Things are looking up After spending the night in a blissfully clean and comfortable hotel, I had a much better attitude towards our host country today. We rented a motorbike, much fun but an experience I'll let Mark explain, and then took off to discover if the beach was icky as I'd feared. My fears were luckily unfounded. The beach is beautiful, and minus the once a minute hassle of someone offering you snacks, a pedicure, or some kind of souvenir, it's blissful. You can see mountinous islands in the distance across a turquois expanse of sea off a sandy beach. I was in Heaven. We've already booked a room at the beach resort for xmas eve and day, that will be our xmas present as it's $60 a night (outrageously expensive for Vietnam, and that's a deal because we took a room near the construction site, but they're only supposed to work from 8am-5pm on xmas so hopefully not too noisy). We're spending one more night in the Hoi An Hotel, then we're off to another hotel in Hoi An that's only $15 a night, but still has a pool, then we'll be at the Hoi An Beach Resort for the 24-26th. Not sure what's after that, we'll probably head down to Ho Chi Minh for the last few days of our trip.
Swimming in the pool has been one of my great pleasures of the last two days, especially fun is singing "E. coli" to the tune of the "Ricola" commercial, while swimming up to Mark (I've noticed no clorine in the pool).
We had some clothes made for us today. Pretty fun to pick out the fabric and design of an outfit made especially for you. My outfit (skirt and blouse) was $21, which seems expensive here, but is really a steal. We'll go pick up our clothes soon, I'm expecting some modifications needed, but hopefully they'll still be nice. I'm scared they'll be made with white thread and single stitched since we didn't specifically request matching thread and double stitch, we'll see. Hard to complain either way. I think the ladies at the shop felt like we were dream customers because we didn't try to bargain down on the price.

We rented a motorbike today, which was a trip. Not the riding -- we've gotten used to how traffic works around here -- but the renting itself. The process literally took about 30 seconds. A guy right across the street from our hotel was renting for $5 a day; we said okay, and he gave us a key, asked our room number at the hotel, and that was it. No forms, no instruction, no anything; we didn't even give him our names.

This is truly the freest free market I've ever seen. You have a bike? Rent it out. You have a kitchen? Sell food. A washer? Do laundry. Set up anywhere, even on the sidewalks, and charge anything you want. Copy anybody's business name you like. Pirate CDs and books and sell them if you want. Walk into anyone else's business and sell your wares. It's crazy.

Speaking of pirated books, I've finished reading (and almost completely re-reading) "The Quiet American" (which was great), and have moved on to Irving Welsh (sp?)'s "Trainspotting", which I bought at a book trading place up the street. It's pretty obviously a pirated book; the print is fuzzy like it's been photocopied. It's raining, and we're stuck here, so you're going to get a lot of trivial information like that in this post.

I'm getting a shirt made today, for $8. I didn't even try to talk them down. Clothes-making is a big thing in Hoi An. If I had to live here, before long my whole wardrobe would be custom-made, I'm sure. Marjorie's getting a blouse and skirt for $12 and $9, I think.

An interesting experience in Hue the other day; we took a walk along the river through the non-touristed part of town. Actually, it was almost a shanty town -- certainly the low-rent district. Aside from the general disarray -- and the people we saw washing their dishes in the filthy filthy river -- it was a lot of fun, because every little kid we passed shouted "Hello!". I guess they don't see whiteys like us a lot in that area. It was very sweet.

