New Year in Nha Trang...back to the beach

    There are two photo albums for this diary entry. The first is New Year in Nha Trang, and the second is the Vietnamese Opera performance.

    Dec 29th: Our guest house is up a small cul-de-sac.  It is too narrow for vehicles, but the bulb at the end contains a cluster of about eight nice little hotels, all about the same size. Ours has possibly 24 rooms on 8 floors. 

    It's just next to another "historic craft village", a cousin to the one we visited in Da Lat.  It's actually a fairly high end craft emporium, and a very entertaining experience even if one isn't going to purchase any of the high quality crafts and artwork, which are available there at very reasonable prices by international standards.  Mind you, many of the silk tapestries are handmade copies - we saw two of them in Da Lat already, and these villages exist in seven different cities, so you might think you're buying an original, but later see it in someone else's home.

    We're right off the beach, across a beach road that curves gently up in a new moon shape with lovely islands not far off shore. The water is a bit rough for swimming, and I've learned that we've come at the wrong season for calm, clear seas, so we probably won't be doing the snorkeling or island trips until February. 

    There's a Cham temple, and the Long So'n Pagoda.  Apart from those we'll just be walking the beach, enjoying the small tourist market, etc. It's a nice interlude and always a soft, gentle restorative experience to be back at the seashore. At first glance there isn't a lot we'll find to intrigue us for more than three days, so we'll leave for Hoi An before we have a chance to get bored. We're in the mood to stay here to bring in the New Year, and then take one of the "sleeper buses" for an overnight trip to Hoi An. The sleeper bus is something most Canadians have never heard of, a double-decker enclosed bus with a lay-down, stretch-out sleeper for every passenger.

    I found a copy of Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: a History in the Spot Cafe, which was an inexpensive alternative to the larger tourist trap restaurants but with excellent food. We had delicious seafood fried rice and Vietnamese seafood pancakes there in the evening, and again for breakfast when I returned to read another few pages of the book. It's an amusingly counterfeit text.  They don't seem to have any laws against counterfeiting or any sort of copyright law in Vietnam; but the text is genuine even if the photos are poorly reproduced. One of my goals is to locate a local bookstore we've been told about so that I can get my own copy to read during our onward travel. I'm really enjoying Doris Lessing's African Laughter, but I have a bigger craving to read material that delivers insight into the places we're currently travelling, for example the Tragedy of Cambodia that I recently finished.

    After breakfast we met "Bitsdewan" - his Couchsurfing name - Bitan Dewan, "Bits" for short, the local CS Ambassador in Nha Trang, for coffee at the Sheraton - the best coffee in town, he says. He's an Indian businessman who studied in Australia for a number of years. He ordered a local "ca phe, banciu" that he'd been responsible for perfecting with cinnamon, turmeric and other ingredients. It was delicious. 

    After chatting for a while he introduced us to two young ladies from Kazakhstan, one working for an NGO and the other a manager of a tax and legal department for KPMG. The five of us trooped off to one of three "spa resorts" in town, where they have hot pools, a waterfall, mud baths, massage and water jets. I had a long chat with Bits and Deborah joined the KPMG girl in a mud bath. Then Deb and I went with Bits to a Mexican restaurant in a food court, a little food stand with burritos and other iconic Mexican dishes, recently opened by a friend of his who is Mexican - a backpacker who arrived here two years ago, set up a little stall on the beach, and sold that to open the food court location; now he's in the process of setting up a restaurant in Saigon as well.

    We took our leave of Bits then, with thanks for a great day and a promise to meet for coffee the next morning to meet another friend, Michael, who owns a language school. Except for one taxi ride that we paid for quickly, Bits would not allow us to pay for anything today - he insisted that if he comes to Toronto, we'll treat him. On the way home, we got to watch an open air performance on the steps of the Nha Trang Vietnamese Opera House, a very grand building. Every Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 they stage a free performance of traditional operatic dance and musicians.

    It was a great day - I worried a little when I woke up this morning whether we'd enjoy our short time here, but by the end of the first day, Deborah is convinced that Nha Trang may be even a better choice than Da Lat for settling down in one spot for a month and teaching English. And after a month, she's still very glad we chose Vietnam as our destination this winter.

    Dec 30th: We had a good chat with Michael, a friend of Bits who owns a local language school. We have an idea how we'll fit in and what we'll do if we come to work with him or someone like him. He's from Alaska, and we discussed the U.S. a bit - one comment he made, incisively, is that North America generally seems to be in some sort of cultural depression when compared with the people of Vietnam.  That observation struck a chord in me and stuck with me. 

    Afterward, Deb and I went to the Cham temple called Po Nagar, a pleasant, peaceful place just across the river. We went there and back on a public bus, to avoid a package tour and/or taxi fares, and paid about a tenth of the taxi rates. Some musicians and dancers there put on a very sweet short program for tourists, dancing in the Champa style. 

    We had supper in a food court of a local mall beside the Sheraton, where Bits has his office suite, and strolled home. We've booked our onward tickets to Hoi An on the overnight sleeper bus on New Year's Day.  It'll be another "first" experience, so tomorrow we'll just stroll the beach, the craft shops and the big lotus, and enjoy Vietnamese food, which is a big part of being here.  There are so many tasty and interesting dishes.

    New Year's Eve: This morning Bits and Simon helped us out with currency exchange. Outside of Saigon and Hanoi, ATM's will only dispense $100 at a time, and charge high bank fees on top of what our home banks will charge - we could lose $7.50 out of each $100.  That's another example, of many, of what Vietnam needs to figure out how to change to make the country more attractive to tourists. The recent boost in tourist visa cost, lack of training for the service industry, lack of signage in English and other languages, and lack of tourist information services are all impediments to attracting overseas visitors.

    For lunch we sourced a local dish called Bun Cha Ca, a fish and noodle dish. We found the one little restaurant in all of Nha Trang that is most famous for making it. We picked up some photocopied books to read - clever counterfeits but with terrible spelling errors on the front and back covers - one called Understanding Vietnam and the other called Catfish and Mandala, which is also about Vietnam. Both seem excellent, and should sustain us on the sleeper bus tomorrow. Someone stole the Stanley Karnow book about Vietnam (another bad forgery) that I was reading when we went to the Spot Cafe - darn it! I knew I should have stolen it the first day I saw it there. I tried to borrow it or buy it, but they either didn't understand me, or turned down my request.

    In the evening Deb splurged on a delicious fancy plate of prawns to celebrate New Year's Eve, and my usual seafood fried rice with vegetables and Tiger beer hit the spot. Dessert on the way home was a bust - don't eat at the Kirin Restaurant.  We've had two disappointments there in spite of the friendly tout from Oklahoma luring customers in from the street. We bought some sweet tiny bananas and satisfied our sweet tooth with their fresh flavour. After dark we enjoyed a very good stage show put on in the peoples' square beside the Lotus Tower - singers, dancers, break dancers, drummers and other musicians.

After three days here, Nha Trang is still at the top of Deb's list of places to settle for a longer stay on our way back south from Hanoi.

Next diary entry: Ancient Hoi An

Delightful Da Lat, a wonderful town with a Crazy House, and Flower Show

    There are three photo albums that illustrate this blog.  First, The Da Lat Crazy House; second, Da Lat Town and Countryside, and third, the Da Lat Flower Park.

    Our first two days in Mui Ne were warm and pleasant, but overcast. The final half day was sunny, and would have been much better for photos, but we had a fantastic breakfast at The Bar and then walked the beach for an hour. Deborah noticed how one's mood improves with the degree of sunshine. Then we packed, checked out by noon and hiked over to the Sinh Tours office to get settled early with a good seat on their bus.

    We had stepped into the Sinh Tours office here three times in as many days and not once had our presence been acknowledged by the staff, which is in stark contrast to the way most tour agencies gaily invite your business in Vietnam. The main office in Saigon was barely much better. However, Deb's Tripadvisor research made her feel most comfortable with this company, and we'd had a reasonable tour with them in the Mekong - better during the first day than during the second, mind you. And they were a third of the price of Buffalo Tours, which appears to sell "corporate" and private tours to higher end customers.

