Vietnam, Part 2 (through May 6)

The train ride to Hanoi was a nice riot. I got on at 7 AM. About 8 I thought I'd try the dining car for a second, better, breakfast. I walked the wrong direction and passed lots of cabins with lots of drinkers. Someone was grilling squid in a wash room (I ate a piece, delicious). On the walk back I was almost bodily dragged into a cabin for very advanced rice wine drinkers. I got by with eating a bit of dried fish.

When I found the dining car every surface and a good portion of the floor was covered with empty beer cans. A large crowd was singing very loudly. The large crowd took off in a rush. The staff made an effort with the empties. The train stopped at a station while I was waiting for my order. I saw porters loading cases of beer through the door to the kitchen. Then a tapping on the window. Would I mind lifting some cases of beer in through the window? Of course not.

I think a Hanoi football squad beat rivals at an away game in HCMC. Hence the high spirits of the returning fans.

Hanoi is a noisy, polluted, lovable city. One guy's view.

It has lots and lots of motorcycles. One could fairly note that HCMC has more, but Hanoi seems to have less room for them to, urh, express themselves. It seems very immediate in Hanoi. Roads are for motorcycles to drive in. Both ways on one way streets. Sidewalks are for motorcycles to park on.
This leaves walkers a choice of which bit of motorcycle turf to trespass on.
Local folk, made of tough stuff, do just fine. All kinds of commerce and transport works in the streets.

Hanoi is also pretty. It has modernized, but seems not to have lost its past. And it has lots of past. It is having its 1000 birthday this year. The center of the old quarter has a lake named Hoan Kiem, with a temple, and a legend involving a turtle. It also has a stuffed 500 pound turtle that isn't in the legend but is big enough to deserve a story. Does the turtle's head look like a seal to you?

The lake is used by city folk to breath a bit, couples to stroll and old men to stretch.

Hanoi has other nice things. I very much liked the Temple of Literature, appealing in one stroke to my book thing and my travel thing. It has very nice water puppet theater, at which I took very poor photos. Water puppets are theater in a pond. It is backed up by a small orchestra and a chorus that sings the story in Vietnamese. The puppets are controlled by rods and cords that run under the water. The puppeteers stand in the water behind a bamboo screen and make the magic happen. Puppets leap, spout fire, pass objects back and forth. It is also funny and sweet.

Having been to this city a couple of times, I gave a pass on some very good things to see. One thing I saw for the first time in the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology. I very much recommend it to anyone in the city with even a slight interest in hill tribes or who enjoy climbing up scary ladders at the outdoor tribal building portion of the museum.

Back in town and walking the markets, I passed several roast puppy stalls.
OK, as I mentioned, Hanoi is polluted. I was happy enough to leave town for Halong Bay. I was a bit spooked at being at sea for three days with the same strangers. My boat, the Prince 3 from Indochine Junks, had four cabins and seven crews. It featured lavish, prolonged meals with very complicated decorations, like the watermelon, carrot junk below. People were to doped with food to get on each others' nerves.
There was a day of kayaking. There was exploring some caves. There was cruising the very beautiful bay.

I got back in Hanoi on May 1. Which is a holiday. Hanoi seemed to be enjoying a day off, but otherwise going about its life, though there were a goodly number of decorations noting the event. I got on a train ride that night to the mountains of Northeastern Vietnam. I'd bought the train ticket some days in advance through a travel company. One of the "perks" of the purchase was a free transfer to the train station. At the appointed hour a not overly large fairly mature man met me in the lobby of a hotel and, trailed by a couple of porters, the driver introduced me to his small my Vietnam standards motor bike. I had a little conversation with myself, then helped the driver put my large bag between him and the handlebars (he couldn't see over the bag, but could see around it a bit) and slung my second bag and my day pack on my back and got in behind him. The suspension bottomed out immediately. Because safety is first, I also put on a helmet with a strap that very nearly connected under my throat.

