Good Afternoon Saigon

Saigon is crazy!  This is easily the craziest, busiest, all together whacky town I’ve been in yet.  First, the amount of motor bikes on the roads is crazy.  Even compare to KL, where there were tons, they are everywhere.  And there is a copious lack of respect for traffic laws.  Basically you just gradually push through oncoming traffic when you want to turn and i won’t even talk about crossing streets as a pedestrian.  Needless to say, I’m very happy I had copious amounts of practice playing frogger as a kid.

Plus the people are crazy, but in a good way.  The street life is unlike anything I’ve seen – I’m staying in the tourist backpackers area, and even that is still extremely different from the McDonalds and Starbucks I’ve seen everywhere else (there are some KFCs though).  At night, there’s tons of people sitting together on the curb, eating, drinking, smoking, talking, making fun of the American student who is sweating like crazy, basically just having a good time.  And at night, you pass so many of these small groups, that the city has a certain fascination for me.  It’s quite unlike anywhere I’ve ever been before.

But it’s also unbelievably hot.  Hopefully I’ll get up into the hill country in the North when I go up to Hanoi, b/c that’s probably the only place to escape the humidity.

But I never got to say anything about my time on Borneo!  I don’t think at least.  I might have.  We staying at an eco resort at the island National Park just outside of Kota Kinabalu, the largest town in Sabah.    KK (Kota Kinabalu) is definitely not in tune with the rugged, wild idea I had of Borneo – it’s a big city, and a polluted one, just like every other town in Malaysia.  And the Park definitely has some of that pollution spill over – there are two fairly large shanty towns right on the beach of largest island, and right in front of our bay where our resort was, there were two or three supertankers parked.  Not only did they ruin the view, but kind of makes the whole thing seem a little less eco friendly than before.

We also got to spend a day on Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain on Borneo, and also a World Heritage Site.  Definitely an improvement over any other Park in Malaysia I’ve been too, and it definitely reiterates the idea that international recognition can be everything when it comes to funding infrastruture, and success for National Parks.  But there’s a dark side to World Heritage recognition, more responsibility and to the international community who doesn’t always know what’s going on, plus more tourism which can end up ruining the site you were trying to protect in the first place.  So you need a good balance.  Like everything, I guess.  I’m a little sad that my paper isn’t going to have the cut and dry, black and white, answer that just solves everything right now for National Parks forever, but you’d have to be a moron to expect it to anyway.  Nothing ever is easy.  Especially sight0seeing in this humidity, but I’m going to try.  I must be crazy.