The Honeymoon Adventure Part 3 and Parts 5–88:
The increasing humanity around us was very noticeable as we traveled from Turkey to Greece. The humanity of Vietnam was overwhelming. The first thing we noticed when we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, AKA Saigon, was that there were no empty chairs. Every space, and especially seat, was occupied by a person. We didn’t get out of the airport until 10 PM, but it was just boiling with activity. Maybe 10 PM is a popular airport time, but the growth of Vietnam is undeniable.
The ride to the hotel was exciting, with big flashing Japanese brand signs, and lights everywhere. Our hotel had a rooftop bar, and we celebrated our arrival in the last country of our journey with some local drinks.
There was construction going on everywhere, and the new building across from our vantage point had extremely colorful lights, and a helicopter pad! The weather was warm and beautiful out, the food was great, and we went to bed with a really good feeling about Vietnam.
We were sitting in southern Vietnam, and had our flight home leaving from Hanoi in northern Vietnam eleven days later with nothing planned in between. The plan was to figure out a way to get there, and see some interesting stuff along the way.
With nothing on the agenda we met up with an old family friend the next day, who had been living in Saigon for a few months. It was great to see her again, and she was absolutely chock full of useful information! First off, she took us to a little spot called Lunch Lady, where the proprietor makes one vat of soup per day, and serves it until it’s gone. It was delicious. They also fill your table with crap you didn’t order. The trick is that if you leave it there and never touch it, you are not charged. If you try one, the whole plate goes on your bill. I’m sure I would have failed that test a few times over. She also told us that there are tons of cab companies throughout Vietnam, but only a few that will rarely rip you off, Vinasun and Mai Linh. She also showed us that you can order a scooter ride with uber, but folks in-the-know carry their own helmet around to avoid the communal one the drivers carry.
That night we dove right into Saigon with a food tour. Bubbles had done her research on this one, and found a Vintage Vespa tour. I almost refused when I found out we were not allowed to drive them ourselves, but I’m very glad I went with it.
We met at a bar, and took off from there. As we were leaving, our young tour guide asked me if I wanted a “rho-dee”. I had to beg her pardon a few times, but finally flashed that she was offering a roadie; a fresh beer to sip on for the ride to the first restaurant! Yes please! That set the tone for the night and we were all smiles tearing through traffic on the wrong side of the road.
I had another friend with extensive experience in Vietnam warn me to eat just about anything I want, but avoid the shellfish at all cost. Something about being filter organisms, and a likelyhood to get violently ill.
Of course the first stop on our food tour was entirely shellfish! My road soda had me feeling confident, so we ate everything. We went to about five or six places that night, but the coolest stop we made was to Banh Xeo where we had Saigon pancakes. There was an army of sweating cooks over huge flames, flipping these crepe looking things, throwing bean sprouts in them, and adding shrimp and pork.
It was impressive to see, and the Vespa tour folks were great, ordering all the stuff for the table. The proper way to eat this pancake turned out to be tearing off a chunk of it, and wrapping it up in a purposeful ordered combination of fresh greens that came on the side.
A side plate of fresh greens is to Vietnamese food like ketchup is to American food. Nearly every dish we ordered in Vietnam came with a side of fresh greens. And they are fantastic. I got pretty good at identifying (and mostly avoiding I must admit) the fish mint, which is a heart shaped herb that tastes like fish.
While in Saigon, we decided to take a day trip out to the Củ Chi tunnels. As usual we planned this last minute, with little to no research, hoping we would learn along the way. We finally ran out of tour-luck, as we didn’t learn much at all. By the end of the trip, Erin had put in ear plugs to avoid listening to our Cambodian guide. I didn’t even realize why the tunnels were famous until talking with a later tour guide. Basically, this tunnel network was right next to an American military base in the south, and the Vietcong utilized these tunnels to conduct night raids for years and years, but the Americans could never shut them down, or figure out their scale. We eventually learned how important they were, and there were signs of it (bomb craters) in what is now the tourist park.
The best thing we saw all day was a new Range Rover with the license plate 51F 868.68
This was quite an amazing and prosperous license plate, and I actually managed to see this car one more time before we left Saigon, but wasn’t able to get a picture. Our driver estimated that this person paid about USD $10,000 for it.
