Sea Kayak!

Hello!

I write this update from the swankiest hotel at which I have ever stayed in my short and impoverished adult life. If you have ever met us, you will know that the Sheppards are not wealthy people. We are, at best, Comfortable and spend the majority of our time either staring wistfully at, or bad-mouthing Those People who stay in posh resorts and eat at the Ritz. The Sheppards waitress at the Ritz and suffocate themselves with stolen fois gras canapés when the maitre d' isn't looking or we dress up in our best clothes and pretend to know what the heck we're talking about when the sommelier asks for our wine order in fancy restaurants. We are more ruined aristocrats than New Money.

Anyway, I digress.

Having arrived at the Mia resort in Nha Trang and gorged ourselves on complimentary breakfast, taken photos of complimentary breakfast and supped on birthday bucks fizz, it was time for the De Tang Clan (this is our 5-piece girl band name that will rival K-Pop's 2NE1) to rest by the infinity pool. Infinity pools are a scam, by the way: I swam to the edge of infinity and looked over the side expecting to see rushing water and an endless blue horizon and maybe a lone tree branch clinging to some form of cliff face. Instead there was a gravel path and a Vietnamese man searching around in some sort of maintenance cupboard. I smiled at him, but really, I felt betrayed that he was not some form of mythical sea creature.  (Both 'Pirates of the Caribbean: at World's End' and 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader' have been on HBO recently. My perception of reality may in some ways be altered by the fiction I consume.)

All this relaxation infinity nonsense couldn't be kept up for long so, prancing around and wiggling my hips like a dog waiting to be thrown a stick, I asked the De Tang Clan who wanted to go and play. Play. Play. Play.  Primary 1, who will now be known as Risk Or Death, and whose Big Birthday it is this Sunday, hence the Weekend of Luxury, decided that sea kayaking sounded like the playtime activity of choice.

Sea kayaking! Li Hi!

This sounded like the best and most fun idea of all time ever, so off we frolicked down the private beach, singing the Baywatch theme tune. Alarm bells began ringing through the Li Hi fog when the volume of the waves pounding mercilessly against the long-suffering sand seemed to be somehow amplified the closer we got to the sea. The red flags dotted along the beach also made me a little nervous as did Risk or Death's snorting in the face of the offer of a life jacket. 

"Life jacket?" she scoffed, like a fifteen-year-old cheerleader of whom we are all afraid, "I am not wearing a life jacket."

(Disclaimer: none of us are afraid of Risk or Death.  She is way too maternal.)

Luckily,  PETA and I were those pale-looking nerds at school who pulled their socks up to their knees and wanted to play women's rugby and didn't have the social skills to say no to our parents telling us to roll our skirts down.  So we took the life jackets, gratefully because as adults, we now have a certain fondness for Life as a concept.

The following conversation with a member of Vietnamese staff from the hotel was the icing on the Birthday Cake of Warning that we continued to ignore:

Risk or Death: we can take the kayaks?
Vietnamese Staff: uh... it is vey dangerous...
Me: we can charge it to our room.
VS: of course.
RoD: great! Emma, are you alright in the single kayak?
VS: uh... the sea...
RoD: it's fine!

The Vietnamese are, as a peoples, incredibly willing to help each other out and please you and will go to great lengths to see that you are happy, even when you haven't asked them to, so this dude's reluctance was a bit of a hint.

It was in a floaty sort of dream then, that I found myself dragging a kayak down to an angry set of waves, urged on by a blindly confident Risk Or Death who assured us all that she did this sort of thing all the time in Cornwall. Could it be, I wondered, that I had stumbled across someone who was more stubbornly insane than even myself?  Did she have even more voices in her head than me? Did she have the happy voice that hummed merrily as destruction approached?

Thankfully, the leggy Dutch manager who had spoken to us earlier came sprinting down the beach at this point, arms outstretched, desperately trying to reach us before it was too late.

