Days 124-126: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh City was Saigon, why they changed it I can’t say, people just liked it better that way. Or so They Might Be Giants (and The Four Lads) might’ve sung it, although in this case we’ve found that no one likes the new name more than the old one. Almost predictably, no one in Saigon (except for party officials) calls it by the new name. In a lot of ways, the city seems to be in denial that it’s in a socialist country. It has a youthful energy to it that seemed lacking in Hanoi, and an honesty about all the buying and selling going on that always felt more circumspect up north.

Saigon traffic is similar to that in Hanoi, but at least the blocks are longer here, meaning that you have to force your way across four lanes of bikes (two official lanes and two impromptu) less frequently. This makes Saigon much easier to walk around, especially combined with the actual availability of parking, meaning that the sidewalk can be used for walking instead of for parking motorbikes. I took advantage of this and did a walking tour around the city one day. I saw a lot of the famous old French buildings, visited the huge Ben Thanh Market, and had a bowl of pho at the famous Pho 2000 restaurant (made famous by a visit by then president Clinton). In the afternoon I visited the Reunification Palace, which is what the Presidential Palace is now called, and then the War Remnants Museum. The former has a lot of historical significance, and the latter has both a lot of historical information as well as serving as a reminder of the horrors of war.

Our last day in Saigon saw a lot more walking, a little bit of shopping, and a visit to the zoo and botanical gardens. The zoo was pretty disappointing, but it was nice to be in amongst the real trees after spending so much time in the concrete jungle. Plus there was a gibbon with a wonderful climbing gym who was putting on quite the show, swinging this way and that, jumping all around and having a wonderful time.

Days 120-123: Hoi An, Vietnam

The train from Hue down south to Da Nang is one of the highlights of Vietnam. It travels along the ocean nearly the whole time, sometimes right at sea level, other times climbing along the edges of hills that rise hundreds of feet above the water. We were traveling on a bright sunny day and thoroughly enjoyed the whole trip. We took a taxi the remaining 20 kilometers down to Hoi An from Da Nang, passing the famous China Beach and Marble Mountains.

Hoi An is an ancient trading city, once one of the major ports of Asia, but now a relatively sleepy town known primarily for its beach, tailors and old town. Given the quality of all three, I expect that it won’t remain a sleepy town for terribly long; apparently the transformation is already well underway, with a dozen new hotels built in the last five years. We found a nice place to stay near the beach, about five kilometers from town, with a nice swimming pool and a view out onto the river that connects the town with the ocean. We walked into town every morning, then took cyclos back home, with the two drivers chatting the whole way, while Mary and I fought off the urge to fall asleep after another long day.

We planned ahead to have some clothes made in Hoi An, figuring that no trip to Asia would be complete without some tailor made clothing. We did a lot of research ahead of time to pick which of the 500 tailors in Hoi An to visit, since it’s nearly impossible to get unbiased advice in the town itself (everyone is related to a tailor). We picked two different tailors, deciding to have suits made at what is generally regarded as the best tailor in town (Yaly Couture), and shirts made at a cheaper but still recommended tailor (22 Le Loi, named after its street address). The two shops are radically different in appearance. Yaly Couture is a two story, dark wood paneled shop filled with a dozen women ready to help you pick out designs and fabrics, or take measurements and do fittings. It’s a beehive of activity, with another dozen customers in various stages of the process at any given time. 22 Le Loi, by contrast, is a one woman shop, and only once did we see any other customers stopping by. All of the work is done back at her house, with her brother serving as tailor and other family members acting as seamstresses (I think).

All of our clothes turned out wonderfully! I ended up getting 2 suits made (1 wool, 1 linen), 3 shirts, and 3 pairs of casual pants. Mary got 1 suit (with matching skirt), 1 trenchcoat, 2 dresses, 3 shirts, 3 pairs of casual pants, and 1 pair of leather pants! That all came out to a bit under $800, largely due to selecting very high quality wool and linen for our suits. For those of you who will see us at weddings, bar mitzvahs, or family reunions later this summer (5 in total, the travelling doesn’t end when we get home!), I’m sure you’ll see some of them modeled. Mary and I both had a pair of shoes made as well (at a different shop) and had more mixed results. Mary’s turned out well in the end, but only after having them remade from scratch when they used bad material the first time, and mine were just generally disappointing, although nothing in particular that I could point to (or have fixed in the time we had left).

