars and rum here and there. Vietnam, and the previous country we visited on that 50 Year Backpacker trip, Laos, are both technically communist, but it appears more politically communist than economically, and you have nice stores and the like, and great street food, particularly in Vietnam, whereas Cuba struggles to even feed their population due to the incompetence of the government with a ‘vegetarian’ pizza just having tomato paste and onions on it, and lasagna being tins of tomatoes with some minute pieces of meet, and cheese toasties being some of the only things you can buy outside of fancy resorts (my Juanito’s Travel post about Cuba is a bit of a parody presented by the rather under appreciated character of Hammerhead from the original Star Wars movie). 

Back to Vietnam. Vietnam’s struggle for independence only ended when the North Vietnamese finally took control of the south in 1975, after the American forces left the country in 1973 – though not before they dropped over 20,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi around Christmas 1972, starting when I was just one day old, as a parting gift. I daresay the Vietnamese would have preferred frankincense or myrrh. We bought some fridge magnets that commemorated the bombing, including one celebrating how the US war planes were shot down during the period.

We were actually there in Hanoi for Vietnam’s Unification Day on April 30, so there were perhaps more flags and celbratory displays on show that usual.

I see today (which is certainly not today for you reading this as I’m unlikely to press ‘publish’ on this post for a bit because I have to a.) finish writing a draft, and b.) go find all my Bánh mì, bao and bun cha photos – I should add and then c.) spell check and proofread this post, which you may have noticed from previous posts, and likely this one as well, can be a bit hit and miss – by the way, if you are looking for an unpaid internship to proofread all my posts you’re welcome to apply using the email address I have somewhere on my Juanito’s Travels website.

Where was I? Yes, ‘today’ President Trump imposed tariffs on Vietnamese goods entering the USA of 46%. All I can say is ‘sore losers’. As our visit to Vietnam showed, Vietnam was really poorly treated by Western nations – particularly France and the USA – for over a century. First the French came in and then just took over the place, just parce que (French for ‘because’ according to Google), although perhaps pourquoi pas (why not) is a better description. 

The French practically, and often very literally, enslaved local people, treated them terribly, imprisoned ‘trouble makes’ like Ho Chi Minh and many colleagues in places like Hoa Lo Prison  – though in Ho’s case they only managed to get the British to put him in jail in Hong Kong rather than Vietnam as Ho was a slippery character who used to sneak out of back doors of places to avoid the French secret police.

Ho escaped from Hong Kong to Russia (well the USSR), where, as a communist, he was quite warmly welcomed. I think he even met Stalin at some point. Anyone with even a passing interest in history will know that one of the worst communists ever to exist was Stalin. 

So, the communism of Vietnam, and particularly Ho Chi Minh, wasn’t, in my opinion, as dogmatic and destructive as Russia – particularly under Stalin where many millions died from his megalomaniac persecution of his own people, including causing a devastating famine in Ukraine which left millions dead.

The communism of Vietnam, in those many years during their struggle for independence, had a strong nationalist focus. Ho and others were fighting for Vietnamese independence more than they were fighting for communism. This was not the case in USSR, China or Cuba where they fought for an ideology. 

The French were arrogant imperialist, colonialist bastards. The communists were simply the main opposition force who managed to get rid of them. 

The French even had the gall – the Charles de ‘Gaulle’ (the French leader after World War Two for those with no history background) – to come and reclaim ‘their’ French indochina, just a short time after – no wait for it – just a short after their own country was occupied by Nazi Germany. Now that, for me, is kind of like the ultimate irony right? Not kinda, is-a!

The British did the same thing with ‘their’ colonial ‘possession’ of India. Lucky India had a ‘Ho’ named Gandhi. Except Gandhi didn’t get into all the guns and armed struggle type things that Ho resorted to!  

So, the Americans help liberate France from the German occupiers, in the name of freedom and all that hoo-ha, what with the Nazis taking innocent people from their homes and killing them in concentration camps, underpinned by a radically racist bigotry, and the like, and Nazis being genuine A-grade evil, evil, unspeakably evil people. And then, literally straight after that, they go and re-occupy, and reinforce their own, racially based, claim to the territory they took from the Vietnamese, and Laotians and Cambodians. Racially based in the sense that, like many European nations, despite the horror of the holocaust, they still held views that Asians, Africans and pretty much anyone with darker skin than the snow white European snowflakes, were inferior, culturally, intellectually, the whole kit and kaboodle.

Ho, in the brief period after world war, rightfully declared Vietnam an independent state that should not have any colonial masters. He also tried to convince the Americans that, being the home of liberty and all that hoo-ha, they should be supporting the Vietnamese over the French colonialists. However, the Americans were too caught up now in the start of the Cold War, so couldn’t bring themselves to condemn the French presence in ‘French Indochina’ because, despite the French being bastards, they were, at least, not communist bastards and they were on the right side of what Winston Churchill dubbed the ‘Iron Curtain’. The other side of that curtain being where the communists did all those evil things like the type of political repression, and suppressing opposition movements, the French, British, and other European powers, were doing in their colonies.

History is never cut and dry. The baddies can sometimes be less bad than you think, and the goodies, only kinda good, and only when it suits them. The Vietnamese communist also did plenty of bad things, mind you. 

Once the Ho-led commies kicked out the French, or at least got them to cede control of Northern Vietnam, the Americans then stepped in to prop up a terribly despotic regime in the South which never had much popular support and which used its military and secret police to do things like political repression, suppressing opposition movements, and persecuting Buddhists. One of the most famous symbols of opposition to that persecution was when a Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức self-immolated on a busy intersection in the city that was then known as Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh (the city not the person). We later visited the site in Ho Chi Minh (city).

See Tom Gleeson of Hard Quiz ‘fame’. I know quite a bit about Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam and stuff which would have been quite interesting to have on your show, but your producers didn’t think so!

See previous blog post for more complaints about Hard Quiz.    

Ok, now that I’ve got that increasingly inaccurately named ‘first’ bit of the post I can go back to the bits about what my wife and I did in Hanoi on the 50 Year Backpacker trip.

Part Two – the bits about what my wife and I did in Hanoi on the 50 Year Backpacker trip 

 Our first night in Hanoi was terrible.

We arrived in the evening after our flight from Vientiane (Laos).

