Vietnam for the Holidays - Part 2

Hue to Ho Chi Min


We woke on the train approaching Hue, on the central Vietnam coast, just in time for the legendary Hue-to-DaNang stretch, said to be the most beautiful in the country.
The train cut across the steeply dropping mountainsides as they descended straight into the South China Sea, occasionally crossing high trestles where deep valleys cut into the range. On the trestles, we appeared to hang in mid-air while watching the waves crash onto the beaches below. Here and there, brightly colored wooden fishing boats lingered offshore, and clusters of round “basket-boats” laid nets closer in to the beach. It was gorgeous, and a nice introduction to the next phase of our trip.

We disembarked at Da Nang, and took a taxi the 45 minutes to Hoi An, where we planned to spend my birthday.

Hoi An is an historic town, relatively unscathed by the Vietnam War, and since listed as a World Heritage Site for its original wooden homes, shops and bridges and mix of French, Chinese and Japanese architecture.

It completely charmed us, and our plan to stay three nights extended to four and then five, before we finally pulled ourselves away. We loved wandering the narrow streets and exploring the shops and waterfront cafes.

At night, most shops would light lanterns, which added to the mesmerizing quality of the historic “old town.” One evening, we ate on the upper terrace of a small cafe with no menu, just the chef/owner's daily four course menu of fish, meat or vegetarian dishes – fantastic! On my birthday, we ate at the cluster of street stalls across from the river, where each picnic table was serviced by a different cook – we couldn't decide between them all, so would up eating twice at two of them. ;-) Our Singaporean bunkmate from our overnight train was in town too, and joined us for the celebration. On another day, I finally broke down and let one of the local tailors (the town is famed for them) fit me for a tailor-made dress – but just a simple linen dress, rather than one of the fancy silk numbers most travel here for.



The highlight of our visit was a day with the Red Bridge Cooking School, which started with a morning visit to the local market, followed by a ½ hour boat ride up the canals to the riverside cooking school (Colin got to steer the whole way – there and back), and then the preparation and eating of five local dishes, including making our own rice paper for fresh spring rolls (!) and a fabulous eggplant clay pot dish that probably requires that I change all our cooking and eating paraphernalia when we get home.

Our next destination after Hoi An was Mui Ne – a coastal fishing and bungalow/resort strip a few hours north of Ho Chi Min City. It was a long haul from Hoi An to Mui Ne, so we broke it up with an overnight stop in Nha Trang, in/famous party beach town.
The beaches were beautiful, but the snorkeling was a bit of a disappointment – very poor visibility and enough tiny jellyfish to set Colin's skin stinging and chase him out of the water. The boat trip out to the reef, though, was very scenic. The next day, we boarded an open tour bus – the top line of comfort with comfy beds in place of seats! - a nice surprise given that we had about six hours on the road between Nha Trang and Mui Ne. The bus dropped us at the door of our “resort,” where we would stay through Christmas.
We booked it sight unseen before leaving Seattle in September, and it turned out to be lovely! Individual little bungalows, a cabana-style bar/cafe with pool table, and a beautiful emerald-green pool just inside the gate leading to the beach.


The beach was even better, with talcum-powder white sand, bathtub-temperature water and basket-style fishing boats scattered in both directions, not to mention the beach-massage peddlers waiting to pamper you whenever the mood struck. They also did the most fascinating variation on “waxing” Ive ever seen – a piece of string and complex two-handed, double-dutch string dance and they could pull every last bit of hair off your legs... given enough time. I took advantage of the massage, but passed on the rest. ;-)


Christmas morning, we hid Colin's gifts – a Kindle (to try to keep him in books as we traveled) and envelopes containing mostly cash for various purposes from family back home – under the small Yule tree set in the tropical landscaped gardens outside of our bungalow. We munched on treats friends had sent from home (including a package of opened bubblegum for Colin – hmmm, wonder who that could have been from...?) and reveled in the weirdness of it all.
Then we hiked off to the “Fairy Stream,” which ran through red- and white-colored sand dunes and ended in a picture-perfect waterfall just right for a shower. On the way back, we scrambled up steps cut into the dunes for a cold drink at a small hut we spotted on our way in, and relaxed in the company of several coconut-eating chickens.

