Up The Coast (and One Night in Bangkok)

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Our bus to Dalat, a hill station about four hours north of Saigon, took all day. First, it arrived an hour and a half late, and then we got into an accident with a car (very slight fender bender -- we barely felt it on the bus) on the outskirts of the city, but it took a long time to sort out because there was a lot of yelling and the police got called. Apparently no one has insurance, so it's all a big argument about who should pay for what and it takes a long time. We learned this from a nice American expat, Carl, who has lived in Saigon for eight years working in business and has married a Vietnamese woman. At our stop for lunch (where there was a sad monkey in a cage outside of the restrooms :-( ) we ate with them, and Carl shed light light on Vietnamese attitudes towards America (they don't hate us), the role of the socialist government in daily life (not much), police corruption (tons), economic development (tons), and road maintenance (not much).

LP and LG said the trip would take four hours. My ass. We left at 9:30 a.m. or so and got in at about 6 p.m. Steve navigated us to Peace Hotel II without much trouble, but when we got there, the power was out. Apparently, the government can just cut off power to various blocks to save on town expenses, so the hotel had been without power (and water) from 2 p.m. and would continue to deprive its guests until 10 p.m. It was at this time that the headlamp I had packed became very useful. It's always a joyous moment when something that I -- a chronic over-packer -- brought along proves useful even though it may seem extraneous. The headlamp also came in handy when we rode on buses at night and there were no overhead lights to read by! Thus, my packing logic is justified.

Steve and I went to an unexceptional restaurant for dinner that our hotel had recommended (so unexceptional that I forgot what we ate, but according to Steve, I had a vegetable hotpot and he had beef with garlic wrapped in a leaf). On our way to and from dinner, I made the following observations about Dalat; first, they sell winter hats. The weather was about 55 degrees. Granted, that is 30 degrees cooler than Saigon, but still. Christmas is big here, too, and there is a lot of neon and flashing lights for a small town in the hills. There was some kind of Christmas fair going on, and some streets were closed off to traffic. One of the songs blasting was one that we heard EVERYWHERE in Vietnam -- "I Just Called To Say I Love You," but it's some kind of modern cover version. We also heard what seemed like a communist government official making a blaringly loud speech to an attentive crowd, teenagers in large hordes roaming the streets (reminded me of the UES!), and a miniature (as high as a five-story building) lit-up Eiffel Tower. When we got back to the hotel, power was back on and we fell into bed with the hotel-provided leopard-print fuzzy blankets that I found hilarious.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

After breakfast at the Peace Cafe attached to our hotel, Steve and I embarked on a previously-arranged motorbike tour of the Dalat countryside. (This is not to be confused with a motorcycle -- motorbikes are smaller and make less noise than something like a Harley.) We clung to the sides of our English-speaking guides, which we booked through a company called Easy Riders, a fantastic organization recommended to us by a Canadian traveler we met at the Cu Chi tunnels. They also provide moto transport if you want to go up and down the coast -- we considered riding with them to Nha Trang, our next stop, but decided that with our volume of luggage and the fact that we wanted to travel at night to maximize what we saw during the day, a motorbike ride was not the best idea. So we had booked an afternoon bus ride to Nha Trang.

For our day tour, we did not wear helmets, which made me a little worried, but Steven, my driver (hehe), and Steve's driver seemed to traverse the winding mountain roads at reasonable speeds. The day was clear, the green hills blanketed with lots of agricultural activity and woven triangle hats were lovely and picturesque, and the temperature was perfect -- warm but not too warm. We made several stops in the countryside: a mushroom farm, a coffee farm (we learned Vietnam is the world's third biggest exporter of coffee and grows four main kinds), a farm that made brooms from a certain plant that we saw everywhere, a flower farm, a silkworm breeding farm, a nice waterfall, a kitschy temple with pastel-colored dragon sculptures, a factory that used the stringy residue from the silkworms to make actual silk, a lookout point over bald mountains bereft of tree cover because of the deforestation during the war from napalm, and, finally the so-called "Crazy House," a bizarre architectural brainchild of a Vietnamese woman who spent time in Russia and was also the daughter of a prominent Vietnamese politician. The house is shaped roughly like a big tree-house and has bizarre aerial hallways/staircases that lead to various animal-themed rooms: the ant room, the tiger room, the eagle room, etc. The outside is a sort of garden with sculpted mushrooms. It was totally bizarre. Steve calls it "Dali meets Gaudi," and a quick internet search brings up similar likenings. Wild. It was kitsch that takes itself mostly seriously with only a hint of a laugh -- very Dalat.