"I've just... got off... the phone... with my management," she panted, doubled over, "and I'm very sorry, but we cannot let you kayak today."

PETA, The Hare and I visibly slumped in relief. Risk Or Death pouted in disappointment. It was her birthday, after all and if she wanted to kill us all by smashing our heads open on the ocean floor, was that not her anniversary right? It was her birthday and she'd die if she wanted to.

"Can't we even swim?" she asked, petulantly.

The Vietnamese staff began to nod, eager to win back some sort of customer service points, but PETA, The Hare and I had already begun dragging kayaks back up the beach. Refusing to walk away empty handed, Risk Or Death then simply walked into the sea and dived into the nearest Wave of Destruction.

"Risk Or Death...?" I called.

"Risk Or Death!"

"RISK OR DEATH!"

Time stopped and, as is her wont, PETA froze, with her gammy shoulder and her mouth open like some broken-stringed muppet. Half a second, a whole second - we all thought, "Well, at least she died happy and full of eggs royale. It was nice knowing her."  A second and a half...

Maybe it wasn't even that long, but up she bobbed and waded her way out of the water, finally satisfied that today she had Risked but not Died.

"Yeah," she said, stumbling slightly, "Pretty strong. Maybe we'll go tomorrow." And then, to the Vietnamese Staff: "We go tomorrow?"

Yes, the eager man nods. Tomorrow.

Smug Treadmill Haters

Alright you Smug Treadmill Haters.  I know you're out there.  I know you're smirking to yourself as you run on roads that bypass gyms where the treadmills sit in the window so everyone in the outside world can see them thinking, 'that's not real running; those poor bubble-wrapped saps won't know what's hit them when they get into the real world of half marathons in the heat and the humidity of Angkor Wat.'

You were right.

I admit it.

At first, when you all kept knowingly telling me that I wouldn't be able to run as fast outside as I could in an air-conditioned gym, I thought, 'hey, guys, have you been to my "air-conditioned" gym?  There are gaps in the panes of glass that separate the cardio machines from the weights sauna and the heat creeps in and in two minutes I am drenching the display of the treadmill with torrents of my own sweat.'  Then when you said, 'your biggest challenge will be the humidity and the heat when you're running', I snorted and turned my nose up at you mist-ridden Limeys and called across Asia and Europe, 'Hey!  I've acclimatised!  I don't even break a sweat until it hits 33 degrees, and most days I prance around happily in jeans in 32.  I'm like one of those French girls you see in the south of France who rock about in leather jackets when any normal person would be melting in a bikini and desperately seeking shade.'

I take it back.  I take it all back.

Today, I went for a run.  Outside.  Outside in the terrible, terrible heat.  It was 28 degrees.  I managed 3.47miles (5.6k) in about 45 minutes, stopping four times for two stitches, and at one point holding my stomach in case I vommed into the middle of the road.  Running in the heat is hard.  Luckily, I had been persuaded into this, and was accompanied by PE Teacher B, who will now be known as The Hare.  Is this the same PE Teacher B who took advantage of a drunken Emma and in her own over-excited and intoxicated tones piped up her endearingly Yorkshire voice to yell across a bar, 'Yeah, Emma, let's do it!  It'll be a raaight laff!'  I hear you ask?  Yes.  Yes it is.

I don't hold it against her though, because running behind The Hare is always a joy, even when I am plodding along like a wrinkly-necked tortoise, waiting for the inevitable heart-attack to hit me.  The Hare has long, striding legs and a bouncy, joyful running style that I gaze at enviously.  Her pony-tail swish swishes back and forth and she has a headband that keeps any stray strands out of her eyes so that she always looks together and with it and less sweaty than other people around her.  The minute I start sweating, my hair has a hula party and frizzes up into a genetically illogical afro.  To counter this, I bought a slightly less cool head band, which is in fact a child's school Alice band, to try to emulate her and keep the frizz at bay.  I hope she noticed and liked me more for it.

