#6: Hué

I've gotten bored of posting about Vietnam, so I'm skipping a chunk of the trip and this will be my last entry.

From Hoi An, we took a 3 hour bus ride across the Sea Cloud Pass (a mountain pass from which one can get a terrific view... thus the name) to Hue. Hue was the capitol of Vietnam back in the 1700s. The city was founded by the Nyugen Dynasty on the northern bank of the Perfume river in central eastern Vietnam. The Perfume River, Hue

The city was severely damaged in the 1968 Tet Offensive. However, there are still tons of temples, pagodas and tombs that have outlasted war and modernization. By the time we made it to this last leg of our journey we'd gotten a bit more travel-wise, realizing that the crowded tour buses were not a pleasant way to see the sites. Instead, we found a random Vietnamese dude in a bar who worked part time giving motorbike tours (each tourist has their own motorbike driver and just hangs on), rented our own motorbikes, and offered him a few bucks to lead us around in his free time. The catch: ah, you've got it! Joyce doesn't know how to ride a motorbike. Of course, there was the brief midnight lesson from Christina in Mui Ne. Luckily, Vietnam could care less if you have a bike license, a helmet, an ID... anything. They just want your $3, and will hand you a bike for a day. So off I went, swerving through the bustling streets of Nam, with cyclos, cars, rickshaws, cattle, pedestrians and other bikers on all sides. Terrifying, yet fun (though of course, no where near as fun as riding with the Boozefighters!)

The sites we went to were all pretty far outside the city. So we had some nice rides along country rice paddy roads (below, a photograph of rural Hue from the museum at the Japanese bridge). You haven't seen a pothole 'til you've been to Vietnam. Let me just say that.
One of the stops on our moto-tour was the most famous tomb in Hue: emperor Tu Duc (above). Tu Duc is not actually buried here. When he died, they buried him and all his treasure in a top-secret place. It was so secret that all 206 slaves who buried him here were BEHEADED. No one ever found Tu Duc's real tomb, because everyone who knew where it was died. Bad planning.
Above, a lake temple at Tu Duc's, and the mandarins that guard his tomb.
Here is a lotus flower floating on a pond outside a pagoda.

We stopped at a conical hat and incense making village on the way home. I talked to the woman making the hat in this photo about her work. She said it takes her an entire day to make one hat. But she makes 2,000 sticks of incense a day as well. One of these hats costs $1.
So, that's it for Vietnam! If you want to see more photos, just let me know and I can send you the link for my online album.

From Mui Ne, we took an 18-hour sleeper train to Hoi An. The train was quite entertaining. We passed the evening away playing a rowdy game of dice with fellow travelers in the restaurant car. When the train ran out of beer very early in the evening, it was amusing to watch our new dice-playing Austrian friend attempting to communicate to travelers on the platform outside the train windows that we would give them money and they should run buy us beer. Despite his best attempts, train travelers remained beerless. Probably because the only people on the platform were a bunch of Vietnamese teenagers who fell into fits of hysterical giggling when the large white foreignor within banged on the window and started shouting `BIA! BIA!` and gesturing furiously.

My Son (according to the Lonely Planet) was the most important Cham intellectual and religious center in the ancient Kingdom of Champa. My Son is the smaller counterpart to other famous Indian-influenced civilizations in Asia, like Angkor in Cambodia and Bagan in Myanmar. Champa was a kingdom that existed in the middle region of what is today Vietnam, and which warred with the Vietnamese to the north and the Khmer to the south, if memory serves me. My Son was occupied from the 4

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

#4: Mui Ne

12.27 - 12.29

After the Delta, we got on an open-bus and headed 5 hours north east, to Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a pretty quiet beach/resort area with a lot of interesting natural phenomena to visit nearby. These have come about due to Mui Ne`s unique micro climate. Mui Ne has only half as much rain as surrounding areas, and it is home to giant sand dune fields that work some kind of climate control. Mui Ne is surrounded by fishing villages (above is a shot of traditional Vietnamese boats. I saw people fishing in them, carrying vegetable loads, etc. Seem to be multi-purpose boats). In Mui Ne, we spent our days doing several important activities:

1. Eating

As you may have guessed, much of our entire vacation was spent eating. But I feel we did remarkably well for ourselves in Mui Ne and Hue especially. We tucked in like there was no tomorrow. Mui Ne is also where we first really began to discover the joys of Vietnamese coffee. Coffee in VN is made through a tiny metal filter that sits atop your cup. The cup has about half an inch of sweetened condensed milk spooned into the bottom before the coffee starts brewing. Then, the very strong espresso drips out on top of the milk. The whole concoction is too strong for most westerners (or too sweet, if you make the mistake of stirring vigorously) so many westerners request a glass of hot water on the side, to dilute it. So delicious.

2. Chillin

Though we had one day of hardcore tourism in Mui Ne, mostly we were just chillin'. There were beaches, there were palm trees, there were motorbikes for some (Christina), and ice cream for others (Jenny). I got a midnight motorbike lesson from Chrissy but most of my bike riding occurred in Hue. I probably would have killed myself there if it hadnt been for this sole midnight lesson. The VN guy`s teaching method was `ok now get on! here is brake, here is gas, GO!` not much discussion of gear shifting or other important driving skills. Hm.