Drama at the train station regarding whether I really had a train ticket, which turned out fine. A very nice four person sleeper. Off we go. The train ended at a border town with China named Lao Cai. So I am standing in the rain in Lao Cai, being asked 10 times the normal right to ride in a local bus to Bac Ha, a village about 2 hours away. I demure. I find a more expensive taxi and head off.
I got to Bac Ha in time for its weekly and hugely entertaining market day. A big draw was the seemingly locally dominate hill tribe, the Flower H'mong. The women dressed lavishly and in every color all at once.

My train ride had ended at about 5:30 AM and breakfast was in order. I joined the locals at a stall in the market for noodles, which were very good.
Lots of interesting things for sale. Suspicious looking pipes used to smoke the local tobacco. Puppy dogs, which may or may not have been for sale as pets. And a goodly chance to buy a water buffalo or horse at very fair prices. The last I take on the word of a Dutch expatriate I chatted with. He'd bought two horses the day before. That made me feel better about my own souvenir shopping.

Two youthful buffalo salesmen.
After a couple of hours eating and shopping and looking around the local temple, I got back in the waiting taxing and headed off for Sapa. Sapa is very much built around the tourist trade. It has a lovely mountain location covered with rice terraces and fields of hemp. It was a hill station during French colonial times, though a few wars have removed most traces of that. It was a major opium production center during French colonial times, but the times they have been a changing, so no obvious traces of that. And I am assured that the hemp is only for weaving.

Now local and foreign tourists come to see the beautiful and cool terrain and to enjoy the very developed marketing skills of the local hill tribe population. The most evident of the hill tribes are the Black H'mong
and the Red Dzao.

Most local people couldn't spend their time selling to tourists (though it didn't always feel like that), and did the hard things that people do in this region. Not a lot of machines to help out. This is pretty clearly a hard life, for all the bit of commerce with tourists may help out. Strange thing rural poverty. In some, uneasy to say out loud way, I and other tourists come to such places because of the picturesque lifestyle of the locals, which is to say, because of rural poverty that has a certain time honored sense to it. Hmmm.

To be sure, it is not all hard work, at least if you are a kid.

Three days in Sapa, taking hikes during the day, shopping, getting a massage (I had to wait a bit, and was kindly fed sour plums with salt during the delay). I spent a strangely enjoyable couple of hours at the Sapa post office, trying to mail off, well lots of stuff including some items I'd been told in Saigon couldn't be mailed. There was not a lot of English spoken at the Sapa post office. The clerk came out to look through my pile and help fill out the customs forms. "What is this?" "Huh?" Pantomime followed. Apparently I can be quite funny when I don't try.

And this brings me to May 6 and the end of Vietnam. I have one last border to cross and three weeks before coming home.

Blogger's note. I had written most of this blog while in Sapa. When I got up on May 6 to finish it, the draft had become a bunch of panic inducing code gibberish. I couldn't get back into the blog while in China. I have no excuse of merit for nearly two months of delay since I got home.

Vietnam, Part I

The fast boat from Phnom Penh to Vietnam was far faster than any boat I'd been on this trip, but exceeded its 4 hour promise by 3 hours. The Mekong finally looked liked a major river.

After not very interesting border formalities, the boat pulled ashore twice, we turned up a tributory of the Mekong and into Chau Doc. Vietnam looks quickly different from Cambodia. Certainly it is greener. At least here it looks prosperous. Bouncier?

Chau Doc is a fairly small upper Mekong delta town, with a mixed population of Khmer, Cham and Vietnamese. Nearby is a sacred mountain by the name of Sam, which should speak for itself.

The big draw at Sam Mountain is a Godess with a complicated history I do not understand well enough to try to explain. It involves the Thais, somehow, and 40 virgin girls stronger than 100 men.

