Vietnam.  More than any other country I’ve wanted, nay, needed to come here.  And so far it’s nothing like what I expected.

There’s all the obvious reasons to come to Vietnam right now.  The food is incredible, the price of living is very, very low to a westerner (a beer, my international barometer of cost, run about $0.50 – $1.50 here).  It is not overcome with tourism like Thailand which gives you an opportunity to have real experiences in a truly developing country. 

Or at least that’s the hope.  And for many of the travelers I’ve met thus far those are exactly the reasons they’ve come here.  But my reasons are more cloudy.  In all honesty, I’m not even sure I understand them.

The last few months I’ve been challenged like I never have before.  And truth to tell I haven’t felt that I’ve lived up to them.  I launched my website (www.thesacrev.com) in October and yet have struggled to find the long-term vision of the site after making so many pivots before launch.  Additionally, my role at my job has has taken on a more intricate, much larger leadership role.  Which begs the question for me, what does true leadership look like? 

What I needed, I realized, would be impossible to accomplish at home..  I needed to put distance between myself and others and re-learn the things I had gained from my first time living abroad in Amsterdam: who am I, at my core?  What do I believe in?  What drives me in this life?

Buckminster Fuller has a quote that I’ve always come back to : “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

So this trip has become a journey for me, almost a quest, to continue to develop and define leadership.  Go to a country where no one knows your name or speaks your language and see what comes of it.  How do you act?  How are you perceived by others? Adapt, refine, impact.

So that’s the biggest reason I’ve gone to the other side of the world for a month.  But in looking for where to go I realized there was one spot on the map that intrigued me more than any other.

The Vietnam War (or as it’s called here, the American War or the War for Independence) has always fascinated me.  Even in middle school when I first learned about the war itself I had questions.  Unlike other wars I’d studied Vietnam had no clear start date.  Then it became a question of why had we escalated the war in the first place? Or the second place? Or the third place?

Then it was the sheer amount of presidents involved in the conflict: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.  Then it was the foreign policy theories behind the justification for the war (Domino Theory chief among them).  But that theory was based on Eastern European countries which were falling quickly to the influence of the USSR.  Why would a theory that worked in Eastern Europe, a region that has historically always been heavily influenced by Russia, work for South East Asia, a region with histories of shared empires and religious interconnectivity yet a region of divided nationalities and cultures

I went to college to help make sense of this issue.  I plowed through ream after ream of correspondences trying to understand the escalation process.  I wrote an essay on the ramifications of a single unknown Foreign Assistance Act that turned off funding for the war.  I wrote paper after paper on the attrition/guerilla warfare strategies of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese versus the conventional warfare and aerial bombardments of the US.  And every time I wrote or researched I became more and more confused on a subject that seemingly had no clear start date, no clear end date, and no real reason or justification for happening in the first place.

Vietnams history and the early history of the US are shockingly similar.  Both countries took on the largest military in the world at the time (the British and the US respectively) and came out with an independent and unified country.  The true underdog stories of nation building.

I’ve learned about the war in Vietnam on two contingents, hoping to get more unbiased versions of the same events.  But as time went on I knew that the only place I could really get the answers I was looking for, the only place that would help fill in the other side of the story was, of course, Vietnam itself.

Ah, but my fine yet cynical reader, you’re thinning “but Brian, why do you care?  This all happened well before you were born.  What does it matter?”

I don’t know why it matters to me so much but in a very real and personal way I feel a responsibility to be here.  In the same way that I believe the first step to bettering yourself is to admit your own faults so you can fix them, I believe that the role of a good citizen is to recognize the mistakes of their country in the past.  Ensuring history doesn’t repeat itself is, in my mind, the goal of any generation preparing to take over the reins from the previous one.

So make no mistake – I’ll be having fun here.  My little time I’ve spent in this country has only highlighted that.  But I’m looking for something here too.  I’m not sure what or what it will mean to me when I find it.  But I, like so many others, have come to Southeast Asia in search of some form of enlightenment.

The plane begins it’s initial descent. 

