Adventure, Neology, Photography, Reviews, Writing

The Om-Velt of the Desert

| thetembo
Reading Time: 12 minutes

A desert is a place for mysticism in the dancing shadows of a night fire and appreciation of the grandeur of nature on the trail. So what better companions for a desert trip than Anil Seth’s “A New Science of Consciousness,” on audio, and “An Immense World” by Ed Yong? Seth’s book is a journey into the source and meaning of consciousness. Yong’s book explores the strategies employed by living organisms for processing and making sense of the world. The inner world of an organism and the outer world of the environment confront in the desert, where life is harsh and spectacular.

My purpose for the trip was rather mundane compared to the lofty themes of these two books. I wanted to glimpse the super bloom and catch it on my new camera. The camera has become an extension of me, like a third eye or a third arm. When I hike, I see the world in photo ops, looking for scenes and frames, hunting for subject matter, and checking for patterns and lighting. The camera has become a part of my extended umvelt. The camera extends my visual umvelt to see farther, in more detail, and at different frame rates than my eyes alone can see. 

Umvelt is a great word. Yong explains, “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, and electric and magnetic fields. But every creature can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world … the umvelt is part of the environment an animal can sense and experience – its perceptual world.”

Umvelt is a great word to think of while blowing sand exfoliates my skin and tries to knock me to the ground and blind me despite a protective pair of glasses. Yong dedicates an entire chapter to the unwanted sense of pain, glosses over internal sensations like balance, and instills a new appreciation for the power of human vision in the animal kingdom. I rendered all these sensations more succinctly in a video clip capturing the fury of gusting wind driving razor grains of sand swirling across dunes and pavement. 

My mind automatically partitions the world into photo-worthy scenes and those that are not. But I still take comfort in the fact that sometimes you just have to be there. The camera doesn’t capture the absence of the snow-covered mountains in the obscuring tan haze of the disturbed desert. Or the white-knuckled driving up the I-8 grade with sand-filled gusts pushing the car from one side of the lane to the other while weaving through the traffic of a tractor-trailer on its side, a trailer ripped from the back of a pickup truck, emergency vehicles, and vehicles stopped to assist or wait it out. 

Still, the desert has much to offer in the way of photo-worthy images, especially in this spring of abundant rain. The super bloom has yet to kick in fully, but pixel flowers are everywhere. Pixel flowers are those tiny pinky fingernail-sized flowers that dot the landscape like a Le Grande Jatte pixel painting. Or larger flowers in the distance yet to overgrow into a matte of continuous color. The browns and greens of the verdant desert still dominate, overwhelming both types of pixel flowers unless you are looking for them. 

I found one early super bloom. At the Imperial Dunes, clusters of violet-hued sand verbena carpeted the sand, broken by patches of light and dark green desert shrubs. Or, as ChatGPT more poetically puts it:

“A tapestry of violets, strewn upon the sand, 
Dotted with desert shrubs, verdant and grand, 
The hues of light and dark, a mesmerizing sight, 
A masterpiece of nature, painted with pure delight.”

Even amid a desert spring blooming with life, the rawness of the desert is a great place to immerse in the determined inspiration of nature. Wrinkled green and light-blue tinted mountains are backdrops for washes of desert shrubs like ocotillo, brittlebush, cholla, and the ubiquitous creosote. A bent barrel cactus grows out of the side of a rock wall before twisting sunward. Cholla gardens sparkle in backlit sunlight while sending prickles up and down my arms at memories of pulling their spines from my hand. Optimistic wildflowers stake out a nook in a crag. A lone shrub somehow pokes out of a mountain of sand. Desert tadpoles take advantage of the brief respite from dryness. Life finds a way.

Seth informed me that life is a boundary. He quotes that the better an organism’s model of the world, the better its ability to navigate and survive it. He defines consciousness as the ability to detect differences between the senses and the prediction and respond to them. Modern biology reduces life to the statistical mechanical principle of minimizing free energy (in the thermodynamic meaning of the phrase) required to align the senses and prediction. Or, as Max puts it, “Life is lazy.”

Lazy is relative. The snow geese I saw at the Sony Bono reserve migrate from the farthest reaches of the Arctic to the saltwater flats of the preserve to minimize the free energy of being a snow goose, one of nature’s many diverse solutions to the free energy problem. Their umvelt may include the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field to guide it from the Arctic tundra to the Imperial County desert.

The Costa hummingbird flaps its wings at a frantic 50 beats per second. I don’t think lazy is the right word. Focused, lean, or efficient might be better choices.

The fagonbush is another solution to the free energy problem. Is the common fagonbush focused? It’s a small bush I nearly stepped on in a wash while trying to take some landscape pictures of teddy bear cholla, barrel cacti, and ocotillo on a hillside. The inconspicuous shrub must have an umvelt to perceive the sun and dig its roots deep for water. 

Seth cautions me to distinguish carefully between sentience and intelligence. But I will let the AI explain the difference,

“Yes, there is a difference between sentience and intelligence.

Sentience refers to the ability to experience sensations and perceive the world, including emotions, pain, pleasure, and other subjective experiences. Sentient beings are capable of feeling and conscious experience.

On the other hand, intelligence refers to the ability to learn, reason, solve problems, and adapt to new situations. Intelligent beings can understand and process information and use it to make decisions and take action.

While there may be some overlap between sentience and intelligence, they are distinct concepts. For example, some animals, such as dogs or dolphins, may be considered sentient but not necessarily highly intelligent in problem-solving or cognitive abilities. Conversely, some artificial intelligence systems may be highly intelligent but lack any form of sentience or subjective experience.”

In the above AI-written passages, I take some consolation in the fact that I used my grammar AI to correct my concept AI and that, on some occasions, both are wrong. I take issue with the AI’s contention that dolphins are sentient but not highly intelligent. Technically though, the AI is not wrong: you can consider anything to be sentient but not intelligent. I’m sure a few people came to mind when you read that.

Yong and Seth warn against our limited ability to perceive the world as another creature and against our tendency to anthropomorphize. Our biases divert us from other creatures’ sensations and thought processes. But I wonder if Yong and Seth have over-limited themselves to the animal world of motion because neither attributes perception to plants or fungi. Plants may not appear mobile, but I have a picture of a poppy with its flower yet to unfurl in the morning sun. Is it a choice? Plants release secondary chemical compounds when under insect attack that warn other plants. Is this perception, or is it just a reflex? Fungi don’t appear to move, but they can destroy mycelia in some spots while creating it in others, effectively creating motion through growth. Does consciousness require the electric field of a neuron? One SA article informed me that the discharge of a neuron is a side-effect of ion movement. Plants and fungi move ions. Can plants and fungi perceive? Can plants and fungi misperceive? Can they change that misperception in the future? Wouldn’t that be conscious, free-will behavior, as Seth defines it? 

I drive from the desert marsh of Agua Caliente to the outlooks at the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Reserve to the Imperial Dunes near Glamis, viewing the many faces of Imperial County: the Salton Sea, the geothermal plants spewing out vapor from their stacks, the many facets of hay processing from field to piles to storage, and the dunes both as beauty and recreation.