The Godess is particularly venerated by local women. A couple of men in Chau Doc credit her as the explanation for why the women in town are powerful and the men do as they are told. She is too sacred to be photographed. However, her extensive wardrobe can be reproduced. Each of these many hundred are made to measure for an three meter figure with Viking scale shoulders. There are also douzens of hats and shoes of similar scale. Gifts from women grateful for the boost, or men hoping for an easier go of it (or grateful for the wonderful and wise and powerful wives)?

Another temple of peculiar architecture if filled with wonderfully odd painted wooden sculpture.

Next stop Ho Chi Minh City, where I spent most of three days fighting some kind of flu bug. Got to happen on a trip. I'd had a couple of nice visits to this high energy city before, so I could have had worse places to feel low. I did crawl out long enough to visit a lovely History Museum and get a taste of Cham architecture. The Cham's, as I understand it, were long time sparring partners of the Khmer at Angor, actually capturing Angor in the 11th century. Time and the growing power of the Vietnamese caught up with them. They left some beautiful monuments. Some preserved in part. Some victims of time and old and recent wars.

I took a night train to Danang and stopped only long enough to see Vietnam's best collection of Cham art at Danang's Museum of Cham Sculpture. Certainly one of the nicest small museums I've seen on the trip and a legacy of the French colonial period in major part. Cham art owes a lot to Indian art, and was later influenced by Khmer art. At its hight it was monumental and fluid. This is good stuff.

Having had a load of Cham art I took a taxi to Hoi An, a lovely small town that seems to have survivied relatively intact for a few hundred years. This town was a great sea trading venue until its river silted a hundred or so years ago and business moved to Danang. Its core is now a museum town oddly filled with a couple hundred tailor shops. No exaggeration.

Perhaps some will be pleased to hear that much of the sewing is done by the young men in town. What is the proper designation of a male that sews for a living? Tailor sounds a bit grand. I don't like the sound of "seamster", that gives the image of the guy who gets to try and get a camel through the eye of a needle. I looked in at the "Hoi An Department of Managing and Gathering Swallow's Nests" and found a goodly number of men scraping away at what I took to be swallows' nests. Hoi on also specializes in silk lanterns. Very pretty at night.And they move about the area on sometimes very crowded ferry boats. Hoi An is lovely day and night. It is very much a tourist destination, which meant another shot of performances, making nice use of the antique buildings. I stayed for three lazy nights, once getting up the energy to take a bicycle around the local area, stopping at a local village noted for its clay tiles and pots. The pots are thrown on a curious to me two person wheel. The wheel itself is near ground level, and the potter sits on the ground to work the clay. The second person stands and kicks back with leg to power the wheel.

The clay tiles made in the village are seen on many of the buildings in Hoi An, and were laid out in neat rows in front of homes in the village to dry a bit in the sun. I saw a woman making simple rectangles. A shallow wooden frame was dusted with what I took for fine sand. This sits on the ground. A clump of clay is thrown into its center. Four economical steps with a foot inside each edge of the wood frame form a rough pyramid of clay in the form. A final step in the center to get excess clay off the foot. A jerk with a wire along the top of the frame to remove the extra clay from the frame. The frame is carried a few steps, laid upside down on the ground and pulled away. Another tile joins its mates, presumably waiting to be fired.

The next day took a taxi a round about route to Hue, taking a detour to see a couple of Cham sites. While these sites may not as grand as the decorations the provided to the museums, it was good to see some context. The larger site, My Son, spreads a bit, some of it showing damage from recent wars. The smaller site, Chien Dan, was maybe closed. The gate was shut and latched but no lock was in place. I considered that maybe opened. The three towers were nice and made a bit endearing for their current use as a good place for a farmer to dry rice.

A very nice drive north to Hue over the Hai Van Pass. Dramatic views over the harbor at Danang and some interesting fortifications from the French and the US at the pass summit.

I ended the day in Hue, Vietnam's onetime imperial capital. The weather was misty and cool with a bit of rain. Perfectly lovely sightseeing weather.

