It is said about Vientiane that it may be the most peaceful capital in the world. The streets are calm, the traffic is limited and lazy and is hot. The dinner I had at Cote d’Azur was great with soup of fish cooked provencal by made out of dried fish and some kind of beef flambee, very tasty. I walked latter on the streets and I got to see the new hotel, Don Chan Palace, built with Malaysian contribution, the only tall building, besides the stupas, that exists in Vientiane. It is located off center, on the Mekong but inside it looks “Chinese luxurious”, meaning kind of bland and with no traits. Just a lobby with nothing, so different from the hotels built by Europeans and Americans architects. I left the hotel and went to take a walk on the Mekong, not a good move because is dark, so after a while I met some guards with a gun who asked me to go back because it is dark and it may be a little dangerous , no matter that in Vientiane crime is almost non existent. So I walked back and continued to walk to the hotel on the main promenade, towards my hotel that was closing the doors at 11:30pm. When I booked they did not have single rooms and I asked for a double room with bathroom, so they looked suspicious and they told me that the hotel closes at 11:30pm and …. no visitors. Laos, like most of the countries in SE Asia, is a major destination for sex-tourism and after dark, like In Thailand or Vietnam, the street is populated by a different crowd that congregate around the guest houses and hotels frequented by foreigners. During the evening I was trying to book a train to BKK for the next day but the offices were closed. I was convinced that is no problem to find a berth and I was wrong because the next morning when I started more convinced to do it, there were no more AC berths available, just with fans. I hesitated and latter on when I checked there were none left, the entire train being booked including first class. So I bought a bus ticket, that had some advantages, one of them was that brings you directly to Kao Sarn Road so I did not have to schlep my luggage from the train station.
In the morning trying to find seats on the train, I got to a guest house where I tried to make a booking. One guy who was at the reception asked me where I want to go and I said that I will go with a tuk-tuk directly to Pha That, that is a stupa famous in Laos, the symbol of the country that is also on the national flag. He said that he will go with me for free on his motorbike because he is a student in English and wants to practice the language. So, still waiting for an answer for the tickets, we left and visited the stupa located in the northern part of the town. Very interesting and beautiful, the stupa was full with people from Thailand who came in a weekend visit to Vientiane. I shot some video and I noticed a blemish that I did not notice before on the filter. After I figured out how to clean my viewfinder I noticed that the blemish is still there so I had to replace the filter with the UV one and shoot again. We visited also the two temples nearby and we left to their Arch located in a park close by, that is the symbol of the city. I climbed in the arch for a great view of the city, that as I assumed is flat with no tall buildings. After this visit we left back to the guesthouse fwhere he dropped me and left to school and I continued to investigate for my ticket. In the end not finding anything I bought from my guesthouse a bus ticket, that also had the advantage that instead of 15:00 they were picking me up at 17:00, extending my time in Vientiane for 2 more hours. I started around 11:00 the tour of the city, that is small enough in terms of attractions to be covered in 4-6 hours. I went to the market and I had some great shakes, looking through the overpriced items sold there. In Laos the asked prices are much higher than in the other countries in Asia, and you have to bargain hard to get to the real price. I bought another milk shake and I went to visit two importnmat wats, Wat Phre Kaw and Wat Si Saket. the first housing now a museum of religious objects and the other is the oldest wat in Vientiane. Most of the wats in Vientiane were destroyed in various wars in the 19th centuries and rebuilt in the 20th century, sometimes in a different style than the original. From there I continued to see an old stupa and several other temples, chatting with the monks that are kids getting their education in the wats, this being for many of them, country boys, the only way they can afford. All of them study English hoping to become guides and they want to practice, so they come to you to talk in English, asking mainly the same questions, where are you from, how many days in Laos, etc. I chatted with them everytime the possibility came by. Following my way to the other temples, that more or less look and feel the same, most of the having the “sim”, main building, built in Siamese style, I passed by a handicraft store where I purchased on the spot a great hmong wedding jewelry. Great stuff that I could not find anywhere else! I got another shake to cool off the heat, it was very hot in Vientiane, and continued my tour and at 4:30pm I went to the hotel to change, pack and be ready for the bus. The minibus came at 5:00pm and picked me up and several others to the border, where we exited Laos and got in the no main land. We left our luggage in the bus that is a two tiered one with super AC and reclining seats and we waited one hour tlll 7:00pm for the bus to leave. I chatted with a German student from Mainz and two Japanese sisters from Okinawa, one of them impressed me a lot because she spoke English extremely well with the high school vocabulary all the kids in America have. I asked her if she studied in the States and she said that she studied one year in high school. The kids are like sponges and they absorb right away. She was not perfectly fluent but she had an American accent and ALL the expressions of kinds in school: “amazing”, “actually”, and a lot of “like”s. The funny thing is that the German student was speaking in the same way without ever being in the States. He got it from movies I guess, but obviously the attraction of America is fascinating among young generation.