Just like the transitions of driving from one spot to another, my thought processes frame ideas as potential stories. The umvelt and free energy of real and imagined creatures and systems are an excellent basis for the beings of a sci-fi story, including AI entities, remembering that the ChatGPT AI has already warned me about confusing sentience with intelligence. Still, writers must venture where science and AI bots fear to tread. As a writer, I will endeavor to tread, staying within the framework of umvelt and decision, though unafraid to try it out on the universe’s many biological and non-biological possibilities for sentience and free energy minimization.

Seth bursts the bubble on one of my story ideas. He says more recent research has exposed a flaw in the study that claimed a researcher could predict your actions from neuronal patterns in fMRI measurements almost a full second before you are aware of your choice. When I read about the original research, I had the idea that employers could augment their employees’ brains with motivational neuronal work hats. The work hats could replicate the neuronal pattern of a decision to put the thought in their heads to do the corporate work as if they had the idea themselves, so there would be no resistance to the enterprise’s mission. It would be the latest, greatest in workforce motivation. So much for free will, right? But the employees would have their brains back at the end of the day simply by removing the hats. 

In the original study, the researchers only looked at cases where the research subjects decided. But more recent research suggests that the same neuronal patterns also occur when they are about to choose but don’t reach a critical threshold to pull the trigger. Seth makes the comparison with the ring-the-bell carnival game. The original research only focused on cases where the bell rang, e.g., a decision was made. The subsequent analysis included the trials where the puck didn’t reach the bell. Our free will lives to decide another day, so the companies might have to return the hats as yet another failure in workforce motivation. 

With one story lost, another comes to mind. What would it be like to have neural augmentation that enhances our umvelt so I can see infrared with pits like a viper, sense electric fields like a shark or an eel, see circularly polarized light like a mantis shrimp, hear the ultrasonic squeaks of a bat, the subsonic communication of an elephant, or magnetic fields like a migrating bird? It’s one thing to see the ultraviolet translation of a picture in ordinary light. It would be quite another to have that as part of our sensory capability. Instead of asking why our brains are so big, we should ask why they are so small. All that extra processing would come at a steep metabolic price to add in the extra brain processing, but is it one that an advanced civilization can afford? What would it take to integrate our new senses into our existing umvelt?

Seth suggests that consciousness comes from the difference between what our minds predict and our senses report. When the outfielder tracks down a fly ball, he does so by continually trying to correct for being directly in the path of the ball, not by running to a fixed spot determined by physical calculations of force and motion. Free will, or at least our perception of free will, arises from recognizing alternatives. When you realize you could have done something another way, it is your brain’s way of laying down more enlightened processing for the next time you find yourself in a similar situation.

I have always thought that consciousness and learning are intimately intertwined. There is no learning through osmosis. To learn, you must become aware of another way to do something. To become aware means to bring it into your conscious mind. Bringing it into your conscious mind allows you to change the behavior.

Athletes talk about being in “the zone” where they don’t think to perform fluidly. Learning disrupts an unconscious behavior to develop a new model to aspire to. For an athlete, that means slowing down high-performance reaction times. Training minimizes the gap between perception and aspiration, and between awareness and flow. Or, to put it another way, it strives to make a learned behavior automatic, to perform without thinking.

I’m in another kind of zone. The ideas swirl in my head like the desert wind. I have a bottle of soju to fuzzy my awareness and to save some of that free energy while trying to keep warm at the night’s fire. Sitting at the fire, I learned that a bundle of fire burns for about three hours, and I can stretch a bottle of soju for about that time, but not with the mind-altering properties I desired. Next time I will bring two bottles, maybe more. I was striving for much slower response times.

Yong ends his book on a cautionary note. Humans are inadvertently and sometimes advertently destroying the umvelt of the creatures of the natural environment with light pollution that fools moths into dropping dead under a street light, with noise pollution that interrupts interocean whale communication, and even with electric field emitting cables that trick sharks into an attack. Global warming and umvelt destruction are a symptom of a more significant problem: the failure to embrace ourselves as of nature and not apart from it. It’s not hard to appreciate nature in the desert with its rugged mountain, cholla gardens, snow geese in the desert, verbena blooms, and raging sandstorm. Love nature first and let all else follow. 

 So I’ve invented a new word: the Om-Velt. Om comes from the spiritual meditation of om. Velt is a shortening of the word umvelt. Om replaces um, signifying the deep sensory and sentient experience of an organism’s separation from and connection to its environment.

Or, as ChatGPT puts it:

“The “om” part of the word refers to the spiritual practice of chanting “om” in meditation, which has a calming and centering effect on the mind and body. The experience of the “Om-Velt” is a deeply felt, meditative state of awareness.

The “velt” part of the word is a shortened form of “umwelt,” a term coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll to describe the subjective world of an individual organism. In other words, the “Om-Velt” encompasses an organism’s unique sensory and perceptual experiences as it interacts with its environment.

The concept of “Om-Velt” refers to a state of heightened awareness or consciousness in which an organism is acutely attuned to its surroundings, both as a distinct entity and as part of a larger whole. It suggests a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and a recognition of how their environment shapes an individual’s experience.

Overall, “Om-Velt” captures a profound spiritual and ecological awareness and describes a particular contemplative experience.

And here is the soulless ChatGPT’s poetic take on Om-Velt in the desert:

Amidst the sands of time and space 
A seeker wanders, searching for grace
To feel the Om-Velt’s gentle touch 
And know the world’s sacred clutch.

The sun beats down upon her brow 
But in her heart, she feels somehow 
The desert stretches all around 
A deeper sense, more profound.

She sits upon the burning sand 
And takes a breath, a single strand 
Of serenity that settles in 
And makes her feel the world within.

The wind picks up, a subtle breeze 
That whispers secrets through the trees 
Of cactus and of ancient lore 
Of life that thrives amidst its core.

The Om-Velt brings a sense of awe 
That fills her up and leaves her raw 
With joy and wonder, love and bliss 
She feels her world is part of this.

The sun sets low upon the land 
The sky ablaze, a fiery brand 
Of colors and of shifting light 
That marks the end of day and night.

And at that moment, all is one 
The desert, seeker, setting sun 
Are joined in Om-Velt’s holy glow 
And all is well, as it must flow.

The seeker rises, dusts her clothes 
And knows that in her heart she glows 
With Om-Velt’s gentle, loving light 
That shines forever, day and night.

Author’s Note: ChatGPT wrote that poem in less than a minute. I on the other hand, did not finish those two books in two days. It happened that, coincidently, I finished both during my adventure.”

Photography, Writing

Liverwurst or Liverwort?

| thetembo
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Liverwurst and liverwort, they sound alike,
But don’t be fooled, they’re different in sight.

One’s a sausage, made from liver and spices,
The other’s a plant, that grows in the vices.

One’s a sausage, a treat to savor,
The other’s a plant, that vegetarians favor.

Liverwurst, a staple of German and Polish cuisine,
Served sliced on bread, for a delicious routine.

But liverwort, a different type of creature,
its tiny spheres a defining feature.

Confusing the two, might bring you trouble,
Eating the plant, could burst your health bubble.

So now you know, the difference with ease,
Liverwurst and liverwort, no more mistease.

[Assist by ChatGPT. Note: mistease is a ChatCPT word]

Uncategorized

Superbowl

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Reading Time: < 1 minute

The Superbowl is a manifestation of the American Dream, played out on a field of neon and violence, a microcosm of the country’s endless pursuit of success and excess.

