Hoi An Cooking School (2nd November)
Sunday the 2nd of November.
Our first full day in Hoi An; at 10am we were to be picked up out the front of the hotel for a Vietnamese cooking school.
I went out onto the road and found some croissants and things at a bakery, and bought this bounty back to our room. I took myself across the road for a coffee at the same cafe as yesterday, and looked at pictures on the computer. Life was fun.
At 10.15 a bubbly girl in a pink t-shirt turned up on her motorbike, and was followed by her friend about half a minute later. Her name was Hahn Le. She was sorry she was late.
Only the two of us were booked for the lunch time school, so we got on the back of the motorbikes and had a ride over to the market which we had walked past night, except now it was open, and full of fourteen types of everything. Fish, meat, vegetables, grains, beans, cocnut and rice paste sweets, herbs, spices, humidity, jelly lollies wrapped up in banana leaves, Vietnamese music over the PA, motorbikes squeezing their way through the people crowding the narrow alleys between tables. And they even sold coffee, and coffee filters, and those little cinnamon wood toothpick holders that give the toothpicks a cinnamon smell and taste.
The whole place was a live animal.
Hahn talked to the cinnamon lady and determined that the price of the cinnamon toothpick holders should be 20,000 VND, which became relevant later. We bought some of the things we were about to cook, others they had already, and we got back on the motorbikes and rode a little way up the hill, away from the river, to the cooking school. We thought we would be going where Tuan had pointed out, but the restaurant really was closed, and the cooking school was being run in the back of somebody’s narrow terrace house. What they had done was set up a preparation table, and next to it was a sidetable with spices and sauces and whatnot, and in the middle of the room a gas burner with two cooking rings. With the entire back part of the house open and air coming in, it didn’t seem all that hot.
We sat at the table and Hahn explained which recipes we would prepare, and then we stood and did what she told us to for about an hour and a half. She didn’t seem to consult any instructions or recipes, but talked as though she was. 100g of this, 1/2 a teaspoon of that… fry for 30 seconds. Our lunch was made up of four separate meals; vegetable spring rolls, a green papaya salad, stir fried tofu with chilli and lemongrass, and a Clay Pot eggplant; clay pot being the thing it was fried in.
All were delicious, and while we chopped and changed which one we were working on, and put things aside to marinate or for later, Hahn told us all about how they had started the cooking school because floods in October had ruined their restaurant and kitchen for too many years, and cost too much in appliances and painting to fix, so now they just close in October and move everything out of the restaurant. It goes without saying that the best part of the cooking school was eating lunch, seeing as we’d done a fairly good job with all the recipes. If I’d known it was so easy to make spring rolls I would have been doing it all the time at home.
We were back in room 201, at the front of the hotel looking over the road, by 1pm, and spent most of the afternoon looking at pictures from the cooking school and typing out the recipes that Hahn had dictated. We had offered to put together a proper design which they could print for the recipes we’d done; Hahn was enthusiastic.
At 4pm we met out front of the hotel and saddled ourselves up onto a bicycle each, and went riding out through the countryside and the laneways and concrete bike paths for an hour or so. As we trundled past little children waved hello. Once again ‘Georgie’ ran off a few times, but that’s just how he is. I didn’t realise that we were going to end up at the beach; I thought we would just ride around for a bit and then come back to the hotel, so when we pulled up in the sand, and parked our bikes underneath the rows of palm trees, I had to quickly sneak behind a building and shuffle my undergarments out from beneath my shorts.
The beach was fantastic, but like the ones we saw on the way here, it doesn’t seem to have any waves. The water gets pretty deep pretty quickly, so there’s just a bit of foam at the edge and that’s it. Great for wading around in, though. In Viet Nam the sun sets rapidly and early as well; we swam around for 15 minutes and then got out as it got dark, and sat on the beach dripping, then found our bicycles and rode home along the main road at the slowest possible speed. Traffic goes so slowly in Viet Nam that riding in the gutter with all manner of things passing you is a very pleasant experience. This was going to go down in our journal as the day I decided to move to Viet Nam, but we can’t move to both Yangshuo and Hoi An, so something needs to get sorted out. After all, Yangshuo doesn’t have a beach…
Next to our hotel, and across the road from the cafe we had been to yesterday, was another restaurant, which also turned out to have an adjoining cooking school and tailoring shop, which was owned by a very friendly lady. When Geelong-Adam and Catherine and ourselves finished dinner she said, ‘OK see you for breakfast…OK you promise’ They had an item on the dessert menu identified as ‘Steamed Bananas with Orange Rhum’; Adam ordered this, still salivating from the bananas we’d had during our bike ride around Hue, and found that it was everything he had hoped for. The steamed bananas were as good as before, while Orange Rhum turned out to be an orange juice and rum sauce. Jackpot!
(tee hee… jackpot… that reminds me of the man in the station at Rotterdam collecting his 20 euros of change from the change machine, and saying ‘Jackpot!’ for a giggle)
There had been a plan to get in the bus and go see a temple named My Son (‘mee-son’) tomorrow morning, which was built by the Cambodian emperors quite some time ago, but as we were all going on to Angkor Wat anyway, this plan was abandoned, and we went to bed knowing we didn’t have to get up at any particular time.
Greg
Going over the Hai Van pass (1st November)
Downstairs, on the first floor of the Thai Son hotel, there is a restaurant where the tables are set up on a split level around the railing, and you can look over the edge into the lobby, and out the front windows to the street, which is already incredibly busy.
We were the only people having breakfast there, although my omelette was very good and Alice’s pineapple pancake was quite good but not so good that she didn’t look longingly at the omelette and wish she had ordered that. We had taken our laptop down with us to see if the video we posted last night was still in working order, and check we had put the right pictures in the right galleries, and so forth, but the internet was running unfeasibly slowly, and it was at this time that we were glad we stayed up later than usual.
