Sapa and last thoughts on Vietnam

For my last weekend in Vietnam, my colleague Leah and I went up to Sapa - a hill station on the Chinese border. We found this weekend package offered by Victoria hotel that included an overnight train ride to and from on their special car, which they referred to as the "Orient Express of Vietnam". It was certainly nice but the bunks were just nicer versions of indian sleeper cars. The pict is of the cafe car which was nice. We still had to share with two strangers. The bathrooms were probably worth the price alone!

Sapa is pretty amazing but in the end I left a bit torn. As a photo-addict I am completely in love with the minority tribes that inhabit the area and still dress in their traditional garb (I especially liked their legwarmers - check the pict of the girl!) But they were essentially surviving on the tourists like me who come to gawk and photograph them. So the charm of getting pictures of them wore off very quickly and it felt like the worst kind of voyeurism. And yet - the villages were fairly well off presumably because of our tourist dollars (or Dong to be accurate). The package included an "excursion" on Saturday that was actually lovely. It was a few hours of very light walking through some villages and the scenery and rice paddies were stunning. And although these villages too made their money mostly from tourists (one had village homestays and there were little tourist shops all along the way) it was a lot less intense. One of the outcomes of all the tourists is that everyone speaks decent English (which was very rare for the rest of my trip). But the "where are you from? how old are you?" gets pretty tiring.

I ended up buying some basic stuff from the one lady (close up picture) who had walked with us most of the way and just chatted with me rather than trying to sell me anything most of the way. The second day Leah and I walked up to the radio tower. I love these little hikes in Vietnam. We go all ready for hiking - geared up with water and proper shoes and day bags and everyone else is barefoot or in heels. I get all sweaty and everyone else is just enjoying the day with their kids. Silly white people. The area was surprisingly pretty. Crazy tourist ready with ice cream stands everywhere but still really nice. The area gets misty and then sunny so the views are always changing and pretty spectacular. I wasn't prepared for how pretty Vietnam is.

The train station is actually in a town called Lao Cai which is right on the Chinese border but oddly no chinese signs or evidence at all. Must be that the government wanted it to appear that people don't cross the border but seemed very strange. I gave the trinkets I had bought to Tenzing, my housekeeper and then showed her the pictures so she'd see who made them and her response was that they looked very Tibetan. I explained that we were close to china there and she said, "I don't like China". But she saw a lot of resemblance, even in the gold teeth of some of the ladies I took pictures of!

So that was it for Vietnam. My big take aways are I love the food. Everything is relative (everyone else found vietnam very chaotic and noisy and full of traffic while I was enjoying the peacefulness). Vietnam is gorgeous - i think Halong Bay is probably the prettiest place I've ever been. Love the internet connectivity - wireless everywhere! India has prepared me well and makes me appreciate how lovely everywhere else is.

Perfume Pagoda

Sunday I organized a day trip with my colleague here in Vietnam, Yasmin, and one of her friends, Ellen to what's known as the Perfume Pagoda. The guidebook said very little but it sounded pretty so off we were. Rented a car and driver for the 2 hour drive - past incredibly green fields of rice. We also passed some pigs on the back of motorbikes but I never had my camera ready at the moment - very disappointing as my pig-on-bike picture from Cambodia is still one of my favorite and I was hoping to start a photo essay. All I could capture was the pig behind the bike! Vietnam is clearly growing and everywhere you look things are being built up but it's still very easy to imagine what it must have looked like just 10 years ago.

Vietnam is much harder to navigate than I expected due to very low use of English so we relied heavily on our driver - who also didn't speak english but figured out we were pretty useless. I so appreciate when people don't hesitate to ask for directions! The only way to get to the pagoda mountain is to hop in a metal boat and get rowed there (well, I guess there are some motor boats too). After buying the tickets and paying extra money so we wouldn't have to wait for 3 more people to share a boat with we were off. This tiny woman rowed us for about an hour and half making it look incredibly simple and effortless while clearly I would have lasted 15 minutes. It was a lovely ride though, so peaceful. There were little boat alleys off the main river and I am interested to know where they went - people's homes? Most people on the river were tourists (although all but one other boat was Vietnamese tourists) but we did pass some fishermen as well. (photo on left)

By the time we got to the base of the mountain we were already pretty sweaty - it was very high humidity. We walked past various food joints lining the water with dead animals of various types hanging by nooses in front (why?) and once we got to the mountain we headed towards what looked like temples (pictured) but quickly realized that was a dead end. Found a white person who pointed us back where we started and we realized our mistake. However by this point I was drenched- DRENCHED! in sweat. So much so that even people at the bottom of the hill were sorta pointing and laughing. The guidebook called it a 4km very steep hike. To me a hike is peaceful, nature, exercise etc. Well this was exercise but none of the other adjectives. It was all steps and lined with vendors for t-shirts, cold drinks, small live turtles, etc. And there were loud speakers with this song BLARING on continual repeat. It was anything but peaceful. It was sorta miserable. We got to the top (looked like I'd jumped in a pool) and followed a crowd to this cave but as we depended we looked at each other and just turned around. It was packed with people and vendors and didn't look peaceful at all. Yasmin described it as a fish market - which seems about right. We instead sat and had a coke and the man next to us explained that the whole mountain was the perfume pagoda (complex) and this indeed was the big cave where people went to get their wishes granted by giving them (the gods?) large wads of small bills and incense. This guys English was excellent and we realized he was a tour guide.