– When I asked ChatGPT what Hunter S Thompson would have to say about the Superbowl.

Writing

Diagnosis

| thetembo
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tim asks, “What are you doing in the dark?”
John says, “Writing a love letter to Anita on my laptop.”
“I don’t remember an Anita. Do I know her?”
“I don’t know. You both come from the same place.”
“Hmmm.”
“Well, this is what I have so far.”

My Dearest Anita, 
As I tinker with my motorcycle, oiling its gears and tightening its bolts, I cannot help but think of you. You are the lubricant that keeps my heart running smoothly and the wrench that tightens my soul.

John makes the corrections suggested by the AI-connected Spell Checker.  
Tim says, “Is Anita a woman or a form of transportation?”
“Haha. The motorcycle is a great metaphor for love.”
“Right, Shakespeare used it all the time.”
“Whatever.” 
An ad on the side of his letter reads, “The five beneficial foods for people with schizophrenia.” John ignores the ad and continues reading.

Just as a motorcycle needs regular maintenance to keep running at peak performance, my love for you must be nurtured and cared for. And just as a motorcycle can take me on the most exhilarating journeys, my love for you takes me on the most thrilling ride of my life.

A notice pops up, “Saving to cloud…” and then disappears. 
Tim asks, “What kind of motorcycle do you have?”
John answers, “I don’t have a bike.”
“Have you ever ridden one?”
“Well, not a real one.”
“What other kind is there?”
“Well, I mean, I’ve thought about it. Just never gotten around to it.”
“Okay. You can make the analogy that riding a bike is like riding a woman. Not sure that is how I’d phrase it in a love letter, though. Is she a biker chic? Does she have a lot of tats and wear leather?”
“No. She’s kind of.” John tries to picture her in his mind. “Not as strong as I thought. I can’t remember any more.”
Tim offers, “Oily and smoky?”
John grimaces. He looks up at Tim but doesn’t see his face in the dark. He turns his attention back to the screen.
He sees another pop-up advertising twenty-four-hour-a-day psychiatric treatment and says, “What is with all of these ads I keep getting for mental health treatment and medications. So annoying.”
Tim chuckles, “Maybe they are trying to tell you something.”
“Very funny.” He dismisses the pop-up and continues his reading.

I will always be your mechanic, constantly working to keep our love in top condition. And just as a motorcycle can withstand the toughest of roads, our love will weather any storm.

Forever yours, John.

John types in Anita’s address and hits the send button. His email application responds with, “No address found. No suggestions.”
He air-swipes at the monitor, “Worthless machine. How can you not auto-complete the email address? I write to her all the time.”
Tim says, “Don’t you have a younger sister named Anita? What happened to her.”
John clutches his temples and crumbles into a ball, whimpering.
Tim continues accusingly, “She died in a motorcycle accident, didn’t she?”
John whimpers, “No. No. No. No.” He is crying. He wants to beat on Tim. He runs over to the wall and turns the light on. The room is empty. The door is locked from the inside.
He pulls on his hair. He wants to destroy something. He picks up his laptop. The webpage says, “Experiencing a mental health crisis? Call the hotline for immediate care from one of our mental health care professionals. Now. John. Here is the number.”

John puts the laptop down and pulls out his phone.

He makes the call.

Author’s note: ChatGPT assisted. Ironically, the AI wrote all the crazy parts. Art by Craiyon.

Writing

Invasive Flying Reindeer

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Reading Time: < 1 minute

Invasive flying reindeer have been discovered roosting in the treetops of Rose Canyon. Mark Wilder, spokesman for the Department of Invasive Species Control, says, “Plants, animals, and microorganisms are not native to a particular ecosystem and can cause harm to the environment, economy, or human health. They can outcompete native species for resources, alter the physical environment, and introduce new diseases.”

Asked if the department planned on taking any counter measures, he says, “Invasive species can be difficult to eradicate because they have no natural predators or pathogens in the new ecosystem, allowing them to reproduce and spread rapidly. Additionally, once an invasive species becomes established, it can be difficult to control using traditional methods such as chemical pesticides or physical removal.”

Asked why the flying reindeer are so hard to eradicate, he answered, “It is often hard to detect an invasive species before it becomes established, as these species are also known to be able to camouflage, blend in and mimic native species, making them hard to identify.”

Asked if the flying reindeer presented any particular challenges, he responded, “To make matters worse, the global trade in gift exchange and delivery has made it easy for this invasive species to spread to new areas throughout the world. All of these factors make it difficult to effectively control and remove this invasive species once it is established in the ecosystem.

Finally, he closed with, “Previous efforts to remove the species have failed. They seem to return each year just after the holiday season.”

— Assist from ChatGPT

Writing

Which is Witch?

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Reading Time: < 1 minute

Which is the AI and Which is the Human?

Dodder

A tangled patch not so rare,
A Halloween tangle of witch’s hair

Its slender hairs, so thin and fine
Threading branches intertwined

Waving tendrils in the wind
Innocent branches to reel in

Scheming hair gives not a crackle
While engaged in botanical battle

Infested victims cannot thrive
A witch’s curse does deprive

 ==========

Dodder, a plant so sly and sly
A parasite, it cannot thrive
Without a host to give it life
It wraps around and takes its share
Leaves its host wilted, stripped and bare

It’s a slender vine, so thin and fine
It blends in with its host, so intertwined
But its thorns are sharp, and its grip is tight
It sucks the life out with all its might

Some say it’s a curse, a plague upon the land
But it’s just a plant, trying to survive
It’s adapted to a life of taking and giving
But to us, it’s a nuisance, a problem to be ridding

So let us respect this plant, so sly and sly
For it’s just trying to survive, like you and I
But let us also be cautious, and keep it in check
For it can do harm, if left unchecked.

Image by Craiyon at Craiyon.com.
AI Poem by ChatGPT

Adventure, Photography

Northern Vietnam Trip Log.

| thetembo
Reading Time: 19 minutes

Day 1 Hanoi

Welcome to the chaos of Hanoi. The humidity and heat hang in the air like a wet blanket. 

Tube Houses on Hanoi Street

Welcome to the sidewalks: tube houses ten feet wide and six stories tall, scooter parking lots, pedestrian walkways, dining areas, shops, and places where people live out their days and work. I’m told the narrow tube houses arose because taxes were based on the storefront size. Post-trip research supports this, but the architecture lived on because the property is expensive and population density is high. It was and is cheaper to build up than buy more land. 

Traffic

Welcome to the streets: scooter traffic, pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, cart-pushers, car traffic, and places to sell things. The boundary between the road and the sidewalk has nothing to do with the curb. The streets are alive with the sounds of drivers honking at one another and the smells of food grilling on sidewalk barbecues. Intersections are mesmerizing, watching traffic weave its cross-hatched patterns without incident. The indoctrination to Hanoi is crossing a street without getting hit. It is an act of faith and strength, and the weak don’t survive. 

