Vietnam

Leaving Hoi An on Thursday morning, we finally seemed to out-run the rain at Whale Island which is slightly north of Nha Trang (where we will stop in a few days on our onward journey towards Siagon – still 450 kilometres or 280 miles away). When we planned this trip, two days on a sandy, palm-lined beach with nothing more than a couple of novels and a rum cocktail seemed like a great idea. But neither Lloyd nor I ‘beach’ very well, so it was a godsend that this tiny resort has a pretty decent dive operation in ‘Rainbow Divers’. With just the two of us on board, we set off both Friday and Saturday mornings with a crew of three to explore a couple of local dive sites.

Our dive boat. The diving wasn't great, which is a bit of a paradox given that this is allegedly where Cousteau got the idea for scuba-diving equipment!

Wish we could report that the diving was spectacular, but it wasn’t. Consistent with Lloyd’s pre-trip research, the visibility was poor (from 3 to a rare maximum of 30 feet!!), and there just wasn’t that much fish-life around. One reason is the illegal practice of dynamite fishing which is still – tragically – commonly used here. Our first dive of the day exposed a ‘ fishing’ team in action, with dozens of fish either stunned or killed by the blast. Happily, we weren’t in the water when the team detonated, but when we surfaced we found ourselves bobbing among two fishing boats collecting their bounty.

Can you find Kermit?

On the bright side, the water was bath-tub warm, and the variety of corals was impressive. We saw some lion fish, the longest sea-cucumbers I've ever seen, a tiny shrimp, and interesting nudibranchs. I wouldn't come back to Vietnam just to dive, but it’s always wonderful just to get back in the ocean again, and these dives were intended as little more than a warm up for Papua New Guinea in a few weeks. Lloyd, of course, can’t be kept out of the water once he’s in it, and continues to confirm my suspicion that he’s part-man, part-fish.

The resort itself offers basic, thatched bungalows just a few feet away from the beach. Constructed in part of bamboo, each bungalow is also home to any number of exotic beasties, including snakes, spiders and scorpions. A mosquito net over the bed was enough to reassure me that I wouldn’t be sharing the sheets with anything too unsavoury (other than Lloyd, of course), and we used our own net to prevent any stowaways climbing into our bags and shoes. Meals on the island are included in the room rate, and of the set menu variety. That has perhaps been our least favourite part of our stay here, with the food simply paling in comparison to the wonderful meals we’ve enjoyed throughout our time in Vietnam.

The tree frogs chorused through the night which kept us awake, and was louder than the sound of the ocean lapping on the shore. But we can't compain. Enforced rest is always good for us even if we don't appreciate it at the time! But we're looking forward to finally getting to Ho Chi Minh City, which we will do on Monday after a Saturday overnight in Nha Trang and then a Sunday overnight train.

We arrived in Hoi An on Tuesday after an easy four hour drive from Hue to news that Vietnam (along with Libya) has been elected to a two-year rotational membership of the UN Security Council. You’ve simply got to give this Communist country its due: as recently as 1989 it was dealing with a nasty border skirmish with Cambodia, and less than twenty years later it has embraced some form of capitalism in the form of ‘doi moi’ and aggressively targeted improved international relations. Vietnam's temporary membership of the UN Security Council, a hotly contested honour, is another sign that the international community is impressed by Vietnam’s efforts. Congratulations!

Not that anyone in Hoi An seemed that bothered. Hoi An used to be a port of major importance to Vietnam, but that business has since moved to nearby Danang, leaving Hoi An almost entirely reliant on tourism. Practically every one of its 16th to 18th century houses is a restaurant, café, tailor or souvenir shop. On the plus side, we once again were able to enjoy terrific Vietnamese/French cuisine. But on the other hand, we were sharing this UNESCO Heritage site with thousands of tourists: this is not the place to attempt an intimate cultural experience!

The good, the bad, or the ugly? Note the old lady's beetlenut-stained teeth.

The closest we came was a quick stop at a local beauty salon for a haircut. We’ve been looking for somewhere with electric clippers since India as Lloyd didn’t fancy offering his neck to an unknown entity with a very sharp straight razor. Finally finding clippers in Hoi An, we strolled into this salon and were literally stormed by four young Vietnamese women. Lucky for Lloyd, only one targeted him and got to work on the most uneven haircut ever. In the meantime, I was overwhelmed into a chair by three ladies who – before I could object – were filing the nails on three of my four limbs. Within the space of five minutes, I had – according to our final bill – enjoyed a manicure, pedicure, face massage and foot massage. In practice, I left looking a lot worse than when I walked in, and felt anything BUT relaxed! The upselling on Lloyd included the world’s worst head-massage, and would have included a shave with a rusty razor had I not physically intervened to prevent it. But it was all in good spirit, and even with the $9 bill for a $2 haircut, we had to laugh at the experience. Well, I laughed at it. Lloyd will probably start finding it funny in about two weeks when his hair grows back.