Culture Shock Mark and I had bragged before this journey that we had never experienced culture shock, and were almost hoping to, at this point. Well, that is no longer the case. I'm deep in the throes of culture shock and want to retreat home to my mommy.
Everything is dirty here (including the gritty keyboard that I'm currently using), and there's soooo much poverty and desperation everywhere. Every encounter with the people is laced with scepticism, are they talking to me just to try to sell me something later (usually this seems to be the case, sometimes people are just curious and/or want to try out their English). There is constant hassling and haggling "you come in, you buy now". No peace, unless one retreats to the safe tourist only enclaves such as expensive hotels and restaurants. In the more typical restaurants you are constantly harrassed by venders trying to sell postcards, shoe shines, tacky souvenirs.....the list goes on.
Tonight we are staying in Hoi An, at the Hoi An hotel, a blissfully westernish establishment complete with swimming pool and cable television, very nice, but not hardly how the locals live. And hard to justify the $45 a night, when the less nice establishment down the street charges $6. I'm still hoping we can make it to a nice beach, but I saw what appeared to be the beach from the bus ride here, and it looked pretty run down, construction and dug up earth everywhere.
We'd heard that Vietnam was one of the, if not the most difficult travel destinations in Asia. I hope this is the case because I'm still greatly looking forward to visiting many of the surrounding countries, but honestly, I'm not excited about ever coming back to Vietnam. That said, this experience is still important and worthwhile. I wanted to see how the other half lives, and now, to some extent, I have. I'm feeling extremely grateful to be from my half. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant. It's not meant to be. The trip has been enlightening in many ways, one of which is to maybe show me that I'm not as "enlightened" as I thought I was.
Mark and I will be in Hoi An for the next two days, then who knows. We now will spend the last two days of our trip in Ho Chi Minh City/Siagon. Maybe we'll see if we can leave a few days early.

We went on our first cyclo rides today. Cyclos are those bikes with the passenger seat in the front popular everywhere in S.E.Asia. The drivers originally wanted 50,000 dong a piece to take us to where we wanted to go, but I talked them down to 40,000 for both of us. I'm getting better at bargaining. Of course it helps if you have some idea what you should pay for something. It also helps if you're willing to walk away if you don't get the deal you wanted, that's how we got the two for 40 deal.
Hue is hot! But, seeing as we now live in S'pore, it's not too bad. I'd love to get to the beach soon. It's becoming my obsession.
We tried to go to Phu Quoc (an island near Cambodia) for xmas, but seemingly everyone else here wants to do that too, and we can't find a room. Unfortunately, other popular beach destinations in Vietnam are not so nice....Nha Trang is reported to have syringes on the beach, and Phan Thiet supposedly smells of fish sauce (sigh).

Back from the Imperial Cty. Pretty cool. The grounds are humongous, and much of it is in disrepair. This was the North Vietnamese Army's furthest incursion into the south, and they held it for thirty-some days, before we bombed the crap out of them following the Tet offensive. So, a lot of the damage was done by our bombs, but mostly I think it's just disrepair. I promised Marjorie a place like it, someday.

Forgot to mention -- one of the money changers (I think the one at the airport on the way in) gave me a counterfeit 50,000 dong note (worth about $3.33), which was not noticed until I tried to spend it. The paper is splitting, like the front and back were printed separately and glued together, and the watermark picture of Ho Chi Minh looks different. It'll be a nice thing for the scrapbook.

Greetings from Hue'. We flew in relatively uneventfully today. Our head colds didn't give us the head-in-a-clamp effect they sometimes do when flying.

Only walked around a little bit. Nice weather here, and a less hectic pace, which is nice. We'll hit the Imperial City tomorrow. The thing we're most looking forward to, though, is clean laundry in the morning. Hooray! I'll spare you the gruesome details of the laundry situation. You have no idea.

In the gift section of the Hanoi airport today, amidst all the hooray-for-the-worker's-revolution books and others about Vietnam culture, I noticed a John Steinbeck book translated into Vietnamese. I had to ask the clerk for a translation of the title. He said, "The East of the Garden. No, The East of Heaven's Garden." Interesting.

WAH! We are both sick today with a head cold we probably caught in Sapa. And we have to fly (to Hue). And we can't get a hotel reservation on the island we want to go to for xmas (Phu Quoc). And Mark accidentily used the tap water to brush his teeth today, getting a whole new influx of bacteria in his mouth (yum!) Life sucks right now. I want to go back to S'pore.
On a brighter note, Hue is supposed to be rather nice, as is Hoi An nearby.

Another strange sighting on the streets here in Hanoi: the karaoke bar across the street from our hotel has what appears to be a small black bear in formaldehyde as its street display. Inside they seem to have other animals pickling in large jars. Really distasteful. Last night on the way back from Sapa we ate at a place that had a bottle of snake wine on display, which had a splayed-out cobra inside the bottle.