My indoctrination continued with a military jeep tour of the city. Our (Guy and myself) guides were Tring and Huyen, who both have excellent English language command. The famous Hanoi railway that runs within inches of houses was not operating because of an incident of nearly hitting tourists. We stopped by a bridge reported having been built by Eiffel, the same architect that built the Eiffel Tower. It looks like an Eiffel Tower laid on its side. We passed by the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. Before going on display in Hanoi, his body survived seven years in a freezer in Russia.

We visited with a Vietnam war survivor, Duc, living in a building complex fronted by a downed B-52 left as a historical marker in a pool. He was born in 1960, the same year I was born. His house was decorated with urns and multiple-framed folk art prints, and he served us astringent green tea and peanut butter brittle. The conversation turned very intense in the tearful retelling of his memories of the war. He has memories of John McCain’s capture. I’m not sure of the translation, but the emotion was unmistakable. My memories of the Vietnam war are through second-hand stories and television reports: “a guy next to me was turned off like a light bulb,” the images of the helicopter lifting off the embassy during the evacuation, the reports of the Mai Lai massacre (they knew that only one man was convicted), and Nixon’s illegal carpet bombings of Cambodia. Duc’s message is that war is a lose-lose proposition. I like the symbolism of the B52 sheet metal that he has incorporated into his garden, literally picking up the pieces, building with them, and moving on. 

On the rest of the long ride, I learned from Huyen that :

* The people’s religion is respect for ancestors and local shrines.

* Water, energy, and communications are state-operated.

* The state provides public health and education but is augmented by private versions, sometimes in the same building.

* The trash all goes to a giant landfill outside Hanoi.

* She studied German; her favorite series is “Never Have I Ever.” 

* She is young enough (22) to never have lived in an occupied Vietnam.

* The youth are angry at inflation, which, while understandable, is not as bad as being angry at someone dropping bombs on your head.

Later that night, Guy had us on a brew tour. Our guide was Lan, an effervescent young lady that smiled for the entire four-hour excursion. She is absolutely adorable. She is five feet nothing tall and led us, and two other big guys, fearlessly about the city. She says she has no fear of walking around by herself at night. What is it with American cities? The night was my introduction to the sidewalk cafe, with its red plastic kindergarten seats, short tables, piss holes in crumbling cement closets, and street food. I can’t say I care much for fizzy, 3.5% beer, craft, or otherwise, but maybe it’s what keeps the streets safe from tipsy drivers in the chaos.  

Day 2 Ninh Binh

The bus for Ninh Binh was leaving at 7 a.m., about two hours before I was planning on getting up. We spent over five hours on a bus for three hours of activity. 

Trang An in Ninh Binh province was our introduction to the fascinating karst landscape of Northern Vietnam. We took a river ride down the Sao Khe River on Vietnamese woman-powered row boats. Unlike other row boats, the rowers face forward. It helps with the steering and lets them watch their passengers. Once I learned I could paddle, I laid into it for most of the trip, mainly for exercise but also to help our rower. I had heard that the daily two-hour rows take their toll on women’s bodies. They chew on some type of intoxicating leaf to ease their pain. The penalty for drug use and trafficking in Vietnam is death. 

We powered our way through the imposing karst landscape shrouded in rain clouds, visiting temples along the way. High water prevented entrance to the caves and flooded the temple grounds. The platform of the water temple was completely underwater. 

After the ride, our tour group dined in the restaurant. In the spirit of trying new things, I sample goat blood sauce. I’m not sure if because I knew what it was or not, but I didn’t like the texture or the taste. Blood of any kind is off my menu.

Running out of time, we had an abbreviated tour of the Buddhist Bai Dinh Pagoda complex, offering incense to giant gold-colored Buddhas and admiring the view of the surrounding Ninh Binh flood plains from the top of the Bao Thap Tower. When I asked how old the place was, the guide told me it was built in the early 2000s. It surprised me, expecting the answer of centuries, if not millennia, old. Post-trip research suggests there is an old temple and a new one, so maybe the guide misinterpreted the question narrowly, thinking I was referring to just the temple at which we were standing.

After the long and tedious two-and-a-half-hour trip back to Hanoi, Guy took us to an expensive 20-course tasting menu at TUNG (Twisted, Unique, Natural, Gastronomic) restaurant. It’s not my style: overeating food makes me feel dirty, and being served too little makes me feel cheated, so it’s a no-win scenario. The portions were small, and I didn’t throw in the towel until dessert. It was a bit overwhelming, and I only remember the foie gras because that is something I had written about in a book. Duck liver is another thing I will never order again. The wine was pleasing, each course was interesting, and the presentation was thoughtful. But would you ski for a minute, jump on a surfboard at a wave machine, skydive in a wind machine, hike up a trail for a tenth of a mile and say you had the experience? 

Day 3 Ha Giang Loop Day 1 Hanoi

Red River

On what would have been the first day of our transit of the Ha Giang Loop, while waiting for the delayed arrival of Chris and Hetal, I rode with Hoan, our guide, the leader of our trip for the next eight days, to Ba Vi National Park to the west of Hanoi. On the fifteen-minute walk from the hotel to the motorcycle shop, it felt like I was wearing the humidity like a winter coat in a heated car, so I rode without my motorcycle jacket, violating my ATGATT (All the Gear, All the Time) training. On the way out of the city, I only briefly negotiated the insanity of Hanoi traffic before Hoan led to a lightly traveled road that followed the red river. 

Huon and Yours Truly

We stopped at a restaurant where an expressionless young lady named Emily served us. I figured Hoan probably had some regular stops where he knew people and maybe even raked in a little commission for the effort. I asked Hoan about tipping, and he told me if I left a tip, that person would remember me for life. So I left a small tip, and as we were suiting up, a beaming Emily came out of the restaurant to see us off and thank us, still holding the dong (Vietnamese currency) in her hand. Her face had brightened from blank to supernova so she might remember me for at least a few days. The tip was worth every dong, unlike most, which feel like a tax. At each of the following stops, we met another Emily. I figured maybe the name Emily was a job requirement, but what I learned is that it is just a way of addressing a person, usually younger and female, em being the word for sister. 

Ba Vi

We rode up the mountain on curving and usually wet roads to a saddle between the summits. I made Hoan hike up the 1200 stairs to the top of the taller twin peaks to admire the Buddhist temple and the view. 

On the way back, we stopped for a half hour to sit out a downpour. 

Hoan wanted to make it back before rush hour to avoid the traffic, but delayed by the rain and the hike, we hit rush hour traffic dead on. I can only describe that experience as a two-hour bike walk and balancing act, trying not to hit the person in front of me and not step on the toes of the people on either side of me. A scooter, bus, or car immediately filled the slightest gap in front of me. Traffic signals are mere suggestions and not rules. While Hoan explained that honking is their way of saying hello, clearly, there is a set of drivers that bully their way through traffic, laying on the horn and riding inches off the back tire of the vehicle in front of them. It took us about two hours to go that last ten kilometers.

Comparing the five-hour bus ride to and from Ninh Binh against the eight hours of riding on the motorcycle to and from Ba Vi was the difference between impatient boredom and exhausted exhilaration.

Day 4 Ha Giang Loop Day 2 Hanoi to Vinh Linh Family Homestay

On the following day, with the full complement of our motorcycle gang now assembled, we headed north out of Hanoi to Yen Binh. Because of the one-day delay, we had to make up time. The drive out of Hanoi followed the Red River. Hoan took us down side roads to the main highway. Farmers use the streets to dry rice on tarps, spreading and turning the seeds with wooden rakes. We had to drive through drying hay completely covering the road. The day’s lesson was that no road is too large for agriculture nor too small for a truck. 