After a few days of lazy bliss, we boarded another bus for Ho Chi Min City, which dropped us in backpacker central, an easy half block from our guest house. Even crossing the street wasn't as bad as in Hanoi – there was actually a traffic light to (kinda) help! Id been warned that Ho Chi Min traffic was more “mental” than Hanoi, but the mere existence of traffic lights helps immensely in my book – maybe its just all in my head, but still...

To my surprise, Tom took to Hi Chi Min immediately. We had already decided to spend his last few days in the Mekong Delta, but he would have been content to explore the city for longer, I think. He went wandering off for a look around while I crashed exhausted in our room – buses always sap my energy. The next day, we were on another one, bound for My Tho, capital of the Mekong Delta. We had decided to go with a local bus this time, rather than book our visit through a tour company. Wow.

One taxi to the bus station, one shuttle bus to the other (aka “right”) bus station (that we should have gone to to start with), one bus to My Tho, and yet one more taxi to our hotel – simple enough, right? Wrong. The shuttle bus slowly filled until Tom, Colin and I were all shoved into sardine-sized spaces at opposite ends of the bus, legs wrapped around our bags with extra ones on our laps, when suddenly we were being shouted off the shuttle to board the bus for My Tho, which had appeared inexplicably at the side of the road instead of at the bus station, where everyone could have gotten off the shuttle and actually let us out. Since that didnt happen, we had to hand our bags out the window to waiting runners (but which way would they run with them??) and climb over the other passengers and bags to get to a door so we could follow after our bags and get to the bus.... OK, whew, we and most of our belongings made it – but I had to retrieve one bag from the seat of a motorcycle where the luggage “helper” had stashed it, and chase down the (same) guy wandering off wearing Colin's conical hat, which he had been painstakingly transporting since China. This bus too, was full to bursting, and had tinny speakers blaring a screechy comedy showing on the TV at the front, but the windows let in a nice breeze. It was fine (for me – but Colin and Tom weren't so thrilled) until we reached the outskirts of My Tho and we were once again ejected at the side of the road with no bus station in sight. This time, a gaggle of motos (motorcycles for hire) surrounded us, vying to transport us into town – child, luggage and all. Oh boy. Fortunately, one of them spotted a driver they knew spoke English and waved him over. He called us a taxi, gave us his card (he was a tour operator), and refused to take a tip for his help. Score. We'd use him for our day touring the delta.... Once safely settled in town, we learned we could have done the whole trip for less in a nice air-conditioned tour bus by catching a ride back with the day-trippers from Saigon. Grrrrrrr.


Our hotel was nearly empty, but we had a top floor room with a terrace overlooking the Mekong.
The river is wide and busy so far down the delta, with huge barges transporting cargo and dredgers harvesting the fine river bottom silt – quite a different operation from the farmers we'd seen scooping buckets of the stuff to load on their oxcarts in smaller towns. The farmers were harvesting nutrient-rich mud for their rice paddies; the dredgers were mining silt to make cement to support the ever-present construction that had awakened us nearly every morning we'd been in a Vietnamese city or mid-sized town.

My Tho itself wasn't much to speak of – reminded me strangely of Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon -


but we had a great day arranged by our savior/tour operator touring the nearby islands by boat, paddling through the canals, visiting coconut candy workshops, playing with pythons, biking through the countryside, feasting on whole fried “elephant-ear” fish, and catching fireflies after dark. Nice.

After our cushy return to Ho Chi Min City, we explored the central market, stocked up on a few souvenirs, and had a nice dinner out before saying goodbye to Tom – he left for the airport about 8 p.m., and we left Ho Chi Min early the next morning for our journey up the Mekong River to Cambodia.....