I don't know if she was just being kind, but during this 3.47miles of death, The Hare also stopped a number of times 'to stretch'.  Really, she just didn't want to be the one held accountable for me if I were to fall, twitching into the road, and so thought she'd keep a keen eye on me.  When we reached the home straight, I gallantly gasped, 'It's fine!  Go on without me!' adding breathlessly, 'just... different... paces...' to try and maintain an outward projection of dignity.  As if I had planned to be running this slowly all along.  At this point, The Hare sprinted off quite happily back to our air-conditioned gym.

I arrived, some three hours later, feeling actually quite proud of my achievement through the stabbing pains in my lungs and stomach: it was hot, yet I had run.  There was a loop, and I had completed it.  I could have given up, but I didn't.  It was slightly depressing, therefore, when I was greeted with this:

Please note the coconut from which The Hare drinks: the service in our gym is not fast.  It would have taken her a good eight to ten minutes to sort herself out with one of these.

I, on the other hand, was left to gasp desperately at the ice water that the establishment gracefully provide for those who cannot articulate anything more advanced due to fatigue, exhaustion and sweat.  I looked something like this:

Do you like my Alice band?

I may actually, genuinely die in Angkor Wat.

In other news, I am becoming a whizz on Little Moto.  Apart from today after school, I got myself stuck in the bike shed because I'd parked in a tight spot and then been parked in either side and couldn't wheel it out to turn it around.  After hefting and heaving, staining my trousers (the ones that had blue dye bleed into them last week) with oil, pushing another person's bike over and picking it up again in a panic, I had to admit defeat and, hands on hips, simply stared, perplexed at the situation until a tall, delightful science teacher came out of the school building.

Me: (bleating) Um... One Who Has Slight Resemblance to Eddie Redmayne, my bike is stuck.

OWHSRtER: Oh.  Is it?

Me: I don't know what to do.

OWHSRtER: (awkwardly) Er... it's been packed in by those other bikes, hasn't it?

Me: Yes.  Can you help me?

OWHSRtER: (mutely moves the other bikes and wheels my bike out for me)

Me: (meekly) Thank you.

OWHSRtER: (in a simple manner) That was quite funny, wasn't it?

Hahahahaha!  I honestly do think that other people are far weirder and more amusing than I am.

So.  I'm afraid it's just daily Saigon Life Anecdotes until next weekend when I go to Nachang.  I hope nobody minds essentially reading my odd little mind until a more interesting story comes up.

Ooh, today I saw a man riding a moped with one hand, and holding a small dog with the other.  Even the dogs are sensible in Vietnam.  I bet a British dog would have struggled, caused the man to crash his moped, jumped away from the accident scene only to be smushed by another passing moped.  Not in Vietnam.  In Vietnam the dogs know where it's at.

Dung Lai!

Omg, it's been like, for ages since I blogged.  Huge apologies for the anticipation with which you must have checked every day, sometimes twice a day for news and updates.  I know how dedicated you all are.  How?  Because even Bridget Clay has now figured out how to comment, the day before she herself hits SE Asia to partay partay in true noodle and chopstick style.

Laura, I have lost you.  Whatever you're doing better be more interesting than me flying along a Vietnamese back road on a barely stable, two-wheeled vehicle.

Many of you have asked in private and highly confidential emails whether I am doing any work at all whilst I'm out here as all my blogs are about diving and mopeds.  I am, in fact, doing lots of work between the hours of 7am-6pm on weekdays.  I stop for cake at break and baguettes at lunch and today I had coffee which made me feel strange for the rest of the day.  However, it's not advisable to blog about your workplace in case the Professional Police catch up with you and sue you for slander and libel and stuff so I shall just ask you to assume the following three Universal Truths:

1. The children are angelic.
2. The class sizes are small.
3. The staff are friendly.

In teacher terms, this is paradise, so any other issues that may or may not arise are generally eclipsed by the blinding glow of all-round goodness and productiveness.

