I’m here a week now… waiting for a mission… getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.
We landed eight days ago. Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam. I haven’t been posting because I’ve been ill. It started in Sri Lanka and it felt like pneumonia. I know this because last year I did get pneumonia and it had similar look and feel. Not wanting to make the CBC News back home “Canadian Man Falls Ill During Trip to Asia After Spider Egg Dare” (or some variant of), we decided to take it easy for a couple of days until the worst had passed.
I called Tele-Health Ontario and for the first time in the history of the service they didn’t send a caller to see a doctor. The nurse Stephanie was great. She took my list of symptoms (achy neck, coughie lungs, cloggie sinuses, painful everything else) and advised me to take the emergency antibiotics our doctor had prescribed proactively.
One of the side effects of the drugs however was to mess up the one part of my system that was working fine – the same part from that train ride back in India. The cure sounds worse than the disease? Actually no – the rest of me was in pretty rough shape – my head holes were killing me – so I welcomed the tradeoff. Our Ho Chi Minh City hotel was great so I was more than happy to hang around there while the Azithromycin engaged in a form of asymmetrical warfare against my lower colon.
Three days later I was feeling much better. But we had to cancel our thirty-six hour train ride to Hanoi. We stayed one extra night and flew north. This kinda sucked because I was looking forward to that adventure. The other train rides on this trip had been really interesting.
Once we got to Hanoi things returned back to normal travel mode. Local food. Local sites. The night market cometh. This city is very cool. Lots going on. Tonnes of traffic. Here are some photos.
Hanoi at night:
A meal – the restaurant served one dish, and one dish only, Vasily.
And the Vietnam Women’s Museum was amazing – a must see.
Next up was the Ha Long Bay luxury boat cruise. This deserves it’s own post.
Die Hard Three 
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