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.

Bite-sized Sunshine

For everybody out there enjoying that snowy season – take a good look at these pictures. Hopefully you can glean some vitamin D from them... Ridiculously small, fairly cheap (if you are friendly to the ladies selling them), and jumping-up-and-down sweet, these things are addictive. I'll give you some, but you better get here fast!

Mei you yisi

I'm afraid this is going to be a very random and unorganized post, nothing new about that I guess. How about Castro?! Two stories, about the same event, from somewhat amusingly opposite perspectives. The parade in Havana commemorating the beginning Castro's revolution was attended by Vietnamese officials. From Vietnam News, the story on celebration and mutual memories I think, Vietnamese toast Cuban President’s birthday, forces. And from the BBC, Ailing Castro misses Cuban parade.

I have never really had much fascination for studying or experiencing communism just for the sake of it. I guess I grew up at the very end of the Cold War in a very sheltered place and was just never that fascinated by it. However, I have been to three of the remaining five nominally communist countries (China, Laos and Vietnam - I expect Cuba and North Korea are somewhat less 'nominal' in their ideology) I get a lot more news here, on the opposite side of the world, about Cuba than I ever did in America, all of 90 miles of Gulf away. I wonder if you can buy Cuban cigars in Vietnam? I wonder if Fidel knows about the Che graffiti in Hanoi's old quarter?

It has actually been cold here. The paper said 16 C yesterday. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit but I am voluntarily wearing long sleeves, and actually used my jacket today - for the first time I used my fleece that I carried from America. My fleece bought in Labrador, Atlantic Coast Canada, where in August it was probably colder than this. I do miss home sometimes. But photos like this help me get over that feeling! It might be cold enough here for me to shiver while riding my motorbike, but I don't miss the ice and snow. I can't afford to snowboard anymore anyway!


Today I went to my first ever Vietnamese wedding. I mean the first time I've ever been to a Vietnamese wedding, not 'my' first one. The idea of me ever having any kind of wedding is scary enough without calling it 'my first' one! Anyway, someone who is I think, an acquaintance of an acquaintance got married today. An early morning (for Saturday) van ride 50 k out of town to a village, a large tent with tables full of food, a lot of noisy people and noisy events, a few crystallized moments of comprehension separated by long periods of 'well I am here so I may as well eat and drink since I can't understand what's going on...' All in all, not a bad strategy, I think. Actually it was a good time to talk with the group of people I went with, even though I didn't really follow much of the ceremony, that was quite short anyway. The food, local rice wine and tea was worth the trip!

Ski Colorado

The road less traveled… and here’s why

Notes on the pickles one finds oneself in when, having completed a semester in Shanghai and having mastered at least eleven Chinese words, one decides to go to Tibet.

So there I was, trying to get out of Tibet.

First, I thought I would fly out, since the only other way is some crazy bus... But my judgement was unusually over-optimistic after my best night of sleep ever in Tibet. Altitude sickness is generally worse at night, resulting in long periods of blackness, breathlessness, and the unexpectedly psychedelic Tibetan design on the ceiling of my rented room doing unexpected things. Did I mention that you can't sleep? So I decide to buy a bus ticket.

Sleeper bus from Lhasa, Tibet to Golmud, in the Qinghai province of China, whose only claim to fame is that it is where you get the bus to Tibet. A sleeper bus, for anyone fortunate enough not to know, is kind of a misnomer to begin with, but I guess the idea is good. You have three rows of beds, two high, in the bus. I was on top, in the middle row, and at the front of the bus. The bed is wide enough for me to lie down on and hang my arms down both sides, not wide enough in plain words. And long enough for me lie flat in if I skipped my head and neck, which is to say, not long enough. What holds you on (since I was in the top bunk) is two little steel bar loops that stick up beside my knees. Which might work if my knees were flat on the bed, which they aren't because I have a head and a neck that take precedence over my knees. So hanging on is a bit like snowboarding blindfolded - all work and no fun.

Anyway, this bus was kind of amusing for a couple hours. I practiced my Chinese a little with the few Mandarin speakers on the bus. Then we stop at a fairly scenic spot for lunch. Lunch over, the bus doesn't start. So they play with it, spraying starter fluid in the engine which is right in front of my ‘bed.’ Crowds of curious and helpful people stand around watching them spray starter fluid (flammable) and smoking cigarettes (great idea!) So the bus smells not only like cigarettes, but like gasoline and starter fluid as well.

The bus still doesn't start, and we are towed by a little overgrown pickup truck and try to kick-start it. Yes really. That doesn't work either, so this guy tows the bus 20 miles or something to the next town where there is a garage. The pit crew tears a carburetor (I think it was a carburetor, but I'm not sure - it was too cold for me to tell) off an old truck sitting beside the road, and installs it in our bus. It still doesn't start. So somebody has to come out from Lhasa with more bus parts, which takes awhile.