We got through immigration easily. The officer just asked why we had two visas (well four in total for my wife and I).

‘Well, we’d originally thought we were going to arrive in a few days time, but then we changed our plans to today, but as you can’t change your visa date we had to get new visas and keep our old ones’.

The officer just shrugged, stamped our passports and let us through. Pretty easy with the correct visas.

We have talked to other friends though who had troubles getting into Vietnam when they got duped into getting visas through third parties after being told, by those third parties, there was no direct way to get visas for vietnam. This is, of course, total BS. You can DEFINITELY apply directly to get a Vietnamese-visa, don’t let anyone tell you any different. Just go here: https://evisa.gov.vn/ 

It’s very confusing when you google e-visas for Vietnam as there’s millions of kinda legit looking sites out there that are mostly not legit but which Google seems to do nothing to monitor. I suspect they even have a few ‘sponsored’ posts that lead to non legit websites that may or may not allow you to get a proper visa.

If you get your ‘visas’ anywhere other than the official Vietnam e-visa site, you may or may not get an actual Vietnamese e-visa and you may or may not have to pay an extra fee of a few hundred US dollars at the airport on top of being scammed. Rather than the 25 USD single entry e-visa (in March 2025). That is if they let you in, as technically I don’t believe there is an official visa on arrival system for Vietnam. Don’t quote me on that though.

It’s a really Laissez-Faire buyer beware world when you rely on Google. I know, it’s hard, it is in no way readily apparent which site you should go to to get a legit e-visa.

But since you’re a ‘fans only’ Juanito Traveller supporter, and I don’t accept money from anyone, you came to the right place for real information! 

Just go here: https://evisa.gov.vn/!!!!!

Just don’t expect any other ‘fans only’ privileges, as my wife would NOT like me posting pictures of my pompis on the internet. Look I don’t mind, I think my pompis are worth a look, but they are just reserved for my wife and masseur now! Plus doctors I suppose.

After crossing immigration successfully with our 4 e-visas (2 each do the math), we headed straight to the SIM card people. Some of them seemed a bit dodgy but we got a SIM that worked.

Another tip – check the SIM works before you leave the airport!!

We then headed out to the car parking area and booked a Grab rideshare. The Grab app. was such a godsend in places where taxi drivers can be dodgy as hell – especially in Bangkok! 

Hanoi airport carpark is the most chaotic I have ever encountered anywhere in the world. At Reykjavik airport – sorry again with the jumping countries randomly, you can read about my trip to Iceland here if you like – you have one little place to wait for taxis. In Vienna it’s really quite easy (Vienna is further along in our 50 Year Backpacker Trip, I’ll get to that) you walk out the door and then, low and behold you have taxis there. Even when I travelled to New Delhi in 1995 I found the taxi area fairly easy to navigate, despite the millions of people, camels and elephants vying for your attention. 

But Hanoi, boy Hanoi is on another whole level. There are lanes and lanes of cars just trying to squeeze into this tiny area. When you book your Grab they say you have to meet them at some post in the car parking area, and you have to go through 20-30 lanes of traffic that is almost at a standstill until you find your post and then squeeze yourself and your luggage by the side of the road so you don’t slowly get runover. My mind gave up and I just put all my faith in the very capable hands of my wife who managed to navigate this sea of cars and mopeds and people and noise. We managed to find our Grab and we grabbed it and soon we were heading out of the airport and towards the centre of Hanoi along a pretty nice freeway and past 5-6 story buildings lining the sides of the road until we reached our hotel.

Someone should write a song about getting taxis and rideshares from airports around the world. Maybe something like Peter Allen’s I go to Rio.

I’d booked the hotel – we’re back in Hanoi by the way if you’re lost – on Booking.com. It had lots of stars and good reviews. Seemed like a real steal for the low price – just $33 AUD a night or something like that.

The pictures looked nice, it didn’t seem to be in a bad location. All was good.

Until we got there.

It was terrible. Really, really shitty, terrible.

The rather small room they had us in – you would literally not be able to swing a cat in the space – had been very roughly divided in half and a flimsy semi-transparent plastic wall had been installed to turn half the bedroom into a bathroom area, with shower and toilet.

From the photos both the ‘bedroom’ and the bathroom looked nice and totally in order and ‘separate’ from each other like rooms normally are. 

The room was so small I’m not even sure how they fitted in the camera to get the creative angles that made the ‘bedroom’ and ‘bathroom’ look like actual separate rooms. The description certainly didn’t mention how creative they’d been in dividing up the space.

That, in itself, wouldn’t have been too bad. I can handle small rooms on occasion. We had a tiny one on the island of Koh Chang when we were in Thailand.  

But, the room walls were also paper thin, you could hear every bump and car horn, and truck and conversation on the street down below. I could also hear the guy next door coming back at sometime between 2.30 and 3.30 am and then vomiting loudly in his bathroom. I imagine his room was probably originally our room’s bathroom that had been converted into a bedroom/ bathroom. He sounded like he was dying, but I didn’t see any bodies being dragged out the next day so I assume he made it through. As with my previous warning with alcohol in Laos – don’t think you are going to get quality alcohol from places that give you bucket cocktails for 80,000 dong! It is going to be bad/ potentially fatal.

Of course, having a bucket cocktail of even the finest alcohol will probably leave you feeling crook the next day anyway.

For now I don’t have to worry about those things as I’m trying to be a Buddhist and I’m not drinking alcohol or taking drugs. I can’t quite bring myself to committing to that for the rest of my life, but I will certainly keep it up the next few months as I’ve put my name down for another Vipassana meditation course. I think after that I may just allow myself a day a year where I have a drink and a joint. I think that day may be in March next year when my wife and I are planning another trip to Thailand for our 7th wedding anniversary. That is, if weed is still legal in Thailand by then.

I could not sleep at all – back at that Hanoi hotel again. Luckily my wife, tired from our flight from Laos, went out like a log.

As she slumbered away, I embarked on an epic search for a more suitable abode.

I realised I’d been very lucky so far with the accommodation we’d had in Thailand and Laos, it was all pretty decent and mostly lived up to the descriptions on the booking website (still through Booking.com – they aren’t paying me, I just found it convenient to do most of my bookings through them for that trip).

