Lunar New Year 2013: The Year of the Snake

We had spent a few months to prepare for a long 45 day trip thru 4 countries, Viet Nam, China, Campuchea, and Korea in the Spring of 2013. I started my planning in early October of 2012. The main part was to spend our Lunar New Year in Viet Nam, and the rest of the time, we'd be visiting other neighbor countries.

I found out that there were plenty of Vietnamese students either studying or working in Korea, specially in or near Seoul. How would I be able to find them? I asked Dr. Google.



 I connected to some of them thru some of the Vietnamese forums which they used to communicate with one another, but mostly to sell their unused stuffs or to ask for help with their own issues. I posted a private-tour-guide-wanted-ads all over the place. I gave them a rough time frame, and what type of tour guides we were looking for, and what we wanted to do and where we wanted to spend time on. After a few days, there were plenty of responses.


It took me about 3 weeks to screen out our potential guide via emails and phone calls directly between Korea and our home in the U.S.



We found a young man who had spent over 6 years studying and working in Korea. He spoke Korean fluently, and knew Seoul real well. He promised that if I was serious about the trip, and if I confirmed about the dates and times, he'd take those days off for vacation. He would have some free trips paid by us and he would earn some money doing that job as well. The wheels started to roll.






After securing a tour guide for our Korea trip, I turned around and prepared for our China trip. Since we were not comfortable in dealing directly with the Politburo regime in China, we looked for a complete tour package sold in Viet Nam leaving from Sai Gon. It was easy. We got this done in the matter of days. They had an office located in Orange County, California. We would book and pay for the trip here with US currency, then joined them in Viet Nam.



Time flied so the 4 months passed by so quick. It was time to pack.

Our first stop was Los Angeles, California. We hadn't been back to our neighborhood in a while. Things seemed to change quite a bit. It's felt suffocated, with too much traffic, and too many people. We had 3 days to visit friends and relatives, and to refresh after 6 hour flights across the country. We still had another 18 hour flights before we landed at Tan Son Nhat airport.

 Manhattan Beach, California.