We decided to ship most of our clothes home from Vietnam since there was too much to carry with us. We brought everything to the post office directly from the tailors, with some presents and other stuff mixed in. It ended up being quite a bit (almost 15 kilos), and the post office clerk insisted on going through every single item and making sure that we’d itemized it and declared a reasonable price. This turned out to be a difficult task, given her limited English and our non-existent Vietnamese. The items of most concern turned out to be the CDs I’d burned containing our photos; she warned us a couple times that if they contained any “improper” photos, they would be confiscated. I wasn’t sure if she meant porn or images of military bases or either, but we weren’t in danger either way.

Although we did spend a lot of time inside the tailor shops, we still had plenty of time left to walk through the old city, swim in the pool, and walk along the beach.

Days 118-119: Hue, Vietnam

We had an early morning flight out of Hanoi, which meant we arrived in Hue hours before our room would be ready. We used the opportunity to finally sample Pho at the time it’s supposed to be eaten – in the morning, for breakfast! We found a street side vendor who looked popular and had a couple bowls. The pho here has been good, but amazingly, not vastly better than the pho we were able to get in Boston. The same goes for a lot of the food we’ve had across Asia. Not that we haven’t been eating fantastic cuisine day and night, but we haven’t found many dishes we’d never at least seen on a menu before (except the fried spiders and assorted insects in Cambodia and some of the soup ingredients in Vietnam), nor have we found dishes that tasted radically different from what we were used to.

Hue was the capital of Vietnam for 150 years and there are many remnants of that time. In the old part of the city lies the Citadel, a large walled compound, with the Forbidden Purple City and Thai Hoa Palace inside. Hue is also home to at least four universities, and therefore also home to many students, for whom the evening time means sports! So I got to play some volleyball with the locals and go out drinking with them as well, which was a blast.

Up the river a bit from the city lie the tombs of three of the emperors whom ruled from Hue, providing for the kings to live the afterlife in the same style as they did their real life, much like the Egyptians (sans pyramids). The tombs also served as pleasure palaces for the emperors while still alive, featuring rooms for all their concubines, large stocked hunting grounds, and beautiful views. On the same cruise, we also visited a beautiful pagoda and an unremarkable temple, but a large part of the appeal was just being on the river.

I was shocked to see the amount of dredging going on in the river, to provide silt to fuel the construction going on in Hue and the surrounding areas. Apparently there are limestone mountains up river from Hue and their silt makes for excellent building material, but the massive dredging of the river is not surprisingly leading to big problems downstream, where there are large floods and the river is covering flood plains for more and more of the year. As frustrating as the lack of environmental awareness can be in the US, it’s clear that we have made a fair bit of progress. Vietnam, like most of the countries we’ve visited, has a fledgling environmental movement, but it’s largely powerless in the face of businesses eager to grow as quickly as possible.

Days 116-117: Hanoi, Vietnam

We returned to Hanoi after our Halong Bay cruise to do some more touring around the city. Whereas we spent our first few days in the city mostly wandering around, we did a bit more targeted walking in our remaining couple days, visiting Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum (one of at least 3 in the country!), West Lake, and a few other sites. We tried to find the famous One-Pillar Pagoda but failed due to a bad map! Our favorite was the Temple of Literature, an ancient university and temple with a very peaceful feel. It had a beautiful courtyard that I could just see students studying in, practicing their calligraphy and writing poetry. Or perhaps they just goofed off and flirted with the girls – some things never change, I suppose.

There was one sight that particularly made us miss having our camera. A woman had a huge “tree” of pinwheels mounted on the back of her bicycle, probably a hundred pinwheels in all, of dozens of colors, all spinning rapidly as she biked along the river. We bought a couple pinwheels in memory of the sight, but what I would’ve given for a camera!

The Vietnamese really do eat everything! Although we’d heard that before arriving, we didn’t see immediate evidence of it. On our way to one of the museums we stopped at a noodle shop to get a bite to eat, expecting to grab a simple bowl of pho. Listed on the menu:

• Beef penis
• Intestines
• Dog
• Rat
• Ox blood, Ox tail, Ox brains
• Chicken feet
• Cockles
• Assorted cartilage

We ended up getting the fish.

Days 114-115: Halong Bay, Vietnam

Halong Bay is a set of over 1000 islands off the coast of Vietnam almost directly east of Hanoi, built up from the same Karst rock formations that we saw in Krabi. They’re really stunning, rising straight out of the ocean for a hundred or more feet. Some of them are simply Karst pillars on their own, while others have other soil and rock alongside, becoming full islands. It’s considered Vietnam’s greatest natural resource and is in the running as one of the seven natural wonders of the world (and you’re reminded to vote quite frequently!).

