The highway, the citadel, the forest

The Road

Road trips have always spoken to me. In Vietnam, that appeal is heightened by the fact that road trips invariably involve a motorbike – putting me closer to the countryside, more able to hear and smell the places I'm passing through. (The smelling bit is not always, believe me, a positive thing, but it is always what I would call an honest experience!) So, having a three-day weekend for National Day, I took a weekend road trip to visit the Ho Dynasty Citadel in Thanh Hoa Province, not quite 200 km south of Hanoi. 

I decided to rent a “real” motorcycle for this trip, instead of taking the trusty 100cc Chinese-engine driven putterer that I drive around town every day. What I ended up with was a Honda 250 something-or-other with dubious brakes and a sticky throttle (and, yes, a nicer seat). That was not my best decision of the weekend, but in fact the bike did perform reliably and just as you would expect from such a bike, I just didn't much like it, that's all!

Leaving Hanoi, we headed southwest through an interminable stretch of road construction dust and exhaust fumes. About the time we got free of the city traffic, we found the cut-off which would take us down to Ho Chi Minh Highway. A beautiful narrow road through fields and villages and, fortunately, past a chicken house with a large thatch-roof overhang perfect for taking cover from drenching summer rainstorms.

After awhile, though, we gave up on waiting and, getting properly soaked, we did reach Ho Chi Minh Highway. It was wide smooth and mostly empty – the best kind of road for a motorcycle with a power-to-agility ratio something akin to a Mack truck. (The whole idea that I find a 250cc motorcycle to be overly powerful tells you something about the kind of riding I normally do here in Vietnam - bobbing and weaving through traffic or tooling along on pot-holed country tracks!)

The Ho Chi Minh Highway takes its inspiration, if not its exact route from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the network of supply routes, traveled by foot, bicycle or truck, that the North Vietnamese used to deliver the necessities of war (and necessities of life too – those shouldn't really be the same things, should they??) to soldiers in the south. So the highway is a project which will eventually offer a more highland and hopefully less congested alternative to Vietnam's Highway 1A, the coastal road which runs the length of the country.

The weekend before this trip we visited the Ho Chi Minh Trail Museum, which is a bit outside of town and seemed largely deserted. It included a fine collection of rusting trucks, plus a bulldozer, sitting outside on blocks with signs in front of them with vital information like, for example, explaining that one was a Japanese-made truck which was given to the Vietnamese by the Cubans. Hmmm, a well-traveled truck indeed, and it looked that way too! After successfully ignoring the guy taking a bath in the sluggish stream out front, and waking up the guy in the back who called someone who roused the lady who was scheduled to open the door that day, we got inside the place. (Maybe calling to make an appointment would've been a good idea, but after a loud discussion in Vietnamese about how normal lunchbreak/siesta hours did not apply when there was a foreigner waiting to get in, the door was happily opened and the lights and fans turned on. The highlight of the museum was a large-room-sized diorama allowing visitors to look over the mountainous terrain of Vietnam (from Ha Tinh south) and the edges of Laos and Cambodia. Lines of coloured lights showed the many routes of the trail, as introduced by a video narrator. Three floors of displays covered the weaponry used and the items of daily life among the soldiers who worked on the trail – including a mandolin with its body reconstructed out of aircraft aluminum. I thought it was a pretty good museum, just outside the city and, at least on that day, totally empty of any visitors other than us.

This section of the Ho Chi Minh Highway was not really mountainous, but winding among the limestone outcroppings typical of the area. Being a pretty large highway going through an area with not that many major roads, it is fairly easy to follow this road. In spite of that, I did go for one detour, which got progressively bumpier and dirtier and hillier until I got suspicious about it being the supposedly brand new Ho Chi Minh Highway and stopped to check. After a cup of nước bột sắn we stopped heading toward Laos, turned around and found our way back to the highway.

Ho Chi Minh Highway cuts around the west side of Cuc Phuong National Park, and a half hour or so after going past the park we took a left turn, following a beautiful road running along the Ma River until we got the the site of the Ho Dynasty Citadel.

Ho Dynasty Citadel

The Ho Citadel, built in the 15th century, was briefly the capital of the Vietnamese nation. What remains today are the walls, in some disrepair, of a roughly three quarter km square citadel, with large stone “gates” in the center of each wall. Basically all traces of the structures inside the wall are gone, except for two smallish stone dragons with their heads knocked off. So the wall now encloses rice fields and lotus ponds (and two headless dragons).