We had a lot of fun learning about superstitions and luck in Vietnam. From what we could tell, they were heavily influenced by their northern Chinese neighbors. I’m going to bastardize this as only an American can, but here’s what I think. The word for ‘four’ rhymes with ‘death’ in one or more popular Chinese languages, which makes the number very unlucky, and ‘eight’ rhymes with a synonym for ‘fortune’, which makes eight very lucky, and by adding a magic dimension that transcends combinatorics, is able to be used again to make 88 twice as lucky, with diminishing returns after that though. [11] In our travels the Vietnamese folks we met agreed with this. We got conflicting reports on six, where we were usually referenced to the fact that it’s close to eight and also even, making it very lucky. I think in Chinese six also rhymes with an awesome word, so maybe there was some cultural diversion there.
[11] The awesome manifestations of 8 being lucky could fill a wikipedia page, which they have, but here are some of my favorites: United flight number UA8 is Chengdu -> San Francisco, UA88 is Beijing to Newark, and UA888 is San Francisco -> Beijing, The Beijing Olympics started at at 8:08 PM in the UTC+8 time zone, on 08–08–08, and a high-rise in Hong Kong that set a then world record price for what was labeled as the 68th floor in the elevator, but which was only a combo of the 43rd and 44th floors up if you were counting. They cut out all floors that ended in 4, all the 40’s, every floor between 68 and 88, and also the 13th floor for good measure!
We also learned about why our tour guide wanted a son, and it had to do with elderly care. Basically, a daughter marries away, into another family. And a son that finds a wife, marries her into his family. So when our guide and his wife get old, if they have a son, they can move in with him, and his son’s wife will take care of them. If they only have daughters, she or they will end up taking care of her or their husbands parents, and our tour guide will be screwed. Small sample size, but he represented that the viewpoint was common.
After seven hours heading to the tunnels and back, we stopped into the War Remnants museum, which was well worth the visit. Our tour guide waited at a coffee shop and suggested that we just read the plaques.
We spent some more time eating around the city and enjoying the warm weather. When we first landed we were very nervous that we would be soaking wet the whole time. Turns out it only rained a few times during the four days we were there and we only had to borrow an umbrella from our hotel once!
We also started our quest for the perfect Banh Mi sandwich. We are lucky enough to have an awesome Vietnamese sandwich shop walking distance to us in San Francisco, and were excited to see how they compare to the real thing.
Our first stop was My Banh Mi Saigon, a very hard to find place walking distance from our hotel near the Opera house. We got the pork sandwich with “spicy garlic sauce” and a cold Saigon green beer. It was fantastic, and set the bar for future sandwiches.
The original plan (in my head) for Vietnam was to find a big scooter or motorbike and drive to Da Nang, the biggest central Vietnam city. It looked like a reasonable distance on the map, we only had two backpacks, and anticipating this awesome voyage I had brought tie down straps along (which I had already tested to transfer hotels via scooter in Santorini!)
Unfortunately Erin was sitting right next to me when I finally Googled how long the scooter ride would be.
I actually agreed that it would be stupid to attempt it on a scooter, still thought about it for a bit, then booked a flight for the next day.
Flying to Da Nang was one of our favorite experiences of the trip, and it finally clarified some of my deepest existential questions. Who am I, and why am I me? Now I understand.
I am a SkyBoss.
<start SkyBoss story> The next-day tickets were not very expensive on VietJet, maybe $80 each, and for an extra $20 we upgraded to their flexible fare so we would have the option of switching flights if we woke up early or late. It also promised VIP service, and higher weight allowances for carry-on’s, which was helpful since we were definitely over the limit. This was called a SkyBoss ticket. The website looked like a red and yellow Yahoo Celebrity news page, complete with a job posting for a captain, and a flashing “Hot Deals” .gif, but what are we doing in Vietnam if we didn’t want to take any risk?
We printed our boarding passes at the hotel and got a Mai Linh taxi to the airport. There was a priority line for security, so I looked at Erin and figured we would try it. I mentioned SkyBoss to the attendant, and her eyes opened in recognition, and she let us in. Once past security we made a beeline for the VIP lounge, where the nice attendant looked at our printed boarding passes and politely told us we were not allowed in. I actually accepted her rejection, but always one to chat people up, mentioned that I thought we could get into this place with our SkyBoss tickets. She was confused and claimed that I was not SkyBoss, so I gave her my phone that said I bought SkyBoss seats. Her eyebrows raised while looking at my phone, she apologized profusely, ripped up our boarding passes, told us to go have as much food and drink as we wanted and she will figure out why our tickets didn’t have proper SkyBoss insignia.