Another funny note about our Easy Riders tour: more than once, they left me and Steve on the side of a road and left us to take a "romantic walk" while they drove up ahead of us and met us after a couple of bends in the road. Dalat is known as a favorite honeymoon locale for Vietnamese, and though we didn't walk around a lot in the city centre, there is a lake where you can rent "romantic" swan boats for two, and other sort of couple-y attractions. We had beef pho for lunch at a very local-ocal place (as my mom would say), where there was a giant table of 19-year-old boys drinking beer who kept staring at us. I also made our tour guides stop at a hillside cemetery -- in Vietnam, the cemeteries are above-ground (to preserve the belowground space for agriculture and for religious reasons, I think), and I think they are eerily beautiful.

We returned to our hostel, grabbed our luggage and headed for our bus to Nha Trang, which turned out to be more of a minivan. Seat belts aren't really available in Southeast Asia, except for the driver and sometimes the passenger seat, so we kind of slid around the front-most backseat. Heading down from the hills towards the east-coast beach town of Nha Trang involved going down some very windy roads with hairpin turns, and the woman two rows behind us became very noticeably carsick. Poor thing. As we drove along a dark two-lane highway, I noticed that pretty much every house or business along the road seemed quite poor, but they all had the TV playing and satellite dishes off the roof. Hey, it was Christmas eve. When we got to Nha Trang, we took two motos from the bus station to Sakura Hotel; it was hilarious to watch my driver balance my big red suitcase between the handlebars of his moto, and Steve's struggle to keep his giant rolling duffel between his handlebars.

After walking around the town for awhile, we settled on a 12-course French meal for the equivalent of $23, which is absolutely exorbitant in a country where a dinner costs between $2 and $5. But it included a bottle of wine, cognac, pate, truffles, chocolate mouse, steak, and more... so we figured hey, it's Christmas. A little tipsy from our wine, we take a stroll along the beach, where lots of couples have "parked" and are "hanging out" on motos. The Vietnamese version of a suburban Lookout Point, I suppose. We happen upon this mess of green lights that, upon closer inspection, we discover is a giant Christmas tree made out of Heineken bottles with which people are posing for hilarious pictures. Giant blinking signs proclaim "Heineken Brings You The Magic of Christmas." Wow. We take some funny pictures of ourselves, two Jews, with a light-up Rudolph and Santa's sleigh before heading back to Sakura.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Steve and I were picked up early in the morning for $6 daylong boat tour around the waters off Nha Trang. We had three main guides on our boat, all of whom seemed to be in their early twenties, at the oldest, and ridiculously energetic and fun. They wore Santa hats and took immense pleasure in childish games like the one where you try to slap your partners' hands and hot potato with a one female passengers' straw sun hat, which got tossed into the water when someone missed a catch. They also recreated Kate and Leo's scene at the prow of the Titanic to much laughter and applause from our good-natured group, which was mostly made up, oddly enough, of couples with one Vietnamese-American member (i.e. from Houston) and one Vietnamese member (i.e. from Saigon) who were having a romantic rendez-vous over the holidays. Our hilarious guides (who still had acne -- how old could they be?) also blasted dance music and gyrated their hips rather a lot throughout the day, and I got a huge kick out of it when they played "My Humps."

