The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  Fundamentalists of all shapes and sizes seize on this hapless stegosaurus. “God created all the land animals and man on the same day! So says the Bible! Therefore, dinosaurs and man must have lived together in perfect peace and harmony.”

  The argument is bulletproof, and any rebuttals that the carving also resembles a rhino in front of some vegetation, or that there are plenty of mythical carvings around Ta Prohm, or that stegosaurus remains haven’t been found anywhere even remotely close to Cambodia are misguided falsehoods that merely bounce off the ironclad logic of the faithful. Apparently, the stegosaurus is carved out of solid bullshit, completely impervious to the weathering of storms, time, and common sense.

  No, clearly, whatever determined artist carved this here illustration decided that this would be the one spot where he would leave absolute proof that he once caught sight of a stegosaurus while going for his daily stroll. Science and fossils be damned. And just to make his point, the artist carved an animal that looks an awful lot like the Cheshire cat a few inches below the stegosaurus. Clearly, that must have existed too, and presumably this is the spot where Lewis Carroll found his inspiration.

  This bit of nonsensical trivia makes me enjoy the Angkor temples in general and Ta Prohm specifically even more. I prefer my wondrous archaeological sites mixed in with a healthy dollop of wild conspiracy theories, and the fact that there are few other such sites connected to said theories is something I’m sure the new-earth creationists will soon rectify, hopefully in time for my next round-the-world adventure.

  As we leave Ta Prohm, sans pictures of our ancient reptilian quadruped but with about a hundred other pictures of us climbing all over the temple, we stop for a fresh coconut. Every temple has its own well-armed militia of coconut salesmen. They wield sharpened machetes, ready to violently and efficiently thwack the top off a coconut for one dollar. (The official Cambodian currency is the riel. Since roughly 4,000 riel equals one US dollar, Cambodians prefer dollars. They will occasionally give you change in riel, so that if you buy something for $1.75, they will give you the equivalent of 1,000 riel instead of 25 cents, instantly making your change worthless. Although they’re happy to get rid of riel, they’re loath to accept them back.)

  The coconuts, of which we purchase quite a few in our attempts to quell the palm fruit warriors, offer a quick and healthy boost of sugar in the blazing heat of Cambodia. Temperatures rarely drop below ninety degrees, so I’m always sweating and always burning through blood sugar. The coconuts are a quick fix.

  At one point toward the end of a day at Angkor, we can’t find a coconut vendor, so we buy a Coke. I have a few sips to keep my blood sugar up. As of this writing, this is the last sip of Coke I have had. It’s strange the things you take note of after a diabetes diagnosis.

  And while we’re on the subject of blood sugar, one last thought on the jerks who stole my blood sugar monitor.

  Over the last few months, I’ve had to look at a lot of different things in a positive light, and this is no exception. I consider it a win-win situation that they got away. Those two punks didn’t have their arms broken, and I didn’t have to go to a Cambodian jail. Given the generally fervent belief in karma in this part of the world, I fully expect they will develop type 1 diabetes.

  In that case, I hope they held on to the monitor, since it’s a damn good one.

  Chapter 17

  April 24, 2014

  10°46’34.2”N 106°41’40.1”E

  Saigon, Vietnam

  Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as most people here still call it, is exactly as crazy and hectic as we’ve been told. Motorbikes seem to spawn and multiply in real time, so that if you see one down the street headed your way, it becomes 12 by the time it reaches you, then 50, then 137, each blasting its horn in a chaotic symphony of noise that might as well be the Vietnamese Philharmonic Orchestra, because the musicians on their two-wheel hell-riders play it all the time.

  The high-pitched whine of the 125cc bikes are the sopranos, the six-cylinder Toyotas and Hondas are the altos, and the trucks with their clank-clanking rumble fill in the bass and percussion. Saigon has life, all right, unless that life inadvertently steps in front of a bus. By the looks of the streets, the unfortunate meeting of flesh and fender should be happening all the time, but there is the slightest hint of coordination on the roads, and our friends explain the simple rules of surviving as a pedestrian.