Hue is a real city lying on both sides of the beautifully named Perfume River. It has its own present, and a past made of imperial palaces and temples, and it the countryside wonderful imperial tombs. The tombs sit in grounds lovely or formal.

This is a place my guidebook didn't praise enough. I enjoyed three days.

That takes me to April 22, the center of Vietnam, and the middle of my time in the country.

Next stop, Hanoi.

Happy (Khmer) New Year!

Today is the first day of the three day Khmer (and Thai, and Burmese and Lao) New Year. More on that later.

When we last left our blogger, he was nattering on about Angkor. Then next day, back on a boat, this time to Battambang. The boat was a bit smaller, but the voyage was only 7.5 hours with one chance to get off, and more frequent chances to sort of hang over the side of the boat.

It wasn't comfortable, but much of it was scenic and it was improved by its frequent use by Cambodians to actually go from one place to another on their normal business. We peaked at 33 on board. The normal hideous episode of lugging luggage down to and up from the boat. On arrival later in the day at Battambang we were met by an "army," to quote a fellow passenger, of hotel touts to add to the adventure (one of whom recognized me the next day, and asked me why I hadn't stopped to talk).

Water levels were predictably low. We ran aground a number of times. That required a bit of backing up by the engine, some polling by the boat crew and grumbling by the passengers.
But as said, the journey was pretty good. We passed a number of curious floating villages early in the day. At first we were crossing an equally curious lake, Tonle Sap, which is said to double in size from dry to wet season. The villages simply keep moving with the shoreline. The real oddity is that the Tonle Sap River, the lake's exit to the Mekong and the sea, reverses its flow in the wet season as the Mekong floods.
We we on a small river flowing into the lake most of the day, which narrowed as we moved upstream.
Eventually floating villages were replaced with homes on the banks. And kids splashing in the afternoon.

Battambang is said to be the second largest city in Cambodia, though it seems far smaller than Siem Reap now. It is not a big place and has a complicated history as a Thai town for more than 200 years up until 1907 and, in common with all cities in Cambodia, a virtual ghost town during the Khmer Rouge period between 1975 and 1979. As a major rail point, it handled lots of forced refugees from other areas in Cambodia that were being moved internally by the Khmer Rouge, only to be murdered on arrival at Battambang.

Now it is a nice river town with some pretty temples and attractive French colonial buildings.

Next morning after arrival I took off with a guide on the back of his motorcycle to see what was to be seen in the area. Khmer ruins, a local Khmer Rouge killing field (a Buddhist mountain monastery where many are killed, with bones now on display) and lots and lots of steps. I am pretty sure the 1000 mark was met and conquered this day.
These steps came with a small portable fan.
The fan probably is more effective as a sun screen, and its wielder had a hard time remembering what he was about. Chat to me, chat to my guide, run up steps, run down steps, one swoosh of fan, sit down, examine feet, jump up, chat, run off path, point excitedly several directions saying something, one swoosh of fan. Whatever the social politics of this, it was charming.

All that work required laying in a hammock and drinking sugar cane juice for a while (not the young fan wielder, he ran off with his earnings). We were joined by another pair, the tourist being an 18 year old from The Netherlands working on month six of a nine month tour of Asia. Generally on his own. That is something. Setting aside a scout trip to Canada and another with my family to Niagara Falls, I don't think I left the US until I was in law school.

We then two pairs then went to take a ride on a local contraption called the Bamboo Railroad (stopping to look at some fruit bats for about one minute, the time limit at my request). The train is assembled from bits kept by the side of the track - bogies, a bamboo decked wood platform, a little two stroke engine and a rubber belt. I can promise it can carry five adults and two motor cycles.

This is on a spur from the main line between Phnom Penh and Battambang. It is a single track spur. What do you do when you come on a "train" heading the opposite direction? The big boy wins.
Here are three guys, having disassembled their train and low volume cargo waiting for the the five of us and our two motorcycles to move on a full speed. Which seems to be about 15 mph. Which is actually pretty exciting 8"over the rails on misaligned gappy rails.

