The trouble and the joy of traveling without a plan is that you’re likely to find yourself in places for which there is no rational explanation
Only one amongst you patient readers, are likely to know (or care about) the trade acronym F.I.T. which obviously is in the title of this piece. My eldest son J. could probably give you a more precise definition of this sub-segment of the travel industry than I, but I’ll give it a shot anyway, because I am one of them, I think. That is to say that I eschew traveling as a part of any group for any reason. I’m happier to have a bad meal at a restaurant of my own choosing in (name any town anywhere in the world) than a good meal with any group large or small not of my own choosing. I’m perfectly happy to be lost in a strange town rather than be following a travel leader with a raised umbrella to mark the spot. I don’t mind paying a good bit more for the privilege of individual discovery and making my own mistakes.
I am a Foreign Independent Traveler and will remain so until relegated to wheel chair travel by the infirmities of age, and perhaps even then, I’ll find some complicit soul to wheel me about in those locations who abide by the American Disabilities Act or the foreign equivalent thereof. Independent travel is a type of travel filled with more than a little mystery interwoven with the joy of being surprised by the good and the bad of the people and the locations in which your find yourself. You have no one to blame. You called the shots. Yeah, the travel agent might have screwed up some of the logistics, a stranger on the corner might give you bad directions in bad english, you might have been given a bum steer by an expat in a local bar about what one must see. But at the end of the day it’s always your choice.
My friend and business colleague, John H. have travels the world in one another’s company, and we were at it again. We started in Manila with a board meeting and then took the opportunity, having traveled so far, to move on to Cambodia, which I had never visited and thence to Vietnam which I last saw about five years ago. This is a region of the world that is largely unknowable by farangs (foreigners) how ever long they may have been here or how many times they’ve passed through. The only certain knowledge of this region comes with the certainty of knowing that you’re never going to understand.
Our stay in Manila was a typical corporate foreign travel experience. We were met at the airport by a corporate security person and driver. Whisked to the hotel and put to bed for tomorrow’s meetings. The next morning we were driven to the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission building for a well choreographed meeting with the top executives of our largest investor. A quick coffee at the Starbucks next door and back to the hotel to get ready for committee meetings at our nearby corporate offices, group dinner (pre-ordered) in the hotel, and then the board meeting the next day. Everything tightly planned. No room for personal maneuvering. No mistakes. Kind of like group travel. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, but it’s not really “travel”. It’s just business as usual in strange place.
The first time I can remember John and I tacking some “real travel” on to an interminable corporate business trip was in the late 80’s in Japan. We had a weekend to kill between meetings in Tokyo and decided to see some new territory on our own. We’d heard of an charming seaside resort in a small village fifty miles or so north of the city of Sendai which was a two hour Shinkasen (Bullet Train) ride north of Tokyo. The trip to the resort was an adventure, but not overly so, having arranged for a car and driver (supposedly English speaking) to take us from Sendai to the resort. Of course, the driver spoke no English, but tried nevertheless. We somehow communicated that we were in need of food on the way. He sucked air through pursed lips indicating a problem of unknown proportions. He stopped at several small establishments which he rejected as being unsuitable for gaijin and travelled on searching for the perfect spot well in to the afternoon and well beyond my hunger threshold only to finally arrive a lovely spot in a secluded grove of trees by a mountain stream. There were no other cars in the lot, but I did not attach much importance to that fact as I was driven by hunger more than logic. In fact, the place was closed, but agreed to open. Apparently, the honor of hosting gaijin was too much to pass up. We were seated on floor cushions around a low table in the Japanese fashion and attended to by lovely young kimono clad waitresses. We were offered a menu, all in Kanji, but thankfully with pictures which needed no description. The pictures were all of eel in various culinary presentations. John, inquired somewhat timidly to those attending us, who neither understood or spoke English, if they served anything other than eel. I think he did this with a combination of hand signals while speaking very loudly and slowly. I do know that Americans when confronted with the need to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak English tend to raise their voice two or three fold and s p e a k v e r y, v e r y s l o w l y. The only thing the intended communicant understands from this is that the speaker may be mentally retarded and tries even harder to take care of him. So I guess that it works in a way. I ate the boiled eel and John had several bowls of rice.
