Fleetwoods Circumnavigation

My forelast day to explore Hanoi. If this blog comes out a little garbled it is due to the hotel manager bringing out the rice wine, 45% alcohol. It tastes like Pear Schnapps. I am with two German couples. One from Muenster/Wahrendorf, the wife is from Gothenburg. So, similar to my twin brother who is married to a Swedish woman from Malmoe. And just to make the world even samller, the other couple is from near Hamburg and she used to be involved in politics in the town my twin brother lives, Reinbek. Margarite Hoffmann, Stadsraeter fuer die Gruene. And she knows Kueckallee where my brother lives. My first stop, on the bicycle, was the Temple of Literature ( Van Mieu ), dedicated to Confucius, was founded in 1070 by Emperor Ly Thanh Tong. In 1076, Vietnam’s first university was established here to educate Vietnam’s administrative and warriors class. Parts of the university date from this earlier time period although the large complex has undergone many changes over the centuries. But recent archaeological study indicates that the architecture of this site belongs primarily to the Ly (1010-1225) and Tran (1225-1400) Dynasties. The complex is in a tranquil park-like site in the heart of central Hanoi. The most important artefacts in the temple are the ’stelae’ , stone tortoise pedestals, which list the names and birthplaces of scholars who recieved doctorates.
Here is what I found on the internet on the oldest universities: By continent, the oldest universities are headed up by the University of Nanjing, in China, founded around 258 BCE. It was only formally termed a “university” in 1888, but it has offered education to Chinese without the issuance of formal degrees for centuries. Next, representing Africa, is the University of Al Karaouine in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859, followed by the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy, founded in 1088 by students who recruited instructors. Next stop the “Hanoi Hilton”, or Hoa Lo Prison. This is were a few hundred American pilots had free Hanoi lodging in the seventies. The best known of them senator John McCain, he was plucked outof the lake I showed on the web site yesterday, Truc Bach Lake. The third sight was the Quan Su Pagoda. Quan Su is one of the most important temples in Vietnam. Constructed in the 15th century along with a small house for visiting Buddhist ambassadors, in 1934 it became the headquarters of the Tonkin Buddhist Association and today it is headquarters for the Vietnam Central Buddhist Congregation.

After our Botoms up “Gian Van Chian!??” with the two German couples I ended up going for dinner with my three new French friends, Maud, Martine and her daughter Caroline, all three from La Rochelle. And a Bearnaise, Lea. Maud was born in Vietnam, and repatriated with her French father and Vietnamese mother to France when she was 5 years old.

I am sitting in the lobby of the hotel and the t.v. is playing the early eighties movie of the 4  couples who get together after a college reunion. I forgot the name but I remember the one song “Jeremiah is a Bull Frog”. Great movie, I saw it in the mid eighties with Joan Wildman.  And according to the printed text today’s epistle was from Jeremiah but on further scrutiny that was a printing/language error. The epistle was from Isaiah 1-2A, 3-8 “Here I am Lord”. And the Gospel was from Luke 5-1-11. The miraculous catch of fish on the lake of Gennesaret. I had expected that there would be a French service at the cathedral of St. Joseph, where I went to Easter service in 2006, in a French mass. But St. Joseph has only Vietnamese services. The English service at 10.30 a.m. was at Cua Bac Church. It was a once monthly children’s mass. Very few tourists because it is a distance from the tourist hangouts. Mostly ex-pats and Vietnamese English speaking wannabes. Nice service. Father Alphonsus Hung (same  as our Gig Harbor priest, father Nguyen Hung) Pham is the parish priest. Ugly church from the early 20th century, similar to St. Joseph. But it brough me to a part of the city I had not seen in 2006; near the presidential palace. There is the Citadel that was stormed by the French in 1882 and the garrison in the Citadel compound. On the grounds were several competitions going. The most unusual one was a contest of the best sing bird. As you will see from the photos there were at least 173 entries and they are judged for how well and how long they sing in a three hour period. It was just amazing to watch the intense expectations of the owners. I was told that these birds, they were all the same and in the same cages, are worth a small fortune. The other competitions were for bonsai and marble sculptures. It was just incredible how much the Hanoians were taking advantage of all these parks and events. I had to rent a bike and go back to the same area and see more of it. I rode down West Lake and Truc Bach Lake. Both were at least the size of Lake Washington in Seattle. Paddle boats, people fishing, restaurants, lovers relaxing on the banks, beautiful residential areas that reminded me of Lago Magggiore. Hanoi is just a great city to live and play in. Much more so than Saigon.  I also rode the Red River banks trying to find the same back alleys I remember from 2006. The below figures show some of the transformation the country is going through, getting ready for Tet. Women are busy planting thousands of fresh plants to liven up the parks and boulevards. The red Peach blossom branches and miniature Mandarin trees are everywhere.  I had more fun on the bicycle than all the guided tours I have dones so far. But I will do just one more guided day trip on Tuesday to go to the river of Tam Coc. I was trying to Google for the cruelty committed to the Redemptorist priest Nguyen Van Khai but most of the sites are blocked by the Vietnamese government. Please, make a point of getting this information. This is not a perfect world and we all need to be aware of what is still being shoved under the carpet as far as the the limited freedoms of expression in this country, China, Laos, Birma, Cuba etc.