Next up: Journey to Angkor Wat

Vietnam for the Holidays - Part 1

It is New Year's Eve on a tributary of the Mekong River, a stone's throw from the Cambodian border.
We are sitting below the full moon on the deck of a floating hotel struggling to keep our eyes open until midnight. Colin throws in the towel at 11:30, collapsing onto the mosquito net-draped bed in our room. I persist, and cheer the new year as a ship going by in the dark channel blasts its celebratory, deep welcome to 2010. A quick round of toasts with the other guests on board and I retreat to a chair on the lower deck to watch the clumps of lily pads float by on the blackness of the water. From a lighted patio across the river, music from Chau Doc's only New Year's Eve party wafts across the wide channel. Then, about 10 minutes into the new year, a soft light on a rooftop on the far side of the water catches my eye, and rises slowly. A single, fire-lit paper lantern drifts upward, then sideways, then up again, crossing through the shaft of moonlight. It is a lazy, somehow hopeful, sight – I imagine that it holds collected wishes for the year ahead. For several, long minutes it bobs slowly in the air as it ascends, then flickers. The flame dims, and high above our houseboat, it silently disappears.

Happy New Year, Vietnam.

We have just finished nearly a month of travel through Vietnam, starting in Hanoi and ending in the Mekong Delta. North to south, our path stretched from Sapa, pressed up against the Chinese border, to Ho Chi Min City (old Saigon, and Vietnam's largest city) in the far south.


Arriving at Hanoi's airport, we taxied into town and I was pleasantly surprised to see a somewhat Caribbean-looking city with faded green, pink and blue buildings, none over six stories high - a style my mind dubbed “concrete-colonial” - in contrast to the modern Asian high-rise metropolises we had come to expect. It looked historic, charming and full of explorable nooks and crannies. All true – so long as you didn't have to cross the street. We quickly found that despite Hanoi's charms, you could not GET there from there. While the locals strode out into the street, appearing to magically step through eight or ten lanes of motorbikes, trucks, taxis and bicycle carts, we cowered on the curb, looking for a break, and finding absolutely none. The first large intersection we eventually conquered left me jelly-kneed and Colin shaking from head to toe with rage and anxiety – in addition to the whizzing, weaving traffic around us, the high-pitched blare of a thousand horns in our ears rattled every last nerve we had. It went against all of my maternal instincts to attempt it a second time, so we hopped, helmet-less, on the back of a motorbike (for hire at every corner) and entered the frenzied flow of bleating, honking traffic for the return – in this context, it was the safer alternative.

We had several days before Tom was scheduled to arrive, and decided we'd have a better time if we got out of dodge, so we booked two tours back-to-back to span the five days we had until his arrival – the first to Sapa, in the mountains, and the second to Halong Bay, on the coast. That night, we were on an overnight train, sharing a sleeper car with an entertaining English couple and playing Quiddler until we couldn't keep our eyes open. In the morning, we were awakened before daybreak as we pulled into Lao Cai station, and shuffled to a nearby cafe to meet our connecting minibus to Sapa.
As we climbed the road into the mountains, the sky lightened over views of rice-paddies, lush mountainsides and the occasional waterfall. It was stunning, and couldn't have been farther from the press and noise of Hanoi.


We spent the next two days lounging on the patio of our hotel, with an unobstructed view of the mountain range, and trekking to nearby villages along mazes of interconnecting paths with our H'mong guide, Me.
Me (pronounced exactly as it looks) was strong, petite, smart and funny, and had a habit of rewrapping her leg coverings or long hair coil whenever we stopped for a refreshment break or swim – her hair, done up in a continuous circular wrap around her head, hung to her knees when released, and had to periodically be retwisted and rolled back into place as we hiked up and down the mountain paths to the outlying villages. Chatting on the trail, she revealed that she was three months pregnant, but the only signs of it were the small green mountain apples that she continuously munched as we walked – their sour taste satisfied her cravings and kept her energy up.

Me was also unwittingly the source of endless humor throughout the day, in a very Laurel and Hardy kind of way:
BJ to Colin, running ahead on the path: “Colin, wait for Me!”
Colin: “Why do I have to wait for you?”
BJ: “You don't, but you have to wait for Me.”
Colin: “Huh? Do I have to wait for you or not?!”
BJ: “No you don't, but Me is behind me – you have to wait for HER.”
Colin: “Ohhhhh... Why do I have to wait for Me?”
BJ: “Well of course you have to wait for you – you don't really have a choice do you?”
...and on and on. It got funnier the next day when we met Yu (but at least the names were easy to remember!)

Sapa stunned us.

