Time for Hoi An

I just came back from a trip to Hoi An and China Beach. I will just post some photos since I didn't really DO anything there, only watched life and smiled!

Loads and loads of photos, it turns out, and new pictures in the funny English category!

Hoi An is famous for tailors, here are a few, more on that later!

Marble Mountain

Marble Mountain, conveniently located on the wide tourist road between Danang airport and Hoi An, consists of a couple jagged spurts of rock sticking up above the countryside, and a town full of shops selling marble sculptures, and knick-knacks. The mountain, like most in Vietnam, is home to a temple. It is also full of caves - more temples - and has a nice view from the top if you can crawl through the crack at the end of a cave to get on top.

Vietnamese lions have more dragon in them than lion. This one, at any rate, was really annoyed by the flower which kept blowing past its ears.

From the top of the hill. Overlooking, incidentally, China Beach. Since Danang was a major US air base during the war, and China Beach was only a few km away, I'm told it was a popular spot for spending time off duty. Rather more to the point, it is a great beach for walking along since it goes forever and there aren't too many snooty resorts with fences!

The actual town is, of course, a little dusty with all the granite shops.

So someone made a fountain to keep the dust down.

And some musicians to keep everybody happy.

The multitudes.

Mother and child, Lady Liberty, and Liberated Lady

Cua Dai Beach

Café sữa đá, dừa, and the South China Sea

My favorite boats in Vietnam - overgrown baskets, basically, that are waterproofed somehow. They get thrown on fishing boats for extras I guess, and I've seen them off the coast so far I can barely see what they are, a six or eight foot diameter basket propelled by an oar that is just stuck in the water and wiggled, like you might wiggle a shovel when you are leaning on it talking to your neighbor, only presumably this wiggling involves more work, because it actually propels your basket through the water. I have not tried that, myself, but rowing something that is round would take some technique, it seems.

The people selling stuff on the beach were great fun to practice my Vietnamese on. Unfortunately for my wallet they were good enough at what they do that my Vietnamese practice usually involved buying something, but that isn't a bad thing. Pineapples, lichees, biscuits, nuts, peanut-sesame candy, Tiger balm, suntan lotion, mangos, bananas, deck of cards, bootleg Pringles ... and a big smile!

One guy selling stuff was telling me about the $60 an hour jetski rentals at the resort further down the beach. He seemed quite amused by the idea. $60 is enough for a month, he said, to study and buy beer and have a lot of fun too! Then he laughed.

Outside DaNang

Mỹ Sơn

Mỹ Sơn UNESCO World Heritage Site is the leftovers of the Champa Kingdom's capital. The Chams ruled what is now sort of central and central southern Vietnam for, I don't know, a long time - some multiple of the timespan my own country has been around. It is a fascinating place, in spite of the fact that ruins are all that remain. Compared to Angkor Wat it is very small (and ruined) but there are similarities. Vietnamese culture, particularly in the north anyway, is closely related to Chinese culture - Confucianism, Buddhist traditions similar to China's - but the Cham Kingdom was Hindu, taking cultural inspiration from India. And you can see that in the ruins, with engraved Shivas and Apsaras still visible all over the place.

Aside from that, the place has 'grown' since I was there four years ago. At least the road to the site has grown, with a great deal more hoopla in terms of tourist villages and tour buses and parking lots and exhibition halls. Fortunately, all that is limited to the way there, once you run the gauntlet to get there the actual site is mostly free of distractions.

Vespa World Heritage...

The road to Mỹ Sơn was made more interesting as there was a tourism festival going on, which involved a bicycle race. Naturally I was completely unaware of this, and totally by chance (like most of life) I ran into the back of the bike race just as it was beginning. So the last 30 km to Mỹ Sơn were slow driving, with crowds of motorbikes following just for the spectacle, and crowds of locals lining the road yelling hello and, I suppose, scratching their heads at why people would want to ride bicycle that far that fast... Anyway, I didn't have to worry about getting lost - following the crowd is the safest way to drive here, and in this case it was also the right road, an added bonus!

In addition to the bicycle race was a Vespa Convention. I don't know that much about Vespas, but living in Vietnam I have developed a certain liking for motorbikes, and my weakness for vehicles with 'character' goes back to when I was like 13, hanging desperately on to the back seat of my brothers' VW Beatle waiting for it to disintegrate around me... So, the Vespa Convention:

It's the retro version of retro woodgrain.

Che travels

To make up for all the motorbikes in Vietnam that don't have

mirrors or lights or horns.

Open Season on Social Evils

When I was teaching English I would sometimes find reference to the Social Evils in student essays. Upon inquiring about exactly what sort of things are Social Evils, some of the responses were predictable - gambling, prostitution and drug use, while some were less predictable - littering, disrespecting your parents... Still, for me at least, when I read about somebody cracking down on Social Evils, I have to keep on reading before I have any real idea of what might be going on!

The Social Evils are having a hard time here recently. A couple months ago the New Century, Hanoi’s biggest night club, was raided and over 1000 “revellers” were taken into custody, at least for a night. The club is, for now anyway, closed down and the owners are facing drug charges.

More recently some Vietnamese were arrested for gambling. In a rather puzzling bit of logic, foreigners are allowed to gamble, but Vietnamese are not. These are the same Vietnamese who sit on street corners everywhere exchanging cash over a game of checkers, or mah-jong, or a football match, or most anything it seems.