Went to the infamous Hoa Lo prison today, popularly known as the Hanoi Hilton, of Vietnam war POW prison fame. It is now a museum. Its focus is on the tortures inflicted by the French occupying forces (who built it) on the Vietnamese people. There's a small section on its use during the "American war" to hold American POWs, and no mention is made -- at all -- of the tortures inflicted. In fact there's a room showing pictures of prisoners being treated well and an inscription that claims that all the Americans were treated according to the Geneva convention, despite the "untold crimes" we commited on their people. They even had a volleyball net that was supposedly used by the Americans during their internment. Chyeah right! Senator John McCain, what an exaggerator. He was playing volleyball the whole time.

It occurs to us that we've seen no evidence at all that we're in a Communist country right now. If we were dropped here without any prior knowledge, we would think it was all just capitalist. The green military uniforms and the red flag make it look Communist, but there's nothing else that we've noticed.

We keep re-meeting fellow travelers and tour guides. It's like God is running out of extras in the movie of our lives.

Took the noisy, bumpy night train back from Lao Cai/Sapa last night, and arrived back here in Hanoi at around 5 am. Strange walking around the streets so early. Almost tranquil (but still stinky). Flying off to Hue tomorrow...

No pictures for you. Just found out this tidbit:

In Hanoi, the government puts a tone on the line every 15 minutes, making high-resolution transmissions impossible.

So it really doesn't look like we'll be able to upload any pictures. Alas. Maybe they're not like that in the south.

CELEBRITY GOSSIP You heard it hear first! Even in Vietnam we're in touch with celebrity dirt. Apparently Tim Roth ( Pulp Fiction, Reservior Dogs, Four Rooms..) is in Nha Trang filming a movie called "a beautiful place" or "a beautiful day" something like that. Anyway, he's apparently been hooking up with a different girl every night (he's married). A couple of the travellers we met in Halong Bay shared this tidbit with us and said some guy was going to try to sell the story to one of the British news-rags.

Still among the H'mong. I was embellishing the last blog last night when all the power in the city went out. Such is the way of life out in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, here are some random bits to fill in some of the gaps:

At one point some little H'mong boys yelled "Peh bah bah!" to us. We asked the guide what this meant, and it turns out they were saying "Pen! Bon Bon!". Lots of people give out pens or candies to the village children.

Our dinner last night at a restaurant in Sapa: two large bowls of noodle soup, stir fried chicken with peppers, fried noodles with mushrooms, garlic, and vegetables, a glass of Sapa wine (nasty, tasted like cooking sherry), and a Schweppes soda water. The total: 74000 dong, or a little less than $5.00.

After finishing up Clavell's "Tai Pan" and Hornsby's "High Fidelity", I traded in a few books a traveler's cafe for Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Marjorie laughed at me -- it seems to be such a cliche in the backpacker culture here to read it.

This is the hotel we stayed in last night. Not exactly rustic but then we've been OD'ing on rustic lately.

Apparently people selling goods in the market think we can't see their products unless they point to them. It's kind of surreal, all the attention you get. Makes you feel almost like a celebrity.

Advice for visitors: we were overcharged last night for internet service at Green Sapa. The cafe at the Auberge Hotel in Sapa is a much better place.

At our homestay, we didn't interact with the family much. Our guide told us we were going to do dinner with them, as we were the only guest staying there -- we were a little apprehensive, as we struggled to recall all the various courtesies we had read about (don't point the bottom of your feet at anyone; take food from the shared bowls with the back end of your chopsticks; always pass and accept items with both hands, etc.). But then another couple from Germany showed up, so we had to go eat at the "tourist's table". This was both relieving and disappointing. We did press our guide before we arrived on how to say "Thank you" ("chaw bye", sp?), and they did seem surprised and happy when we said it to them at the end of our stay.

Yes, we have been drinking from the firehose of experience here. Allow me to fill in a few gaps.

As we hadn't really planned on trekking, our shoes and clothes were, shall we say, atypical of most trekkers. Marjorie bought a beautiful velvety jacket in Hanoi before we came out here; as it was her only warm thing she wore it, and was the envy of most villagers. One Black H'mong woman even followed her around a bit to touch it and ask about it. I think she wanted to buy it and sell it to someone else. "H'mong" must be an ancient word meaning "persistent".

