Dave Fox's Outbursts!

Kowloon Typhoon

Hong Kong

Vietnam was 95 degrees Fahrenheit and very humid. That was fine with me. I grew up in the swamplands of suburban Washington, DC, where a similar climate prevailed in the summer. But yesterday, I looked forward to getting back to Hong Kong, where temps were a more comfortable 80 degrees.

Nobody warned me about the typhoon.

I first learned of the typhoon in the South China Sea on the flight from Saigon yesterday. The pilot announced we'd be deviating from the usual flight path and flying over the Philippines to reduce our chances of crashing into the sea, or having a monster appear on the wing, which, as you know if you watch “The Twilight Zone,” can happen while flying through storms.

So we flew around the storm and landed in Hong Kong, where people seem to take typhoon warnings quite seriously. “Typhoon Signal Level Three is Hoisted,” say signs around the city. This, local residents are assuring me, is totally normal. Death is not imminent until you reach level eight.

I've tried to learn about Hong Kong's typhoon warning system in the last 24 hours. Since I have arrived here with no rain gear, and there are heavy downpours and gale force winds outside, it's been the best way to amuse myself. It's a mysterious system. According to signs at the airport, where I am now, level one means the storm is out at sea, days away from killing you. Level three, where we have been ever since I landed in Hong Kong yesterday morning, means the weather is really really bad, but you should be glad you are not in America where in similar weather conditions, you would have to endure Quintuple-Mega-Doppler StormTracker Team Coverage from your local television affiliate.

Level eight, everybody tells me, means death really could be imminent. There are also levels nine and ten. Level nine means the monsters have donned parachutes and left the wings. Level ten means they have landed on the Kowloon Peninsula and are beginning to gobble up random residents of Hong Kong, and possibly an innocent tourist or two, in a sweet chili pepper sauce.

The big mystery, however, is that while everybody talks about levels one, three, and eight, I cannot find out anything about levels four through seven. Even the official information posted at the airport ignores these numbers. They are apparently similar to the US Department of Homeland Security's terrorist threat levels lavender through turquoise.

Whoa! This is live reporting, folks, and as I sit here in the Singapore Airlines departure lounge, they have just announced the Hong Kong government has now declared a “rainstorm black warning" due to severe downpours and winds, and we are all supposed to take cover in a safe place.

I'm staying by the bar.

So I am supposed to fly out of here in three hours, but I'm growing skeptical that our flight will leave tonight. I'm hoping it won't. I'm told Seattle is expecting snow all weekend.

Midnight Snacks in Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

It's 2 a.m. here in Saigon, and just 10 minutes ago, I watched four ladies show up in front of a crowded Internet cafe with two massive pots of food and about six plastic stools. Within two minutes, they had set up a makeshift restaurant in the street.

Food vendors are all over this city. If there are tables and chairs at all, they are generally made of plastic, and rising just about 12 inches off the pavement. You have to be careful not to get knee hair in your food.

Street food generally scares me after a traumatic salad attack I endured in Turkey years ago that landed me in the hospital, but Nigel, a British guy working here as an English teacher, promised me it wouldn't kill me at one particular place. And I certainly couldn't argue for the price -- a barbecued pork chop and a massive plate of steamed rice cost me 9,000 đông, which, at today's exchange rate, is 56 US cents.

If I do keel over dead and this is my last post, it is probably the pork chop's fault. Or feel free to blame Nigel. It was rather tasty, however, and I can think of much worse causes of death than tasty food.

Unless you happen to be the pork chop.

Still in Saigon

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

I met a nice Finnish couple this afternoon in the bar across the street from my hotel. When they found out I was a writer, Aki, the male half of the twosome, asked when my stories from this trip will be on my blog.

"I meant to be blogging a lot more than I have been," I said, "but I've been so busy."

"Yeah," Aki smirked, looking at my beer. "Busy."

But seriously... this trip has been delightfully chaotic. I've been shipwrecked in the Mekong River, rescued from the jungle after dark on a motorbike, I've taught impromptu English lessons in a local park... and this afternoon I had a beer.

