Vietnam

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October 17: Today we flew to Vietnam and arrived sort of by chance at the same guesthouse we stayed in three years ago, Guesthouse 70 on Bui Vien in the Pham Ngu Lao district which is frequented mostly by backpackers. We stayed in what must have been the smallest room they had on the sixth floor. There's no elevator, but thankfully they have a winch which can pull big backpacks up through the center of the stairwell. We went for a walk and bought a Vietnamese SIM card and had some noodles and stopped in for nostalgia's sake to the Guns'n'Roses Bar. The GNR bar has gone a little downhill. It was empty and the "DJ" was a listless teenager. He was mostly playing the Police, and managed to play "Roxanne" twice in ten minutes. Played a little pool against some fairly plastered older local guys, then a little against a local weirdo who came in wearing a long sleeve white patterned shirt, leather vest over that, motorbike respirator thing on his face, sunglasses and big headphones. He proceeded to play most of the game dressed like that, saying nothing to anyone and drinking beer that he had apparently brought in with him. Oh well.

October 18: We decided to do the walking tour around to catch some of the important sights, but by the time we actually set out, it was about 2pm and we hadn't had lunch yet. So we reversed the direction of the walking tour and started out by trekking an hour across town to a new burrito place (California Burrito) that had just opened up. Neither of us could get excited about seeing the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes") or any of the other guidebook highlights. We made another attempt to go to the cinema but we had missed the only English showing of "The Island" which is supposedly crap anyway. The other Western movies were unwatchable tripe I had never even heard of. The burrito, incidentally, was excellent and very large (though it have P a tummy ache). It fair outshines anything available in Europe in both sheer taste and value for money--it even comes in a foil wrapper. We got home after dodging our way through the motorbikes that dominate the city streets. Motorbikes probably outnumber cars on the roads here by at least 20 to one. Crossing a major street is a somewhat harrowing process involving picking kind of the right time to go and then crossing through the bikes at a steady pace so that the drivers can predict where you're going and miss you as they zoom past a few inches away. The key point is not to hesitate once you start on you'll confuse the traffic--it would probably be easier and safer to close your eyes and just walk across. Or you can follow in the wake of elderly people, which is also a good strategy. For dinner we decided to be charitable and tried to go to a restaurant operated as a hospitality training center for orphans and former street children, but as the sign outside said, the lazy brats get off of work at 9:10, exactly when we arrived, and so we walked down the street to a Vietnamese barbecue place. The menu included some nice, normal seafood type dishes, as well as lots of exotic bits of rare animals which presumably have some kind of specific function in traditional Chinese medicine. At the table next to ours was a really interesting group. It was a group of about 10 Vietnamese men and women in their thirties and forties, downing a bottle or two of whisky. At some point one of the guys took out a guitar and starting playing what sounded kind of like generic vaguely Spanish sounding folk songs, and then began to sing along in Vietnamese. One of the women who had a pretty good voice piped up and the next thing you know, another guitar, some bongos and a few pairs of maracas have materialized and everybody's singing along, entirely for their own amusement. It was pretty clear that none were professionals but it was pretty interesting to see a group of ten people where pretty much everyone could at least carry a tune and/or had some maracas stashed in a shoulder holster or something. To state it crudely, this is what I imagine communist people must do for fun in light of the crap TV and censored media, etc, and what our ancestors probably did before radio.