A small anecdote, however: today I worked out a very good deal.  I teach a very small year 8 Extra English class.  These students began the term very shy, but we all soon realised that we are kindred spirits in craziness.  I play them music to get them to talk to each other, they make hilarious mistakes when they misunderstand what's going on in their mainstream English lessons, they double check tenses with me, I correct them in their speaking and writing, and I make them draw pictures for all their vocabulary.  We have an overall lovely and pleasant time.  On Friday we are going to the library, all bakers dozen of us (including me) to pick a book to create a book blog on to practice our past tense.

Sitting in a taxi at the weekend, and having sat in taxis for the last five weeks, frustratingly indicating with my hands where I wanted the taxi driver to go, and on one occasion drawing a picture of the highway and indicating with arrows, I suddenly realised that I was completely neglecting an untapped resource of Vietnamese children who can actually help me to do something about this for free.  So today, I practiced my following key phrases (spelled phonetically) with my Extra English kiddies :

- Well fi - turn right
- Well ji - turn left
- Dee tang - straight on
- Cam uhn - thank you
- Shin ciao - hello
- Sin loi - sorry

And learnt 'Yung lai' - stop!  It's actually spelled 'Dung lai' or something like that, but I will not remember it unless I internalise it in a visual way.  They laughed at my pronunciation, but I don't know if this is a good thing or not.  I've told them that they will have to test me every week like I test them.  The girls (who love to mark each other in coloured pens) seem delighted by this.

In tourist news, I spent my Saturday morning at the Cu Chi Tunnels a little outside Saigon.  This is where the clever Viet Cong hid from American soldiers during the war: in a series of tiny, claustrophobic tunnels with occasional cooking, sleeping and hospital chambers.  Even though it is panic-attack inducing to scramble through them, it was really quite a sensible idea at the time because the earth that the tunnels are dug into is predominantly clay so the more the Americans bombed the area, the harder and more protective the soil became to the people in the tunnels.

As an aside, there are a lot of sensible things that the Vietnamese do: they are really quite a sensible peoples. For example, I got my hair cut the other day and instead of having those horrible chair-basins where you end up with a dislocated spine because you have to lean your head back for ages whilst the hairdresser shampoos you, the Vietnamese have beds that lead into basins so you're lying down whilst your hair is being washed and it doesn't hurt at all!  Genius!  Also, in Vietnam, if you're on your moped and it starts to rain (it does this a lot), instead of motoring on because they're British and think this is the only possible option, they simple pull over onto the side of the highway in droves, unpack their big plastic ponchos, put them on, and then carry on.  I watched them enviously on Tuesday as my new blue shirt from the wonderful Saigon Cheap Square Market began to bleed into my tan trousers, but I didn't have the balls to pull over on the highway.  I barely have the balls to ride on the highway.  I only get through it by drifting around very slowly and repeating to myself, 'They can see you.  They know what they're doing.  They can see you.'  It's comforting.

Anyway, there are some very amusing photos on Facebook of me on a tank, and of me in a tunnel looking through my legs and being photographed by a good looking Chilean boy.  Alas and alack, none of these photos were taken by me so I can't post them on here.

I will, however, endeavour to steal some of these from my new pals to include post-blog publication.  I'd like to promise some moped-in-action photos, but that would be definite suicide.  All and both hands must stay fixed on the controls at all point, with knuckles turning slowly white through tension and fear.

Hello Moto!

Sorry to blog again so quickly, but Exciting Events occur thick and fast in the life of one who is so Li Hi.

Firstly, I ran 3.8 miles (kind of) this evening in about 40 minutes (ish), which demonstrates Great Progress in the Impossible Build Up to Angkor Wat.  Tomorrow, if my legs have not fallen off, I will run 4 miles.  I will. I will.

