Vietnam Travelogue – Week Two

Below is a recounting—with recommendations and admonishments—of our second week in Vietnam. It is perhaps a bit long, but rolling into our third month of Covid-19 cease travel orders, we seem to have plenty of time on our hands and are starting to go a bit mad. We’re hoping that you are in the same boat—not going crazy, of course, just that you have time to peruse the account of our travels at your leisure.

Do you still remember what it was like to go wherever you wanted?

February 24 Nha Trang – Da Nang

Panic. Chris thinks we should be hours and hours early for every plane and train departure. Holly errs on the side of being five minutes late. We usually compromise by getting to the station a half hour out. This time, Holly won, and we scraped into the station roughly at leave time.

Exacerbating our mounting anxiety, no clear indicator told us which train was ours, or which track it would be on. Not a lot of English happening at this station, nor any helpful conductors in matching uniforms. There are only four tracks, however, so we figured it couldn’t be too far away. And there are no silly stairs to travel up safely over those tracks; you just kind of walk across them, which, I suppose, is a huge time saver. Maybe the fact that all the people in the station were sitting quietly and motionless should have tipped us off—the train just hadn’t arrived yet.

We then realized that for all of our rushing, we still had plenty of time. So we bought provisions. Snacks aren’t interesting in their own right, but this time they were interesting because we are pretty sure Holly got scammed in the receipt of change, paying 500,000 instead of 50,000 for five hard-boiled eggs. The numbers sound higher than they are, but I’m pretty sure the seller swindled her out of eighteen dollars—which is super annoying.

I should mention that this was the first time someone scammed us out of money (that I know of) since we were in Prague in the summer of 2009. Ah, Prague.

Anyway, eventually the train arrived, and we boarded with our overpriced eggs. It was lamentably not as shiny as our first Vietnamese train from Saigon. We also fell victim to our penchant for postponing booking tickets until the last minute, which led to perches spread across five top bunks in three different compartments. Oh well, after nine hours of books, podcasts, and window-staring, we arrived late at night to the medium-bustling metropolis of Da Nang.

In comparison to the luxury experience of Nha Trang, our long-awaited hotel was sad. I booked it because the name rang a bell. Unfortunately, it rang a bell because of a critical article about lousy hotel chains. In the morning, we moved to nicer rooms—ones with windows that opened to air rather than brick walls and fiberglass insulation—and we enjoyed the buffet breakfast with views of the river, served by a friendly staff. It wasn’t all bad.

February 25 – Da Nang and the Marble Mountains

Cranky. In the morning, we went around the corner to perk up travel-weary souls with some fancy coffees and teas. The boys tried sweet pea tea, which, like a chem lab lesson on acids and bases, turned from pretty blue to pretty purple upon adding lemon. I tried a charcoal coffee, which was blacker than black because of the not-so-secret ingredient and turned my mood from pretty tolerable to pretty nauseous. Chris was happy with his cappuccino.

However, this inauspicious beginning to our day contrasted sharply with what lay in store at the Marble Mountains. Five hunks of rock rise like massive, ancient guardians along the coast just south of Da Nang. They are alive with greenery and, even more marvelous, centuries of human reverence carved right into the stone. We chose Water Mountain (each is named for one of the five Chinese elements) and spent most of a day meandering under, over, and through its many paths and caves.

We are used to exploring caves that are being preserved and offered up in their natural state. In the Marble Mountains, by contrast, the caves are living temples. Descend into their dark depths to see scenes of demons from hell. Then climb the dazzling stairs that elevate you past thousands of little Buddhas toward the light from the heavens above. The result is breathtaking.

At the sight of the giant Buddha, whose meditative stillness was illuminated by shafts of light streaming in from ground level and stirred only by curling smoke of incense and vibrations of deeply resonant mantras, I wept. (That’s Holly talking, of course.)

These caves, combined with the shrines, the temples, and the hiking trails to the summit where you can see the ocean and feel the breeze, make the Marble Mountains one of the most beautiful landmarks we have ever visited. How had we never heard of this place, with its awe-inspiring synergy between natural beauty and human craftsmanship?

For untold generations, locals have been delving into these hill-sized dollops of marble and turning out beautiful carvings. We saw the obligatory Buddha statues and Virgin Mary statues. We saw eagles and wild boars. We also saw a nearly-life sized statue of Cleopatra. The price was very reasonable considering what you were getting, but Holly reminded me that a five-foot-tall stone statue of the Queen of Egypt would not fit in my backpack, no matter how pretty she was.

Point of interest—people are no longer allowed to quarry the marble mountains as they have become too important culturally and touristically; the local artisans now bring in marble from elsewhere.

Go to the Marble Mountains. Allow more time than we did and see them all. Buy a Cleopatra statue if your wife will let you.