October 19: This day we went on a one-day canned tour to the Mekong delta. You can obviously spend days or weeks in this region but I had imagined that it would be quite similar to southern Louisiana and thought it would be better to spend more time elsewhere. On the bus we had just settled down to sleep through the 3 hour bus ride when our guides decided to launch into a tag team series of monologues on a number of fairly random and not very interesting topics: burial customs, the history of Saigon, arranged marriage, etc. It was made particularly painful by the fact that their English was very difficult to understand (I could follow only about 10%) but they spoke through very loud but muffled loudspeakers and repeated everything so that we would understand (didn't help). So we couldn't really sleep. We then were herded onto a boat for a little boat ride down the river, which was pretty nice and about the only worthwhile aspect of the tour. The Mekong river looks a lot like I imagine the Mississippi must look when running through a rural area--about a mile wide, muddy, and with dense vegetation on each side. People were riding leaky boats of all shapes and sizes around with goods and livestock on board, and also setting and tending little nets to catch fish. After a while we stopped for a few hours of visits to little factories/shops where people make rice paper, coconut candy, banana wine, and three or four kinds of sweet that seemed like variations on the Rice Crispy treat. These little shops were clearly hosting a non-stop stream of tour groups, so we didn't get much of an idea about how ordinary people work in real workshops on a daily basis. This was pretty boring. Our well-meaning guide also made it even more boring by stopping every 30 meters to try to point out various trees and plants, but he rarely knew or could pronounce the English name for them so it was pretty pointless. We then stopped off in a town to visit the market, where we saw the meat section included live chickens, ducks, various crustaceans and mollusks, turtles, frogs, eels and snakes. Every time we would stop to look at something, our guide would start to tell us how in Vietnam there are three kinds of it (it was always three kinds)--coconuts, incense, rice, whatever. Then we had to listen to really dull descriptions of each one, and I was often heartbroken to realize that when I thought he had finished with some topic, he was really only one-third through because he had described three sub-varieties of the same kind. Then we took a really long bus ride back to Saigon on a terrible road in pouring rain at about 30 mph. We stopped at a fake bonsai garden where the 20 or so staff members appeared to be going to a lot of trouble to move very small fish from one pond to another for no apparent reason. That night we managed to go to the orphan restaurant, where the food was very nice and the service was very eager and friendly but a bit inefficient, which I guess is what you'd expect. Good luck to them.

October 20: Today we took an early bus to Mui Ne. We decided to stay at a little mid-budget resort which appears to cater mostly to German package tourists. We had a walk around the town and then had a pizza at an Italian restaurant called "Good Morning Vietnam". It is a chain with about 4 locations around Vietnam, which appears to pride itself on having a real live Italian as the manager of each place. The guy who was managing the place was from Brescia but had done his military service in Friuli where P is from, so they could reminisce about how cold it is in Friuli. The pizza was quite good but P managed to find a few things to complain about regarding the crust. There were some famous sand dunes in Mui Ne but we skipped them because we'd seen a lot of dunes and were afraid someone would make us ride a camel. We hung out by the pool, ate some so-so seafood and had an early night.

October 21: This day we went to the beach. After a little while I saw some people sailing around in a little Laser so I watched where the boat landed, which was a resort down the beach. I walked over and rented the little boat for an hour. The wind was very high, and getting higher, and the sea (the South China Sea) was quite rough. I was able to sail downwind away from the resort pretty easily but sailing back up the beach was quite hard because it meant sailing almost directly into the wind. It took me about 40 minutes to remember enough (this mostly consisted of remembering the wisdom of my friend and Boy Scouts buddy Fred Wild and our various adventures and misadventures in Paul B Johnson State Park and Lake Ponchartrain) to tack back up the beach to the resort. Unfortunately, just as I was turning to sail toward the beach, I got disorganized in the boat and the sheet (one of the ropes that you use to point the sail) got tangled around the tiller (which you use to point the rudder). So I couldn't really control anything for a few seconds and the boat turned right over. The boat rental guy starting swimming out to help me, and when he got about halfway out to me, I remembered more wisdom of Fred Wild and turned the boat rightside up again. So it was all a bit embarrassing and I sailed the boat in. Eventually the boat rental guy swam back to the beach and took the boat off my hands. P made the right choice of staying onshore. After a while we left the beach and got some nice ravioli at Good Morning Vietnam, then spent some more time at the pool, and then ended up having some more pizza at Good Morning Vietnam. Everything else looked empty, expensive or not very good.

October 22: This morning we woke up early to take the bus to Dalat. The trip was scheduled for 4.5 hours but we made it in about 3. Dalat is in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and is much more cool and hilly than anywhere else we had gone at that point. We walked over to a hotel called the Peace Hotel (nice room for $6). Next door is the Peace Cafe, where the owner stands out and shouts "Welcome to Peace Cafe!!!" at the top of her lungs to any foreigner who passes within 30 meters. We dropped off our bags and had a walk around. The town has a reputation for being touristy but in my opinion it's not very deserved. We saw many fewer other tourists, in particular because most tourists are out of the town during the day on hikes, bike rides, motorbike tours, etc. Also, there aren't many touts and peddlers wandering around and trying to sell you stuff. We had a walk around the artificial lake (which was brown and muddy), stopping at one point to try Chon coffee at Trung Nguyen (which is kind of like the Starbucks of Vietnam). Chon is the most fancy grade of Vietnamese coffee and may or may not be produced by feeding the special coffee berries (which contain the bean in the middle) to a special kind of weasel or fox, which then poops out (or perhaps spits out, or both) the undigested bean. We read and heard a couple of different accounts of this coffee, and aren't 100% sure which to credit. Anyway, the coffee was nice but nothing special. For dinner we wandered around to find V Cafe, which gets big reviews from Lonely Planet but we thought was pretty ho-hum for both Vietnamese and Western food.

