The Tale of Camera Number 2

After finishing the North part of Vietnam, we headed further south for the center.  We made stops in Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang and Mui Ne.

The joy of travelling Vietnam (other than all the amazing things you can do, see, learn and people you can meet) is its geography.  This country must be one of the most traveller friendly places I have ever been (shhhh to all of those pointing out that I havn’t really travelled much!).  It’s a narrow country, making it easy to travel from North to South (or South to North if you choose).  We didn’t need to spend more than three days in one place, and we were able to book tickets for our next spot with only one day notice (unlike how annoying it was how early you had to book in China… blahblahblah olympics, national holidays …).

Vietnam was therefore very in and out.  Get in, get freshened up, get out, do your thing, see what you gotta see, do what you gotta do, eat what you’re meant to eat, drink where you are meant to drink, book next ticket, wake early, grab a snack for the road, get your travel pillow ready, arrive in the next town, repeat.

Hue was quaint, with a beautiful old Citadel and amazing old tombs.  I enjoyed.  This is where Natalie bought a new camera.  She wanted badly to capture the trip on her own, and not just take my pictures.  Understandable, we all have a different way of looking at things and capturing our memories.  She got an excellent deal too!

Hoi an was good for what it promised: good tailors, good shoemakers, old well preserved french architecture and flooding in the wet season.  Nothin like sitting at a bar, drinking $0.50 pints watching the river fill up, spill onto the street, and slowly creep up to your feet till they have to close the bar down and close the street down for that matter.

Nha Trang, heaven on earth.  Well, maybe not that good, but it was good.  After a few busy cities, it was awesome to lie on the beach all day, soaking up the hot sun, swimming in the ocean and having ladies with baskets on their heads cut up fresh fruit for you to munch on. 

Natalie has this pout that she does whenever she looks in a mirror.  It’s something that I can’t help but mock her about.  She doesn’t even realize she is doing it, but it’s funny for me every time.  I can’t do it as well, but she enjoyed taking photos of me trying to pucker up in a pout as perfect as hers.

This was the last we saw of her camera.  Most likely it was stolen at a bar we hung out at that night.  Whan whan whaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn.  There’s someone out there, wondering what the ef I was doing.

We headed for our next beach paradise, this one less touristy.  Mui Ne is about 15 km long and lies along a beach front comparable to Nha Trang.  Apparently it has a surfing season, but I saw none of that.  Its lined with beach resort after beach resort and Nat and I could not complain about our $8 bungalow on the waterfront, or the ladies that gave you massages on the lounge chairs on the beach.

Thats about as resorty as i’ll go.  The place may actually have been more touristy than Nha Trang, but you wouldn’t know since everyone is hiding out in their resorts.

  There’s something unappealing about staying on a resort while travelling.  You arn’t really travelling, it feels like.  You’re ignorning the fact that people actually live around this make believe place, working and not just relaxing on a beach day in and day out.  Makes one feel a little shallow too.  It was nice to spend a day on the beach free of annoyances and something that we had to do or had to see, but one day was enough, and it was time to get back to reality.

  We did ventured into the village where the people actually live, saw the fishing village and did some sand sledding. 

You heard me.  Sand sledding.  Mui Ne also has huge sand dunes which tourist come to check out, photograph, and take a slide down on a sled.  It was … interesting… sledding in snow is better, i must say.

Time in Vietnam is running out.  Only two places left to go!  I have so far fallin in love with Vietnam and have found a reason to come back. 

Marriage!  No really!  No I havn’t found someone in Vietnam I want to marry.  It’s the tailors in Hoi An.  Its perfect, everyone can get their outfits tailor made (wedding dress, bridesmaid dresses, tuxes, after party dresses, beach dresses… how many dresses do you get at a wedding?  Honeymoon dresses…) and then you can have bachelor/bachelorette parties on the beach, where the beer is cheap!  Mostly I just have dreams of tailor made dresses.  I’ll let you guess how many I got done in Hoi An (don’t worry, I didn’t jump the gun and get anything white… i’m not that keen). 

Biggest regret: I didn’t get hand made boots.  Whyyyy?!  How do I live with myself?!?!

…we just kept lookin for this guy named Charlie…

Sorry for all the Gump quotes, but man! this country makes me want to watch Forrest in action again.  Especially when the rains came and we were driving through one of the National parks in NinhBinh and … “We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain… and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.’”

Sorry… that was the last one.  I think.

After the ever beautiful and breathtaking hills of Sapa, we headed to the coast for some Island time. 

