I woke up on 1/8 early to go on a day tour of the Mekong Delta. I finally got a Vietnamese breakfast sandwich- a baguette with a fried egg, cucumber, tomato, cilantro, and chilli sauce. I love the French-Asia fusion stuff.
I slept on the bus to Cai Be, where we got on a 20-seat motor boat and started to cruise. The water was opaque, choppy, and brown, and covered with vegetation that the river had ripped from the shores. In places the river seemed more like a lake, the shores barely visible in the distance, but soon we turned into an offshoot off the river's main course. In slowly became narrower and more shallow. Villagers in groups fished by standing the the water with a huge net rigged with plastic bottles for flotation, manually gathering the thing up. The process took 10 people 10 minutes, and in the end netted only 2 small fish.
We got off the boat to visit a candy-making factory. They pressed coconut juice from the meat, recycling the pulp as fertilizer. The juice was boiled down to a caramel on a fire fueled by rice husks and nut shells, then mixed with chocolate and poured into hand-made wooden channels to cool and harden. Apparently they also use banana leaf and durian as flavorings, and do plain coconut candy, but the chocolate is for the foreigners, who prefer it. Besides the woman stirring the coconut caramel, there were 3 women at the candy-manufacturing table. One woman pulled strips of hardened candy out of the channels, cutting them with a giant cleaver. Another wrapped them in rice paper, apparently necessary in the humidity, and the 3rd wrapped the rice paper and candy in wax paper.
At another part of the factory (which, by the way, was a thatched, open-air hut, if a large one) they made a sort of rice crispy treat. They mixed rice into hot black sand in a cauldron, which popped the rice into puffed crisps. A sieve above the cauldron received the mix from below, letting the sand fall back in and leaving the rest to be transferred to another sieve a few feet away. This separated the husks, which fell into a pile on the floor which would fuel the fire under the cauldron. The puffed rice was then bagged and sent to the next station, where it was mixed with sugar syrup and stirred in a pot. It was then poured onto a greased sheet, maybe 8'x4', and rolled out and cut into cubes by two men with heavy steel rollers, cleavers, and a straight edge. I tried the finished blocks, but as a bit of a rice crispy treat snob, I found them lacking the certain je ne sais quoi imparted by bottled marshmallow fluff and sticks of butter.
They made other candies there, as well as distilling disappointingly uninteresting banana and jackfruit liquor, but I didn't see any of that in progress. The still was very simple, and I wondered afterwards how much methanol I got in my liquor samples. They also hawked tourist crap of all kinds there- low quality silk goods, the same paintings you see everywhere here, tea leaves, even carved wooden pigs (seriously, what the fuck). My big gripe about the place was how touristy it was, but I guess I wouldn't have seen the cool, primitive, assembly-line candy making otherwise.
We left the factory and moved farther up the river. The river narrowed and became too shallow for our boat to continue- it kept jarring as the propeller hit the mud bottom. It was low tide, and the mighty Mekong had been reduced to a sliver lined by swathes of mud. We switched to 4-person canoes, narrow and low, piloted by a guy standing at the back with two paddles. Actually, mine was piloted by a guy, but the other 3 were old-Vietnamese-lady-powered. Mamma-san-powered, if you will. These boats were uncovered, of course, and the mid-day sun was brutal. I was fine, and got to only for the second time use the sunblock I'd bought, but I felt sorry for the drivers working in the heat.
The muddy banks were crawling with amphibians, invisible, either because of their native color or a mud layer, until they moved in quick bursts. The water was perfectly calm except for bubbles rising to the surface all around, I assume from decomposing plant matter releasing CO2. UNder the calm surface, the clouds of mud looked like crumpled silk, motionless until broken by an oar, when the silk vanished in a puff of smoke. It was quiet and I found myself thinking about the spirituality of the river, bringing flooding death and rotting end, at the same time the genesis of the green surrounding us, and enough rice to feed millions upon millions. It was hard to picture navy boats interdicting sampans running guns.
Eventually the channel became more of a puddle, and not even the low-draft canoes could continue much farther. The pilot began to pole us, then jumped out and pushed, finally inserting a peg and shoving on that for the last little bit. We stopped for lunch and to wait for the tide to come back, pooling a tip for our poor pilot, at $2.50 probably his day's wages over again, as we left.
Lunch was boring and touristy, but afterwards the restuarant let us borrow bikes to explore. I separated from the group and got lost on dirt paths. I dodged motorbikes, then, as the path got smaller, only dogs and chickens. The path had tiny, arching stone bridges over the canals. I passed graves and temples; open, airy houses strung with hammocks; and children playing in the dirt.