In the absence of anything better to do, we all go to sleep in this bus that smells like various unpalatable highly flammable fluids and cigarette smoke. This was January. In Tibet. January in Tibet. I had on three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, a shirt, a sweatshirt, a fleece, my North Face coat, and my hat, plus a nice big blanket that came with the bus. I was not too cold, except for my feet, which I kept waking up without. The scarf that I was breathing through had ice on it when I woke up and my water bottle was frozen. Eventually the bus was fixed, and at three AM after about twelve hours of no motion, we began to move again.

The worst part about the bus trip was not the altitude, although we were up to almost 17000 feet. It's not as if there was anything to do except lie there, so I could concentrate on maintaining the oxygen level in my brain. The worst part was the smoke. How ironic that in this barren and beautiful part of the world where they probably have some of the best air quality on earth, I was stuck for 36 hours in a bus full of people endlessly smoking cigarettes. When I opened the windows for some fresh air, things didn’t go so well.
"It's too cold!"
"Yes, but can I open it a little when it is smoky in here?"
"No, smoking is good, open windows are bad." (That, by the way, is a direct translation from some Chinese that I knew.)
"Actually, open windows are bad, and smoking is bad too..."
Well, I left it at that, and usually left the windows closed and tried to breathe through something to filter out the chunks of nicotine floating around.

Probably half the road, or at least half our time on the road, was in "construction," which just means there is no road. It would have been amusing in a jeep, but hanging on to my perch while four-wheeling was a bit of a challenge, never mind trying to sleep. Some of the scenery was truly amazing, but most of it was overshadowed by my green face and wire-brushed throat.

After 36 hours of that we get to Golmud. At about midnight I find myself in a motel with a nice flat bed, but no shower. It's Golmud, what did I expect? The next day at the train station, still feeling decidedly green inside and a bit like a burnt piece of popcorn, I buy a hard sleeper ticket to Lanzhou – not a place where I want to be, but where I have to go to get the train to Turpan. After waiting in the station a couple hours, I get on the train and discover why my ticket was even cheaper than usual. It is actually a hard seat ticket, not the hard sleeper ticket I wanted. Yes, I suppose the lady at the ticket counter told me that but she didn't do a very good job of making it clear. I am told I can probably upgrade my ticket after the train leaves Golmud, so against my better judgement, I stay on the train. After waiting by the conductor’s office for an hour or two, I give up and slither back to my hard seat.

Chinese trains are always interesting. There was one guy who, at random intervals, would shout "HELLO" in my direction, apparently just to make sure his one word of English worked. At first I reply ‘Hello’ then, 'hi, wa’s up’ and ‘hows it hangin’ etc etc. Eventually I respond by saying something like, “In 15 years half of China will be dying of lung cancer while jabbering incessantly on cell phones and still won’t be able to vote, and you want me to keep parroting ‘hello’ to you?!” That's when I realized that I needed something like a real bed, a hot meal, or just a couple seconds with nobody staring at me.

Seventeen hours, overnight, on that train. No sleep. The seats are actually hard, but the problem is really that they are not like seats; they are like the two unfriendly sides of a right triangle. I amused myself playing with the little kid next to me, who was fun although he did take up more room than the spot on his mother's lap allotted for him. Anyway, this morning I got here to Lanzhou, which I never heard of before yesterday. Had a shower, a lovely hot lunch of some nameless variety of tofu and fried stuff, and lots of good Chinese tea, and I get an actual night of sleep tonight before leaving on a REAL hard sleeper (I double checked this one) to Turpan.

That's all of six days from Lhasa to Turpan. Well, it was definitely cheap! And I have a new appreciation for wool socks, and the hot water they give you in restaurants here, and Tibetan mechanics, and little kids whose fascination with oranges is a refreshing break from my own foul humour, and Chinese farmers who DON'T spit all over the train floor (most of them do) and people who open the window now and then to let in a rare breathe of real (albeit frigid and oxygen-deprived) air, and the lady in the train station here who actually made sure that I understood her when I was buying tomorrow's ticket in spite of the 47 people pushing behind me, and the guy at the restaurant who, when I asked where an internet café was, got so happy that I could say “internet café” in Chinese that he just took off from his job and walked me like four blocks away to the cheapest one around... People are the same everywhere, they are all different!

Tibet Archives

Lhasa



Drepung Monestary



Jokhang Temple in Lhasa

Looking over Barkhor Square from the roof of Jokhang

The Potala

On the road from Lhasa to Golmud, Qinhai Province