It’s always interesting to see what people will carry on a scooter or how many people can fit. A typical configuration would be kid, dad, kid, and mom all squeezing together on one bike. The craziest carry-on of the day was the guy carrying torpedo-sized propane tanks. I couldn’t help but wonder what his hazard duty pay was. 

A typical “restaurant” stop was a sidewalk cafe with traditional red plastic foot-high chairs and a low table to match. We quickly fell into a routine of ordering a 333, Hanoi, or Saigon beer, drinking the 3.5% beers more like water than alcohol, along with our multi-course lunch of rice, wraps, tofu, soup, boiled chicken (not a fan), and the specialties of the house.

With daylight fading, we ended up at Vu Linh’s family homestay (Hoan’s family homestay), working our way around the workers, blocking the dirt road to the house with a hay shredder. Hoan invited us to dinner with family, including daughter, wife, mother, and father, serving us a multi-course buffet. Dad tried to drink us into the ground toasting each shot with Howmedo’s (Thank you in the local language) with the local homemade rice wine. Mom, daughter, and French lady dressed in traditional garb. Hoan shared his father’s writing of local customs, which is impenetrable in the local language. I love the homestay concept. It’s a beautiful venue for having an intimate and unpretentious encounter with a Vietnamese family.*

Day 5 Ha Giang Loop Day 3 Vinh Linh Family Homestay to Hi Giang City

In the morning, we headed north to the city of Ha Giang, following scooter trails around the eastern perimeter of Thác Bà Lake, crossing narrow bridges, viewing the placid lake with its mountainous backdrop, and driving through agricultural obstacles of drying rice and hay covered roads. The hay covered the entire road for short stretches, leaving no choice but to drive right through it. A man dragging thirty feet of rebar was the strangest cargo of the day.

Leaving the lake and the flat terrain, we rode the busier main highway to take us into Ha Giang. I had one flat tire obtained inbound to the city. I’m not exactly sure where it went flat, but I was riding on a nearly deflated tire when we pulled up to the hotel. My attention on the way in was distracted by another problem. A biting insect managed to land and sting me through my kevlar riding jeans, leaving a welt about four inches in diameter. 

We stayed at Khách sạn Yên Biên Luxury catching up to the non-motorbike contingent of our tour, giving me a nice view of the city from my eighteenth-floor room. As the name suggests, it is an actual hotel, not a homestay. Taking a respite from the Vietnamese cuisine, we convened for pizza and beer at a place called “Pizza Here.”

Day 6 Ha Giang Loop Day 4 Ha Giang City to Phố Cổ

Because the flat was a rim flat, Hoan couldn’t fix the tire. He traded out the spare bike on the back of the support truck. We crossed over the river in the town, then rode out into mountain country and karst formations. On the rural road, I stopped to photograph a woman harvesting rice with her baby on her back, protected from the sun by a purple umbrella, and her mom. Hoan engaged her, and I learned the proper technique for slicing and clumping rice stalks: cut low at an angle, putting three or four handfuls together. Of course, doing that a couple of times is a lot different than cutting down the whole field.

Hoan advised us not to pay or tip the lady, explaining that it is not good to make it an expectation. I agree. Once such an experience becomes transactional, then I think it becomes significantly less authentic. Is it genuine culture when you sell it? When does the product become what the consumer wants it to be rather than what it is? Commoditizing culture is an essay for another time.

While I am on the subject, kids would wave to us as we rode through tiny villages. Some would reach out their hands for a slap. During the trip, I received the finger six times. One little girl with a big grin gave me the finger. Her finger followed me as I passed her. Given the big smile, I don’t think she understood what she was doing, but someone told her to do it. Other faces had scowls and disdain written on them. It was a tiny minority. I can understand why someone would not be excited about foreigners racing through their town on noisy bikes, stirring up the dust, the dogs, and the roosters. 

From here, the ride headed into the picturesque karst mountains. We stopped for a bathroom break at a spot with an overlook of a Hmong village, people working their gardens and yards. We drove to an incredible overlook of a verdant u-shaped valley split by a ridge terminating into a karst cone. On this narrow, mountain-hugging road, a woman passed me on a scooter, keeping my ego in check. Hetal bypassed this section of the motorcycle ride to go straight to Dong Van. Unfortunately, the driver got lost. She ended up visiting the Nho Que river early but arrived at the homestay much later.

Phố Cổ is built right up the base of the karst mountains. They even use the wall of one as a billboard to advertise the town. I wondered how many advertisements would adorn the mountain if something like this existed in America. All the karsts would probably be named after companies. Our homestay was right across the street from a square with outdoor restaurants and a few storefronts from the karaoke bar. Vietnam will never be the same. As Chris says, you can never unhear that sound.

Day 7 Ha Giang Loop Day 5 Phố Cổ to Coa Bang

Rain. Slick conditions. And heading up the mountain passes on ribbon-thin roads. We stopped at a pass between two karst coneheads for a view. The brave climb the conehead. The courageous step out onto an unprotected black rock tongue. The crazy do it in white clogs and an evening dress.

We continued down this path, my back tires sliding on the hairpin turns onto a paved path, maybe two feet in width, until we reached my point of fear. I don’t have the skill to negotiate ninety-degree downhill turns on a slick path. So Huan, Chris, and I walked the bike down the thirty foot with me not on it. 

The scenery took a turn for the spectacular at the overlook of the Nho Que river. The river is aquamarine and does a near-horseshoe bend around a karst formation. Sadly, we didn’t have the time to get on one of the boats to see the spectacular gorge from the bottom up.

Hmong Outfits

Hmong women sold organics outside the Panorama bar at the overlook. Someone told me the Hmong refused to move to cities at the demands of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments. The story sounds inspirational, but I haven’t been able to verify it. There are Hmong in Wisconsin. A diaspora.  

We completed the day with a ride to the Pac Bo Homestay in Cao Bang. For dinner, we sampled fried bees and bamboo, an unusual combo. 

Day 8 Ha Giang Loop Day 6 – Cao Bang to Ban Gioc Waterfalls

In the morning, the woman proprietor tried to refund us money because we didn’t eat all the bee and bamboo, and the dinner roll was rock hard. We never complained, but actions speak louder than words. The place doesn’t receive many Western visitors, and she wanted us to have a reasonable opinion of the home. I’ve never heard of such an action before, so I have an excellent opinion of her business ethic. 

The weather took a turn for the worse with a promise of rain. I watched a touring Vietnamese girl in pumps and hip-flexor high shorts double up on her scooter with a transparent rain jacket. NTGNTT (None of the gear, none of the time).

To start the morning, we visited the Ho Chi Minh memorial park. With limited time, we bypassed the museum attractions and only took a short river walk to the cave where Ho Chi Minh reportedly hid and worked at a cave office and desk. While waiting on the stairs to the cave entrance, as about thirty Vietnamese men paraded by, I learned that the preferred shoe of men is the black leather penny loafer.