    Sinh Tours had been unresponsive to emails and phone calls in their Phnom Penh and Siem Reap offices, and they'd lost our business in their Siem Reap hotel as a result. Very inconsistent levels of professionalism, I'd call it...possibly riding on their earlier reputation as the Sinh Cafe, which was always recommended in the Lonely Planet guide and on Tripadvisor. Too bad they don't have some sort of loyalty recognition program for previous customers. I'd love to give their staff a training course in customer service. 

    

    When we boarded our bus a sour young agent scratched out our seat assignment codes and told everyone to "sit anywhere!" because she was too lazy to supervise the assignments - which caused a real problem for a young family of four from India with two small children, who were last on and were forced to sit in separate seats all over the bus, from front to back. If I encounter a promising alternative on future legs of our trip over the next two months, I'll happily give my business to someone else.

    Anyway, we swallowed our annoyance at being ignored by the desk agents, which bordered on disrespectful to paying clients, and asserted ourselves long enough to demand the tickets they had on offer to Da Lat. We'd been told there were no coaches to Da Lat, that the road is too steep and winding, and that a smaller 24 seater was the only choice; but up pulled a 40 seater coach, which regularly does the run for Sinh Tours. It was comfortable, slower, but had good air shocks, and crawled its way up the bumpy winding road through dunes and coconut palms changing to fields of banana and then acres of coffee bushes, with hillsides of wild yellow hibiscus and white hibiscus that looked like the Rose of Sharon so fondly kept in gardens in our neighbourhood in Toronto. There were hydrangea, bougainvillea, and many other flowers.

    We pulled into Dalat six hours later, and stepped off the bus to a bracing chill. We were 1500 metres up from sea level now, and no-one needed air conditioning. This was a French hill station, and a very popular summer retreat from the heat in colonial days. It is an amazing growing area producing a tremendous amount of vegetables and flowers, in addition to coffee. 

    We met our hosts, Teun and Phik Li, at a vegetarian restaurant.  Teun had been a vegetarian for sixteen years.  We ordered a "hot pot", which is a soup that boils with a lump of parafin wax beneath it, perfect for chilly air at high altitude. There was a large plate of fresh leafy greens and cabbages that we put into the pot, along with mushrooms and soy items that had arrived already in the broth, and a plate of white rice noodles. I was hesitant about not having any meat, but impressed with the different tastes and textures, and satisfied with my meal.

    On Christmas Eve day we visited the "Crazy House".  Then we went to the Bao Dai summer palace, hiked around downtown getting the flavour of the town of Da Lat, and in the evening stopped at the Cathedral, which was brightly decorated and had worshippers lined up down the steps for the Christmas Eve mass.  We went to the Zen Cafe, where "Tim from Albury", a.k.a. Tim Carson, or "Tim Tiger", played jazz standards, then accompanied Teun who played his harmonica, and then a Danish guest joined in on his guitar, and I tried to remember the words to "Georgia". It was a pleasant evening.

    It's amazing what you hear from expats when you visit a new country. There are always elements of what Doris Lessing calls "The Monologue", a disparaging script developed over time by the whole group. However, one also pick up useful tidbits and expressions of pleasure and satisfaction in the place, the people or the culture; or ironic amusement. 

    One interesting story from this evening was from a teacher who had been contracted to teach university English teachers. She'd prepared lessons and powerpoints, and showed up eagerly for her first class, but there was no-one there. Eventually she learned that the university professors had decided not to attend, some because they were embarrassed at their lack of ability to speak as opposed to parsing grammar (which was the very point of the teaching contract), but too many others because they were afraid of being exposed as someone who really wasn't qualified to teach English at university level - and that included many who'd gotten their jobs through "connections", and some who'd actually purchased their degrees. Crazy, eh?!  

    It reminded me strongly of the English teacher at the school in Malingua Palma who never showed her face around us.  Another teacher explained his employment in Da Lat as "I teach English...when my students show up to class". I have no way to judge whether that says more about the culture or his personality and teaching style, mind you. It's something to consider if we decide to teach here for a month, which Deborah thinks she might enjoy. We've already been invited by one of the teachers to teach at her school - an unpaid voluntourism position like we did last winter. It's a really good way to connect more deeply with a foreign culture.

    The town is only about a quarter million, with a large complement of retired expats and others for whom the cooler climate is appealing, so it isn't a large downtown area to walk about. The air is clear and unpolluted, and it is a garden city - gardens and flowers are everywhere.  On Boxing Day the bi-annual flower show is supposed to start. We're hoping to see the opening event and a parade scheduled for that evening, although - oddly - tickets to the flower show Opening Ceremony are for "residents only". That's a bit bizarre for a town that is trying to foster tourism. However, there's a permanent flower garden set up with paid admission, and the whole city is becoming one enormous garden for the duration of the festival.

    We had a great commercial tour of Da Lat and its surroundings on Christmas Day.  Sinh Tours was once again singularly unhelpful.  They said they just didn't have enough people sign up for the tours for the 25th or 26th. But with the miracle of cell phones, all the little tour agents connected to every little guest house or hotel managed to fill a van and a smaller vehicle by aggregating tourists. 

    We had a very entertaining tour guide, "Zoom", who joked with us all the way. She took us to a flower farm and showed us hillsides full of greenhouses, then a coffee plantation where we ate coffee fruit and learned the difference between Arabica and Robusta plants. We stopped at a cricket farm and sampled fried crickets with chili sauce.  Deborah really liked these.  She downed about twenty of them.  Then we stopped at a silk factory where we ate silkworm larvae, nice fat grubs that have a slightly peanut buttery taste to them.

    We went to the Elephant Falls and the Linh An Pagoda, and a "weasel farm" where they keep the civet cats who eat the best beans, which makes the tastiest coffee once passed through their intestines. I was skeptical that it could make any difference that we'd be able to notice, but the coffee, surprisingly, was delicious and smooth, strong but mocha in flavour. 

    We sampled whisky made from rice wine, and stopped at a "minority village" where Zoom was a font of information about how Vietnam treats its ethnic minorities,.  This was also a great source of jokes about the "fifteen buffaloes" that a young woman's parents from that particular group might be willing to pay in dowry for a big strong man to be her husband, someone who could make her wealthy as a farmer. Good looks might be worth a couple of scrawny chickens...but a big strong ox of a guy would be worth a small fortune. 

    Our final stop was an artists' village where they do hand-embroidered silk art, and the driver took us to buy our onward bus tickets as well - bonus. It was a fun day. The downside was the 237 photos I had to process to make an album.

    On Boxing Day we spent a few hours in the Da Lat Flower Park, where they were setting up for opening day of the flower festival, which was the next day. We saw amazing orchids and many other types of flowers which are now in a third, separate photo album. We saw astonishingly painstaking wood carvings and hundreds of bonsai. We walked several kilometres along paths and through vendors stalls by the hundreds. Someone who retired here would have the perfect climate and all the resources and raw materials you'd need for a very rewarding garden.

    We checked out the room at the Dreams Hotel where we might stay if we came back here for a month to teach, and had lunch in their dining room - delicious, and with reasonable prices, although the hotel itself is pricey compared to what you can find within the neighbourhood.  There are dozens of small hotels and guesthouses. After walking about downtown for a little while longer, we came home to rest, read and work on photos, and then took Teun and Phik Li out for supper again. On the way home, we strolled in the night market, which is pleasant and interesting, and a good place to walk and munch, making up a dinner as you go from roadside vendors.  I bought a Chinese chromatic harmonica for $8, which was astonishingly well made for the price.

    On Dec 27th we went to the national archive building which has a small museum of war history (more rhetoric about the "puppet soldiers" and "imperialist lackeys").  We saw ancient woodblocks used to record significant events during the Nguyen Dynasty, in Chinese characters. There was little English translation.  It appeared that the woodblocks were a printing press negative and that multiple paper sheets could be printed from them and distributed.