The Vietnamese obsession with couples continued as they made every couple on the boat kiss and Steve had to kiss me on the cheek to get them to leave us alone and to make me stop turning bright red. It seemed totally beyond Vietnamese comprehension that we were traveling together as friends. In any case, we stopped near an island to snorkel and fool around on inner tubes that our guides tossed at us as they cannonballed off the boat. Back on the boat, they'd folded down the bench seats to create a big table where we ate noodles, fish, rice, pineapple, and spring rolls family-style. Then it was time for the advertised "floating bar," which consisted of one of our guides balancing on an inner tube holding a crate of Dalat mulberry wine, which was very sweet. The guide, wiggling his hips to the dance music blaring from the boat, would pour little paper cups of wine down our throats as we swam around his inner tube. It was hilarious.

We stopped at another island where Steve and I both napped (he in a lawn chair in a rather windy gazebo and myself on the beach, where I lazily watched people parasailing and jet-skiing); our next stop was at an aquarium shaped like a big plastic pirate ship where there were some giant fish and some CLOWN FISH, like NEMO. Steve has not seen the movie and scoffed (with good humor, of course) at my insistence that it is really a work of genius. Outside in a kind of dirty inlet there were some massive turtles that, for a fee, you could feed some bread so that they would thrash about and open their massive jaws. It was a little sad. We headed back to Nha Trang, where I got a three-dollar pedicure that lasted for a surprisingly long time considering how cheap it was. Then we boarded our overnight bus to Hoi An, an adventure in and of itself.

We had been promised a stop for dinner. It was a good thing I had my emergency provisions -- Nature Valley granola bars bought expressly for this purpose from the Costco in Queens -- because we did not stop until 11:45 p.m. (after boarding the bus at 6 p.m.). We did not stop for a bathroom break before this, and an Israeli couple and I had to beg our driver, who did not understand English, to stop at around 10:30 p.m. The driver, with an aggravated sigh, pulled over to the side of the road, where we basically had a choice: we could squat down to pee in the glow of the light from the bus and have all of our fellow passengers see us, or we could move towards the back of the bus and pee in full view of the oncoming traffic (whose headlights illuminated our bums quite nicely, I might add). We chose the latter, as we did not have to face them the way we did the other passengers on the bus. THAT was an experience, to say the least. Our chairs did go way back, which made it easier to sleep, but the downside was that the people in front of us were practically resting their chairs on our laps. Steve and I both have the blessed skill of being able to sleep in mostly any situation, so we did catch some shut-eye that night.

Tuesday December 26, 2006

Still, we were relieved to arrive in Hoi An, another coastal town, at about 7 a.m. We convinced the folks who met the bus that we did not want the hotel room they were selling and pried our bags away from them. Using our various guidebook maps, Steve navigated us through the city centre to our hotel, Pho Hoi 1, which was very nice and had an adorable balcony. I took a quick shower to shake the icky feeling of sleeping on a bus, and then Steve and I headed out to the Hai Scout Cafe to book a half-day cooking class at Red Bridge that LP had recommended. I grabbed some chocolate croissants from across the street and we had a complimentary coffee with breakfast. This was also when Steve broke a glass, so we were even.

The cooking class was definitely a highlight of the trip: it started with a jaunt through the market, where we learned about different types of fruits and vegetables and how to tell if they were fresh. We walked by the stalls of raw fish and learned how to tell if squid was fresh or if it had been sitting out (you bend it, and it should give easily). We also got a demonstration of some kitchenware staples for the Vietnamese -- a knife that has a slit down the middle that can also serve as a dicer, sort of, as well as a zester-type thing. We then hopped on a boat to the school's waterfront location downriver. We sat in rows, clutching handouts with recipes printed on them, taking notes in the margins as we watched a chef demonstrate the recipes. He had a mirror mounted behind him so that we could have a birds-eye view of the countertop; he joked this was Vietnamese TV. For some of the recipes, we got to go to our own carefully arranged cooking stations to try them out. This was what we learned how to make: Warm Squid Salad in Half a Pineapple, Vietnamese Eggplant in Clay Pot (excellent!), Fresh Rice Paper Rolls of Shrimp (also excellent -- and we made the rice paper ourselves, too!!), Hoi An Pancakes, and garnishes of Tomato Flowers (this involved peeling a tomato in one giant swirly shape, a task at which I failed miserably) and Vietnamese Hand Fan of Cucumber. This was the menu for lunch as well, with the addition of mackerel and vegetables. We met some really nice people during the class, including a lovely older couple in which the wife had had a Fulbright in Italy, and we bonded over the fact that I'm spending a few months there this spring.