Young women come to this spot to enhance their beauty in the idyllic setting of the river, posing on the rocks with the river and thick trees as a backdrop. We watched a young artist parade all her friends, Ferris Buehler Chicago Art Institute style, down the river bank. Another posed La Grande Jatte style with an umbrella, a pointillist painting also found at the Art Institute.

Hetal made friends with two charming and well-educated English-speaking Vietnamese kids from Hanoi. Many people said “Ha-lo” as they passed, but that is about as far as they go with the English language. 

From the park, we rode in the rain for two solid hours, splashing through orange rivulets crossing the road and avoiding mud orange water buffalo. The rain and splashing soaked my socks and gloves, but otherwise, the rain gear did its job.  

We came to Ban Gioc the back way, down a dirt road paralleling the barbed-wire border. When we arrived, the authorities locked down the town for a fall festival. Only official cars were allowed in and out. So we had to backtrack to the front of the town. We found a very distraught Hetal, having sat with the driver and truck outside the barricade in a questionable spot with suspicious police wanting to know why they were there. Finally, we devised a plan to park the bikes and walk in. 

We checked into our hotel at Ban Gioc with enough time to walk down to the festival at the waterfall. We shared the view and celebration with five to ten thousand of our closest friends, still somehow managing to take a boat ride right up to the waterfalls, illuminated by a changing color palette of lights. After the boat ride, we ordered sausage and meat on a stick from a sidewalk vendor before retreating to the hotel for dinner and later drinks with our late-arriving companions.

Day 9 Ha Giang Loop Day 7 – Ban Gioc Waterfalls to Ba Be National Park

Rushed in the morning to meet a riverboat deadline, we took a no-nonsense ride to Ba Be NP. The conditions were sloppy and wet but without the previous day’s downpour. We saw one truck in a ditch, but the driver appeared to be squatting on the side of the road, talking into his cell phone, uninjured.

We made a brief stop at a knife shop. We watched the men work to make the knives while Hoan bought one for his wife. Talk about digging your own grave.

At Động Puông, we loaded the motorcycles on a river boat and cruised to Ba Be the back way. The river road traveled down a beautiful jungle-coated karst valley, passing through a karst cave on the way to the lake. From the south end of the lake, we road the short distance to the Minh Quang Homestay. The homestay overlooks fields on the south end of the lake. 

We dined with the proprietors on the upstairs patio, participating in the traditional Mot! Hai! Ba! Yo! ritual, drinking plenty of wine to close out the evening. 

Day 10 Ha Giang Loop Day 8 – Ba Be National Park to Hanoi. 

The trip back was fast and direct, attempting to beat the rush hour traffic. We achieved the goal, but Hanoi traffic is still Hanoi traffic, chaotic and close, yet somehow predictable. We said goodbye to Hoan with a few beers at an intersection-facing cafe, watching others negotiate the hazards of the street to their ends. The ride was everything I could have asked for and so much more. **

Day 11 Hanoi.

It’s the one too many. I didn’t have a plan. I went with Jake, his uncle, and his cousin to the Imperial Citadel at Thang Long. The Imperial Citadel has a history of a thousand years, serving many dynasties and kings in the past. Recently, it served as a command center and bunker for Ho Chi Minh during the wars.

After that, I wandered the streets of Hanoi for one last time. Interestingly, I found a Black Swan, a highly improbable event according to the literature. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Well, I proved to myself once and for all that black swan events, well, black swans, in any event, are real. I don’t know if I would call the trip a Black Swan Event, but it certainly was a very memorable one.

All trip pictures: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QRPSLT2RHgrHL0EvuPIVSui34fCVH6Rn?usp=sharing

  • Review of VuLinh Family Homestay

Beautiful home and accommodations. Spending an evening with the Vu Linh family was one of the trip’s highlights. Hoan welcomed us into his family with an intimate dinner and evening with his family and the other guests. Fantastic food and bottomless shot glasses of rice wine served with pride and enthusiasm. They are sure to make your trip to Thác Bà Lake memorable.

** Review of Offroad Vietnam

If you are brave enough to take on the traffic and back roads, riding a motorcycle in Northern Vietnam is as good as it gets. An unforgettable adventure of spectacular riding from the mayhem of Hanoi traffic to the hidden lakeside byways to twisting ascents over mountain passes to mountain-hugging ledges. Offroad Vietnam tailored the trip to our requested itinerary and provided excellent motorcycles and support throughout the journey. Our Offroad Vietnam guide Hoan is a skilled rider with a decade of riding experience. He showed us roads and trails we would never have found, considered, or negotiated if we tried to ride by ourselves using Google maps. He bridged the language gap for us, making our encounters with the friendly people of Northern Vietnam more personal and rewarding. I wouldn’t hesitate to use Offroad Vietnam again if and when I make it back.

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Mo Hi Ba Yo!

| thetembo
Reading Time: 7 minutes

One thousand kilometers, maybe more. Eight days of riding more than eight hours a day. We all survived. We made the trip without death or injury or seeing any death or injury!

Mo Hi Ba Yo! (Một – Hai – Ba – dô)

Mountain Trail (An Easy One)

I had one real moment of fear. We left Dong Van to a drizzle and wet roads. The roads turned into mountain-hugging sidewalks barely wide enough to pass two bikes. On one hairpin-dropping turn and going no more than 15 to 20 kph, my back tire took the turn by sliding a couple of feet. I’m sure the slide would have looked fantastic on a video. But the fact is I didn’t mean to do it. Chris says sliding the back tire is okay, but you have to worry when the front tire slides. I was worried anyway. This sidewalk narrowed to a ledge no more than two feet wide with hairpin turns. Sometimes the fall to the outside was protected by bamboo, sometimes not. I walked the dropping hairpin turns on the bike, not trusting my ability to do a 180-degree turn smoothly enough without going over the edge. Even walking the bike, I was sweating and anxious. Then we came to a dropping turn that went left 90 degrees, dropped, and then went right 90 degrees and dropped some more.

Hoan’s bike, Hoan was our guide, slid both front and back tires when he did it and when he reached a stopping point, he put up the X signal with his forearms meaning for us not to do it. Hoan walked back up the path to help. Chris walked his bike down with Hoan holding the back end. I said, “Fuck It,” jumped off the bike, and told Hoan to take it down. It was only about a twenty-foot section, but trying to help by holding on to the back end to keep it from slipping off the path, I slid on my slick motorcycle shoes down the twenty-foot stretch of slippery path. I had a lot of internal dialog, recalling a teacher’s advice to use fun as your guide to managing risk. It was the one time during the trip I was not having fun. That narrow ledge was way outside my comfort zone, and that dropping wet stretch with the turns was beyond my ability. But in the end, no injury and no dropped bike. Just a shake of my head and a massive sigh of relief.

Mo Hi Ba Yo!

We had other stretches outside my comfort zone but not my ability, about which I can’t say I was particularly thrilled. I would describe those stretches more as work than fun. We had to drive through several construction zones, basically off-roading stretches with operating machinery, dust, and big ass trucks. I’ve done a lot of scree riding on my KLR 650 in the outback of the California deserts. Scree isn’t particularly fun to ride in, as the steering starts feeling loose and sloppy. Usually, a little speed is your friend as rocks fire out from under your tires as long as you don’t overpower a turn. 

