More ‘lost on a motorbike’ photos

One more day of wandering the countryside. Today I went southeast from Hanoi, roughly following the Red River. It was easy not to get lost that way – there is a road following the top of a flood control dike, which you can see from far away so I found my way back without a problem today. Unlike Saturday, when I spent two hours getting from Tam Dao back to Hanoi, then two more hours getting from the Thanh Long Bridge part of Hanoi to the ‘my house’ part of Hanoi. Darkness and large trucks and light-absorbing pedestrians and ox carts stuffed and overflowing with bamboo and elbow to elbow crowds of traffic and testosterone driven racer bikes … Well, I did get to ‘see’ some parts of Hanoi that I don’t think I have seen before. Anyway, I was talking about today.

First, here is the obligatory water buffalo photo. They are kind of far away, not a great photo, but water buffalos are my favorite large slow farm animal here so I had to take a picture anyway!


























Here you can see a ‘field’ of lotus. Lotuses. Loti. Whatever. Aside from being an important symbol in Vietnamese Buddhism, lotus flowers are sold fresh, used to make medicine, and most importantly, you can put lotus seeds in che. Mmmm! The area behind the lotus is a cemetery.



A cathedral on the delta. There was no one around so I couldn’t go inside. Catholicism has been around in Vietnam for a long time. I am always fascinated to see the similarities in iconography between the cathedrals here and the pagodas (Buddhist temples). In any case, the grounds outside were very nice.


























The road, following the dike, gave a nice view of everything else which was flat like a pancake. Well, flat like Indianapolis, maybe I should say.




And finally, the Red River itself which is of course brown. There seem to be a lot of these barges/houseboats on the rivers and canals here. They are quite big, as you can tell when they are empty and have six or eight feet of the keel between the water and the deck. Anyway, that is my day at the river. I may not be able to go play along the Susquehanna, but I can keep busy!