We left at 7:00pm and we stopped in Udon Thani that is the border to Thailand, we crossed after a passport check, got on the bus and stopped again after 15 minutes in a place on the shore of Mekong where they fed us, some veggie rice. I chatted with a girl from Vancouver who was on a long journey like most of the people here, going now for the wrap up to Pukhet and with one middle aged Italian from the Po delta who was traveling also for a long time, telling me that he suspended his job for 4 years (!) in order to travel. After that the bus stopped only at 12:30, a classical stop for all the buses for the driver and the assistants to eat. This is not great because they wake you up and is hard to get asleep after that. The ride was great, the entire way on highway of several lanes where the buses are driving very fast. The bus was very good, (yes, we are finally in Thailand), and we arrived in Khao Sarn Road at 4:30am, much earlier that planned. The street just started to wake up, only the girls and the other “girls”, the boys, where pondering it looking for late customers. I left my luggage at a hotel, shaved, washed, got a quick fix with a watermelon and I am ready to go for a day in Bangkok. My flight is tonight at 12:35 am

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Vang Vieng is quite of a place. It is populated with young backpackers and is surrounded by karst peaks with tons of caves inside. Also, the river that crosses it represents its major attraction for water sports and the mountains are enticing for biking and rock climbing. It is an outdoor sports place like Moab, UT or similar. Meanwhile, the place is full of guest houses that charge ridiculously cheap prices, around $5/night, and is full of restaurants that have these style table-beds with pillows like in Dahab, Egypt, with the difference that the pillows are not directly on the ground/sand, but on these elevated beds like in the chaikhanas of the Middle East. So all the “falangs”, foreigners, and locals are stretching their bones on these beds, eating on a small table in front of them and watching a large TV that is playing mainly “Friends” or soccer. I knew about all this but I said that is worth seeing to believe it!
Most of the backpackers are hanging out there for many reason one being the cheap accommodation and food, the great crepes on the street very popular in the night and lots of sport activities , that make many of them to stay for at last a week in Vang Vieng.
In the morning after I had my breakfast of eggs and coffee, I started to explore the places around and what better way to do it than by bike. So, I rented a bike for $1 and I went to see a cave on the other side of the river Nam Song. The cave was interesting but no big deal, but the beauty was the nature around, with the beautiful river and the karst peaks that were magnificent. I biked around, in the forest on small paths where the legends says that the entire area is populated by spirits, and I came back in town, going again on the other side to see a beautiful guest house a German woman on the way mentioned it to me. The guest house named Maylin, held by an Aussie I guess, is charming with adorable gardens and cottages on stilts and everybody living there were like living in paradise. It was funny that I got to talk with two Irish. She was laying in a hammock and was so sorry that she had to leave because the whole setting was marvelous. She kept saying that she is very sorry and very sorry, but she has to be in BKK by tomorrow. I consolated her telling that I have to go to work myself and I asked her where she has to go from BKK, expecting something like Dublin, but she said that she has to go to ………..Sri Lanka. I felt her pain into my soul! What a trade off: Vang Vieng to Sri Lanka. I said good bye to them and planned that we will meet at the bus stop because they were taking the same 1:30pm VIP bus to Vientiane. Meanwhile I talked in the guest house with a couple from Vancouver who were already traveling for about 4 months, 3 in Vietnam and they were going for an entire year.