October 23: This day we mostly spent on a tour around Dalat and the outskirts with a couple of guides we had met at the Peace Cafe. They belong to a group called the Easy Riders, which consist of about 70 freelance motorcycle guides based in Dalat. They're more like a guild than a company. Anyway, the hotel put us in touch with a guy named Lulu, who also brought along his friend Mui. Lulu looks a lot like a slightly older version of Jackie Chan, while Mui bears a passing resemblance to Jamie Foxx. Lulu was a South Vietnamese soldier in the war and speaks OK English, while Mui is about 40 (so was a child during the war) and speaks very good English. In any event, they are good friends and are a really good team. Lulu mostly explains points of interest related to the war, while Mui covers most of the other things. We spent the day riding around on the backs of their little 125cc Honda motorcycles around Dalat and in the countryside. We visited a few very beautiful (but built in this century) pagodas set in beautiful pine forests around Dalat. The woods are very similar to the woods in Mississippi, kind of sparse pine woods. Most of the pine trees were planted after the war as part of a government reforestation effort. We also went to the Crazy House, which is a little guesthouse with kind of knock-off Gaudi architecture and themed rooms where the theme generally consists of some large papier-mâché monstrosity with red Christmas light eyes in the room. There's a big papier mache bear with red light eyes in the Bear Room, a big ant in the Ant Room and so on. The owner and designer was the daughter of the successor to Ho Chi Minh, and spent 14 years getting a PhD in design in Moscow in the seventies and eighties. It's kind of interesting that the Communist world produced its share of spoiled ruling class brats--though the Crazy House lady is a pretty benign one. Her family connections also explain why the local authorities put up with the eccentricity of the design for all these years. We also saw French colonial villas which were boarded up but will be renovated as part of a big redevelopment plan. After that we went into the countryside, which consisted of beautiful forested hills and agricultural land with little twisty roads running through them. We stopped off at a little village called the Chicken Village, where an ethnic minority (i.e. non-Vietnamese) hill tribe called the Koho people lives. The village was recently connected to the electric grid and seems fairly prosperous, as they get lots of tourists buying their woven handicrafts, and they have abandoned corn production in favor of vegetables and flowers which are a lot more valuable. The village is called the Chicken Village because there's a 10 meter high concrete chicken statue in the middle of the town. This chicken was apparently a present from the government (which, stupid as it sounds, has probably paid for itself dozens of times over in increased tourist traffic--I mean, if you're trying to decide which minority village to visit, and you can't think of any other criteria, the big concrete chicken can be the deciding factor) and has to do with a tragic folklore story involving a chicken. We also visited a very pretty, maybe 5 meter waterfall near Dalat, and a coffee plantation, and saw a Hyundai dealership set sort of incongruously in a beautiful green valley with nothing else around. When we stopped for lunch, Lulu and Mui gave us the hard sell for hiring them to take us to Hoi An (which was where we wanted to go next from Dalat). We had a really great day with them, so we were tempted. On the bus, its a pretty miserable 16 hour ride, but with the Easy Riders, you take between 4 and 6 days, stopping around and seeing more of the same, "but better" (more (better?) minority tribes, more (bigger) waterfalls, more (interesting) local handicrafts, etc). Anyway, it's not cheap, and we didn't really want to commit to 6 days on the back of the motorbike, covering many hundreds of kilometers, etc. We also didn't really have time to take 6 days, or even 4, and still spend enough time in Hoi An, Hanoi and Halong Bay as we wanted. However, as we were sitting around the Peace Cafe, waiting to tell them no, we started talking to a Dutch couple, Leon and Ingrid, who were having the same dilemma, and came up with the idea of asking them to drive us 3 days to Nha Trang (which is MUCH closer than Hoi An, but you can still see some good stuff on the way), whence we could fly to Danang which is only an hour from Hoi An. After a lot of ho-hah we hired Mui and our Dutch friends hired Lulu.

