Huế and Da Nang, Vietnam

After Hanoi/Halong Bay, I flew to Hue. I spent the majority of the day traveling, and then dinner brought my first authentic Pho experience:

Yum!

 The next day, I went out exploring the Imperial City.

China used to rule here, which is why there are lots of traditional Chinese temples, characters, etc.

Exhibit A

 This guy started talking to me while I was trying to listen to the guide talk about the history of the city. He kept speaking Vietnamese to me, even though I only knew about 10 Vietnamese words. He knew this, but either found it amusing or was crazy. I couldn't tell.

Selfie with a guard!

Incense is a huge religious experience in front of and inside most temples in SE Asia.

Old ladies and fruit...so photogenic. What can I say?

 Thien Mu Pagoda was a site of anti-government protest in the 1960s. At the time, the government was pro-Catholic and anti-Buddhist. It was from here that the first monk travelled from to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, and publicly burnt himself to death to draw the world's attention to the actions of the government. 

Graffiti=art

 After Hue, I made my way to Hoi An. To get there, I drove through Da Nang, a beautiful beach town.

 A guy trying to sell me postcards while the bus stopped for a photo opt. Obviously I took the bait.

We stopped at the top of a massive hilly mountain to take photos. One side was Hue, the other was Da Nang. 

 The Hue side. Wedding photos of strangers... 

Human cake toppers

 The Da Nang side off in the distance

One of the hardest things about traveling by bus the majority of the first half of my trip was the fact that I wanted to take pictures of everything, but a lot of times they turned out mediocre-at-best because we were moving. As a photographer, it broke my heart when I missed a good shot! This is all to say the quality of this one is awful, but this bridge was awesome!

Halong Bay, Vietnam

...and the transportation to/fro our overnight junk boat cruise

This is leaving Vietnam's capital, Hanoi. I didn't get to experience Hanoi since all my planes were delayed, but I got to see it the morning I left the hotel (that I arrived at a mere six hours earlier). I was blown away by the sheer volume of scooters on the roads, as well as the lack of caution people used when driving. Most people pictured here have helmets on, but many don't wear any protection while on their scooters in Vietnam. I saw a graphic scene of a dead man laying in the road on the way back from Halong Bay, which was disturbing but also eye opening to their lack of resources such as readily-available ambulances, etc.

More views from the bus window. People ride scooters with mattresses tied down to them, cages of chickens, and their own families (I saw six people on one, including an infant)

Did you think I was kidding?

Hmmmm...what's inside?...

 Sneaking a view into someone's house/apartment at this pottery-making place we stopped at on the way to Halong Bay

We made it! Ferrying out to our junk boat...

 The top deck, AKA my own personal 5 a.m. reading nook. It took me about eight days to get over the jet lag.

 Locals paddled around the junk boats trying to sell tourists whatever they possibly could

 Exploring the inside of a cave

 I got to check out this beautiful little island. See that hut-looking building on top of the limestone formation? The hike to get there was STRAIGHT UP. We're talking 90 degrees.

 If the hike didn't interest you, you could swim.

  But if you made it to the top, the view was incredible.

  People do a lot of sleeping in this country...

  Sunset views off the back of our boat

  Everything looks like it's about to fall apart in Northern Vietnam. Locals have chairs with mirrors set up along the street for cutting hair, and lots of Vietnamese gather under bridges to find some shade during the days. The heat and humidity in Southeast Asia is inexplicably relentless. The way people live in this part of Vietnam is more foreign to me than that of any other country I've ever visited.

Next, I returned to Hanoi and hopped on a plane to Hue, Vietnam.

10 hours in Japan

So, I skipped around a bit and my last Elephant Nature Park post was actually at the very end of my trip. I'm backtracking to the very beginning now.

Where my trip began:

6/19/2015-6/21/2015

A series of [what I originally considered] unfortunate events led me to the most incredible layover of my life in Narita, Japan. 

After the pilot turned our airplane around while en route to Tokyo from Chicago (because something "critical" broke....?!), I had a God-awful experience trying to get a hotel for the night. Long story short, American Airlines is the absolute worst. Anyways,  I "slept" on a Chicago airport bench and ended up meeting someone who was in the same situation as me. Chase and I immediately bonded over how much we hated AA and made the best of a pretty bad situation. We ate super-stale Dunkin Donuts in the lonely food court, and ended up basically telling each other our life stories since we essentially had 8 hours to chat. It ended up being a really fun night. 

One of the better takes from our delusional 5 a.m. photo shoot.

I met another friend, Linh, because she sat next to me on the plane from Chicago to Tokyo. Small world in that we were both eventually bound for Hanoi, Vietnam. She taught me a good bit of Vietnamese on the plane!

So, after the second try, we finally made it to Tokyo. But thanks to the Chicago flight being delayed a casual 16 hours, I got to Japan about 10 hours before my new flight to Hanoi was departing. So Karn (another girl I met on the eternal layover) and I went exploring.

Bye bye, airport.

Sogo Reido Hydrangea Festival

I won't even begin to explain how difficult it was for us to order this soba. Or figure out what it was or how to eat it. The Japanese language may be completely impossible to understand if you've never attempted learning it, but at least the people are incredibly friendly, helpful and accommodating. 

You dip the noodles into the soy sauce. Then they give you hot water––which we thought was tea––and you're supposed to pour it into the soy sauce and continue drinking it until it's gone. It's a soup sort of situation. We would have had NO idea if the kind woman eating behind us didn't keep getting up to come check on us. We must have looked so helpless in this extremely non-touristic town.

Kiwi juice. Yum! 

This lady and I only spoke about 5 words of each other's languages and yet had so many laughs together on this flight. She would point at things and say them in Japanese and I did the same in English. She kept saying, "you young, I old," and then cracking up. 

"Niji." "Rainbow."

--

After 56 hours of transit...I finally touched down in Vietnam. 

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