Dawn, Vietnam

Wednesday 28 October 2014

I awoke suddenly from my cocoon under the sound deadening pillows to see the light before dawn and a very big island out of the cabin doorway (we have a balcony cabin with a sliding glass door). There were ships and boats gliding around everywhere, many with lights on. I shot a lot of video. I’m finding that my SLIK tripod with its central bubble level, plus the little Cullman tripod head with its bubble levels, plus the built in level gauges in the Olympus E-M1 are allowing me to do some nice steady video shots. The tripod head is marvellous. It’s not meant to be a video head but it’s doing a great job, very smoothly panning and tilting. Nice.

This is a big bay leading to the harbour for Saigon, Phu My. Very, very slowly we moved closer to a huge concrete pier, finally edging right up and stopping.

The Phu My container port was revealed, and what a contrast with Bangkok! All the machinery is here, scores, almost hundreds of container cranes and transporters, but no business! Nothing happening. No containers.

I can’t help wondering if this illustrates the difference between a free country, Thailand, and a Communist one, Vietnam.

Jan left for the 2 hour drive to Saigon but again, I can’t face that so I’m staying “home” for a day off. Ha.

Midday – the tide’s gone out. All the stone around the pier is exposed and the ship must have sunk several metres.

Keeping the peace?

At 3.30pm it’s lunch, and very nice too. It’s very hard to resist all the delicious foods when you can take whatever you like and as much as you like. I keep feeling I should go back so as not to miss something. But I don’t.

Random thoughts

• I’m having difficulty reading, and especially, seeing the LCD screens of my cameras. My eyesight near/far accommodation is getting very much worse. My distance vision is fine, but I’ll have to get bifocals asap. Maybe in Hong Kong they could run them up while I wait?
• What ugly people we Westerners are. Some people are just plain lumps with bumps. Not me, of course.
• The cranes on the wharf here in Phu My have all their static weight limit markings in English, and some of the other signage is in English too. For instance, out the door at the moment I can see the “Tan Cang Cai Mep Oda Terminal”. They use the actual word Terminal.
• There’s a TV channel available called Prime Telly and it’s running the ABC News 24 channel at times. But I discovered later that it’s just a five minute chunk and it’s repeated several times during the day, the same piece. What a waste of time.
• Australia is getting international condemnation for banning people from the three Ebola countries from getting visas to enter Australia. That’s this wonderful Liberal government for you.
• Several other channels are Chinese — news, drama, documentary. All except the last are in Chinese with Chinese subtitles. Must be dialects.
• I’ve forgotten my bathers. It’s no problem, I can either wear one of my colourful PTUs as bathers, or use my shorts. They’re made of nylon stretch material much like bathers. (As it happened, I never went swimming due to my leg skin problems. More on this later.)
• My legs are much improved though, with no skin breaks that I can see. But it’s a worry about going into the pools, a worry both that I might pick up an infection, or that I might leak. I think I’m probably worrying about nothing. The pools all look very clean, crystal clear and chlorinated.
• Wow, there are some senior Vietnamese army guys here, both on the wharf and in the dining room, er, dining. I mean shoulder boards with four gold stars, gold braid all around and gold braid on their cap visors too. That says General to me. There must be an awful lot of ‘em.
• There are no maps for Vietnam in my TomTom GPS South East Asia set. I don’t need them here, but it would have been nice to have them in Hanoi. Booger.
• I have maps for Hong Kong, though. Big help, not.
• I’ve been studying the brochure for HK tours and there are two I’d like to do, but US$169 for one of them and US$109 for the other. Ouch. This ship is all about making money from us.
• There’s no Wi-Fi internet access anywhere I go except through the ship’s system. I can access the ship’s website right here in the cabin, but can’t get any further without paying big bucks. It’s US$0.79 per minute, and they warn how slow satellite internet is, i.e. many minutes to do anything. Grrr.
• Six days so far without email or web access and I’m feeling it. It’s become such a vital part of my life.
• I brought three letters in the side pocket of my carry-on bag in Perth, intending to post them at the airport. But of course, I forgot. Two of them are not important but one has a deadline for payment of a charge of 6 November. I asked Jan to take that one with him to Saigon today, just on the off chance of finding a post office (it needs stamps over the Aussie ones), but as he rightly says, you need local currency. Pot luck. No success.
• I haven’t opened my wallet since last Friday’s taxi to Perth Airport. All we have on board is a plastic card that does everything from opening the cabin door to paying for drinks. Yesterday my total was US$123. They get you.
• The ride to the airport in Perth was interesting. The driver had just had the gastric bypass operation done. He said the weight is just falling off and he’s not having any problems. He weighed 185Kg before! And I thought I have problems at mmmmKg, which I do, of course. I might have to rethink my cancellation in May. I’m dying this way. Anything’s got to be better. I asked if he can still drink beer and he said “Yes”, in a slow, qualified way. That’s OK.
• I remember when I used to travel and thought nothing of a 2Km walk to get somewhere. I used to walk all day, and I didn’t even give a thought to moving around. But now I feel tiredness in all my muscles just getting up from my chair. The thought of even 100m walking is daunting, unless it’s slow and easy. I’ve really, really lost it.
• The tide went out today and it’s come back in again. At 16:13 local time it’s nearly where it was at 07:00. We’re due to push off at 17:30 local, only 1 ¾ hours away.
• Exploring the ship after lunch, I found the lifts to two more decks above deck 14, the dining room deck. We’re on 12, we eat on 14, but there are two more decks, 15 and 16. Both have pools, so that means there are pools on 14, 15 and 16. I find that amazing. Each has two spas attached, and a wading pool section, so there are many hundreds of tonnes of water right up the top of the ship. Why doesn’t it tip over??
• The day turned very grey and cloudy, but no rain unfortunately. I was hoping for a big thunderstorm. There was some thunder and lightning, but not much.

