Reflection

     The night of the last post, Lou and I hopped a red eye flight from Hanoi to Seoul, Korea where we had an 11 hour layover before our flight back to San Francisco. Seoul must be an airport where many airlines make transfers because they are truly set up for travelers who must spend a LONG time in an airport. They offer four or five different free tours into the city of Seoul. There are lounge chairs set up all over the fourth floor for people to lie down on and sleep. They offer free showers and free computers to work on. We opted to rent a room in a short term stay hotel housed on the 4th floor and I grabbed 3 or 4 hours of sleep, showered and used the wifi before getting on the 10 hour flight for our final flight back to SFO. A sign at the little cafe where we grabbed some udon noodles for lunch provided our final smile before traveling from Asia to the US.

     We got home to feel like we had time traveled from another reality back to our more familiar one. Except for a few days on our own in Saigon and then a few days after the bike tour in Hanoi, we were in the hands of our two guides for two weeks of very chaperoned travel through Vietnam. We certainly could not have done what we did without them. We would not even have know what to see and where to go. So, did we see the "real" Vietnam? I think we saw much of the geography both rural and urban. We got an idea how people move through their lives - some of them rich and some of them very poor. We ate some of the food, viewed some of the history and the celebrations and observed how some of them try to make a living in this country. The biking made us move through Vietnam at a much slower pace than if we had been only in a bus or in a car. For Lou and me, the slower pace of the bike allows us to see more and experience more than we could on our own. We are very glad we spent some time in this country that holds a special place in our memories. Seeing many of the places that were names on the news in the 60's and 70's made the country more 3-dimensional  and we are very much richer for the experience.

   

     

Last Day in Hanoi and it was Unique

     Thai's friend Ha met us at the hotel after getting a bit lost in the Old Quarter. She lives in Hanoi but I believe few Hanoians venture into this part of the city. We followed her down the street to meet up with those she had come with, one of whom owns a car! We hopped into a new Mazda 3 with Ha, two older women friends and the 5 year old son of one of the women and made our way out of the city center to a program for developmentally disabled young adults. We visited a classroom where a dozen or so people who have Down syndrome and other significant cognitive delays are eating lunch served by a woman named Mrs. Chung. She has been running this program where disabled people can come and participate in art, dancing, music, sewing and learning English. They socialize and she seems to work very hard to support, teach, encourage language development and vocational skills. When possible they work in factory jobs after leaving the program. She gets no government money and takes no pay and has been running this program for 20 years. When she found out that I had been a special ed teacher she kept asking me for suggestions. It was interesting.

     After this we went to lunch in a large mall at an Italian place in the food court. It is quite close to the home of the woman who owned the car and her son who, it turns out, also has some learning issues. They explained to me that the boy, Viet, is really, really smart but learns differently. At lunch he was able to do multiplication, adding and subtracting in his head at a pretty advanced level for a 5 year old but was very impulsive and demanding. He can read and write but also grabbed the squeeze bottles of hot sauce and squirted it all over Ha's pizza even though she told him no. Turns out, Ha runs a small school in her home where Viet is a student. The more time we spent with her, the more we learned about her life and choices.

   These women are all part of a church called Word of Life. They are evangelical Christians in a country that does not encourage religion. Our next stop was their church in the home of the pastor after meeting up with  a few more people at the huge home of the car owner. It was Sunday and this was their first service of the year. There were 100 people there for a full-blown worship with music (electric keyboard, acoustic and electric guitars), 3 lead singers with hand held mikes, an hour long sermon, a review of their work of last year, communion and more. A very handsome young man with flawless English sat next to me and translated. Finally, after about 2 hours, I told Ha we really needed to get back to get ready to make our way to the airport. I convinced her to call a taxi so that she could stay with her congregation for the rest of the service and whatever else followed and not be burdened by us.  Who would have figured that Lou and I would wind up at a church service in Hanoi, Vietnam surrounded by evangelical Christians speaking in tongues and singing upbeat hymns in Vietnamese? Not me.

     We certainly got a taste of Hanoi not seen by a regular tourist. 

Back to the Big City

     Hanoi is smoggy. It is in a perpetual haze. If you have asthma, this might not be such a great place to visit. If you are an electrical engineer or electrician, do not come here. You would have a stroke. The wiring is unbelievable. I will have to post a picture. Transformers are about two feet away from housing and stores. Wires are coiled and jumbled in the most amazing ways. If, maybe when, something happens, it won't be pretty.