From Maylin guest house I went directly to the bus station to buy my ticket and when I arrived the guy from the booth asked me if I want to go with the local bus at 12:30pm for only 25000. The price was irrelevant but because I had nothing special planned, I went back and dropped the bike and took my luggage and I made it in time for the 12:30 local, on a bus in a very bad shape (where I met the Irish couple) but it did the trick and reached Vientiane in exactly four hours, at 4:30pm. The ride was good, with all the windows open for fresh and non-AC air. A tuk-tuk brought me for 15000 kips to the Mekong promenade and after choosing between two guest houses I ended up in Joe’s Guest house where I have AC and I am right on the Mekong for $14, quite expensive for Vientiane standards. I walked a little and found all sorts of Internet places and overseas call centers and I plan to eat tonight at Cote d’Azur, a French restaurant and after that, to have a beer on the Mekong.

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After I finished my blog I left to my guest house, Hoxieng, to drop the bike and pick up my Romanian passport that I left it as guarantee. The guy was astound when he saw the passport because he never heard about Romania and now he saw somebody from there. But before I was able to reach home I bumped into Hunter in the market and we started chatting. He told me to go to the agency because the guy was concerned that I did not show up today to pay so he did not know if I will come with them the next day. He told me a little about himself, studied System engineering, that is applied math for solving engineering problems and he worked in MA for a defense contractor till last year when he left for Thailand, where he liked it a lot and decided to try to live and work there, so he posted his resume on a website in BKK. A high-school in Phisanoulok found it, called him for a math teacher position, interviewed him and offered the position at the interview. He was the only applicant and they offered him around $900/month a large salary for teaching in Thailand. The job was easy because the expectations are very low, just to be presentable and to be able to get along with the other people, so they liked him and they wanted to raise his salary and offered him another year to teach, but he decided to return in the States where he wants to teach math so, after his return, he will apply for the certification and start teaching math in high school. He found his way in life in Thailand!
We kept chatting about my own family connection with math and I had to leave him to solve my immediate and non-math problems, in any case we would have met next morning for the trip. I went to the agency, I paid and I dropped the bike and eventually I took the passport latter in the evening, because the guy was not there, and I left to visit the night market for the last shoppings, that are always a lot and the result was that I filled up the new backpack I bought in Vietnam with things from the market….
I went to sleep at 11pm and next morning, the host started to knock in a door and woke me up around 5am but I did not get down from bed till 6:15am when I went to see again the monks, but just the ones coming near my guest house. I packed and I went for a coffee that was good this time at Joma, reading the paper to see what is still going on with the hazy air that was settled over the city and country in the last days, caused by the fact that the peasants are burning the rice fields to clear them for the new plantation. The haze is terrible and it is also over Chiang Mai in Thailand causing a number of people to check into the hospital and obliging the Thai government to spray water from the planes to try to clear it. I paid the guesthouse and I asked them for an extra receipt, and I got both stamped by the travel agent, and they give me some water and bananas to have it on the way. The van was in front and the driver loaded my luggage and we went to pick up Hunter and Dana from their guesthouse and at around 8:15am we left towards Phonsavanh, the capital of the province Xieng Hoang the place where is located the Plain of Jars. The trip was more than awful because was on a continuos winding road the same way as the one when we crossed from Meteora to Metsovo, the only road where as a driver I got nauseous. But this road was not one hour like the other one, but 7 hours and continuosly winding. We stopped several times to get air and all three of us were kind of nauseuos. Each time I had to stretch on the car bench to calm my stomach but in the end none of us threw up. At least this! Obviously that the landscape was beautiful, we continuously crossed mountains, the country being very mountainneous. Winding road with lots of hair pins going up and down for almost 7 hours! And if this would not have been enough, on the way Hunter mentioned to us that the road between Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng was listed in February 2007 on US State Department