Mike Sinkovich Tells You How It Is

Happy Birthday To Meee!

Yeah it's my Birthday, and what are you going to do about it? Well you could show your appreciation for me as a human being and send me cold, hard cash and hope that someday I might say thank you. Then you can die happy knowing that Mr Sinkovich has aknowledged your existence, then run and cry about it on a chat show.

Thank you to everyone who sent their Birthday wishes, you will be rewarded when the revolution comes, and a place in my cabinet will be waiting for each and every one of you. For everyone who forgot, you will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Sorry, you should have been better people.

I hope you are all having a great time at work, slaving away for the man. I will take a sip of my white russian for each and every one of you. It's a tough life guys, but stick at it.

See you on the beach.

Hue To Go

After one random night in Dong Ha, where there is officially nothing to do except drink beer that is chilled at your table in a paint can full of ice (like a hobo champagne cooler) and wait for the next day to come, we got another early start and set off on our tour of the DMZ with a Mr Dien, friend of Mr Tinh who ran the guesthouse in which we crashed. While I would thoroughly recommend the tour from the DMZ cafe in Dong Ha, I would suggest you stay somewhere else, unless you don't mind a room that smells like wet dog ass, and is particularly cold in the winter months.

The tour was, for me, very interesting (due to my fascination with the history of the country) and Mr Dien was a veritable fountain of knowledge, since he fought with the US troops for the whole war ('65-'75). When the south fell he was offered the chance to flee back to the US where he would be housed and given a new life, in order to avoid capture by the NVA. He said he was literally on the convoy when he was told his family (who were in Saigon at the time) would not be allowed to come, so he jumped ship to stay with his family and suffer the wrath of the northern army, which took the form of 6 years in a 're-education' camp where most of his friends died from lack of care.

For anyone who has read '1984' and had trouble imagining what a person looks like after they have had their political ideals smashed out of them, and new ones forced into their place, I suggest you talk to Mr Dien. Watching the action of 'doublethink' take place on someones face as you ask them about their opinions of communism is truly chilling.

I have managed to get my film pentax shots onto the website via the gift of CD, so our tour of the DMZ, and our travels in Vietnam since, can be found in the photo section.

After the tour we re-assembled our packs and caught a lift to Hue, about 70km down the road, on a DMZ tour bus that was headed back there. Randomly, or maybe not so considering how many times this has happened during our travels, we meet back up with some nice English lasses who were on the Mekong boat trip to Luangprabang, in Hanoi at new years, and a completely dead night club in Cat Ba. So having secured a room, that later turned out to be damper than your girlfriends pants at a Brad Pitt movie (...sorry), we headed out to sample the delights that Hue night life had to offer. As usual this turned out to be some okay music, another attempt to find the best white russian in southeast asia (so far Tim at Bluehouse in Chiang Mai is way, way ahead), getting hassled by cyclo drivers before finding ourselves completely lost in a new city.

The next day a random wander down a food-stall street would throw me into the path of Chi and her sister I, who would call me over and ask me to sit down and speak English with them. Being the obliging gentleman I am, and never one to turn down the company of a couple of lovely ladies, I spent the next hour or so having a bit of banter and trying out some local street-dishes. Eventually it transpired that Chi was a tour guide for Vietnamese tourists, and offered to take me on a tour of the city for free, so she could practise her English. If my old man taught me one thing, it's a free tour is worth one for a lunch but too many chefs could kill the cat if you waste what you want. None of which ever made any sense to me so I took her up on her offer and went off to go and tell Captain Timbo of my good fortune and see if he wanted to climb aboard.

In a massive display of the usual over-enthusiasm only Captain Timbo could employ, he agreed with an explosive "uhh....yuh, okay" and we both broke into a dance routine neither of us knew or was aware of, but would rival any west end performance you've ever seen or dreamed of (that last bit is not true, but it would be cool if it was).

So the following day we were treated to a morning and early afternoon in the company of two lovely ladies taking us to see the citadel and heavenly lady pagoda in the old city.

Today Captain Timbo has finally had enough of the city and has set off down south to check out Hoi An, avoiding Danang under the impression it was another city, claiming he may "go check out China Beach, since I've heard lots of good things about it", unaware that Danang contains within....China Beach. With travel research as solid as this, I'm amazed either of us have made it this far. It's a good thing neither of us were involved in planning the D-day landings.

I have decided to stay in Hue for a couple more days and check out two museums on the other side of the Perfume river that looked quite interesting, say goodbye to Chi and I and make my way down to Danang for some R'n'R. Hopefully the weather will be a bit better and I can catch some more beach time and take a day (or two) to get back to the grindstone that is white russian research in south-east asia. It's a tough life this backpacking thing.

The Road to HaNoi, and Beyond

So I hugged Captain Timbo and Sarah goodbye and caught a tuk-tuk out to the bus station, scaring a small child by singing The Who at him, I assume badly since I had my headphones on. With a smug sense of satisfaction that only bus-time can bring, I made my way past the tourist bus queue and booked myself onto a cheap local bus up to Phonsavan.