All around you is pitch black water.  You know you’re losing altitude but at the same time you can’t see anything below or around you.  Small lights suddenly begin popping into place – small boats, you realize, anchored well out of reach of the islands. 

It starts with one, then two, then four.  Burnt orange lights dance on the pitch black water but still you can’t see anything: even a glow of light pollution would put your mind at ease at this point.

Meanwhile, fog runs off the wing in sheets as larger boats begin to pop into existence.  “How far are you from the city?” you can’t help but ask yourself.

This sense of unease, this eery calm stays with you until you see the first runway jutting out into the water.  Lights flash to give planes their landing patterns and you suddenly realize the vastness of the place you’ve entered.  Your massive plane is simply a dot on the canvas that is Hong Kong International Airport.

The doors open and everything is sticky. 

Jumping in a cab, that feeling of eeriness returns as you get a first glimpse of the outside world, the world you just waited 14 hours on a plane for.

That burnt orange glow surrounds everything, the haze from the humidity bouncing off the strange lights used for standard illumination.  As you turn out of the airport, you get your first view of the architecture.

Fourteen towers, all at least 50 stories high, push themselves int the sky surrounded by that eerie orange haze.  What strikes you is not their height, however, but their width – each tower stands close to the next one but is thin, thinner than any set of buildings you’ve seen before.  You realize each floor is a single apartment.  They push themselves into the sky and all you can think of are a pianist’s long, slender fingers reaching out to grab the keys.

The first bridge comes out of nowhere.  Long and stout, the sides disappear into the same dark waters that you saw from the plane.  You turn a corner and a very different Hong Kong awaits you.

Ports.  Ports and docks as far as the eye can see all once again covered in an alien orange haze that makes this feel less like a maritime scene on Earth and more like a launching of the spaceships on Mars.  You’re not in Kansas anymore.

Tunnel.

The second island opens up in front of you as you leave the first tunnel with more and more of those thin skyscrapers, slowly becoming closer and closer together.  The scenes now playing out before you remind you of LA: a group of palm trees swaying in the wind in front of a Louis Vuitton sign, a motorcycle club dashing by in neon colors, a Porsche Carrera S driven by a very, very young man.

Tunnel.

Then the real Hong Kong is in front of you.

Everything you thought you knew from what you’d seen before is false.  The towers crowded together former blocks upon blocks of skyscrapers, each different and yet each looking like a master pianists hands prepared to play upon the sky.  You hit the main roads and people begin to appear, walking the streets, popping into restaurants.  Everything is familiar and yet everything is not either.

You turn a corner down the back streets and the first scent hits you, something wonderful being made down an alley.  A few blocks up and there’s another scent, something cooking in it’s own fat, and then another, something sweeter thats been baked to perfection.  That saying about discovering Hong Kong through your nose makes sense now.

More turns, more streets, faster now, until suddenly, and without warning you’ve arrived at your hotel.  Everywhere the haze is still with you, people walk up and down the streets and yet you notice one thing that’s missing from a city landscape. 

That hum that you’ve come to expect is not here.  It’s so very quiet here.  And you’re left remembering that feeling of eery calm you landed with.

You’ve arrived in Hong Kong.

——

Hong Kong was both everything I expected and none of what I expected.  Both China and not of it.

I’d been wanting to come here for awhile, both from the stories I’d heard from a friend who used to live here and from the food stories of fellow travelers.  But if I’m honest there was really only one reason I had come to Hong Kong – the search for the golden goose.

You’ve seen pictures.  A beautiful, trussed up bird with perfectly cooked golden brown skin hanging from a hook in a window.  It’s one of the oldest recipes in a country consistently distancing itself from it’s traditional cuisine. 

So yes, I’d come to Hong Kong really to just eat one thing.  Was that so wrong?  But the goose would have to wait.

I woke up Wednesday morning still jet lagged and popped right out into the city.  I was actually here for work, and would be spending the next few days cooped up in an office.  But I had until mid-afternoon today for my own time.

I had seen a restaurant on my way into the hotel that looked promising. And sure enough it was everything I wanted it to be and better.