The next day a bus ride to Kompong Chhnang (spelling seems right to me). The bus was surprisingly nice. Until it passed by Kompong Chhnang. I woke up the attendant (he was asleep on luggage), he got the bus to stop. I got a 30 minute walk back to town. Several nice motorcycle riders volunteered to give me a ride, but good as they are at balancing large bundles, I didn't like the idea of being on a bike with my now three bags.

I checked into a guest house that was hosting a group of evangelical Christians from the US that were helping building a house. I rented a bicycle and road to the Tonle Sap River (the one I mentioned earlier that changes the direction of its flow in the wet season) and hired a boat for another look at floating villages.
I thought the attached outhouses (see far left), which must be a misnomer, particularly noteworthy.

The next day, a completely uneventful minibus ride to Phnom Penh.
I had a great view of the Royal Palace and the river from a deck over my suite. The next day reason to hold and I moved to a more modest room.

Phnom Penh has a great National Museum housing all kinds of nice bits from various Khmer temples (though perhaps the Musee Guimet in Paris has a nicer, albeit more selective collection of Angkor era pieces).
Phnom Penh also has its own Temple of the Emerald Buddha, but it does not make the running list of Emerald Buddha temples I have seen. The Buddha is an impostor! Or more fairly a nice piece of green crystal made by the good folk of Baccarat.
The next day focused on some of the dark events of the Khmer Rouge. About 10 miles out of town there is a memorial to victims of the Khmer Rouge on the site of one of the killing fields. About 17,000 people were thought to have died at this location, one of hundreds that was over 1 in 5 Cambodians killed or starved to death in 4 years.

Many but not all of the bodies have been exhumed at this location.
You walk near some of the areas that were not dug up, and see the bones, teeth and clothing of victims that have been washed to the surface by the rains.
The memorial stupa holds the bones of some 8,000.

I've seen large groups of bones before, some in crypts in Europe. That was a bit macabre. The killing fields are horrible and very sad.

Next stop was the ex-high school turned into torture center by the Khmer Rouge. This was the source of the victims for the killing field I had visited earlier in the day. A fair number of torture devises were on display. Most of these seemed very basic but no less horrible for that.

Then there were wall after wall covered with photos of victims and their keepers. Most of the keepers looked like teenagers. The victims were of all ages, down to very young children. Maybe that is enough for a travel blog.
Today back to seeing the typical things to see in a Southeast Asian cities. Some temples and some markets and street life.
So, as I mentioned, today is the beginning of a three day Khmer (and Thai and Lao and Burmese) New Year celebration. I have hunting for information on what it includes, and spent some of yesterday looking for signs of preparation (beyond "Closed for the Holiday" signs). I've been told that is supposed to involve tossing water on the unwary - but surely not tourists! I have been looking forward to getting splashed.
I had no idea if I was seeing business as normal or holiday preparations, but building sand pyramids on tombs has got to be for special occasions, doesn't it?

Today at breakfast, the waiter said today I should look for:

People burying cash in piles of sand to leave any bad luck from the ending year behind (a ha!): Found it.

People taking food to temples to be blessed by monks, in memory of ancestors: Yes, some of that too.

People playing special games: And that as well. The first game involved two lines of people taking turns throwing their big seeds at the other sides big seeds. You wacked folk on the knee with your big seed before throwing it for good luck. The second game had a circle of folk, with one person walking around the circle with what looked like a sack with some cloth in it. The walking person would leave the sack with one of the people in the circle, who would then leap up and chase the person to his or her immediate right with the sack. I'm sure I have this right.

There was some non-New Year related goings on as well. This is a game of shuttlecock. But unlike badmitton, with its convenient racket, this is done with one's feet. The classy shots seem to be done behind the back.

This is not a Chinese holiday, but I noted the Chinese temple gardians getting a breakfast of eggs and bacon.

That is all from Cambodia. I am off for Vietman.

Best regards,

Sam