October 24: This day, Lulu came to pick up Leon and Ingrid with his sidekick Qui (nickname Monkey), and Mui came to get us with his sidekick Tai (nickname Mr Tai). Qui is the youngest of the bunch, very enthusiastic and friendly, though still learning the English and the various spiels at the various locations. He focused on guiding us through the big climbs up and down waterfalls. Tai was the oldest and quietest. He was very thin and a little shy, maybe, but was very helpful and careful in taking good care of P. Our first stop was a Buddhist pagoda with big plaster amusement-park style magical animals in it. There was a plaster dragon about 15 meters long, a big turtle, a Chinese unicorn and a phoenix. Despite the slightly Disneyland style vibe of the place, Mui took the opportunity to explain a little about Buddhist philosophy. We then stopped off at a flower farm and a few very pretty scenic overlooks. When we would get to a stretch of rode that went along a particularly scenic hillside, the guides would usually stop, let us off, explain a little bit about the surrounding area, and then continue on about a kilometer so we would have a ten minute or so walk to catch up. We saw a mushroom farm, a silkworm farm (presented by Tai) and a silk spinning workshop. Unlike the canned and touristy workshops we saw on our tour of the Mekong Delta, these were real functioning farms and workshops where the guides knew the boss and would say hello before leading us around explaining a little bit about the activities there. It was much more interesting to see ordinary Vietnamese folks going about their daily lives. We also saw a rather dangerous looking rice wine still being run out of a small shack on a pig farm. The farmer here was a Vietnamese guy from the North who had moved down after 1975. He bought rice and made a little money out of distilling rice wine in his flammable looking operation, but then fed the leftover fermented rice to his pigs (his main income) and also sold the pig manure as fertilizer. He also had the biggest hair I've seen in Vietnam so far--about 15 centimeters straight up. He had a bicycle in his yard that was a old-style Vietnamese bicycle with thick spokes on the wheels, extra struts supporting the front wheel fork and a break that was just a rubber pad that you had to hold against the front tire with your foot. These bicycles can carry hundreds of pounds and were a main method of transporting things along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We stopped off at a waterfall called "Elephant Waterfall" which was maybe about 20 meters high but didn't look much like an elephant. One funny thing we noticed was that at one point, there was a hose running down the hillside right by where the water fell--purposefully or not, it had holes in a few strategic places and gave out a light spray that would hit you if you stood right by the most scenic place to look up at the waterfall--I think this was done on purpose to "enhance" the effect. We stopped for lunch at a little ramshackle restaurant open air roadside restaurant with plastic tables and stools. The guides ordered about 5 dishes which were all great. The view through the open window was a beautiful green valley. In the afternoon we stopped to visit a village where some people called the Ma people live. They are much darker than the Vietnamese and have flatter noses. The village seemed really poor--their land isn't good enough to grow coffee and they only recently got electricity. We stopped off in a house where the chief lived and had a little cup of tea while Lulu talked to some of the men in the village. Luku had apparently learned a lot of the hill tribe languages in high school, and he and Mui were able to speak the language of all the tribes we visited on the trip. Lulu generally passed out candy to the village kids and cigarettes to some of the younger men. One of the younger men showed us around the little house where we were drinking tea, which had one main room and housed about 10 people. The kitchen was a separate building in the back. Apparently, a year before about 20 of the children in the Ma villages had gotten sick and died, but we weren't able to understand the disease that had killed them. Around dusk we stopped for the night in an ethnic minority village on Lac Lake. The people who lived there are called the Mnong or Muong people. The village probably had about 40 houses. Traditionally, the people in this village lived in longhouses on stilts about 4 feet off the ground, where the floor is just pieces of bamboo thrown over the beams. The domestic animals lived underneath the house. For the most part, the houses now have proper floors and the domestic animals live in separate buildings. However, the guides took us to their friends' house, where the village chief lived. The village chief lived in the back room of his family's house. His house still had the traditional bamboo floor. The chief and his wife were about 85 years old. The chief's wife was incredibly ancient looking but still very lively, and she waved and shook our hands when we came into her room. The chief himself had huge hands and was already three sheets to the wind. He took out a bamboo flute and played something that was almost a tune to say hello. Afterwards, the chief's wife went to bed and the chief went out to visit some friends. We stayed in the front room of the house with the chief's grandsons. We had noodles and some pot-bellied pig grilled on a little barbecue that they had in the room, which was very tasty. They also served rice wine in little cups out of a big plastic water bottle. We only managed to learn two expressions in the Mnong language, both of which having to do with the rice wine. "Nit lekh" is kind of like "cheers" or "bottoms up" and indicates that you should drink the entire glass, while "Nit nahm" indicates that you should drink about half. If you tried to cheat and only drink part of glass when you should have drunk the whole one, people would shout "Lekh!" Anyway, we went on drinking the rice wine and talking to the three grandsons, Kin, Lam and Smee for a few hours. Leon did most of the drinking at first and I did more at the end. The grandsons were already so plastered they didn't notice. After visiting the chief's house we had a little walk and then went to bed. We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the fanciest longhouse that we saw, which had mosquito nets over mattresses.

