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).