Asia, China

Shanghai (I) Closing the Loop

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The loop is closed: I am back in Shanghai, sitting in a Starbucks Café and drinking one Cappucchino after the other. It is a good feeling…not because the Cappucchino is good (it is OK, but can by no means compete with a real Vietnamese coffee), but because it is so clean and relaxing an atmosphere: Just sitting without being bothered by any hawkers at all. Especially after fleeing Ho Chi Minh City. In fact, this 20-million-people city of Shanghai gave me an odd feeling of emptyness: Just walk on the clean and broad pavement in the direction wanted. Cross the streets with a surprising sense of safety at traffic lights. An odd statement after all my complaining about the mad Chinese traffic between the lines of many earlier articles. Forget it, in comparison China is a kindergarten’s traffic education site. It is a good feeling of safe, clean, straight-forward, and fast transportation when leaving Shanghai Pudong Int’l Airport with the first MagLev of the day at 300km/h (in early morning and late evening the trains run with reduced speed for noise reduction), switch to a surprisingly empty subway, which brings you into the heart of the city in a time you probably just managed to leave a Vietnamese Int’l airport. If, that is, your immigration runs as smooth as in China. These two contries are still worlds apart. Continue reading Shanghai (I) Closing the Loop →

Asia, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City (II) Walking

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On my way south through Vietnam I had not found people who liked Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. I know now why: This city sucks. There’s nothing really worth seeing. It’s loud, noisy, dirty, traffic is mad, has way way way too many street hawkers (which makes sitting in a cafe a pain as you get interrupted every minute with newspapers, head-wagging plastic dogs, or piles of copied books) and motorbike offers (which makes walking along the streets a pain as there is a motorbike waiting every 10 meters). In the smaller cities I could bring up the effort to smile and say “No, thanks” and that usually ended it. But here I had to revert back to the rude way of entirely ignoring.

Walking had the additional pains of mad traffic and long ways, and my right big toe really hurting. The bruise from the diving fin there heals, but slowly. Continue reading Ho Chi Minh City (II) Walking →

Asia, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City (I) Arriving

Carribean View
Carribean View

NT_20070822_101226.jpg: Bye bye Nha Trang…the view from my breakfast table this morning. Has something carribean to it, doesn it?

My last hours in Nha Trang I spent at the beach having breakfast and reading.Then boarded the hotel’s owner’s brother’s car or something like that and was brought to the airport. With Hanoi Airport being a joke already I didn’t expect much of an airport, and that was what I got: Not much.

Asia, Vietnam

Nha Trang (III) More Diving

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I finally have pictures! The last dive today, two National Geographic Dives. One of the divers of our group of three could not descend with problems equalizing. Really a pitty for her, but she engaged in her ‘project’ taking pictures of us while gearing up and entering the water. Many many thanks!

The underwater pictures are made by one of the Rainbow Divers, it is probably not far fetched to call her a professional 😉 which means: We bought these pictures from Rainbow.

Asia, Vietnam

Nha Trang (II) Open Water Diver Course

No new pictures, sorry, at least nothing exciting. I had kinda promised an article by now, hoping I would have had diving pictures, or at least pictures of me right before a dive, but I haven’t. There was another guest on the boat today by chance taking a picture of me while doing my first “backroll entry”, which means sitting on the edge of the boat and rolling backwards over board into the water (you have seen that in James Bond movies), which must look quite great. But I couldn’t find that lady later after the dive in the Rainbow Bar, grrr….
Continue reading Nha Trang (II) Open Water Diver Course →

Asia, Vietnam

Nha Trang (I) Discover Scuba Diving

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Nha Trang as a town is not exactly exciting. That’s not what you come for. What you come for is beach and water.

Beach

Yesterday I just walked up and down the beaches without actual lying down or going for a swim. It was by all means way too hot for beach. I have seen locals at the beach early in the morning (I am talking about 6am) or late in the evening (when the sun is more or less gone again). Inbetween none of the locals is so mad to lie down and get fried by the sun. The beach is all to the western tourists. But even they aren’t so numerous. Continue reading Nha Trang (I) Discover Scuba Diving →

Asia, Vietnam

Hoi An (II) My Son

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My Son

(not to be pronounced like your own male offspring, but rather like Mee Soon, with both vocals relatively short), the intellectual and religious center of the Cham kingdom, partly dating back to the 8th century. Described as the “most stunning sight to see in the Hoi An area” it is a tourist magnet. As such it reportedly gets very crowdy. Some people I asked told me it is not worth the visit, others were amazed. But all agreed it is too crowded. Lonely Planet says so, too, and suggest a visit in the early morning, which would give you the best atmosphere. Continue reading Hoi An (II) My Son →

Asia, Vietnam

Hoi An (I) Old Town

Hoi An

…is a picturesque old city, which luckily was at an early state preserved in its current state, cars banned from its inner roads (not motorbikes, though). There is even a ticket to support maintenance of the city, which includes a bit a complicated system of visits to historical sites within the city. In the end…I never found the right time to buy such a ticket and see the sites, which mostly consisted of buildings of Chinese congregations or temples. Not the most interesting stuff anyway. Just the town by itself is the main attraction.

Asian Past