Southeast Asia | Part II - All Around
My dad and I travel overland from Singapore up through Malaysia and on to Thailand.
The crack-shack award for the most nightmarish place we stayed in goes to a nameless guesthouse in Malaysia. We arrived somewhere at 1am and after stepping out of the bus we were led by a local through a dark alley and into a questionable building, all the while thinking, So this is where they take you to get mugged.
I’ll spare you the details, let’s just say that I slept with the sheet completely covering every inch of my body in that $7 room. I was afraid to inhale the air in that place. I cringe to think that I put my middle-aged father through that just because I was committed to “roughing it.” Needless to say, he woke up at sunrise to scout out a different hotel.
As if I hadn’t learned my lesson, we took a 20-hour train in THIRD class through Thailand for a whopping $6. Poor dad falls slightly ill from the stresses of third-class travel in a third-world country; we check into the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Bangkok where, once showered, I declare I will never leave. As a bonus, I run into Robert Downey Jr. in the Business Center while checking my email.
Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples do not fail to impress. We cruise the night market in Luang Prabang and buy handmade slippers that look like elephants. By day, we ride actual elephants in the countryside.
We kayak and sail around magnificent Halong Bay in Vietnam after spending some time in not-so-friendly Hanoi. I buy a suitcase to hold all the clothes I had made to order in Hoi An, our favorite town in Vietnam.
It’s hard on my dad to see the places in Vietnam where his friends and generation fought a losing battle. But we do visit the war museum in Saigon and I learn more in 20 minutes about the Vietnam war than I did in 12 years of completely biased history classes. I had passed people in the street with major, shocking deformities and had no idea that these were birth defects caused by the Americans’ use of Agent Orange during the war. I lost it after about ten seconds of graphic photos depicting the horrific effects of this chemical weapon.
We end our trip together with by boating around the Mekong Delta for a few days and observing local life on the waterway before Dad flies home, exhausted but enriched.