I don't know whether I've mentioned this before, but many of the graves here are above-ground. On the train through the countryside, passing rice paddies, the fields were like a flooded lake. Rising a few feet above the lake would be an island with the house, sorrounded by a club of vegetation. Farther out into the fields would be a smaller island with stone boxes and grave tablets. The farmers work on the family land in constant sight of their ancestors, a clear look at rural culture here. Land profiteering, buying and selling and moving for a profit, doesn't exist. You don't own the land in Vietnam, at least culturally, you're simply its caretaker for your children. Without land you're not only a vagrant, you've literally and figuratively lost sight of your ancestors. I think that's part of what kept the villagers in place through napalm and search and destroy teams and chemical defoliants.
Anyway, I got lost on the back roads, and kept my tour group waiting for 15 minutes while I found my way back. Thankfully one of the other passengers reminded the guide I was missing, or the guy would have left without me. The tide was back in, and our motor boat had come up to meet us. I felt bad for keeping people waiting, but if I hadn't I would have missed out on the back roads that only I saw, and ended up being my favorite part of the day. So I told them I was sorry, but I lied.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
DMZ - Densely Militarized Zone
The Vietnamese DMZ runs south of the Ben Hai River, the dividing line set up when the Geneva Convention of 1954 pulled out the French troops and provisionally established 2 Vietnams until a general election to be held in 1956. The election was never held, and villages that were once in the middle of Vietnam found themselves instead in the middle of the Vietnam war.
I went on a tour of the DMZ out of nearby Hue. You can get a motorcycle driver, often ARVN (South Vietnam's regular army soldiers) vets, to give you a personalized tour of the area, but I paid $10 for my group thing instead of $60 for a day on a motorcycle covering 300+ km.
The Ben Hai River was bridged, and split down the middle as North and South territory. Each side set up flagpoles, competing to build the tallest. The South kept trying to repaint their side of the bridge, and the North kept trying to match the color (there was only 1 Vietnam in their eyes). Each side set up batteries of loudspeakers, blaring their propaganda increasingly loudly to the other side. The US settled the competition in 1967 when an F5 sank the bridge into the river.
South of Ben Hai is the 5km thick stretch of the DMZ. It's rice paddies now, a flat plain hill-less to almost the horizon. During the war it was defoliated and shelled daily, one shell or bomb for every square meter of the 5km by 50km region. The villagers didn't run away, though, instead digging tunnels and hiding out. They knew that if they left, the VC (South Vietnamese communist guerrillas) would be unable to receive supplies from the NVA (North Vietnamese Army, the regulars). The Ho Chi Minh Trails originally ran straight through Vietnam, through this region, with local guides escorting cadres and troops and supplies from the North in the middle of the night. The US had indisputable control of Vietnam during the day, when there were only harrassing attacks, but at night they mostly had to hole up in their firebases, and that's when the Vietnamese took the offensive.
I learned why the US had troops and launched bombing raids in Laos and Cambodia. As the US tightened control of the DMZ, bombing it to uninhabitability and lining it with razor wire and minefields, the HCM Trails had to move around it, skirting out into Laos and then back into the country further South. The US special forces teams and bomber missions were there when they thought they'd detected the trails. Interestingly, while the US bombed the North, it never really sent troops there, as it would mean declaring war. I'm sure there were black ops, as in Laos and Cambodia, but it was small scale. But anyway, the US command, probably rightly, thought that if they could cut off the supply trails from the North they'd win the war. The McNamara Line was under construction, extending the razor wire and mine boundary to include motion sensors and fire bases, trying to isolate the South from the North. The project was never finished, though, and the trails never shut down. It's interesting to me, though, where VC supplies came from. Before 67 or 68, when Chhiense AK-47s and artillery were rolling in, they were scrounging for material, building home-made guns. They used tins from discarded US rations to make grenades and mines, unexploded shells were disassembled for explosives. The waste created by the US juggernaut was turned against it. It sounds to me like this was realized, and there was a 'bash, burn, and bury' policy instated for all waste, but that it wasn't followed very closely. I think this was a huge failure on the part of the US. The troops weren't convinced of the importance of not leaving Coke cans for the enemy, and so they left them one day only to have them thrown back filled with explosives and shrapnel the next. US intelligence should have, if they didn't, set up a display with captured VC weapons and bombs, showing the GIs exactly how what they discarded could be used to kill them.