It was our first time going somewhere where we didn’t have a place to stay.  How unprepared of us!  What risks we take!  Ha!  Smartest choice ever.  Since it was low season on the island, we had guesthouse owners begging for us to stay at their place.  Nat and I ended up choosing a guy that was giving us a double room for $4 a night… $2 each.  My kinda deal. 

This shall be our new form of getting a place to stay in Vietnam!  Cat ba Island was fun, there wasn’t much going on, but enough to keep us entertained. 

We took a tour of Halong Bay, which if you have a chance (since I can’t really get any pictures up…) you should google image that shit!  It’s spectacular!  We spent the day on a boat touring around the magestic rocks jutting out of the water, kayaking through caves and visiting fish farms.  The fish farms… least exciting.

The tour also included a day on Monkey Island.  The poor monkeys on this island..their natural life completly destroyed by tourists, and the tour companies that bring dreadful tourists like us to ruin beautiful places like this.  These monkeys diets consisted of oreos, pringles and whatever else bits of food tourists will hold over their head to watch the monkeys jump and dance.

Nat and I spent a few hours lying on the beach insulting two boys that were teasing the monkeys the most.  What pricks.  Luckily, the monkeys sought revenge by chaseing one boy into the water and standing guard, probably threatening to bite if the American came out of the waters… the guys left the island shortly after calling much unnecessary attention to themselves.

Later that night, Nat and I decide to hit up a bar for some happy hour bevies.  And whaddaya know… look who the bartender is… prick from the beach #1.  American guy from Hawaii.  Alright, he wasn’t so bad, but we did confess that we caught him being cruel to animals.  He pointed out that those monkeys natural life, free of teasing tourist was long gone, and they were only there having a little fun.

Fair enough.

In walks Prick from the Beach #2, an English guy… who also turned out to be alright.  One happy beer turned into three (or six…?).  Either way, the night was good… especially since we ended up at Karaoke!  Nat and mines first time since Japan!  Tim, (the American), was living on Cat Ba island for a bit, and knew the places to go when all the rest of the bars were closed at the ridiculously early hours of 11pm.  Karaoke was where it was! 

I mean, we did have to beg and plead with the guy to let us in, let us stay, let us drink, and let us sing, but it worked!

How i’ve missed you Karaoke, love of my life.

Cat ba is worth visiting, most tourists opt for Halong bay tours, where they spent tonnes of money booking through their hotels.  Nat and I just got a bus from Hanoi to Cat ba, easy as pie and tonnes of money saved, plus, cheap cheap tours of the bay are offered everywhere.

Ninh Binh was next.  This was one of my highlights of Vietnam.  Nat and I spent the whole two days on a rented motos, singing “Born to be Wild”,  driving around the back country roads, visiting fishing villages, driving to far off National Parks that look like jungles, awaiting the moment when T-Rex would pop his head out of the lush green trees and eat us. 

We may have become too adventurous when it got late one night, and being out in the country where there are no lights, we should have headed home earlier.  We got the dreaded shake and rumble of the moto running out of fuel, leaving us with dead transportation in the middle of nowhere.

Luckily we broke down right in front of a big old house.  We walked down the hill towards our saviours. 

“Foreigners?” Asked a women to the male approaching us in Vietnamese.

“Yah, foreigners.”  He replied.  They had obviously seen and heard our moto die.

“Hahaha, foreigners!!!”  She squeels.  Yah yah, haha.  They helped us out and got us our tank refilled, gave us some tea and showed us many pictures of their family members.

The next day we hiked around the beautiful park and touched some thousand year old trees.  I love you Mother Nature.  I would highly suggest Ninh Binh for its awesome back roads, beautiful mountains and country side, and amazing parks.  Today we were very careful to have a full tank of gas before heading out and singing our song of glory.

‘Booooooorrrnnn to be wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiild.’

Take Care of Your Feet

and Don’t do Anything Stupid Like Getting Yourself Killed…Thanks Lieutenant Dan.

Alright, so, we’re on the bus heading out of China, down the highway with rolling green mountains as our background, on our way to Vietnam.  Nam.  Yaaah.  I’m definitely feeling very cool at this point, almost as cool as when I arrived to China on a boat.  Also a little scared… maybe not scared but apprehensive.  I have visions of hot sweaty immigration offices, with Vietnamese men holding guns and bribing me so that i pay them more money.  Yah, yah, I have a slightly overactive imagination. 

It was so smooth though.  Get off the bus, get on a mini golf cart type mobile, get my passport stamped (man that thing is starting to look so much hipper!), get back on the bus and that was it.  No questions, no threats, no mean stares, no bag searches, no drug dogs… it wasn’t even hot.