Perhaps it was more a Vietnam thing, but I found hundreds of really highly rated places – with 5 stars and all – which when you delved into them turned out to be either average or, like our current hotel, completely shit. I resorted to only looking at the WORST ratings/ review for each hotel as a way of narrowing down potential options. Often the 5-star places had pages and pages of 1-star reviews which expressed shock at how such a shonky/ crappy hotel could possibly have gotten 5-stars. 

I eventually came across a few places in the central zone, where I wanted to be in, where the worst review/ rating was something like ‘the place was good but the staff didn’t smile’ or ‘the place was good, but they didn’t have any croissants for breakfast’, I’d shortlist them for later review. Eventually , around 4 am, post-vomiting neighbour, I found what I prayed was a nice, big, clean room, in a decent area, where it seemed quiet and there were no horrible reviews – the only negative one being, “hey this place is down a narrow alley so if you don’t like going down narrow alleys don’t stay here”. It cost something like $125 AUD a night.

Then, still unable to sleep, I went and had a shower, conveniently located just 5 cms from the bed, then got back into bed and, for the rest of the night, watched some shows on Netflix.

At around 7.00 am as my wife’s eyes were just opening I said, ‘good morning, I found another hotel’.

‘Ok’ she said, and she rolled over and went back to sleep for a while longer.

When she did get up a short time after we went down to reception, I said to them we’d found another hotel and, no offence, but that this place was really terrible. The woman there was absolutely sweet and she said ‘no problem, we can give you a full refund’ for the remaining days we had booked which came to around 2,436,111 Vietnamese Dong. 

And then we asked where we could get breakfast and she recommended a nice little coffee shop that was around the corner and up some stairs. So we packed our things up and then went off and had breakfast at the coffee shop which was so cute, with these tiny little chairs and very, very nice coffee, plus I’m sure some nice Vietnamese breakfast sweet pastries or something that I can’t recall and then we walked around a bit and had a look at the neighbourhood, which was noisy, but really cute and interesting. 

Then we walked around some more and had some more food, and enjoyed some more sites and walked down to some little lake as we waited for the afternoon to arrive so we could move our stuff over to the new, hopefully much more awesome, hotel. 

And my sleepless night was mostly forgotten as we took in all the wonderful sites and sounds of Hanoi! Let’s admit, hardly the struggle for Vietnamese independence that I spent half this blog post focussed on.

We went back to the hotel, having been blown away by Hanoi, and the lovely receptionist expressed her regret that the room hadn’t been up to standard and handed over a big wad of Dong amounting to around 2,436,111 (it was the first time in our lives that my wife and I were millionaires) and we went on our way with the yellow backpack and suitcase in tow as we didn’t think it’d be worth taking a taxi there as the new hotel was only on the other side of some lake, sort of, down a lane near St. Joseph Cathedral – the one that looks like Notre-Dame Cathedral.

Maybe we did take a Grab, I can’t remember. I could probably check on my past trips, but nah. It was a really short trip anyway.

We met our new receptionist at our new hotel, the one I mentioned was a real cack, and then checked in and went up to our room which felt like a penthouse suite after the night before. 

It even had a balcony overlooking St. Joseph Cathedral.

We went to bed for a while before heading back out into Hanoi and exploring more.

And that was our first morning in Hanoi. 

Apart from the first hotel, really cool and interesting.

Part Three – other stuff that happened in Hanoi

What else did we do in Hanoi?

We saw a pagoda thing down by another big lake not far from the mausoleum where Ho lay in state.

We went to the water puppet theatre, where some obnoxious fellow tourist immediately got out her phone and start filming, blocking our view until I leant over and said, ‘hey can you put your phone down we’re actually trying to watch the show’ to which they said nothing.

I didn’t ake any pictures during the performance as I was considerate enough to let other people see the bloody thing! People, with their phones, they can be so oblivious to the rest of the world.

We lined up for some great bánh mì near St. Joseph Cathedral. I’m always a bit dubious of lines, thinking perhaps some influencer had said this street stall had the best bánh mì in all of Vietnam or something and it turns out it was just ok. But it was much, much better than ok, and for only 25,000 Dong, amaaaaazing value.

We also had that Bun Cha, that I mentioned earlier and actually looked around the cathedral. We also walked down pub street, tried to find boutique beer breweries which I just could not find, everyone just serving bucket cocktails and the standard Hanoi Beer, which is not that bad, but not as good as Beerlao.

And we went to the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ and French colonial prison where many of Ho’s comrades were interned and tortured, including using the infamous ‘tiger cage’ a low cage made from barbed wire which was out in the full where the prison guards would put mostly naked prisoners to suffer. Plus a whole bunch of other tortures. Well worth a visit for those interested in the modern history of Vietnam.

We had egg coffee at another cute little cafe just across the little lane from our hotel. The coffee was for me an acquired taste, but my wife really enjoyed it. I preferred the coconut coffee.

We also went to the famous railway bar/ cafe area where bars and cafes line the railway track and, if you are there at the right times – tip, check the times of the trains as the bar/ cafe owners won’t tell you and you may have to sit there for ages before the next one arrives. That’s a fun/ scary experience and I’m sure some tourist is going to die sooner or later as they wander all over the tracks taking selfies. They used to put tables on the actual tracks but I think the authorities put an end to that a while ago.

So, Hanoi was very fun! Very fun indeed. Go there, you’ll probably love it!

But I don’t really know you and not sure what you’re into, so maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

We did do one other thing while in Hanoi. That is, try and collect the knife I’d bought in Laos which our hotel guy in Luang Prabang had arranged to have delivered by a bus driver because you aren’t allowed to take knives on the fast train from Luang Prabang to Vientiane (see previous posts for that).

But, I want to spend a little more time on that story so I might call today’s post mostly done and start the next post with that story before moving on to Hoi An.

Hasta entonces – until then!

 

It’s been a while since my last post.

It feels a bit like a Catholic confession writing that. Like when I was back in year 8 at Marymount and I had to tell some priest that I stole a pen from Kyle Lawson even though he had plenty of extra pens. 

He shouldn’t be so attached to physical things anyway. 

The Buddha said such attachments are the cause of our human suffering.

The Buddha also outlined 5 precepts to help you on the path towards enlightenment, or at least to being a better person.

I know the Buddha wasn’t Catholic.