We went to the Dakrong Bridge over the Han River, another one-time dividing line. South of the DMZ on Route 9, the Rockpile is one of the many hills emerging from the plains, this one particularly tall and named by the marines who saw it stripped of all vegetation. They set up an observation post on top, calling in air and artillery strikes and looking for activity. When I visited the vegetation was back. It's amazing how this country seems alive again. Dioxins from the Agent Orange are still in the ecosystem, and will be for ages. Unexploded mines and shells still kill people. Vets still walk around (or don't walk) crippled. But the countryside looks almost unscathed. I didn't see the craters the guide pointed out until I knew what I was looking for. They're deep and round, but covered in foliage, with clumps of bamboo growing out of the bottom. The amount of life in the tropics never ceases to amaze me, it's a creeping hand that, without constant human intervention, would clench the region into a tightly curled fist of jungle in just a matter of years.
We drove past the Lang Vay special forces base, invisible unless it's pointed out. There a group of Green Berets and the indigenous fighters they trained were assaulted by NVA regulars. It shocked the US at the time, especially troops in the region, because of the tactics. Bangalore Torpedoes took out the defensive wall, the advancing troops had tanks, and they sprayed the bunkers with flamethrowers. It was an incident where the US were fighting the tactics they had trained against, well-equipped warfare in open combat, but it came as a surprise. The special forces in Vietnam, as I hear about them, amaze me more and more. 14 of the 24 survived the assault. Many of the troops they were training were killed, but despite being outgunned and outnumbered they still inflicted tons of damage on their attackers and many managed to get away.
One last thing to talk about. When the Lang Vay troops escaped, they made it to nearby Khe Sanh. The Khe Sanh Combat Base is on a plateau overlooking Laos, the DMZ, and the central highlands. It had an airstrip capable of landing C130s, but didn't do that much in order to prevent their loss. The Dispatches book I read talks about it a lot, as the author was there during the US buildup. Before the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese troops used Khe Sanh as a diversion. US command, up to President Johnson, who had a relief model of Khe Sanh in his office, were afraid of a defeat there like the French suffered in Dien Bien Phu. They poured more and more troops in, up to 6000 at the height, and were ready with support from all over the country in case the surrounding troops turned the situation into an actual siege. Lots of US planes were lost in the region, shot down by Chinese-madee rockets or mortared just after landing on the airstrip. The author of Dispatches describes how, on landing, you had to immediately run for trenches and cover to avoid the shelling, and how the Seabees there spent most of their time repairing the strip and clearing the remains of destroyed aircraft from the runway.
Khe Sanh has a museum now. There's a guestbook that I read cover to cover (at least the English entries). Most of those entries were from US vets or their families, which were very moving, but alternated with general anti-American diatribes. I've met a lot of foreigners in my travels, and no one has ever gone off on America to me like they did in that book. I guess it's easier to pour it out on unresponding paper than to someone's face.
I went on a tour of the DMZ out of nearby Hue. You can get a motorcycle driver, often ARVN (South Vietnam's regular army soldiers) vets, to give you a personalized tour of the area, but I paid $10 for my group thing instead of $60 for a day on a motorcycle covering 300+ km.
The Ben Hai River was bridged, and split down the middle as North and South territory. Each side set up flagpoles, competing to build the tallest. The South kept trying to repaint their side of the bridge, and the North kept trying to match the color (there was only 1 Vietnam in their eyes). Each side set up batteries of loudspeakers, blaring their propaganda increasingly loudly to the other side. The US settled the competition in 1967 when an F5 sank the bridge into the river.
South of Ben Hai is the 5km thick stretch of the DMZ. It's rice paddies now, a flat plain hill-less to almost the horizon. During the war it was defoliated and shelled daily, one shell or bomb for every square meter of the 5km by 50km region. The villagers didn't run away, though, instead digging tunnels and hiding out. They knew that if they left, the VC (South Vietnamese communist guerrillas) would be unable to receive supplies from the NVA (North Vietnamese Army, the regulars). The Ho Chi Minh Trails originally ran straight through Vietnam, through this region, with local guides escorting cadres and troops and supplies from the North in the middle of the night. The US had indisputable control of Vietnam during the day, when there were only harrassing attacks, but at night they mostly had to hole up in their firebases, and that's when the Vietnamese took the offensive.