After waiting for about half an hour, and watching all the tourist buses leave, we finally pulled out of the bus station and began making our way north. There were no other westerners on the bus, and I seemed to entertain most people by laughing uncontrollably as Bill Hicks told me how it was via the gift of MP3.

Two hours into the journey and I noticed an intense visual disturbance in the left corner of my vision, which I instantly remembered as the first sign of an incoming migraine. Although they run in my family, I have been lucky and not suffered one since I was 18, and I couldn't quite believe my brain was going to cash one in on me during a 10 hour bus ride. For anyone who is lucky enough to never get migraines, don't believe the stupid adverts where the woman walking around shopping suddenly looks a little pained, gently touches her temple and says "ooh, migraine". What she would really do is go blind, feel like all the blood has drained from her body, feel like her head as been re-positioned to the bottom of the sea and is about to implode and spend the next 6-8 hours curled up and unable to decide between having another convulsion from the pain or suffering the extra pain involved in moving in order to get to a toilet and throw up, from the pain.

I quickly noshed two paracetamol and codeine, downed about a quart of water and got my head down before the pain would make it impossible to sleep. Luckily this seemed to stop it from breaking and about two hours later my vision had seemed to restore itself. When we stopped for food I bought another two litres of water, scared some more people by downing almost a whole one in one go, and banged my head against the language barrier in order to check with a local that I was on the right bus.

After a quick breakdown at about 4am, bumping a 10 hour journey up to 16, and waiting for a few hours for another bus to come pick us all up, I treated myself to a $10 room in Phonsavan and resolved to sleep for a day before getting the bus up to Sam Neua. It would mean missing the plain of jars, but I was at the wrong end of an energy deficit and there was no point going to see something if I was just going to wish I was back in bed.

Catching the bus out of Phonsavan threw me into the paths of a nice couple from South Africa (Johan and Jennifer) and British bloke named Mikey. Once again, our 7 hour bus journey was bumped up to 10 when a steering pinion-bolt sheered itself as we were climbing up a mountain. The following procedure to fix such a problem, in Laos at least, appeared to be smacking the shit out of it for about 30 minutes before taking the wheel off, smashing the shit out of the stuff behind that for about another hour, then resolving to the idea that nothing could be done and there is, after all, one more bolt left holding the wheel in place, so fuck it, let's put the wheel back on and get back on the road.

When we limped into Sam Neua we found a place to stay and I finally got what I had spent the last two hours of the journey fantasising about, some laap with sticky rice and a big bottle of beerlao before crashing into an awesome sleep.

We spent the following day over at ViengXai, home to the old headquarters of the Pathet Lao during the secret war held by the US during the American war in Vietnam, hidden away in the caves a little valley. Some of the caves we saw were unbelievable, complete with volleyball courts, swimming pools, bars, meeting rooms and even emergency rooms with air-purifiers for when the US dropped gas-bombs. One general even turned a massive crater formed from a 200lb bomb, dropped practically on his doorstep, into a heart shaped swimming pool. That has got to have pissed some of the pilots off.

We finally made our last bus journey from Sam Neua up to HaNoi, which came in at another orgasmic 15 hours, with our original bus which was supposed to drop us about 3 hours south of HaNoi actually dropping us just the other side of the Laos border and giving us a $6 refund in order to catch another $15 bus that was going "the long way round". The bus was full of an extended Vietnamese family who were all shitfaced on grain-alcohol, and proceeded to spend the next few hours singing, shouting, and trying to remove the trousers of Issac, one half of two Canadian brothers we met at the border. Eventually the afternoon booze caught up with them and we watched them crash out like dominoes until the bus was practically silent and conversation amongst ourselves became possible.

We finally got into HaNoi at about 2am, and being unable to barter down the taxi drivers to a sensible price, the Canadians and I decided to crash out at a hotel near the bus station and try and get more centrally located the next morning, as well as treat ourselves to a rather swanky lunch at the Sofitel Metro hotel. I would also have to start trying to find out if Captain Timbo was anywhere around town and meet up with his badself.

As always everything worked out just fine, with Timbo being on MSN when I logged in, and within a couple of hours it was catch-up chats and beers before moving into new-years celebration dinner with some Mexican girls from the bus, the Canadians and, of course, Captain Timbo. Suffice to say the rest of the evening was a memorable blur with, okay, maybe a few too many drinks but wins as the most surreal new year celebration as we watched a huge ballet display on a stage erected in the middle of HaNoi before the countdown started, then watched nearly 2000 people all on motorbikes try to leave all at once, as soon as new year had arrived.

Since HaNoi we have been on a round-trip to HaiPhong, CatBa island and HaLong city before we decided to start making our way down south and into the better weather. Today we arrived in DongHa, about 100km north east of Hamburger Hill and just south of the DMZ where tomorrow we should be going on a tour of the US firebases, NVA tunnels and the scenes of some of the largest battles during the American war. Since I have been obsessed with the history of Vietnam since I was a kid, you can imagine I'm rather excited about this.

We have managed to lose the second of our digital cameras, which means we have no more photos of Laos and we are unable to take any more of Vietnam. I do still have my pentax, so hopefully I will be able to find somewhere down south with a negative scanner so I can put some of my film shots on the site. If anyone I met in Laos has any shots they could send me, it would be much appreciated.