Just after 8am we eased our four people into the 10-seat bus, and journeyed off up the road. We journeyed through vast wide wet fields, like swamps, and we saw a man standing on the back of a buffalo, and a woman pedalling a large armoire with glass doors on a cyclo, and then we journeyed into the hills.
Road works made the occasional passing of a slower vehicle almost carelessly dangerous in places, but it was OK because the driver beeped the horn before going around blind corners. Down the hills we came into a town and pulled over at a beachside restaurant. Tuan and the driver had a coffee and we went straight out to wander around on the beach, which was not lacking in ladies trying to sell you every type of thing they had in their basket, but they were going to be unlucky because one of them asked Alice if she was pregnant.
‘I’m not buying anything from that lady. No way,’ she said.
We were soon joined on the beach by the other larger Intrepid group, which despite leaving ahead of us arrived after, although I don’t recall passing them anywhere; I suppose that’s their business, really. The beach was nice, and fairly clean, and flat, but we had a bus trip to attend to and could not stay all day wandering occasionally back to the restaurant for a drink.
Out of the town we came upon hills again, and we drove up the Hai Van pass, which would seem, according to how narrow and windy the tarmac was and how spectacular the drops were, to be the Vietnamese version of the Great Ocean Road. It was awesome.
At the top we stopped to look at the Old French bunkers and suchlike, for only 7 minutes (according to Tuan), and to see the view on both sides; south was Danang and around the bend Hoi An, north the beaches and hills.
The ride down the hills was far quicker than the ride up, and in Danang we stopped at the train station to get tickets for later on, and petrol while the driver left the van running and probably talked on his mobile phone and smoked a cigarette just to make sure. Danang is actually now the third biggest city in Viet Nam, and very modern as well, but we’ll have to get to that in another future trip; all we did this time was stop on China Beach (for 9 minutes this time) to have a look around and take some pictures, and then we got back in the Air Conditioning.
Not that much further down the road, at about 1.30pm, we got out of the van in front of our hotel in Hue. The heat had graduated from sweating level to grunting level, the whole town had no power because of floods a few days ago, and they thought it would be back on this afternoon but couldn’t say, and we couldn’t set up the video call we had planned for Simon and Bronwen’s wedding, so there was nothing left but to go across the road to a cafe for lunch.
They had fish and chips on the menu and that was a strong selling point. It reminded me very much of sitting on the beach at Noordwijk in Holland, where we asked the waiter what the kibble was, as it came with chips, and he said ‘Kibble is fish.’
‘Oh, so it’s fish and chips, then?’
‘Well, yes.’
And that was the last time we had fish and chips. I didn’t think fish and chip deprivation would be possible, or that it would be fish and chips which we would be most pleased to discover unexpectedly. I mean, we had a list of things in our heads that we would like to eat when we got home, having not been able to find them very often for four months; turns out fish and chips has now been added to that list.
OK. Enough about the damn fish and chips already. In the lobby we came across Tuan who, just like us, wanted to know if the orientation walk could be made to happen at 4.30pm instead of 3.30pm. Yes, yes it could. No problem.
About 3pm the power came back on, sometimes between when we gave up on the video call and got in the pool, but before the clouds came over, cooled everything down, and made the pool less of a paradise than it had seemed, and more like a mirage, not full of plump dates and 40 virgins at all, but instead full of twittering anglo tourists. Meanwile Tuan sat on his own at a table in the hotel restaurant, next to the pool, eating some kind of noodles and checking figures.
The orientation walk took us along the main road into the old town, to the ticket booth to buy the pass which helps maintain the Aged Buildings and also gets you into one each of four types of attractions, and then down the hill to the main street of the Old Town. Past the market and a plethora of shops, restaurants, tailors, trinket stalls, restaurants and tailors we came across the Old Japanese Bridge. It used to be that one side of the river was occupied mainly by Japanese traders, and the other side by Chinese traders, and in the 1600’s the Japanese traders thought it would be appropriate if they paid to build a bridge between the two sides. It’s no bigger or more ornate than the bridge we saw on our motorbike tour yesterday, but it’s older and as a symbol it’s quite a beautiful thing.
And there’s always kids fishing near there.
Turn left and you get down to edge of the river, which is more like a canal now, with concrete banks and so forth, except that it’s about 25m across, and wider than some of the other canals we’ve seen on this trip. There was a minor debacle when I stopped to change camera batteries and lost track of the group completely, and had no idea where they were going next, causing Alice to double back and come find me looking up this street and down the next one.
‘Georgie wanna picture’; so goes the all-purpose excuse.
Along the waterfront are many more restaurants and space to display cultural shows like drum music and dancing and what-have-you, as well as the restaurant of the people who would be running our cooking school tomorrow, which Tuan kindly pointed out. Only the restaurant was shut, and the front doors were locked.
We had dinner at Mermaid cafe, headed back to the hotel, and stopped at an ATM which refused to work, and then went on a major-league wild goose chase looking through town for an an ATM, eventually cajoling the machine near the ticket station to work by asking for slightly less money than we wanted; then we found an ATM further along the road back to our hotel. Which is always how these things are. The ATMs must be in town, right? Wrong.
The other thing we couldn’t find was a reasonably priced bottle (or even glass) of champagne to celebrate the wedding; but out the back of the hotel, next to the pool, there was another little beach hut type enclosure, which was home to the pool table and bar. Here we found half of the other Intrepid group, who were staying in the same hotel, and we had a couple of beers with them before they left to walk down to the beach.
The rest of the evening was uneventful; we might have written some travel journals that night, but we probably didn’t. I’m writing this in Phnom Penh and can’t remember.
Greg
Wedding Hello
Hello.