    We attended an opening ceremony of a photo display of "120 years of socio-economic development in Da Lat", but first had to sit through dancing and choral singing presented to local officials, men in dark suits, one of whom then made a short speech. It was listed as an event for tourism, but there was no attempt to incorporate tourists or communicate with them. We were befriended by one of the officials, however, and given a place to sit, and the photographs after the ceremony were interesting.

    In the evening Phik Li was extremely ill with a very harsh cold. Deb and I went downtown to the night market and had a beef hot pot - an excellent food choice in the chilly winter air. We tried to watch the parade of flower floats and the opening ceremony extravaganza.  This is the one that only residents can get tickets for - a major shortcoming of the city's attempt to attract tourist dollars, I'm afraid.  The main roundabout downtown was absolutely jammed with many thousands of people and there was no way for us to get through.  The next day we managed to see a long string of the floats from the parade, as they made a point of driving through the streets of town in the sunshine so that residents who couldn't attend the ceremony could still enjoy the floats, which were decorated entirely, pictures and text and graphic design, in colourful fresh flowers. They really are very impressive.  I think this annual festival only began in 2011.

    We had breakfast with Steve, who does IT for the military in Moose Jaw, and his wife Do-an, a Vietnamese woman originally from Da Lat who has been in Canada for 22 years, exactly half of her life. They were here visiting her sister who is a Buddhist nun. They brought their daughter Ti-en An, and Do-an introduced herself in order to help us order breakfast, because we're not staying in a tourist neighbourhood.

    This morning a young man named Binh introduced himself, and in excellent English, performed the same function for us.  He sat with us through breakfast, chatting.  It was chance to practice speaking English face to face, he said, rather than only interacting with his language programs on computer screen.

    After both these experiences, I reflected on how many times here in Da Lat, a safe, friendly city, Vietnamese people had emerged from the crowd spontaneously to offer advice and assistance in English. It is really quite astonishing how many people speak English here better than you might imagine, and how eager they are to be helpful. Although Da Lat is a little cooler than I might like, especially now in the dead of winter, it is certainly a place I'd be comfortable to stay for a month or longer, teaching English...clean, safe, friendly, attractive, sunny every morning although it tends to become overcast in the afternoon.  With good food, affordable taxis and accommodation, and cheerful people, it is easy to see why so many foreigners are willing to spend their retirement dollars in this city, which in turn is a great source of income and foreign exchange for the community. There's a pretty good chance we'll be back.

    Getting to Nha Trang on Dec 28th was a bit hairy. We decided to try another coach company, Futa. They pick you up, take you to the coach, and deliver you after you arrive to your address in the new city - door to door service. There was a problem with our pickup, however: the small orange satellite Futa van didn't arrive, although Deb's phone kept ringing, and the person at the other end couldn't or wouldn't speak with her. Finally, after several calls and some help from our tour guide from two days ago, Zoom, the guy - who said he'd been to our address twice already, but he hadn't because we were standing on the street fifteen minutes ahead of time with our bags, and there was no orange Futa van - arrived in a surly mood. 

    There had been a suggestion that we should make our own way to the bus station in a taxi, but that would have added a sizable taxi fare to the cost of our trip, and that didn't seem fair - they'd written our address right on our tickets at the ticket agents, after all, and we were very clear about our address. Anyway, the guy finally arrived, didn't greet us, didn't help us with our bags, had a cigarette hanging from his mouth and drove dangerously to the bus station, braking constantly to narrowly miss motorcycles and other vehicles. He pulled up at the front door of the station without a word and again, offered no help with our bags.  We went to the coach and sat for another fifteen minutes in our seats before we pulled away from the station, so I don't know what the crazy driving was all about.

    The coach careened down the steep winding roads, and swayed on the switchbacks, but the driver was focused and careful. At one point he braked hard for a young boy of perhaps twelve or fourteen who was sitting right in the middle of the road on the dotted line - we have no idea why, and neither did the worried driver, who called someone immediately on his cell phone. The boy didn't look injured. 

    The vegetation changed and the landscape levelled out until we had rice paddies on either side, and then we crawled through miles of grimy suburban sprawl. At the bus terminal a taxi driver tried to hustle us into his cab, but Deb told him Futa would take us to our destination, and he pointed to the minibus that they use for that final service. We arrived at the guest house that Teun and Phik Li had told us about, steps from the beach, with a large clean room, hot showers and air conditioning. The owner hadn't answered my booking request, but she was delighted when Deb marched up to her with the business card that Teun had given us, and she gave us her best rate. We rested a little, then went out for a walk and an evening meal.

Next entry: bringing in the New Year in Nha Trang

Saigon to Phan Thiet and Mui Ne

    Photos for this diary entry are here.

    On Dec 18th we returned uneventfully to the same little hotel in Saigon. The border crossing, as I suspected, was a much larger, paved, and more sensible affair than on the other way through - we still had to hike a short distance with our bags, and have them scanned, but the steward on the bus collected passports and had them processed for us. We only had to line up once to verify that our photographs matched our faces. The scanner was interesting: the body scanner didn't work, so anyone with a snub-nose tucked in his waistband walked right through; the suitcase scanner might have been working, but there was only one operator, who pulled individual bags aside if he was suspicious, but paid no attention to the rest of the bags that flowed through on the conveyor belt while he investigated the one that concerned him.

    On our first day back we went for breakfast, did laundry, and bought train tickets to Phan Thiet, from where we we would take a short bus ride to Mui Ne. There are major sand dunes, kite surfing, ocean wave surfing, and some nice beach walks there. We planned to see how much we liked being there, and that would determine when we would buy our onward tickets to Da Lat, which seemed a likely place to hole up for Christmas. Da Lat has beautiful waterfalls, gardens and scenery, although we weren't sure what season is best for the gardens. 

    We spent our first evening back working with Truong and with Tam. I helped Joe finish deciphering Inception, and Deb did mock interview questions with Tam to help her prepare for her IELTS exam. For some odd reason we picked the 20th as our onward train date, so we had two more days to kill in Saigon. We considered inviting Tam back for another mock interview; and hanging out in the park in the evening with all the young people and families who like to congregate when the temperature drops. 

    In the evenings, in many Asian cities, social life begins - sidewalks cluttered with motorcycles on blocks devoid of restaurants during the day suddenly spring to life as outdoor street cafés complete with a cook and his handcart cooking station, usually involving a wok and burner.  Staff and family members set up tables and chairs and then run around serving customers and bussing the tables. There can be five or six along one short block, with no shortage of choices that include noodle dishes, pho, fried rice and other standard dishes.  Meanwhile, in the park people dance, play hacky sack and badminton, or stroll with friends, and the students sit in large groups and share conversation, study tips and useful personal items. It's quite a warm and relaxed lifestyle.

    At lunchtime every day, people shut down for ninety minutes or longer. They'll eat, again at sidewalk food stands, and then nap, anywhere.  Some nap on the floor beside their desks at work, or they'll put up a hammock across the framing in the back of an open truck. I saw a bus driver stretched out in his cargo compartment with a comfy pillow. 

    I stopped at a hairdresser at 1 p.m. and unfortunately woke up the barber, his mother, two aunts and a grandmother all sound asleep in the barber chairs. He was only too happy to wake up and give me a cut for three times the going rate, according to Truong.  He didn't crack a smile, and he fussed for a lot longer than I'm used to, but I was shocked at how well my hair combed after his haircut. In Cambodia I saw a number of open-walled businesses set up where there were low tables, like at an open air restaurant, but with hammocks beside each. Workers would pull in off the road for a midday lunch and a nap. It struck me as a very civilized daily routine.  Mind you, the Vietnamese get up at the crack of dawn or before, often at 5 a.m., to begin their day.