Each ethnic group in the villages had distinctly different clothing and hair- or headdress styles, characteristic crafts and food, and many lived in villages comprised exclusively of their only their minority group -- some villages combined three or four ethnic groups, but apparently never all. And the scenery was to die for. We gazed over miles of mountains ridges and valleys alternating between the dark shade of the forest and the lighter hues of the rice-fields cut into ridges climbing the slopes. The sky was spotless blue, and ripples glistened through the landscape where streams cut through.

We swam in waterfalls and returned exhausted and happy at the end of our days.

On the third night after leaving Hanoi, we once again boarded the night train for our return, arriving back in the city at 4 a.m., an hour ahead of schedule. Not wanting to wander the streets with an 11-year old in the darkness, we settled onto benches in the train station to wait for sunrise. Except for the one borderline looney who insisted on reading my newspaper at the same time as I was – squatting beside me reading the back side of the page I was reading, or leaning over with his head on my shoulder to read my side from the seat behind me – it was a hassle-free and uneventful wait. After a detour for breakfast, we then headed for the van taking us to our next destination – Halong Bay.

Halong City – port to Halong Bay – is a long drive from Hanoi. By the time we arrived at the docks 4 -1/2 hours later, I wondered if this trip would be worth it (buses are among my least favorite modes of transport, perhaps matched by the shockless tin-can minitaxis we found in smaller cities in China). Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and I had been oogling photographs of the limestone karst-dotted sea for years – I hoped it wouldn't disappoint.

2,000 karst islands scattered through a 1,500 square mile bay.

Some house cavernous limestone caves accessible from the outside, allowing a peek into the interior of the spires, while others are cut through by arches large enough for a kayak to access an otherwise invisible oceanic lagoon.
We feasted on seafood, and jumped from the decks of our overnight junk into water just the perfect temperature to refresh from the sun, but not cool enough to ever feel it was too cold to jump in again.

We played harmonica on the roof deck, and watched the sun set over one of the world's most celebrated settings – it definitely did not disappoint.

Colin promised to buy one of the wooden vessels for Tom and I to retire on, at least for a year, if he became a celebrity chef with loads of cash. I think I'll take him up on that. ;-)

We headed back into Hanoi again the next day to meet Tom's plane, due in the following morning.
He arrived with bags intact this time (yay!) and we introduced him to our favorite cafe that didn't involve crossing a street before venturing further afield. By day's end, we had found a street light and crossed the road that defeated Colin and I on our first day. On the other side was a lovely lake with a temple in the center, accessed via a red wooden bridge. We took our time circling the lake, snapping photos of the photographers snapping photos of wedding parties. At the temple,

Colin and Tom climbed trees and we all watched groups of old men playing Xiangqi – a more complicated, Chinese version of chess.

Hanoi was beginning to feel manageable, but we still decided we wanted to day-trip to the Perfume Pagoda the next day, rather than navigate the streets to the city's sights. We had a night train booked out to Da Nang at 7 p.m. the next night, requiring that we be back in the city and at the train station by 6:00. We found a tour through the local backpackers hostel that guaranteed our return before six, and drop off at the train station if we were running late – perfect. And too good to be true. We boarded the bus with our bags the next morning, to the consternation of the guide, who was surprised to hear that the company had promised to drop us anywhere other than at our pick up point. As we squeezed into the last seats on the minibus, our guide started to run down our itinerary for the day – two hour drive to the river, boat trip to the mountain, hike to the pagoda, lunch at the top, cave visits on the way back down, return boat trip, back in the van, and if all goes well, we'll be back in Hanoi by 7:00. What!?! Slam on the brakes, quick negotiation, unsatisfactory result, exit the van, drag bags from the back, and stand on the street corner in an unknown part of Hanoi as the van drives off, leaving us to figure out our next move....

But all's well that ends well. We taxied back to the backpackers, received a full refund plus taxi fare, and set off for the Army Museum, Hanoi's repository of the history of the U.S./Vietnam, French and all other wars Vietnam has suffered or provoked throughout the years.
We caught our evening train, slept in comfort in our “tourist class” 4-berth cabin with a Singaporean bunkmate, and woke the next morning just north of Hue, on the central Vietnam coast.

Up next: Vietnam for the holidays – Part 2 (Hue to Ho Chi Min)