     After our rural expedition, we came back into the city, Vu brought us on a walking tour around Lake Hoan Kiem and through the Old Quarter for a taste of Hanoi. The lake is small and pretty mad there are many people sitting, walking, exercising and getting pictures taken. It is a favorite spot for a bride to come with her fiancé and the wedding photographer to take pictures. Yesterday there were at least 10 couples we saw doing this. The Old Quarter is a trip.  It has a maze of streets and each block, if you can even call it that, has a name. They seem to change quickly. Originally, each street was dedicated to selling particular items. Hang means street so Hang Gai is Silk Street. There are streets for cotton, metal, herbs, toys, etc. It isn't absolute that only one product is sold on that street but it is predominant. In between there are  cafes and bars, hotels and street food vendors, women carrying the two baskets on a stick  balances on their shoulders with whatever they are selling, fruit, sweet potatoes, socks, soups, whatever. The sidewalks are pretty much all parked up with Hondas and people need to walk in the street along with the traffic including motorbikes, cars, cyclos, trucks, tour busses, bikes.  You must pay attention to what is going on around you always.

     In the morning we met up for a tour of several of Hanoi's attractions including the Temple of Literature, founded in 1076 to educate royal men and mandarins. It is now a peaceful landscaped place with a temple honoring Confucius. Even now students come to this place to make an offering before their important exams. Education is determined by how well you do on exams which makes it rigid and stressful but at the same time, this developing country has a 96% literacy rate. Then we went to see Ho Chi Minh as he lies in state at the Mausoleum. He is honored the way George Washington is with us because he was able to finally secure independence from colonizers. Even people who don't like the communist government like Ho. Lastly, we toured the infamous Hoa  Lo Prison where John McCain was held prisoner for 4 1/2 years. Originally a French prison used to house Vietnamese independence fighters, it was pretty gruesome. Most of it is gone, but enough remains to get a sense of how bad the conditions were. 

      We ate at a restaurant known for its Bun Cha. It's sort of a version of pho. You sit down at a laminate table on plastic stools and they plunk down plates of vermicelli noodles and another of lettuce and cilantro and then give you a bowl of broth with sliced pork and pork patties in it. I was still recovering from the traveler's curse so Thai was kind enough to go across the alley and grab me another version of pho with chicken. They always serve it with a small dish with small sliced red chilies. It is a signature dish of Hanoi and without Vu and Thai, I never would have ventured into this establishment. Later he brought us to another Hanoi tradition called hidden coffee. You have to walk through a business into a back alley and then go up several flights of stairs to get to one of two floors overlooking Hoan Kiem Lake where the view is great and there is a breeze. There you can order Vietnamese coffee or tea or a soda. We finished the afternoon by attending a performance of a traditional water puppet show. This folk tradition evolved hundreds of years ago when it was flood season and there was nothing to do in the rural rice paddy agricultural areas. Someone came up with the idea to create wooden puppets, attach them to a pole with wires, stand in a rice paddy up to their waist behind a bamboo screen and enact a drama. Go figure. It is now a very elaborate show with traditional musicians and singers and a large pool of water where these puppets "perform."

     Later we met up for our farewell dinner for the tour. 5 ended the tour and 6 are extending for two more nights in Ha Long Bay. The next few days are on our own to do as much or as little as we wish in Hanoi before we head back home.

Celebrating New Years in the country

     We took a one hour flight from Hue to Hanoi for the last leg of our journey. In the last two weeks we have come from the south to the north of this long country that is about the length of California. We ate dinner at a French Colonial restaurant and then headed for our hotel in Hanoi. Unfortunately, I was felled by something I ate and spent an unpleasant night. I feared I would not be up to a four hour bud journey to the home stay in the north but had recovered enough to give it a try. The roads here are rough. That is an understatement. They are potholed, under construction, sometimes narrow and all bets are off when it comes to rules of the road- at least that's what it seems like to a Westerner. The truth is that driving here is constant vigilance and negotiation. The road may be one, two or more lanes but that only means there is more space to move. People pass on curves and weave in and out of traffic. Vehicles flow and everyone knows to look at each other and move slowly. It's hard to describe but it mostly seems to work. That being said it was a long bumpy ride on a bus that was designed for Asian bodies. At 5'2"' I had one inch of leg room between my knees and the seat in front of me. 

