Rambling Pt. 2: Vietnam

I just got back from a week in Vietnam. I have to say, of any vacation I've ever been on, I think this was the one for which I did the least amount of prep work -- the gal I was traveling with, our school's curriculum director, took charge of booking the airplane tickets and our hotel in Hanoi, arranged our visas, and looked up some information about tours of Halong Bay, and the rest we just figured out as we went along. I didn't so much as have a Vietnam tourbook or map along. I couldn't even draw on much background knowledge from history or geography classes. Being born in 1971, the whole "Vietnam Era," as it pertains to American history, fell into that gap in my education, after where my history classes ended and before current events showed up on my radar screen. The only background I have is what I've picked up along the way, and I what I learned on this trip was really just enough to raise more questions I'd like to learn about. One of the things they teach in Librarian School is that information literacy depends on recognizing point of view and biases in information one takes in and actively seeking information from varying perspectives. The information coming from my Hanoi tour-guide and my tour of the "Hanoi Hilton" was definitely one-sided, even falling into the realm of propaganda, yet I don't know enough about the other sides of the stories to allow me to sift the valid from the skewed. I did get to see Ho Chi Minh's remains on view in his mausolium, and the oldest University in Vietnam, dating from somewhere around 1074, structured around the teachings of Confusious and a strict testing system -- talk about high-stakes tests -- if you didn't pass a test you got kicked out. I road in a rickshaw, had high tea at the Sofitel hotel, went to see a traditional show of water puppets and a performance of traditional music, and did a little power-shopping the last day, taking advantage of some real bargains (on the one hand, I'm happy to contribute to the local economy, but on the other hand, I do worry that the prices seemed so low, I wonder how one can tell whether or not someone is getting exploited along the way). Hanoi is a much smaller city than Bangkok -- still a city, but not a megatropolis full of skyscrapers. The French influence from the time when Vietnam was occupied/colonized by the French was evident in the architecture and in the food. For the most part, Vietnamese food is very similar to Thai food and Chinese food -- lots of rice and vegetables and spring rolls and such. But oohh.. the bread! Thailand doesn't really do good bread, except in isolated spots you need to search out. In Vietnam, there were baguettes and croissants and good sandwiches everywhere. Yum!

The one thing in Hanoi that probably made the biggest impression on me was the traffic. The first thing I noticed was that we were driving on the right-hand side of the road. The second thing I noticed was the abundance of motorbikes and bicycles, which way out-number the cars and buses. The third thing I noticed, and perhaps the most startling, was the seeming lack of "rules of the road." We used to joke about Boston traffic, saying that the lane markings and traffic signals were merely suggestions. Bangkok traffic is often grid-locked, and it took some getting used-to to see the motorbikes weaving inbetween the cars or going against traffic to take a short-cut. In Hanoi, the motorbikes swarm (like Bangkok, without many helmets, but with toddlers aboard); all vehicles are really loose with that whole line-down-the-center-of-the-road concept; and traffic signals of any kind are few and far between -- most intersections were unmarked, and the major safety device seemed to be honking your horn as you approached to let folks know you were there. As far as I could see, the only real rule of the road seemed to be, "Try not to hit anything." And even that wasn't followed always. At least twice I saw folks lying in the road after motorbike accidents.