We had one sustained downpour for two hours which we powered through. I wiped the rain from my helmet visor with my gloved hands. Orange rivulets crisscrossed the road, and I venture to say that the orange-colored water buffalos marching down the road were much happier than I was. By the time the rain stopped, it had soaked through my socks and gloves, but all the rain gear kept me dry otherwise. The rain wasn’t cold, and the clothes dried quickly during the rest of the ride. Misty clouds moving through the trees and mountains make for incredible scenery, but I wouldn’t take my eye off the road for more than a second to appreciate it. 

We had one other rainy day. Conditions were sloppy from time to time, but the rain was light. We saw one truck on its side in the ditch at the side of the road on a wet turn. Seeing the driver squatting on the side of the road on his cell phone, I don’t think anyone was injured. I saw a guy with a girl on a scooter in front of me overpower a turn. He was right at the start of the turn crossing over the passing line to the left at the end. Fortunately, nothing was coming from the other direction. That’s the kind of driving that will get you killed.

I was astounded at the roads on which trucks would travel. There is no road too small for one. If I had waited long enough, I’m sure I would have seen one on the two-foot ledge. Big trucks and buses would honk a couple of times before rounding blind corners, where they swept out the pavement outside their lanes. Even the sleeping dogs would move out of the way for those oversized beasts. Often, we would pass these behemoths waiting for a stretch of road long enough to squeeze by them on what little room they offered. No one ended up as bug splat on the grill of one of these oversized road ogres.

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

Hanoi Traffic (Before Rush Hour)

City driving was a whole different skill set if one can call wading through the chaos a skill. On my first day of adventure to Na Vinh, I returned to Hanoi during rush hour. It was an exercise in walking the bike or, at best, trying to ride it in the 0-5 kph range. The challenge was keeping sight of my guide while not bumping the scooter ahead or stepping on the toes planted to either side of me. Leaving any gap between you and the rider in front of you shows weakness. Five scooters, cars, and buses will all try to fill the vacuum. During rush hour, there are no rules, only guidelines. Scooters shoot through intersections against the light and cross over in front of traffic to get to the other side. Pedestrians walk across the streets, only sometimes signaling the traffic to stop. Huon told us people honk to say hello, meaning to let you know they are there. But a subset definitely uses the horn to bully their way through traffic. It all seems to work based on empirical observation, but I would be shocked if the statistics back those observations.

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

I had one flat tire obtained inbound through a construction zone to Ha Giang. At least, that is the spot where I thought the bike handled a little slushy. I dismissed it as the silty conditions of the construction site we had to ride through. It turned out to be a rim flat and not a puncture, which suggested the tire might have been flawed from the beginning. I don’t know how long I rode with it because shortly after that, we drove through the outskirts of the town and I became distracted by another problem. I felt a sharp burning sensation in my upper right leg about two inches from my nut sack. I thought maybe the engine was overheating near my leg, but I didn’t see or feel anything on the bike. The shooting pain persisted. When we pulled over for a piss break, I checked under my kevlar pants to discover a four-inch welt with a circular pus spot at its center. It looked like a mini volcano with lava flows. I think somehow while riding at 30 mph, a hornet or wasp managed to land on my leg and stab me through my kevlar pants to deliver its sting. The only upside is that it didn’t impale me in the nuts. I can’t imagine trying to ride with welted nut sac three times its natural size. Thank god for that.

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

Pedestrians, children on bicycles, roosters, dogs, water buffalos, horses, cows, drying rice, and drying grass, to name a few things, created the target-rich environment. One of the strangest phenomena is the sudden appearance of something that wasn’t in the scene just a second ago. Chris speculates that your mind identifies that brown patch in your peripheral vision as a dog, and suddenly, it pops into your awareness. 

Traffic Jam

Speaking of Chris, he came the closest to running over some chickens, and I am convinced he tapped the ass of a dog. The dog was trotting in the direction of traffic on a city’s busy, four-lane divided road. It veered in front of Chris’s bike. He slammed on the brakes, but I saw the dog’s back end drop suddenly, and then the dog cut over to the median. The rule of thumb is to run over any small, soft creature if it crosses your path and to keep on going. In the calculus of life, the rider trumps the rooster. You don’t risk your life by veering into oncoming traffic or obstacles to save a chicken. Fortunately, it was a decision I never had to make.

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

Ha Giang Loop Pass

The Ha Giang loop features a beautiful and well-photographed twisting road up and over a pass. But we went up to another mountain pass that I didn’t get a picture of and don’t know its name. It featured nine or ten hairpin turns and ten to twelve percent grades. The road was so steep that I couldn’t take a picture from the top because trees obscured the view. 

I rounded one hairpin turn to a steeper grade, so I wanted to downshift from third to second. Instead, I ended up in neutral. It was the only time I missed a shift on the trip. Instead of speeding up on the steep grade, I was slowing down, frantically trying to get the bike in gear before I stalled. I’m sure the riders behind me were less than pleased. But aside from that misstep, the snaking ride up and the view from the top were fantastic.

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

And finally, I have to admit to more humility. Riding along mountain-hugging sidewalks trails on my powerful 250cc bike, more than once, a lady passed me on a scooter. One even had a kid in the well. Another teacher once told me to ride my ride and not ride to pride. 

Mo Hi Ba Yo!

But after all that. No, because of all that. Not for a second would I trade my motorcycle for a bus ride.

“Mo Hi Ba Yo” means one, two, three, cheers! Usually, a drink follows. But I am toasting to the ride and all its misadventures and challenges. 

Mo Hi Ba Yo! 

Does It Get Any Better?
Adventure, Photography

Living the K-drama

| thetembo
Reading Time: 8 minutes

While the missiles were flying from North Korea and the weather forecast for Seoul predicted temperatures somewhere between 25 and a thermonuclear 250 million degrees Celsius, my attentions were more focused on soaking up the K-drama culture in Gangnam and Jeju Island. I knew Kamala Harris had my back with her visit to the DMZ.

Gangnam-gu


My real intent was to spend time with my son Max. He has been living in Korea on and off for a couple of years to pursue his e-gaming career. Max was effectively more jet-lagged than I during my visit since I interrupted his stay-up until 5 in the morning and sleep until mid-afternoon gaming schedule. By the way, he told me Gangnam is pronounced pretty much as you would expect. To me, that was gang-nam, as in street gang and Viet-nam. Of course, it is pronounced nothing like that. Gahn-yum is the closest I can get.

According to the K-drama “Glitch,” food always comes first in Korea, even before alien abductions and end-of-the-world scenarios. Why get abducted or vaporized on an empty stomach? So in the most pleasing “My Mister” style, Max and I visited restaurants with wooden picnic benches, stoves, kimchi bars, and Soju in the restaurant row of the trendy Gangnam District in Seoul. Max did all the ordering, so not entirely sure the names of all the dishes we consumed. It was fantastic watching Max converse in Korean. On the first night, we had Korean beef with lettuce wraps, which I think are called Ssambap. There was a spicy crab side dish that we didn’t know how to eat, so I had our waitress coach us on the finer points of dining. Despite her above and beyond the call of duty effort, we didn’t leave a tip. Tipping is considered rude and frowned upon. Service is always expected to be exceptional. The custom seems so much more civilized to me.

