Sapa I

I've now gone from Tip to Top of Vietnam, and loved every inch of it. My last stop in my journey took me to within 3km of the Chinese border and up into the mountains of Sapa, where I encountered ethnic minority hill people, lots of livestock, and a fair amount of rice wine...but we'll get to that part. I took the midnight train to Lao Cai, where a shared a bunk cabin with some rowdy businessmen and a Vietnamese woman who refused to believe I couldn't speak Vietnamese. I suppose it's rather counter-intuitive to learn certain questions and phrases in Vietnamese until you know enough of the language to be able to understand the response. I made the lamentable error of asking her name and how old she was...and then I couldn't get her to stop chattering at me...in Vietnamese...all night. Anyhow, we arrived in Lao Cai then took the scenic and breathtaking bus ride up into the mountains. And by breathtaking I refer to small gasps and white knuckled clutching of the seat as we teetered over the narrow gravel road...but it was beautiful. Sapa itself was suprisingly built up. I felt I'd stumbled in to the Broadmoore Resort in Colorado Springs with 5 star luxury hotels set against the beautiful mountains. Then I ventured abit further afield and went to visit the villages of the minority tribes. Myself, a guide and another friendly couple from Ireland & Norway trekked for two days through the terraced rice fields, where gargantuan waterbuffalo wallowed in the out of season flooded fields, and we crossed paths with the Hillpeople eager (understatement) to sell us their handmade earrings, stitched pillow cases, garments and blankets. The phrase "you buy from me!" will forever be associated in my mind with the mountains of Sapa. More to come...this story is far from over.

Ha Long Morning

This morning I woke up in my little cabinet (no, that's not a typo) on board a ship floating peacefully in the Hal Long Bay. Or at least it would have been peaceful were I not lodged directly above the generator. Checking my indiglo timex watch I discovered it was about 4:37am. Perfect.

I gathered my blanket and pillow and climbed out of the stuffy closet of my dorm and up to the breezy top deck, curling up to sleep in one of the deck chairs away from the cocophonous clatter of the engine. From there I drifted in and out of sleep as we floated past the giant limestone fins that jutted out of the emerald green water. The legend of the area tells of a mother dragon and her children descending from heaven and playing in the magnificent caves and coves of the bay. I doesn't take much of imaginative agility to picture the high arching islands as the undulating backbone of a giant submerged sea creature cutting through the surface of the water.

Waking up to this, it was difficult to pinpoint when I actually finished dreaming.

Silk Thread Factory

Rice Paper

My Son by Motorbike

If you really want to feel the vibe of Vietnam, there is only one way to do it: on the back of a motorbike. (incidently extended periods of feeling this "vibe" may lead to posterior atrophy and numbing)

My friends, Alison Dave and I all met our biker brigade at 10:30am and began our day tour Easy Rider style through the back roads of the country. To die for! Quite possibly the coolest days of my life.

We made our first stop at a pottery village, where we were invited to squat down at a wheel, spun by a small woman who stood next to it on one foot, gripping a rail for balance, and kicking the wheel smoothly with her other bare-foot. It reminded me of the reverse of a kick powered merry-go-round in a park. Our lumps of wet clay with abysmal, but a humourous occasion for all the locals who gathered to watch the strangers try their (inept) hands at the craft.

Next we buzzed through small neighboorhoods and villages with houses and streets that were more like generous sidewalks, and kids who chased along side us shouting out "hello, hello!!" and a handful of other English phrases they were eager to try. We stopped to get a picture of some round rice-paper sheets drying in the sun on the porck of a small home. Before we knew it we found ourselves in the back room of the house watching as steaming fresh sheets were poured, covered, steamed and then quickly pulled one by one from the screen and laid with elegance and grace and incredible techincal precision onto a drying rack of woven banana leaves. All this was done by hand and a single chopstick. We were once again given an opportunity to try our skills, and once again the attempt was a cause for much riotous laughing. Oh how we Americans amuse these people. Our sticky, gooey sheets stretched, broke and plopped onto the rack in steaming heaps- but they still tasted delicious!

The rest of the day we made chronological tour of the silk making process. We went from a "worm farm"- thousands of soft white caterpillars, one three large stick racks on a man's front porch, spinning themselves into cocoons. Then to a muggy boiling factory where the cocoons were boiled and unspun into a single 10,000mt tread of unrefined silk. The fingers of the women in the small factory were permanently wrinkeld, shriveled and soft from the days of steam and boiling water. Finally in a looming village we watched as the cocophonous looms clattered and clacked breaking the otherwise stoic atmosphere and spinning the reams of silt into workable spools.

This was all before we reached our final destination: My Son. For my final paper at Bates I wrote about these ancient Hindu Champa towers, built around the 7th centuries, a fascinating implantaion from merchant and traveling kingdoms, on trade routes from India. As I wanderd around the deteriorating buildings I pictured my nights in the stacks of George & Helen Ladd Library, going through blueprints, diagrams and sterile layouts of the complex. And now I was walking amidst it all, feeling the crumbling stone, tracing my fingers in the carvings of Hindu gods and sentinels guarding the temples, feeling the grass and moss creeping up between the brick. It was incredible.

On our way back to Ha Noi that night, I looked forward to returning to my favorite little enchanted Vietnamese town. A chance to look back on all I had seen of the country and give the "vibe" in my backside a rest.