But Hanoi was only one part of our trip. At the beginning of the week we spent two days and one night on a Chinese Junk boat in Halong Bay. My first impression, and one I cherished throughout the trip, was how much it made me feel at home. When I was on Koh Tao I had come to the conclusion that tropical beaches are nice and all, in a shiny, polished, pretty sort of way, but I like a little more of the rugged and dramatic in a beach. In contrast to the turqoise water and white beaches of Koh Tao, Halong Bay was colored in a pallette more familiar and comforting to me -- the grays and browns and dark greens of the Pacific Northwest. Even the weather cooperated (although I really hadn't packed appropriately for this trip). I'd left Bangkok in the midst of the hot season, and had chosen this itinerary in the hopes that it might be a little cooler, but this place really made me feel at home -- gray skies, fog, 50ish degrees and damp -- yippee! After 9 months of perpetual summer, I was ready for a shift in season. Halong Bay is a large body of water with about 1600 limestone islands of various sizes scattered throughout. For those of you from the Northwest, it looked like a family reunion of Haystack Rock's relatives. There are whole communities of people who live on the water in their fishing boats or in small houseboats. They're called floating villages, and there are even floating schools for the children in these communities. It was Easter Sunday when we went to Halong Bay. (That's a whole other issue -- I saw signs of Halloween and Valentine's Day, and more Christmas than I ever expected, but even with the looking for it, I hadn't been able to find any of the trappings of Easter, and only made it to Good Friday service -- after teaching in Catholic schools for 10 years, where Lent and Easter have always held an important place, I feel like I missed it this year.) We got off the boat for a while to tour a huge cave on one of the larger islands. It was beautiful. It was awe-inspiring. It was like a Cathedral carved by the hand of God himself. Yes, they'd developed it enough to put in stairs and pathways and to charge admission, but all this had been done in a very subtle way designed to blend in, so it didn't distract from the natural majesty of it all.

Our second excursion from Hanoi required a night train and a bus to take us to a little mountain village called Sopa. What a beautiful place! My understanding is that back in the days of French colonization this was a popular French vacation destination. Like Koh Tao, this was also a place full of folks from all around the world, but in contrast to Koh Tao, this also seemed to be a draw for Asian tourists as well. It's a beautiful village nestled in an absolutely gorgeous mountainside, tiered in stair-step rice paddies that make it look like a living topigraphical map. Again, the fog and the damp and the cool weather were a delight in making me feel at home, but it also meant I spent a good deal of time shivering and going from one hot chocolate to another as we wandered the town that first day. The mist hanging over the hillsides made it not so good for picture-taking, but definitely good for this girl's soul. The town is a central meeting spot and launching-off spot for an assortment of small villages in the area inhabited by different tribal groups described as minority peoples. Folks from the villages come into town to sell their wares (mostly needlework and silver jewelry). It might be rude to say, but I have never met such pushy salespeople in all my life. They follow you and surround you generally pester, I assume with the notion that eventually you might just buy in order to make them go away. They speak enough English to ask you where you're from and how old you are and how many children and brothers and sisters you have, and to insist, "You buy from me. I sell cheap."

I think my single most favorite experience of the whole trip came our second day in Sopa, when we hired a local guide to take us outside of town to her village, Ta Phin. Now this was one of those experiences that seemed to be happening on lots of levels at once, and I'm still not sure I've completely wrapped my mind around it, so I'm skeptical about how well I will do trying to convey some sense of it to the rest of you, but I'll do my best. There was definitely a sense of stepping back in time throughout the day, yet with enough connections to my own world to remind me that this wasn't some sort of museum exhibit, but a very real current day reality that just happens to be very different from my typical daily reality. Our guide was Sue Mae, a 22-year-old member of the Red Sao tribe, who is from the village we were visiting. She was dressed in "ordinary" blue jeans and sweatshirt. She speaks excellent English, which she has learned on her own from tourists. She met us at the tourist information center in Sopa and loaded us into what looked like an old army surplus jeep (one question that will forever remain unanswered is just how old that jeep was -- my friend Jane suspected that it dated from the Vietnam war era, but I wouldn't've been surprised to learn it's been around since WWII). The Jeep took us a little ways out of town and dropped us off to begin the rest of our trip on foot. According to the map and the information we'd been given at the tourist bureau, the walk we were setting off on was about 3-4 miles, so being a Longview girl, I was equating it with walking the lake, anticipating that it would take about an hour or just over. The thing is, this wasn't a stroll along a manicured park path. It was a mountain trail/"road" that wound and twisted and dipped and climbed through a spectacular piece of countryside, and given the rain that the region had been experiencing, it consisted of this really thick slippery mud that thoroughly caked our feet by the time the day was done. I swear, it is only by the grace of God that I managed to avoid any full-body splats in the mud -- I started to slip more than once. As we wound our way along the "road" Sue Mae was great about answering whatever questions we had, sharing with us about her life and her family and the villages in the area, about farming and about schooling and about social customs. Along the way we met up with a French family having difficulty communicating with their guide, who didn't have as strong of English skills as Sue Mae, and asked if they could join us, so the 7 of us continued on together. At times the fog rolled in so thick we could only see a few feet around us, and sometimes it rolled away to reveal vast expanses of the tiered rice paddies and mountains that characterize this region. All together, the walk to Ta Phin took us a little over 3 hours. Along the way we saw water buffalo (some just grazing and others working the fields under the guidance of local men), goats, pigs, ducks, a water-power dam and a bamboo irrigation system. We passed several local children. Between the goats and the rocky hillside and the walk from town to village, there was something very Heidi-esque about it, yet different, of course.

