Northern Vietnam- Now This is What I'm Talking About

Using Hanoi as your base is the way to travel north Vietnam. There are tour offices everywhere - you never need to plan ahead - just show up and shop around for the right package and price. We did several trips out of Hanoi - one being Halong Bay. About 3 hours East of Hanoi, Halong Bay is a collection of 3,000 limestone islands in a fairly dense area off of the coast. We boarded a junk and cruised the bay before stopping for exploring a cave and kayaking - and you then sleep on the boat. This area is another Phang Nga Bay in Thailand, which is where James Bond Island is (Man with the Golden Gun was shot there) which had similar geography - but the scale of this was much larger. And so there were boats.... probably 200 of them. Above is the mooring where we got out to climb up into a large cave - over a km walk through the cave. Below - the scene on the top of the boat - there were lots of "oh my gods" spoken. The legend is that a dragon (big in Vietnamese myth) ran from Hanoi to the sea - and as he ran, his tail carved valleys in the land, leaving mountains. The sea filled in these valleys, and thus Halong Bay was born. I believe as much as Intelligent Design, just more charming.

Aileen and I on the top deck enjoying the first sun in Halong Bay in a month! She is not wearing her J-Lo sunglasses (bought in HCMC for $4) but I am wearing mine - and they broke shortly afterwards... a little tear was in my eye.

Went kayaking through some caves and caught the sunset on the way back to our boat.

Overall, Halong Bay was lovely and a nice gentle break from our trekking in Sapa the days before. We had one full day before Aileen had to leave - so we chose to go to the Perfume Pagoda. We knew it was the most sacred Buddhist site in Vietnam, and included a hike 3.5km up to a cave to the pagoda, after an hour row down a river lined with mountains that looked suspiciously like Halong Bay, but on a river. Since the three of us have Buddhist bents, and since we knew that it was the time of year that Vietnamese Buddhists travel there to make offerings and pray for the New Year, we thought that it would be a peaceful and spiritual thing to do.

OH MY GOD WE WERE SO WRONG!!! We should have known when our hotel staff tried several times to get us to go another day, not on the weekend (not an option since Aileen was leaving the next day). The two hour van ride there was okay .... until our driver clipped a dog. My heart just stopped. He ran away with one leg up so I desparately hope it wasn't broken. Our driver was introduced as someone with 20 years of safe driving - but he would drive sooooo fast down these narrow roads with kids and dogs and elderly folks.. and tourists ... wandering around.

The river trip was amazing... we had a girl rowing our boat. Many people in other boats were carrying food and golden flowers and would wave and say "HELLO" to us...... our guide explained that many of the folks were from the country and would never have seen a westerner. We were the exotics at that point - so Aileen did her best royal (remember...Queen of Cambodia) wave. Later people were petting her... well more like touching her arms either because she is pale or pink from the sun. There were TONS of boats on the river heading to the cave.

I can't even describe how brutal it was to step off the peaceful boat into this riot of people. I am guessing there were 10,000 people there. Our guide disagreed but I swear I brushed against a good 1,000 myself. Here is the view from our lunch table - which was interesting. We had passed many types of carcasses hanging outside the restaurants - because this is the ONE time of year that people from all over Vietnam come to the pagoda, the restaurants offer stuff for the country folk, like deer, and dog, and cat. We even saw a cage of cats and one of porcupines. It was enough to put me off my food so rice and fish for me. We decided to take the cable cars up and walk down to save time. Uh huh.

This is as close to the Black Hole of Calcutta that I hope I ever get. We stood in this queue for 75 minutes before we got on the cable car. It was okay (eesh) when we were in the parts with metal dividing the crowd. But there were parts where you were simply in a mosh pit of people - and you had to push and be pushed. Here is a shot inside the building - the stairs were sign of heaven - until we got to the second floor. Many Vietnemese were grinning their heads off - it was all big fun, the pushing. I stood there and thought to myself, "Do I really want to go to to China where this will be more common?".

Here is Aileen in the cable car.... she LOVED the view as you can see! The funny thing... all that waiting meant it would have been faster to walk up.

After another 30 minutes or so, after morphing into a simple head being transported by a thousand legged body (that is what it felt like), we got into the cave! Here is the first room - tons of people milling about, many carrying their offerings on plates (like chickens) and boxes and flowers. We went further into the cave and found the main alter - all light up with incense in the air. People wouldn't leave all offerings - some they would take back to their home shrines, I suppose - so they hauled stuff 3.5km up the hill through crowds and then back down.

We got separated in the cave (I was shocked we stayed together as long as we did - at one point I was gripping John's T-shirt) so we walked down the hill separately. Now, the experience had already been disgusting and amazing at the same time, and the walk down added a new element. The whole 3.5km walk down, a mix of stairs and boulders, was lined with stalls and restaurants, selling sugar cane juice and crawling army men and videos of prepubescent Vietnamese boys singing pop songs. So, I thought, how does this play with the precepts of Buddhism. Classic Buddhism teaches that this life is temporary and one of many on the way to the ultimate truth. It also teaches that you should not be possessive of things or people since they are temporary. So this blatant and LOUD display of commercialism was depressing.... but in a way, the perfect way to illustrate how I see Vietnam. Here are some stalls on the way down.

Mystery meat - there are chickens, cats and dogs here.

Some friendly guys on a neighboring boat.