A few minutes later we get our new, properly authenticated tickets! She also moved us from row 6 to row 1.
At boarding time we head to the chaos of the gate. There is a huge line of people, all pushing to get out the door, and onto a bus that goes to the plane. I stand back from the crowd around the desk, but when one of the gate agents catches eyes with me, I give her a friendly quixative look, and flash my big red stamped boarding passes. I recognize the expression on her face, and she waves me to the very front, and tells us to sit in some handicap only chairs right next to the gate. We then watch the entire flight board through Gate 11, except for us. (They were actually just getting onto a bus, but I didn’t know that at the time.) After five minutes sitting there by ourselves, I get nervous and go ask why we haven’t been boarded yet. The gate agent smiles and lets me know our transportation is ready now! She escorts us out to a waiting van just for Erin and me! I’m still a little miffed though, as we have carry-on bags, and will now have to find a place to put them on the already packed plane, as everyone else had left already. Our van races across a few runways, and pulls up to the jet-stairs. I notice two buses still parked outside the plane. We hop up the ladder to a grinning flight attendant, and find out we are the first people on the airplane! He grabs our backpacks, smiles and says “SkyBoss!” and runs back to put them in a bin for us.
He gets us a drink right before two buses full of people hit the plane like a broadside. And once in the air, Erin and I are the only two people to get a food service!
Now, I happen to be especially proud that I wear my seatbelt on a plane at all times. I believe this is the easy way to avoid the most likely injuries that I might get from flying, since clear air turbulence and taxiing over baggage carts are way more likely than a good old fashioned plane crash. So when our fellow passengers took off their seatbelts as soon as the plane hit the ground, while we were going 100 MPH on an active runway, I was horrified! By the time the plane parked at the gate, Erin, myself and the two flight attendants were the only ones still belted in, and the entire isle and forward galley were stuffed with people jockying for position. We had nowhere to be, and it didn’t really bother us that much, but our flight attendents weren’t having any of it! The bigger guy started shouting for everyone to back up, and shoulder checked the grandmas back to row 3! That’s where he had stuffed our backpacks! He turns around and hands them to us, blocks his elbows out at row 2, gestures towards the front of the plane, lowers his head and yells “SkyBoss!” This time we were the ones with wide eyes, but I graciously accepted the honor, told every VietJet employee I could find thank you, and we strolled off into glory. </end SkyBoss story>
After we got our flights to Da Nang, we discovered that hotels in this beach town were obscenely expensive, but hotels at a town on a river 45 minutes south, Hội An, were much more reasonable. Erin fired off a bunch of emails asking for 50% of their advertised rate, and we booked two nights with the nicest one that responded to us!
Hội An was relaxing, hot, and beautiful. We ended up asking the hotel to extend their rate for two more nights, as we didn’t want to leave! It was a great contrast from the neon lights and 24/7 hustle of Saigon.
The place we were staying was a French colonial resort, had big terraced rooms, was right on the river, and even though their #1 recommended activity was taking a river boat tour, we somehow never found time to do one. During the day we would take the resort bikes and head into the old town, which was car-free during lunch and dinner hours.
For whatever reason, the thing to do in Hội An is get custom clothing made. I’m not sure what came first, the clothing reputation or the actual tailors, but the old town streets are literally lined with them now, cycling through different specialties. Suits, shoes, leather goods, suits, suits, leather goods, suits.
We spent a lot of time visiting clothing shops and surfing TripAdvisor, and ended up ordering clothes at four different places. Gotta spread the risk!
I’ll post the details for what we recommend other Hội An travelers do later, but the basic process starts with you browsing google image search for something that you like, and then any tailor you talk to will tell you that they can exactly replicate it. Price, material selection, and recommended modifications come next. You are left to judge if the mods are for ease of manufacture, cost, style or comfort. And then you weigh your instincts against the TripAdvisor reviews, the confidence of your salesperson, and the price they want to charge.