Another stiff hike to the village of Lao Chai and Ta Vam. Roughly 20 people from our hotel were divided into groups of six each with a Hmong woman/girl as a guide. The as soon as we leave the gate each individually gets an unofficial Hmong woman/girl to walk the trek right alongside. They make sure that you watch for the dangerous spots and then at the end they expecvt you to purchase their handicrafts at outrageous prices. Most of these tribes ladies are from Lao Chai; they live here with the other mountain tribe the (Red) Dzao. The Hmong are usually nothing over 5 foot tall. The Dzao are nearly a foot taller, they wear the colorful red headdress. Today we went all downhill and then were picked up, after a lunch in the village, by the hotel bus to bring us back for an early dinner and the bus ride back to the rail station in Lao Cai. Our night train departs at 8.10 p.m. and arrives early Sunday morning in Hanoi.

Iris will take the night bus to Hue on Sunday and continue on via Hoi An, Dalat to Saigon. I plan to use the February 11 flight ticket from Hanoi to Saigon, that I had bought for both of us in early January. I will try and make a few trips in the Hanoi area and then we will probably meet up on the 15 th in Saigon when Iris flies home. I have seen Hue, Hoi Ann and Dalat in 2006.

I had never seen a train in Vietnam in this or any of the previous visits. There was the usual confusion getting on the right platform and the right train. The train was made up into 12 cars, a baggage car and a wagon for the light motor bikes. We shared a 4 bed sleeper compartment with a young Scottish couple. The berth was hard but we all slept reasonably well. The train left right on time at 5 minutes to 10 p.m. and arrived at 6.30 a.m. It was another 25 k.m. bus ride to the hotel where we could clean up and get breakfast. The hotel has a superb view of the valley and the mountain ridges the highest peak is above 10,000 feet and they get an occasional dusting of snow. The aboriginals here are the Black Hmong and there a couple other ethnic minorities here. They all wear colorful embroidered traditional dress and silver jewelry. The women and girls hawk their handicrafts in a rather aggressive manner. The men leave you in peace. But don’t we always? After breakfast we took a serious hike down to Cat Cat village. The air was crisp, morning clouds were drifting low over the valley, the smells of cow dung and wood fires made it feel like I was hiking on a fall afternoon in the Alps. The pink peach blossom branches are being gathered now and shipped to Hanoi and elsewhere for the Tet celebration. The terraced rice fields are now barren in the dry season but a sight to see in a few more months when they change to a bright green. Tomorrow we go on an all day hike and have lunch in the valley.

We are back in Hanoi to take the night sleeper train to Sapa. The sun tried to burn through the mist and low clouds while we rode the tour boat back from Cat Ba Island to the mainland. We said our good byes to the varied groups we had met on the buses, hotel and tour boat.

