North Vietnam

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It's Sat night in Hanoi, and we just visited 2 places of worship: a local Buddhist temple with a small, all female group chanting and kowtowing, and one of the largest Catholic churches in Hanoi, a full house singing mass in Vietnamese, very moving. Such a contrast of sights and sounds and scents! We just returned from an overnight boat cruise in Halong Bay, thousands of karst limestone islands, as far as the eye can see and then some. This is now a wildly popular trip with both Vietnamese and foreigners, I counted over 30 overnight boats parked at the caves we visited. And this in an unseasonably cold and damp off-season! In Hanoi we also took in a traditional North Vietnamese art form, water puppets, slapstick humor, splashing, set to traditional instruments, drums and singers. The four dragons dance enchanted me the most, two of the golden dragons spit water and two spit fireworks as they dove and jumped in and over the water and each other. Tomorrow Sunday we travel to Siem Reap in Cambodia by air, to explore Angor Wat.

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Photos

Thien Cung cave
this cave was discovered in the 1930s by a farmer following a monkey. It's right next to Dau Go, used in the 1200s by a famous Viet generalto hide bamboo stakes to defeat Kublai Khan.