On the next day, after wandering about the streets of Gangnam and pedaling along the Han riverfront, we stumbled across a Kyobo bookstore in the underground Sinnyeon subway shopping mall. I picked up “Crying in HMart,” a memoir by Japanese Breakfast. She takes her name from the orderly perfection of a Japanese breakfast, something that her young life was not. The book is a tribute to her mom, who died young of cancer, and recounts the author’s troubled formative years, often at odds with her mom and frequently through the memory of the Korean dishes her mom prepared. I couldn’t keep up with all the different recipes, but I’m getting smarter. Gimbap is seaweed (gim) rice (bap), the preferred dish of the Extraordinary Attorney Woo. It’s not much different from a California roll. Bibimbap is mixed (bibim) rice (bap). Ssambap is a rice (bap) ssam (wrap).

Underground Subway Mall

Later at night, we had Korean pork and potato soup with enoki mushrooms while watching K-drama customers enjoying each other’s company, sucking down their Soju from green bottles on a Tuesday evening.

After a few days in Gangnam, we headed to Gimpo airport to fly to Jeju Island on Korean Airlines. In my K-drama series and movie experiences, Jeju Island is an out-of-the-way Korean escape from the demands of big city life. In the “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” (EAW), Jeju is a Korean retreat for an office team-building exercise based on the pretext of taking on a case involving 3000 won (about two dollars). The team quests for the best Haengbok noodles in Jeju. In the extremely dark and twisted love story “A Night in Paradise,” Jeju serves as a rural hideaway for a double-crossing young hoodlum. If the movie is any indication, there is quite a gangster population on the island.

For Max and I, the side trip was a two-night gangster-free stay in Jeju City. I wanted to rent scooters since it seemed like an excellent way to tour the island, but it’s surprisingly hard to rent a scooter there. The scooter rental websites aren’t foreigner friendly. Google translated the pages from Korean into English, but that doesn’t work so well on the date picker widget. My forty-eight-hour rental somehow translated into something like four hundred thousand hours, and at 40000 won per day per scooter, that worked out to something thirty-two billion won, just a bit outside my budget. Max wasn’t too keen on learning how to ride anyway. He tapped into his Korean knowledge base, and his friend assured us that we would be able to rent a car without a reservation.

We did manage a car but had a little trouble catching the correct bus. The rental companies provide their private buses to their not colocated remote lots. The lady at the rental counter sent us to area 3, station 8, but everything was labeled as a zone. We stood at zone 8, station 3, for a few minutes until we realized we should be at zone 3, station 8.

Transported to the correct lot, and having acquired a car, I wanted to drive. We headed east along the island’s north side to Hamdeok Beach, a destination chosen because it looked like the first decent thing to see in that direction. Max figured out how to program the Korean Language GPS navigation. The navigation persona insisted on warning us of “Danger Ahead” and advised us to drive at a “Safe Speed.” We saw no accidents and no construction, but after an hour or so of driving, we realized that our Korean Map female voice was warning us of speed monitors. The island is booby-trapped with what Max called “Speed Bumps,” but I call them tourist snares because I’m sure only inexperienced visitors like myself who can’t read the signs or operate the GPS unit get tickets from these traps. The lady should have said is drive at “Legal Speed,” so we would have realized much quicker that the danger was financial rather than physical. As far as I know, I did not get caught, probably because the savvy traffic ahead of me forced me to slow down at the right spots.
Jeju turned out to be surprisingly built up and congested. The driving scene to the Buddhist temple in “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” is only shot in the scenic Hallasan Mountain area, probably the only road on the island without a stop light every half mile. The scene and others led me to believe the island was more isolated and remote than it actually is. It took a long time in Jeju City traffic to reach Hamdeok Beach.

Hamdeok Beach

Jeju Island is volcanic. Hamdeok Beach has nice contrasts and a spectrum of colors, ranging from the white sand beach to shallow turquoise waters, deeper blue waters, and black frozen lava flows. We also encountered our first grandfather statutes (Dol Hareubang) working as end posts on a small bridge out to a viewpoint of the ocean.

Bridge Guarded By Grandfather Statues

We stopped for a drink and snack before pushing on.

Incredible Pastry

Running out of daylight, we missed the lava tubes, so we headed back to Jeju City to check in to the hotel by an inland route. The eighteen-story hotel thoughtfully (sarcasm) changed its name from the Avia to the Asia hotel to make things confusing.

Jeju City from the 18th Floor

Later, we ate barbecued beef, mushroom, and cabbage at 숙성도 F&B 별관.

Beef and Pork Stock

The server grilled our beef and mushroom dish in front of us over a pot of hot coals.

At the same time, Max and I observed my favorite K-drama tradition, drinking the bottle of Soju, following the excellent practice of keeping the other person’s Soju glass from going empty.


We picked up the trip the next day at the Manjanggul lava tube cave. The lava tube is an impressive underground cave paved and lit for a kilometer in one direction but continues several kilometers in both directions. The public trail terminates at a lava chimney of twenty-five feet, billed as the largest in the world.

World’s Largest Lava Chimney

From there, we drove to the island’s east end to see Seongsan Ilchulbong,” a volcanic caldera with a five-hundred-stair climb. I contemplated the entrance sign warning hikers not to attempt the ascent if they have a heart condition or if they have drunk to excess the night before. On the previous night, we managed to drink a bottle of Soju, but I fell asleep before making much of a dent in the second. The climb rewarded us with views over the “Sea of Japan” and the town of Seowipo.

Sunrise Peak

On the way down the trail, we were treated to the ritual dance and drumming of the mermaid women. The women divers of Jeju Island are famous for their cold water surface dives for sea critters.

Mermaid Women

From there, we drove south for a hike and a view of Seongsan Ilchulbong from the other side.

We drove some sixty stoplight-riddled kilometers along the island’s south side to Cheonjiyeon Falls. The falls are nestled inside the city of Seopwipo. Empirical observation on the short hike to the falls suggests it is a popular tourist destination. In other words, it was crowded.

Cheonjiyeon Falls


We drove through the volcano national park to return to Jeju city, I believe on the same road as Attorney Woo on her field trip. I recognized the tree-canopied, traffic-light-free and danger-free highway from the episode.
For the EAW crew, they came up with a solution of the case to resolve the problem of the 3000 won charge for passage over a road that incidentally routed over monastery land. The team finds a revered chef working in obscurity in a local monastery, having been outmaneuvered and run out of business by a competitor that stole his business but serves a substandard recipe of Haengbok noodles endured by the team. The EAW team always gets their noodle and wins their case.

In the end of “A Night in Paradise,” the vengeful gangsters catch up to the double-crossing hoodlum in Jeju with dire consequences for everyone involved. Spoiler alert, things didn’t work out well for the guy, the gangsters, or the love affair. The ending was perfect for such a dark movie, but that is all I will reveal.

For my ending, I managed to read the entire book, “Crying in H-mart,” while Max slept off his jet lag. I enjoyed volcanic wonders in Jeju and biking along the Han river, people-watching in Gangnam, eating Korean, drinking Soju, and watching Max work magic with his adopted country. I managed to fly from Jeju to Gimpo and take a train from Gimpo to Incheon for the next leg of my trip without incident. It was easier getting out than getting in, but that is another story.