We took a 2 day, 1 night cruise through the islands in order to properly appreciate sunset and sunrise amongst the islands, considered the best time to see them. It turns out there are easily a hundred different tour operators offering junk trips out into the bay, each running almost exactly the same route, differentiated mostly by the quality of the food served on board and the service you receive. It’s something of a shock to be leaving the harbor on your cruise and seeing 30 other junks leaving at the same time, going to the same place – you lose something of the sense of serenity and calm that the bay is supposed to be known for.

Once you’re out into the bay, the junks spread out a bit and you’re able to appreciate the scenery better. I’m calling the boats junks, since that’s what the tour operators call them, but their masts are for show only, everyone runs on motor power all the time. We were fed lunch shortly after getting onto the boat, and what a lunch it was. Shrimp, squid, crab, fish, several vegetables, soup, and several other dishes I’ve forgotten. We were seated with a couple women named Mary and Anne who were very nice and we had a great conversation, albeit frequently interrupted by oooohs and aaaahs and “I’ll be right back, I’ve got to go look at that!” They were kind enough to send us some of their pictures from the cruise, which have been useful in reminding us that all those impossible visions in our memories are actually accurate!

We stopped at a variety of locations during the cruise out and back, including time to visit a large natural cave in one of the islands (with an amazingly smooth roof, resembling a set of sandy dunes), and an island that we could hike to the top of. The highlight for me was a natural lagoon with a single opening to the sea through a tunnel in the rock. We took a boat through the tunnel and emerged into 200 meter diameter pool with high rock cliffs on all sides – it’s the kind of place that every pirate must have dreamed of finding! We also sailed past several floating villages, where many of the residents spend most of their lives on boats, making a living fishing and selling supplies to the passing tour boats.

Overall we had a wonderful time, with one glaring exception. Our cabin on the boat turned out to be infested with dozens of cockroaches, forcing a midnight exodus into a new cabin!

Days 112-113: Hanoi, Vietnam

Months of practice walking around Asian cities have prepared us well for Hanoi’s vaunted traffic. It’s the sheer number of motorcycles here that make crossing streets hair-raising, combined with the lack of street lights (and ignoring them when they do exist). Six motorcycles can cram themselves into the space that a single car would take up, somehow arranging handlebars, legs, and any luggage into a configuration any puzzle designer would be proud to dream up. The key is to keep on walking, slow and steady, through the stream of traffic and let them figure out how to negotiate around you. Once you get used to it and learn to trust the drivers, it’s not too bad. As I said, we’ve gotten lots of practice with this kind of thing by now.

Our camera is totally dead. The motherboard is toast, same price to replace it as to replace the entire phone. And the prices on new cameras here are pretty bad, so we’ll wait till Hong Kong to buy a new one, assuming prices are better there. It was a great camera and we actually remembered to take pictures with it, of which we are tremendously proud. We were both half expecting to get back from the trip with 10 photos from LAX airport that we snapped on our way home… In any case, we have some photos of Hanoi from a friend we met in Hue located here, but no more photos for now. Thanks Garth!

We spent a lot of time walking around the old quarter of Hanoi, with each of its small streets largely devoted to a single trade (toys, clothing, repairs, bags, etc). We also walked around the beautiful Hoan Kien Lake and out the Huc Bridge to Jade Island and through parts of the French Quarter. And of course, I had to stop and sample all the local varieties of Bia Hoi, “fresh beer”, which can be a very time consuming activity given how many there are! Luckily it’s not a very expensive past time – each glass costs between ten and thirty cents, and it gives you a good excuse to sample all the different local foods as well. Overall a great way to see a city, although it requires strong knees and a good back, since the chairs at most of the shops are less than a foot tall, the small plastic things normally reserved for kindergarteners. I worried about crushing each one as I sat down, mostly a flashback to an embarrassing incident back in Lennox Head near the start of the trip.

I was treated to a wonderful dinner by Lan and Nga, the real-parents of another of my parent’s host-students, Ngoc. They took me to the famous Cha Ca La Vong, serving a single dish for over a hundred years, the eponymous Cha Ca, fried fish. It’s a small restaurant, clearly popular with tourists (apparently it got a spot in 1000 Places to See Before You Die), but also still a favorite of the locals as well. They bring out a frying pan with a fish frying in it to the table, place it on a charcoal brazier, and let you add your own condiments and serve it up. It was great to have locals with me to explain the intricacies of eating the dish, as well as to tell me all about Hanoi. They were wonderful hosts and I had a fabulous time, although unfortunately Mary was again not feeling great and was unable to join us.