  “Just start walking across the road. The motorbikes will miss you. Don’t cross in front of a car or bus. They won’t stop.”

  From what I can tell, the best preparation for crossing the street in Saigon is to play Frogger on an old Atari until your eyes bleed. No amount of planning or strategizing better simulates the streets of the city than the 1981 console game, in which you must guide a frog across five lanes of alternating traffic and a river, which somehow also has five lanes. The cars come at you from all different directions at all different speeds, and to survive you must choose when to move with traffic, against traffic, and when to stay put. The game might as well have been called “Frogger: Streets of Saigon.”

  As in most of Southeast Asia, lane markings, traffic lights, and anything that might imbue a sense of order are mere suggestions to be promptly ignored if inconvenient. I never see anything that might be a speed limit. Cars and motorbikes and buses pick their own speed in a way that appears quite random. What amazes me is the only rule that everyone seems to follow. If you break one traffic law, you have to break them all. No one only speeds. You speed, weave, fail to use turn signals, drive the wrong way down one-way streets, park illegally, and have a broken headlight all at the same time.

  Even on the five-hour bus ride here from Phnom Penh, sometimes we would go fast, sometimes slow, without any discernible relation to the condition of the road, the velocity of other traffic, or our surroundings. Why does the left lane go fast, the right lane slow, the right-middle lane somewhere between moderately fast and decently slow, and the left-middle lane at a ludicrous speed? Maybe Saigon’s Director of Public Development had an Atari 2600. It would explain a lot. Saigon makes Bangkok look like a quiet city.

  Our guest house is a ten-minute walk from the bus stop, during which at least fifty cab drivers, motorbikes, and bicycles with attached chairs ask us if we need a ride. Apparently, there is a law covering all of Asia that requires everyone to bombard you with questions and requests as soon as you step off your bus or plane. Maybe it’s some sort of ingratiation ceremony, in which case I’m not showing nearly enough deference and respect for the local custom. Or maybe it’s a sort of hazing to prepare us for what’s ahead. If so, I dread what’s ahead.

  Our street is twenty feet wide with thirty feet worth of stuff packed into it—street vendors and people and bars and cars and, of course, motorbikes. Our room on the fourth floor keeps most of the noise out, but there is a constant drone of activity that is perpetually audible. It is the white noise of Saigon. Having worked our way through three countries in Southeast Asia already, we are mentally and emotionally prepared for the cacophony. It is insane in a way cities that grew up too fast always are. Too many people, not enough development. Still, it is fun to walk around.

  The soaring temperature hasn’t even considered abating yet, so a five-minute walk at night leaves us drenched in sweat as if we had just completed back-to-back marathons. We expect cooler temperatures in North Vietnam. We just don’t know how far north we have to go to notice any real difference.

  We visit the Vietnam War museum in Saigon, known as the War Remnants Museum, which gives us a very different perspective on a war we didn’t learn enough about in high school. Though any museum with a wing called “Historic Truths” must be approached with a bit of skepticism, we enjoy our visit, and learn just how terrible Agent Orange was, which was noticeably lacking from our grade-school education.

  After two nights in Saigon, we fly to the center of the country, visiting Hoi An and Hue. Our final stop before Hanoi in northern Vietnam is Phong Nha, hom
e to what was the largest cave in the world before they discovered an even larger cave nearby. We rent motorbikes and explore the area with some Dutch friends we meet at our farmstay. Without knowing it, our stay here coincides with one of the biggest holidays of the year in Vietnam—Reunification Day, also known as Victory Day or Liberation Day. On April 30, 1975, North and South Vietnam were united and the Vietnam War officially ended. To celebrate, many Vietnamese visit the exact cave system we’re visiting, which means the lines are long and the waits even longer, but with nowhere to be and nothing else on our agenda for Phong Nha, we enjoy ourselves and our new friends.

  The owner of our farmstay, an Australian guy who left all of his worries Down Under, books us an overnight sleeper to Hanoi for the last leg of our Vietnam wanderings, and after one night in Phong Nha, we bid adieu to the farmstay and the neighbor’s cow, who walked over to say goodbye. A transfer bus takes us to the café that serves as the bus station for the sleeper bus.