Also, I got to the gym today riding my very own new toy.  Please may I introduce to you, Little Moto:

Little Moto is hired from a very relaxed American man who English Teacher A thinks is constantly high on drugs.  I think he just has a calm aura and does not have to deal with the rat race of modern Western society.  I too shall return to the UK with a vague, glazed look in my eyes and a general approval of most things and nonchalant shrug of the shoulders in response to any crisis.

Little Moto has also been sitting in his basement for the last two weeks, and has been taken for run arounds circling my apartment block.  I have only used third gear (there are four), and on one occasion panicked and reacted by accelerating onto a grass verge.  Lolz!  Of course, therefore, I thought it was definitely a good idea to take it out into this kind of traffic this evening:

This isn't even a particularly stressful image, but it's the best I've got.  Maybe this is for the best because the next question is, hands up if you fear for my personal safety right now?  Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  I do!  But don't worry: I'm wearing a helmet which means I'm ensured against all evils, and the healthcare I have here is like staying in a 5 star hotel.

Luckily, I also had the chivalry of ETA who agreed to let me pootle along behind him to the gym.  He was a true knight in shining armour: he even took me to the petrol station and stopped by the side of the road whenever he thought he'd lost me, and gave me useful hints and tips at key moments like, "When we cross this part of the HIGHWAY OF DEATH we have very little road to get over to the left, but just go for it, and everyone will go around you."  The general consensus is that as long as you don't make any sudden movements or ride too fast, everyone will go around you, which will be my Rule of Thumb from now on.

HOWEVER on the way home (in the dark, on the HIGHWAY OF DEATH), some fool (Vietnamese drivers are, generally incredibly sensible and aware, despite what might seem to us ignorant Westerners to be complete and utter chaos) cut up a dry bamboo wagon (the latest and flashiest mode of transport in Vietnam) and the poor bamboo driver came smashing to the ground and all his bamboo was flung across the road.  The scooter couple also came off their moped and I had to swerve around them, using all my spidey sense to avoid collision.  Of course, my spidey sense is a sharp, honed instrument of death-avoidance and I zipped by unscathed.  Both ETA and I stopped because we are British and began to go back to see if everyone was alright, but then a traffic policeman rocked up and we had to run away because traffic policemen know that we don't understand them or, essentially, the exact Vietnamese Green Cross Code, and explain kindly to us that there is a fine for being a white person driving a moped, and you have to reach into your bribe purse and pull out the 'only money you have on you', and ask, apologetically how much the fine is.  It seems tough, but those traffic police have to get their kicks somehow.

Mummy, Daddy, if it helps, you can imagine that none of this is happening.

Are you for scuba?

Some of you may remember this event in my life with fondness:

If not, please do catch up with every intimate detail of my biography here: http://emmadoessouthamerica.blogspot.com/2009/10/puerto-madryn-mark-ii.html

I am very pleased to inform you that, whilst in Hoi An this weekend, such an event was recreated thanks to the lovely people at Blue Coral Diving, and a little encouragement from Primary A who is a diving enthusiast/nazi who travels around with little cards with fish on them and won't let you dive less than 24 hours before a flight because it's a rule or something.  Matt and Pete, if you ever read this: I think you would all get along and be fish friends together.

As a small preface, this Sunday was Freedom Day in Vietnam.  Now as the Vietnamese have been screwed over by some heavyweight superpowers through the years, I'm not entirely sure who they are celebrating freedom from, but it's probably safe to say they are celebrating their liberty from all of them.  They do this with loud, public karaoke outside your hotel window, school parades with dancing and a three day weekend.  Holidays don't happen often in Vietnam, but they do happen quite often in the school calendar.  Sadly for us, it means that having just returned to work and gotten used to wearing restrictive school shoes instead of carefree, wild flip flops, we have now been duped into thinking we are on holiday again.  Pretty much every person in our party reverted to Gap Yah mind frame and dug out their bracelets, anklets, wacky baggy pants, got sunburned and enjoyed the feel of saltwater in their hair for longer than was necessary.