This is just a little video to say hello on the occasion of my older brother Simon and Bronwen’s wedding, on the 1st of November, 2008. We hope that it plays properly and there are no problems with web streaming etc. If there are you will find an identical copy in your email (Simon).
We apologise for not having our journal up to date as requested (sigh). What can we say? Vietnam is too much fun. We love you both and are already sure that you are having a wonderful day. For people who are interested, we have gotten as far as adding pictures up to and including today’s (yesterday’s) awesome motorbike trip around Hue. Which can be found in the Vietnam album.
The Long-awaited Motorcycle Ride (31st October)
We awoke excited, for the motorbike ride was today.
While getting bottled water from the large, modern, and nearby but well-hidden-in-a-paddock supermarket the night before, we also got some pastries and tart-type things for breakfast, and these we ate before taking ourselves downstairs to wait in the lobby. The other larger Intrepid group set off before us, with riders decked out in Intrepid shirts, and shiny helmets. Our four riders wore what they felt like, and had comfortable helmets. We liked our riders more; the larger group probably got a marginally better price.
We rode out of town and onto village tracks, which soon became ankle-deep in water, and the motorbikes slowed a little to prevent too much spray. My rider thought it was hilarious that Alice, on the bike in front, held her legs right up out the water, like a freeze-frame of one of those guys on the pommel horse in the Olympics. She was wearing shoes; I was wearing sandals, which could get a little bit wet. The water got deeper, and then a little deeper after that, as we rode along a concrete track now, the water reaching up to my footrests, and on both sides there stretched a large flat expanse of newly created wetland.
Boats fished there, and moored at the sides of the path, under the shady trees.
Through the village we stopped at a market next to an old wooden bridge, built across a small river. Three of our riders spoke no English, but the fourth, the guide, was very good, five-and-a-half-feet high counting the little button on top of his white cap, had more missing teeth than present ones, and his name was Phuoc. He explained that there had been a lady who had no children, but who was wealthy, and well known, and who decided that her gift to the community would be to build this bridge across the river (she had hoped that the good karma would help her become pregnant – alas no luck). It was built in 1776.
Inside the bridge, which was maybe 10m long, there was a poem, written in Mandarin, framed and displayed in a portico, telling the story of that lady. Now, in Phuoc’s rough translation, she does have children in a sense because people remember her after her death; and that is really what the tradition of ancestor worship is all about. We do the same thing, really, but they are far more systematic about it. We’d just have a picture of Grandad Smith over the mantel, which gets taken down once and only once a year for dusting.
Across the bridge were two interesting things; an agriculture museum and a flood marking post. At the present time, since there had been buckets and buckets of rain about three days before we arrived, the water was about half a metre below the level of the bridge; on the marking post were previous high water marks, several of which were above my head. The agriculture museum was dedicated to the old-time ways and means of sowing, growing and harvesting rice. An ancient hunched lady – I suspect she paid for that bridge – trundled around the museum demonstrating how the machine to separate the heads from the stalks of the rice worked, and how the basket, when thrown properly, would separate the grains of rice from the miscellaneous bits of stalk.
They used to have nets to move water around as well, like a giant Lacrosse stick, but made of tightly woven bamboo. One stands next to the irrigation canal, and picks the water up in the net and throws it into the rice field. Also there were some early-model un-combined harvesters, which you can hook a buffalo up to the front of, and various models of fish nets; attach a lantern to the top of the bamboo frame, and the fish swim right in, and then you pull the net up. And then it’s dinner time.
Peasants the World over, back in the day, were definitely not educated, but they weren’t stupid either.
We took a tour through the market next, which had all the hustle and noise and fresh vegetables and meat being cut and prepared that we had come to expect by now. Supermarkets back home will be rather boring, I think. Outside the market we sat down for a beverage, while the other Intrepid group set off with a bit of a war cry. There were not enough of us for a group war cry; maybe we could have just yelled Geronimo but I didn’t think of it.
Back on the motorboats oops I mean motorbikes we swished back through the recently extended network of canals, and eventually reached a dry dirt path which took us back towards town. The sequence and variety of roads, alleys, paths, intersections and tracks we went through over the remainder of the day is quite difficult to describe, but it was a lot of fun, and nearly half an hour after leaving the Bridge we pulled up at the Monastery. The monastery had a story of it’s own as well. It was funded in the 1860’s by a group of eunuchs.
After watching the monks pray, Phuoc explained the whole thing.
There had been a monk whose mother was sick, and so he took her to his retreat up on the hillside, and looked after her for years, although she did finally die and although the monk received many unusual looks while buying meat in the market in town. The eunuchs, having no children, were possessed of disposable income, and just like the lady who built the bridge, they decided their gift would be to fund the monastery. There are plaques in the main altar, again in Chinese, explaining the whole story and who the building is dedicated to, and also there is a statue of the original monk.
Around behind some other walls are the monks’ graves, ordered by size according to seniority, bordered off by a thick stone wall, and very much encrusted with various green growths. Near the graveyard was a small enclosed statue of a female monk, which is known as the Bodhisattva; in Buddhist tradition the female epitomises compassion, and the woman, instead of reaching nirvana, will choose each time to come back as a woman and therefore be able to alleviate other’s suffering.
And there I was thinking Buddhism might be the only religion which doesn’t put women firmly in the back seat.
Hmmm.
Back on the bikes we took a short trip through some downhill dirt paths, and back up onto tarmac, with my chin strap now properly tightened so that the helmet didn’t fall back every time I turned my head. Along the side of the road we stopped at a store where the ladies made and demonstrated the making of incense, and did the same with those famously conical hats. Alice had been hanging out for one and chose the model with paper silhouettes sewn inside, showing the bridge we had just visited and some other landmarks from around Hue. The incense was remarkable and came in every known colour, but probably wouldn’t get back through customs.