Pristine white table cloths? Check.  Waiters who rudely push and point you toward a table in the corner? Check. Not a menu in English and none of the staff speak it either? Check and double check.  Why, you must be sitting down to some traditional Hong Kong Dim Sum! 

Since I couldn’t read the menu I’d walked to my table with my nose, smelling what other tables had.  Once I sat down and had my tea I pointed at the tables whose food I wanted.  Worked beautifully. 

My first meal in Hong Kong was a huge success – BBQ pork wrapped in noodles and something I’d never had before.  Congee, a porridge like mixture filled with poached eggs, more pork, fried bread and green onions.  Kinda like if oatmeal and an omelet had a baby.  It was perfect.

One thing I started to notice at my first truly “Asian” meal was the delicate taste profiles of dishes.  Western cuisine puts a heavy emphasis on perfectly seasoned items, aka salt, and knowing how much enhances and how much spoils.  While there is salt in the dishes in Asia, it’s far less which makes the flavors initially seem bland in comparison.

In reality, however, the flavors are just more subtle but often even more complex.Eating, in some ways, becomes a trial in patience.

From there I went back to the hotel to get actual pay-the-bills work done before heading into the office.  Somewhere on my way back I noticed the weather.  Not so much noticed it as began swimming in it.  I don’t deal well with humidity (it’s the California in me) and by the time I made the walk back to the hotel I was, well, soaked. 

Considering I had brought mostly winter clothes from my previous three weeks of travel around the US, this was a bit of a problem.  If Hong Kong was this bad, then how bad would Vietnam be?

But that, as I often say, was a problem for future Brian.

—-

After a few hours of work it was lunch time.  Right across from my hotel I’d seen a little dim sum place that I fancied.  Popping in was the right call as a kindly old Chinese grandmother ushered me in, sat me down and proceeded to order for me.  Nothing too crazy for dim sum: two fish and pork dim sums, one wrapped in noodle the other in a bun.  I nearly told her I was stuffed from the first two but she insisted on the third.  God I’m glad I didn’t say no.

What came out next surprised me: wrapped in a huge tea life was baked rice with soft chicken inside it all.  Kinda like a casserole. But the cooking of it all is absolutely genius: the moisture of the tea leaf cooks the rice, which then helps to keep the chicken moist.  Incredible.  Delicious.  Enter food coma.

And did I mention Hong Kong is relatively cheap for Americans?  Both meals that day cost me less than $14.  Together.  Not too shabby…

—-

I was staying in the mostly residential neighborhood of Sheung Wan, and I was one of very few westerners in the neighborhood.  I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but the longer I spent in HK, the odder that was.

Hong Kong began as a fishing village, salt production site and even a pirate haven (the city is home to over 260 islands) before the British as a trading post in the 1800’s, eventually growing to the most important port outside of London for the Sun-Never-Sets Empire.  As time has gone on, and the city has changed hands multiple times it has retained it’s international population.

Where the Brits are still very established is the business culture.  Walking into any of the biggest companies in the city and you’ll find a very British hierarchical system, that is to say an incredibly flat command structure.  And yet weaved through it is the traditional and somewhat rigid Chinese business laws: everyone shows cards facing towards the recipient with a small bow and pause to read the cards.

Suffice it to say it makes for an interesting business trip.  And so, after sucking all this in in one afternoon’s work, I was once again famished.  Meal time number three I believe?

I’d been given a recommendation by a friend of a place I just “had to try”, usually a good sign.  The style was Yakatori, or for those of you unlucky enough to have not had it, chicken on a stick.  It sounds so simple but as with all things Japanese simple can be deceptive.

Unfortunately it was located in SoHo.  Which meant a pretty decent uphill climb from the Central neighborhood office I was at.

Which brings me to my next transition – Hong Kong Island is built on a bit of a hill.  And the whole city wraps around and spirals up it’s face.

How tall? Oh just 1818 ft.  Did I mention the city also has escalators built into the side of the mountain?

Sadly, I couldn’t find any of those and hiked it up the mountainside.  Along the way I stopped to take in the sights…

…or to catch my breath.  You’ll never know really.