The site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site earlier this year, and there is work underway now to put pavers on top of the south gate, I suppose to keep it dryer and avoid further deterioration, and to redo the roads under the gates, which are of course used daily by the people whose fields are inside the citadel. There is a bit of a museum, and we saw a few tourist buses. Thanh Hoa Province doesn't have a lot in terms of major tourist attractions, so this place getting UNESCO recognition was a big deal. I have to add, though, that the town just down the road from the citadel has a duck rotisserie place in the market that is definitely worth a visit!

   

We walked through the middle of the citadel, and around the edge on what appeared to be a newly paved pathway along the walls of massive stones. The walls are crooked and fallen in a few places, but most places they are more or less intact. The east wall of the citadel is lined by the backs of houses, some gaggles of geese, stray dogs, water buffaloes taking mudbaths, and banana trees and kudzu vines clambering out over people's backyard walls.

 

This is also the site of the headbanging temple. (Just relax and let me explain.) Binh Khuong, the lady to whom this temple is dedicated, had her name inscribed in history after repeatedly banging her head against a block of stone until there was an indentation in it just the size of her forehead, along with her hand prints. Her husband had been appointed by King Ho Quy Ly to build one side of the citadel, things didn't go well, and he was killed as punishment. (Maybe he neglected to read the fine print in the contract before signing on to that gig!) Like any responsible woman in Confucian society, upon her husband's death, Binh Khuong committed suicide, and the large stone with the evidence right there on it is inside the temple. Outside the temple, though, there is a lotus pond.

   

 

Cuc Phuong

When we were finished walking around the Ho Dynasty Citadel, we headed north toward Cuc Phuong, Vietnam's first national park and the nation's largest nature reserve. The road up to the park was beautiful, helped out by the fact that it was cool and cloudy that day. The day before we had downpour and then strong hot sun – I much prefer to ride in cool weather, even if it is drizzling sometimes.

First order of business in Cuc Phuong was touring the endangered primate rescue center, a collection of sleeping, leaping, scratching and eating furry friends. Well, they were not all that friendly, really, but still fun to watch. The turtle conservation center had some glass-walled tanks where you could watch turtles swimming around, some engaging and informative displays, and an outdoor area with different turtle species crawling or swimming around.

With the weather looking even more rainy the next morning, we rode the single road about 20km to the center of the park in the late afternoon before dinner. A single lane concrete track through the jungle, this road does give you a sense of smallness, as the massive trees seem to cover the road most of the time. There are these plants that look a bit like ferns, but they are like 8 meters tall. And my favorite, the giant leaf plant...

 

Halfway back to where the rooms and restaurant are, it started raining. The next morning we had a lovely and relaxed breakfast watching the downpour. With coffee. And extra toast, and another coffee, and it was still pouring like the plumbing was broke. Eventually it did slow down a bit, and we checked out and headed north through more beautiful countryside.

Had a bit of rain, a short piece of road construction (no road, really), stopped to buy some custard apples, bit of sun, bit of bánh đa (like rice crispies but it comes in big round pieces about the size of a large pizza) and nước mía đá (cane juice), and a short (but entirely too long) jaunt on Highway 5 traffic madness, finally passed the handful of Holsteins that I keep seeing around Phù Đổng and arrived back in Hanoi.

Winter Water and Woods

Winter in Hanoi, always surprisingly colder than the temperature would suggest, is not really my favorite time of year here. Too many days of dreary greyness and the kind of fog which somehow suspends large amounts of water at face-level, with the result that any movement such as, say, walking or riding a motorbike, renders both umbrellas and raincoats into largely decorative effects. In this season, a trip to the coast, the north coast where you would expect the weather to be much the same, didn't jump out at me as the best of ideas. However, as usual, the trip turned out to be a fine time. Lan Ha Bay and Cat Ba Island were quiet and only slightly chilly, a marked improvement in both scenery and the shiver factor in comparison to the weekend in Hanoi.

