Blatant Domestic Bliss

I suppose that one of the things one learns with age is how to keep doing the same thing, but in a new way. One reason (excuse) that this blog is rarely updated anymore is that my experiences in Vietnam are not so often 'new' anymore. A few years in one place will do that to you! While I might regard this as a loss, I like to think that any lack of new locations in my daily geography is more than compensated by the fact that the life I live is manifestly of my own choosing.

I was thinking of all this recently after a rainy, cold winter weekend in Hanoi. (The fact that we live in a concrete and tile house with no heat gives me special dispensation to call 50F "cold"!) I did not go on a bike ride. I did not find a new lake, or ride along the river. I did not find out anything new about Vietnam.

I made pancakes. Now, my pancakes aren't as good as what my wife makes, but they are still fun to make.

We went to the mall. I actually suggested going to the mall, which should tell you how unpleasant it was outside! An out-of-town sort of mall which was refreshingly empty, we walked all four floors, the daughter charmed some bored salespeople, and we left after having fixed my coffee crave.

I made ginger snaps. Round bits of crunchy, zingy goodness, these things were almost as good as I remembered them to be, a rare result indeed! We lacked the hot spiced cider which would have made them perfect, but tea does almost as well. Might have to come back to that recipe.

My wife made eggs and bacon. Now bacon is something, like a good hamburger, that I never bothered to appreciate until I hadn't had it for a long time. Now my dear wife cures it herself, for Pete's sake, and it is worthy of profound appreciation.

My wife made coconut-covered donuts. I don't mean  far-from-the-tropics dried coconut from the store, I mean coconut from a coconut, of the Monty Python clip-clopper variety. I don't mean donuts from the store either, I mean donuts from a pot of boiling oil on the stove. Now I know I'm a touch provincial, but this seems extraordinary to me. It's like the muses of Entenmann's and Achenbach's both came to the Orient, collided with a coconut and landed in my kitchen on a Sunday afternoon.

Some days, when I think about how I used to wander around trying to find something new all the time, and eat street food day in and day out, I don't miss it at all. (I still eat street food, just not every day.) A few days after that weekend, it occurred to me how oblivious I am to the blatant domestic bliss which that weekend was more or less drowning in, as is most of my life these days. It sneaks up on you, domestic bliss!

I'm not suggesting that domestic bliss is best represented by food; clearly the food is only one of the more superficial aspects of the thing I'm trying to talk about. But, seriously, pancakes, the mall, bacon, donuts... all in one weekend? How could Vietnam get any better than that?

Habits Happily Resumed

Back in Hanoi after a long summer away, I am amazed at how quickly I find my comfort zone on the cacophony of these streets. After the 12 hour time shift turns the world neatly on its head, and a few days of dealing with a sullen stomach surprised by the sudden onslaught of airline food and street food in quick succession, I am once again pedaling to work. This is a habit I missed over my long summer. Jumping on my bicycle again felt very good, in fact the thing feels so light and responsive to everything I put into it that I thought for a minute there was something wrong with it. But no, it's just a nice bike which hasn't been ridden for awhile. I am in the process of fixing that!

After work, sometimes, the road home goes around the lake. The rowers practise on the lake, a few runners and a lot of cyclists practise around the lake, and the fishermen practise in between us. 

On the journey back to Hanoi, I was thinking that the long summer back in the US hadn't really felt like the more than three months that it was. Packed with work, a little travel, and a lot of activities with family and friends, the time flew by quickly. However, arriving back in our neighbourhood in Hanoi, it suddenly felt as if we had been away for a long time. Good times race by!

Out by the lake, sometime over the summer they widened this little stretch of street and installed these gaudy Formula 1-looking stripes on the pavement. I'm hoping they won't inspire Formula 1-like driving, and in any case, I'm sure in a couple more months they will be faded and dusty enough to not stand out so much - hopefully they will still keep anyone from driving into the lake though.

Farther around the lake I stopped by this little contemplative spot. It seems like it should be, say, the entrance to a hidden temple or a forgotten tea-house or something. However, it is not. Rather, it is the side entrance to one of those giant hotels where I am a little nervous about stopping in front of for fear they will jump out and charge me 30$ for parking, or something ridiculous like that. But in fact, nobody noticed me or the red bike, and I kept on moving on.

Most of the way around the lake, after finding my favourite lakeside watering hole closed up for the day, I stopped down the road for this cup of coffee under a shade tree leaning up against the railing. Now this is a habit that takes no time at all to resume, only that I forgot to bring a book with me!