  The sum total of all the white people on our sleeper bus is four: the two of us and the Dutch couple.

  We have heard horror stories about the sleeper bus from pretty much everyone who has ever taken it, known someone who has taken it, has thought about taking it, known someone who has thought about taking it, or has ever been on a bus before. It isn’t a sleeper bus at all. A sleeper bus implies that you can actually get some sleep, which numerous online reviews and travelers claim is absolutely impossible due in no small part to the ongoing disco music played at unreasonably high levels and the abundance of fluorescent lights that are never turned off, no matter the time or how many hours remain until sunrise and our arrival at our stated destination.

  EdwardRY from Beaumont kindly informs TripAdvisor that the sleeper bus is not the most pleasant experience. “It’s nothing short of hell. Should have taken the train, or did we actually drive on the RR tracks all the way? … The driver hammers on the horn continually. Music on the speakers until 1 a.m. No shocks on the Huong Long red bus—or maybe even tires. Driver thinks he’s on a moto, swerving and braking and stopping for a whiz every 20 miles like my kids! And you sleep on dirty sheets that are still warm from the last body—ugh!”

  YorkFoodie: “As has been pointed out, you are more likely to arrive in one piece if you take the train: besides the insane traffic and poor roads, some buses are driven by absolute cowboys who may even be … er … chemically enhanced, which does not improve their driving skills.”

  The last review is much shorter and to the point, though somewhat less colorful. “Sleeper buses are an unforgettable experience, and one never to be repeated.”

  So it is with a healthy amount of trepidation that we four foreigners step onto the bus. If I am going to die, this is as good a time as any. The young Vietnamese usher immediately herds us to the back of the bus. He speaks not a word of English, but strangely enough is fluent in German, which does me no good since that’s not a country we visited on our trip. Even if we had, I’m pretty sure my German vocabulary would have been limited to yes, no, cheers, and weinerschnitzel, so I’m not sure how much progress we would have made.

  Every Vietnamese person gets their own reclining seat on the bus, but only one of our small team of foreigners gets an individual bed—the Dutch girl. The rest of us have to share the only communal bed on the bus, way at the back, as far away from as many people on the bus as possible. I get the sneaking suspicion this is more for their convenience than for ours. And so it is that I end up in the middle, Cassie on my left and our Dutch friend, Marc, on my right—a ménage à trois of travelers on an overnight bus to Hanoi. We play involuntary footsie for most of the ten-hour bus ride, gently intertwining big toes and caressing feet because our sleeping arrangement leaves us no choice.

  I don’t understand any of the words uttered by the Vietnamese people looking back at us, but I can imagine their phrases roughly translate to “Suckers!” or “Stupid white people!” or “This is what they get for bombing the shit out of this country.”

  Conveniently, we are next to the toilet, which inconveniently means that whenever someone goes to relieve himself or herself, our auditory and olfactory senses are promptly and duly notified.

  Our bus sets off at about 8 p.m. and makes its first stop at about 8:05 p.m. I’m not quite sure what’s happening since the only thing I can see from my elevated perch at the back of the bus is three square meters of the ceiling. All I know is that we’re stopped for a long time, at least twenty minutes. At this rate—20 percent driving and 80 percent stopping—we are not going to get to Hanoi before our flight to Hong Kong in six days.

  Cassie, who has a window seat offering her a slightly better view, says they are packing the storage compartment of the bus with cargo. I wonder whether it’s of the rice variety or the opium variety. Neither would particularly surprise me, but at least I now understand why they threw our backpacks on the beds below us instead of the luggage hold.

  The bus sets off again and maintains what feels like a pretty good pace judging from the rhythmic rocking of the bus. Left and right. Up and down. The staccato blasts of the horn indicate that we’re regularly passing people, so at least we are making something that resembles progress.

  And then we stop.