I learned why the US had troops and launched bombing raids in Laos and Cambodia. As the US tightened control of the DMZ, bombing it to uninhabitability and lining it with razor wire and minefields, the HCM Trails had to move around it, skirting out into Laos and then back into the country further South. The US special forces teams and bomber missions were there when they thought they'd detected the trails. Interestingly, while the US bombed the North, it never really sent troops there, as it would mean declaring war. I'm sure there were black ops, as in Laos and Cambodia, but it was small scale. But anyway, the US command, probably rightly, thought that if they could cut off the supply trails from the North they'd win the war. The McNamara Line was under construction, extending the razor wire and mine boundary to include motion sensors and fire bases, trying to isolate the South from the North. The project was never finished, though, and the trails never shut down. It's interesting to me, though, where VC supplies came from. Before 67 or 68, when Chhiense AK-47s and artillery were rolling in, they were scrounging for material, building home-made guns. They used tins from discarded US rations to make grenades and mines, unexploded shells were disassembled for explosives. The waste created by the US juggernaut was turned against it. It sounds to me like this was realized, and there was a 'bash, burn, and bury' policy instated for all waste, but that it wasn't followed very closely. I think this was a huge failure on the part of the US. The troops weren't convinced of the importance of not leaving Coke cans for the enemy, and so they left them one day only to have them thrown back filled with explosives and shrapnel the next. US intelligence should have, if they didn't, set up a display with captured VC weapons and bombs, showing the GIs exactly how what they discarded could be used to kill them.
We went to the Dakrong Bridge over the Han River, another one-time dividing line. South of the DMZ on Route 9, the Rockpile is one of the many hills emerging from the plains, this one particularly tall and named by the marines who saw it stripped of all vegetation. They set up an observation post on top, calling in air and artillery strikes and looking for activity. When I visited the vegetation was back. It's amazing how this country seems alive again. Dioxins from the Agent Orange are still in the ecosystem, and will be for ages. Unexploded mines and shells still kill people. Vets still walk around (or don't walk) crippled. But the countryside looks almost unscathed. I didn't see the craters the guide pointed out until I knew what I was looking for. They're deep and round, but covered in foliage, with clumps of bamboo growing out of the bottom. The amount of life in the tropics never ceases to amaze me, it's a creeping hand that, without constant human intervention, would clench the region into a tightly curled fist of jungle in just a matter of years.
We drove past the Lang Vay special forces base, invisible unless it's pointed out. There a group of Green Berets and the indigenous fighters they trained were assaulted by NVA regulars. It shocked the US at the time, especially troops in the region, because of the tactics. Bangalore Torpedoes took out the defensive wall, the advancing troops had tanks, and they sprayed the bunkers with flamethrowers. It was an incident where the US were fighting the tactics they had trained against, well-equipped warfare in open combat, but it came as a surprise. The special forces in Vietnam, as I hear about them, amaze me more and more. 14 of the 24 survived the assault. Many of the troops they were training were killed, but despite being outgunned and outnumbered they still inflicted tons of damage on their attackers and many managed to get away.
One last thing to talk about. When the Lang Vay troops escaped, they made it to nearby Khe Sanh. The Khe Sanh Combat Base is on a plateau overlooking Laos, the DMZ, and the central highlands. It had an airstrip capable of landing C130s, but didn't do that much in order to prevent their loss. The Dispatches book I read talks about it a lot, as the author was there during the US buildup. Before the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese troops used Khe Sanh as a diversion. US command, up to President Johnson, who had a relief model of Khe Sanh in his office, were afraid of a defeat there like the French suffered in Dien Bien Phu. They poured more and more troops in, up to 6000 at the height, and were ready with support from all over the country in case the surrounding troops turned the situation into an actual siege. Lots of US planes were lost in the region, shot down by Chinese-madee rockets or mortared just after landing on the airstrip. The author of Dispatches describes how, on landing, you had to immediately run for trenches and cover to avoid the shelling, and how the Seabees there spent most of their time repairing the strip and clearing the remains of destroyed aircraft from the runway.
Khe Sanh has a museum now. There's a guestbook that I read cover to cover (at least the English entries). Most of those entries were from US vets or their families, which were very moving, but alternated with general anti-American diatribes. I've met a lot of foreigners in my travels, and no one has ever gone off on America to me like they did in that book. I guess it's easier to pour it out on unresponding paper than to someone's face.