The Shopping Commute

One of the contrasts which I enjoy maintaining in my life in the US (such as it is - a few months every year or two), is the comedic lack of proportion between the 18 wheelers I drive for my job and my chosen commuter vehicle, a scooter.

The scooter has two wheels, one floor, a little bit of some kind of style but no rumble whatsoever, and a box big enough for a helmet or a bunch of flowers or two bags of groceries or, I suppose, a free kitten. My commute , it should be said, is twenty miles of about the most ideal scooter roads around. When I go to work in the middle of the night, the highlight is the stars. When I come home in the daytime, I watch the fields and the farms, and it seems at least half the farms have stands out selling something. The summer isn't long enough to stop at all of them, but I do my best! So here is a selection of what's beside the road tempting me on the way home from work.

As my summer commuter workhorse, the scooter is about perfect. Mostly, it is about enjoying the ride on the way to work and back. I don't know about the price of horse feed or coal these days, but its also pretty nice for me to put on 100 miles going to work and bringing home goodies, and then to fill up the tank for this:

Great Lakes Hanoi

Hanoi is a city of many lakes. Many of the best known landmarks in town are either right next to a lake, have a lake inside them, are inhabitants of a lake, or are, in fact, a lake. Tran Quoc Pagoda is almost surrounded by West Lake, the Temple of Literature has a handful of ponds inside it and a small lake across the street, cụ rùa the mystical mascot of Hanoi lives in Hoan Kiem, which is in and of itself an attraction which every tourist, and more than a few of the rest of us, have to walk around to have truly experienced Hanoi. Many of the city's lakes have trees, green space and sidewalks to walk around them – all of which are not so easy to find in central Hanoi if you are not next to a lake.

In the spirit of properly exploring this city in which I live, as a mission for a new bike route, and as a test of my Zen sensibilities for enduring Hanoi traffic, I set out on a pedal-driven journey to see as many of Hanoi's lakes in one trip as I could.

My goal was limited to the lakes inside the perimeter of Minh Khai - Truong Chinh - Duong Lang - Duong Buoi - Lac Long Quan and the Red River. Having mapped out a route only roughly ahead of time, I missed four of what turns out, in my count at least, to be 32 lakes/ponds in central Hanoi. With the three lakes I went past on the other side of the river, that makes 31 lakes for the day. The great in the title should be understood to refer to the number of lakes, not the size of them! Almost 65 km on a very loopy route passing by quite a few places that I had never been to before in my years in Hanoi, plenty of friendly faces, hundreds of cafes (I only stopped at two, honest), and – yes – a couple of traffic jams as well.

Here are the lakes in the order I saw them. “Hồ”, by the way, means “lake”. Many of the lake names are simply the name of the area, the village, as most of them were in villages back in the day. The four that I missed are listed in parenthesis in the order I would have seen them, had I followed the map!

Three lakes on the other side of the river, a prelude to the main event:

Hồ Lâm Du 1: A new fish raising shack floats in the middle of this lake, and there is a lady at one corner selling bánh rán on the sidewalk. Lâm Du is the name of the place, the village.

Hồ Bồ Đề: A handful of cafes on one side of this lake sit across from the school (usually full of uproar) and the local People's Committee building (usually dead quiet).

"Hồ Đình Ái Mộ": This tiny bit of water is in front of the Ái Mộ communal house, where the friendly neighborhood elders will invite you to stop for tea and bananas.

Hồ Gườm / Hồ Hoàn Kiếm: The most famous of all Hanoi lakes, home of the 'Turtle Tower' island and Cầu Thê Húc, the red wooden bridge to Ngoc Son Pagoda on Jade Island, and the famous turtle who always causes a traffic jam whenever she comes up to the surface. Green space, walkways and wide streets all around it.

Hồ Hai Bà Trưng: Very small lake in front of Hai Bà Trưng Temple, a friendly motorcycle mechanic is on one corner next to my old house, surrounded by a small street which usually doesn't get too much traffic. “Hai Bà Trưng” are the Trung Sisters, legendary Vietnamese heroes from about 2 millennia ago.

Hồ Thanh Nhàn 1: A relatively good sized lake I had never been to before. I came out on the residential end of the lake and had to jump down next to it and duck under a bridge to get to the park end of it, and the park stopped about halfway back up the other side.

Hồ Thanh Nhàn 2: This lake has no road, alley or path to it, it is surrounded by the backs of houses and businesses. I got there climbing through someone's “yard” (don't tell anyone) from the big Thanh Nhàn Lake, and got out through a walkway at the back of a bia hơi. I got a surprised “hello” from a lady hanging laundry behind her house, and the guy sitting by the lake watching his black puppy play around was friendly enough – I asked him if there was a road I could get out from there, he said no … he didn't say “What the sam hill are you doing here?”, he just said no, and kept watching his puppy while I rode halfway round the lake and back again to find the back of that bia hơi.