Advisory list as a no-go destination for Americans. There were attacks on buses that happened in the past and the road was listed as unsafe. The Hmongs conducted a guerilla war against the government forces that lasted since 1975 till 2004 when they gave back the guns but in situations like this, many guns still remain available used by wrong doers. These guys were coming from the mountains and attacked villages and buses but the book said that these incidents did not happen for a long time. Still on the way, in each village we saw at least one person carring an AK47 but when we asked everybody told us that they were government soldiers guarding the village and we should not worry because the road is very safe… Finally at around 2:15 pm the road got to be in a lower plain and we arrived in the nondescript town of Phonsavanh at 3:15pm. I got a room for 70000 kips at “Nice Guest House” and we went for lunch of sweet and sour fish and rice. After lunch the sun was towards sunset so we went for a walk in the market that was full of unknown products and we tried some of them. Hunter has a passion for languages and he learned German and studied some Arabic and in Thailand learned Thai so he was able to talk with people here in Lao, the languages being very close to Thai. He knew a lot about the world, traveled in Eastern Europe also and he impressed me by the fact that he knew that my name is Romanian. Dana grew up in a farm in CT and he was a horse trainer. He went to the university on a scholarship for polo, a sport she told me many things about, and she worked in Hawai as a polo player and horse trainer. Now she wanted to play polo just for fun, staying away of the glitzy crowd that populates this game, and to work more to train horses . I lost them in the market and when I finished my visit I started walking the main street but it was nothing to see, just a beautiful sunset, so I sat in a restaurant to have a beer and read my book. The restaurant named symbolic “Craters” is located near the MAG office, that is the office sponsored mainly by New Zeeland to do demination here, the main danger in a region that is littered with mines and UXO, all sorts of detonable devices from the American war and also from the war between the Vietnamese and Royal Lao Forces. The area was bombed to oblivion by the US because the Vietnamese setlled here and they were running the front from this area, so the number of sorties was extremely high to the point that the capital Mueng Sai was completely obliterated and after the war was over, they had to move the capital of the province in Phonsavanh, because there were no buldings left standing in the old capital. MAG did the demination of the main sites in the Plain de Jars and the sites can be visited since 1990 but still you have to walk only on marked path, being a slight possibility to still exist undetonated explosives. The number of bombs that were thrown from planes was so large that their cases are used for decoration in town, “Craters” having four tall cases standing in front of the restaurant and there are many more in Bomb Cafe and other. You can see all sort of bomb cases, both from aluminum and steel, the ones from aluminum used to make pans and pots by the villagers. I had my book and beer till 9 00pm and I went to the hotel earlier for a shower and a good sleep but unfortunately I was awaken latter by some noisy guests.

Next morning I woke up at 6:00 am I packed and I went outside in a nice sunrise for a quick walk and breakfast. I met Hunter and Dana and at 8:00 am the driver came to pick us up in the hotel. I went to the bus station to buy a ticket for tonight bus, (VIP bus at 7:00pm – 6 hours to VV , local bus at 4:00pm – 7 hours to VV) and I noticed that the price dropped considerably at the bus station compared with what I spoke with people in the city! No surprise! From there we left for Plain of Jars, an area that has a lot of jars, huge stones sculpted inside used probably for storage, but about which nobody knows anything when or by whom were built. It is a megalithic mystery of Laos, the only place where these Jars/stone exists. There are several legends, each minority having his own, but the bottom line is that nobody has a clue. There are about 60 sites in the area with jars like this but only 3 are visitable being demined. The bombs thrown from the American bombers left many craters and destroyed many of jars in the area named in the war, PDJ, a French acronym for Plain de Jars. We met or guide, Mr. Yeung who joined us latter on, and we visited Sites 1,2 and 3, all being relative close to one another but still you have to go by car. What is interesting is the large concentration in each of these sites and nothing in between. The supposition is that the jars were used by the villages for storing various things, including people , alive as jail or dead as in a cemetery. Some jars have lids but very few still remain. Mr. Yeung gave us all sorts of stories and we visited also a cave used by the