    Deb and I are pleasantly surprised at how comfortable we feel in Vietnam. The people are relaxed, cheerful and empathic, often laughing along with you without sharing a word of each others' languages. They celebrate Christmas, but only because it is an excuse for another party, and to make the foreign tourists feel less lonely about being away from home during Christmas. One lady was singing Jingle Bells loudly in Vietnamese in a minimart; Deborah joined in singing the English words, and the lady grabbed her arm and sauntered down the street with her, both singing in two languages. Then they both peeled with laughter and the lady said good-bye in English.

    Not that we didn't enjoy the people in Cambodia, but Saigon has its own energy and the odd thing is that in spite of being part of the same peninsula and sharing a long common border, Cambodians and Vietnamese seem astonishingly different in appearance, language, religion and culture.

    Crossing the street in either country is still a cheap thrill - it feels so dangerous. But in traffic there is only one rule, essentially. Drive wherever you want, across any lane, any direction, even the sidewalk; but don't hit anything or anyone, including tourists. It sounds weird to a westerner, but it works, and it keeps traffic flowing in a city that would snarl if they had to obey traffic lights and a more rigid set of rules.

    Dec 20th: Our last day in Saigon was interesting. I spent hours trying to finish Chandler's Tragedy of Cambodian History, and then in the evening we sat with Tam for a few more hours prepping her for her pending oral English exam. While we were with her, the skies opened up. We sat inside a restaurant over a pot of tea and watched rain cascade down in sheets and bucket-loads. Later we waited for Joe to arrive with a gift he wanted us to deliver for him, and as we waited, there was a major brawl in the lobby of our hotel between a tour agent who worked at the front desk and some very unhappy customers. A couple of ladies took turns slapping the tour agent, and then one picked up a metal stool and whipped it at her right in front of where I was sitting. I wish I could have found out the precise details, but it is never wise to get involved in a foreign language situation like that, even with just mild curiosity.

    We got up at 5 a.m. the next morning and by 5:30 we were in a hired car heading for the train station, which was actually not very far away.  There was no traffic at that hour of the morning. We had worried about distance and rush hour traffic, and so we overpaid significantly for our ride, a set price. We were in our train seats a solid hour before departure! As we arrived at the train, the car attendants marched past us in perfect drill, single file, wearing caps and suits like a flight crew, and each carrying a briefcase in the same hand. They looked very paramilitary, including two young ladies in the crew.

    The train ride was fine except for a very loud and rambunctious child in the seat next to me - the loudest one in the car. I usually have better luck. Still, my luck was intact when we arrived at the Phan Thiet train station and caught our bus to Mui Ne. We'd had no luck arranging a booking over the internet, so I asked the bus driver to drop us at the Mui Ne Lodge, which was a name that had stuck in my brain from the Lonely Planet guide. 

    We walked in with our fingers crossed and dropped our bags, but the clerk said they were full. We stacked our bags and I prepared to do "Plan B", which is when Deb sits with the bags while I hike up and down and locate a room we can live with. They range from $10 to $80 along less than a block, where we are. However, the clerk suddenly said, "Hold on!" - someone was checking out at that very moment, and fifteen minutes later we were in their room, one of a narrow little strip of bungalows with air con and hot water heaters, sketchy wifi and beach frontage. 

    "Ok, how much...?" 

    "$15," he replied. 

    It's the gardener's cottage compared to the rooms with stars and swimming pools a few doors away, but it has everything we need, as well as proving our friend Tony Conforti correct. He'd told us we could rent a bungalow on the beach for $15. I was skeptical - I thought, there's got to have been inflation since Tony saw those rooms - but he was right. Ours is possibly the cheapest beach-side room but there are even cheaper ones on the opposite side of the road.

    There was wifi at the room, a good router, strong signal, and the owner who speaks English fluently with a U.S. accent got internet on his iPad there, but my laptop wouldn't - it read "no internet" or "internet", had five bars connection, but either way, no pages would load.  If I stepped to the front office and connected to a different router, I got connected to the internet, but pages loaded very slowly. There's free wifi everywhere you go in Vietnam, but outside of Saigon, maybe it is only at dial-up speeds. We strolled the street, and stopped for a delicious lunch, which they served with complimentary tea and two quarters of dragon fruit. This is a major area for dragon fruit, and we saw the orchards all along the rail line as we approached Phan Thiet. We saw some of the other menu offerings as well - Christmas menu suggestions, perhaps.

    Dec 21st: We walked along the beach this morning and saw the iconic local fishing technology: blue plastic coracles and blue fishing boats. 

    In the afternoon we shelled out for a private jeep and driver to see the "Mui Ne "Tour" sites. We were underwhelmed by the tour. A "Fairy Stream" was interesting - a stream of freshwater flows down a very flat hard-packed sandy bed between two steep banks of kaolin topped by oxide sand, in dramatic contrast. It would have been more magical and possibly "fairy-like" in the absence of dozens of other tourists, a modicum of garbage strewn along the banks, and a dozen bratty adolescent boys who should have been in school instead of hassling the tourists for handouts. The drivers should do something to make sure that doesn't happen to their clients.

    We had a lookout over a "fishing village" (actually the fleet) which was a great view. Then we drove 50 kilometres past white sand dunes to one of several official "White Sand Dunes" areas. There was an extra charge for entry that we hadn't been warned about. Our jeep, in spite of its wide tires, didn't venture out onto the dunes; instead, we were delivered into the hands of a crew that tried to sell us half an hour on a quad for another $25. We declined, and walked to the top of the nearest dune from which we took photos of the dunes and some of those who'd succumbed to the quad experience. We had to endure the ear-splitting quads whipping by on their way up and down, but at least we weren't sitting right on top of that noise.

    On the way back into town we stopped at the "Red Sand Dunes" - same sand, slightly different colour. Hundreds of kids tried to rent us plastic strips to toboggan down these, but the dunes weren't steep enough or high enough to get much of a ride, and again we declined. There were even more bratty boys present, a little brigade with sticks in this case, who teased, made fun of and harassed the tourists with mimicry and sexual lewdness, led by one particular joker of a ringleader who played to the amusement of his friends at the expense of the tourists, one young couple in particular. Their boldness was intimidating to several tourists, especially young women travelling without male companions. The ringleader took a try at me, but he got right up in my face so I stepped even closer, and growled at him, and he decided to pick on someone else. Again, I found it difficult to understand why the drivers did nothing to prevent these little shits from harassing their customers. Obviously this behaviour is going to be related to future visitors, who may choose not to take these tours, and the income is going to decline. I found it a shocking contrast to what I'd been told, and previously experienced, about the respect that younger Vietnamese show to elders.

    As it was, our tour was absolutely guaranteed to last four hours, but we were delivered back to our hotel in under three, hardly impressed with what we'd been shown. The walk along the beach was free, and better, and free of harassment; there are free bicycles, or bicycles for rent, that can be used to see the "Fairy Stream" and the fishing fleet, which are just at one end of the resort strip. And there are group tours for much less cost that would take you to those and to the sand dunes.

    Dinner was a success, a tasty plate of seafood noodles for Deb, a giant Tiger beer for a buck for me, and a "mango pancake" - actually a crepe with fresh mango slices and chocolate sauce.

    Dec 22nd - another long walk on the beach, followed by relaxing, reading, and creating my photo album. I hadn't swum in the South China Sea yet. The water was cloudly, perhaps because of clay run-off. It is warm, but I have no idea where the effluent from the town goes, so I was hesitant.

    One thing that's interesting about Mui Ne is the number of Russian tourists there are, and the signage supports them. In Saigon we noticed a lot of Australians, some Germans, some French.  Here there were also French and Belgians, but the resort strip seems to be particularly Russian-friendly. Restaurant staff did their best to speak Russian, French, Chinese, Japanese and English. I've rarely had conversations with Russians. They seem relatively unsmiling - the men a bit sour and stolid, the women somehow pouting when they talk.  I've watched a vlog by a young Russian woman who addressed this phenomenon after living and studying in the U.S. and then returning - she also found it remarkable, and had to make a conscious effort to slip back into her unsmiling Russian character. But the few Russians that we chatted with in Cuba who knew some English were very nice.

