The thunder down under…
I had no idea what day it was there…or in New York…or honestly anywhere. We had been traveling for days, and this was the fourth city we had been in in a week…maybe two…who knows, it was all a blur by this point. I would love to describe this day to you, but I honestly don’t remember what we did that day. It will come back to me as my day goes on.
All I remember is dinner. The usual suspects in the group decided to go out to dinner that night. The restaurant that we had wandered into the day before was disappointing, so we asked for a recommendation from our tour guide, and this is where we ended up. I think my usual up to this point was seafood-fried rice. Tonight I threw in some calamari and shared a bottle of red wine with two other dinner companions.
Through the trip, my fellow travelers were amazed at my ability to down a glass a wine like a shot, but really I feel the second glass is to savor; the first is to ease the pain and exhaustion, so it must hit the blood stream quickly. Tonight it was great to not feel like a lush and have someone to share the love with.
It was a nice dinner as our dinners tended to be, good conversation, a lot of laughs. We stopped off in a Vietnam dance club on the way back to the hotel…or should I say a few of us stopped off at a Vietnam dance club on the way home. Club 18…I feel like that is a story for a completely separate post after I have introduced you to everyone on the trip, but I think I can summarize the experience fairly easily without hurting the story. After several glasses of wine, we were feeling good, dancing under seizure-inducing strobe lights in a room full of men under five foot nine. Three black girls and one white guy (straight) dancing to the universal beat that is techno as the circle of Vietnamese men got tighter and tighter around us. I will shorten the story by saying our male friend was offered two drinks, my ass was pinched, and it was all very confusing. We left about twenty minutes later. So back on track…walking back to the hotel, we couldn’t believe no one else wanted to take part in the adventure. Either way we were in by 11 p.m.
The hotel we stayed in in Halong Bay was definitely our favorite. All of us were on the same floor in rooms that were side by side. We opened the door that first day with a collective reaction of “WTF!” I don’t know if it was the room or the view, but we all had a balcony overlooking Halong Bay. It was awesome.
Happy to be back to my amazing room, I signed on to the free Wi-Fi (yes, free, it’s not everywhere, people). Before nodding off, I turned the air conditioner off and opened up the terrace to the bay. It was perfect sleeping conditions, then…
It started raining, and there was this incredible breeze coming off of the bay from the open terrace door. It snuck up on me under the dark of night, attacking my system with several stabs to the gut. Ten seconds of pain as the knife turned, and that is when the thunder began. Night sweats every hour until the morning. Involuntarily seeing the sun rise as I sat beaten and dehydrated, praying to be spared.
Only at breakfast did I find out that I wasn’t the only one that had been visited that night. One of my fellow travelers had also been attacked in the wee hours of the morning. The only evidence was a beautiful photograph of the sunrise over the bay that he had caught on his way back from the bathroom. As we shared our story, other victims shared theirs, telling stories of suffering and offering various remedies in the form of white rice and Imodium. That day we would leave for our fifth city. It required a four-hour bus ride with a rest stop only after the two-hour mark. We would pray that we would have the strength to make it.
I made it…God was willing and the creek didn’t rise…I made it through the entire day. My traveling companion wasn’t so lucky. After we arrived in the next city, he told us to go on without him. Reluctant to leave one of our own behind, we trudged on to the water puppet show in Old Town. After a decent nap and soothing music, we left the theater and were given the choice to go on or go back to the hotel. The thunder had been silenced temporarily, but the pain persisted and I thought it was better to return to the hotel to mend my broken digestive system. But they wouldn’t let me; days of camaraderie had bonded us, and they promised to make sure that I was OK. So I got off that bus and walked Old Town with the rest of my fellow travelers. We returned to the hotel early, and I slept soundly, thinking the worst was over, but the worst was yet to come…
It was our last full day in Vietnam so everyone was game to do the optional tour…almost everyone…but that is another post. The first part of the tour was a beautiful pagoda. This was about an hour visit, which was pretty much a luxury at this point. As we exited and headed back to the bus, the clouds started to gather. I couldn’t make it to the next stop. That memorable scene from Bridesmaids played over and over in my head like a combat flashback. I really had no choice…
I wouldn’t say I love peeing in a hole in the ground normally, but it is a chance you take when traveling through Asia. This, though, was too much to ask…I wasn’t strong enough for this…my thighs weren’t strong enough for this…After the battle was over I scrambled around for toilet paper in my bag and I couldn’t find it, I couldn’t find it!!!
Eventually I found it, and as I exited the bathroom, remnants of war left behind, my comrade was coming out of the stall next to me. I didn’t realize that I was in some type of Ally McBeal coed bathroom. As I tell this story, only the woman that chased me down for 2000 dong and I know what really happened back there.
As we sat at the last dinner on the last day at a table of fourteen, my comrade and I could look at each other confidently, relieved that we had survived and would hopefully make the seventeen-hour trip back to the States untouched. Then, to my right, as if he had been inhabited by Jesse Owens’s ghost, one of our fellow travelers jumped up and bolted out of the room.
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