Vietnamese army as a hospital. Some jars were short but several were as tall as the height of a person. The whole visit was short, maybe about 2-3 hours and it proves that it can be done in one long day RT from either Luang Prabang or Vang Vieng but the agencies want to do it in no less than three days. Because we still have lots of time on our hands we went to visit a destroyed Russian tank and the old capital, the obliterated city of Mueng Sei. The only 3 things that remained standing was the old French Office, the old temple dating from the 16th century and an old stupa. All three are kept as they were with no renovation, a relic of the bombardments. We visited all three and we went back to Phonsavanh. On the way back, realizing that we have a lot of time left in the day, we decided to change gears so Hunter and Dana asked to be driven that day to Eastern Laos, instead of the next day, an me , after a short stint at the Internet Cafe to complete my story I picked up a tuk-tuk for $1 and I went to the bus station where I changed my ticket for a local bus at 4:00pm, and they even gave me 10000 kips back. The other local bus in the morning at 9:30am did not leave because of lack of passengers. Because I felt so nauseous the other day when we came by minibus I was horrified by the prospective to take again the same road, even for only half of it. So I did not eat and drink anything all day, except some fruit in the morning. I had a bottle of water with me and that’s it and I kept pondering if the VIP bus from 7:00pm would be better that the local, that has small seats and no AC. But to my surprise the ride to Vang Vieng was very smooth with no problems and no nauseous feelings. I understood once again that these minibuses, that are great because they pick you up at the hotel, are a pain because they drive faster and you are less comfortable in them. After a good part of the way with the local bus when I saw that I feel perfect I ate a sandwich and bananas and drank some water. I chat with two Dutch girls from Rotterdam who were traveling for 3-4 months and they plan to visit so much in SE Asia that even I thought that is a little exaggerate. We talked a lot about Burma where they wanted to go but they were reluctant. The VIP and the local bus takes the same 6-7 hours to Vang Vieng and I reached Vang Vieng at 10:30 pm, the bus station being on a long Airstrip built by the Americans in the war, Lima site 27, and right away I got my luggage to Nana guest house very close to the bus station, that for $5 gave me a spotless room with two beds and a perfectly clean bathroom. I did not have too much time, people in Laos go to sleep early so I went right away on the main street, got a crepe with chocolate and a beer, weird combination, watching in awe the restaurants and discotheques that populate this town, where people are not sitting but they lay down on some kind of elevated tables, with another table in the middle, similar with what they have in the tea houses in Central Asia or in Dahab, Egypt on the beach. I watched a snippet of Friends, that runs on all TVs in Vang Vieng, a snippet of a soccer match of Manchester United and went to bed. During the night it rained twice, strongly, but when I woke up in the morning the rain was over.

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Laos is the dream come true. I spoke with many travelers in this trip, here and in Vietnam who were in Laos and all of them went more or less through the same experience: they planned the trip in Laos for 1-2 weeks based on what they were able to read in the book and all of them ended up extending their visa and no necessary because they found much more to see or explore. It is just the atmosphere of, probably, one of the best kept secret in SE Asia.

Sabaidee! This is the salutation you hear continuously from everybody. It is for “Hello” and “Goodbye” also and it is used also by the foreigners and is nice and comfortable to hear it. In Vietnam everybody says “Hello” or “Hi” and everything is very pro-American, surprising after such a difficult past, but maybe the new market economy makes people try emulate America. Here a lot of things remained French, including the inscriptions on the major institutions, like the Post Office, but still the salutation is local.
Last night, after I had my email done, I went for dinner to the oldest restaurant here in Luang Prabang, dating from 1960, and I had Stuffed Bamboo shoots, a very good and interesting dish. Inside the bamboo shoots they put some meat and they fried it, the dish being delicious. As a matter of fact the food I had here is exquisite, maybe caused by the large number of tourists and travelers who can afford to pay just a little more on dishes. Not the same thing is in Vietnam, where if you want to have good food you go to the best restaurants, that comparatively with the rest of them are slightly more expensive, (still very cheap comparing with USA or Europe). Otherwise the food in Vietnam is repetitive and unappealing.
