Ngày Xưa

I was just reading an article about Kashgar which was reminding me of my brief time there. So I put up some pictures and comments from back in the day, to see them click here.

My Pink Slip

I sat on the front step for awhile, waiting for the guys from the moving company to show up. My neighborhood in Saigon is so quiet. Interesting, because everybody says that HCM is so much noisier and busier than Hanoi, yet living in a small alley there I’m always somehow startled to see that, while in the morning there are a handful of coffee and breakfast soup stalls on the alley corners, in the afternoon the place is dead quiet. Good spot for me! Anyway, the guys from the train station came and we had the prerequisite conversation going: Hi, are you the guy moving to Hanoi? Why are you speaking Vietnamese? Where are you from? How long have you been here? How old are you? Do you have a wife? Why not? After exhausting that topic we are back to the subject at hand: Why do you have such an old motorbike? Is this all the things you are moving? After we were officially acquainted, he filled out a form saying something like “Blue Honda, old, many scratches, one helmet, one box of cotton”. Giving me a crumpled carbon copy of that form, my pink slip, he drove off, precariously balancing the large, fragile cardboard box full of books and clothes (passing for cotton) on the back of my motorbike. I put my pink slip in my pocket and hoped it wouldn’t rain before he got to the train station.

Upon arrival in Hanoi, I moved into my next room and went about enjoying the cool weather. The cool weather was, incidentally, accompanied by rain and humidity of the type that leaves the question ‘Is it raining?’ superfluous, as the same amount of water is floating around in the air regardless of whether or not it is raining. Three days of enjoying this left me with a nasty cold from which I am still recovering. My room is serving me well I guess – it has art and some character, which is nice although that doesn’t quite make up for the utter lack of sunlight and fresh air.

After two days I went to the Hanoi train station bearing my carefully preserved pink slip. Upon presenting it at the office there, I sat and waited awhile. And engaged in a few more of those prerequisite conversations… I guess I was a little early. They sent me across the tracks to the little shack where all the working guys were having tea, and those guys sent me to a rickety green rail car off in a corner where a guy with a green hat was lounging across a couple crates smoking a cigarette. He looked at me, a little annoyed, and pointed over to the passenger cars. I explained that I was picking up my motorbike and a box sent from Ho Chi Minh City, and he took my pink slip and wandered aimlessly around the inside of the rail car, full of boxes and crates of all sizes, kicking one here and there and reading numbers. After heaving my box out the railcar window he found my motorbike, completely wrapped up in bubble-wrap and box tape. I gave him $31.46, and walked outside the station and bought a plastic bottle full of gas to drive home on - they had drained the tank. My cardboard box, somewhat rounder than before but still in one piece, balanced nicely on the back. The bike apparently didn’t mind the slow train ride, and I got rid of my pink slip.

The Road Home

A short video of the labrynth of alleys one passes thru on the way from the real road to Ong Noel in my room.

Cao Dai Temple

Weekend on the Road

Hopping on my motorbike and going somewhere else always sounds like fun to me, so last weekend I went to Tay Ninh Province, north of Ho Chi Minh City sticking up into Cambodia. One thing I never learned to like about Saigon is that it takes like an hour of driving through traffic, in most any direction, before you get somewhere that looks like countryside, where you can breathe the air and hear things other than traffic and karaoke joints. In any case, after awhile you get out of the city and the driving gets more fun.

Probably the most famous place in Tay Ninh, with a firm position on the tourist routes from Saigon, is the Cao Dai temple. I am no expert on Cao Dai, but clearly somewhere in the code is something like “Thou shalt paint everything hot pink, baby blue and sweet corn yellow.” The temple is a riotous presentation of color, dragons, and all-seeing eyes. Apart from the visually arresting aspects of the temple, the music they played during prayers was fascinating. The religion is syncretic, the three main saints are the founder Ngo Van Chieu, along with Sun Yat-Sen (Chinese nationalist leader) and Victor Hugo (French author).

Nui Ba Den is a classic Asian mountain destination experience. I was remembering the first mountain that I climbed in China – the crowds of people, the squawking bullhorn-toting tour guides, the concrete steps going all the way up the mountain, bare flourescent bulbs hanging everywhere, the rickety cable-car option, the trail lined with plastic chairs and ramshackle shelters selling drinks, snacks, incense, palm-reading, knick-knacks and the omnipresent coconut carved into a monkey. Nui Ba Den was not so crowded. It was, however, raining and getting dark so I neglected to go to the actual top of the mountain. Shh, don’t tell anyone!

Khu du lich Long Dien Son, nearby, provided a bunch of animal statues, a lake with paddle boats, and a good cup of coffee. The road home was nice, came by Hồ Dầu Tiếng where you can get a nice hammock for buying a glass of sugar cane juice, went past a lot of rubber forests which always fascinate me, and eventually made it safely back to HCM through the hour of traffic to my house!

Concrete Fish to Rubber Forests

The Lotus