Ta Phin is one of the larger villages in the area, where two tribes live together, the Hmong and the Red Sao, with an estimated total of about 2000 people. Many dress in traditional clothing, some in modern dress, and some in assorted combinations of the two. As much as I enjoyed the beautiful hike through the mountain to get to the village, it was arriving here, being invited into another community and seeing their homes that was really somehow very profound for me. I don't know if I can really describe the experience. Hopefully some of my pictures will help communicate better than my limited words. I just remember looking around and realizing this was like something I would have only ever seen in a National Geographic magazine or something -- much more exotic or beyond my scope than anyplace I had ever imagined myself actually going. The kind of place I wasn't sure still existed in our modern-day world. Of course one of the first things that first struck me was the poverty/simplicity of the dwellings, but it didn't strike a chord of pity in me, but more a sense of wonder. I don't want to go so far as to suggest that there was anything grand or noble about this poverty, as I'm sure their lives are not easy, but there is definitely something to be appreciated in a different kind of richness they hold in their traditions and independence and their ability to thrive without all the trappings that I wouldn't know how to manage without. Their homes were very basic structures, reminding me of some of the living history set-ups I've visited that re-create life in the US hundreds of years ago. Yet there were touches of modern-day technology to be spotted as well -- blue jeans plastic tarps and motorbikes and those molded-plastic patio chairs and about 3 or 4 small satellite dishes telling us that some homes have TV; Sue Mae told us that some folks have cell phones, too, though internet access is still something they only make use of in town. The electricity we saw in evidence amounted to a few bare light bulbs. I never asked about bathroom facilities. There was definitely a sense of respect for these individuals who were so gracious as to share their hospitality with us, and as much as I wanted to take lots of pictures to share with folks back home and help me to remember the day, I was also very self-conscious about snapping too many photos like they were some sort of zoo exhibit or something -- I didn't want to be rude. Like I said, I'm not sure I've completely wrapped my head around the day, but I sure am glad I got to have it. At the end of our visit in Ta Phin our jeep met us again to drive us back to town. That evening we caught the bus back down the mountain to board the night train (sharing a 6-berth cabin with the same group of German guys we'd met on the way there) back to Hanoi, where we only had a few hours before flying back to Bangkok.

Getting myself unpacked and getting the mud off my shoes and getting this blog posted have been my big accomplishments for the weekend, and tomorrow we go back to school. It's a little hard for me to believe that there's only 2 months left until the end of the school year. I've got one more long weekend sometime in May, so if I actually manage to go on any more mini-adventures, I'll keep you all posted. One way or another, I hope to have at least one more posting before the year is out. Otherwise, I hope I get to see a lot of you when I'm Stateside this summer. I'll be home from June 23 to July 28. Oh, and a belated Happy Easter to everyone -- like I said I kind of missed it this year.