Alice: Watching the incense get rolled was amazing. The lady had incense putty which with a paddle she rolled quickly onto sticks (so that they looked liek the incense we know and love) and then put out to dry. Except all this happened in a matter of seconds. Apparently thousands can be rolled by any one person in a day. Also it smelt good. As the motorbikes passed through this area you periodically got a strong waft of incense (and sometimes garlic – I can’t explain that).
Greg: Up and down another dirt path leading off the other side of the tar we found ourselves wiggling our way up a rutted track between pine trees, which grow plentifully in Viet Nam because they make good wood quickly. Among the pines, overlooking what had become known as the perfume river a few hundred years ago, were the remains of some North Vietnamese army bunkers, while across the river (and into the trees) were the remains of some South Vietnamese army bunkers. Apparently neither side made it across the river, which had it’s name modified after a General of that olden day was courting a woman by taking her on a boat ride, and she thought the river must be named the Perfume River because it was lined with flowers. He was trying to find a wife and so he just went along with it.
After the bunkers we went rolling and rattling through more alleys and tracks and whatnot, and then turned up a hill and through some narrow gates, where we pulled up at a nunnery. Or whatever a place where only women study is called in the Buddhist tradition. In the middle of a pond undergoing construction was a huge statue of the Bodhisattva which we were now easily able to recognise, and round the corner we sat ourselves down at the table in s small hall, and were treated to a magnificent lunch.
The Bodhisattva Nunnery Restaurant
A la Carte Menu
(Reservation Required)
– Entree –
Pumpkin, Lotus seed and tofu soup.
Chips of some description (taro or cassava?)
Mixed plate of enjoyable sushi-stye rolls – including curried eggplant wrapped in some type of leaf
Served with sweetened Lemon Juice
– Main –
Green beans, tomato and thin white mushroom stir fry.
Mung and green beans, tomato, and pineapple concoction (sweet and sour)
Dim Sum/Ravioli type item, fried and filled with finely diced carrot, tofu, mushroom, onion.
Rice (steamed)
– Dessert –
Hot miniature bananas (steamed in a rice steamer)
Grapefruit, of the huge and green, but sweet variety
More lemon juice
Having not gone to the Citadel in the old part of Hue yesterday during our boat trip, we wanted time to do that this afternoon, so the motorbike riders were to drop us there, but the tomb of Tu Duc and the Tiger/Elephant colosseum still to be visited, there was no time to lie down on mats on the stone floor for a light rest.
We reached the tomb at about 1pm, and it was gaspingly hot. I felt like one of those small bananas being steamed. But it was worth it.
Tu Duc was the last of the Emperors of Viet Nam, before their spectacular capitulation to the French in the 1870’s. Obviously while he was alive this building wasn’t used as his tomb, but as his Summer Palace; Tu Duc didn’t really want to be Emperor, it seemed. He always wanted to be a lumberjack a poet and owner of concubines, and a theatre watcher. And he got to do all those things and less at his Summer Palace, and why not? I forget how many concubines he had but it was a lot, and far more than I will ever have, and the palace is surrounded by a huge stone wall (6-7m high?), with landscaped gardens and mighty ancient trees, and a dragon shaped lake.
Tu Duc’s tomb is officially underneath the dragon’s mouth (i.e next to the part of the lake, not under the water), although as with Tsin Shi Huang in Xi’an, all of the workers who built it were sealed inside, or killed, or both. The accepted historical fact is that Tu Duc is buried somewhere on site, but definitely not in his actual large stone tomb. I know that Phuoc knows where he is buried, because he has taken a lot of tour groups around the tomb and he is a smart guy and would eventually get a feeling like ‘He must be under here, yes, this is the place’. But Phuoc pretended not to know.
The building which housed the concubines, who unlike in China were not killed when the Emperor died but instead furnished with cash and lodgings and supervised by eunuchs, was being renovated. That is, the government had taken their sonar machines through, determined that Tu Duc had gotten himself buried underneath the Concubine lodgings, and declared the building ‘off limits’, and ‘unsafe.’
There are ten stone statues, and the elephants they rode in on, guarding the entrance to the walled section which houses Tu Duc’s surface tomb. Just as in Xi’an, they have different ranks which can be told by their uniforms and hairstyles, but unlike the Terracotta Warriors there aren’t 6,000 of them and they are built to be respectfully slightly shorter than the Emperor was. So that’s how they know Tu Duc was less than 5’2″. Up the stone steps there is a colonnade, with four pillars, and inside is Tu Duc’s last poem, inscribed in Mandarin on a huge tablet, of more than 5,000 characters, in which he regrets being a B-grade Emperor, and ceding the whole country to the French, due to spending all his time at the Summer Palace having naptime and composing poems. How long it took him to compose, and what the French were up to during this time period, is not really worth discussing.
His actual tomb is quite a nice piece of craftsmanship; it’s walled off from the rest of the compound, in it’s own courtyard about 30m x 15m, and it’s just a simple stone crypt, which appears much larger due to it being the only thing inside the final nested set of walls.
Across the road we stopped for a cold drink at a little cafe, where our other motorbike riders had been laying in hammocks for quite some time. There was a spare hammock going so I retired there to drink my canned fruit salad juice. When the time came to get back on the bikes we all felt a while lot better, and weren’t really that disappointed when we reached the Colosseum, only to find it was being renovated and all you could was walk around the outside and look through the gates. It used to be that tigers were quite a nuisance in Viet Nam, so the Emperor would set himself up a little Tiger Vs Elephant death match, the trick being that elephants were really quite useful and therefore should be allowed to win the fight if at all possible, so they decided to break the law of the jungle by removing the tiger’s teeth and claws. The animals came in through their own gates on separate sides, and the elephant had only to step on the tiger at the first available opportunity, and the job was done.
