From Sapa to the Crappa

Sapa and Ha Long Bay definitely rival one another for most beautiful places in the world. I can't decide which wins, but they both definitely top the list. Our four-day "Homestay and Trekking Adventure" in the Northern Mountains went off swimmingly--figuratively and literally. It was an amazing time. All-in-all, we hiked about 35km through the mountains over three days, staying in hill tribe villages for two nights along the way.

The hiking was intense. Some of the up-hills definitely put my rather-out-of-shape father (His sizeable belly created a bit of a stir on our travels, and the best comment has to be the motorbike taxi driver that pointed and said "Like Buddha.") to task, but we all made it through. It started raining the first night we were out, continuing intermittently through the second day and night. By the end, we were all connoisseurs of mud, which comes in a surprising number of varieties in the mountains of northern Vietnam: there is the red sticky clay, which which coats your shoes and everything else, but has the advantage of sometimes being too sticky to be slippery; then there is the black sticky mud-clay, which is both slippery and coating; the brown mud-sludge is child's play, it splashes more than it sticks, and a simple spray with a hose will get it off; the charcoal gray clay must be respected, however, as it will quickly build into 6-inch platforms on the bottom of your shoes, the one advantage of which is that once you stop trying to scrape off the extra ten pounds of foot baggage, you find that the shoe extensions can actually create portable steps for going down the steep inclines if you position your foot properly; I could go on.

Of the five people in the tour group, I am proud to say that I ended up the cleanest, not falling on my ass until our final decent, which was basically 1.5 hours straight down a mountain side, more mud skiing than walking. Slogging in a line through a muddy, narrow mountain path, surrounded by palms and bamboo, and growing gradually soaked as my sweat and the drizzle communed with one another, I felt like I was truly in 'Nam. The perennial diatribe of John Goodman's crazy Vietnam vet character in The Big Lebowski--"I didn't watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to..."--kept running through my head, and I hoped that I wouldn't be watching any of my buddies do the same.

Our final homestay was in a Black Tay village, a tribe closely related to the Thais of Thailand and the Lao. I paid 15,000 dong (about $1) to have the youngest son run to a neighbors house and get a 1.5 liter water bottle filled with homemade rice vodka. One other member of our group, my father, our guide, the father of family we were staying with and his eldest son, and I sat up until the wee hours drinking the rice vodka and smoking the thuoc lao, a wooden bong that is used to smoke strong tobacco in massive doses (anyone who knows my father knows that he was not partaking in the thuoc lao, as he would die). Communication was slightly awkward, as the family spoke only Tay and Vietnamese and my father and the other group member spoke no Vietnamese, but I think a good time was had by all. One of the village water buffalos had fallen off the road in the rain and died, so everyone in the village had purchased some of the meat and was up late eating it and partying. We were served some of said buffalo, which was delicious. Once we went through the jug of wine I purchased, the father brought out the half liter that remained of his own brew, and we polished that off as well. The only awkward moment was when our guide looked over to me as he was lighting the thuoc lao for the woman from our group who was joining us and started telling me in Vietnamese how he thought is was terrible when women smoked and drank and that that was why he could never marry his English girlfriend. Embarrassed, and lacking the language skill to really engage the topic, I just kept repeating "Van hoa rat cach nhau"--"The cultures are very different."

We arrived back in Hanoi at around 5am yesterday. After a long nap, we did a little touring, and then met up with Tu, my tutor from when I studied here. I wanted to show my dad a quintessential Vietnamese Bia Hoi night, and we did it to the nines: 23 beers, one plate of salt-coated shrimp, a plate of chicken intestines and ly flowers, and a massive lau, which is basically the same as a hot pot. We got the mixed lau, which comes with a hot plate of boiling broth and vegetables and a variety of meats, greens, and noodles you cook in the broth. Our meats included beef, fish, snails, eel, chicken, pig liver, chicken liver, beef stomach, chicken intestines, and a gallbladder and pool of blood of unknown origin. It was all delicious and/or interesting, but, unfortunately, I think we treated my father to his first bout of welcome-to-Vietnam diarrhea, and our touring today is limited to brief sprints of site-seeing, with frequent "rest" breaks back at the hotel.

My dad headed back to the hotel after dinner, but Tu and I went out for a night on the town. He took me to Ho Guam Xanh (Guam Lake Green), a club that normally has live rock, but we were lucky enough to show up right after a visiting South Vietnamese pop star took the stage. (OK, so it sounded like karaoke to me on the way up the stairs, but this guy is huge.) I just realized that one very important detail that I forgot to include in my account of Nathalie's visit is that we were sitting in the bar car on the train from Saigon to Da Nang when a Vietnamese music video was being filmed, and we were asked to serve as extras. Basically, we were supposed to sit at our table and talk, ignoring the spiffed up dude sitting next to me, lip-synching a ballad to the camera. SO, this being my second brush with Vietnamese celebrity, I was able to play it cool, but I couldn't help a breathy giggle when he came around to our side of the stage and grabbed the hand I reached out (following the lead of Tu and the two girls sitting next to us) and gave me a little point and wink.