Hoi An to Hue
Before leaving Hoi An I met a girl from Boston. We hung out in bars, the cheap ones with the $0.25 draft beers, and chatted a lot. It was nice talking to someone from Boston, but she was very career focused. It got annoying talking about jobs and school and real world things like taxes and insurance. Sheesh. I also find I'm getting really sick of running the 'just met while traveling in SE Asia' script. How long have you been traveling? Where are you from? Where have you been? How much longer do you have? Where's next? What do you do back home? I've met some great people and had interesting conversations, but the introductions wear me down, and I'm sick of talking about why I dislike China and why I'm no longer working at the UN. Actually, I don't like bringing up the UN at all. It always gets a "Really? Wow!" response, and it always feels like I'm bragging. The only time I don't mind is when someone asks me whether I'm teaching English in China. It's the same thing with school. If someone asks me where I went to school I always answer Boston, and only MIT if they follow up. But saying I work in China always leads to the next question.
I collected all of my clothing before leaving Hoi An. Of the 10 shirts, jacket, and pair of shoes I bought, the only thing I was really unhappy with was the tux shirt. I may do another one in China. I had a hard time explaining stud eyelets to them, the collar isn't as stiff as I'd like, and the fabric I picked sort of makes it look like a curtain. Since that last part was my fault, I paid for the thing, but I'll probably never wear it. I don't know whether I mentioned before, but for one of the more casual button-up shirts I ordered I picked a blue and orange striped fabric, and for some bizarre reason they made the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. I tried it on, and it looked ok. I had half a mind to make them re-do it, but I thought that maybe it'd grow on me, and all of my shirts are vertically striped, so I kept it.
I took a bus to Hue. I paid $4 for the 3 hour trip, which turned out to be almost twice as much as I could have paid.
I could talk a lot about Hue, but I'll keep it short. My hotel on the first night was a too-expensive $9. Its redeeming feature was the fact that it was on the 5th floor, a one floor walkup from the elevator to the 4th. Next to my room, one of 2 on the floor, was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to a skylight that opened up. At night I took a little bottle of Vodka Hanoi up and sat perched on the edge of the window, looking down on the city.
Hue was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, which I didn't know until I left the city and started reading a book called Dispatches. It's the old imperial capital, and the ancient part of the city is surrounded by a citadel with towering, meters-thick walls that go on for 10km. During the Tet Offensive, NVA regulars took the city and flew their flag over the citadel for weeks before the US could retake it. It was street to street combat with incredible losses, said to be one marine for every meter captured.
In the battle, and in a previous Viet Minh-French battle a decade or more earlier, the city took heavy damage from air strikes and shelling. The Thai Hoa Palace, Vietnam's equivalent of the Forbidden City, is mostly leveled to a foundation covered in grass, despite the hesitance of the US military to target it. What's left has been restored and reworked, and out front flies a huge Vietnamese flag. It's interesting for me to compare Vietnam's palace with the Forbidden City. The two-story gate here looks tiny in comparison to Tiananmen. The courtyards in China in which the emperor could review his mandarins and troops would hold armies, while the courtyard here would fit into a soccer stadium. Instead of 27 steps, split by a huge tablet carved with dragons, leading up to the Chinese throne, there are 3 unornamented steps here. It's fairly obvious where the power in the region was during the imperial days.
I collected all of my clothing before leaving Hoi An. Of the 10 shirts, jacket, and pair of shoes I bought, the only thing I was really unhappy with was the tux shirt. I may do another one in China. I had a hard time explaining stud eyelets to them, the collar isn't as stiff as I'd like, and the fabric I picked sort of makes it look like a curtain. Since that last part was my fault, I paid for the thing, but I'll probably never wear it. I don't know whether I mentioned before, but for one of the more casual button-up shirts I ordered I picked a blue and orange striped fabric, and for some bizarre reason they made the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. I tried it on, and it looked ok. I had half a mind to make them re-do it, but I thought that maybe it'd grow on me, and all of my shirts are vertically striped, so I kept it.
I took a bus to Hue. I paid $4 for the 3 hour trip, which turned out to be almost twice as much as I could have paid.
I could talk a lot about Hue, but I'll keep it short. My hotel on the first night was a too-expensive $9. Its redeeming feature was the fact that it was on the 5th floor, a one floor walkup from the elevator to the 4th. Next to my room, one of 2 on the floor, was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to a skylight that opened up. At night I took a little bottle of Vodka Hanoi up and sat perched on the edge of the window, looking down on the city.