I’m not knocking the Catholics. Confession can be somewhat liberating, but I gave up going to confession because I would repent with a few Hail Marys and then just go back to stealing pens.

I’m now much more of a Buddhist.

One of those Buddhist precepts is to: Abstain from stealing: Not to take what is not given.

By the way Kyle Lawson is not meant to represent an actual person whose dad used to go to Alcoholics Anonymous with my dad Roy, and who had a Filipino step-mum, and a little tinnie we used to take out on the Tweed river fishing. A tinnie we took out one night at the back of his dad and step-mum’s house, which was then attacked by a shark! Well the shark just brushed up against the side of the boat and made it lurch to one side, even though his dad, who was an ex-cop with a bad back, didn’t believe us.

His dad reckoned it was a turtle.

No way a turtle would have made a tinnie lurch that far.

I am afraid of turtles though, they kind of sneak up on you when you’re snorkeling and they are just there floating in the water munching on seagrass, like some evangelical angel floating in space.

I’m slightly more perturbed by sharks.

Another of the Buddha’s precepts is to Abstain from wrong speech: Not to lie or gossip.

With that in mind I’d have to say while ‘Kyle’ is a real person, just with a different name (Craig ‘Herbie’ Erbet), there was a girl at school called Kylie Lawson who I had a mad crush on who ended up moving schools in year 9 or something. Those catholic school uniforms were meant to be unflattering but it wasn’t much to deter my budding libido.

Moving onto another of the Buddha’s precepts: Abstain from sexual misconduct: Not to overindulge in sex or commit sexual offenses. 

Now that I’m married, for the second time, that Catholic school day crush is well and truly over, and I really should move on. Having written that, I wonder when I’m old and wrinkly and heading towards death whether the crushes I had when I was at school will still be a memory?

While in Mexico, on our last trip, my wife, son and I got tattoos. My son got a sword with some scales on it. My wife got a libélula (dragonfly). I got a large Buddha on my right shoulder blade, which is a little hard to see because it is on my back. But if I get the right angle in the bathroom mirror I get a glimpse of it.

Since getting that Buddha tattoo, I have been abiding by another of the Buddha’s precepts: Abstain from intoxication: Not to use intoxicating substances that cause inattention. 

This is something I only did on the odd day or two on my Mexico trip. I am in no way inferring that Mexico is a party place, but I do like their beer and tequila, and margaritas, and micheladas, and palomas, and jamaica, mezcal/ tequila cocktails.

There’s one more precept I haven’t mentioned yet, and that is Abstain from killing: Not to kill any living being, including animals. I’ve not been doing too badly adhering to that one either. At least directly. 

I’ve been indirectly responsible for a lot of dead animals, because I like to eat them. Cows, lambs, chickens, fish, pigs and whatever animal sausages are made from. 

I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon if I’m to be honest, which, if I want to follow Buddhist principles, I need to be.

Oh, and we did kill hundreds of ants recently as they had moved into the cupboard when a cyclone visited the Gold Coast and they looked like they were going to stay.

Sorry, but not sorry, ants.

So I have a Buddha tattoo. I gave the basic design to the tattoo artist which I sketched on the back of a receipt. I also sent the tattoo artist several photos of Buddha statues from my wife and my trip around South-East Asia – focusing more on the Laotian and Cambodian style Buddha statues we had photos of.

So I now have a Buddha tattoo on my back around my right shoulder blade which is a bit inconvenient that I can only see when I really twist my head and look into my bathroom mirror. I feel that might symbolise something like it requires effort to follow the path of the Buddha.

But it doesn’t really have to be hard following the path of the Buddha.

I’ve been reading Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Buddha’s Teaching and he writes that following the Buddha’s path should be easy or enjoyable, or both. It should bring you happiness. 

I can tell you, even though I sometimes crave one of the wonderful red wines we had in Italy when my wife and I were travelling, plus all those delicious Mexican drinks, I haven’t been drinking alcohol since I got that Buddha tattoo just before we left Guadalajara. 

It was easy, and I’ve been feeling fine. 

I think I only drank alcohol out of boredom and to ‘relax’ (literally in quotation marks to mark that I don’t think it really relaxed me that much). I’ve found drinking unnecessary. 

Instead, I go for walks along the beach – apart from a few days last week when that cyclone I mentioned earlier hit the Gold Coast and it was too windy and wet and dangerous to go outside. 

I sometimes play computer games – I’m trying out the latest installment in the Civilization franchise at the moment, Civilization VII, which I don’t understand much and which is heaps more complicated than Civilization VI, and often I think it a waste of my time, but not quite as detrimental as drinking alcohol. It also doesn’t really ‘relax’ me, so I might give that up to.

I brought an expensive bottle of tequila back to Australia that I bought in the actual town of Tequila in Jalisco Mexico. It’s a Cascahuin reposado. It’s been sitting on the shelf since we got back, unopened. I’ve hardly had any desire whatsoever to open it, though I may have a sip one day, who knows.

 

I really did enjoy the wine in Italy by the way. When my wife and I were in Salerno we went to a little restaurant that had a wine from a grape variety I’d never heard of in Australia and it was absolutely divine. The grape started with V or Z or something, definitely not a Cab Sav, Merlot or Shiraz.

 So perhaps, when we return to Italy one day the country will persuade me to have a cup again. 

Who knows.

Over my life I’ve tended to fluctuate from year to year from drinking, smoking weed – though the later much more in my early twenties. More recently I’ve just had the occasional joint in places where it’s legal, like in LA and Bangkok (see some previous posts on that).

Post COVID I started having at least one drink a day, just a beer or a glass of wine. It just became habitual, not overly damaging or anything and I’m certainly no alcoholic, though I am the son of one, as was Craig ‘Herbie’ Erbert. But, as much as I didn’t have a ‘problem’ with alcohol, or weed, I’m happy to not have any for the time being.

Since this is a travel blog I should maybe get back to travel stories. I promise you I’m not trying to groom you to become a Buddhist by first getting friendly with you through travel stories.

Spiritual journeys also involve travel though. And my recent return to Buddhism, strengthened by the Buddha tattoo on my shoulder blade I got in Guadalajara, has felt good. The actual tattooing was mildly uncomfortable at times, but my tattooist has a super magic touch!