Once you agree on terms, you put down a deposit and come back later to try on what they made. If it looks ok, they finish up the seams and you come back to pick it up. All of our clothes needed more work so we had to come back again for a second fitting. After design sessions and two fittings at multiple places, we were very sick of trying on clothes and took a gamble by having everyone after that just deliver whatever they ended up with to our hotel.
Overall we spent way too much time and money on custom clothes and should have just gone to Nordstrom’s. I got about 1.5 nice blazers out of the deal and BooBoo got some nice silk tops, but we also got a bunch of crap.
We knew had to occupy ourselves while all our crappy clothing was being made, so we looked up some tours. The top rated thing to do (besides try on clothes of course) was a motorcycle tour. But instead of the Vespa food tour we did in Saigon, this was a legit, operate your own bike, ride through the jungle motorcycle tour! I showed this info to Erin, who promptly ran an IPTRACE to make sure I wasn’t spoofing the positive reviews, and she agreed to check the place out. I walked into the tour shop convinced that I wanted to ride a vintage Soviet Минск (Minsk), and that Erin could ride her own scooter. The lady in the office convinced me to ride a new XR150 instead, and convinced Erin that she shouldn’t ride on her own if she wasn’t used to shifting. Oh well!
The next morning we took a cab to their storage garage and hopped on a bike following Hawk, our guide.
We quickly took to the open road, following Hawk through roads, trails, and sidewalks built through farming fields. Overall it was great being out in the open air, and if you went fast you could cool yourself down. Our first visit was a big Cham temple.
As we got further away from Hoi An, the sights got better. One of our stops was a local farm, where they reuse things in a way that would make a shoeless Oregon hippie proud. We watched a nice lady packing compost cubes with mushroom spores, to be stuffed into dark, wet, plastic huts. Once the mushrooms were grown, the soil would be sprinkled onto wheat fields as fertilizer, and once the wheat was harvested, the chaff would be turned into compost for more mushrooms. Or something like that.
We continued along the scenic route to Da Nang, and rode through a former Vietnam War era Marine base called Hill 55 We stopped on top of the hill and checked out the monuments.
Da Nang is large city, also on a river, and they have some really cool bridges. There’s a big suspension bridge, a Soviet-era rotating bridge, but the coolest one by far is a bright yellow dragon bridge. This bridge is freaking awesome. It looks like a serpent, with the humps of the creature acting as some sort of support.
The bridge designers spent the time and effort to build a full tail on one end, and a dragon head at the other! And yes, the geniuses thought to pipe natural gas to the Dragon head, and every full moon they light the thing off! This is the role of government people!
After some pho in an air conditioned cafe, we set off to summit Monkey Mountain.
It would have been nice to have a little larger engine heading up the hills since there were a lot of blind corners to carry speed through. We saw a baboon hanging on the side of the road around one of the corners though!
We got some refreshments at the top, and on the way down the backside we turned the engines off, and looked for any unusual tree movement. We saw a few rustles, but struck gold on a lone tree protruding above an amazing vista.
We saw an extremely rare and officially endangered red shanked douc! We have new appreciation for wildlife photographers because it was 1) impossible to see the little things to begin with (good eyes Hawk!) and 2) even harder to photograph them.
We continued down the backside of the mountain, past the stunning InterContinental, and past the largest Buddha statue in Vietnam.
It was a tiring but fulfilling day. Really hard to experience that much without the freedom of a motorcycle! Back at the garage we had a beer and I told Hawk I originally wanted to take a Minsk. He offered to let me try out one and I’m very glad I didn’t try to ride it around all day.
The transmission was horrible, with grindey neutrals in between random gears, the front brake drum felt glazed, and the rear brake was a bent metal rod, not in any position that your foot could naturally operate it, and it sucked too. Fun for a 5 minute ride though!
Back in Hoi An we ate the time away! Top on our list was Bourdain’s favorite Banh Mi sandwich in the world.
Apparently we are not the only people who had this idea! Totally worth the wait though. On one night we cruised around on bikes, looking to replicate the chicken stew meal we had on the street in Saigon. After stopping to peer in street-eaters dishes, we found a vendor that looked promising. It was on the edge of town, away from where most tourists were.
They had one big pot boiling, and when we realized they didn’t speak english we got excited! I pulled out my phone calculator, handed it over and the price came back as $2 or $3. Fantastic! There were a few rats scampering around, but they were friendly and generally left us alone.