Next entry: Delightful Da Lat

Siem Reap

    Dec 12th: Deb and I both have scratchy throats - she was virtually bed-ridden in Phnom Penh for the second day we were there - but Mr. Tan was here bright and early with his tuk tuk this morning to take us to the Angkor Thom temple complex. There are over a thousand temples in the Angkor region, an area of 150 square kilometres - think about the immensity of those numbers for a minute. We toured two of the larger ones, and it took us four hours of climbing up and down very steep steps, stumbling through passageway mazes, and snapping too many photos.

    Much of the complex was built a thousand years ago in the 11th century, and there was a rather inexpert reconstruction attempted in the 16th century. A lot of the stones fit together like those of the Incas in Machu Picchu and other sites in Peru, which are only half the age of these, and are smaller sites (but amazing in their own right). Piecing together a 3D puzzle of fallen stones is difficult, as Deb and I saw in Borobudur and Prambanan. 

    In the past two decades, many countries of the modern world, such as India, have assisted Cambodia in trying to reconstruct the main temples close to the town of Siem Reap.  They realize that it is a world heritage site and a tourism gold mine - one of the few generators of foreign income that they have, apart from garments, textiles, footwear and some agricultural crops. It has to be remembered that Cambodia is only thirty-four years out of a decade long occupation by Vietnam, following their disastrous four years under Pol Pot.  Thoroughly ill-conceived and botched attempts to invade Vietnam and recover territory they believed belonged to them led to Vietnam's much more powerful and well-trained army invading in return, and turfing the leadership. Not a moment too soon for a few who were just about to become further victims of the genocidal madman.

    It got hot, so we drove back into town for a nap and a lunch of pomelo salad and coconut soup. We returned at 4 p.m. to see Angkor Wat itself before the sunset - it is a ritual here, as at many other wonders of the world, to experience sunrise and sunset at the temples. To experience sunrise, however, we'd have to get up at 4 a.m. That wouldn't happen. After all, it's only sunset in reverse, isn't it?

    Last night when we arrived we reconnected with Charlie Whight, a young lady we travelled with on our Mekong Delta tour, bumped into again on the streets of Phnom Penh, and connected with here by email for a dinner date. She's a former philharmonic clarinetist who saw the error of her ways after a couple of years and went to law school. She gets to tour S.E. Asia now before beginning her in-service training in September. She hired a driver for the three days who told her he'd been a Buddhist monk for a year, and then again once for a spell. Many men become monks here, but it's usually short term rather than a life commitment as it is in the west. He first told her he became a monk because he thought it would bring luck to his family; later he admitted it was also so he could get half-price English lessons at the Buddhist university, which was an important prerequisite for making a living in tourism.

    The sunset was unspectacular.

    Dec 14th: We saw a final few smaller temples (really, the first two days would have been sufficient) and then spent three hours in (you guessed it!) the museum. The Angkor National Museum isn't cheap or free, as western museums are; it's obviously a revenue generator for them, but it's also quite well done. I came away with a better "connect-the-dots" awareness of the Hinduism and Buddhism which formed the backbone of society here for the past thousand years.  I got to see many of the better statues from the temples, which are no longer in the temples themselves. 

    Mr. Tan dropped us at the hotel for our afternoon nap, and we stepped next door where a lovely young girl practiced her English on us - she has put in her first year of English study at the university, apparently - and served us two large bowls of soup, more like a stew of rice, pig offal, bean sprouts and other green and brown ingredients, into which I stirred freshly squeezed lime wedges and chilis; two bowls plus a large pot of delicious jasmine tea and two cups came to a grand total of $2.

    In the late afternoon Mr. Tan took us on a final "about town" cruise of Siem Reap, showing us the nicer features of the town by tuk-tuk, including the villages and rice fields in the surrounding countryside, and a great locals-only market that spanned both sides of a paved road just out of town for a kilometre. We thanked him and paid him for his three days of service. 

    I spent the next few days working on over 300 photographs, trying to whittle them down to 60 or so that'll make an interesting photo album. Here's a site with, frankly, much better photos than mine, even though they are all exactly what we saw over the past three days, and often photographed from exactly the same perspective: http://www.lovethesepics.com/2012/11/laura-crofts-tomb-raider-indiana-jones-temple-of-doom-ancient-angkor-pics/ I'll try not to compete with these, and perhaps I'll focus on the whimsy and a few cheap laughs in my slideshow, or a few cheesy ones with Deb in them.

    Our challenge tonight will be the Cambodian birthday party next door, on our side of the hotel. The music is "ballady", and would actually be quite soothing if it weren't for the ridiculous level of unadorned bass. Sometimes I think we give bass players a lot more credit than they deserve, as musicians; except for friend Martin, who is tasteful and intelligent about his bass playing. We'll be up at 5:30 to eat some fruit and wait for the tuk-tuk that takes us to the Mekong Express coach back to Phnom Penh.

    Dec 15th: John Money and Dara Deng were both incommunicado when we arrived in PP. We went directly to John's address, but had no idea how to get inside.  He told us later that he'd been working through the afternoon on painting and renovations. After fussing about it for a while, I hiked around the corner and found a "guest house" that was clean, had a nice foam mattress, small room and no window, but had A/C, so when they quoted me $14 for the night, I took it. Later that evening John finally recharged his cell phone and read his email, and suddenly realized what he'd forgotten about all afternoon. He'd checked his email at noon, although my last email said we'd arrive "mid-afternoon". He felt very regretful about standing us up, and bought us a street-food supper, gave us a gift of a couple of sampots, and we had a good conversation for a couple of hours.

Dec 16th: We got up bright and early to purchase onward tickets, but could only catch the last bus of the day, at 2 p.m., so I worked on our photos for part of the day. It was an uneventful return to Saigon on the Mekong Express, a seven hour trip - at least one hour taken up by the border crossing, where Vietnamese agents scanned everyone's bags, but not their persons, and let lots of bags slip by while they questioned one or two travelers. 

    We spent the next few days planning our next lily pad on the way up the coast toward Hanoi, and reconnecting with Tam and Truong, who've been following the blog. Truong wants to finish studying idiomatic language in Inception. We hope to arrive in the north as the spring begins to arrive, so that when it approaches highs of 40 degrees in Saigon, we'll be in a more temperate climate similar to North and South Carolina.  We have to fly back home out of Saigon in March.

    Here are two Siem Reap photo albums:  the temple complex, and scenes in and around the town. In addition, here's a direct link to a Youtube video called City of the Gods, in six ten minute segments, which is a really excellent history of the temples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSNqdIz0jYI&feature=youtu.be

Next entry: Phen Thiet and Mui Ne

Penning from Phnenomenal Phnom Penh

    We arrived in Phnom Penh around three in the afternoon. Kristina was out of town with a flat tire, but three hours later she arrived and took us into her apartment to stay in her spare room. She's a teacher at an I.B. school just outside of town, here on a 2 year contract. She has worked in Bangladesh as well. She loves Asia, and finds the international school circuit preferable to being a supply teacher waiting forlornly for a full time job in Canada. She has hosted twenty Couchsurfers including us, in Canada and overseas, and used to organize Couchsurfer meetings in Fredericton, N.B.

    Kristina arranged for us to ride around with her favourite tuktuk driver, Nil, (Nils?) and gave us his cell phone number. Nil took us to the five main City attractions for tourists. The first two were deeply sombre: one of over 300 "killing fields" where Cambodians, a kind and gentle people, massacred between one in eight and one in four of their own countrymen in less than four years, over three million people, under the influence of an ideological and psychopathic megalomaniac who called himself Pol Pot. The world is at a loss to explain how such a thing could happen, and the Cambodians themselves even more so, although a lot has been written about it. It illustrates the juggernaut brutality of waves of ideology, an ignorant peasantry, rising expectations and blind obedience crashing together. I'm guessing that in the leadership that supported him, there was also a measure of corruption and cowardly complicity.  Only one of the butchers, a camp commandant, has ever admitted his guilt and expressed his regret for those nightmare years. (That's an understatement - I don't even have nightmares that are as horrific as what happened to those people.)