"Finnish people usually miss their saunas when they're on vacation," Aki said, "but this entire city is a sauna."

Not really. Saunas are dry. Saigon is  thick with humidity. Also, most saunas do not contain a trillion motorbikes driving simultaneously in random directions.

The city has an addictive energy -- so much that I keep extending my stay here and shaving another day off of Hong Kong on my return home. But I fly back to Hong Kong Friday and on to Seattle Saturday. Details are coming soon about all of the above stories... except probably the beer, which is refreshing but not nearly as interesting as my Honda scooter jungle evacuation incident.

Vietnamese Millionaire

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

There are 16,000 Vietnamese đông to the US dollar, which is one of the more perplexing exchange rates I've encountered in my travels. I currently have more than two-million đông in my possession.

In the States, we have dollar stores. In Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon), they have 999 stores. Everything, apparently, costs 999 đông.

The best tourist attraction in Saigon is the streets themselves. Kattina and I spent hours today wandering aimlessly through the chaos. The city is a never-ending symphony of car horns and motorbikes. I won't write about the joys of crossing the street because every other visitor to Saigon writes about that. Suffice it to say it's reminiscent of the "Frogger" video game from the 1980s.

Kattina went back to our room after dinner. I stayed out and wandered for a while. Without her, I was approached by several extremely friendly young women who wanted to "have a drink" with me. At one point, I pondered having the following conversation:

Them: Hello! You want to go have a good time?

Me: Sure! How does one-million đông sound?

Them: One million đông? Okay. Let's go.

Me: Excellent! But you have to pay me first.

(I found a simple "no thanks" to be easier, however, given the language barrier and all.)

Low-Voltage Shock

[I have arrived safely in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam -- a city with a neverending symphony of car horns and motorbike motors. Tomorrow, we head into the Mekong Delta, and I'm guessing our traditional Vietnamese homestay does not include WiFi. So it may be a few days before I get to blogging about Vietnam. In the meantime, here are a couple of random anecdotes from the last couple of days in Hong Kong.]

Hong Kong: Day 1
I've experienced culture shock enough times to know the first few hours in a totally new part of the world can feel intimidating. Jet lag and travel fatigue add to the jolt. Warning myself to expect it helps soften the blow.

“Brace yourself,” I told myself as I landed in Hong Kong, late at night, after 28 hours of travel. “This could be intense.”

I stood in line to get my passport stamped. “Okay, here it comes,” I thought as I passed through customs. Then, as I emerged into the airport, the first thing I saw was... Starbucks.

Hong Kong: Day 2
The next day, we set out in search of some real culture shock. It was hard to find at first. The language barrier is thicker in parts of New York City. But we finally made it to Kowloon – a neighborhood clogged with pedestrians and neon.

At night, we managed to find a hole-in-the-wall restaurant with no white people in it. Not that there's anything wrong with white people. Some of my best friends are white people. But hey, we were on a mission to escape Hong Kong's “international” culture, into a neighborhood free of Starbucks. We wanted a place that wasn't crawling with foreigners such as ourselves.

At this particular restaurant, nobody spoke English. Perfect! Until it came time to order a beer. The lady waiting on us understood what I wanted. She pointed.

Oh. So I needed to order my beer at a different counter?

The restaurant was packed with people. I squeezed my way between the tables and made my way in the general direction the waitress had pointed. There was no beer to be seen.

I made my way back to the table. Kattina looked up at me. She wanted beer too.

“I dunno,” I said. “I couldn't find it.”

I felt deflated. Plenty of other people in the restaurant were drinking beer.

Twenty minutes later, I figured it out. The restaurant sold no drinks whatsoever. All it had to offer, beverage-wise, was plastic pitchers of tea, served free with food. If you wanted beer, you had to go outside, down the street, to a kiosk where they would sell you one to go.

I ran down the street and bought a large, sharable bottle of Tsing Tao. I felt like I was doing something illegal as I carried the open bottle into the restaurant. But the owner smiled when he saw it.

“Toto,” I thought, “I don't think we're in....”