Jan got back around 5pm tired but happy enough. He said the traffic this time wasn’t too bad. He’s very disappointed that a major park in the middle has been almost completely torn up to build a new underground railway. He feels it was historic and will never be the same.

Phy My, Vietnam, the port with no business.

The dining area

Tuesday 28 October 2014

We didn’t meet up today, but I’m sure we will later. This ship is so big and has so many passengers, around 2,300 I’m told, that you could meet once and never meet again.

The day started quietly and we resumed our discussion about what the time is. The ship says it’s one hour behind Perth time. That’s very strange, because we’re well east of Perth by at least an hour, so the clocks should be ahead. The time lines must bend around Thailand or something.

Man Overboard! It wasn’t a drill.

Then after lunch, at 1.54pm (my camera tells me so) came a PA announcement, “This is the bridge. Man overboard, man overboard.” All very calm, and it wasn’t an exercise. Wow.

The ship immediately began to slow and turn to starboard, my side. An orange life ring was thrown overboard (above) and it started trailing copious amounts of orange smoke. You don’t turn a 155,000 tonne ship around easily. I reckon it took more than 3Km and 20 mins to go around 180 deg. Soon we were pointing in the opposite direction and could see a large island about 10Km away, at least. There were around a dozen Vietnamese fishing boats in the area too, but none of them made any moves.

Then there was a shout and I suddenly saw three figures floating in the water. But they were wearing plastic wings, like water wings, and appeared to be enjoying themselves. There were no frantic waves for help. They appeared to be just lying back, kilometres from any land. Crazy.

Vietnamese crazies?

The ship was slowed to barely moving and at 2.17pm a large orange jet-boat launch was lowered over the side, roaring off astern. It moved out of sight and about 2.30pm the bridge announced that the three people had been transferred to a Vietnamese fishing boat for return to the shore.

The swimmers were taken by this launch to a nearby fishing boat to be taken ashore. It cost the ship more than an hour, doing a full circle, slowing to a stop, then accelerating again. It must have cost tens of thousands of dollars in time and fuel.

What the hell were they playing at? It would have cost this ship an hour’s time, at least, and probably tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and time costs to rescue these idiots. We were already running two hours late from Bangkok, so now we’re at water-ski speed to make up time.

It made for an interesting diversion and I’ve got at least five minutes worth of video clips to prove it.

Now for some rays.

Later: my GPS showed us travelling at 41Km/h, compared with 31Km/h earlier so we really have speeded up.

We knocked off most of Jan’s bottle of cabernet sauvignon last night. Very nice, too.

We also watched Pavarotti under the stars around the pool, then attempted to watch a movie on the ship’s TV in the cabin. I say attempted. We got an hour into quite a good movie (The Time Traveller, by coincidence) and it stopped. We attempted many times to restart it but to no avail. So much for that. It’s an inadequate server that can’t keep up with the demand for bits, I think.