Hồ Thanh Nhàn - Võ Thị Sáu: Nice small lake with a sidewalk-style path around it. There was wedding preparations going on at one corner when I went by, and I had to wait for the procession of suit-ed and áo dài-ed folks to get through the alley before I could keep going. Võ Thị Sáu, the name of the main street past this lake, was an anti-French guerrilla, captured at age 16 after throwing a grenade and executed at age 19, who now has streets all over Vietnam named after her.

Hồ Qùynh: Very cool lake with only small streets around it and cafes green vines hanging the whole way out across the street, like the picture in my head from Turpan, on the Silk Road. Quỳnh is the name of a common flower here, and also used as a given name, usually for women.

Hồ Tiến: On the campus of Bách Khoa University, which was very quiet on a Sunday, this lake was overshadowed by the big library building next to it. It doesn't even have many benches around it, it was looking under-appreciated.

Hồ Bảy Mẫu: The big lake in Công Viên Thông Nhất (aka Lenin Park), with swan-shaped paddle boats, and sweet walking paths all through the park. No bicycle riding inside the park – that is what the sign says anyway. Mẫu is a measurement of land, so this lake is presumably 7 mẫu in size.

Hồ Thiền Quang / Halais: A squarish lake neatly taking up one city block, I buzzed around this one pretty quickly on streets with traffic, though there are walking trails and trees around the lake too. Thiền Quang means something like 'enlightened path'.

Hồ Ba Mẫu: Oddly, having been around the lake in Lenin Park like a hundred times, I am not sure I had ever gone across the street to this lake, which, although not in a park, is large (3 mẫu, apparently) and has a lot of open space around it. Good for riding, good for relaxing.

Hồ Kim Liên: Another one I had not been to, this lake is hidden between the French Hospital and one of my offices, and has a very competitive 9 year old bicyclist prowling around it just waiting for a new challenge. Kim Liên is the name of a golden lotus.

Hồ Hố Mẻ: I had been past this lake but never really looked at it before, and frankly it isn't much to look at. Small square lake, reasonably clean as far as I could tell, but with main streets on two sides, a muddy track on one side and an overgrown path on the other. There is a bus stop there, so its easy to get to I guess, but no big trees, no green space, no cafes. It does, though, have a nice name – which I have no idea what it means.

(Ao Khương Thượng): I had intended to go by this one next, I have never seen this pond, but just totally forgot … too much sun???

Hổ Xã Đàn: Sweet lake, one side has cafes pushed up on the sidewalk practically overhanging the lake, while another side has, across the street, cafes and bia hơi with a huge (by Hanoi standards) open space in front for sitting outside under the trees.

Hồ Huy Vân: I wasn't expecting much from this lake, small and in the middle of what has to be one of the most densely populated areas of the city, but in fact it was delightful – trees around it, everything was clean and taken care of, and the pagoda on the corner looked spic and span.

(Hồ Linh Quang): Based on the map, I wasn't sure if I could get to this lake, and I just rode through the neighborhood without going down every alley to find it, so I didn't see it.

Hồ Giám: Across the street from the Temple of Literature (Quốc Tử Giám), this lake is small but surrounded with well manicured lawns and, on the day I was there, completely deserted except for me.

Hồ Hảo Nam: They just finished a new wide street past this lake, the other side of it didn't look easy to go around so I just went past on the new road, waved at it, and kept going.

Hồ Đống Đa: A big lake with a nice alley running around it, somehow I don't think I had ever been around this one before either. The side near the main road looks a bit industrial with giant pylons standing in a line across the corner of the lake to support the new metro rail system which is, at the moment, just a lot of concrete pylons and messy construction in the middle of roads and lakes.

Hồ Thanh Công: I used to work up the street from this lake, it is pretty big and the one entrance goes through “Indira Ghandi Park”. Thanh Công means 'success'.

Hồ Láng Thượng: A long, narrow lake lined with cafes and bia hơi places staffed with those guys who jump out in front of you in hopes of startling you into stopping and buying a beer. Another nice spot which I had never seen before.

Hô Ngọc Khánh: I used to work up the street from this lake, too, and stopped there for coffee on the way home all the time, it is a quick loop off a main street.

Hồ Thủ Lệ: Another long lake, between Daewoo Hotel and the zoo, this one has more swan/duck paddle boats. I went in to the park at the far end and walked around, but didn't go into the zoo itself - I haven't been there for a few years, but I don't remember being so inspired by it. The lake is nice, it has a big island in it with two bridges and walking trails.