After dinner I walked on the main street and I bumped into Susan who was nursing a beer in one of the restaurants. We chatted for two hours, a great discussion about many issues. After she raised in Virginia her two daughters, who just finished college, she retired from a job of photography, graphic design and product conceptualization and marketing, sold her house and she began wandering throughout the world. She got a voluntary position with Peace Corp in Essaouira, Morocco where she lived for two years working with the Berbers who were making handicrafts, helping them promote their products. She learned one of the Berber languages and when she was done she decided that she will keep traveling. So, now she wants to spend half of the year traveling in SE Asia and other places and half of the year working with the guys who bought the Silk Mill in Pittsfield, MA, who want to create there a artist commune with work, living and exbition spaces. We are invited to the opening of the first exhibit in June.
I left Susan at 10:30pm and I went home to take a shower and go to sleep because I had to wake up in the morning to see the monks. Again!

The monks did their tour of duty the same like the day before, long rows of yellow robes, taking their rice in silence and peace. I met Gunther and I walked with him, losing him latter in the crowd. From there I went back home to dress for the day and I went to have breakfast on the Mekong, Lao black coffee, banana shake and omelette with a Mango cake that they sell in the city. Plus the views over the Mekong in the morning! When I left the restaurant I bumped in a middle aged Aussie that I met yesterday on the boat. She was telling yesterday about the hellish experience she had riding the bus from Hanoi to Vientiane. The bus was crammed to maximum, having a bench in between the chairs to fill it to more than capacity. It was an AC bus, so the windows could not open being sealed, but….the AC did not work and inside was like in steam bath. The entire trip took…23 hours, leaving at 8:00pm and reaching the border at 8:00am and entering Laos at 9:30 am. She said that she would not wish it to anybody, but she was lucky because…. the other day the bus broke down and the passengers missed the border opening so they had to sleep in the border town and it took …45 hours to get to Vientiane. So I guess that my one hour flight did the trick !
She will travel till her money run out, somebody was renting her house in Australia implicitly paying her mortgage, and she traveled a lot when she was young but she told me regretfully, with no too much interest in those times for cultural travel. And I know what she talks about because I see many young travelers who are here to have a great time, not knowing most of the times what great opportunities they have to see these great sites. It is just about hanging out and living in a cheap place where money is running longer and they chill more without work. Obviously, most of them are not like this and they are deeply involved in seeing, exploring and understanding the culture of the place.
After I parted with the Aussie, who was going to live in a tree house for three days to see and hear gibons, a successful ecotourism program that she decided to join, I went to rent a bike for $1 a day and I start exploring the city. I did not have any plan today and I wanted to wander with no checkboxes or lists of to-do things. I saw several temples that I missed last time but this was not the intention, I just bumped into them. I crossed a bridge trying to get to a place and I found a meditation temple, about which I read but I had no idea how to reach it. It was looking and feeling like the one we saw in Chiang Mai, with inscriptions on trees but his time just in Lao not in English. It has a beautiful gilded stupa on three tiers.
From there I came back in town and biked lazily to other places and I visited two more temples. I stopped around 2pm in a very hip coffee place, Jabo, close to my guest house, a sort of local Starbucks with pastries and nice assortment of coffee, but the frappucino I had was more than disappointing, so I may skip it tomorrow no matter that I planned it for breakfast.
After that I stopped in several stores to buy some things and I went on Mekong to cross it to see some temples on the other side, not very convinced but still… But maybe the weather noticed my visiting mood so it started to rain and I took refuge in a store waiting for the rain to stop, forfeiting my plan to cross the river. The rain continued and after I got some info from an agency for the next time I come to Laos, to go to Mueng Sing, I biked through rain stopping in some other stores. The stores are expensive here. They know that the ones who are buying from them have to have money so they jack up the price ridiculously. I bought a hanging from Sapa for $4 that here they try to sell for $62!!! The same one! There are also very beautiful stores with remarkable things. I found extremely beautiful weaving that they sell, different ones, in the market for $4-7 but in this store they were, of a different quality and an exquisite taste, for $300-650. Eventually, I decided to go to eat something so after I stopped at the guesthouse to take my book to read I went to a great restaurant that I saw on some ads named Tamarind, that makes traditional Lao food. They served me sticky rice, that you eat with your hand making a ball and getting the food with it. The food was more than delicious, was an experience in itself on all sort of spices and dishes from Luang Prabang, a seaweed from the Mekong that they dry outside with sesame, garlic and tomatoes, eggplant salad cooked in a different style, coriander as salad that I never ate before and some sweet tomatoes all with a local hot sauce. They are specialized in these kind of specialty dishes and they do not serve dinner so I told them that I will link them to the blog http://www.tamarindlaos.com , one of the best culinary experience I had in Laos.