February 26 – Food, food, food in Hoi An

Lemongrass. Pound to release flavor, tie in a knot (green ends removed), roast in a dry pan until it is just seared, and put on top of the boiling curry. Or, after removing the green, pound the bottom to remove the pith, chop very fine, and soften by sautéing in oil before adding to a dish.

Today in Hoi An I went to a cooking class! First, a visit to the market where I learned that taro root has a leaf like an elephant’s ear, free-range chicken has white skin instead of yellow, shrimp are fresher when they have translucent shells, and you can sauté silkworm pupae after extracting them from their cocoons. I also made friends with a basket of ducklings.

Trendy experiences like cooking classes are common in Hoi An, as it is one of Vietnam’s most popular tourist destinations. It used to be a port of great importance, where traders from around the world gathered centuries ago, once a year, for an international exhibition of tantalizing foreign goods. They’d rent a room above the local restaurants and feast on Hoi An’s special noodles—distinctive because they are made with the local well water, and the lye of ash collected from tiny islands offshore (they tasted like regular noodles to me).

In the 17th century, though, the silt from the river mouth made the port impassible to big ships. Now all shipping heads up the coast to Da Nang. (Not even the train tracks reach Hoi An.) The only vessels bumping about the river these days are those that take tourists for romantic rides, or, as in my case, to one of the remote residences in the delta for a learning experience. In the cooking class, my teacher taught me, Adrienne (from Hungary), and Rico (from Germany) how to make lemongrass curry and green papaya salad.

February 27 – Exploring Hoi An

Hungry. This town died when the river silted up but is now resurgent with tourist dollars. As a result, there are endless expensive tours for the tourist. And perhaps because all the Korean and Chinese tourists had been banned from entering the country, it felt like our family was supposed to pick up the slack. We couldn’t walk two meters in any direction without someone asking us to buy something—a boat tour, a personally tailored suit, a mango, a meal, a leather bag, a bag of peanuts, a cheap toy, a cheap lantern to float on the river—it was an endless gauntlet of declinations. The more we resisted, the more they persisted. Finally, I got to feeling so negative that we decided to stop saying “no” and start saying “thank you” instead. It worked!

We did say ‘yes’ to a couple of things. The first seemed almost obligatory—a history tour. Hoi An boasts a collection of old structures and houses that open a window on the city’s past as a cultural crossroads. Chinese, Dutch, and Japanese traders had communities here, and organizations like UNESCO have worked hard to preserve their heritage. You buy a ticket and choose which of a series of old houses to walk through. The experience honestly wasn’t super engaging, but it felt good to respect the preservation of history.

The second ‘yes’ was a big one, an impulsive one, and the best decision of the day. I took the boys to the circus. This is not your run-of-the-mill collection of acrobats and contortionists. It was an immersive experience of Vietnamese culture, a story of both past and present.

Bamboo Circus was the apt name of the show. The building itself was shaped like a giant bamboo basket, and the actors used bamboo in a myriad of shapes and sizes—balancing on it, throwing it, hiding under it, flipping over it, rowing in it and more. The uses for bamboo (much like real life) seemed endless. We were captivated. Live traditional music, transformative role-play, thrilling feats, inventive humor (ever seen anyone play ping pong in slow motion with a hairdryer?), and emotive set and lighting design… I was on my feet, both laughing and crying by the end. (That was Holly, again.)

February 28 – The Road to Hue

Clay. Cold, heavy, and sticky. Wet your fingers, keep the pressure steady and smooth—one hand on top, one on the bottom. Now, carefully work your way up and down… I think that’s what we would have heard if we understood our teacher’s Vietnamese instructions.

On this day, we had an extraordinary bit of luck in finding a pottery class for Leo. He’d been dreaming of the experience for months, and the pottery village in Hoi An came to our aid. Like much of the historic town, it is a protected site. It functions as a working guild of artisans and a place for tourists to engage with the local style of pottery making.

From Leo’s journal:

To spin the wheel, you kicked the outside. I volunteered, but they didn’t let me; instead, they let Mama and Papa do it. (I have to admit, that sounds like prejudice against children.) What they let me do instead was [shape the] pottery, which beat kicking a wheel by a lot! Then we hopped over a couple of stalls to the spot where you make whistles. I decided to make a cat called Narkhon, after the cat in the book Papa is reading to us at night. I added wings from a [toy] dragonfly. I took her for Grandma, but I dropped her on the way so she would never play a note. Still, I’m grateful I thought of giving Narkhon the Flying Cat to Grandma.

The scenery surrounding our train trip to Hue was a delight. We saw a spectacle of sloping jungles careening into the sea, never dammed by human hands. Then we passed water buffaloes, rice paddies, and fishing nets suspended high on poles as though ready to catch a trapeze artist falling from the sky. I could have done without the faded blue Santa Claus decal stuck to our window, but all told, this was by far the most scenic of our Vietnam travel legs.