Hue was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, which I didn't know until I left the city and started reading a book called Dispatches. It's the old imperial capital, and the ancient part of the city is surrounded by a citadel with towering, meters-thick walls that go on for 10km. During the Tet Offensive, NVA regulars took the city and flew their flag over the citadel for weeks before the US could retake it. It was street to street combat with incredible losses, said to be one marine for every meter captured.
In the battle, and in a previous Viet Minh-French battle a decade or more earlier, the city took heavy damage from air strikes and shelling. The Thai Hoa Palace, Vietnam's equivalent of the Forbidden City, is mostly leveled to a foundation covered in grass, despite the hesitance of the US military to target it. What's left has been restored and reworked, and out front flies a huge Vietnamese flag. It's interesting for me to compare Vietnam's palace with the Forbidden City. The two-story gate here looks tiny in comparison to Tiananmen. The courtyards in China in which the emperor could review his mandarins and troops would hold armies, while the courtyard here would fit into a soccer stadium. Instead of 27 steps, split by a huge tablet carved with dragons, leading up to the Chinese throne, there are 3 unornamented steps here. It's fairly obvious where the power in the region was during the imperial days.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Town of food and tailors
My bus to Quy Nhon was a 3rd-world experience. There was no 1PM bus, as I'd been informed there was, and the 3PM bus seemed to be full. The lady at the ticket window advised me to stick around to see if a seat opened up, which I did until about 2:30, but by then everyone had arrived and claimed their tickets. My 1PM deperture became a 4PM departure, so I killed time in a nearby pagoda that was much more peaceful than the bus terminal.
My bus's driver thought he was Schumacher. He cut aggressive paths through curves, leaving passengers hanging on to the armrests. The 1A highway, Vietnam's major North-South route connection HCMC and Hanoi, is one lane each way and involves passing lumbering dumptrucks on blind curves on tortuous coastal mountain roads. In some spots the road is perfectly paved, in others the ground under the asphalt seems to have sunken away, leaving unmarked pits requiring evasive action. Pedestrians and motorbikes hurry across the road in the dark.
The one nice part of the trip came at night. It was raining and dark as we raced past a bay. There were lights out on the water that I at first thought must be a bridge, but as we got clser I realized they were boats with batteries of fluorescent lights hanging off the sides, presumably to draw squid to the surface. One island was surrounded by hundreds of these boats, an eery sort of fairy necklace or halo of ghost boats. They seemed other-worldly and beautiful in the distance, but I imagine that closer-in they would be cold, wet, and miserable.
In Quy Nhon the motorbike taxis chased the bus through the station gate. One driver hopped off his bike and kept trying to pull open the locked sliding door. Because the bus (actually a Sprinter) had power locks, they wouldn't open as he pulled on the handle. In disgust I skipped the motorbike taxi again, instead opting to hike my gear 4km up the beach through town.
It was a Friday night, and as I walked I was passed by gangs of teenagers on identical motorbikes. They cruised slowly up and down the streets, 2 or 3 to most bikes, but there was the occasional lone wolf who'd from time to time stand up on his scooter and rev the little 50cc motor for all it was worth. They were a ridiculous spectacle circling back and forth, especially as frustrated cars and trucks laid into their horns, trying to pass the band. Gaggle? The bikers would eventually ease into a single lane to let people pass, but they'd take their sweet damned time about it.
Quy Nhon was quiet. It's a beach town, but the weather wasn't any good during my two days there, so I checked out the temples and churches and spent hours wandering the streets. I hung out with some backpackers at the hostel- drinking beers on the beach or in the lobby. We also hired a boat to take us to an island in the bay. There's a statue of a Vietnamese hero pointing defiantly towards China, apparently telling the invaders to go back where they came from. There used to be an abandoned US tank that emerged from the surf at low tide, but unfortunately the city government recently had it moved. I tried to run along the beach, but the town's fishing industry ensured that there weren't too many litter-free stretches nearby the hostel.
I opted to take the train from Quy Nhon to Hoi An, in hopes of getting some sleep and maybe not dying. The trip is actually from Dieu Tri, 13km from Quy Nhon, to Danang, 30km from Hoi An. I got a seat rather than a sleeper, planning on relying on the tray table as a pillow and saving some money, but I got one of the 2 seats in the whole train car that didn't have a seat in front of it for a tray table. I didn't get much sleep.