The only challenge to our eating expedition was that the breakfast spread at our hotel was too good!
Pho and coffee turns out to be an excellent breakfast [12], only rivaled by fresh mango and bacon!
[12] one of our food tours told us that phở is traditionally served in Vietnam as a breakfast meal, and it’s a pretty American thing to eat it for dinner.
We still wanted to get up to Hanoi, so we stopped by our favorite clothing shop one last time, took some funny pictures and booked a flight north.
Even though (as a veteran SkyBoss) I knew better, I saw that the flag carrier Vietnam Airlines offered a ridiculous choice of aircraft flying between Da Nang and Hanoi. And with the Airbus A350 being the newest commercial airliner in the world we just had to check it out! The airport was a mess, but the plane was really cool.
Once in Hanoi we picked a hotel right in the heart of downtown, next to the opera house, that someone later told me was where Jane Fonda met with American POWs. Apparently the Hỏa Lò Prison was sarcastically referred to as the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War, but the actual Hilton Hanoi is about 7 blocks away from that location and didn’t start construction for another 26 years.
We immediately booked a scooter food tour because we were hungry, and we knew by then that scooters were the only way to get around.
The next day, with our bearings set from the tour the night before, we explored Hanoi. If Hoi An was our favorite place this was our second favorite place. Hanoi has all the great things about Vietnam, the charm, the food, the weather, the prices, but not as many of the downsides. The streets were clean, there were plenty of trash cans (!) and there were a lot more police, which meant you could actually cross the street when the light turned red.
We found some more banh mi sandwiches, and enjoyed some more street food.
From our hotel, we would walk north, past the lake in the middle of Hanoi, and into the nightlife district.
The locals lovingly called this place Beer Street, and it was awesome.
We had always planned to go visit Ha Long Bay while we were in Hanoi, where tourists flock to take boat cruises and selfies. However, we weren’t digging the four hour drive in traffic and the amount of tourist demand made us nervous about finding someone who had insightful things to say. So while surfing around for what else to do, I somehow stumbled onto a website for another motorcycle tour. This site was slick, and had a live chat widget. Alan popped up asked me if I had any questions, and well, I did!
10 minutes later I had told him all about our wedding, how Bubbs has a motorcycle license but has never used it, and I basically couldn’t ask to do another motorcycle tour because she would kill me. He promised to design an entire day around her, making sure she was comfortable, and going on G-rated trails.
I worked up the courage to ask Erin if she would consider another motorcycle tour and was delighted to hear that yes, she would, but only if she could drive one! [13] A quick phone call with Alan and we had a date! We would come over to his shop early, which is near a University with little car traffic, and we can play around with the various bikes and scooters until she feels comfortable.
[13] there are seriously 12 year old girls driving scooters around like it’s no problem.
Erin finds a Yamaha she likes, of course she is a champ and has no problems, I hop on the biggest bike he has, a CRF250F made in Thailand, and we take off into the countryside!
This was the funnest thing we did on the whole trip, so we have a ton of pictures.
We started the day with some coconut milk and eggs, and toured an old Buddhist temple. Then we hit the trails and generally had a blast. I immediately forgot my old dirt bike experience, and zoomed off the road to the first mud puddle I saw. I regretted it the second I felt the mud splatter all over the only pair of jeans I brought on the trip! Whoops!
Alan ended up being a total badass, and took plenty of pictures of us. We would ride through some amazing scenery, stop to take pics, keep riding, then get some drinks.
We were seriously out in the sticks, and would ride right past water buffalo just chilling in the water.
We had lunch at a UNESCO world heritage site, where Erin found a dragon egg!
Erin was doing so well on off-road trails on her scooter that we decided to pick it up a notch. We ventured into some areas that had a lot of mud, and Alan actually got stuck trying to hot-dog through a ditch.
We had to pull him out, which was a sweaty muddy mess. But no adventure is complete without adversity! As the trails were getting narrower, Alan and I thought it would be a good idea to offer to Erin to take her bike through the especially narrow sections, where there was no room to put feet down, and four foot drops offs on either side. Big mistake.
Erin had been doing just fine the whole day, but just like staring at a word for too long makes you second guess if you know how to spell it, trying to focus too hard on going straight makes you question how to do it.