Hong Kong Day 3
The Tian Tan Buddha statue is one of the largest in the world. It's located on Lantau Island, the same part of Hong Kong where I am staying. Kattina and I caught a bus across the island today in search of said Buddha.

We had to take a gondola to get there. (The suspended cable car kind, not the kind they have in Venice.) At the gondola line, we were greeted with a warning sign:

“The weather today is windy. Cabins may experience oscillations during the journey. Please feel at ease.”

Ummm... yeah. Just how big were these so-called “oscillations” going to be?

“You know it is very windy up there,” said a woman named Yoyo, who sat behind the ticket counter.

“But it is safe, right?” I asked.

She laughed. “Of course!”

We boarded a gondola car with six other people and began the 30-minute ascent. At first there was little wind, but as we approached the hillside on the first incline, the updraft caught us. The sound mimicked that wind sound you hear whenever there's a hurricane somewhere in the US, and some idiot TV news reporter is running around outside in the storm, telling everybody else to stay inside.

But the wind didn't scare me. We didn't sway that badly. The real danger, I realized, was that if someone else in the gondola car freaked out, there was no way for them to get relief, no panic button, no intercom to the ground, no way out.

Fortunately, nobody panicked. Not even me.

After a long journey, hanging from a steel cable and swaying in the wind over Hong Kong's steep landscape, we reached the top of the mountain. We arrived at this site, created to honor Buddha. The first thing I saw was... another Starbucks.

The second thing I saw was... a 7-Eleven.

"Apparently the path to enlightenment includes a Slurpee," Kattina said.

There were plenty of shops and snack bars catering to American and Japanese tourists, but Buddha was nowhere in sight. He was sitting at the top of one final, steep hill – a hill with no gondola – a hill with 9,863,212 steps to climb. (I counted.)

Well, we had come this far. Could I manage the final stair climb?

“Do it for Buddha,” I thought.

We made the final trek. At the top we saw... not much of anything. The mountain was shrouded in fog.

I could see only a silhouette of something. I'm pretty sure it was the Buddha statue, but I don't know for sure. It might have been another Starbucks.

Crossing the Line

Over the Pacific Ocean at the International Date Line

[Over the next couple of weeks as I'm traveling, some of these entries may be posted a few days after I write them, depending on when I have Internet access. The time stamps on each post reflect the time I originally wrote the messages, not the time I uploaded them. All times are listed as US Pacific Time. Hong Kong is 15 hours ahead. Vietnam is 16 hours ahead.]

---

Don't be fooled by the date at the top of this message. Where I am, it is already April 7.

I have just crossed the International Date Line on this arduous journey. I have been craning my neck, looking out the window, trying to see the dateline, but it's too cloudy.

Wow! I wish I could have 24-hour-long airplane journeys every day! And lucky me! This one will now be more like 27 or 28.

They had a little problem at San Francisco airport. Just as it was time to board, somebody at the airline figured out that the cabin lights and video monitors were not working on our aircraft.

Solution Part One: Make an announcement telling all of us to stand around and wait for ten more minutes, at which time they would have more information.

Solution Part Two: Repeat that announcement every ten minutes for the next three hours.

They did eventually come up with an ingenious solution. My flight – flight 569 to Hong Kong – was scheduled to depart from gate 97. Flight 857 to Beijing was scheduled to depart from gate 95. What they did was move flight 857 to gate 94, and move us to gate 95. Meanwhile, flight 900 to Frankfurt, which I think was originally scheduled to depart from gate 94, would now depart from gate 97. You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about.

Yeah, so anyway, here's the thing: For reasons known only to the wizards who make airline rules, all of this required not only gate changes, but also -- according to rumors circulating at gate 95 -- that we swap planes with the Frankfurt flight. The hope was that our original aircraft might be repaired in time for their now-delayed Frankfurt departure.

But apparently, you can't just swap a plane to Hong Kong with a plane to Frankfurt. For reasons of cultural sensitivity, meals on the two flights are different. You can't serve udon noodles on a flight to Germany, or wienerschnitzel en route to Hong Kong, It violates the Geneva Convention. Solution to that conundrum: Delay both flights more, remove the entire galleys of both airplanes and bring them over to the other plane. 