Back in Hoi An, we set out to find tailors, making a detour into a shoe shop where I ordered custom-made flip-flops and Steve got custom-made brown loafers that I insisted he should wear without socks. After poking our heads into a dozen of what must be 150+ tailor shops in Hoi An, we decided to have our clothes made at A. Dong Silk, a store that looked a little more professional. As in, it was an actual store and not just an open storefront. Steve and I had a total blast and went to town -- buying much more than we meant to because of the fun and cheapness of it all -- running around first in the suit section, draping fabric after fabric over Steve's shoulder and finally settling on three different materials for suits and seven for dress shirts. I went upstairs and picked out a white silk and a deep red silk for two strapless, knee-length dresses that I had made based my own measurements and the fit of this Banana Republic seersucker dress I had brought along. I picked out material for silk pajamas, as well as a knee-length blue silk skirt and a black silk tank top. While our clothes were being sewn up by the team of tailors in the basement of the shop, we had gin and tonics across the street at Treat Cafe and then attempted to go see some of the architectural sights of Hoi An (which was a port town and has a cool fusion of French and Chinese influences, among other things. I really liked the two-story decaying yellow-painted buildings with wrought iron balconies off the second floor.).

We had made it down a quarter of a block (aiming to see the covered bridge, which is from the 16th century or some such thing), when we got sidetracked by a smaller tailor shop that had a pair of zip-off shorts/pants displayed in the window. We both decided to get a pair at $10 per, and I had mine zip off at mid-calf so I'd have cute capris, while Steve's, of course, zipped off at the knee. I chose this blue-gray fabric, and after talking Steve out of the sort of not-nice khaki colored ones, he got the blue-gray one too! I was excited that we matched (like all good Asian couples), and I think he secretly got a kick out of it too. We got to take a fun matching pants picture later, at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. After this detour, we ambled on down to the covered bridge and walked along the river for a bit before it got dark. We ate dinner at Dac San Hoi An, where we tried some of the supposedly famed local cuisine. We liked the white rose, a tender shrimp dumpling, but the fried wonton and cao lau pork with noodles were just okay. We picked up our shoes, Steve bought a rolling suitcase off the street, and we were off to the fittings at A. Dong. We had to send things back several times -- it was very cool how they would mark stuff on our clothes with chalk as we tried them on, then tell us to take it off and whisk it downstairs, from where it would reappear, altered, about five minutes later. Steve kept asking for his suit pants to be let out -- I think they may wear pants a little tighter in Asia, because the tailor from downstairs even came up to argue that they fit. The clothes came out very well, though, and we finally left at 10:30 p.m., happy for the most part and kind of tired in a giddy way from the whole ordeal.

Wednesday,December 27, 2006

We arose early the next morning for our flight from the nearby city of Danang (which has the closest airport) to Hanoi, where we are picked up by a taxi sent by our hotel, Camellia 5. After time to regroup, we eat lunch nearby at Cha Ca La Vong, a place recommended by 1,000 Place To See Before You Die (their restaurant recs are really spot-on). It's basically fried fish in a simmering pan with a yummy sauce that is kept hot with a mini-stove on the table, and you chopstick some fish onto some noodles in your personal bowl, add some fresh veggies, a voila, deliciousness. Ca Cha street was named after the fish speciality (which is the only dish this restaurant serves), and other streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi are named after what they sell; i.e. Shoe Street, which has store after store selling, you guessed it shoes. Talk about market saturation. We grabbed a tuk-tuk to drop Steve at the US Embassy to get more passport pages (this doesn't work) and me at the Temple of Literature, where we planned to meet up. On the way, we passed a street with store after store selling toilets. Go figure.