We chose to take the cable cars down so as not to have to face that chaos again and that was just lovely. The mountain pict is taken from there. The whole walk I hadn't seen the mountains at all due to all the tarps and vendors. We found a restaurant at the bottom to have a beer and I found a hot dog and loaf of french bread shaped like a turtle which was very satisfying. I also bought me one of those pointy hats to shade myself on the boat ride back, which was again lovely.

All in all a very nice trip - with the exception of the hike up! The name perfume is likely from the trees we occasionally encountered that did have lovely smelling flowers (almost like lilac).

Halong Bay

As Tuesday was a holiday in Vietnam (dead king's birthday, I think) my colleague Leah and I took a day trip to Halong Bay. It was billed as a natural wonder and one of the prettiest things in Vietnam - now I've seen almost nothing of Vietnam but I think it lived up to its hype. After a 3 and a half hour bus ride next to two sleeping women who I assess as a 12 year old and her mother (in fact a 22 year old Canadian and her friend - was totally wrong) and a dumb as rocks 22-year-old American boy who had figured out all the customs and values of asia based on his two weeks in Bangkok, we reached the Bay. Well, after a stop at a ceramics tourist trap, of course. It's actually funny to be in a country that gets all types of tourists (especially inexperienced travelers). I realize India really only gets the die hards. The bay was a bit of a madhouse initially with boat traffic jams to get out.

But it is stunning. Rock formations that they believe are due to volcanic activity or as legend has it spit out by a dragon dot the skyline. I actually don't know how to describe it so will leave that to the pictures. The tourist boats are all around but at least are pretty. We spent a few hours cruising the bay and then docked at what was somehow called the "surprise cave". I'm not sure I've actually ever been in a cave this big (that I wasn't swimming through). There are all these rock formations that are supposed to look like a frog and various other (often unmentionable) things.

So the thing I was most looking forward to was the kayaking. Just after we exited the caves the boat stopped again at what they called a fishing village but was really about 6 huts built on stilts in the water as a tourist stop to offer kayaks and fish and snacks. These women with boats full of "beer cold", oreos and other oddly inappropriate but tempting treats would come up and see if we wanted to buy anything. The kayaking was sadly very short. That's what we get for trying to do it in a day trip but it was still nice. We went around this hill/rock thing in very shallow water and went to check out a little shrine embedded into the rock.

That was basically it. Cruised back to the bay and a bus ride home. We reached back at like 8pm so it wasn't a crazy late day either. I would love to go back someday and just kayak for 3 or 4 days - it is so lovely.

First week in Hanoi

Got into Hanoi last Monday and after finding the airline had lost my luggage and the hotel couldn't find my booking, Monday was pretty much wasted. Went to a mall to buy enough clothes to make it through the next day - found out I need to buy men's pants here as the women are way too small! The luggage arrived the next day:)

Most of the week was spent in the office and doing more work in the hotel. Doing two jobs at once isn't really the best idea. I finally started going out and seeing some stuff this weekend. The people at the office are lovely - we went to get a manicure/pedicure (the picture is of me and my colleague) and lunch most days. The food here is amazing! They seem to do all types of food well and obviously the vietnamese food is so yummy. Good coffee, not fried - not spicy - well seasoned - not living in oil food! I'm in heaven.

But really Hanoi is nothing like I imagined. I was imagining Cambodia or Laos (as they both border Vietnam) but it's really more of a combination of Thailand and China. Life is high-tech, huge skyscrapers, not much english and definitely wordly. Most of the traffic is motorbikes. They have kept the pointed bamboo hats and over the should baskets but there's not much in the way of "traditional" dress or anything in the city anyway. I hear the countryside is totally different and hope I get to see some of it.

On Saturday my colleague Leah (american) and I went out and explored Old Quarter. Typical tourist world with tons of little shops (many selling war propaganda w Che Guevara imagery). The design stuff is so much more appealing to me - hard not to buy it all. All I bought was a coffee filter so I can make my own coffee at the office (they have nescafe!). When it got misty we took in a show of water puppets - puppets attached to long sticks and the performers are also standing in water (behind a curtain). It was actually really interesting. The guy next to me was, I think, a vietnamese man in his 50s who came by himself and was completely amused - laughing aloud. It was really enjoyable.

Sunday I spent the morning walking around the hotel neighborhood with a mission of getting the pants I bought here hemmed (seriously, I'm short even here) and buying some coffee. The pants mission was surprisingly easy. I found a dry cleaner who wrote down in very clear english the address of a tailor. Went to the tailor and a nice customer helped translate for me. 10 minutes and less than a dollar later, I had my pants. I also thought I solved the coffee mission but upon further inspection I didn't buy coffee beans or grounds - I bought those coffee packs with fake milk and sugar already mixed in. So I'll have to go back to the drawing board on that one. In the afternoon we went to the Museum of Ethnology which did give me a sense of life outside of the major cities. The thing that struck me most is how similar the Thai tribes (ethnic, not country) are to the groups of Thai Buddhists we met in Assam a few years ago. Same houses, dress, etc.

Traveling to the beach on Tuesday (it's a holiday) so will have more then