I celebrated my long lost traveler by booking myself onto a day's worth of diving and going out to the exotic Cham Islands in the middle of the South China Sea (some of the cooler people among you may have enjoyed Extreme Rubber Ringing in the exact same sea) with the intention of snorkeling (it was cheaper).  When I got onto the boat though, a mixture of sea sickness and desire to be as Li Hi as all the other casual Canadian/Malaysian/Vietnamese people around me forced me to sidle up to the dive master and ask for an upgrade to a Discovery Dive.  We all agree that this sounds a bit like a nursery school swim lesson, but trust me, it is heap way cooler than that, even if the dive master does essentially keep you on the underwater equivalent of baby reins for the whole time.

After puking over the side of the boat (yum!) I met my lovely dive master, Jess, whose first question was 'Anglais or Francais?'  Being a complete show off, I smirked smugly, looked around me to check everyone was watching and said 'Les deux, comme tu veux' chuffed with myself for having persevered with French grammar for the last fourteen years in order to achieve this very moment, whereupon Jess breathed a sigh of relief and, in French, said, 'Thank God, my English is awful.'  What I did not consider was the fact that once again, every life saving instruction about jumping into the open sea weighted down by oxygen tanks and metal belts and being only able to manoeuvre myself like a pregnant whale in flippers was going to be delivered to me in a foreign language.  Luckily, my French is a heck of a lot better than my Spanish was when Mathias threw me into the freezing ocean.

Once in the water, Jess and I fulfilled the intentions of the Discovery Dive by Discovering!  (We made finger paint art about it later after nap and toilet time).  With outstretched, searching four-year-old sticky fingers, I swam after lion fish for which there is a special hand sign, and orange banded coral fish for which there is not, and pennant coral fish and flute fish and blue starfish and tiny bright blue ones and black and white stripey ones that I can't find on Google to name properly.  The coral fingers did the swoopy wavy thing that was so hypnotic that I found myself trying to mimic it with my hands as I flippered towards it before remembering that another human being could see me and I was releasing the strange thoughts from inside my mind through the medium of body language.  I also got stung about a gazillion times by tiny jellyfish.  Pesky jellyfish.

The rest of the weekend was spent getting shoes made, learning to cook Vietnamese food, eating Vietnamese food, taking riverboat trips, smashing ceramic pots with blindfolds on, taking photos of lanterns, taking photos of other people whilst they were sleeping and laughing at PETA who had a little accident that she can't remember and ended up in hospital with a dislocated clavicle.  Obviously this isn't funny.  Except that it is a little bit funny.  I will let her tell you the story once her insurance is cleared.

Hoi An, by the way, is famous for tailors and cobblers.  Vietnam is famous for having women with tiny feet, and therefore shops with very small shoes in them.  Every shop assistant/market yeller I have asked to find me an appropriately sized pair of shoes has laughed at me and told me I am a 'vey big laydee!' before saying something to their friend and laughing some more.  I resent this.  I am not a vey big laydee.  I am actually quite petite.  And it is rude to talk about people in a completely incomprehensible language when they're standing right in front of you staring sadly at their kangaroo feet.  Thankfully, the laydees in Hoi An draw around your enormous boat feet on a piece of paper in order to make sure the shoes they knock up for you in 36 hours fit perfectly and stink of leather and glue.  I am quite pleased with my purchases (I picked the colours and the materials myself and everything) and will be returning just before Christmas with a list of presents for anyone who wants to take the time to give me the measurements of their entire bodies.  They don't just make shoes there.  They make everything.  Family: you are obliged to give me your measurements, otherwise you will not be getting noodles and fish sauce for Christmas.

Training for the Angkor Wat half marathon of death will continue this week with School Night Gym Nights, Wednesday Pilates of Pain, Weekend Swimming, and Lunch Time Sports Psychology Pep Talks.  I shall keep you updated.

A gem for any of you who have ever seen 'Along Came Polly':

If you are for scuba, then I am a pea!