Traveling Over...

He sat beside me on the plane, from San Francisco to Taipei. At first, I assumed he was Chinese and going to Taipei. He was resetting his watch shortly after taking a seat, so I asked him if he knew what time it was in Taipei. He didn’t and said he was still on Oklahoma time. Despite his accent, I could also pick out a bit of twang. He’d lived most of his life in Oklahoma City and was going back to Vietnam for the first time in over 30 years, taking with him his wife and three children, ages 17 to 27. He had graduated from high school in ’66 and was called up into the South Vietnamese army during Tet, in 68, serving as an officer in the Quartermaster Corp. He remained at his post as the surrender occurred, until relieved by the victors. For having done his duty, he was rewarded with a year in a re-education camp where he said he was forced to do hard work in the rice fields and on other projects deemed worthy by the conquering army. And he’d been hungry, always hungry, which was how they tried to control them. All former officers spent at least a year in the camps, he said. Some were there as many as five years. The first chance he got, like thousands more of his countrymen, he fled his homeland, taking a risk on a boat in the South China Sea. He made it to Malaysia, where he spent a year in a refugee camp. There, he met the woman who would become his wife. He noted that she was Chinese, although she’d been born in Vietnam as had her father and grandfather. They married after they were resettled to the United States and have been together for thirty years. He was excited but unsure of going home, of what he might find. “Vietnam is dangerous,” he said. He was leery about traveling with just his family and booked a tour so that his children can see the country from which their parents had come. But was only for a visit, for a month, afterwards he’d go back home, to Oklahoma. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,” he bragged proudly of his home.
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The trip began at the Grand Rapids airport with a ticket agent that wasn’t having her best day. She argued with me over my ticket-saying that it was because I was changing carriers that the full flight wasn’t showing up. I argued, since it showed me flying to Taipei, but not Jakarta, and I was on the same carrier. She wanted to send my bag to Taipei and have me re-check them. No way! Finally, she realized that it was because of the day change and said she’d have to manually enter my bags into the system to get them to Jakarta… GCK was the code and something didn’t look right. It said, “Garden City,” but I had no idea where that was at. My wife looked up on her phone and discovered that it was in Nebraska (or was it Kansas?). Needless to say, it wasn’t in Indonesia, so it was back up to the woman and she agreed that her coding could be a problem and recoded the bag to CGK (for Jakarta)…

From the train, between Jakarta and Yogyakarta

Somehow, I safely made it here. After a day in the capital city, which is hot and crowded and smoggy, I escaped over the mountains on a magical train ride and am in Yogyakarta (I keep thinking Yogi the Bear will show up any minute, which may not be farfetched as they showed an Indonesian version of Thomas the Tank Engine on the train!). More to come…