Alice: Alice’s memory of this is that the elephant’s got to win because they were the symbol of the King – and all things King related could not be denigrated. We will do some more research and get back to you about who was right on this one.
Greg: The colosseum had roughly a 100m circumference, so I don’t think we missed that much by not being able to climb the stairs and look in at the grass below, and anyway we’ve seen a bigger one in Rome.
Next stop: Citadel. We had photos with our motorbike riders, thanked them very much, and said goodbye. The citadel, if I understand correctly, was the seat of government and therefore the place where Tu Duc probably should have been, but having visited his time, and been drained of all fluids over the course of the day, we felt it was sufficient to have look from the outside, stand in the shade for a bit, and then walk back to our hotel as slowly as possible.
For dinner we went no further than the Mandarin Cafe, where we had a cheap and filling meal of sour noodle soup, garlic bread, vegetable noodle soup, and a Country Style (?) tofu stir fry, and Geelong-Adam figured it prudent to try the Mango and Peanut Butter pancake for dessert. You all should try it home, too. It sounds a bit weird, but it’s actually pretty good. After another thorough examination of Mr Cu’s photos we were able to pick a favourite, and enquired about the price simply so that we could make sure we wouldn’t be able to afford it; but the second smallest print size (6″ x 8″) was only 30,000 VND. So we invested, and Mr Cu was kind enough to sign it for us.
As British-Adam from our previous group used to say, ‘Happy Days’.
And there’s more. Back at the hotel we had to organise, choose, resize and post our photos to the web in lieu of actually having our journals up-to-date, and also video the back-up Wedding Greeting you will all have seen by now. Then we had to dry our eyes and go downstairs into the wireless zone and get it all posted to our site, and order our breakfast for the next morning, and go to bed at half-past-midnight even though we had to get early to get our bus to Hoi An.
But this is travelling. There is always more to do. And it’s fun.
Greg
The Seven Level Pagoda
What happened very early on the morning of the 30th of October?
I woke up. Having gone to bed very early, I opened my eyes about 6.30am and slipped the curtain open a little bit. There had been stories of Hue being flooded a week before our tour started, and the countryside I was looking at still looked pretty flooded at the moment. Every now and then you would see a power pole poking about halfway out of the water.
So I sat there, and waited for people to wake up, and looked out the window some more, and took videos on my mobile phone, and had unhindered usage of the toilet and eventually everyone began to look alive.
Hue would be coming down the train lines a little bit after 9.30am, and in the meantime we marvelled at the sheer amount of water laying around the place, and pointed our cameras out the windows. At the station we had little more to do than to walk along the platform and out the gate, and straight to our taxi. Too easy.
Once again I walked into our hotel room and declared that I would never leave, because it was in fact rather nice. Before our boat trip out to the Seven Level Pagoda at 2pm, we had to get lunch, and to get lunch we had to leave the hotel room, so there was no other way. The newer part of Hue is gathered around the south side of the river, while the old town is over the other side. In the newer part, a short walk toward the river, we found the Mandarin Cafe Tuan had recommended, and had a superb lunch of a local specialty called Banh Khoai, which is like an omelette-shaped fried pancake with vegetables inside and a satay sauce, as well as fried noodles and coffee and a mango pancake.
In the menu, potential toppings were listed in brackets (chocolate, honey, peanut butter, strawberry). Surely they wouldn’t actually produce such a thing as a mango pancake with peanut butter, but if one requests it, produce it they do. They look at you funny, and have a giggle, but a mango pancake with peanut butter on it is not actually a bad thing. Not bad at all.
On the walls of the Mandarin Cafe are a great many very good photographs, printed and framed. The owner, Mr Phan Cu, as his business card will testify, brings you an album of pictures, each one numbered, much bigger than the menu, and explains that these pictures are his hobby and he hopes you like them. It’s hard not to; they range from quite nice to really exquisite.
From the hotel we found Tuan waiting around and took a short taxi ride down to the river, hardly any further than the distance we walked down (and then back) to the restaurant. Along the edge many dragon boats were moored close together, bobbing, and we climbed the little step ladder into one of these and set off. It was hot, and steamy, and getting on the boat improved things only slightly. And then the lady on the boat pulled out all manner of trinkets, souvenirs, shirts, and trousers and spent most of the trip trying to sell these things to us.
There are two main bridges across the river in Hue, and under both of these bridges we floated, sitting sometimes in the shade of the boat, walking sometimes out onto the prow, and watching the town changing on one side, and the weeds crowing the bank on the other, and the fishing boats loafing along the Old town edge.
At a curve in the river we could see the pagoda nearing; at the edge was a stone wall, angled and reaching under the water, set upon the point of the river-curve, and just on this side of the curve steps were cut up into the stairs. There was nowhere really for the boat to moor; the lady hopped up and tied our boat to the one next door, but what it was tied to we did not check. They laid a plank over onto the steps, and we walked the plank and up the steps, and across the road there were more steps, this time leading up to a four-pillar gate and to the Thien Mu pagoda. The pagoda has seven levels, hence it’s English name.
But there is far more to the place than just the pagoda, which is ornate and austere at once. There is the monastery (hence the pagoda), but what I did not know is that this very monastery is the same one at which Thich Quang Duc was the Senior Monk. Or whatever they call the head or chief in Buddhism. People who remember that picture of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in Saigon, in 1963, have seen a picture of Thich Quang Duc. Out the side of the monastery, they have on display the restored car which was in the background of the photo, in which Thich drove himself down to Saigon. Somehow, his heart survived the fire, and the proper cremation which came after it, and it’s now stored in a glass case. And he is revered by Buddhists throughout Viet Nam.
Another thing I didn’t know was that he was indeed protesting the war in Viet Nam, but he was also protesting against the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government; the very same government that the US decided to prop up and put forward as victims of invasion by the North.