Above, the over-photographed but still amazing view from a high point on Cat Ba Island, of Whale Island and Bat Island. Can you guess which is which? It's funny, the urge to christen pieces of rock as animals, or sailboats, or foods, or profiles. I'm remembering a small shiny bit of stone in Luray Cavern called the fried egg, and a "Sleeping Ute Mountain" in Mesa Verde National Park. There are hundreds of these karst limestone islands in startling shapes in nearby Ha Long and Lan Ha Bays, and most of them come pre-packaged with names, just in case your imagination isn't quite up to the task.

Staying overnight at a 'floating village' was a first for me. Ha Long Bay cruises typically stop by one of these places for a seafood meal or a tour, but it was fun to spend more time on one. Part of Cat Ba National Park, the area we were in is controlled in terms of how much seafood harvesting can be done. The view above is looking over one of the on-board plants toward a cruise vessel passing in front of more karst limestone islands. Below you can see our hotel/restaurant. Yes it is floating on those blue plastic barrels which, in a previous life, I used to haul around filled with well-placarded corrosive chemicals. Naturally, I'm sure these ones were emptied, washed, dried and spitshined before they built this fish farm on top of them in the middle of a pristine national marine park.

I wonder if they make kayaks in earth-tone colors like seaweed green or Sahel brown? The first time I really looked at a kayak was somewhere along Rt 9 in southern Vermont, eating lunch at a roadside pulloff next to a lake and chatting with someone dropping his kayak in the lake and about to paddle off into the great blue yonder. So, having had only the briefest of introductions to kayaking (in any color) before this, I was glad to find these little ones very easy to handle. They really do glide along with surprisingly little effort and, in spite of being (just a wee bit) top-heavier than I once was, I succeeded in having a great time paddling among island cliffs and fishing boats, and kept the shiny side up the entire time. It gives you a great perspective on those abrupt island cliffs when you can paddle right up to them, or go into what ought to be a cave to come out the other end into a "lake" entirely surrounded by cliffs.

In the shot below you can get an idea what this 'village' looked like. The wooden walkways have nets hanging in between them for keeping track of the fish they raise, and they have some serious fish there - seriously big and seriously good eating. Our hotel was the yellow shack on the right. It kind of reminded me of a house trailer inside, although the bedside window, where you could look out over jumping fishes, did sort of remind you about the floating bit. Amidst all the islands, there were no waves to speak of and the fresh seafood dinner on the porch was nothing short of delightful. Any lack of evening entertainment was overcome by the village dogs, who were having a fine time chasing each other with great abandon around those walkways until the least lucky puppy fell into the ocean and had to be fished out, with an unmistakably sheepish look on his face.

From the seafood-laden floating trailer park on Lan Ha Bay, we moved to a lodge in it's own happy valley on Cat Ba Island, which is of course made up of more karst limestone mountains. Lots of opportunity for hiking around the area, you just want to keep your eyes open when passing the very impressive spikes (above) of the bồ kết tree. According to my dictionary, notoriously incorrect about such things, it is called in English the soapberry tree. I don't know what the tree below is called, in any language, I just thought it looked cool.

That valley was also full of litchi trees. Litchis are delicious, incidentally, bite-sized round morsels of refreshing juiciness. Also refreshing, delicious and sort of juicy, there were an exorbitant number of fresh bưởi just hanging out on trees all over the place. Pomelo, commonly called grapefruit here, are bowling ball sized and way more mouthwatering than their grapefruit cousins that I grew up avoiding. That's my opinion and I'm sticking with it!

And yes, Hanoi felt warmer when I got back. You should come check it out.

Trailing Another River

Just realized how long it has been since I posted any pictures here. Life goes on mostly in the same places, but I did get out of town not long ago for a nice wander and found some good photo opportunities.

Most of these shots were taken from the dike road along the Duong River just outside Hanoi. Actually, on Christmas Day, that's why you see all the snow and sleds about (just kidding).

This three wheeled "truck" was going back and forth hauling sand from a barge on the river up to a village on the other side of the dike. Vehicles come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations here, and they usually have one purpose-designed for the job at hand.

Corn above the riverbank. They do grow a great deal of corn around here, but there is rather more variety in the fields than in the corn-bean-alfalfa fields I grew up around.

There was a fair amount of barge traffic on the river. This barge cooperated nicely and I was all set up and ready when it cut through the sunset reflection.

This cheery message was not out by the river, but near my house in Hanoi, and it makes me laugh every time I look at it, which is good for me, and I thought it might be good for you.