On this trip, we’ve instructed our guides that we do not want to go anywhere or see anything where we will be confronted by tour buses full of aggregations of tourists. Unfortunately, we more or less missed the mark in Siem Reap, Cambodia, because, after all, the only reason people go there is to see the amazing piles of 1000 year old rocks which have been stacked to look like the remains of religious edifices ordered built by self aggrandized kings and such. The area known as Angkor Wat is spread over 400 square km, and our guide wanted to make sure we saw it all. My takeaways from this visit are that Cambodia has a long way to go before it joins the 21st century, that once you’ve seen one pile of old rocks, you’ve pretty much seen all you need to see (kind of like cathedrals in France), that any group of traveling Koreans will offend pretty much every one they come in contact with, and that Cambodia now tops my list of countries with the worst roads. And yes, the shadow of Pol Pot still lays heavy on the land.
We had better luck with our guide in HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon if you prefer). We told him we were tourists but that we didn’t want to see any other tourists. This confused him at first, but then he seemed to get it when we agreed to travel an additional thirty miles to avoid the conventional tourist stop at the Cu Chi tunnel complex, and proceeded to another lesser known entrance. I was rather liking the tunnel complex tour as it had a faint Sylvester Stallone quality, until they showed us a propaganda film circa 1967 in which they awarded the designation of “Glorious American Killer” to a sixteen year old girl who had somehow killed several American troops. It brought back too many really bad memories for me. I buried the flashbacks and followed the trail to see the ingenuous tunnel complex and punji pits. But we achieved our goal of taking the path less traveled and still seeing the sights we wanted to see.
The next day we clearly took our “off the beaten path” concept too far. We wanted to experience the Mekong River Delta via private sampan, but did not want to do it at the normal tourist jumping off point of My Tho. “Not to worry”, said Mr. Nguyen. “I will take you to places no tourist has ever been”. Yellow, or even red flags should have been going up at such an assertion, but hey, we were F.I.T’s. We could call our own shots. The day did not start well when Mr. Nguyen called to say that he had a problem with the driver or the traffic or both. I only understood that he would be a “few minutes” late. At 45 minutes past the appointed hour he finally appeared, keeping in tact his record of being late for every appointment. Our plan, he explained, was to go beyond My Tho into Long An province to a small village on a tributary to the Mekong where in we would get on a “special” private sampan for a tour of the area. He thought we could get there in about two hours. Three hours and forty-five minutes later, our SUV stopped on a single lane dirt road, and Mr. Nguyen informed us, “we walk from here”. When I inquired how far, he replied, “not far”. Another in a long string of polite deceptions. We followed a path by a stream with small living huts periodically interspersed with increasingly thick vegetation. After a longer, hotter walk than I had anticipated or desired, we arrived at a narrow opening in the vegetation which revealed an exquisite French colonial structure where Mr. Ngyuen said we would take tea before our boat tour. We sipped green tea presented by lovely young Vietnamese women in their specially tailored ao dai’s. We were to return here after our Mekong adventure for lunch he said. As it was already well past noon, and the heat and humidity had climbed precipitously, I could have been easily persuaded to spend my afternoon in situ, without the benefit of a Mekong sampan journey. But this was not to be. I was greedy for adventure.
As we left the immaculately groomed grounds, Mr. Nguyen pointed to some bicycles and said we would ride for a bit, I assumed to the private sampan dock nearby. My bike was set up for Vietnamese riders who average 5 feet 4 inches in height, and had a gearing system so complex that only a Tour de France rider could have operated it. John’s bike was a better fit, and he seemed to understand the gears, but his front wheel was bent to the extent that he and the bike wobbled as they moved. I figured, what the heck, anything for a few minutes. In about ten minutes we stopped. Thankfully. The sun and humidity and a painfully distorted riding position were taking their toll. Mr. Nguyen said, “let’s go talk to these locals”, pointing to a group of some dozen or so men and women lounging around two small houses in the local style wherein they were eating their midday meal and drinking huge amounts of Tiger beer. Upon noticing us they began to giggle, chatter with Mr. Nguyen, and among themselves, while offering us cans of beer, slices of various fruits and small plastic chairs. A clear invitation to join them. They were celebrating “Memory Day” which is the occasion on which one “remembers” those who have gone on to join Buddha. Evidently this celebration requires quite a bit of beer, because the place was fairly littered with empties, and they were still passing it around, and insisting that we join in…..which we did until I dropped an entire platter of watermelon and John knocked over his third beer. We took pix, shook hands all around, and allowed the old granny to pinch us on the arm (which really hurt) and thankfully bid our adieu’s.
The rest of the trip was down hill from here, metaphorically that is. We had met a wonderful local extended family, who had never met another farang, shared their hospitality, drunk their booze, eaten their food, had our picture taken to memorialize the occasion and provided gossip for the entire village for weeks to come. They’re probably still laughing about it.
Travel doesn’t get any better than this.