As the afternoon cooled, we walked back down the steps, rode the boat back to town, and taxied ourselves back to the hotel, where we were glad to find and exploit our remaining bottles of water. In the evening we met for dinner, and took another taxi across the river to a restaurant near the point of the first bridge, which was obviously popular with Intrepid groups, judging by the number of people who had written their names on the walls in a variety of sizes and colours, adding ‘Intrepid’ plus the year, or the trip name. Or something vulgar that they should have left in their backpack, or at home.
Almost every space in the wall was taken by people’s names and their drawings, including some space on the ceiling above where the fan was turning. Also adorning the walls were large frames full of small snapshots, evidently of people who had visited the restaurant and sent their photos back as a token.
Beer was ordered and bought to the table, and the opened with an unusual kind of tool; little more than a piece of balsa wood with a bolt on one end, but hitched up the right way and struck with finesse, it never fails.
Incidentally, they sell food as well, and good food. People who have been to a Vietnamese restaurant where they do those roll your own rice-paper rolls will know what we mean. People who haven’t should find their local Vietnamese restaurant.
On the way back over the new metal bridge, which was lit up in a variety of colours cycling through red, white, green, blue, purple and possibly some others I can’t remember, the cult of ‘Georgie’ began. I had already become a source of ridicule, or perhaps mere risibility, within the group for regularly disappearing completely when there were photos to be taken, and catching up or turning up somewhere between 1 and 15 minutes later. And with a metal bridge all lit up in front of you and traffic flying past, who can resist trying one of those tidy time-exposure pictures with the long lines of light streaking through?
Catherine had already suggested more than once that Alice acquire a leash for the purpose of restraint, so when I hurried along to the end of the bridge and the waiting group a few minutes later, they had decided it was not me who had disappeared, but George.
‘Georgie want a picture. Georgie run off.’
And so forth.
On the way back through town, a cyclo rider offered to sell us a ride, and when we said ‘No’, he offered to sell us a joint. Of course.
With all of that in mind, we went to bed, dreaming of the motorbike ride in the morning.
Greg
Rainy Day Hanoi (29th October)
On the 29h of October, truthfully and in fact, your honour, we did leave the hotel room.
Quick reference to the Hanoi guidebook chapter we downloaded, and the map within, proved useful in deciding to walk West to the Literature Temple, then up to the West Lake, and back through our old neighbourhood, where we used to buy our pineapple on a previous visit to Hanoi, to the hotel and the train to Hue. I can’t work out how to type the accent which is supposed the be present above the ‘e’ in Hue; but if anyone is saying it like ‘Hugh’ in their head as they read this, please cease doing so.
We walked no further than the same restaurant as last night for breakfast, and left quite well fed.
It’s not very far across town to the Literature Temple, along the footpaths covered in motorbikes, under the low-hanging clumps of electrical wires, and it’s the same route as the way we came back yesterday, except that you don’t turn right to go up Dien Bien Phu. And once we came to a big wall that went a fair way in both directions, we knew we were in the right place. An old man was kind enough to be asleep in his hammock on the footpath, presenting a perfect photo opportunity; I seized it.
The Literature Temple is actually something much more like a University; Confucianism was bought down from China, and at that time (1050 AD?) the Temple was founded as a place for people to learn about the same. Inscriptions adorn the stone front gates, and they’re in Chinese. Mandarin or Cantonese or a grandfather of either? – I couldn’t say which. There are five or maybe six main buildings, spread out quite widely, and to reach these buildings you go first through a small garden with two ornamental rectangular lakes lined by stone balustrades; and then through a large gate, in which there are tablets informing you about the age of the buildings and the reasons for their existence; and then you reach the turtles.
I guess they might be tortoises.
It used to be that at the Literature Temple people learned about and were examined upon certain things, and the people who passed those examinations had their names inscribed on tablets. Turtles (tortoises?) being a symbol of wisdom and learning (and oldness), somebody had a brainwave and set up the stone tablets, with names engraved, ornamentally on top of huge stone turtles. Lots of turtles. Eight rows of at least 10, maybe 15 turtles, and just as many in the other rows on the other side of the courtyard.
After the turtles, and through another stone gate, you reach the main lake, where the people who studied at the Temple used to get part of their afternoon meal from. It’s not really a lake; it’s a very large square pond, something like 20 metres long each side, and deep enough that we couldn’t see the bottom leaning over the engraved stone balustrade, watching the fish dart about. And finally after that, under another high stone gate, built into another red brick wall, you come to the main courtyard and the main buildings. And the gift shop.
In the main buildings, in the parts you can go into, there are several very large wooden statues of scholars in the seated position, looking wise. From the next building came music, and in there, the biggest of the main buildings, we found a traditional folk concert in progress. The final building is H-shaped, and the musicians, in their bright costumes, sat in the end of one of the legs of the H. Standing in the middle part of the H looking east and west, along red brick paths, were small pagodas housing a huge drum and a huge bell. We sat on the stone seats, with gardens all around, but 15 minutes later the rain began, so we moved underneath the bell tower.
The rain got heavier, and then lightened, and then got heavier, and we sheltered under the Bell Tower for more than an hour; and it was very pleasant indeed.
By 2.30pm the rain became a tenable proposition, and we walked back through the courtyard, past the turtles and the lakes and the gardens, and turned left out the front gate of the temple, intending to acquire lunch. The rain returned slightly, and we were set upon by a lady selling plastic panchos, which we didn’t really need. She wanted 10,000 VND for two, so we offered 6,000 which she wasn’t having, but that excited the interest of another pancho-lady, who then also followed us up the street for a while, insisting that 8,000 was OK, but she wouldn’t go as low as 6,000 either, although the second lady gave up eventually, which left the first lady free to pretend to give up and then turn around and follow me again for another 50 metres or so, trying all manner of things like standing halfway in my way and pushing the panchos into my hands.