October 25: We woke up at about 2.30 in the morning to the inexplicable sound of crowing of roosters. The roosters later realized they had it wrong and went back to sleep for a few hours. This day we continued from the Lac Lake village to a place called Virgin Falls. We stopped off the see the village from a nearby hillside, and saw that the village was actually on a peninsula in Lac Lake, surrounded by rice paddies. We were able to make out and elephant walking through the rice paddies. We stopped at a bridge where Lulu explained how during the war, the VC had been hiding on a hill on one side of the bridge, but later fled across the bridge into a church when the Americans started bombing the hill. The church had been built by the French a long time before for the local minority people, but after 1954, a lot of people had come down from the North to get away from the Communists and had settled there, so the tribes moved away. Anyway, the VC apparently thought that they could hide in the church but instead helicopters destroyed it pretty completely, leaving only a shell. Lulu pointed out the new church that they had build after the way, up on a nearby hillside, and the place on a different hillside where the catholic men among the dead VC had been buried. He also explained that the destroyed bridge over the river had been blown up by the South Vietnamese army when it fled south, and the new bridge we were standing on had been built by the government in 1979. Lulu went into a little bit about the later history, about how Vietnam had invaded Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge had killed Vietnamese people, and installed a friendly government in Cambodia and Laos that they still kind of control today. He also said that a lot of the inspiration for the recent (since the mid 90's) opening of Vietnamese society to the West had been undertaken after the Vietnamese officials had visited China and seen all the advantages the Chinese had gotten from moving to a capitalist economy. Later we stopped in Buon Ma Thot, which was a major strategic point during the war, and saw the communist victory monument that the government had built in the middle of the town. We had a walk around the market there. We stopped off to visit a village where people called the Chin people live. They were about as poor as the Ma, and their agriculture seemed to focus on corn and mountain rice. They had a little pool fed by a waterfall where they did everything from washing clothes to gathering water to cook with to cleaning their motorbikes. In the afternoon, we stopped off at a number of really large and beautiful waterfalls. Again, the guides brought us to one, then let us walk about 5 km to the next one, where Qui was waiting to show us the second one. The second waterfall was really impressive, maybe 20 meters high and 50 meters across. We then tried to walk to a third one, but Qui saw that the bridge over to it had been wiped out in the monsoon. We did see a campsite where a couple of boys had an open air wooden shack and were fishing for river fish using nets, dams and some kind of electric shock equipment that involved hooking up a long metal pole to a car battery and seemed really ill-advised. That night we stayed at a little resort in Virgin Falls where the shower didn't work very well (so we used the bucket method) and there was clearly something scurrying around in the ceiling. We had a nice dinner, where Mui treated us to a long lecture on his personal brand of Buddhist philosophy.. One interesting but kind of scary issue that came up was that when we had been on our way to the waterfalls, we had seen a small motorbike overturned on the side of the road with a guy lying next to it. I didn't see anything else, but when Leon passed by he was moving slightly and when P passed by he saw that the man had blood on his head. Tai told P, and Qui told Leon, that the man was just drunk, but when we were sitting and talking to Mui, we got out of him the truth, that basically it's not a very good idea to stop to help people who have been in "solo" accidents, because often litigious victims or relatives will accuse people who didn't even see the accident but stopped to help of having caused it. Mui said that he had been wrongly accused in such a situation fairly recently, and all four of the guides had driven past without hesitation.