My rekindled interest in Buddhism also relates to my travels. In the 50 year backpacker chronology my wife and I are now in Vietnam (which I may continue on with in my next post). It was in Vietnam where I saw a guy reading one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books at a little cafe with little chairs down a little lane by our hotel in Ho Chi Minh – the city not the person. 

I used a version of that joke when auditioning for the ABC TV’s Hard Quiz hosted by Tom Gleeson. You have to pick a specialist topic and mine was Ho Chi Minh, the person NOT the city.

I got through the first stages of my Hard Quiz application but I wasn’t successful with the audition and I’ve vowed to never watch Tom’s stupid quiz ever again.

But my mum, whom my wife and I live with at the moment as she has a big house and there is some sort of ‘housing crisis’ going on which means buying our own house is really expensive and renting on the private market is a really shitty and expensive prospect. Hopefully you are reading this is some future time when our AI overlords, or the electric car business oligarchs, have worked out how to house us all really economically, and you’re like ‘what housing crisis?’.

Back to Buddhism, one central focus of the Buddha’s teachings is that things are always changing. 

You notice change everyday when you’re travelling, changing places, changing smells, changing beds, and changing cuisine, but even without travelling things are changing all the time. Every moment. Nothing – literally nothing – remains the same forever. It is always changing!

Our entire universe will at some point not exist, or probably more correctly exist in a completely different form to what we see today. We can see that now. We can look back to moments before the universe was created in the big bang to see what we have now is different to what we had 13.8 billion Earth years ago.

You, I, my mother, my wife, Tom Gleeson, and that leftover doner kebab in the fridge, will all be gone one day, or, more correctly, all the bits of all of those things will be changed and become part of something else in the universe.

Put something about that in your f*cking stupid “Hard” quiz ‘Tom’. One day bits of you will end up with bits of soggy, garlic sauce soaked kebab from the fridge. There’s not even any prize money on the stupid quiz so I’m not sure why I’m getting all stirred up about it. I just wanted to be on the show! Is that too much to ask? I mean my taxes pay for the bloody ABC TV, and supposedly nobody watches regular TV anymore, so why can’t you just put me on! I mean I’m a middle-aged man who lives with his mum, so give me a break!

Returning to the Buddha. He would say I should forget about my attachments to Hard Quiz, and everything else, as attachment will make me unhappy and unattachment (even though spellchecker says that’s not a word, it IS a word and I’m going to use it) will make me the opposite of unhappy, which is un-unhappy – hey we live in a world where Presidents of the USA make things up all the time, so I think we can be un-unhappy at times, or even happy. 

Speaking of the USA, my wife and I went to Universal Studios in LA on the way back from Mexico to Australia. We were there on the day Trump was inaugurated, or close to it. I messaged my friend Kurt – who I’ve known since the early 1990s – in Australia and told him we were having a ball at Universal Studios in LA, and boy he started going on about ‘how can you be happy when Trump is in office?’ and ‘I’m never going to visit the USA again’ and his Yank friends are all going to move to Mexico – which is kind of ironic if you ask me as the Gringos seem to be able to freely pass the border going south.

My wife and I found that out in the town of Sayulita, Nayarit, Mexico, which is completely overrun by Gringos in golf carts paying too much for everything (a guy tried to sell me a single joint for 500 pesos – unbelievable! I used to get a whole bag for 200 pesos) and making loud observations about the most inane of things about coffee machines, and investments, and Karen and Kevin type things – but when my Mexican compadres, who I’ve adopted since marrying a Mexican (so technically on a kind of ‘white-ican’), come the other way they want to build a big wall and get all stressed even though half the USA used to be part of Mexico – Including Los Angeles where Universal Studios is.

So Kurt, who has also been somewhat of an anarchist back in the day in Berlin in the 1980s, was really stirred up about Trump and I was like, ‘that is ridiculous, I’m not going to stop being happy for the next four years  just because Trump is in power’. 

In fact, my wife and I found LA to be pretty cool this time around, and quite enjoyed it. We went to Maccas for breaky one day and had egg and bacon McMuffins with heaps of Latin Americans. It was awesome. We also had waffles at I Met Her at a Bar, this time I was not stoned (see earlier blog post for stoned version) which is legal there, both being stoned and having waffles. I had vegan waffles. They were delicious. 

They do have a huge homeless issue in the USA – something President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to point out to President Donald Trump, which the latter didn’t want to have a bar of, saying we don’t need you to tell us our problems, and so forth and so on. I imagine that homelessness will just get worse with the oligarchy of tech billionaires and orange coloured elderly men running the show.

So the USA is A-OK. We met Optimus Prime at Universal Studios, and he said, With your help the universe will be fine!

So, I’ve given up alcohol for the last few months. I’m also trying to keep the other Buddhist precepts – though I really must say I do like on the Gold Coast, seeing women’s bums in those tight exercise pants. And anytime cleavage is waved in front of me I can’t help but peak. But it’s not my fault I have eyes! My wife’s bum and cleavage is highest on that list though (insert that cheeky face + the nervous emojis here).

Being happy is about being happy, not about certain circumstances that make you happy. I mean there’s some seriously crappy stuff happening in the world at the moment, thousands of Palestinians getting killed, Russia intimidating Ukraine, the producers of Hard Quiz inexplicably excluding contestants from their show because of some woke agenda (which is fair enough actually after years of colonialism etc, though Tom is the epitome of all things white and colonial – just saying). 

All of these things will make us unhappy. Some with very good reason. But even the crappiest situation will change one day. World War Two is becoming a distant memory. The Jewish holocaust of World War Two is over, Stalin is dead, Pol Pot and the murderous Khmer Rouge were run out of power by the Vietnamese army in 1979. 

With all the terrible things that have happened, and are still happening, in the world, it can be easy to lose hope. But, as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: the ocean of tears cannot drown us if karuna (compassion) is there. That is why the Buddha’s smile is possible.

US politics will change one day, and anyway, ultimately we’re all going to kind of disintegrate and become part of the universe anyway and all of us will be mixed back into the giant cosmic cake mix, green, orange, white, black, Gold Coast exercise pant pink, and banana colour, will all just change into something else.

So that chance encounter with that guy reading the Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam has really changed my perspective on life. I was into Buddhism and meditation anyway and did like 8 or 9 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats, in the tradition of Goenka, in the 1990s in Australia, Britain and France.