So we waited, and the announcements continued – telling us they would soon be announcing a new departure time, and to please wait in the boarding area for further instructions. Also, to allay confusion, it was announced every three minutes for several hours that if you were originally supposed to board at gate 95 to please move to gate 94, and if you were originally supposed to board at gate 94, please go to gate 97, and if you....

What they did not consider mentioning is that swapping the entire galleys between two airplanes takes a lot of time, and it would have been perfectly safe to leave the gate area for a couple of hours and go sit in a happy place, such as the bar. Instead, they kept us in suspense and made us wait at the gate.

Now, I'm all for cultural sensitivity. Really I am. But at some point, I started wondering, would it kill a few passengers from Hong Kong – passengers who had already been in the US – to eat some non-Asian food on their flight home? I'm guessing most of them would have been happy to if it would have meant avoiding a two-and-a-half hour delay.

The most quizzical part of the ordeal did not come, however, until many hours later. Ninety minutes before landing, we were served dinner. After all that, our culturally-sensitive, Asian-friendly choices were... (drum roll please...) a toasted turkey-and-cheese sandwich... or lasagna.

...Over the Septic Tank

First and foremost, I would like to apologize to every single person I know. I am sorry for not returning any of your phone calls, e-mails, smoke signals, or carrier pigeon messages over the last month.

You know how you are always telling me I am too busy? Doing too much? Need to slow down? Finally, I agree.

Throughout March, I've had book deadlines, speaking engagements, proposals to write, and too many doctor appointments. I've had Saint Patrick's Day to contend with, and a sad, sad final night at the Pig & Whistle, the pub down the street that has been my second living room for the last seven or eight years. The Pig closed its doors for good a couple of weeks ago. I had to fit in as much quality time there as I could before the final squeal.

So I've not been in touch with anyone. I have barely been blogging. I have also barely been sleeping.

Ahhh... but vacation looms. Finally, a real vacation -- my first trip in years that has not been work-related to a totally foreign place.

"All I have to do," I told myself yesterday, "is proofread my entire book manuscript, pack for both a writers' conference and a kayaking trip through the Mekong Delta (fashion varies for these two activities; it's tricky when you string them together), write a proposal for another conference,  proofread my book some more, go to some more doctor appointments, figure out which country I'm going to spend my last four days of vacation in and... EEK! I'm leaving in three days?!

I called my airline. I changed my flight to leave a day later for Dayton.

I'm headed to Dayton, Ohio, early Thursday morning for the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. I'll be there through Saturday. Sunday I fly from Dayton to Chicago to San Francisco to Hong Kong, where I will bask in 48 hours of excruciating jetlag and travel fatigue before heading south to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In Vietnam, I will eat lots of food, cycle and kayak my way through the Mekong Delta, and hopefully take a nap at some point. The last four days of my trip are up in the air. I'll either stay in Vietnam or head back to Hong Kong.

"Phew!" I was thinking to myself at 3:30 this morning, awake with insomnia. "I sure am glad I changed my flight to Dayton! This extra day of prep time is just what I needed for a slightly calmer departure."

Eventually, I dozed off again.

My first thought when I opened my eyes at 6:30 was, "I should get out of bed and pack before the next version of my manuscript arrives from the publisher around lunch time."

My second thought was, "What the hell is that sound?"

It was a peaceful sound, actually... the sound of bubbling water -- kind of like a softly babbling brook -- only the brook was babbling out of the drain in my bathroom sink, all over my floor, along with some sticky black goop. I called my upstairs neighbors and asked them not to shower. I called a plumber and asked him to rescue me. I called my girlfriend, simply to whine.

It's been a long morning.

I'm hoping to blog more consistently starting in a few days when I hit the road. In the meantime, if you'll excuse me, I've got a couple of things to contend with.