When I finished lunch/dinner it was almost 5:30pm and the monks in the wat across the street started to chant, a thing that all monks do at that time. I joined them and I shot some video inside and moved latter for more chants and more video and sound recording in another wat nearby that I missed to see inside. I wanted not to miss any more the chance to call home so I came and at 6:30pm I spoke with Victor who just woke up and was very happy when I told him that we will play together soon.

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Last night after I wrote the blog I walked a little in the night market where I bought several things and I was pondering what to do. I kept entering in agencies and talk with guides to see if I can go to the North. Apparently, the guy who gave me the first information, was misinformed and the night bus ride to Luang Nam That, that he told me that is 7 hours is actually around 10 hours and the ride to Muang Sing that he told me that is 1.5 hours is actually 4 hours and not back to back, Muang Sing being all the way in the North at the border with Burma. These are the ways you have to deal on travel, especially if you go on sites that are way out of the beaten path and no information you receive, including this one is not guaranteed. So this destination was out of question and I started to investigate for the original plan with the Plain of Jars. I found two guys leaving today and coming back to Luang Prabang in 3 days but that did not serve me at all, no matter that it was a possibility riding a night bus to Vang Vieng, so I put it as an option and I thought that the morning will bring something and it did.

The monks are the heart of Laos. When the Commies took power in 1975, sweeping in victory the entire Indochina they banned the offering of alms to the monks, that represent the core belief for Buddhists. As they got in trouble, because one year later there were riots in the streets, they had to reinstate it and live in a communist system with religion on the side. Still they banned many children for going to monasteries and introduced the indoctrination in temples but the alm offering remained. I was in the morning at 6:00am and latter at 6:30am to see this alm offering and is a spectacle by itself to see a long row of monks aligned on the side of the street coming from far away to the place where are seated people who give them rice. A long row of yellow robes with a large bowl of rice that they open and accept the offer. Begging for monks is a major element in Buddhism in order to make you humbler and acept that you don’t mean anything. This alm offering is important both for the believers but also for the monks to strengthen their religious education. The long line of yellow robes passed in front of my camera, impressive and silent, the whole procession that lasts somewhere around 15-20 minutes happens in silence in the dark light of the early morning.
On the sidewalk were lots of people aligned on straw mats with bowls of rice giving each monk a little rice…. And throngs of tourists to see the show, some of them making also the offer.
It finished around 6:45am and I went to have breakfast on the shore of the Mekong, coffee and omlette with the always present fruit shake. Right after breakfast trying to get in contact with a guy from an agency with whom I spoke yesterday, I entered another agency and I asked about the trip to Plain of Jars, a place that is quite out of the way and few people go because is not cheap. The guy told me that he has two Americans going there on Wednesday and continuing to the border with Vietnam. No matter that in my mind was to leave there on Tuesday, tomorrow, I found it very convenient and I decided in my mind to go with them. Actually, returning to the agency later today for the day trip I booked, I met them in the agency: Hunter teaches Math in Physanoulok, Thailand and is from MD and Dana is from CT at the border with RI, close to Cape Cod. I chat with them a little and they were happy latter on in the trip when I told them that I may join. The trip of today, a classic of the area is a two part trip. In the morning we left with a long boat on Mekong admiring the life on its shores with the fishermen in full action. We arrived, after we stopped to a village that makes whiskey, as they call it, a typical tourist trap, to some caves, Pak Ou, where the kings of Laos brought every year statues of Buddha as offers, most of them standing, Luang Prabang style. The statues are small and they fill several ledges in the cave and the whole experience would have been great if I did not visit the Buddha cave in Kalaw , Burma, where the statues are huge, gilded and you walk through them like through a forest. So for me the cave was a total disappointment. There are two caves and the second one, in spite of being dark was more interesting than the first. The good thing was that the caves are somewhere up the cliff that confers great views over the Mekong.