When I got to the restaurant I was shocked.  Clean, modern interior.  Nearly all European faces.  And most odd of all, EVERYONE had American or Canadian accents.

Turns out, Brits, are no longer the predominant “other” citizens as I had assumed.  They are fifth, after Canadians, Mainland Chinese (yes Canadians beat out mainland China in order of expats in the country) and then the good ‘ole US of A. Traveling through Europe, I’ll hear only a few American accents throughout my day.    In Hong Kong there wasn’t a single time I walked down the street where I didn’t hear at least one.

So there I was surrounded by Americans.  Americans from Portland no less – they even had Stumptown coffee on drip available.

What is this city?

The food, however, was exquisite: First up, some chicken neck please.  Then the oysters (sometimes referred to as the chef’s portion), then the skin, then a special off the menu option called “The Meatball” that everyone said I had to try. 

It was all the best cuts of the chicken.  Thigh meat, oysters, and a few “special” portions they wouldn’t share.  I didn’t care, I was in heaven.

—-

Walking back meant going downhill, which was well appreciated.  On the way back down I saw the mostly European/N.American neighborhood of Soho disappear into the more residential, mostly Hong Kong and Chinese neighborhoods.  The city is still fairly broken up into ethnic districts, but not for racial, or more correctly, for racist, reasons.  But money does seem to be a huge part of it.  The richer you are the further up the hill you can be.  This would be proven a bit later on.

The next few days went by in a blur, catered meals in meeting rooms with some beers amongst work colleagues.  One other thing I will say about businessman in Hong Kong, the stereotype of them hard drinking after work is very, very true.

Saturday was also a bit boring as I caught up on the work I had neglected that week at home.  The hours strolled by in my tiny Hong Kong hotel room as I responded to email after email.  I suddenly realized I’d never finish it before dinner, which suddenly reminded me.

THE GOOSE.

I had (nearly) forgotten about it.  I rushed down the stairs to the hotel lobby where I asked all of the staff their favorite place in the area for goose.  It was nearly a tie until two managers popped in to see why I had taken over the lobby for some off-the-cuff voting action, at which point they both smiled and pointedly pushed me towards…the very first restaurant I had gone to.

Turns out, this place was a bit of a stable in the neighborhood.  A bit more pricey than others around but let’s put it like this: if your family was coming and visiting from out of town you’d take them here.  in fact, the place was packed with families that night.

My friendly hotel lobby workers had given me a note in Cantonese with exactly what I wanted.  Half roasted goose, split down the middle and a small appetizer of shrimp dim sum.  While I was waiting for the order I popped into a grocery store next door and grabbed a large Asahi to wash it down with, a purchase that cost me a total of $1.20.

The goose came out still hot.  I raced back to my hotel and popped it in front of me.  I opened up my Asahi and prepared my tastebuds for what was to come.

It wasn’t good.

It was divine.

In fact, I’m going to keep the rest of that night to myself.  Suffice it to say that goose ranks as one of my top five meals of all time, even in a small hotel room in Hong Kong.

—-

My last day in the city I only had a few hours left to me.  I had to be on a flight at 3pm to Vietnam, but this gave me just enough time to do the one touristy thing I had been hoping for.  Time to head to the peak.  Victoria Peak, that is.

I honestly wish I could have hiked it.  It’s about 2 hours door to door from my hotel, but that was going to cut it too tight.  So I opted for the 30 min cab ride. 

I mentioned earlier that I thought that the more affluent Hong Kongese might live on the Peak.  A few minutes into my drive and I was proven right.  Huge mansions popped out of the hill in front of you, with gorgeous driveways and car houses located above or below the house itself.  It reminded me of La Jolla in San Diego.

But the views.  Every time we hit a curve in the road another fantastic view hit me for a half second before it was covered in foliage.  Higher and higher we went up the hill before a huge complex appeared before me.  We’d reached the Peak.

I realized pretty quickly that, while there was a tourist viewing station, it was going to cost money.  About $15 I learned later.  While that just wasn’t going to do.

I spotted a private road and began my hike.  I marched up as far as I could go, then found a private staircase and hiked up some more.  Where I was promptly met with a disgruntled security guard.