All that is stuff I read about in the news. Not being much of a club-goer or a gambler, I’m not particularly offended or gratified by dance halls and casinos being shut down. However, Friday night I went out for some music, and discovered one new Social Evil – live music. Live music was, at least this week, verboten at the R&R Tavern, which is the place for laidback live music. The R&R is also the place for pork BBQ with coleslaw and, considering it is in Hanoi, authentic burritos with pineapple hot sauce by the guy who is supposed to be singing. Fortunately, strange foods that foreigners like have not yet been nominated to the Social Evils list. Although if I were nominating, I’d award that hot sauce a higher potential for evil than any music I’ve heard there!

Power cuts on somebody’s birthday

Saturday, last weekend, was Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, inspiring various neon-bright celebratory displays with black and white pictures of ‘Uncle Ho’ leading the revolution, teaching children to read, or sitting in a bamboo chair next to his traditional Vietnamese stilt house reading a book and smoking. His stilt house is still there, right up the street from the somewhat less traditional imposing Russian granite house where he currently resides…

Sunday was election day in Vietnam, proclaimed by more neon (and flowery) signs, and polling stations well bedecked with flags and posters.

More standard Old Quarter shots.

Another view of Hoan Kiem Lake.

St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

Shrink-wrapped Buddhas (I guess they're Buddhas, I’m not an expert and really don’t know).

The rose-seller's bicycle.

“Moto moto! Very cheap! One hour! Go around! West Lake! Hashish? Museum Uncle Ho! Where you from? My friend, cheap for you!”

Pas de power in Paris

Military History Museum

Saturday, on a sudden urge to be a tourist, I went to the Military History Museum. It is a couple blocks from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and across the street from a big statue of Lenin, with flowers and people playing badminton and people doing tai chi and ladies selling bananas and teenagers making out while perched on their motorbikes. Just like everywhere else in Hanoi.

The museum display started with the Battle of Bạch Đằng, which is where, in 938, the Vietnamese put sharpened iron-tipped stakes in the river bottom. At high tide they snuck out beside the Chinese navy and said “nanny nanny boo boo, bet you can’t catch us,” and took off up the river drawing ‘hot pursuit’ – which is allowed under international law, they checked that first. Then the tide went down, and the Chinese boats were stuck, looking uncannily like hydrofoils perched precariously in the wrong millennium, and feeling a ‘there’s a stone in my shoe’ kind of feeling, only slightly more ominous than that. In any case, in the short and sweet version of Vietnamese history, that is the beginning of independence from Chinese domination.

There was one display on a musician who, I suppose, wrote patriotic and revolutionary music. Nice sculpture, I can’t really speak for the music, I didn’t hear it.

I think it’s fair to say that the most popular part of the place was all the equipment they
had outside, old French stuff from before they were defeated in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ (the museum is on Điện Biên Phủ Street, after all), and of course lots of stuff from the American War, as it’s known here. Scattered around the ‘flag tower,’ built in 1812 as part of Hanoi Citadel, are cannons and airplanes and bombs, a huge pile of wreckage from an American plane that was shot down, and tourists having their pictures taken next to big, old, deadly stuff.

The war, in a direct way at least, seems to have very little to do with my life here. I guess in some way my interest in Vietnam right from the beginning was motivated by kind of a reaction against my impression, of the war and the ‘Vietnam Era’ and it’s impact on the American psyche, of all of that completely overtaking the ability to see Vietnam the country, today, with beauty and pain just like everywhere else. I guess that is pretty direct – directly contradicting what I said before...

Of course the leftover bombs are not all sitting in the museum. Just last week somebody found a 500 kg bomb at the My Son World Heritage Site – that is in central Vietnam, some six or eight hundred year old remains from the Cham culture, which are fascinating. But less fascinating if there are 35 year old bombs lying about rusting away… I was at My Son twice on my first trip to Vietnam, don’t remember seeing that bomb. Unexploded ordnance are still found regularly in some areas here. Sometimes safely, sometimes not safely.

From the top of the flag tower, you have a nice view across central Hanoi, high-rises going up. At the bottom of the tower, next to the ATM and the row of motorbikes, generously providing recovery services from strenuous ‘posing next to deadly machinery’ exercises, is a Highlands Coffee Shop. Under a canopy of trees, with a funny musical mix of a traditional Vietnamese song, something else reminding me of the beach, and always one 4th generation version of something that used to be reggae, the java and hoa quả was all good and very peaceful.

Quote of the week:

From China Daily:

"China is like a giant elephant riding a bicycle it has to maintain a fast speed, otherwise it will crash."

Remember that!

- ON THIS DAY -

On May 8, 1973, militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrendered.


Once, in another life (a teenage life) I spent some time in Wounded Knee. Hamlet is a good word for it. I remember a hill with a cemetery on it, a handful of trees mixed with a few old buildings, a couple Winnebagos, and a horse corral with a guy in a cowboy hat training horses. Mostly I remember a lot of space and the feeling you get, on the west side of the flat middle bit of the US, that the sky and the earth have not only gotten bigger, but also closer together, leaving less room for all the stuff that people do. More space and less room … It's a feeling I don’t find often in Hanoi!

There is one spot here which always looks very secluded to me, somehow. Every day on the way to work I go through a big intersection, usually sitting at the light amid the crowd of jostling motorbikes and sundry wheeled paraphernalia, and I see a tower on the corner of one building. It’s not really that high, but it is two or three stories higher than all the surrounding buildings. Just a square, concrete tower not any larger than it would have to be to put a stairway inside it. The top is a jumbled mess of green-ness, plants spilling down the sides and pushing up and out like bean sprouts bending toward the sun. Ten square meters of somebody’s private wilderness, spurting above the middle of Hanoi, it’s a personal version of more space created around less room.