Monday 27 October – Laem Chabang, the port for Bangkok:

We’re confused by the time here in the Gulf of Thailand. The ship said to set our clocks back by 1 hour, when we thought it should be forward. I’m certain now that the ship is back one hour. Although my watch and phone are showing 18:20 Perth time, local time is 17:20. Sunset is still to come. Strange, though, that although we’re east of Singapore (therefore ahead in time) we set the clocks back to one hour before Perth time. Why? Maybe we’re actually west of Singapore? I’m confused.

Bad night last night. I don’t snore due to my CPAP machine, but I might have to sleep out on the balcony from now on! It would be possible, there are recliner lounges there and the temperature is beautiful. Soft breezes from the ship’s movement. We’ll see.

We’re tied up at the wharf at Laem Chabang, about 80Km south east of Bangkok and a 2hr bus trip each way. I can’t face that, and since I need to keep my feet up, and being so tired, I stayed “home”. I’ve been to Bangkok and I didn’t want to pay US$169 for four hours on a bus and only three hours in the city. It was a very good decision staying on the ship as I found later with other tours. I got another 3hrs sleep and feel better.

It’s interesting being here. There’s lots of crane and container truck action. At about 4pm it was time for the daily thunderstorm, and what a beauty it was. Dark clouds, thunder and lightning and steady, drenching rain for about half an hour. Nice.

Jan went in to Bangkok today and isn’t back yet at 18:30. The ship leaves at 19:00 local time, so there’s another 90 mins yet. Confusing time.

They say it’s a small world. Well I can tell you it’s getting smaller all the time. We’ve just held the Northam Senior High School 50^th Reunion, right? Who should I run into this afternoon on Deck 5 but Lindsay DelaHaunty, one of the former NSHS students who was at the reunion. He’s one of our former classmates. On this ship! I was amazed. We’ll meet up later.

Leaving Laem Chabang.

This vast swimming pool area is under a sliding roof and is air conditioned. Amazing.

Sunday 26 October:  Up at 7am. Jan went and did 50 minutes of hard, vigorous walking around the Promenade deck and came back sweating and panting. I did one circuit mid morning. That’s about 0,5Km, not bad for me. Jan’s determined to push me to go further each day. It’s a good idea in theory …

There’s a big group of walkers among the passengers, nearly all elderly people. It’s good to see. I’m not elderly, of course. But all of them walk faster than me. I cannot walk as fast as even elderly people.

I shot some vision of a couple of Thai fishing boats coming at full speed for the ship’s wake. I assume they’re looking for fish in the turbulence, which stretches for many kilometres back over the horizon in a dead straight line.

There’s a bigger mixture of old and young on this ship compared with the Arcadia in March. Not many young people, but some, including one incredibly shapely woman in a bikini. It was enough to stir the juices. Wow. Later I saw another even more beautiful body. This is a bit better than the March cruise.

I’d been struck by the similarities to the Arcadia, of the P&O line. Dammit – Princess Cruises is a subsidiary of P&O. I’d vowed I wouldn’t travel P&O again because of their restrictive dress code policy and a cabin fridge which is not a fridge, but the same things apply on this ship! Damn. I do have long trousers and shoes and socks, but I hate to wear them. Getting my socks on is a difficult process.

Lunch, and the restaurant was crowded. We could only get a table around 70m from the servery by a winding path. Good exercise I suppose, and it was quiet where we were.

The food is good, much better than the Arcadia. That was stodge. This is freshly cooked, and nicely presented. I was much happier eating in the main dining area this time.

Balls in the air.

Nothing happened. End.

No, we explored the ship to try to find our way around this multistory building, full of curving passageways and surprising doorways. It was also so we could find our way back to the cabin.

It was a lazy day of sleeping, sitting on the balcony watching the fishing boats go by, reading a bit, but being distracted all the time.

We found a lounge and restaurant area that served nice food, coffee and alcoholic drinks, so that was it for dinner. I was finally persuaded to buy a coffee card which gives 15 coffees for $29, so the cost is quite reasonable. I’m always wary of the catches in these card schemes. The food is already paid for, of course. (Now, after the cruise has ended, I only used 7 of the 15 coffees, so I ended up paying $4 each for them anyway. That’s the catch.)