The Temple of Literature, the site of the first university in Vietnam (Confucian, since the Chinese ruled a lot of Vietnam for about 1,000 years), was very cool, with lots of gardens and weeping willows, and these cool stelae (row after row of stones with people's names on them who passed the very difficult university exams). They rest on top of tortoises, symbols of wisdom and longevity. We learn here that the four sacred animals are the tortoise, the dragon, the unicorn, and the phoenix. Frankly, their artistic representations all look like dragons...there were nice gardens within the temple's walls, and there were weeping willows, which I adore.

Afterward, we hopped on a moto -- Steve holding onto me for dear life while I clutched our driver's jacket -- to head to NY Times recommended Café 129 in the French Quarter, where we tried some of Vietnam's world famous coffee. I loved the coffee with sweetened condensed milk (to which I added two packets of sugar), and Steve tried a Vietnamese specialty drink with a raw egg beat into it! It was yummy. Then we strolled through the French Quarter and the Old Quarter, stopping briefly in the Sofitel Metropole (because we like to see fancy hotels even if we can't stay in them), before heading onto Hoan Kiem Lake. (Internet description: "According to a 15th Century legend, a giant turtle presented Emperor Le Loi with a magic sword with which to defeat Chinese invadors. In accordance with their pact, the Emperor returned the sword to the turtle after a glorious victory in battle. Thus, the lake was named Hoan Kiem, or "restored sword."). It's the main lake in a pretty series of them that runs through the city. Hanoi is greener than Saigon, hence I like it better.

A sidenote about our walk: we passed men in the park playing some version of Chinese chess. The boards were on the ground, and a dozen-plus men would just squat on their haunches for what must be hours at a time. Their quads must be super strong. Everywhere in Asia, people seem to squat a lot. They also inexplicably sit on little plastic kindergartener furniture at streetside restaurants.

At the southern end of the lake, we saw the tortoise tower, and then we went across a bridge to Ngoc Son Temple, where we saw an embalmed turtle and photographs of other turtle sightings in the lake (the most recent of which was in 2002!). We bought tickets for the evening's water puppet show and then walked around the Old Quarter, passing Shoe Street, Candy Street, etc. The water puppet show was comprised of 17 little scenes-- performed with wooden puppets that kind of pranced on the surface of a shallow pool of water -- with names like "on a buffalo with flute," "rearing ducks and catching frogs," and "unicorns play with ball." It was cool when there were fireworks out of the dragon puppets' mouths and neon lights darting around. Steve and I giggled a lot. At the end, the puppeteers emerged from backstage and it appeared that they stood thigh-deep in water to operate the puppets for four shows a day.

We took an LP recommendation and had a really yummy buffet dinner at Brother's Cafe. We got back to Camellia 5 and fell asleep immediately.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

We rush around trying to pack our overnight bags for our tour to Halong Bay, because we're leaving the rest of our luggage at Camellia 5 to pick up before our flight to Bangkok the next evening. I grab some chocolate croissants and an almond tart for Steve from a bakery across from Ca Cha La Vong recommended by LG. We're picked up by an ODC (Old Darling Cafe) bus, and our very sweet tour guide introduces herself as Phuong, but we can call her "Little Mouse," since she apparently resembles Minnie. After a few-hour drive, we board our refurbished junk around noon and have lunch in the dining room (the boat was three levels -- small cabins down below, the dining room in the middle, and an observation deck up top (where Little Mouse joked we could experience a million-star hotel -- get it? Looking at the starts? Ummmm, Vietnamese humor.). It was quite foggy, but it was very cool gliding among the misty massive limestone rock formations (which you can also find in Guilin, where I went in January with Julia) and in the Andaman Sea in Thailand. Steve described the rock formations as "craggy," and I agree. Very picturesque.

After passing a very cool floating village with picturesque boats (though don't write off the nightlife -- there is a disco and KTV there, we learned), we visit Surprise Cave, which to me, is just a cave, but Little Mouse pointed out various animal/Buddha shapes in the stalagmites and stalagtites. There was a very long joke about a phallic-looking one before we boarded the boat again to head to our kayaking site. Also on our tour was a French-Vietnamese family with a mom and two kids, an adorable couple with two daughers who were somewhow Australian, and Chinese but lived in Singapore, a lovely, very tan guy from the Netherlands who had bicycled through a lot of Vietnam, an athletic-looking couple from Australia, and a nice Swedish couple that was currently living in Tokyo while the husband worked for Sony Ericcson.