Just a Touch of the 'Phoid

If it isn't bad enough that I've been ingesting rat poison for the last three months, I am now storing microbes of a deadly virus in my fridge, and gobbling them down periodically.

There are two ways to vaccinate yourself against typhoid. You can inject it or you can swallow capsules. The oral vaccine contains the live typhoid virus, which means if you take it, you are basically giving yourself an extremely low-grade case of typhoid. The injection does not work this way, but I went for the live virus because (1) the results last longer, and (2) shots make me whimper.

I've been getting way too many jabs in the arm lately -- a series of hepatitis shots for my upcoming trip to Asia, tetanus (in a matter of hours -- waah!) because I've avoided it way too long, and frequent blood tests to be sure I'm getting just the right amount of rat poison each day. (Because, seriously, too much rat poison is bad for you.) The typhoid vaccine is also for my upcoming travels.

It's strange to think I'm actually ingesting small amounts of a potentially deadly virus. And I'm having some minor side effects -- fatigue, muscle aches, and severe whining.

"What's wrong?" my girlfriend, who had not yet started munching typhoid capsules herself, asked me over the weekend when I started nodding off at 6 p.m.

I could have said I was experiencing side effects from my vaccination, but that sounded stodgy. I needed a trendier answer. And when we have influenza, we call it the flu.

"Eh," I said, "I think I've just got a little touch of the 'phoid."

And the Winner is...

Deanna in Los Angeles, California, was the extremely clever first person to guess where I'm going on vacation next month. After six arduous plane rides (actually, only one of them will be arduous), I will touch down in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Why so many plane rides? As I said on Day One of the contest, I'm taking a circuitous route to get there, and it'll be a week before I land at my final destination. The first day's clue was a list of how long each flight would take:

Flight 1 (4 hours): April 2 - Seattle to Chicago
Flight 2 (1 hour): April 2 - Chicago to Dayton, Ohio

Q: But Dave, what kind of idiot flies from Seattle to Vietnam via Ohio?

A: Me. I'll be in Dayton for four days attending the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. Moving right along....

Flight 3 (1 hour): April 6 - Dayton back to Chicago
Flight 4 (4 hours): April 6 - Chicago to San Francisco
Flight 5 (14 hours - eek!): April 6-7 San Francisco to Hong Kong

(Two-day stopover in Hong Kong)

Flight 6 (2.5 hours): April 9 - Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

So the detour via Dayton threw a few people off. My Day Two clue was also a bit of a decoy: "A song about this city made Billboard's Top 40 charts in the 1980s." The song everybody thought of was "One Night in Bangkok," which was recorded several times by different artists. (The 1984 version by Robey peaked at number five on the Billboard dance charts. And here's some totally random trivia for you: The song was actually written by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson from Abba!)

So what song was I thinking of? "Ho Chi Minh City" hardly rolls off the tongue when you're writing lyrics. But in 1982, the Charlie Daniels Band recorded an ode to Vietnam veterans using the city's former name. "Still in Saigon" hit number 22 on Billboard's pop charts and also ranked on Billboard's country charts. Deanna tells me when she guessed (after Day Three's clue about the country being a former French colony), she was actually thinking of a different song, which I had forgotten about -- "Goodnight Saigon" by Billy Joel, which topped out at 56 on Billboard the same year as the Charlie Daniels tune.

So... congratulations Deanna, and thanks to everybody who entered! Deanna has won a copy of my forthcoming second book, Globejotting: How to Write Extraordinary Travel Journals (and still have time to enjoy your trip), which will be published this summer. (I am putting the finishing touches on the manuscript this week.)

About my itinerary: I'll be traveling with my girlfriend, Kattina. We're spending two days and nights in Hong Kong before flying on to Vietnam. We plan to spend a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City before heading off to smaller towns in the Mekong Delta. Due to vacation restraints, Kattina flies home after six days in Vietnam. I've got four more days when I don't yet know what I'm doing. Possibilities include more Vietnam, more Hong Kong, Cambodia, and mainland China. I'll be blogging along the way as much as time and technology permit. (Including reports from exotic Dayton, Ohio.) Stay tuned!