Alright, so Í’m in Vietnam.  That was easy.  Now I start worrying about when we arrive into the city.  All I ever here about, is how taxi drivers and moto drivers hound you and insist that you  get in their  vehicle, promising to take you to your hotel, only to lie to you once you are on and take you to some hotel that they have connections with (everyone in Vietnam has a connection somewhere and everywhere) where you’ll pay double the price, because actually, your hotel is full, the driver just called them to make sure for you, and sure enough those (unrelated) bastards gave your room away.  They’ll beg you to take their vehicle and they’ll all surround you, and you’ll probably get pickpocketed.

Again, everything went fine.  Five minutes before we arrived, a woman got on the boat.  She asked us where we were staying, and as it turned out, the hotel we were staying at was her sisters hotel.  No kidding.  She could get us there, nooo problem.  Oh, and she convered the price of the taxi since we hadn’t gotten any money changed over yet. 

Well, that was easy. 

We spent the evening learning how to dodge motos and cross the street while weaving between cars and motos and looking both ways to avoid the oncomming and passing by traffic, saying ‘no’ to every other person trying to offer us a ride on their moto (“Where you goin Madame?“) and declining offers to eat in every restaurant and look in every shop (“You wanna come in?  Take a look at my shop”).

Hanoi was a nice city.  We stayed in the Old French Quarter, and honestly, that was the only part I saw of Hanoi.  The architecture is French inspired (for obvious reasons) and the small area is close to a small lake in the middle of the city.  Surrounding the city are busy streets that looked like they’d been squashed, and the houses and shops and buildings all squeezed into a small space so that everything looks ready to burst at the seam, and the buildings are tall and narrow.  The streets are all cracked down the sides, like they are ready to pop.  People are falling out of every doorway, men, women and children are standing in doorways, hanging around on lounge chairs, taking up the sidewalks, playing cards (they are always playing card games!), picking at one anothers hair, cooking up things in pots that they carry around on a beam that rests on their shoulders and on mini barbeques.  They are usually surrounded by people that are squatting or sitting on mini plastic chairs enjoying the street food.  Everyone is selling something and everyone seems to not be working… just sitting and yelling and playing cards and eating.

We did the cultural thing and saw a Water Puppet Show.  It was alright, though I couldn’t really understand the story or what was the cause of the puppets and the dancing and the snakes and the turtle and the bird.

One of my favourite places in Hanoi was the Temple of Literature (by the way, just read On Beauty by Zadie Smith…absolutely brilliant).  It was the first University in Vietnam and it was a school of Literature and Philosophy.  It was a beautiful area and I thought, hey, it would be nice to learn and read here.  We checked out some other sites, but this one stands out in my mind still.

After Hanoi, we headed on a train (this more woody and rickety than China) to the mountains of Sapa.  The view was absolutely breathtaking.  The mountains are perfectly lined horizontally with terraced rice fields.  They have an elevation of about 3000m, they are deep green and while we were there the sun was shining on them the whole day.  The mountains of Sapa are the homes of many minority groups in Vietnam.  In the valleys of these hills are their homes and their farms where they keep their cows, dogs, and children. 

We spent two days trekking through the mountains visiting these people and talking to them and eating with them.  Our guide was a very intelligent and wonderful speaker, she was one of the minority people and her job was taking people for tours and telling them about the different groups.

This guy Kim and I had many questions for her.  We were curious, and she answered all of our culture questions.  The most surprising piece of informations that she told us, was that her group does not kiss.  They don’t kiss.  Can you imagine?  Not only are you getting married at 17, but for as long as you live, you won’t kiss this person.  I thought this was sad, but I guess, if you don’t know the difference.. as they say.

Also surprising was the marijuana tree that Karr (our guide) pointed out.

“Wait.  A what?”

“Marijuana.”

Run up, touch it, smell it, “What do you do with the marijuana?”

“We use it to make hemp…”

Oh.  Good.  Hemp.

The hill groups were fabulous, cheeky and smart people.   These were some of the cutest kids I have come across.  I thoroughly enjoyed spending a few days with them.  They are a little influenced by the western world (“Äre those Oreos…?”), and their English is awesome, especially since they learnt it from tourist.  They can mock any accent (except Canadian… “Little boy:”Where are you from?”

Natalie : “Australia”

L.B: “G’day mate.  Aussie, aussie, aussie, oi, oi , oi.  Where are you from?”

Me: “Canada.”

L.B: ” Oh, it’s cold there.”

Yessss, its cooold there.  C’mon.

Two days was enough for that small town.  So far, the livin’ is easy in Nam.  Let’s go to the Island!