Motorbike Posse

Hoi An Hypnosis

Hoi An is my favorite city yet! It's marvelously charming, with its small alleys, beautiful yellow hued architecture, streets lined with gas lamps, restaurants with little twinkling lights strung along the river. Perfect for evening strolling. The character of this city is like chipped tea-cup, a sophisticated and antique air, a bit scuffed, but still graceful and dignified. I could wax romantic about this town for hours, but I'll refrain. My first day in the city and before 9am I was already siphoning off my savings. Piece by pin-stripe piece, I built and entire wardrobe including a full suit and cashmere wool pants, all fitted to my meticulously taken measurements! I'm in Tailor-Made Heaven! And the FOOD! The most succulent fish, wrapped in banana leaves, spring rolls, banana crepes, squid salads! Soft shrimp dumplings called "white rose" are a specialty of the city and are listed on every cafe chalkboard. After a good lunch my friends and I rented bicycles with baskets and peddled down for an afternoon on the palm lined Cau Dai beach. Along the way we passed flooded rice fields, small fishing houses and a few resort hotels on the outskirts of the city. Who dreamed this place up? ...I thank them.

Hoi An Evening

Is Birthday Cake on the Desert Menu?

Looking back over my last 3 years, I realize the 18th of October I always seem to find myself a bit far afield in some fabulous location for my birthday celebration. My 21st was spent at the Chupaterias of Salamanca, and the next I celebrated my "duece-duece" at a Notre Dame football game. And now my 23rd has its own story.

A birthday lunch on the beach to end all birthday lunches. 5 close friends of mine and I were prepared a seafood feast right before our eyes there on the South China surf of Nha Trang. As we sat sunbathing, a woman walked by with two baskets balanced across her shoulders like a scale. A common sight, but this one had something special to offer. In one basket she revealed a bucket of live prawns and lobsters, and on the other basket was a make-shift grill. It doesn't take Julia Childs to imagine up this menu. Fire and shellfish, when you get down to it, I'm now convinced that's really all you need in life.

She cooked the fresh (as in still moving) seafood right there on the sand. We watched as the grey and blue shells spit and whistled and turned succulently pink and smokey, charred in just the right proportions. She servied it right off the flames, with the most deliciou lemon pepper sauce ever to pass my palatte. It was a gastronomic wonder that trumps even a seafood dinner on the plaza. The ambience couldn't be beat, and the price- about $3.25 a person. As for hygenic concerns- well, I can't say she carried FDA approval papers with her but that was about 5 days ago and I'm still alive (...and my mouth still waters to think of it)

Beach Buffet

In a Scrape in Mui Ne

Yesterday was my first day teaching...so to be followed by more, with the added benefit of getting paid to do it!...at least that's the plan. Right now I'm looking to work outside of Saigon, but job hunting from afar isn't the easiest thing to do, especially when your contacts are in Seoul, Hanoi, Nha Trang, and possibly a hut in Nepal. But I'm doing my best to be an International Emissary...then looking up what exactly and "emissary" is and does... but through a complex network and flow of e-mail exhcanges and cell phone credit rapidly dropping on long distance calls, I've managed to actually talk to some "higher ups" (I hear the guy in Nepal has the biggest goat heard within 5 days walking distance! there's some credentialing for you!)
But in between all my networking and name dropping (and by that I mean "name misprouncing") I've had some time to enjoy some Vietnamese ventures...and come away with (ahem) minimal damage. This last weekend I jumped on board the midnight bus to Mui Ne with a couple friends and a bikini in my backpack and a few hours later we found ourselves in honest to goodness Bungalows, listening to the waves on the warm beaches of the South China sea. I'm so used to the chilly beaches of the Maine coast, I've never swam in warm salt water before (mmmm...somehow that description doesn't sound as lovely as the actual experience felt...) After mornigs on the beach, under palm umbrellas we decided to take a trip. We rented scooters for $4 and road along the coastline. There was only one road in town, which made for easy directions, and we buzzed by fishing villages and street markets and carts pulled by some kind of Vietnamese Oxen, steered by old ladies in conical straw hats (the hats still get me, they're too genuine to be cliche, but to cliche to be real...)
We finally found the famous sand dunes where we were quickly surrounded by school-kids chatting in their junior-entrepenuerial English offing rides down the dunes on plastic sleds "Where you from? You wanna ride? 2000 dong. How old are you? what your name? You my friend, I give you slide 1500 dong" All of these were more statements than questions but they were fairly persuasive. So needless to say Im a sucker for sleds and cute kids, and dunes. Afterwards we stopped at a hammock cafe and sipped fantas and coconuts and rocked lazily in the netted slings, one leg hanging over for balance, lightly pushing off with the toes. But right on time the afternoon clouds began to gather so we decided, scooters not being covered vehicles, that we'd better head back. Easier said than done. Pulling out of the cafe, my scooter skidded in the gravel, we lost control and spilled onto the road- earning me a brand new set of road rash patches on my right shoulder, elbow, forearm, hip, and knee. But not to worry, I was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of local women dusting me off and coating me in unusual orange ointments. Smelled like menthol and stung like hell...I took it as a sign that it was working.
Mainly my pride and dignity was more injured than my body, especially as the entire town waved goodbye to the pathetic tourist who fell off her motorbike. We had to hire a couple guys to drive us home...on the scooters we had rented. About halfway home we ran headlong into the monsoon season in full effect. I couldn't have been more soaked if I had jumped fully clothed into the ocean, I at least would have been warmer then. And then the petrol gods (I think I wrote a paper on them for one of my Eastern Religion classes) desided to punish us for our injurious scootering and one of the bikes ran out of gas. So we stood shivering under the rippled tin awning of a street side shop, while the guys went for fuel. The family that owned the shop stared at us with a mix of pity and curiosity and before we left they had unveiled my scrapes and applied a brand new coat of their own medicinal ointments...still stung like hell, must still be good.
Finally making it back to our bungalows that evening, I don't think I could have ever felt so warm and cozy in a grass hut.