    The world has seen so many genocides, but one perpetrated by a people on themselves stands out. All leaders were targeted, and anyone who tried to hang onto property, therefore a disproportionate number of ethnic Chinese.  All intellectuals, teachers, Buddhist monks, the Muslim Cham communities, any educated person, and their entire families.  A few foreigners who saw too much or were in the wrong place at the wrong time were swept up and murdered.  Innocents who Pol Pot felt there was no gain in keeping alive, and some risk, because they could seek revenge, were slaughtered behind military camp walls with loudspeakers playing revolutionary songs at high volume to drown out the sound of screams. They went "like lambs to the slaughter", as many ignorant innocents in history have, probably quite unable to perceive of the treachery and butchery that they faced; one survivor relates that he was promised a job that he coveted, but was taken to the prison and held at gunpoint. Perhaps the Cambodian aversion to confrontation prevented some from refusing even if they harboured suspicions. The only brutality I observe in Cambodian culture today is their boxing matches, which are called "Cambodian boxing" but look identical to Thai boxing matches, which Deb and I saw in Chang Mai a few years ago.

    We have picked up a book of Cambodian history, with an appropriately black cover, and I will try to absorb the experience, even if I never understand it, because as my Couchsurfing motto goes: "I'd like to know what this whole show is all about before it's out" (one of Piet Hein's grooks). Here are our photo memories of the Genocide memorial centre and the CS21 Toul Sleng interrogation and torture centre , which was set up in a former high school). You can choose to skip these photos and move on to happier ones that follow.

    The rest of the day included three more cheerful sites. We went first to the National Museum - not a great museum, but it showed the religious influences of Cambodian culture. Cambodia is more Buddhist and Hindu than Vietnam. Vietnam is more atheist but there are still Catholics there, and several other religious groups, at least one of which has been described to my as a synthesis of all the main world religions, with the whole panoply of gods and saints. A momentary downer for me was when the guard admonished me to put away my camera - I was not using flash - while all around me, school tours were snapping merrily with their cell phones and cameras, as were several other tourists. I don't know why I got picked on.

    At the Wat Phnom Pagoda we observed the strength of the religious influence that Pol Pot had tried to destroy, including gold and silver in quantities that approached the gilded South American cathedral we photographed last winter.  We toured the Palace grounds, which is covered with buildings like the Coronation hall, exhibition halls, museum rooms, stupas and pagodas.

    During the afternoon we had a snack of a rice, mango and coconut treat wrapped in banana leaf, quite tasty. I had a shish kebab of what the vendor claimed was chicken, but it was chewy and weird, unlike any chicken I'd ever tasted. A thought surfaced that had niggled at me in Vietnam: "Vietnam, a place where "puppy chow" can have a slightly different meaning..."  However, Deborah, whose heritage includes such delicacies as chicken feet, assured me that what I was actually munching on was a skewer of "chicken stomachs".

    We got home in time to take Kristina for supper at one of her favourite restaurants, where she steered us toward the Cambodian national dish, Khmer Amok, and a jug of Angkor beer. I was able to teach her an expression she'd never heard, "running amok" - which, however, has nothing to do with the lovely spice mix that is used to make the dish.

    For our final evening together we met a friend of hers, an equally nice guy named Jared. We had dinner at another of her favourite restaurants, and then went to a comedy show where we saw Emo Phillips and Gina Yashere from front row seats - both very funny. I remembered seeing Emo on TV once or twice, and he is as good as he ever was.

    Here are the photos of our two days in Phnom Penh.

    Very early the next morning, Kristina left to accompany the grade 6's on three day school trip to a beach town, while Deborah and I headed to Siem Reap in a van. That was a hairy trip - I think I'm cured of choosing vans, even if they are faster. As usual, we got front row seats, right up front with the driver.  We had the best view of the road as he raced to make up for a late start, dodging potholes and blaring his horn at every vehicle we passed at breakneck speed (no-one passed us!). The road was absolutely awful for at least two of the six hours the journey took, and he was well past the limits of safety. We saw one passenger van with a blown tire; if we'd had a blow-out at those speeds there wouldn't have been any hope of recovery, and I shuddered to imagine how we'd fare in a head-on collision up there in the cab with the driver. The road is being widened to four lanes, but I don't know when they started that project or how long it'll take to complete.

    Jared tried to hook us up with a guide he trusts to tour us around the Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom temple complexes, but that guide didn't answer his phone so we booked someone else to drive us back and forth for the three days that we planned to be there.  We were going to stay for only two days, but you can only get one day or three day passes. We had no luck finding Couchsurfing hosts in that tourist mecca.  They probably get inundated with requests from young backpackers. 

    We wanted to stay at the Sinh Tourist hotel, but we drew a total blank with emails and phone calls to the Sinh Tourist office in Siem Reap and in Phnom Penh - no answer, and delivery failures to our email messages. This is a major tour company recommended in Lonely Planet and on TripAdvisor.com, and it's the one we used to come from Saigon to Phnom Penh, so I was astonished at their lack of response, but I've been told this is something to expect when travelling here. However, our newly contracted driver put us into a very comfortable hotel near the old market - another large tiled room with high ceilings, AC, frig, hot showers, a swimming pool, breakfast included, a large washroom, daily room cleaning, wifi...I'd call it a two star, possible approaching three. Like many Asian hotels, though, everyone leaves their street shoes on the steps or in a rack at the front door to the hotel. It was excellent value for $20/night.

Next entry: Siem Reap and Angkor Wat

Delta Days

To the tune of Up A Lazy River:

"Up the Mekong River,
So happy we will be,
Come up the muddy Mekong
With me..."

    On our final day in Ho Chi Minh City we toured the History Museum and the zoo. The museum was pretty good. In the zoo most of the animals appeared to have been put to bed by the time we got there, including a recalcitrant tiger who we hunted for but could not find, even though we could hear him expressing his annoyance at his keepers - unless, as Deborah suggested, it was just a tape recorded tiger!

    The next morning we left for Phnom Penh, in a comfortable air conditioned coach with only 11 guests and three staff including a pretty good English-speaking guide (you have to be good at accents to understand him sometimes, however). Deborah and I lucked into two of the front row seats. Our journey was essentially in two parts with respect to luxury, however, as we discovered - that wasn't clear upon departure. We rode a comfortable bus to Can Tho, looking out over rice paddies dotted with tombs of the ancestors who'd owned that land and passed it on to their children. At lunch we enjoyed such interesting things as a morning glory salad and a chive flower salad.

    We had a boat ride up one arm of the Mekong river at Ben Tre and experienced life on the river, including a floating wholesale market. The bigger boats had travelled as far as they could manage up the river, and smaller boats were purchasing goods from them and travelling further into the delta, up smaller branches to local communities and stores. The delta is an immensely fertile area of 17 million people, great for producing fruit, honey, coconuts and vegetables. We stopped at a honey farm where we bought candied ginger and drank honey tea, and a coconut candy factory. In the evening we stayed at the Van Phat, a 4 store hotel about 4 km out of town. It was very comfortable, a resort style hotel, but rooms were only $50/night. 

    We continued our journey the next day, continuing to marvel at the booming economy and the store jam-packed with produce and inventory. Deborah wants to make a photo album consisting of all the amazingly large items that people are able to carry on the backs of their motorbikes. We visited a fruit orchard and a floating village where the people live by fishing and by fish farming in tanks just below their decks. 