A smile, a “confused tourist look”, a brief conversation and about $5 later I got this view all to myself:

Wandering back down the hill I became pensive.  It hadn’t really hit me yet that I’d be spending my next month or so in another hemisphere, the vast majority of which in what many have told me is a “third world country”.  I still wasn’t yet sure what I was hoping to gain from it all.

With about 30 mins of free time left to me I popped into a diner I had been told about earlier that week. I wanted a small bite to eat (I was still pretty full from the goose) and a beer before I was on my way.

On the patio outside that overlooked the whole southern part of the island, mostly dense vegetation and jungle, I realized that I was taking a very old travelers path.  I was using Hong Kong as so many others had, as my jumping off point into the rest of Asia.  This would be my last bastion of “civilization” until I landed in Australia a month or so from now.

And so I sipped my beer and ruminated on what was to come.

—-

I really wish that was the end of it.

The writer in me wants to stop here and pretend it all ended happy and clear-headed.  But that’s just not the way of the world.

Perched on my shelf on top of the world, I had decided I would get the beer and a single order of salmon ngiri to round out my trip.  Just enough to last me until I got to Ho Chi Minh City.

When the waiter came over I made my order.  He scoffed and told me:

“If you really want some good salmon, you have to order the bagel with lox.  It’s real Scottish salmon.”

“But I’ve had Scottish salmon”

“Not like this you haven’t.  They loaded it in just this morning, fresh.  I watched it come in.”

I was struggling.  On the one hand, the guy was genuinely excited about the Scottish salmon.  That much was clear.  On the other, it was more than double what I had originally wanted to spend.

In the end, however, my “always eat the boiled puppy heads” philosophy won out.  I ordered the lox.

It could not have been worse.

The salmon wasn’t the problem, although it was a bit slimy.  Still, my brother makes the best smoked salmon in the world so I’m biased on that.

The problem was the bagel.  It was totally and completely stale.  You had to chew it 100 times to make it edible.  And when the waiter came back over, I realized the truth.

He was totally and completely excited for it.  I couldn’t even be mad at him.  He truly loved the salmon on this abomination of a bagel.  Maybe he’d never had  a bagel before, maybe he only ate the salmon.  I don’t know.  But I was totally bummed and out a bit more cash than I had wanted to be.

I paid and left.   A bad meal is never what you want to leave a city on, but that’s just what it had to be.  I made it to the airport with time to spare and got lost in the seething metropolis that was Hong Kong International once more while Johnny Cash’s version of Further On Up the Road played in my ears.

—

I absolutely fell in love with Hong Kong.  It’s an incredibly approachable city, with fun and welcoming people.  Should you go? Yes.  I’ll take it even a step further and say if you ever get a chance to live there, take it.

But for those of you up on current events you might be saying “isn’t there some protests going on there?  Why aren’t you mentioning that?”

I got to see Umbrella Square, walked through it and even chatted with some of those involved with the movement (there aren’t set leaders, but it’s easy to tell the folks who garner the most respect, at least for now).  I was touched by their passion, their belief in the rightness of their cause, and their absolutely incredible commitment to non-violent and peaceful protest.  Some of the conversations I had with them I’ll remember for years to come.  One conversation I will carry to my grave.

But I wont try and explain this movement.  I’ll leave that to those with more perspective of all the moving parts.  For now, I’m just a traveller who packed winter clothes on his trip to Asia.

—-

Places

Stayed: Ramada Hong Kong, 308 Des Voeux Road Central, Hong Kong

Ate:

Star Seafood: 271 Des Voeux Road C, Hong Kong (First Breakfast and THE GOOSE!)

Yardbird: Yakatori, 33 Bridges St, Hong Kong

Note: You’re gonna see this a lot in my Asia posts.  I just don’t have the names to places.  Many street restaurants have names like “Happy Restaurant” and “Sunshine Cafe”.  but that’s not the actual name.  And many of them, especially as we move into Vietnam, don’t have addresses.  So message me if you’d like directions ot some of these places, I’m happy to do what I can.