We arrived in Hue in the evening and stretched our legs with a stroll along the ironically-named Perfume River to our beds. Vast parks! (Sponsored by Korean and Japanese governments.) Enormous trees for shade! Walkways separate from the whizzing roadways! Clean public restrooms! Hue was showing itself to be quite an attractive town.

I crossed my fingers that we did not book one of the many fancy hotels that lined the river. We’d stayed in quite a range of places in Vietnam already, from the luxury spa in Nha Trang to the businessman’s room in Da Nang, to the family guesthouse in Hoi An. I was hoping for something a bit gritty and personal. Chris found just the place! It was a hostel on a walking street filled with restaurants, just across the river from the Imperial Palace.

February 29 – Exploring Hue

Palatial. The Imperial City of Hue was built in 1804 to be the seat of Nguyễn Ánh, now ruling over a unified Vietnam. The design borrows heavily from the Forbidden City in Beijing and covers some four square kilometers ringed by a ten-kilometer moat. And from there, the Nguyễn Lords ruled for about eighty years before the French imposed their Protectorate, at which point it began down the path to becoming a tourist attraction.

I confess that we were a bit languid because of the heat and did not explore every nook and cranny of this impressive imperial complex. But I want to remember the striking (even whilst fading) shades of red and yellow lined with cobalt blue, the opulent throne gleaming gold against the dark wood interior of the emperor’s reception room, and the deafening roar of cicadas in tall trees that shade brightly flowered gardens.

From here, in preparation for our trip across the border in a couple of days, we went to the bus station to secure our tickets to Savannakhet, Laos. No dice. The northern station wouldn’t sell them to us. This after much internet research and turning down our hostel’s offer to make the travel arrangements for us. Fast forward just a little; we ended up taking a taxi to the southern station the next day to successfully buy tickets there. On the day that we finally left, our bus departed from the southern station, ironically stopping at the northern station on the way out of town. Oh well.

Quite hungry, we then entered the low part of the day—the part where I suggested that we just get a bit of street food for lunch, knowing we had big dinner plans just a few hours hence. The stall I picked offered a great twist on Vietnam’s classic baguette sandwich—pumpkin and sweet potato, which she caramelized with garlic. The smell was heavenly! However, it was a long process, and we were wilting in the sun on little plastic chairs next to the noisy road and some ear-splitting construction work and stray dogs peeing on stray garbage. There were tears and stomps—eventually, even the kids got grumpy… The sandwich was really good, though!

March 1 – History

Sad. This was a hard day. We came to Vietnam to better understand the story of the war—the “American War” as it is called in Vietnam—and on this day, we dug deep.

There are tours of the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, that depart from Hue and last up to twelve hours. We opted for half a day, which was more than enough to make a painful and lasting impression.

We started by walking across the Hien Luong Bridge. This is a rickety metal structure that draws a pencil line across the 71st parallel, the division between the northern and southern halves of Vietnam. The towns on either side of the line are regrowing, but photos from the not-so-distant past show a landscape like the moon. It’s a familiar sight all throughout Southeast Asia; America dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the war.

We entered the museum on the northern side of the river to take in the damage here. These photos will haunt me. A father burying his wife and five children. Children firing enormous weapons from the ground to wipe the bombers from the sky. Children without arms and legs, photographed as recently as five years ago—victims of unexploded bombs and landmines left by the US military.

We drove on to the Vinh Moc tunnels, an underground network of passageways and caves, dug by hand to harbor an entire village from the nonstop explosions. Dug initially to a depth of ten meters, the villagers went deeper as bombing became more intense, eventually creating three levels, thirty meters deep. Ingeniously designed and built into a hill, the tunnels allowed drainage and ventilation through their hidden openings to the sea.

Mothers gave birth, soldiers were healed, meals were prepared, classes were held, strategies were laid—all in tiny spaces carved into the dirt. Over a period of six years, the US released 9,000 tons of bombs on the sixty families sheltering in the tunnels. Not a single villager died.

A video introduced us to the story. I cried when they showed children singing in the dark to keep their spirits up. Then a guide took us through the three levels underground. The tunnels are black and winding, too cramped to stand up in, too twisted to remember where you are and how to get out. Did families really live here for six years? On this day, we were the only people down there. Quiet as a tomb. And yet, the message of the video is one of indomitable will to live against impossible odds. It left us without words.

March 2 – Reflection and Recuperation

Revival. After yesterday we needed some reflection and recuperation. We sought both at some of the lovely cafes that Hue has to offer. In a bid to practice independence and take advantage of how friendly and safe the town is, we gave each of our kids a couple of bucks and sent them off alone to seek the fruit smoothie of their choosing while writing in their journals.