OK, I’ve been writing a diary for the past three weeks but being unable to post as I go, I’m having to start at the beginning. There’s a lot! Sorry if I bore you but this is my diary and “book” and souvenir and record of trip and everything rolled into one. It’s for me as much as you, but I hope you enjoy.

Friday 24 October 2014

Hooboy, I am so tired! I’m writing this in the cabin on the ship at the Singapore ship terminal at 7.30pm, almost too tired to stand. Getting to the ship has been two long, tough days. Thursday was all day packing, then trying to grab a bit of sleep before the taxi at 2am (a limo taxi, actually). Our Singapore Airlines flight was at 0630 so we had to be there at about 0400. Ugh. From then on it was through the building site that is Perth airport. What a mess! What a mess!! An embarrassing, ugly, dysfunctional, uncomfortable, shit hole of an airport. The total contrast with Changi is too depressing.

At last, after going up to the departure area, then having to negotiate those awful stairs back down to the boarding tunnel, we were on the Singapore Airlines A330 and off at 0625, about 5 mins early. We later discovered the plane was probably only half full, and we had two seats in a row of four. Jan was able to shift across so that I had a tray table free between us.

The in-seat LCD entertainment was amazingly comprehensive, with a choice of over 100 movies, but so maddening. Every time a captain’s voice announcement came on, at the end the sound track would revert to Japanese. Crazy. It seemed the only way to restore English was to stop the movie, use Mode to go to the language selector, select English, which was selected anyway, then try to pick up where you were in the movie. So frustrating that I gave up in the end. I was watching Railway Man with Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman. It looked good enough to try to pick up later.

One interesting thing on the flight was, about 30 mins out, BANG – just as if we’d hit something, or as if the wheels had thudded down or similar. Just once, and nothing was said by the crew, so it must have been a small isolated pocket of air turbulence. I’ve never heard it before and it was a little frightening.

So we reached Singapore airport and got a Mercedes taxi to the passenger terminal. As we drove in we could see the ship at the wharf from the stern, a monstrous floating tower building. Looking at the diagram, it’s around 16 to 20 stories above the waterline. It’s a floating office building.

We entered the shipping terminal and I hadn’t thought it would be difficult. But from then on it was queues! And form filling. It took us at least an hour to negotiate the passenger terminal formalities. endlessly moving down and around the webbing barriers. My back muscles were killing me. Shuffle shuffle. Wait. Shuffle. I was so tired of it. Then some other barrier would appear, with more papers to be shown.

Finally we reached the Princess Cruises counter among the thousands of passengers and were given our plastic card allowing us to board. But they took our passport away from us. I don’t like that.

Then it was another long, slow shuffle up the steel and glass ramp to the ship, showing our pass over and over, shuffling through, being shepherded, until finally we reached cabin 429 on deck 12. Whump. I nearly collapsed. This is a holiday??

That was about 2.30pm. At last we could relax for a while, then go for a beer and some dinner and at about 7.15pm the ship ever so slowly, almost imperceptibly, glided out from the wharf, turned 180deg in the harbour and we were off.

You’d never know it was moving. Even out in the straits, there’s no rocking or swaying at all. That’s stabilisers.

So we glided past many lit up ships, with a vast coastline of lights out to the south. That must have been the industrial island off Singapore. Then by 8.30pm I was becoming monsyllabic and dull because I was so tired. I collapsed onto the bed and slept like a log until 7am.

Beijing. The Chairman’s chair.

Sunday 16 November 2014 – in Hanoi

At last I can post again. No internet on the ship for 17 days (unless you paid their exorbitant rate – $0.79 per minute!). Then Word Press was blocked in China so I couldn’t access this blog. Very frustrating. But now this hotel’s wi-fi internet works perfectly and is fast, faster than I’ve got at home. It’s great.

Our hotel in Beijing was absolutely brilliant. I’d rate it probably the best, friendliest, and best designed hotel I’ve ever stayed at. I’ll give them a 100% review on Trip Advisor. It’s called the Shi Cha Hai Shadow Art Performance Hotel and that’s exactly what it is.It’s a newly architect designed hotel in the Shi Cha Hai hutong, an old narrow street of private dwellings, schools, military somethings, little shops and tiny restaurants. People and kids everywhere, the antithesis of yer Plazas and Raddissons and glass, marble and chrome monstrosities. That’s why I chose it and my friend was as delighted as I was.