But now that dude at the cafe in Ho Chi Minh – he was actually the cafe owner I think – has rekindled my passion for Buddhism. And after a few decades break, I want to go back and do another 10-day Vipassana retreat (Buddhist insight meditation for those who haven’t read my previous posts or my e-book – The Adventures of Kosio and Juanito). 

I want to do something positive with my life besides building some civilisation (we spell it with an ‘s’ in Australia) in Civilization VII, which I seriously don’t even know how to play as it’s super, super complicated and seems to lack any coherent narrative. 

That’s where I will find happiness. 

There and at Harry Potter World at Universal Studios!

Of course I love travel – I am labouring my way through a travel blog as you may have noticed – so even though there’s plenty of places to do Vipassana meditation retreats in Australia, I’m hoping to convince my wife to go to Thailand sometime next year to do a course there with me. 

My wife said I could go by myself but I would have to just go to the course and then return without further travel as she doesn’t want me marrying a Thai woman (or any other nationality woman for that matter) after she dies.

As much as I love Thailand and Thais – and my wife does as well just to be clear – I will have to respect my one day deceased wife’s wishes and not marry a Thai (or any other nationality) woman.

Speaking of South-East Asia, maybe, just maybe, the next post will progress the 50 year backpacker story a little more and try to get us started on Vietnam at least.

I mean I’ve still got to write about Hanoi, Hoi Ann – where our friends Scottie and Howie we just visiting, and Ho Chi Minh (the city not the person – Tom for god’s sake just let another middle-aged white man onto your stupid quiz to answer questions about a Vietnamese national hero) where our friend Fyyaz from Canberra and Bangladesh invited himself on the 50 year backpacker trip and travelled with us for a few days.  

Then I still have to write about Phnom Penh, Siem Riep, Bangkok (again) for one night, before we head over to Vienna, where we stayed at a super awesome sustainable hotel and had a great hot dog under the bridge and some chicken paprikash. Then by train down to Venice, and the Tuscan cities of Florence, San Gimignano, and Sienna. Then off to Roma and the Vatican museum, Hadrian’s Villa and the last day of the Giro d’Italia bike race we saw outside the colosseum. Then onto the Island of Ischia off the coast of Naples, then Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Salerno.

Then down to Siciliy – Palermo and Catania, and across to Athens, the Greek islands of Ikaria and Samos, and then over to Türkiye (sorry for my ‘woke’ spelling that reflects how Turkish people actually refer to their own country) and Şirince, the ancient city of Efes (Ephesus), the actual Virgin Mary’s house near Selçuk, where she and my man John went into exile after Jesus was executed, and then off to Istanbul. 

Before heading back to Mexico City and Guadalajara yet again (on a different trip than the one where I got my Buddha tattoo – that time I got a Day of the Dead style skull tattoo on my left shoulder around about where my deltoid muscle is, a bit above my bicep muscle where I can see it easily in the mirror!).

Writing about all those places seems like an effort some days, so maybe I’ll just call it a day here and say the 50 year backpacker blog is over.

Just go watch one of those shows like Ancient Greece by Train with Professor Alice Roberts, or one of those Michael Portobello travel shows, which often involve trains as well. My wife and I loved travelling by train from Vienna all the way down to Palermo.

I mean who reads travel blogs?

Oh well, my psychologist, and also Thich Nhat Hanh, say writing is a good form of reflection. So whether this is read or not, I still find it therapeutic.

Seeya.

As the Buddha, and my now dead vipassana teacher Goenka during meditation retreats would say: May all beings be happy. 

J.R.A  

Valpolicella! That’s the wine I really loved. I think!

Guadalajara, Mexico

I just turned 52 a few hours ago. That is, when I first wrote that sentence which is/was around a month ago. A fellow student in my professional writing and editing course at RMIT university in Melbourne, reminded me that Woody Allen had said that writing is the process of writing and rewriting, so timeframes are always a bit mixed up. It’s a bit like house renovations. You start with the old house, then you add bits on, sometimes more seamlessly than other times. Like the last house we rented in Brunswick, Melbourne, which had a dodgy extension added on to the back of the house which was falling off the back of the original house to the extent that there was a big gap where the cold, and hot, air, could gush in. I filled the space in with some expanding builders foam from a can before my daughter was born, back in 2002.

This post, chronologically continues on from my around the world trip with my wife which was still last year – now the year before last since the new year started a few weeks ago at the time of writing. The time of writing is a jumbled up world. If I wrote things faster I could probably keep things more under control but I like to spend my time writing and rewriting a bit more now.

Tomorrow, my wife, son and I will do a Tequila tour together. That is a tour to the town of Tequila in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, which involves sampling tours at tequila distilleries. It’s my son’s first visit to Mexico, my 8th or 9th visit, my third time on a tequila tour and the second with my wife.

Numbers: 52, 50th, 1st, 8th or 9th. Tres Mujeres tequila distillery.

Today’s the 15th of December 2024, and we’re just back from Amiga mi Amor, rooftop bar in Guadalajara. One aperol spritz; an Amiga Date Quenta mezcal, tequila and Jamaica cocktail; and most of a mojito which I didn’t enjoy that much but which I got because they had a 2-1 happy hour deal from 5 to 6 and my son wanted one. I should have stuck to the Amiga Date Quentas and spritzes, which are my Christmas drink now. Plus the sprites were two for one. I might even give up grog altogether one day and today I’m getting a tattoo of the Buddha on my shoulder which will remind me that there’s only five precepts in Buddhism and one of them is to avoid intoxicating drinks and drugs – or something like that, I’m not sure what to original wording was, but that was the gist of it, don’t get drunk or stoned.

Before Amiga mi Amor, we had dogos (hot dogs) downstairs. Which I do now in Guadalajara. I like going back to some familiar sites around town, makes me feel more at home in Guadalajara. The places are different every time. Like the Hospicio Cabañas, with the José Clemente Orozco murals on the ceiling (see picture below of Orozco looking up at the ceiling), which I’ve visited every time I’ve come to Guadalajara since I first came in 2015 to experience Dia de Muertos.