October 26: This day we drove a longer way back to the east to Nha Trang. We stopped to see the landscape in a few places that had been defoliated by dioxin during the war, and stopped on the outskirts of Nha Trang to see some Cham temples. That evening the guides took us to a restaurant that is famous for barbecue, where you grill meat on a small charcoal grill right at the table. We had beef and squid, and we stayed for a few hours eating and drinking. Even though we must have made it through 40 large bottles of beer in addition to food for 8, the bill came to just under 400,000 dong, which is about 13 pounds or 25 dollars. Quite a deal.

October 27: This morning we woke up early to buy plane tickets to Danang and then caught the plane. We then took a taxi 30 minutes to Hoi An. We had a little walk around in the afternoon and tried some of the local specialties (prawn raviolis and stir fried meat and vegetables on fried wontons).

October 28: This day we did some little errands in Hoi An before stopping in at a tailor. Hoi An is quite a small town and there are probably only about 45 restaurants that specifically cater to foreign tourists, but it probably has 300 tailors. Most of them are really only showrooms where the ladies working there do measurements, and the clothes are outsourced. This is 298 of them. We went to one of the few (a place called Yaly) where the clothes are actually made on site upstairs. When you're walking around inside you can hear sewing machines humming away through the ceiling. I would say that this should must get 75 percent of the tourist business and the other 299 share the remaining 25 percent. Based on some experiences with a tailor in Bangkok (great work shirts, but suits not so good), and reading an article that pointed out that Hoi An tailors treat their customers as one offs, rather than people with whom they could have repeat business over many decades (as with tailors in travel hubs like Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong), we decided to steer clear of getting work clothes done and stuck to casual items where absolute precision wasn't as necessary. The stuff came out pretty well and probably cost about 30% of what you'd expect to pay in London or about 50% of what you'd expect to pay in the US. We had to go back about three or four times to get things adjusted and refitted, so we were in and out until the day we left. That evening we went to dinner at a place called Cafe des Amis, which I would highly recommend. The owner and main chef guy, Mr Kim (who doesn't actually do much cooking, apparently), whips something up every day, and you basically order drinks and say whether you want meat, fish or vegetables. You then get whatever he decided to cook that day. The food was excellent and Mr Kim helpfully comes over to each table on the ground floor as each dish arrives to demonstrate how to eat it (break off a piece of wonton, put some vegetables on it, then dip a piece of fish in this sauce, put the fish on the wonton and put the whole thing in your mouth, etc). He does this very slowly, because it appears that he's been making his way through a case of Saigon Beer all evening. He speaks really good French but not so much English. He is also really generous and helpful in other ways--it was raining hard at one point and he handed out free plastic ponchos to all his departing customers, and gave lighters (not just a light!) to smokers among his customers who had arrived without one. The music was kind of weird, namely songs by a famous French songwriter, but translated into Russian and played by a Russian singer (name something like Bulya Okruzheva?) playing the guitar. A pretty unique place.

October 29: This day we just had a walk around Hoi An in the morning, which really confirmed how much Vietnam reminds me of Louisiana. A lot of the older Chinese and French colonial style buildings and streets look just like sections of Magazine Street in New Orleans. We had a sandwich on the street which was really basically a po boy (baguette with barbecued pork inside and dressed with mint sauce. The focus on shrimp, other seafood and pork in the diet is also very similar. Hoi An was generally pretty to walk around (a lot of "The Quiet American" was shot there) but two things make it kind of a downer: first, the hawkers are everywhere and never leave you alone--you get solicited to buy postcards, sunglasses, or souvenirs literally every 30 to 60 seconds, wherever you are, no matter what you do. Also, every building within the main old town area has been converted to some kind of tourist establishment--most are tailors but there are also t-shirt shops and purveyors of all manner of other useless crap. Anyway, we originally thought we would want to stay longer but I was glad to leave. There were other excursions you could do from Hoi An (a local beach, China Beach where the US soldiers had R&R during the war, big Cham ruins at My Son) but the weather was rainy and we are pretty "ruined-out" so we didn't do any of them.