It was raining in Danang when I arrived at 5:40AM, and in the last moments of darkness. As I walked out of the train station I overheard a couple of foreigners say that they were going to Hoi An, so I latched onto them. They turned out to have been traveling for 7 months, and had picked up a nifty trick. They had met a tour group bound for Hoi An while in the sleeper cars, and they planned to hitch a ride on the group's bus if there was room. There was, and the driver decided on the arbitrary price of 50,000 dong ($3), which I assume went straight into his pocket and not the tour company's account. I had been prepared to pay up to 100,000 for a motorcycle taxi, but that wold have been a cold and wet 30km. My other option was a public bus, but that required hiking to the Danang bus station and then from the Hoi An station into town. This tour group's bus was fast, cheap, and convenient, and by myself I never would have thought of it quickly enough to hitch a ride before they left.
I spent an hour wandering town and asking about hotel roooms, but it was still only 7AM and rooms were either too expensive or the staff didn't yet know whether there'd be check-outs. I'd resigned myself to paying $15 for the first night and moving the next day, so I went back to a cheaper hotel to reserve a room for the next day. When I got there the receptionist told me that they did in fact have one $5 dorm bed, which she didn't tell me about the first time. I snapped it up. I heard a lot of people asking about rooms to no avail, so it's fortunate I was there early.
I went to breakfast with some people from the dorm room. Dennis, a heavily pierced and tattooed preschool teacher from Holland, Takeo from Japan, whose English wasn't very good, and Sarah from Melbourne. Sarah turns out to be half Thai and half Iranian, a combination that apparently produces very beautiful people. We ate noodle soup and crispy rice pancakes at a morning market, surrounded by Vietnamese buying produce and meat. Then we got coffee at plastic tables under an umbrella by the river. It may have been the best cup of coffee of my life. They have a plastic bottle filled with concentrated black coffee goop which they dilute with hot water and serve. It sounds unappealing, but it was amazingly good.
We split up at that point, and I spent most of the morning going to tailors. My first stop was a cobbler that had Converse All Star high tops out front. The draw was the fact that the Converse logo was stitched by hand, which was completely awesome and ridiculous. I talked to the store owner, and for $13 I designed my own Converses. They're red, lined with a a red and white stripe pattern, with an identical tongue. I spent a while looking at fabrics before I picked one of the more modest tailors to copy a shirt I had with me- my pink and white striped Gap shirt that fits me so well. I had it done in pink, white linen, and white with blue and orange pinstripes. 3 shirts made to order for $30, in less than 24 hours. Today I went to get 4 more shirts made, at a different place with more fabric. I got another copy of the same shirt, this time actually making the waist a little narrower, plus 3 shirts with French cuffs that they fitted me for. I even had them dye cotton to match a color I requested for one of the shirts. The total for those 4 shirts was $48. Today I passed a corduroy jacket on the street that caught my eye. They'd run out of the fabric color they'd used in the display model, so I took the one off the rack and had them alter it for me. So, in total, 7 button-up shirts, 1 jacket, and 1 pair of shoes, all made to order and fitted, for $116.
I said that in addition to being full of tailors this town was foodie heaven, but I'll wait until I've had my cooking class to elaborate on that, especially as I'm sick of typing.
My bus's driver thought he was Schumacher. He cut aggressive paths through curves, leaving passengers hanging on to the armrests. The 1A highway, Vietnam's major North-South route connection HCMC and Hanoi, is one lane each way and involves passing lumbering dumptrucks on blind curves on tortuous coastal mountain roads. In some spots the road is perfectly paved, in others the ground under the asphalt seems to have sunken away, leaving unmarked pits requiring evasive action. Pedestrians and motorbikes hurry across the road in the dark.
The one nice part of the trip came at night. It was raining and dark as we raced past a bay. There were lights out on the water that I at first thought must be a bridge, but as we got clser I realized they were boats with batteries of fluorescent lights hanging off the sides, presumably to draw squid to the surface. One island was surrounded by hundreds of these boats, an eery sort of fairy necklace or halo of ghost boats. They seemed other-worldly and beautiful in the distance, but I imagine that closer-in they would be cold, wet, and miserable.
In Quy Nhon the motorbike taxis chased the bus through the station gate. One driver hopped off his bike and kept trying to pull open the locked sliding door. Because the bus (actually a Sprinter) had power locks, they wouldn't open as he pulled on the handle. In disgust I skipped the motorbike taxi again, instead opting to hike my gear 4km up the beach through town.
It was a Friday night, and as I walked I was passed by gangs of teenagers on identical motorbikes. They cruised slowly up and down the streets, 2 or 3 to most bikes, but there was the occasional lone wolf who'd from time to time stand up on his scooter and rev the little 50cc motor for all it was worth. They were a ridiculous spectacle circling back and forth, especially as frustrated cars and trucks laid into their horns, trying to pass the band. Gaggle? The bikers would eventually ease into a single lane to let people pass, but they'd take their sweet damned time about it.