That was the year I met my then wife-to-be on a dating app and then at a bar. I didn’t end up staying for the actual Dia de Muertos as my ex-wife got a job at Ikea in Australia and needed to go to Sydney for training, so I had to get back to Australia to look after the kids. I married my wife on my 4th visit to Guadalajara, after getting divorced, selling our house, finding a new rental in Canberra and all those things. I didn’t go back to Mexico until 2017, I wanted to visit the Mayan archaeological site of Calakmal which is in the Mexican state of Campeche. I contacted my wife-to-be and asked if she would like to catch up for a coffee. We started chatting again and we ended up organising a trip together to Guanajuato, Queretaro, Morelia and Mexico City.

My wife usually travels earlier, or stays later, when we come to Guadalajara. Last year on our round the world trip we arrived together and she left about a month after me back to Australia. This time she came about 6 weeks before me. 

My son and I travelled together and spent a night in Los Angeles on the way where I thought we may have time to visit the La Brea tar pit museum. Instead we got some birria tacos on our first night, then I bought some weed, legally from a fancy weed shop.

Just a ‘gelato’ joint.  My son is only 20 and not old enough to buy weed in California yet, so he had to stand outside while I went and got my single joint which I then later smoked while walking around the streets of West Hollywood, where we were staying.

We’d visited a little Mexican tiendita earlier and I luckily had lots of sweets to get through the munchies, including a blue lemonade; a small glass bottle of Mexican coke with a metal lid that I managed to get off with a pair of scissors (narrowly avoiding stabbing my hand on several occasions); a few packets of Biscoff bikkies (biscuits (or cookies) the ones with two wrapped in plastic); and some Sesame Snaps – the Polish sesame sweets. I’m not confident I’ve put those semi-colons in the right place in the last sentences but hopefully you get the point. I’m scared I’ll get diabetes from all the sweets I have when I’m stoned, luckily it’s not very often. I just get such bad munchies. 

I had a few more puffs of the joint the next day on the way to the I met Her at a Bar waffle place which was a 30 minute walk from our AirBnB. Perhaps due to the muncies, they were the best waffles I’ve ever had. They’d want to be for the $74.24 USD we paid (a LOT of Australian dollars for waffles), including coffees, a bowl of berries, and a few yellow marigolds.

As it’s now new year, I feel I should resolve something. The knife story from Luang Prabang, from my 50 year backpacker story. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Evidently I’m not the only one who thought of a round-the-world trip for my 50th. At the end of last year my wife, son and daughter went to Mérida, down in Yucatan, Mexico. I was chatting to the owner of the hotel while my son, daughter and I waited for a tour to Chichén Itzá, a cenote, and some town that’s mainly yellow. My wife stayed in Mérida as she’d been to Chichén a few times.

Compared to Uxmal, another Mayan archeological site we visited while in Mérida, Chichén Itzá was a bit disappointing. I knew it would be, that’s why I’d been avoiding going there for years. There’s too many people, it’s all a bit rushed and it just wasn’t as impressive as Uxmal.

The cenote on the Chichén tour was pretty amazing, but it was overrun by tourists. Like hungry zombies, or chapulines (grasshoppers that are often roasted with spices and sold on street corners throughout Mexico) tourists swarmed into the amazing cenote which had tree roots hanging down and beautiful dark and mysterious water, which was all very pretty. The swarms felt like they were engulfing  the environment, consuming it. The more I travel to these types of sites, the more I think us humans, and particularly tourists, just consume, suckign the life out of places. We jump out of buses and planes (the latter mostly once they’re parked), snap photos, buy some food and souvenirs (I got a kitschy yellow owl with Chichén Itzá written on it to hang on the wall back in Australia), then they/we  jump back on the bus or plane and we’re off home or to our next destination.

Maybe it’s time for us all to slow down, be more like Patrick Leigh Fermor when he walked across Europe in the 1930s.

Well, back to Mérida, waiting for the Chichén Itzá tour, the hotel owner Tom, who, like me, had married a Mexican, told me about his 50th birthday year world tour which he and his wife took a few years earlier which had ended with New Year celebrations in Sydney. I guess when we reach such milestones we like to try and mark them somehow before we die.

Back in Luang Prabang, the year before last now, and the knife story. 

We’d booked ourselves on the high speed train from Luang Prabang to the Laos capital, Vientiane. We were told though that we could not bring any knives or sharp objects with us on the train. There was no way to check-in luggage or anything either, so you just couldn’t bring these things on the train with you, at all. I had a hand crafted knife I’d bought in the forest at the Mekong elephant park in Pakbeng and a small Swiss army knife I’d be given by Corinne (with double ‘n’ rather than double ‘r’ from memory), a Swiss woman I’d met when I was living on a farm in Nutfield, Victoria, sort of close to the end of the Hurstbridge railway line, who I’d spent a few weeks travelling around the east coast of Australia with in 1994. There’s a semi-fictional version of that story here.

I mentioned the knife situation to the guy at reception and he suggested I try and mail the knives to myself in Australia. So I wrapped up the two knives and headed down to the post office, which was about 20 minutes walk away from the hotel,  in the slightly less extreme morning heat and humidity which still had my clothes drenched within a few blocks, and asked the posities how much it would be to send my parcel to Australia.

They asked what was in the parcel. I said knives. They said they couldn’t mail knives in the post. So, I head back to the hotel with the wrapped up knives. Then the hotel guy had another bright idea and suggested we try and find a private delivery service to send the knives to our hotel in Vietnam where we could collect them. It sounded like a reasonable prospect, so I jump on the back of his motorcycle and start weaving in and out of the Luang Prabang traffic till we get to a private mail/ delivery service. Again they ask what’s in the parcel. I again say knives. Again they say they can’t do it.

But the hotel guy has a Plan C. He knows a bus driver who drives from Luang Prabang to Hanoi, who will be leaving in the next day or so. We could give him the knives, and he could take them on the bus, then we could go to the bus station in Hanoi and pick them up. It all sounded too easy. So, I hand over the knives and my wife and I head to the train station for the train down to Vientiane where we were going to stay two nights before flying over to Hanoi, where we could just go out to the bus station and collect the knives.

Of course that wasn’t the end of the story with the knives, but I feel I should at least briefly mention our time in Vientiane before moving on to the next chapter of the knife story in Hanoi.