The Butcher of Hoi An with her latest victim

Unless you’re looking for relatively inexpensive custom-tailoring or would enjoy the quaint architecture, we wouldn’t recommend a stop here, but we embraced our two nights nonetheless. In central Vietnam, the wettest season is just a few weeks away, so the locals are gearing up for a couple of months of flooded streets, but the sight of boats sailing up streets and motorbikes swimming through five inches of water is still something of an oddity to us.

As a nickname for my cat Tammy, a visit to the Tam-Tam Café was a must, and we would highly recommend the Vietnamese/Continental restaurant and patisserie The Cargo Club where we enjoyed a couple of meals overlooking the flooded streets of Hoi An.

Note the partially submerged benches. Six hours later, the benches were completely underwater.

At the Tam Tam. I'm holding Tammy's name tag, which has travelled with me every step of our journey so far... And an old picture of the real Tam Tam distracting me from studying way back in May

Perhaps the highlight was a cooking class during which a local chef taught us how to make six local dishes of our choosing: prawn spring rolls, fish in banana leaf, spinach in garlic, coconut shrimp, squid in sesame seed and chicken pho (noodle soup). The spring rolls, made with fresh onion, carrot, turnip and shrimps, were absolutely gorgeous (even if we say so ourselves!) and the chicken pho will likely appear on the menu at our house in the future, as will the others items in some modified form. It was great to learn how to use many of the staple ingredients of Vietnamese cooking that have formed the bulk of our meals in recent weeks: sesame oil, oyster sauce, fish sauce, lemongrass, and vegetable stock powder! No doubt our Vietnamese menu will prove to be one of our favourite souvenirs when we’re back in the Bay Area.

Views of our cooking class. It's notable that we ate each one of our six dishes before we remembered to take pictures of them.

The clothes we had 'tailored', however, will be lucky to end up back in the States at all. Lloyd had two suits and shirts made-to-measure (as is the vogue in Hoi An and what thousands of European tourists bus in to do daily), but apparently his measurements were confused with Quasimodo. Either that or one tailor made the right side and another one the left as the suit fit Lloyd perfectly on only one side! Nonetheless, we were pleased to have had the quintessential Hoi An experience of rushing between 'fittings'. And we're sure there are very good tailors here. We just failed to find them!

After months of travel, most under at least partly sunny skies, the rain has found us! The wet season is arriving in central Vietnam, and as we rolled out of Hanoi on Saturday, the rains began. We moved by overnight train from Hanoi to Hue (pronounced 'Hway'), a former capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty from 1802 - 1945, just south of the de-militarized zone (DMZ) of the Vietnam War. We’re old pros at overnight trains by now, but it was great to add the Reunification Railway, which connects Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the south, to our collection.

Hue is about half way to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) from Hanoi. While we were greeted by a partly sunny day on arrival in Hue, central Vietnam’s skies opened up to show us the force of monsoon: flooding in the streets; dark grey skies; strong winds.

If Hanoi is a hip 20-ish young trend-setter, Hue is his old stodgy uncle with the over-sized empty house but thankfully a decent cook. The town is a UNESCO heritage site but we could have come to Vietnam, skipped Hue, and not really missed anything (in our opinion). Our time in Hue consisted of a visit to the Citadel and a stormy day on the Perfume River. While recent history recalls Hue most famously for the battle there in 1968 during the Vietnam War, our time focused on local and more dated attractions.

The Citadel is the primary attraction in Hue, and with 65% destroyed mostly by the French but more recently by the Battle of Hue in 1968, several buildings have been renovated and offer a glimpse of what life might have been like as an Emperor. We experienced our last Vietnamese sunshine at the Citadel (for the time-being!) and cyclo’d our way back to our hotel. With the onset of monsoon-type weather, roads turned into rivers and we practically waded (I wish I was joking!) to dinner at La Carambole where we enjoyed nine mini-courses of fine Vietnamese cuisine.

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Our boat trip up the Perfume river (rather slowly, as the monsoon flow was quite strong) took us Emperor Minh Mang’s tomb and Thien Mu pagoda dating from 1601 and which – if you’d ever heard of Hue before today – might be the image you have in mind. The tomb offered us the chance to get acquainted with Vietnam’s recent royal history, enjoy the Chinese influenced architecture, but most of all experience monsoon rains in the outdoors!

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The pagoda housed a monastery with connections to the Vietnam War via an old car, used by elder monk Thich Quang Duc to protest the South Vietnamese government’s treatment of Buddhists under the Diem regime by immolating himself. The car he drove to the site was loaned to him by a monk from the pagoda’s monastery, where it now resides as a memorial to the monk’s sacrifice.

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A water lily posing for us just in front of the Thien Mu pagoda

Hue was, perhaps, our least favorite stop in Vietnam so far and, in retrospect, we wished we'd spent the time visiting the DMZ (the demilitarized zone). But we left Hue with high spirits despite the weather. Vietnam's impression upon us still seems watertight!