(Hồ Giảng Võ): This lake was next on the list, and I have been there often before, but I had my head down and rolled right on to the next one … I'll remember it next time!

Hồ Đội Cấn 1: I don't know the actual names of these two lakes, but they are close to Đội Cấn Street. Cutting off the street onto the alley the first one is one your right.

Hồ Đội Cấn 2: Back another alley to the left is the second lake, which is right behind the B52 Museum. I went halfway around until the path got all sandy, where I turned around.

Hồ Hữu Tiệp: A couple hundred meters through a skinny alley are two more “lakes”, or perhaps they are just one lake with a road across the middle! The long skinny one on the left I'm calling Huu Tiep Lake.

Hồ B52: And the square one on the right commonly gets called B52 Lake – it has the remains of a crashed B52 bomber sticking out of the middle of it which was shot down in 1972. I was pretty tired by this time, so I stopped at the “B52 Cafe” which has your standard Vietnamese coffee and a chunk of B52 sitting there as a curiosity/memorial.

(Hồ Ngọc Hà): This very small lake is also just a stone's throw (if there were no houses in the way) from the last three, but I was intent on getting to West Lake for a cool breeze and a proper break, and so I overlooked it.

Hồ Bách Thảo: Inside the Botanical Garden, this place is great for walking around, but since I wasn't in the mood for walking I just rode past on the street, looked in, and put it on the list. There is a big mound in the park which reminds me of those old burial mounds in the US midwest … I suspect it isn't related though.

Hồ Trúc Bạch: On my right as I came up Thanh Nien Road, Truc Bach Lake I am familiar with thanks to having spent many a productive hour sitting next to it drinking coffee and watching fish and lizards.

Hồ Tây: West Lake is by far the biggest lake around, often offers a cool breeze and the route around it is the standard cycling circuit in Hanoi. Being worn out, I just stopped at my watering hole to watch the lake for awhile without going around it.

And that was the end of the Great Lakes Hanoi tour, I only missed four and didn't fall into a single one, so I'll call that a success.

Looking Back

It's not every day on the way to work that I see a car like this parked by West Lake. While this particular Volkswagen was a shiny, pretty much spotless soft-top, the ones it reminds me of were somewhat less glamorous. They received a great deal attention, but the attention was mostly focused on making them roadworthy - we usually left the spots untouched. The kind of roads I see in my daily life around Hanoi, and the traffic on them, never really give me a chance to miss having a car. But, if you're going to have a car, anyplace, having one like this is a great idea!

Cup o' ... Traffic ?

Back in Hanoi, on a sweltering summer day, I am amused by watching traffic through my cup of tea.  I guess I am easily amused - anyway it kept me out of trouble until I had to go back to work!

Honda, Trek or BMW?

Every day before I head off to work I ask myself, should I take the Honda, the Trek, or the BMW - and some days I take the BMW...

HA! Not really, this particular buffalo, affectionately known as the BMW (buffalo-most-wet?) of this particular muddy pond, would not fit in very well on my commute to the office. In fact I think he would block the whole lane on Long Bien Bridge, and cause a huge traffic jam. Which is why he stays there in that pond outside of Hoi An. 

These two photos are from the top of Marble Mountain, halfway between Hoi An and Danang. Above, looking out to the sea and Cham Islands, over what used to be Hoa's Place, for those in the know. And below, looking north toward Danang with the mountains of Son Tra Peninsula in the background. If you look closely, on the left, you can see the yellow "Dragon Bridge" which recently opened. The head of the dragon, facing to the right here, is equipped to spew water or fire when the dragon feels frisky.

PS Buffaloes get frisky too sometimes!

Glacial Tourism

Some days I remember what it is like to be a tourist here. A couple weeks ago, on a touristic sort of impulse, I decided to go an visit "B52 Lake". I had heard about this place since I first came to Vietnam, usually in underwhelmed reports of people getting lost in the back alleys of Ba Dinh looking for the lake (pond) where the remains of a B52 shot down in 1972 are still there sticking out of the lake. I say Glacial Tourism because it took me so many years to get around to stopping by this place which is less than 10 minutes from my office, not because the B52 crashed on a glacier or anything like that. In fact, the day I went there was a proper Hanoi summertime scorcher, which just made the iced coffee taste that much better, at the "B52 Cafe" which you can sort of see in the picture back there behind the trees.