October 30: This day we had a little walk around Hoi An and then caught the plane from Danang to Hanoi. We just stopped at a little hotel when we arrived at 10pm and had to deal with a maddening string of attempted rip offs. We beat all of them but my blood pressure was pretty high by the time we left the next morning.

October 31: This day we woke up early and walked over to the office of our tour company to go on a three day cruise on Halong Bay. After a long and boring ride to Halong City on a bus from Hanoi, we boarded the boat and met the other folks on the trip--two English couples, an American couple and three Australian girls and one of their dads. They were a pretty friendly bunch, with the Australians kind of acting as social chairmen. The cruise was quite good as we had nice weather and even a little bit of sun on this day. Halong Bay is a bay east of Hanoi that is full of hundreds of irregularly shaped limestone mountains sticking out of the water. Some are as small as a big building but others are like small islands. They are mostly grey in color but many are partially or completely covered with dense green vegetation of ferns, palms and little trees. We stopped off in one particularly large rock where there's a cave that we walked through. It was quite a large complex of caves with many different chambers. In addition to stalactites and stalagmites and other things you expect in a cave, the ceiling was mostly covered in a gentle wave pattern that was apparently caused by the sea water coming in and out with the tides over hundreds of years. This is the only place we encountered lots of other tourists. Halong Bay is pretty amazing is a World Heritage Site because of its natural beauty. Unfortunately, Vietnamese and Chinese tourists without much ecological sense buy things like corals and stalactites from local kids who sell them off of leaky little speedboats that pull up to the tour boats. After the cave we sailed over to an area where all the boats dropped anchor within about a mile radius of each other. We jumped into the sea for a little swim around the boat. After about 5 minutes I got stung by a jellyfish on my shoulder and across my back (never saw the thing) so I went in and people all followed. After dinner we sat on the deck and chattered while the turned around on its anchor in the tides or current or whatever. We slept in a tiny but comfortable cabin on the boat.

November 1: This day we spent the day kayaking in Halong Bay and Cat Ba National Park. The weather was overcast but it didn't rain. The kayaks were much more sophisticated than any I'd used before--they had a pedal control rudder and you really climbed down into it rather than sitting on top. The water in the bay was very tranquil and it was quite spectacular to see the big limestone hills from a distance and then paddle up to them and see them up close. We also paddled out to the open sea where there were pretty big waves and the sea was beating against the rocks making really loud thumping and slapping noises and blowing spray everywhere. At the end we paddled through a floating village where people were growing fish in nets. The fish where big dog fish about 80-100 centimeters long. Because they live in such close quarters, apparently they have to be taken out once a week to be rinsed in fresh water to kill the various nasties that live on them. One of the more revolting things we saw was one of the villagers cutting the legs off of a live mouse with scissors and throwing the bits into the fish pens, where the fish mobbed the bits like a pack of piranhas. I was pretty glad to leave.

November 2: This day we got the boat back to Halong City and took the bus back to Hanoi. We stayed at a hotel with three names: Sunflower Hotel, Viet Binh III and Tan Binh II. Presumably it was three names so that it can pretend to be same-same and get overflow business when Viet Binh or Tan Binh are full or "full". This is a pretty annoying practice but, I suppose, is the normal semi-honest business practices of tourist trap Asia rather than the outright ripoff we had to fight hard against at the place we stayed overnight in Hanoi last time. In the evening, we happened across the water puppet theater and popped in to see a performance. The concept appears to be that the puppeteers stand behind the backdrop and operate the puppets, which stand on or in some shallow water. The puppets appear to be operated mostly from below by sticks. Nearby is a 7 person musical section of singers and various instrument players, who provide the voices and the narrative music. The artform apparently began in rice-paddy communities. The most impressive visual stuff (like dragons jumping out of the water with fireworks coming out of their mouths) was at the beginning, while the more narrative bits were at the end. The only story which I was able to follow was one in which a medieval emperor is granted a magical sword by Heaven to defeat the Chinese imperialists, and after the war, a sacred turtle comes to get the magical sword back. I had read the story somewhere in Lonely Planet so when I saw a king-looking puppet giving a sword to a magic turtle in a lake, I figured this was what was going on.