    Our group split up after lunch, and from then on the journey degenerated into rougher backpacker standards. We stayed on a one star hotel ($11/night, includes breakfast) in Chau Doc, and after riding a "fast boat" (we had a choice, "fast boat" or "slow boat", but we couldn't see how any boat could have gone slower than ours) up a canal, with occasional glimpses of a road above the bank which a bus could have travelled on, but from our vantage point we got to see how families lived in stilt houses on the dike that formed the opposite side of our canal.  Here are more photos from our second day, and from our third day.

    Finally we left Vietnam, but that was a bit of an ordeal: we exited Vietnam on a barge, and had to hike with our bags to a small van quite far away in the heat. We had to walk through a border post where we were yelled at for taking photos of buildings that you can already see on google images and google earth. Once in the van we turned off the paved road and rode very bumpy dirt roads to an immigration outpost for Cambodia, where the driver took our passports away to be stamped, which took a half-hour. Then we turned back west and oddly enough, found ourselves back on the perfectly good paved road...we couldn't imagine why the immigration office hadn't been right on that road - or, indeed, right at the border crossing.

    The final ride to Phnom Penh wasn't too bad, and ended up at the Sinh Tours office. The whole tour had cost us only $151 U.S. for the two of us, which included six meals, two nights in hotels and all the land and water transport, so we felt grateful and satisfied with our value for money. Our host, Kristina O'Brien, was outside of town with a flat tire when we arrived, but we got connected soon enough, and have been very comfortable staying in the spare room of her apartment. 

    Here's a coincidence: two posts ago I began by stating that Greg Martin drove us to the subway to begin our trip; he's been our friend for over a quarter century. His sister lives in Sioux Lookout and has two daughters. Kristina grew up in Sioux Lookout and taught gymnastics to the daughters, Cesan and Alix, and Kristina's parents are friends with Greg's sister and her husband. It's a small world.

Next diary post: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

"Vietnam...not a place, but a state of mind"

    The title is a Lawrence Ferlinghetti quote from a poem in 1964 called "Where is Vietnam?" I used it in a multi-media presentation in high school in '68, in grade 9 at Albert College in Belleville, when we were all becoming anti-Vietnam war protesters. Ferlinghetti was one of the most well-known of the early Beat poets.

    The photos for this posting are here.  They jump around a little.

    We are exactly twelve hours ahead of Toronto. I watch the TSX open at 9:30 in the evening and do any trading just before I go to bed.  When I wake up eight hours later I check to see how the market closed, and what may have happened through the night...er, day...my days feel upside down.  

    We will leave very early in the morning for the Mekong Delta, where we'll spend two days meandering on our way to the border of Cambodia and then on to Phnom Penh.

    Right now we're in the "backpacker's hotel" area of District 1, within steps of travel agents, interesting restaurants, and many of the main tourist attractions in HCMC. We're in a nice, relatively quiet hotel with a large $20 room, with a private bath and nice tile throughout.  It's not the cheapest private double one can find, but not expensive, and it has an elevator to our room on the third floor. Single dorm quarters here are only $3-$6 for young backpackers.  In this part of the city there are many backpackers, especially from Australia: independent travelers but also tour groups, older bachelors, and older couples like ourselves.

    Saigon is so busy it boggles the mind.  It is packed like Disneyland with people and stores, with goods of all description. It's more interesting than you can stand, sometimes...stimulus overload. But our room is comfortable and we can rest well here. I felt out of sorts late this afternoon, but the sight and smell of a coffee suddenly made me realize what the problem was: I haven't had any coffee for a few days. Some strong black Vietnamese coffee, the first I've had since we landed, (as odd as that was to realize), fixed me right up. We had a lovely supper, and came home with a 4 litre bottle of water to make sure we stay hydrated. We'll try to get used to living like Vietnamese people: we'll get up early, trot around in the morning, nap through the afternoon, then go out in the evening for a nice walk and a meal or maybe to see something in the nature of a performance, like the famous water puppets.

    Dec 4th. We toured the Reunification Palace (a.k.a. Independence Palace) yesterday morning, and got a good history lesson to remind us of the events of the "American War", culminating in the collapse of the puppet government in the south. 

    In the evening we watched the water puppet performance, followed by a Vietnamese buffet. The water puppets were fun. They are an ancient entertainment invented in the north. Puppeteers manipulate the puppets from below the surface of water about waist deep, using bamboo poles and strings.

    Vietnamese people do have a good state of mind about themselves. They are confident and energetic, and eager to become one of the leading nations of the world economically. They did not lose the war against the world's superpower, and in spite of the brutality of a sheer deluge of bombs, napalm and dioxin, they are psychologically unbeaten, and proud of the fact that they ultimately managed to counter the efforts of France and the U.S. to split their country. Their explanations for the hows and whys of the conflict may differ in a few ways from those of western political historians - indoctrination can be a double-edged sword - but after all is said and done, they are slowly entering the world stage as eager and energetic equals.

    They take tourism seriously. They are gentle, kind, helpful and for the most part, honest, although there is some minor snatch-and-grab sort of thievery, and taxi fare fraud if you go with the wrong company.  Vendors are only too happy to charge foreign tourists triple or quadruple a Vietnamese price for items in the market, for example.  You can purchase clothing in the local "Co-op Supermarket", at much lower fixed and posted prices. 

    The young people are curious and friendly, and appear to look forward in many cases to being able to travel to foreign countries themselves. English language schools abound, in addition to the compulsory English classes in the schools. Joe Truong suggests that the ones in public government schools aren't very good because the teachers are all Vietnamese and haven't themselves mastered the language, especially the pronunciation. So there are lots of positions in private company schools for young foreigners to fill, as I did a few decades ago myself in Japan, and our young friend Adam Sortwell has done in Korea for the past decade.

    We toured the HCMC Museum, which isn't huge, but has some items of interest, and a small garden. About two hours is enough to see it all.  Like other museums in Vietnam, it also has a heavy overlay of obsession with the war and reunification. I've included a few photos in my album but I've done my best to post only the more interesting photos, and save the rest for our private collection.

    Tam offered to meet us for lunch at a restaurant which serves the kind of food indigenous to her region of Vietnam. There are several different groups of Vietnamese people, and they speak significantly different dialects of the common language. She offered to split the bill, but we insisted on paying for lunch; she's good at taking us to inexpensive restaurants.

    In the evening Jay Tran came to find us after he finished work at the British legal firm where he is employed. He walked us to a Thai restaurant that he and his colleagues enjoy, the Coriander - it's featured in Lonely Planet, and we enjoyed tasty dishes, and a couple of different 80 cent beers. Jay refused to let us pay, or even split the bill - Vietnamese "first dinner with invited guest" custom, he said. We had a long chat and a walk in the park afterward, where we watched ballroom dancers practicing "classical dances" in three open air pavilions after dark, when it was a little cooler for them. 

    We watched four guys playing a kind of hacky sack with a shuttlecock made from what look like a stack of shoe tags stapled together with a feather emerging from the top of the stack. It makes a satisfying "click" sound when you kick it, and is a very popular game in Vietnam.  It would import well to N. American parks, if we could get a supply of the shuttle cocks.

    Jay is dying to travel himself. He has plans to go to California, to Ontario...by which he means the town of Ontario in the state of California. He confused me at first, and chuckled about it, but then I remembered that we have passed through or by the town of Ontario ourselves, only two years ago.

Next: Delta Days

Happy in Ho Chi (Minh City)

    Greg Martin drove us to the subway early Tuesday morning, and we took the TTC across the city to the airport. We flew in a 777-300ER with a combined Japanese and Canadian crew to Narita airport in Tokyo. That was a comfortable plane, and the 13 hour flight was not too difficult. The seats were wide enough, and the media system had good movies. After a two hour layover we rode an ANA Air Japan 767 for six hours with all Japanese crew (although it was an Air Canada flight) to Ho Chi Minh City. Not as good, but once again, an excellent crew.