      Food in the north is somewhat different than in the south. The pho has less vegetables in it and is less seasoned. They make a wine here that has a whole snake in it to give it flavor. Wasn't offered that but probably would have declined. People own way more dogs here. People eat dog. Again we weren't offered any and again I probably would have declined. 

We stopped at a lovely home stay for lunch both going up to the village and back. 

   This part of Vietnam is so very different from all of the other places we have visited. The  air is clean, the scenery out of National Geographic and the people gracious and welcoming.

     Our homestay was in a very remote community called May Chau. This is community of one of the 54 ethnic minorities in Vietnam called Thai. They have little contact with Thailand but speak the same language. We slept in a large house on stilts in a dormitory arrangement - mat on the floor with two duvet covered blankets, mosquito nets and a separate building with toilets and showers. It was unseasonably cold-the coldest it has been in 10 years. They built a bamboo fire and we sat around after dinner. Then later, as it was New Years, they put on a special performance of dancing (girls doing traditional dances) and music (men playing a stringed instrument, flute and drums.) They offered us homemade rice wine with dinner and then fermented sweet wine after the dancing. I sure wish my stomach had felt up to drinking. After, we talked a bit but none of us made it to midnight. At that point 5 of us had succumbed to the illness. All of us rode that day on off road trails and small roadways through rice paddies. We met as many water buffalo as people. Again as in every place we have ridden, every little kid and many adults come to the edge of the road and wave and say "Hello, hello." It is amazing how rural this life is. They do have electricity and running water but just about everything is still done much the way it was before all of that.

     New Year's Day we hopped on the bikes after breakfast and cycled off in the chill morning for our last 16 miles - a short last tour through villages and rice paddies back to where we had lunch the day before. On the way we stopped at a small place beside the road where a cople of people were turning bamboo into chopsticks. The whole time i was standing there I could only think of how this could never be taking place anywhere but in an undeveloped area. There were absolutely no safety precautions - no safety goggles, no safety guards on the machine that was splitting the bamboo into sticks, chips flying all over the place... We all just shook our heads at how things are so different here.

     Because it was a school holiday, we could not stop by to give away the rest of the items donated by Michelle, Glenn and their friends, so Vu and Thai chose to give the items to the village we ate in. 

     We were able to shop in the handicraft market full of items made by locals before we hopped on the bus for our return to Hanoi. 

Check in from Hue

On a rainy day in Hue we visited three unique sites: the tomb of one of the last king's of Vietnam, the Thien Mu Pagoda and the Citadel. 

     Traditionally in Vietnam, king's built their own tombs before they died and then were buried secretly somewhere else so their enemies would not desecrate their bodies. However, the second to last king of Vietnam was a bit more modern and perhaps a bit more self-absorbed than the others. He taxed the people exorbitantly and had this monumental structure built in 11 years. He was disliked and spent his life living extravagantly and gambling and died at 40. However, the structure he left is impressive, more impressive than he was. 

      The Thieu Mu Pagoda is built on the Perfume River. This pagoda is very famous in Vietnam and has been linked to political protest. It is very simple with a very impressive octagonal tower. After walking through one of its three gates, you walk into a simple building and see a large bronze Happy Buddha. Thai taught us how to bow. Only those who want to worship can enter another closed off room that has three additional Buddhas. Behind this building is another that has enshrined a turquoise Austin car from 1963. It carried the monk Thich Quang Duc to Saigon where he publicly burned himself to death in protest of the policies of the south Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem who was later assassinated. A photo of this act was printed in magazines and newspapers around the world. I remember it myself from back in the day.

       Our final stop was The Citadel. It is Hue's version of the Forbidden City although only 20 percent of it is left after carpet bombings during both the war. Originally, both sides in the war agreed that it was off-limits but then when the Viet Cong started hiding in the Citadel, all bets were off. It destroyed an irreplaceable piece of history. 
Little by little, the government is trying to restore it. It was a city within a walled city where the king and his wives and the court lived, rarely leaving. So little is left, you need to use your imagination. Our guide Thai helped that along by getting all of us to rent 
royal robes and pose for courtly pictures. It was kitschy but fun.