In the meantime the rain had softened again.
At the north end of the block we turned left, and walked along to the other corner of the Temple wall, looking around for a restaurant. We had seen a French cafe/restaurant on the Eastern side of the Temple, which looked good but a bit expensive, and rather than sally around in the rain we took ourselves back that cafe, and had a very satisfying lunch. Almost all Vietnamese houses, and shops, are as thinner or thinner than the terraces we know, so almost all restaurants have an upstairs, and in the upstairs of this one we, in our wet shoes, and clothes needing a proper wash, felt more than a bit out of place.
The walls were cream, and the roof a yellow-white, and they had huge light-lime lamps, and very nice photos on the walls, and some huge white couches as well. Not to mention the excellent service and the filling vegetable lasagne and eggplant pizza. And there were actual French people eating at one of the other tables. By the time we thought of venturing outside the rain was more or less absent, and the humidity was already beginning to return vengefully.
On the way up to the West Lake, we passed the Mausoleum again, which was still closed, and walked into an altogether different part of town, with parks and a fountain, and a vast roundabout, and wide leafy streets, and a notable lack of street-level chaos. The West Lake was every bit as vast as it appeared on the map; we had no hope or inclination of walking all the way around it. On the bench we sat and watched some people wheel their swan boats back to the rental place, and then walked back towards our ‘old neighbourhood’, where our previous hotel was, looking for the pineapple lady and for something to have for dinner. Pineapple we could not find, but fresh pears and half a bunch of bananas proved a cheap and adequate replacement, but the deep-fried battered banana we thought we were buying from the street-lady proved to be something else; Cassava, perhaps.
From our previous hotel we knew exactly how to get back to the Old Quarter and our new hotel, and had a great fun walk dodging on and off the footpaths as required, and stopping to video the motorbikes synchromeshing through a three-way intersection.
After a little wait around at the hotel, we checked out at the time specified on the note in the lobby by Tuan; 6.57pm. Or at least our clock said 6.57pm, but as we were putting our bags on he called our room to remind us, and somehow managed accidentally to call me George. Which became funnier as we went along.
No time to delve into that now, though, for we had a train to get on, and banana sandwiches to eat. Well, banana buns, really, because almost the only shape of bun available from many Vietnamese bakeries is long, thin and white. This train wasn’t all that nice, really, but for no obvious reason I was dead tired by 9pm and went to bed then.
Greg
Back in Hanoi (28th October)
I might have implied, in yesterday’s post, that an early morning was afoot.
At 4.15am they started the awful (and loud) music on the train, and we all awoke with a bit of a jolt. Fortunately, as always, Tuan had the transport organised and we got straight into a large taxi and went straight through the dark empty streets to our hotel. But without all the shops open, people selling any type of thing on the footpath, and the thousands of motorcycles, we hardly recognised the street we were in until we were pulling up at the hotel.
In what would be the luggage room until we could all check in, Alice lay straight down on the bed and went back to sleep, while I contemplated what to do between now (5am) and the time when cafes and such would start opening. A couple of failed attempts to sleep later, I went down to a cafe near the hotel and had a reviving caffeinated beverage, while Alice stayed asleep the whole way through. We were set up to go for a walk with Tuan over toward Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum at 8am, but she had been sick with a cold for a day or two and slept until 7.53am.
We got some assorted bread-type things from the nearby bakery and went on a deliciously roundabout tour of the multiple streets in the Old Quarter. Although they used to be named according to what they sold, and although many of the streets don’t now sell whatever they are named after, most of the streets do still have shops selling the same things. For instance, hardware stores. One street had about four blocks of shops which were all hardware stores on both sides of the road. None of the shops would have been wider than 3m however, or deeper than 3m, so they can’t all fit the same sorts of things you might buy in Bunnings. Just the same, it was a bit weird.
You can go many ways through the Old Quarter but you tend to end up somewhere along the main diagonal road when you come out the other side; Dien Bien Phu street. Actually it’s not a street; there’s a different Vietnamese word for it but I forget what it was. Turn right and walk along Dien Bien Phu and you arrive at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. At this time of year the mausoleum, in accordance with rumours, is not open, because Ho Chi Minh is not there. His waxen corpse is in Russia being restored by the same technology they use to keep Lenin looking creepy and half-dead. There is another rumour that the contract has been secretly handed over to Madame Tussaud’s, but that is neither here nor there.
Of course if we had known Ho was in Russia we would have visited him when we were there; instead we are left with no way to complete our Worldwide set of Real Actual Dead People Stuffed with Plastic on Public Display. But you can’t have everything.
We still had a good time walking around and looking at the big shiny mausoleum, which is startlingly similar to Lenin’s, except that it has three levels of roof, just like your average Vietnamese pagoda. Which you will be able to observe in the pictures (having reference of course to our pictures from Moscow).
A short debate ensued over whether we should pay to go into the Ho Chi Minh theme park enclosing the house where he lived, the cars that he drove, the gardens he walked in, and probably some pictures of his concubines as well; or, perhaps, we could instead go to see the One Pillar Pagoda, both of which were not very far from the Mausoleum. The One Pillar Pagoda won, but it is kind of small. It’s literally a pagoda built on one pillar, sitting above it’s own little lake which is about 10m by 10m. It’s a nice little ornamental thing; we read that the original pagoda was slightly larger but the French took the time to destroy it on their way out in the 50’s. So the Vietnamese had to build their own smaller replica.
Then we walked back to the hotel, by which time the day was just starting to get really hot, and there were enough rooms available, and Alice promptly went back to sleep. We hid in the hotel room the rest of the day and I took the opportunity to do a test run of the video call which we had planned for Simon and Bronwen’s wedding, while Alice slept and then after that slept some more.