We are on our three day tour to Ha Long Bay. The bus picked us up at our hotel early Tuesday morning and were transferred to our tour boat at lunch time. There were thirteen of us on the boat. A young English couple, three young Poles, Didier and Caroline from Bretagne, Andre Marcel, third generation French Vietnamese, with his nephew and two more of his friends and young Austrian lady. The tour boats all look the same, a two levels boxy wooden structure on the hull of a traditional fishing vessel. The junk sails are strictly for decoration and only a few of the skippers even bother to set them at anchor. The lunch and the presentation in the dining room was well done. Our first stop was at a set of caves. We had seen enough caves and stalactites and stalagmites in Laos. Most of Ha Long Bay is now protected as a national park and the signage and trails are not as rugged as those in Laos. Our next stop was at Tip Top island. It has a good view from the light house on top of the island. At dinner time our tour boat dropped anchor and dinner was served. Andre entertained us after dinner out of his bag filled with tricks, magic and mind games.  The poles got us all involved in another fun game. We were lucky to be in such good company and able to have a good time together not withstanding the language differences.
We had a nice twin bed cabin with a hot shower. I got up early hoping for better lighting for pictures but it stayed overcast and misty. Just like the time when I was very near to Ha Long Bay when I was in Haiphong on “Fleetwood” in 2006.
We raised the anchor, had an excellent breakfast and headed for Cat Ba Island. This is the largest island and has a good size port city and is rapidly developing into another tourist destination. It also is partly set aside as a national park. We rode bicycles to another cave. An elaborate three level hospital and training center was built into this mountain cave to be safe from American bombings. Lunch and another launch took us to Monkey Island. This was an idyllic spot. White sandy beaches, monkeys , kayaking, swimming and a scenic climb over the top to another beach. We are staying in a hotel here on Cat Ba island and will have another sightseeing event, on the way back to the mainland, in the morning before returning to Hanoi. Then we take a sleeper train to Sapa where we will spend two days and then return Saturday night to Hanoi on the train.
I had been looking forward for many years to see Ha Long Bay but it did not quite stand up to my expectations. It is unique but the almost mystic imagination I had from the photographs and the movie “Indochine”, with Katherine de Neuve, did not happen to me. And it will get even busier and more commercialized. But the Vietnamese government is missing a real opportunity by not letting us cruising sailors put Ha Long Bay on our cruising itinerary. There are wonderful protected quiet anchorages and
Ha Long Port and Cat Ba island would make excellent provisioning destinations.  

Dining room on our tour boat in Ha Long Bay

In the nearly 4 years since I last visited Hanoi the tourist count has at least tripled and this is the drawback to many places we have seen, Angkor Wat in the worst way. Unless you get up at the crack of dawn it is nearly impossible to avoid the crowds. We followed a prescribed walk from the Lonely Planet tour guide through the old quarter of Hanoi and we found ourselves in the company of several other groups following the same route. The narrow streets are now too crowded to do it by bicycle, which was still possible in 2006. After the Old Quarter with its specific trades, like metal workers, herb vendors, jewelry stores and silversmiths, etc., we circumnavigated Hoa Kiem Lake, visited the temple on an island in the lake and then watched the water puppet show. This show was amazing. The puppeteers and their orchestra have performed all over the world. This is an ancient form of entertainment. Originally the puppeteers stood waste deep in the rivers or lakes  behind a screen to manipulate the puppets from under the water surface.  Tomorrow we leave early for Ha Long Bay. Iris removed a small tick from my back, this afternoon. It had not burrowed very deep yet and I am hoping that it did not carry any nasty pathogens. Not sure where I caught it, most likely in Laos.