The shadow art performance is what it says. Each Tuesday and Thursday at 8pm they put on a Chinese version of the wayang kulit puppet show behind a screen, with text of the dialogue electronically projected onto the screen. It lasted about half an hour, then you could go behind the screen and see how it was done. Some kids had a great time with the puppets.

An example of their service – I accidentally rolled onto my glasses on the bed and broke the frame. Emergency, I have no spare. The guy at the desk said to leave them with him, he would cycle to a repairer and bring them back. So at 6.30pm he brought them back to the room, fixed almost better than new, an undetectable fix. When I said “How much?”, he said “No charge, sir”. How about that for service?

But overall we hated China. Dirty, unfriendly (not always), too crowded (not surprisingly), and a bit rude. I admit I’m a bit plump but I was getting finger pointing and comments between blokes on the street. Just rude. And the spitting. Disgusting. Cigarette smoke everywhere.

The weather was brilliant for our whole five days, coinciding with the APEC summit. Clear blue skies every day. A bit cool at around 12 – 14C, I’d guess, but not bad. The Wall was freezing, though. I’d estimate 2 – 4C at the village and my friend said it was probably near zero or below up there. There was a fair breeze blowing. I saw the wall from the village but I couldn’t go up, and my friend said even he was struggling to get up the steps and deal with the cold. Been there, seen it, it’s enough for me.

But when we left yesterday, Saturday, it was as if a switch had been flicked and the haze and smog was so bad that we could hardly see the planes on the tarmac.Obviously the order had gone out, “OK boys, you can start up your factories and smoke belchers again, APEC’s over.

The crazy thing is we could not get any good food in China. We got peasant food at tiny restaurants nearby, I mean pork balls in noodle broth and another noodle dish with just a tomato mushroom sauce. Crap. It cost us Y26 for the two bowls so at $5 including a 500ml beer. I suppose we can’t complain, But I can complain about the cigarette smoke. We were practically gasping to get out.

Only once did I have a nice crepe folded over full of egg and veges and spices. That was good. That restaurant was weird. There were small stalls at street level with all different things on offer. You had to pay Y100 up front to get a plastic card, then you chose your dishes and the vendor swiped your card. At the end, you reclaim the balance. But you had to carry your tray up some steep steps to be able to sit at tables. That’s hard for me, but a waiter did help by carrying my tray part way.

This has been a strenuous trip and I’m feeling the strain. I’m getting weaker and weaker, I assume from the diabetes and maybe the leukemia. Yesterday I nearly fell in the airport toilet. I was leaning way forward on my arms and I almost couldn’t push myself upright again. I couldn’t find my balance for 30 secs or more. That was scary. I’m losing all the strength in my thighs. I have trouble standing up from a sitting position. Stairs are very hard. But I’ll push on. It’ll be OK.

Boy I’m looking forward to Bali..In retrospect I’ve been a bit too ambitious – five weeks travelling is a lot. And spending five weeks sharing hotel rooms with a friend I’ve never travelled with is ambitious, shall we say. We get along very well but my friend is a fit walker and I’m really slowing him down. We haven’t had a cross word, though.

This hotel in Hanoi is beautiful! It’s the Oriental Central Hotel, and boy, is it central. The streets outside are absolutely thronged with people, cars, motor bikes, rickshaws, push carts, everything, and all the vehicles’ horns are blaring. To get a meal we just walk along the street a few doors or cross to a blocked off street of shops and bars and restaurants. It’s only 50 – 100m  away. The view out the window is just a mass, a maze, a jungle of roof tops of every shape and height and size. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re on the seventh floor. They build tall here, no space between building, just stacked upwards.

We’ve had an embarrassing blunder. I booked a “Junior Suite” with windows, assuming from the web site that it was twin beds. But when we arrived it’s a big double bed. Uh oh. No way. The hotel was fully booked last night so my friend slept on a folding bed they provided. It was OK, we both slept very well. But I’ve asked for a separate room anyway due to certain “night noises” that are seriously keeping me awake, so today we’ll split up. Unfortunately the other room is windowless but it’s no problem. I think my friend will use that and just come here when he wants windows!

I’ll post this now and do some more pages asap. Standby. (Wow, I nearly lost all this writing just now. I accidentally closed the browser and I thought it wasn’t saved, but after several minutes I found I could recover it. When I’ve written so much, the thought of losing it is almost panic.)