On our previous ramblings through Hanoi we had spotted a restaurant marked Vegetarian, and that seemed a good option for dinner; indeed it was. Alice couldn’t taste much of what she ate except for those things having a lot of garlic in them, so she ate most of those. Halfway through dinner the lights and power went off for some reason, so the giggling staff bought out little lanterns for the table.
‘Tomorrow’, we said to ourselves when we went to bed, ‘we won’t have to get up at four in the morning and should be able to do better than this. Who knows, we may even leave the hotel room.’
Greg
Cat Ca Village (27th October)
For breakfast, on a rainy Monday morning, I ordered a croissant with scrambled eggs, while Alice had a croissant with bacon and cheese. Hers came with bacon and cheese, while mine came with an omelette.
An omelette can be cut up and put inside a croissant, and in combination with one of them gunpowder Vietnamese coffees, and a nice wedge of butter, the effects are quite pleasant.
There was rumour of renting a bus to go and see another traditional village and the nearby silver waterfall, but that was a bit expensive so instead we decided on the other option; walk over to Cat Ca village. It’s a short walk from Sapa and comes well recommended. We had to check out first, which meant leaving our bags once again in the dodgy, damp, paint-smeling luggage room downstairs, but you pays your money and takes your chances.
To get to Cat Ca you go up the main road, turn left into the market, and then keep going that way, along a fairly decent road, which is well-serviced by swarms of motorbike riders offering tourists lifts to or from or back to Sapa or the village or anywhere, really.
And they are all No. 1.
‘Hello, motorbike ride?’
‘No thanks, we’ll walk.’
Yes, motorobike ride, you remember me maybe later, Hokio No. 1.’
Hokio, who was No. 1, had drawn his name on the back of his helmet, as had they all to make it easier for tourists to remember which bike rider they said they would get a ride with, only Hokio had drawn in on like it was a ‘Nokia’ logo. Priceless.
On the way down the foggy road you have to buy a ticket to enter the historical or cultural area or whatever it is, but the entry gate is actually a fair way down the road. If you don’t know that you could easily arrive at the entry gate without a ticket, and have to walk (or even pay for a motorbike ride) 1km or so back up to the ticket office. But we were warned, and had no such problem. Eventually at the bottom of the windy road, after you get through the gate, there is a little bridge across the river, and then you walk along for a while next to the water, which tumbles through a series of waterfalls large and small, surrounded by bamboo.
The last is the best by far.
And it has a little viewing platform sticking out near the fall, where people stand and look miniature while you take pictures of them looking miniature from the wooden bridge leading back over the river.
After that the hill starts. I’m not sure how many steps there were but a lot would probably cover it. We were halfway through the traditional culturally preserved village before we even realised where we were, because it’s really just some huts along the edge of the track with naked kids running around out front, and roosters dodging off the path when you approach. In the rice fields lining the track, several buffaloes were sloping around, burying themselves halfway in the mud, receiving large needles from the crafty farmer who snuck up with the implement behind his back, and after they were finished that – trying to make more buffaloes.
We didn’t know it but the trail we were walking along, after going through the village, actually joined back up to the road we had walked down, so we were thinking about turning back to have another look at the waterfall, but instead decided to walk down the road again, and find the restaurant we had spied on the first lap. Like most places in Vietnam it wasn’t really a restaurant so much as a pergola that serves food, but it was good food: egg, noodle and choy sum broth, with a cup of tea each, for 40,000 VND. And with the added entertainment of watching all the purple-clad old and young men stop for a break and drink some rice wine out of water bottles, it was good times all around.
What was even funnier was when the woman serving us went to fetch another bottle of rice wine for one of the resting motorbike riders. In the corner of the pergola was a large plastic tub, probably 10L or more, which in a Western country would be full of water, but which in this instance was full of rice wine. It was to heavy for the old lady to lift, so she got a tube and siphoned it out, and passed the bottle to another happy customer.
We walked back up the hill, aiming to go back down through the village and visit the waterfall again. Having finished the loop we weren’t supposed to go back through again, but the gaggle of motorbike riders and ticket collectors waiting around the gate to the trail didn’t seem to care. Oddly enough all of those bike riders were No. 1 as well.
‘You get ride from me, later. Ten is No. 1.’
He proudly displayed the back of his helmet, marked Ten.
‘But how can Ten be No. 1.? I said. They all had a giggle, but they’ve likely heard that one before.
By the time we walked back down to the fall, listened to the surprisingly awful music coming at top volume out of the hall where they were holding a cultural performance of some kind, sweated our way back up through the village, the buffaloes, and the gate, and started the walk back up to town, it was nearly 3.15pm. We had to check out (and get our bags from the dodgy luggage room) at 5pm, so we got a bit of a move on and were surprised to find ourselves back in the market at Sapa as early as ten-to-four.
We had washing to pick up from the shop across the road from our Royal Sapa Hotel, but preferred to wander over to the other part of town, past where we had gone for Hot Pot and to the little lake in the middle of town. And that part of town is a pretty nice part of town; very few ‘salespeople’ and wider streets, etc.
Our ‘Will the DVDs read properly?’ problem was solved by Tuan, whose laptop we borrowed for ten minutes to copy the necessary wedding-related pictures off the DVDs which had stopped working in our computer. So we piled into the 30-seat bus to Lao Cai, on the way up the main street picking up about 4 other tourists, and commenced a surprisingly dizzying ride down the hill. Maybe it was because the large bus was rolling side to side a lot as we went round corners, or maybe it was something else, but everyone was feeling more than a bit giddy when we got off the bus about 45 minutes later. With our feet on solid ground again we went to the upstairs part of a cafe near the train station for dinner, which was largely full of other tourists. Good cheap food, though.
On the train we all went to bed as soon as we could, having been warned we could be getting off at Hanoi as early as 4.30am.
Greg