  Again, less than an hour into our overnight bus ride, I’m beginning to see the truth in all of the online reviews we have read. This is the bus from hell. I half expect to see our bus driver doing blow any minute. Maybe he’ll at least have the common courtesy to pass it around. I’ve never done cocaine—or any other drug that’s not alcohol or the occasional cigar for that matter—but an overnight sleeper bus to North Vietnam sandwiched between my wife and a Dutch tourist who was a complete stranger thirty-six hours ago feels like the right place to try these sorts of things.

  Before I get a chance to ask my wife her opinion on my impending drug use, the bus pulls out once again, sans cocaine. This time, we go and keep going. The karst mountains of Vietnam zip by us in the dark. The South China Sea is to our right; the endless rice fields of the countryside to our left.

  Much to my surprise, we don’t stop again, and remain in a state of fairly perpetual motion until we pull into Hanoi. Contrary to all of the terrifying online reports, the ride was quite pleasant once we got past the first hour or so. We didn’t quite make any friends on the bus, but we didn’t lose our lives, and that seems like a fair trade.

  For the first time in eight weeks, the temperature has finally dropped into the normal range. Days are in the low eighties; nights are in the sixties. No more of the relentless heat of Southeast Asia. I get a better handle on my blood sugar numbers and fall into a rhythm with my insulin. Where previously my blood sugar was dropping below 100 fairly often—a bit too low for comfort when I’m far away from help—now it’s coming in around 110 and above. That gives me a bigger margin of error in case something goes wrong or I miscalculate my insulin badly.

  We spend five nights in Hanoi, including an overnight trip to Halong Bay—not so much because there are five nights’ worth of things to do in Hanoi, but because a four-star hotel costs twenty dollars a night, breakfast included, and we need a break. Hanoi is the polar opposite of Saigon in many ways. It is quiet and ancient and spread out. Nothing seems too urgent, no one moves too fast, and we walk around the beautiful city, drinking bia hoi—Vietnamese street beer brewed daily that costs twenty-five cents a glass—while soaking in the culture and the sites.

  One night while looking for something new to eat, we settle on a Mexican restaurant, even though we are about as far from Mexico as you can get in Hanoi and we should’ve learned our lesson the last time we ate Mexican food in Poland. At least the weather is nicer this time, the mood is brighter, and the margaritas are made with tequila. We sit on the second floor balcony, enjoying some generically Tex-Mex staples like burritos and sipping our sweet and tangy drinks. The only thing better than one margarita is two margaritas.

  Big mistake.

  Two hours later I check my blood sugar
. 271. Officially my highest blood sugar since I began taking insulin. My second favorite mixed drink—dirty martini is my favorite—is off-limits from now on. Lesson learned. Two units of insulin and my blood sugar comes down into the normal range. There will be no smiley face in my notebook today.

  Cassie and I retreat to our hotel room, where we while away the evening hours sending emails, sorting through pictures, and relaxing. I realize Cassie has something she wants to say, and yet she is hesitant to say it. Having now traveled halfway around the world and been through a life-changing diagnosis together, this immediately strikes me as odd.

  She opens her mouth, then closes it. A moment’s pause.

  “Do you regret traveling?” she asks.

  Cassie doesn’t mean getting back on the road. She means getting on the road in the first place. If I had somehow known that I would be diagnosed with diabetes on the trip, would I have opted to stay home? Would I have avoided the risks of the road for the comforts and safety of home? Would I trade the life I have now for the life I had before? We have given up our apartment, our jobs, and most of our savings. We are far away from our friends and our family. When we return to the United States, we will have no readily available prospects for employment, no place to live, and no source of income. On top of all that, I have a chronic disease that requires constant monitoring, and we will have to find a way to pay for insurance almost immediately upon our return.

  That’s what she means when she asks, “Do you regret traveling?” Cassie’s question will define how we view this trip.

  I have no need to hesitate when I answer. “Absolutely not. I would never trade in this trip for anything, even with diabetes. It may take us a while to find a job and a place to live. I may have to work at a coffee shop to pay the rent. Maybe we’ll have to live with our parents for a bit. Doesn’t matter. It’s totally worth it.”