Luckily I mentioned to Erin that in all her focus, if it feels like the bike is going to drop, jump the heck off! And she did! So we pulled a second bike up out of the ditch, had a great laugh and continued on!
The ride home at the end of the day was adventurous too. It was the second day of the month on the lunar calendar (lucky day!) so some people had taken over a side street and put up a wedding tent over it! We had to divert up to a road that was currently being constructed, so was technically closed. We could see why as there was a big hole in the road, with a backhoe currently working on it. A few nice gestures from Alan and the digger raised his bucket up and we shot through!
We ran into rush hour traffic, so Alan and I took turns blocking cars for Erin, and we got home in one piece.
Quite the way to wind down the trip! We had a great time, saw, smelled and sweated in some really beautiful parts of the world, and got a lot of sleep that night.
Our flight home left on Saturday morning, so we booked a well-liked cooking class for Friday night, to end the trip on a high note.
Part of the experience is to walk to the local market and buy all the ingredients for the night with the chef. This was quite fun, and almost better than the cooking itself!
I also got some great shots of Erin walking through the market
We learned how to make green papaya salad, crispy pork rolls, and something else.
We walked around the lake on our way home that night, soaking it all in, and feeling all the sadness about having to leave.
The Honeymoon Adventure Part 888: Epilogue
The next day we left from the Hanoi airport on our budget itinerary home. HAN → TPE to chill for a few hours, TPE → LAX on a 12+ hour long haul, then a quick LAX → SFO leg home.
Taiwan looked cool from the inside of the airport, and we tried to prepare for our long flight.
Back in LA, we had US phone service for the first time in four weeks. We called our parents and let them know we were safe, but we had really been in contact the whole time.
For travelling around the globe, were were very connected. I insisted on buying SIM cards in every country, and never really spent more than ~30 minutes without data service. Not sure if it was worth it in the long run, as we never experienced the modern luxury of “unplugging”. As an obsessive precaution, I had a few gigs of OpenStreetMap data on Maps.me, had downloaded Google Maps offline and TripAdvisor offline for the cities where we were going. So I didn’t even need to be connected, but did it anyway.
There were many situations where it reduced friction, like booking activities on the go, paying a few people via PayPal, and sending out selfies (of course), but between checking twitter, waking up to carbohydrates, and drinking beer whenever I felt like it, I probably returned with my brain in a more turbulent state than when I embarked.
Lastly, we learned a few things about the FBI terrorist watch list. We had trouble boarding our final flight from LAX to SFO, and were shuffled all over the place, with different airport personnel arguing with each other before we were allowed to board. I figured that our Vietnam printed boarding passes needed some sort of USA specific code in them. Looking at our new US printed boarding passes, I googled the new letters that had appeared, which I recognized as being bad.
I got the best info from comments on a The Points Guy post, where he had connected through Istanbul and wasn’t able to check-in online to subsequent flights for a while.
Looks like our one-way tickets to Turkey had raised some flags at the DHS! The commenters lamented that it had taken them 4–6 months to be taken off the watch list, even though some of them were TSA Pre-Check!
The airlines were the ones that put you on the list, but they say they just do what the DHS tells them to do. DHS say they get info from the FBI. And the FBI doesn’t publicly acknowledge that a list even exists, so won’t respond to request to get off the un-confirmed list. Looks like I was stuck!
I had a work flight the day after we got home, and sure enough I couldn’t check in ahead of time and when I got to the airport I had the mark of the beast! I got to the front of the security line, and gave my ID and boarding pass to the TSA agent. And they turned around and walked away with them! A supervisor came up and escorted me to a closed lane, where I had to take every item out of my carry-on, and turn on anything electronic. Luckily my hot spot and spare battery packed were charged, and able to produce a blinking LED (which is all they needed to do.) I had to go through the metal detector, THEN the millimeter wave scan machine to disassociate my DNA, and then have a physical pat-down. Same thing on the trip home.
I was prepared for months of this, but it seems the FBI lost interest in 2 weeks :) My next trip I was cleared. (It ended up taking Erin two trips to clear off herself.)
That’s it! Our travel did nothing to satisfy our urge to see the world, and only stoked the flames higher. Sri Lanka is on the short list, and so is the rest of SE Asia. Sorry again for the length! But thank you for reading!
TL;DR — We recommend you plan a motorcycle trip through Vietnam with this guy.