So, this day that we hoped would be a peaceful spiritual trek instead turned into one of the more bizarre and visceral days of my life - its up there with the "crawling through bat guana and over bamboo bridges in the Burmese sea gypsy bird nests cave experience". The ride back was through the same village that we had come before - and was a fascinating peek up close at what struck me about Vietnam. Sometimes on trips like this I realize that I have grown used to things around me and I don't notice them anymore - but they all add to the texture of the country. So here are a few random thoughts on my almost 3 weeks in Vietnam.

Most of the people live near HCMC, Hanoi or the coast. However even 20 miles away from a large city like Hanoi, you see how close the people are to their agrarian and spiritual roots. There were rice paddy fields within 10 km of Hanoi - being worked by hand at 6pm as the sun was setting. In the communist times, people starved. When the economy was opened up to allow private ownership (capitalism) and foreign investment in 1990, within 3 years Vietnam was exporting rice. However, there are still big gaps between poor and rich.

In the rice fields, there are frequently shrines like shown below - we think that they are holding the ashes of the ancestors of the people still farming that land. Its peaceful.

Life is still pretty cheap, I suspect. Drivers all around the country drive fast and aggressively. The national anthem of Vietnam should be car, van and moto horns since the standard way to drive is on the wrong side of the road as you pass others, or on someones butt (usually a moto) as a warning to move over. The experience of hitting that dog made me guess that they are going fast to save money - the faster they get these tourists back to their hotels, the more trips we can do with the van. So the fact that we didn't see any accidents with humans doesn't convince me that they frequently are hurt by speeding vehicles. I do know the Vietnam recently imposed a helmet law for motorcycles as a way to save medical costs - so there must be a bunch of accidents happening.

Its noisy - damned noisy. Constant honking, constant music playing loudly. Not alot of privacy. Speaking of privacy - people seem to live on the sidewalk , I suspect since their homes or apartments are tiny. You will be walking by a hotel in the evening or early morning - and there will be people sleeping all over the lobby of the hotel - and there will usually be a few motorcyles pulled up into the lobby for safety.

Vietnam has seemingly only had an open economy since 1990.However, these folks are some of the most brutal capitalists that I have even seen - so I suspect that throughout the socialist economic times, there were huge gray markets going on. Vietnam is far more touristy than I had imagined - and the people are in-your-face-aggressive about buying their wares or taking a moto or rickshaw ride. You just have to say No and move on. I have only seen the tourist economy in action - but I suspect other industries would be as spirited and competitive.

Food is an interesting topic. I know that I have tended to be in touristy spots - but there are a ton of restaurants, including informal cafes with miniature plastic chairs thrown out for locals to eat at. Also - not alot of stores to by groceries... people seem to buy fresh meat and veg and fruit daily to cook with . Like Romania, in fact. Makes all those stores full of processed food in the US seem... overkill. Here is a typical sidewalk cafe in Hanoi.

Hanoi is a very interesting city. We didn't read it anywhere but figured out that there are neighborhoods, or sometimes just a block, dedicated to a specific good. For example, below is a cobbler in the shoe area on the Northeast side of the lake. After a while , you could navigate by type of store - We're in the candy area! Here are the types of goods that we have seen so far - makes for a long day if you have a variety of things to buy.

* Candy

* Shoes

* Underwear Alley

* Eyeglasses

* Towels

* Kids clothes

* Furniture

* Backpacks/luggage

* Jewelry

* And the weirdest - gravestones. And they display samples. I was walking by this one today and did a double take - its both funny and perhaps prophetic - but I think they stuck a young Brittany Spears on one tombstone. We saw two funerals in Hanoi.One was a van parked in the street with the coffin in it and the family members crying at the back of it. The second was more like a wake for an elderly woman just down the street from our hotel. They had flowers and incense music (reminded me of a New Orleans Jazz funeral) and a picture of her on the sidewalk, and there were people sitting nearby dressed in filmy white robes...

Hoan Kiem Lake is the center of the Old Quarter - we strolled it our first day and saw old men like this enjoying their weekend by the lake. In the distance is the famous Tortoise Tower in the middle of the lake, frequently used on advertising for Hanoi.

We walked through a food market and I was fascinated by these fish. They had been live minutes before, but even with their heads cut off they continued to gasp for several minutes. Probably all muscle memory but fascinating.

One of our last nights in Hanoi we ate on the street (so we got to sit on those groovy mini plastic seats). We grilled beef and vegetables on a hotplate ourselves and ate it with hot chili sauce and baguette. YUMMMM. Here are John and I and our Tiger beers.

So - Aileen left last night for Scotland, and John is off to HCMC today. I will really miss her - she's a great travel mate with a great sense of adventure and humor. And she's gonna be a queen so you gotta like that. We ran pretty hard for the last month - so before I fly to Laos on Wednesday, I am staying in Hanoi for a few low key days of catching up my blog. I moved to a hotel with CNN specifically to vedge with. Total bonus - I found the Academy Awards on several Vietnamese stations - so you know when they say Billions are watching, its true. They didn't mention , however, that a nasally Vietnamese interpreter would be repeating what everyone says! Here is Flat George offering Real George encouragement just as they were announcing the Best Actor winner. His smile turned upside down when Daniel Day Lewis won instead.

Walked around and saw some cool French architecture in Hanoi.

If I were to coach someone who wanted to experience Vietnam, I would nudge them towards the north of Vietnam. There are amazing natural wonders, big and small cities and some history.
I will be going to the Hanoi Hilton tomorrow before heading to Laos the next day but wanted to get this blog out when I had fast internet (rare here).