We are in Hanoi. We would have liked to have spent more time in Luang Prabang but our options to get back into Vietnam turned out to be very limited. The bus service, that I had planned on from Vientiane to Vinh,  in the NorthCentral part of Vietnam, turned out to be fully booked with the large Vietnamese community living in Laos returning to their ancestral homes for the Lunar New Year celebrations. And  at the very best if we would manage to find a place we’d be transported in a mad house of Vietnamese stuffing their boxes and bags in every conceivable  cavity. So we had a choice of flying to Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and we grabbed the last two seats on today’s flight to Hanoi at $ 150 each.
Then another surprise awaited us at the check in counter. My multiple entry visa for Vietnam expired yesterday. I had paid for a 90 day Visa but never bothered to check the fine print. Iris also paid for a multiple entry Visa but to her chagrin discovered that they had issued her a 30 day single entry Visa. So we both ended up having to buy another Visa, with express service Sunday surcharge, of $ 90 each….. We rented bikes again to see a few more parts of Luang Prabang till we had to head out to the airport at 2.30 p.m. First we toured the temple grounds of the Xieng Thong temple grounds. This was built in 1560 as an ordination hall for the coronations of the kings of  Laos when Luang Prabangwas the capital before it was changed to Vientiane. Much of the interior and exterior are elaborately decorated with gold leaf . Next visit was across the river to a village where silk weavers, carvers, etc. sell their handicrafts directly from their work shops. On the way to the village we asked our way to a young couple wo turned out to be from near Grouw in Friesland; Iwan and Miriam de Jong operate a marina http://www.sneekerhof.nl/ and adjacent vacation bungalows on Sneeker lake. I had been looking for just such a set up for when my children are to come and visit this summer. So, they might have run into a potential customer in Luang Prabang. After we got the visas sorted out we were off to Hanoi. I was amazed at the extensive Teak plantations near L.P. in the hills we flew over. From the air, just as they appeared along the highway to L.P., the trees looked kind of sick and dying but I just read on the internet that Teak drops it foliage in January/February. The bulk of these plantations were started in the eighties and they all appear to be of a similar size. We found a good hotel in the old quarter of Hanoi, where I had stayed in  2006. Iris, being in the travel/hospitality business herself got us set up for three day is Halong Bay and two days in Sapa and then we bought an open bus ticket from Hanoi to Saigon, where we can make 4 stops of our choice and timing, which we plan to use to see Hue, Hoi An, Nhatrang and probably Dalat. We will try to sell our flight tickets from Hanoi to Saigon on the 11th now that we ended up travelling south from Hanoi instead of up from Central Vietnam.  

My patience paid off, I had to search for a vantage point making an educated guess where the moon might rise over the surrounding hills. So here you have it the moon set on Friday and the full Blue Moon rise this evening. I am waiting for Iris to come back from her 7 p.m. Buddhist service. There is no Catholic mass here. I rode shotgun in the mini bus from Vangvienand got lots of good roadside shots of the magnificent scenery. The road wound through valleys and up and down mountain ridges. This is mostly Mong tribesmen country. Women carrying heavy loads in the hard whicker back baskets. Lots of Teak plantations and the clear cut pock marked mountain sides. Luang Prabang is even more romantic and idylic  than the expectations I had from the travel guides; wedged as a peninsula where the Mekong forks into another branch. We rented bikes and it is a delight to see all the old colonial style buildings and Buddhist temples and monasteries. Lots of very inviting eating places along the high river bank. A lot more class and style than Vangvieng, it reminds me of places like Carmel, California or de Cote d’Azur. The hotels are dearer, we are paying $15 here.

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It is early Saturday morning. the moon has just set behind the mountain range to the west of the valley Vangvien lays in. Today is the second full moon in January in the eastern half of the time zones. Just in case I do not get a good shot of the moon tonight in Luang Prabang, the below picture will have to proof the point. Yesterday we spent the day on the river canoeing, swimming and hiking up to two different caves. The landscape is spectacular. These hiking trails would be totally prohibitive in the USA under a paid guide service. We wormed ourselves through holes in the caves, descended slippery slopes, climbed rickety ladders. Besides the guide, Om, we had one more Cambodian young man, Vishna, in our 2 man kayaks. Om had brought a shishkebab and rice lunch that he cooked over a charcoal fire on the river’s bank. The rapids were mild but a few of the group ahead of us managed to get dunked. The second cave had been the hiding place for about 2000 townspeople during the Pathet Lao fighting. A few of Om’s relatives had been fishing and we were invited, at the end of the afternoon, to sit and taste the small fries and wash it down with the local rice whisky.

The travel guide for Vangvieng writes that you either love or hate this village. At one time the spectacular scenery and hiking possibilities made this a quiet paradise but the word got around and now it has become a passing rite for the 18 to 25 crowd, mostly from Australia, England and US. And the Lao have found out what they like, cheap lodging, drugs, loud music, floating in inner tubes with a bottle of Lao beer. And lounging in the hotel lobbies and bars watching American soaps for a good part of their vacation. But all this “decadence” still made Vangvieng a highlight of the trip, so far.

We are off to Luang Prabang on a 6 hour bus ride.