As I mentioned before, Mui Ne hosts some amazing giant dunes. There are two groups: the white dunes and the yellow dunes. We hired a private jeep and driver for a day, and got picked up at the unfortunate hour of 5.30am in order to arrive at the dunes to see the sunrise.

A little kid from the house nearby climbed the dunes with us, carrying some plastic sheets that would serve as our sand sleds. Sweeeeet, sand sledding on giant dunes. This was my favorite activity on the whole trip. The dunes were very steep and very high, and if you threw yourself down right, you could build up tremendous velocity flying down to crash in a puff of sand at the bottom. If you had good balance (as the little kid did) you could dune-surf, but this was above and beyond my abilities. I wish we could have sledded more! Though walking back up the giant dunes wasnt anything that anyone would describe as fun.

After that, we hiked a bit in the Red Canyon (it is very red, as you can see in the photo). The cow picture I took out the side of the jeep. We kept getting stopped by herds of cattle moseying down the highway. Our driver, Ty, does not look impressed in the glimpse you can catch of him in the side mirror. After the canyon we were supposed to hike to see a waterfall. The only way to get to the waterfall was by walking upstream in a shallow river for about 20 minutes through an interesting white/red rock terrain. The falls were thoroughly unimpressive, but the river-hike was neat. Last but not least, we drove up to the peak of the peninsula to visit the fishing villages (above). Hundreds of boats dotted the water and shore. It was nice to get away from the touristy resort area and see how the VN people lived their day to day lives. Below are some more shots of the fishing village.

#1 Saigon/Cu Chi

#1
12.24-25 Saigon/Cu Chi

We arrived on Christmas Eve in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. The 2 weeks of our trip happened to be the top tourist season in Vietnam out of the whole year. Saigon was packed with whities. The Vietnamese were certainly trying to accommodate their Christian visitors in the backpacker quarter where we were staying. We roamed the streets wide-eyed, as xmas tunes blared from bars and flashy Christmas trees and gaudy decorations oozed from every crack and cranny. Somehow the pleasant summer weather, palm trees, and thousands of whizzing motorbikes didn't fit with the Christmas decore.

On Christmas day we decided to forego holiday cheer. Instead, crawled through the secret Viet Cong tunnel system at Cu Chi (Cu Chi is not the best place to do this, in case you are planning a trip to Viet Nam yourself. The Demilitarized Zone would be a more authentic experience). After a few hours bumping along the back roads of Vietnam (this phrase will be repeated through out the tale of our vacation. Many an hour was spent bumping along in buses) we arrived. It was a sobering experience.

The Cu Chi tunnels, 45 miles southeast of Saigon, are 75 mile-long underground maze of tunnels, composed of three levels. This was one of the most famous battlegrounds of the Vietnam War. The tunnels were the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam's base of operations for the Tet Offensive in 1968. During the war, this area was declared a "Free Fire Zone", meaning the Americans just blanketed it with bombs and agent orange in attempts to root out guerillas, killing thousands of civilians and destroying everything (as usual) in the process. Walking down the paths in the woods, you have but to glance right or left to see massive bomb craters, 40 years later.

Before you visit the tunnels, you are herded into a room by a soldier, and under a portrait of Ho Chi Minh, showed a video of real war footage from Cu Chi. As bombs fall in waves, villagers run for cover and Viet Cong shoot back on screen, the narrators voice speaks:

"Cu Chi, the land of many gardens, peaceful all year round under shady trees ... mercilessly American bombers have ruthlessly decided to kill this gentle piece of countryside ... Like a crazy bunch of devils they fired into women and children ... The Americans wanted to turn Chu Chi into a dead land, but Cu Chi will never die."


Trap doors leading to the tunnels are hidden under leaves, with separate mechanic opening mechanisms a a few yards away. In the worlds of Wiki,

"The tunnels were used by NLF guerrillas as hiding spots during combat, as well as serving as communication and supply routes, hospitals, food and weapon caches and living quarters for numerous guerrilla fighters... American soldiers used the term "Black echo" to describe the conditions within the tunnels. Life in the tunnels was difficult. Air, food and water were scarce and the tunnels were infested with ants, poisonous centipedes, spiders and mosquitoes. Most of the time, guerrillas would spend the day in the tunnels working or resting and come out only at night to scavenge supplies, tend their crops or engage the enemy in battle." The thought that people actually lived in these tunnels was hard to grasp. Babies were born in these tunnels. In fact, our tour guide tells us casually, the young woman we had seen serving coffee a few minutes ago was born inside the Cu Chi tunnels.

To protect from the enemy, the tunnels were kept pitch black, and dotted with hidden traps doors leading to spiked pits and other gruesome deaths, the placement of which Viet Cong and villagers had to learn by heart. Though widened for tourists, the original tunnels were tiny holes, through which the smaller Vietnamese could crawl. Western tourists would never even fit into the holes, and even entering the widened holes was a horribly claustrophobic experience. I didn't make it to the 2nd or 3rd levels, I had to leave.