After the club, Tu said he wanted to take me to a traditional Vietnamese wine house. We took a cab across the city, finally stopping in front of a small alley on a street I have never seen. Walking down the alley (it was 1am at this point, way past Hanoi's bed time), we reached a door advertising karaoke, and I had a moment of panic that Tu had brought me to a brothel. The reality proved much weirder than that, however, as the door opened onto a dark room, empty except for a woman sitting at a bar in the corner, below a television set playing the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down with Thai subtitles. Most of the floor was taken up with a slightly raised hardwood platform, empty except for an antique baby carriage in the middle WITH A BABY ASLEEP IN IT! To the left, one wall was covered with a weird string spider web, adorned with three large, carved, wooden shields, and something like a bust. The other wall was blank except for a bunch of large signatures, graffiti'd in marker. Tu and the woman had a sort of whispered conversation that I barely understood, and she led us over to a stack of short, Japanese-like tables in the corner, putting one on the floor and instructing us to sit around it. Seeing my baffled expression, Tu explained that this was an all-night wine house, very popular among local artists. Apparently, it is normally packed, but was sort of closed today because the woman had just given birth and her husband, also an artist, was on a trip to the south. However, Tu was a good customer, so she promptly served us a bottle of a black wine purported to cure stress-induced anger, unwell greenness, and a whole bevy of other ailments I couldn't translate. I was still thoroughly confused by the situation, so I did the only thing one could do: I drank up. Tu and I caught a motor bike back to my hotel around 2:30am. The door was chained with a bike lock, so we had to knock and yell until we awoke the bellhop sleeping in the lobby, who very cheerfully opened up the door, retrieved Tu's bike, and ushered me to the elevator. I love Vietnam.

I just realized that nearly every post on this blog mentions excessive drinking in one way or another. Um, sorry, mom. Hopefully the intense cultural experiences attached to nearly every instance are coming across too...

So many things

I just finished a marathon week of travel from one end of Vietnam to the other with Nathalie, and I am getting ready for another mad rush with my dad. I am not even sure where to begin with last week, it was all so incredible. Nathalie and I met in Saigon. We were there for slightly less than 24 hours, so we didn't see a whole lot. I did like Saigon a lot better this time than I did before, but it's still a little too glitzy and crowded for my taste. While it is definitely a Vietnamese city, it seems westernized and modernized to the point of basically achieving generic city status.

The highlight our time there was probably the little street girl who came up to us in a restaurant trying to sell books. She asked if I wanted to play a game: first person to win ten rounds of rock-paper-scissors wins. If I won, I got a free book; if she won, I bought a book. I agreed, and then won a narrow, 10-9 victory. Of course, she was none-too-anxious to give me a free book, and she knew that I wasn't going to press the issue. I tried to compromise, asking her how much she had to pay for them and that I would buy one for that, but she refused ("No way, Jose!"), so we called it a draw, and there was no exchange.

From Saigon, we took the overnight train to Da Nang, and then a car to Hoi An. The train was fun. We arrived to find that our four-person sleeper cabin already contained five people--two women and two small children--but everyone was quite friendly and the kids were quiet and cute as hell, so the ride went well. We spent a night in Hoi An, a beautiful little river town, before flying up to Hanoi.

It is interesting to see someone see Vietnam for the first time. Arriving at night, Nathalie thought Hanoi looked like Paris. The city is full of tree-lined boulevards and lakes, and summer heat means that the streets blow up at night with walkers, bikers, loungers, and performers. Under the light of day, the city is distinctly more third-world, but it still maintains a sense of culture and character Nathalie seemed to find missing in the number of other Asian cities she has visited in the last month. There is almost a sense of validation in having other people find appealing and exciting that which is special to you, so it was great to see her find something special in Hanoi. I felt the same way when my dad arrived yesterday. He jumped out of the cab totally enthused, talking about how much the traffic, and general sense of the city, he saw as he drove in reminded him of Sicily when his family moved there in the 60s.

The geographic highlight of my trip with Nathalie has to be Ha Long Bay. No matter how many times I see it (this was trip 3), riding a boat through the green bay, surrounded by weathered limestone peaks that spring abruptly from the water, never fails to fill me with a sense of complete awe. We slept on the roof of the boat, under a nearly full moon that was bright enough to cast the islands into stark black relief against a navy sky, but not so bright that it obscured the three shooting stars I saw before drifting off--the first ones I've seen in my life. I woke up already sweating from the sun that was just peaking over a mountain, but was able jump immediately into the bay.

My dad and I leave for Sa Pa tonight on the overnight train. We are going to do four days of trekking through the mountains and valleys (hopefully more valleys than mountains), staying in the homes of various ethnic minority (VN government's term, not mine) villages, before heading back to Hanoi for a couple days. More to follow.