    Our taxi ride from the airport was straightforward, the usual anxiety present but unwarranted, thanks to our research and Marianne's advice. Marianne Wilms is German, and teaches kindergarten here for a company based in Germany. The taxi was metered, about 80 cents/km. There are about three companies that are considered safe and reputable; we had a later experience with one of the others. At Marianne's building we figured out how to get past the barricade and rode to the 13th floor, to a comfortable apartment beyond the financial reach of the average Vietnamese person. 

    We looked out over a bright city much like S. American cities. It grew organically around the original streets and neighbourhoods, jumbled up with no clear grid pattern. There is constant honking from motorbikes and cars all day and most of the night. There are hardly any bicycles.  The motorcycles outnumber the cars perhaps 200 or more to one, more than I've ever seen in any other city.  They flow like schools of fish but also cut in and out and across each other like the clowns on mini-motorbikes in a circus. There are paint lines for lanes, but they're only a suggestion.  The rule is that you should fill any spot ahead of you that's empty. People on the right have the right of way, just like sailboats...and if you bump the person in front of you, you're automatically at fault, so when a motorbike squirted blithely into a narrow space in front of our taxi, the taxi braked hard to avoid bumping it. Traffic lights can also be ignored, although they are usually not; but I never saw a traffic cop pull anyone over. There are traffic cops who stand at some intersections and direct the traffic flow, however.

    The motorbike is unquestionably king in Saigon. If the people drove cars this city of ten million people would be locked in perpetual gridlock. Pedestrians tread carefully. Our new young friend Tam Nguyen taught us to cross the street, which is rather like staying still on your feet in a stampede of cattle. When you cross the street as a pedestrian, you move slowly and with clear intent, catching the eyes of the bike riders to make sure that they see you.  You try not to jump or move unpredictably or erratically. No-one ever hits you, and the motorbikes rarely hit each other, or the odd car, truck or bus that moves slowly and stolidly along through the traffic. They simply flow to the right or the left, wherever there is an opening for them.  They are completely opportunistic but non-aggressive. They slow down when they must, but they never stop. No Canadian can even imagine riding a bike like every man, woman or child can here. If they pull up to a light and stop, it's like Satan's Choice is in town, but you can't fit a sheet of paper between the bikes. Then they all move forward smoothly at once, and no-one so much as brushes his neighbour.  But if an old lady on a bicycle accidentally gets stuck crossing in their path as they traverse the intersection, they flow smoothly around her on either side, letting her cut across the pack, and not one of them would dream of flipping her the bird for getting in their way.

    During the day the sun is very bright, the buildings clean and colourful, and fairly new. A lot of construction has happened since the war, so the buildings are not old, although so many men were killed that it was a struggle to develop and to pass on the expertise needed to reconstruct and run the new society. Teachers and intellectuals were in short supply; young people were sent to other countries for teacher training. A person might own a house on a narrow lot, and wish to build upward, without first acquiring the neighbouring lots, so many of the taller buildings are very narrow. Air pollution is no worse than on "heat alert" summer days in Toronto. From the 13th floor we saw lots of rooftop gardens, stainless steel water tanks rather than plastic ones, and excellent solar water heaters.

    Deborah said, "The commerce is astounding". Every narrow building seems to have a store on the ground floor, and a family living above, and all the stores are crammed with inventory, with a vast amount of wealth locked up in stock. There is no barbed wire, and there are no armed guards protecting any stores. The government is a communist one party system with an all-powerful central committee, but the country is not very socialist - few people have insurance for homes or motorbikes, and if you get sick you'd better have family to take care of you while you are in the hospital, to feed you, lobby for your care, and make sure people don't steal from you. Old people without family simply have to die, and then they will be carted away, but if they are dying on the street, no ambulance will pick them up, and no welfare system will provide for them - at least this is what we have been told so far.

Photos of some of our first impressions are here.

    We spent our first day resting, overcoming jet lag and resetting our internal clocks.  I had two naps that day. Marianne is a consummate host, generous and kind. She has hosted almost 40 couchsurfers - I called her the "traveller's angel". We spent one night playing cards together, and on our final evening with her, we went out to a favourite restaurant, the Lemongrass, then ducked into a nearby jazz club, the Saxn Art - saxophones heavily featured. It was packed, standing room only, so we stayed for four tunes and then returned home.

    On the second day Tam Nguyen came to find us. We spent some time chatting and I helped her edit a writing practice assignment. She is preparing for her IELTS exam. Then she took us in a bus to District One where most of the tourists are, to see most of the attractions that tourists visit: the market, the famous Post Office building, Notre Dame Cathedral, City Hall (she called it the "Committee" building), and Commonwealth Bank to find the ATM.  We spent a lot of time walking around trying to find an ATM that suited Deborah, in terms of cost, security (no outdoor street-side ones, thank you very much) and amount that could be withdrawn. We went inside the "War Remnants Museum" (previously known as the American War of Aggression Museum, or something like that). I was reminded of the horrors we saw on television in the sixties of the Vietnam conflict, the first war to be televised almost in real time. I recognised many famous photos, and saw the ugly effects of Agent Orange and related defoliants used in the Ranch Hand operation.

    Tam ordered two meals for us, lunch in a market stall and supper from a street stall. The vendors poured beef broth into plastic bags, bean sprouts, noodles and various meats into other bags, and we created our own bowls of Pho with them.

    On Saturday I began this first diary entry and photo album, but we had a long chat with another young German teacher from Marianne's school, Tomas. We slept in his room while he was away, but he came back to pick up some clothes. He's been here for a year. It's very important to spend time speaking with people who have a foot in both cultures, and can expound at length on comparisons and observations, and sometimes also explanations, of the new culture - especially one like this, where the language is impenetrable for us. We took a break to go out for lunch, and to check out a small local hotel. It looked clean and quiet, but there was a painting of a well-endowed semi-nude lady above the headboard. I'm guessing, like smaller hotels almost anywhere, the rooms aren't only rented for sleeping overnight.

    In any case, we had been invited to stay at another home of a new couchsurfer host, Joe Truong. We went to his house, an apartment over a store, but we only lasted one night there. We discovered that it was over an hour from downtown even in a taxi during rush hour, and an expensive trip, relatively speaking. The home is "urban traditional", you might say.  There were solid wooden beds without mattresses, only a thin bamboo mat over the wooden slats.  My hip bones did not allow me to sleep well on that hard surface.  There was a clean Asian toilet with a cold water shower.  Access to the living quarters was via a steep and narrow spiral staircase.  There was no air conditioning for Deborah's hot flashes.  Dining takes place in the store, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the motorcycles on spotlessly clean and polished concrete. Their food was delicious. However, the distance from town, the lack of air conditioning and the difficulty in sleeping made us decide to move to the "backpacker hotel" district downtown, which is within walking distance of tourist attractions.  We were sad to go because the family are truly lovely, and they appeared to wish that we'd stay much longer.

    Joe told us that they'd had a previous guest, a German girl, who'd stayed with them for two months.  She must have been working at something in the city, to stay so long in one place. I had to explain that Couchsurfers were really only supposed to enjoy a host's free hospitality for one to three nights, and that if we stayed so long in one place we wouldn't get to see Cambodia and the rest of Vietnam. We felt badly since they'd treated us to a lovely dinner and a nice breakfast, but it couldn't be helped.  It just wasn't a practical place for us to stay. Still, we made new friends, and we helped Joe with a language study he was doing, isolating and finding meanings for idiomatic expressions in the movie Inception, which had subtitles. I promised to continue helping him as time allows. His sister Joey, in grade nine, also speaks English extremely well, with clear, precise pronunciation and well-articulated consonants. English is a compulsory subject in schools, but no-one else we've met of her age can carry on a conversation with us.

    In our new digs, the "New York Hotel" ($20/night), we were able to research our incursion into Cambodia to see Can Tho, the Mekong Delta, Angkor Wat, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. This hotel room has a lovely pastoral painting of a stone bridge lined with lanterns over a small river in the woods...and no buxom nudes.

Next diary entry: more First Impressions