November 3: This day we had a look around Hanoi. We took a cyclo down to see the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, which is much less scary than the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. For some reason, I always found the squat, blood red stone of the Lenin Mausoleum at Red Square suggestive of unknowable and terrifying Cold War secrets and mysteries, and it still gives me the creeps. The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is similarly a big square slab but built more above ground and just looks like a generic piece of uninspired civic architecture. We went by a few historic pagodas and to the Temple of Literature, which was a school, examination center and civic temple for the Confucian-era mandarins of the Vietnamese kingdoms in the 1300-1700's. There's a big statue of Confucius and his main disciples as well as the names of the people who passed the exams in certain years. After that we had a nice lunch at a place called KOTO, which is another of the street orphan catering industry training centers. Then we went to an internet place where we took care of some business. One thing that I noticed in Vietnam is that the cheapest internet is usually not at internet cafes as such, but at the online gaming centers that cater mostly to the brigades of dorky Vietnamese teenage boys playing god only knows what silly online swords and sorcery game. These places are really really cheap--about $0.20 an hour--but are not particularly conducive to quiet reflection as the little broncinos crowd around and shout whenever someone saves the princess or some such. We also had really nice coffee and pastries at the French cafes--coffee is one area where Vietnam has it all over Thailand.

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Photos

Elephant Falls
A Qui-approved posed photo taken at Elephant Falls.

Elephant Falls II
Looking up at Elephant falls.

Ma village children
Two cute children in one of the poorer ethnic minority villages we visited.

The road ahead
The view out of the roadside restaurant on the first day to Nha Trang.

Rice wine still
I don't think this contraption is safety-approved by anyone. I stood as far away as possible.

Welcome to Dak Lak Province!
Greetings from the Young Pioneers People's Revolutionary welcoming committee!

Chin village children
Children at the poorest ethnic minority village we visited.

Mosquito net at Lac Lake
Our bunk at the Mnong Village longhouse. Nit lekh!

Catholic church on bank of Mekong River
An old French church along the Mekong River.

My Dung shop
This place has the best My Dung this side of Uranus. (Sorry.)

L'esploratricina
Carrying all our stuff around Dalat.

Bear Room
The aptly named "Bear Room" at the Crazy House, Dalat.

Big Buddha
A very, very large Buddha in the pine woods of Dalat.

P with Lulu and Mui
Lulu on the left, Mui on the right, standing in front of a lettuce field at the Chicken Village.

Big Chicken
The big concrete chicken that gives the Chicken Village its name.

Farms
Some beautiful cultivated valleys that make the central highlands so nice.

Taking a break
The gang takes a little breather and enjoys the view.

Pot Bellied Pig
These little guys are small enough to fit INTO the trough for extra convenience. Unfortunately, we ate one of his mates the day before.

Brand new helmet!
I've got a new helmet--nothing can stop me now!!

Waterfall and rainbow
Self explanatory.

Waterfall
Self explanatory.

The friendliest checkpoint
Leon, the very tall Dutch guy, was the favorite of the guards. They all wanted to come out and have their pictures taken with him.

Agent Orange landscape
This area was defoliated with dioxin at the request of the South Vietnamese. The VC were attacking their training bases nearby from the hills. It now looks a bit like Scotland.

P with Tai
On the way home from the goodbye dinner, I turned around and took this action photo.

P with Qui
Saying goodbye to Qui, the most lively of the bunch.

Vietnamese po boy?
I smell a business opportunity selling Vietnamese roast pork po boys in New Orleans...

Riverfront of Hoi An
This street had flooded about 75 cm the day before. The benches were almost completely underwater.

The Ministry of You've Got to Be Kidding
I think it's time to reinvent government in Vietnam.

Very New Orleanian landscape
This could be Uptown--but it's actually Hoi An.

Junks, Halong Bay
We sailed around on one of these boats.

Sunset, Halong Bay
Unfazed by my jellyfish encounter, I bravely photograph the sunset.

Refreshment Boat, Halong Bay
For when you need Oreos at sea.

Kayaking, Halong Bay
We never fell out.

Kayaking II, Halong Bay
Nope, not tired at all.

Comments

[Jenn]

Wow!
Those are some great shots, David. They are a far cry from the 400+ shots I got in NO last weekend. It looks like y'all are having fun. Say hi to P for me.