The train from Luang Prabang to Vientiane is amazing. It’s a super fancy train built by the Chinese, with money they loaned to the Laotian government, which goes something like 250 kilometers an hour plus, through some pretty lush valleys and past the type of mountain ranges you see in tourist brochures, and through tunnels and rural Lao villages. I can’t remember how many times it stops between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, but it’s not many. It at least stops once at the town of Vang Vieng, a picturesque little town known for its party scene, which includes floating down the river on inner tubes, drunk and or stoned, plus a bunch of nature stuff. Since my wife and I weren’t so much into the party scene we decided it would be too noisy and so decided to skip the place.

The whole journey from Luang Prabang to Vientiane took just a few hours. The station in Luang Prabang, however, is a long way from town, along some windy dirt roads with lots of pot-holes. I think it took at least 30 minutes to get there from the town of Luang Prabang, but perhaps more like an hour. I could go and check, but you can Google it.

On the train, we got chatting to a Buddhist monk. He was on his way to Vientiane to stay at a monastery there. Or perhaps he was on his way back to a monastery in Vientiane having been in Luang Prabang, which has as many temples as Mexico has Oxxos, for a bit. He was a pretty calm dude who wanted to practice his English. We followed protocol and only spoke to him once he’d first asked us a question. He didn’t make eye contact with my wife. Fair enough, one look into her eyes and it could easily have him discard his vows of celibacy. Though perhaps he was getting a bit old for that sort of thing. 

The Buddhism of Laos was something that really resonated with me. I could easily go back for a few weeks and just spend time at the temples there in Luang Prabang. Perhaps at a much cooler and less smokey time of year than what we’d experienced in April.

Vientiane, Laos (the subheading to help me continue with this story before I get too distracted with other things)

I haven’t got a lot to say about Vientiane. It was, and probably still is, a big city. Not at all like lovely little Luang Prabang. In reference to my earlier reference about tourists being zombie hordes and chapulines, I hope it’s not completely ruined by tourists, and keeps its traditional charm, at least not before I can visit again. I know it will change though, as Buddhism has taught me, change is inevitable and happening all the time.

In Vientiane, I got a nice haircut at some sort of London inspired barber. We visited some night markets by the river, which were big but had mostly cheap (though not really that cheap) stuff with generic character, nothing much with local character like we’d seen in Luang Prabang, and nothing we really wanted to buy, especially since I was still actually backpacking. Well I was using a backpack, so that counts, even though we’d not much stayed in backpacker style accommodation, and my wife was certainly more of a maleta (Spanish for suitcase/ luggage/ non-backpack travelling stuff) woman.

On what was our only full day in Vientiane, we set off on foot to visit the temple which once held the famous Emerald Buddha we’d seen at Wat Phra Kaew, in Bangkok, a few weeks earlier. The Thais had taken it away when their empire extended over that part of modern day Laos. You weren’t allowed to take photos in the area where the Emerald Buddha is now housed, at Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok. It was one of the few areas of the Grand Palace where you could just sit and meditate without having some German tourist, fresh from the cruise ship, tripping over you while they film with their video cameras hours of footage I doubt they’ll ever have time to look at again.

They should ban us chapulines (though we’re more like locusts than the little chapuline grasshoppers) tourists from taking photos in more spots around the world. It might help a little to calm the voracious consumption us tourists have of culture and sites. I mean, what’s the point of being able to take a selfie with the Mona Lisa at the Louvre (not sure if they still allow this, but they did in 1995 last time I was there) or with a Van Gough at the Musée d’Orsay. It’s funny that such an advanced species needs to be restrained from being such culture vultures. I even think we should be restricted from going to some places altogether, but I fear then only the rich would get to enjoy the more popular sites like Rome, Paris and the like. Though all of us who travel are rich enough to travel, with high income earners naturally making up the bulk of tourists.

To finish with the mixed species comparisons I think perhaps us tourists are both the grasshoppers who consume all that’s living and growing and we are the vultures who come and pick the bones of what’s left of what we first came to see. Perhaps we’ll find the right balance one day.

The temple area in Vientiane, where the Emerald Buddha once sat, is nice enough, but again, having just come from Luang Prabang, with all its vibrant temples, it was just nice.

We also walked to some archway which looked impressive when we saw it on the way from the train station to our hotel, but which on closer inspection was dilapidated, but not in a good, ancient site dilapidated way, more a no-one-really-looks after it sort of way. 

The hotel we stayed at in Vientiane was very average. One little window that looked out onto a wall a few metres away. Ok for a few nights. 

There was a great family run restaurant just down stairs and next door. After visiting the disappointing archway we walked back to our hotel. I was starving so I raced into the restaurant as soon as we got back, while my wife went upstairs to use the toilet. 

I ordered something very spicy, and suffered through it. When my wife came down she had the brilliant idea of asking them to put less spice in – she is very clever and practical in that way – which we managed to do in Laotian from Google translate. They deserve a special mention. The family restaurant, not Google, who get enough mentions, and who frankly are destroying the internet by making me scroll through half a dozen sponsored links before I find the information I need. One day even Google will get their comeuppance and an even more powerful internet beast will take them on. I think it’ll have something to do with AI. 

And while I’m complaining about the internet, which is a highly appropriate pursuit for someone in their 50s, I’m tired of looking at web pages with all these bloody ads! That is why I refuse to put any ads on my blog, or write anything that will be popular enough to warrant putting ads on. Maybe one day I’ll finish this story, get it published with a good old analogue paper book and whoever is interested can buy it and read it in bed.

But back to Vientiane, my previous subheading not having helped a lot to keep me on track.

In the balmy evening, in Vientiane, far from the internet, we enjoyed a warm Lao beer, with ice in it – which I always find odd, but better than warm beer – at a make-shift alleyway bar where I finally got to sit on one of those seats with the beer holders in the arms! This has been a dream of mine for many years and perhaps one day I’ll get to own one myself!

And that was about it for Vietieane. The next day we headed to the airport to go over to Hanoi. 

And now, here in Mexico, before the new year has progressed too much more. I do feel some sense of achievement that I’ve managed to finish this post and the Laos leg of our journey. It makes my 50 years on Earth seem so much more productive.

And with the next post I can start Vietnam, our 3rd country on the 50 year backpacker trip. And finish my knife story.