We parents did the same, finally trying a Vietnamese Coconut Coffee—and yes, it’s as good as it sounds. Watching the world flit by, mostly on motor-scooters, it was hard to see this place as the inheritor of the seventies and all of the tragedy that we had seen.

When the heat of the day passed, still processing the juxtaposition between past and present, we booked a boat to tour the river and see the Thien Mu Pagoda. Originally built in 1601, this striking pagoda sits atop a hill at a bend in the river and has been watching history go by for more than four hundred years. The temple behind it is beautiful, with bonsai trees, gardens, and young monks playing shuttlecock as deftly as kung fu masters. The sun was setting and the scene so peaceful, a healing antidote to witnessing troubles of the past.

We strolled pleasantly through the grounds smiling at the passersby. And then the weight of history bore down again. Behind the pagoda, polished and proudly displayed, is a blue classic car. That’s odd. Why…oh. This is the car in which Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức rode to Saigon to light himself on fire to protest the policies of the Diệm regime in 1963. There are two photos: a man meditating while engulfed in flames, the blue car behind him; and a black mass resting high on a glass pedestal, his heart that would not turn to ash.

And so, Vietnam lives on.

It’s somehow so hard to reconcile the world in which someone would be driven to such an act with the kids playing soccer in the grassy field or the beautiful courtyard that draws one to stroll and enjoy. And so, I guess, life goes on.

We returned down the river as the sun set, casting a lurid glow over the water.

March 3 – Bus to Laos

The border. Maybe not everyone arrives in Laos sitting on boxes of frozen shrimp, but we sure did.

First, let us say that there are numerous ways to get from Vietnam to Hue but not as many as you might think. The two countries share a long border, but most of it runs through mountains and less populated areas. As such, there are few border crossings. For reasons that seemed wise (but ended up being futile), we chose to cross from Hue to Savannakhet.

We didn’t travel to the northern part of Vietnam because—this being the Spring of 2020—there was evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the northern reaches of the country, close to the China border. We now know, of course, that by the end of February and the beginning of March, when we were in Vietnam, that it was pretty much everywhere in the world already. Oh, well. Our trip to Vietnam was great, truly a staggering array of experiences crammed into two weeks. But to do over again, we would have continued to the well-famed northern part of the country.

Instead, we cut across the middle of nowhere on a crowded, smelly, and crowded bus. Did I mention it was crowded? It didn’t start off crowded. We arrived early-ish and grabbed some seats in the back-middle of the bus, placing our bags on the plentiful empty seats behind us. We sat near a young french couple, and a few seats away was a retired Canadian gentleman. The rest of the bus was full of locals who didn’t speak any more English than I speak Vietnamese. We smiled, waved, spread out, and started reading some books.

One might be inclined to sit in a half-empty bus and wonder about the economics of such a venture—how can this be profitable? There are so few of us, and we paid so little for the trip. Perhaps the return is better attended. Or maybe we’re just getting started…

Five minutes later, we stopped and took on some more passengers, then some more five minutes after that. Then we took on some cargo, carried item by item to the back of the bus. A couple more stops brought some big bags of something. Then the scooter: this should be considered as an Olympic event, and if it were, these men would earn a gold medal every time. Looking out my window, I wondered about the ladder that appeared against the bus in what was beginning to feel like the hundredth cargo stop along our way. Then two men—wearing flip-flops—began to climb opposite sides of this very narrow ladder while pulling up a full-sized motor-scooter by the handlebars. Amazing.

Anyway, we were beginning to understand why my navigation system thought that this trip should take five hours, but everyone said it would take eleven (spoiler alert, it took twelve). On our last stop before the Vietnam-Laos border, we finally lost our spacious seats completely—and we lost them to boxes of frozen shrimp. Previously, the five of us were spread out over six or seven seats. Now, all three boys were squeezed into two seats. I was squeezed next to the large Canadian man who hadn’t showered any more recently than I had, and Holly was sitting in the aisle atop boxes of little crustaceans.

And that is where we were sitting when our driver bribed the customs official…

At the actual border, it seemed like a drama but turned out not to be. As foreigners, our process took much longer than anyone else’s. Our driver came to talk to me while I was poring over three forms for each of the five of us, a glue stick, passport photos, and a pen that was running out of ink. He made hand gestures that might have meant, “I’m going to look for food in your luggage; buy a scooter, and find your own way home.” They actually meant, “We’re going to eat lunch while we wait for you; I’ll come to get you on my scooter in a little bit.”

It was all weird but worked out just fine. Finally, we arrived at the bus station, excavated our backpacks from under boxes of shrimp and bags of something or other, over-paid for a tuk-tuk, and started to explore Laos.

If you made it this far, congratulations! See you soon for more tales of Southeast Asia…