Quy Nhon was quiet. It's a beach town, but the weather wasn't any good during my two days there, so I checked out the temples and churches and spent hours wandering the streets. I hung out with some backpackers at the hostel- drinking beers on the beach or in the lobby. We also hired a boat to take us to an island in the bay. There's a statue of a Vietnamese hero pointing defiantly towards China, apparently telling the invaders to go back where they came from. There used to be an abandoned US tank that emerged from the surf at low tide, but unfortunately the city government recently had it moved. I tried to run along the beach, but the town's fishing industry ensured that there weren't too many litter-free stretches nearby the hostel.
I opted to take the train from Quy Nhon to Hoi An, in hopes of getting some sleep and maybe not dying. The trip is actually from Dieu Tri, 13km from Quy Nhon, to Danang, 30km from Hoi An. I got a seat rather than a sleeper, planning on relying on the tray table as a pillow and saving some money, but I got one of the 2 seats in the whole train car that didn't have a seat in front of it for a tray table. I didn't get much sleep.
It was raining in Danang when I arrived at 5:40AM, and in the last moments of darkness. As I walked out of the train station I overheard a couple of foreigners say that they were going to Hoi An, so I latched onto them. They turned out to have been traveling for 7 months, and had picked up a nifty trick. They had met a tour group bound for Hoi An while in the sleeper cars, and they planned to hitch a ride on the group's bus if there was room. There was, and the driver decided on the arbitrary price of 50,000 dong ($3), which I assume went straight into his pocket and not the tour company's account. I had been prepared to pay up to 100,000 for a motorcycle taxi, but that wold have been a cold and wet 30km. My other option was a public bus, but that required hiking to the Danang bus station and then from the Hoi An station into town. This tour group's bus was fast, cheap, and convenient, and by myself I never would have thought of it quickly enough to hitch a ride before they left.
I spent an hour wandering town and asking about hotel roooms, but it was still only 7AM and rooms were either too expensive or the staff didn't yet know whether there'd be check-outs. I'd resigned myself to paying $15 for the first night and moving the next day, so I went back to a cheaper hotel to reserve a room for the next day. When I got there the receptionist told me that they did in fact have one $5 dorm bed, which she didn't tell me about the first time. I snapped it up. I heard a lot of people asking about rooms to no avail, so it's fortunate I was there early.
I went to breakfast with some people from the dorm room. Dennis, a heavily pierced and tattooed preschool teacher from Holland, Takeo from Japan, whose English wasn't very good, and Sarah from Melbourne. Sarah turns out to be half Thai and half Iranian, a combination that apparently produces very beautiful people. We ate noodle soup and crispy rice pancakes at a morning market, surrounded by Vietnamese buying produce and meat. Then we got coffee at plastic tables under an umbrella by the river. It may have been the best cup of coffee of my life. They have a plastic bottle filled with concentrated black coffee goop which they dilute with hot water and serve. It sounds unappealing, but it was amazingly good.
We split up at that point, and I spent most of the morning going to tailors. My first stop was a cobbler that had Converse All Star high tops out front. The draw was the fact that the Converse logo was stitched by hand, which was completely awesome and ridiculous. I talked to the store owner, and for $13 I designed my own Converses. They're red, lined with a a red and white stripe pattern, with an identical tongue. I spent a while looking at fabrics before I picked one of the more modest tailors to copy a shirt I had with me- my pink and white striped Gap shirt that fits me so well. I had it done in pink, white linen, and white with blue and orange pinstripes. 3 shirts made to order for $30, in less than 24 hours. Today I went to get 4 more shirts made, at a different place with more fabric. I got another copy of the same shirt, this time actually making the waist a little narrower, plus 3 shirts with French cuffs that they fitted me for. I even had them dye cotton to match a color I requested for one of the shirts. The total for those 4 shirts was $48. Today I passed a corduroy jacket on the street that caught my eye. They'd run out of the fabric color they'd used in the display model, so I took the one off the rack and had them alter it for me. So, in total, 7 button-up shirts, 1 jacket, and 1 pair of shoes, all made to order and fitted, for $116.
I said that in addition to being full of tailors this town was foodie heaven, but I'll wait until I've had my cooking class to elaborate on that, especially as I'm sick of typing.
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