And in fact it is a small lake, even by Hanoi standards, and there is indeed a piece of airplane, including a set of wheels, sitting out there in the lake. It's a little hard to know what to make of it - there is a sort of marker at one corner of the lake noting it as a historical site. The 'Christmas Bombings' in 1972 are, at least in the government press here, referred to as "Dien Bien Phu in the air" - drawing the parallel between Vietnam's decisive victory in the battle of Dien Bien Phu which effectively ended French colonialism here in 1954, and the 1972 American bombings of Hanoi and the north. The Vietnamese, to the surprise of everyone, succeeded in shooting down a number of the B52 bombers, though casualties and damage from the bombings were very high.

The "Museum of Victory over B52" is just a block or two away from here, although there is not a direct path between the two places. I have probably gone past that museum at least a hundred times on the way to work, perhaps I'll actually stop in and see it one of these days...

The Scenic Route

Some days (ok, every day I possibly can) on the way home from work, I decide to take the scenic route. Where I come from, when someone says "the scenic route", it means a lot of corn, or trees,  maybe a river, and maybe an hour detour. My life here is a lot more compact, perhaps more suitable for my rediscovered hobby of bicycling.

These shots are the view from my watering hole (and sometimes my office) on West Lake. It's a good sized lake, with a nice route you can ride right along the lake shore clear around it - about 16km. And best of all, you can't go more than 50 yards without running into another cafe! That tower they are putting up over there, I'm sure will include a few cafes, but I probably won't go there much. It will be, once it is finished growing, the tallest tower in Hanoi.

After using up all my lake-watching minutes for the day, I start homeward, which now involves a bumpy pedal across the Long Bien Bridge. There is a railroad in the center of the bridge and a small deck for motorbikes and bicycles on either side. The ramp up to the bridge always smells like something-bridges-shouldn't-smell-like, but once you are up on the bridge the air is fresh - especially when going past the bakery! I don't know where the bakery is, I just know where I smell it every day on the bridge.

 The sign on the bridge is about traffic safety. The sign, it seems to me, is a great idea. The actual traffic safety, it seems to me, is still bottled up somewhere and they've forgotten where it is and can't let it out anymore.

The first thing the bridge crosses is a big road, alongside which is the 'ceramic wall', a long stretch of artwork in ceramic by a wide variety of artists, and non-artists I think, which was put up before Hanoi's millennial celebration in 2010. Some of it represents historical figures or events, and some of it is just fun. Behind the wall, and under the bridge here, is the wholesale fruit and veggie market. 

 Long Bien Bridge was built by the French, and goes from dike to dike - across the river and a fair bit of land on either side that is on the river side of the dikes. You can see they grow corn here too! And bananas, which seem to grow like weeds, and taste way better than weeds where I come from.

Having hopes of staying alive in traffic, I equipped my bike with a bell which happened to come with a compass on top of it. Fun while it lasted, however, it now seems to be lost - you can see the "S" arrow is pointing more or less up to where the North Star should be - but the bell still works. In the heat of the afternoon, traffic is pretty thin. At 7.30 in the morning, not so much! 

Once across the bridge, I can follow the even more bumpy alley straight ahead along the railroad. You can't really see it but the railroad is up above the wall on the right. 

This guy passing me here is well-prepared for the hot day, he's carrying along a mattress on his head - keeps the sun off, and when you get tired you can stop and take a nap in comfort! 

This place put up a tarp to keep the alley (and the house, their front door is there on the left) cooler. Lots of people here also spray water on the street in front of their house on really hot afternoons in an effort to keep things cooler.

After a bit I duck through this motorbike/bicycle/basket lady underpass, neatly equipped with spot mirrors, to get under the railroad. From here there are a couple of tiny alleys which pop out on an actual street again before very long. 

The carousel is pretty quiet on hot afternoons, gaudy, colorful and empty! 

 And, to match the gaudiness of the playground equipment, the red fuzzy tree and the Pepsi umbrella...

After the park there is a greenish not-so-refreshing lake lined up with houses and a bia hoi - the 'green space' is, after all, the lake! 

Cross the highway and I pass this giant mural on the front of the Air Force Museum. 

This road, err, construction zone, goes beside the airport... 

Hanoi's very own paintball range ... who knew that Hanoi had paintball!?  

A lot of vegetable fields beside bluish-blackish irrigation (?) ditch. 

 This is the scenic route, remember? This little path goes beside the paintball range and (almost) into a military post - this is still right next to the airport and you can sort of see the antiaircraft guns on the left of the picture - but at the last minute cuts around the edge of that and then goes by the neighborhood football field.

Across from the football field are banana trees - yummm! 

And finally I get home, and go up to the Friday Afternoon Office which looks pretty lush these days (much lusher than this fuzzy not-so-smart phone picture might suggest!) 

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.