On a recommendation from Little Mouse, Steve and I kayaked through a tunnel into a lagoon surrounded by 90-degree limestone cliffs, and we saw monkeys scurrying along the rock faces! We maneuvered our kayak and I watched them, mesmerized, for a bit, though my gaze was a bit disturbed by a boat with a motor that had entered the lagoon after us and was making monkey noises and generally distubing the peace. We headed back to the boat, which had docked in an area with a lot of other boats that looked identical to ours. I think that for reasons of environmental preservation and not bothering the people who actually live on the Bay, all of the boat tours have to dock for the night in the same place, which leads to a cool view of lots of twinking lights gently bobbing up and down. We share a table and a bottle of cheap wine with the Swedish couple and head to bed early.

Friday, December 29, 2006

We had planned to sleep in and didn't set an alarm, so Little Mouse had to knock on our door twice to tell us breakfast was ready. We ate scrambled eggs, toast and jam, watermelon, and coffee and tea while looking out at the misty bay. We passed a pearl farm, which basically looks like a lot of buoys bobbing around in the water, and at the bottom of each one is a peal, which will take about one year to cultivate fully. More oval pearls are grown in Halong Bay; the perfectly round ones are the ones found in nature that deep-sea divers look for. But pearls are one of the three industries of Halong Bay, the other two being coal and seafood. The staff on our boat was selling pearls, and I resisted until just before lunch, and then I caved and bought a necklace and a pair of earrings for $25. Steve said the way to tell if they were real was to rub them against your teeth to make sure they are grainy and not smooth, so we did, and concluded that they were real, though we did attract some stares from the other passengers.

The boat let us off at one of the islands and we "hiked" (up a flight of stairs) to the Sim Soi Grotto (a platform with a wooden balustrade). We got a nice view of all the mountainous islands that poke up all over the place, and because of the mist everything was various shades of blue and gray and it was quite beautiful. We then kayaked around that island. Other kayakers from our boat had told us that the water was a bit rough on the other side where it wasn't so protected, so we had to work a little harder than the day before, but we made it around, ending up happy and wet and feeling at one with nature. Steve's hamstrings, which have bothered him in the past, held up nicely.

We passed the rest of the time on the boat reading; Steve finished up Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, and I was engrossed in the wonderful trashiness of Alex Garlan's The Beach (since we were going to the island where the movie version, starring Leo, was filmed). A lunch of mostly fried seafood at the Halong City harbor, followed by a bumpy bus ride home (I noticed a warning: water buffalo crossing the same way you see warning: school crossing signs in the US) , left us at Camellia 5 to pick up our bags and check e-mail before heading to the Hanoi airport for our flight to Bangkok, en route to Phuket. We paid too much for bad food at the airport after paying even more for our overweight luggage. Oops.

Late Night December 29 to Early Morning December 30, 2006

We arrived at Khoasan Road via taxi and cheked into Baan Sabai. We changed into fancy clothes (a dress for me, khakis and a polo shirt and the Hoi An loafers for Steve) and headed to the five-star Oriental Hotel, where I felt like royalty as soon as a luggage porter opened the door of our cab for me. We poked around the lovely garden-covered grounds alongside the Chao Phraya river, peeked into the Authors' Wing (Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward have stayed here), and had a drink in the Bamboo Bar while listening to jazz music with some well-dressed hotel guests. (According to Wikipedia, other famous guests have included Neil Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, George H. W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, Sean Connery, Mel Gibson, Václav Havel, Audrey Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Henry Kissinger, Helmut Kohl, David Beckham, Stewart Wilson, Niki Lauda, Sophia Loren, Yehudi Menuhin, Richard Nixon, Pelé, Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Omar Sharif, and Elizabeth Taylor.) We headed back to our hostel to get about two hours of sleep before our flight to Phuket.