My shoes were far too slippery for the task. We had numerous sketchy moments; I ended up sinking my foot in mud the first day, and Marjorie the second. When they terrace the hillside to grow rice, they make a dirt wall between levels to hold the water; we had to walk along these dirt walls numerous times, and they were often six or eight inches wide and slippery with Georgia-like mud, with a pool of water on either side of you. I had only one real fall, and did a butt-slide for a short bit. Some of the paths required such intense concentration that I have no doubt I'll be trekking paths in my sleep tonight.

Uses for bamboo we noticed:

Water pipes

Walls and floors

Firewood

Smoking pipes

Bridges over muddy areas

Ladders

Clotheslines

Fertilizer (after burning)

Mudslide prevention (planting it on hillsides; it grows very quick)

Our guide Tung, on top of everything else, was an excellent chef, and cooked us almost embarassing amounts of food on several occasions. We're still being careful about what we eat though.

By the way, we are now back in the city of Sapa, which we didn't expect to have internet access, but here we are. We stay in a hotel tonight, which has hot water (variably hot, it seems, but still hot) but no room heat -- brrrr. It has a view out over the valley but we're high up enough here (3000+ meters, or over 9000 feet) that we've been in a cloud most of the time, so no real view. We start our trip back tomorrow at around 3:30 pm, when a bus will pick us up and take us to the train station which is about a mile from the China border. We then take the late train back into Hanoi.

We have so many pictures we're dying to show you all. These past two days have been incredible...

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN SAPA Yesterday we arrived here by night train and then spent four hours hiking through the mountains with a guide. We spent last night in a "home-stay" at one of the villager's homes. Today we hiked three more hours out of the valley then had a jeep bring us back to Sapa. The whole experience was incredible. Hiking throught the muddy mountains was a very Zen experience, no time to think or worry about anything other than what is happening NOW or otherwise end up in the mud.
We saw many of the ethnic minorities of the area including the Black Hmong, who dress beautifully in indigo clothing and persistently try to sell you their wares as you hike up muddy embankments (slipping the whole way, they'll laugh at you for that). We also saw the Red Dzao people, who dress beautifully in red, and also try to sell you their products, but not quite as aggressively. We spent the night with the Dzay people. Barn yard animals aplenty: ducks, chickens (including several very noisy roosters), dogs and puppies, a cat, and of course water buffalo.
Our guide, Tung (means "pine") was so knowledgeable. He showed us the dried up Hemp plant which is a boom crop for the summer, but not for the reasons you think; they use the hemp to make thread (and we saw a woman working the hemp so it's true). He showed us some wild coriander and used it making soup for our dinner. He showed us the 101 uses for bamboo, but I'll let Mark talk about this. Also showed us the amazing ingenuity of these farmers. They really maximize their use of the water and land, including using water to run generators. They place their outhouses on top of the streams (smartly) to carry away waste. Our bathroom last night was a little bamboo hut over the stream with a hole in the middle to squat over. No running water other than the stream and no electricity except what is created by the small generator (which in our house was a bare light bulb, one in each room).
The whole experience was wonderful. The reason I wanted to come here was to see how the other half lived and now I have, to some extent. Having a nice hot shower today was a luxury I don't take for granted. So is good medical care...a lot of the kids had hacking coughs, runny noses, and possible eye infections. That said, they are definitely beautiful people, much more attractive than the folks we've seen in Hanoi. And they are extremely fit. They must be to hike through the mountains every day like they do.
The scenery should be mentioned as well. It's like the images on every guidebook for Southeast Asia and China, rice patties on hillsides with water buffalo munching away....Amazing.
At the end of our journey we were "adopted" by a kitten (like Katherine for Mom, Dad, and Susan). She begged food from us, she was just skin and bone...and after acquiring a full belly from "dropped" ramen, she took refuge on my lap and under my shirt. If we had found her in Atlanta there's no doubt we'd have a cat now.
I'd like to say more, but Mark is looking over my shoulder waiting for his turn to blog, so.......