From there we returned directly to Luang Prabang. I had lunch, papaya salad and two(!!!) fruit shakes and I left for the second part of the trip that visits a waterfall 30 km out of Luang Prabang, Keung Si. I did not expect much, I saw enough waterfalls to be weary of them, but what was there enchanted everybody. It was a tropical forest with cascades that were falling one from another in blue small pools of waters, like you may see in movies and the guys from Las Vegas try to recreate in Mirage Casino. Actually the first impression when I got there was that I saw this in the lobby of Mirage Hotel!!!!! If you keep walking up you get to the main cascade, so tall and beautiful on several tiers falling from one to another, each in a blue pool. Absolutely everybody was more than enchanted to see it and is hard to describe in words and maybe even in pictures, the impression that lasted on us.
From there we returned directly to Luang Prabang and we did not stop in a Hmong village as the schedule was. I met in the bus an American, Susan, who will be for 3 years in Pittsfield, MA where some guys bought the old silk mill and try to convert it in an art space, for the artists to show their work. She is the artist that will conceptualize this conversion. I went home took a shower and came back in town , crossing the busy night market, bought some scarves and came here for the phone and internet. Latter dinner and tomorrow I want to rent a bike and go around the town. You don’t want to leave this place!

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Luang Prabang is magic. It is Thailand 20 years ago, because Thailand now is so touristy not being anymore the calm paradise of the forgotten hippies. Lunag Xueng Prabang was the capital of Laos till the communists moved it to Vient Cheng, the “sandalwood city”, renamed by the French, Vientiane. The king built here a palace, that was originally supposed to be the French governor palace, at the beginning of the 20th century and ruled the country from here. But the roads were terrible and Mekong unreliable so a trip on the Mekong from here to Saigon took longer than an ocean crossing to Paris. So Luang Prabang remained unspoiled by times and modernity and just recently the road got renovated and you can get to Vientiane in 10 hours by bus on a switchy mountain road. It looks like a larger village but is full of temples called wat like in Thailand, built in a similar style, and lots of restaurants, bars, internet cafes and outfitters who wants to take you in all sorts of adventures, by bikes, elephants, rafting or kayaking. I woke up early but I laid down in bed and I had my breakfast of fruits with yogurt and sandwich on French bread finished at 9:00am and just after that I left in exploration. I visited most of the wats in town, the town being small and if you rush a little you definitely can cover in a day or two. I took it very easy, chatting with monks and visiting slowly the sites and the Royal Palace. The king, after was appointed by the Commies “Supreme Adviser”, on the same model they did in Vietnam, was jailed in a cave and he died in the 80s of malnutrition and lack of medicine. Officially…. it is not official version but his picture, statues and portraits are all over the palace, that look exactly the way it was when he was evacuated from it. His two daughters are living in Paris, two sons in the USA and another one of them, the Crown Prince is here in Luang Prabang in his previous residence that is transformed in hotel nowadays, after Laos also adopted market economy policies. I walked the entire day through the wats, on the shore of the Mekong and his tributary, Nom Kham, Luang Prabang being located on a sort of peninsula between these two rivers. I stopped at lunch for a cold beer in a very shi-shi bar Kili Wine Bar, rested a little and after that I climbed the steps on top of the hill, Phu Si, to see the view of the city, unfortunately covered in a sort of smoke the entire day that makes the visibility limited. It gives a hazy look to the sun. Coming back to the main street I tried to call again at “bunici” but to no avail and I had an early dinner of Indian Food, not so good like the great Lao dish of fish I had yesterday in Tam Tam Bamboo. Now I will go in the night market, something similar with Chiang Mai with the difference that it closes around 10pm because the entire city does not stay late at all, except several bars for foreigners. I tried during the morning to arrange a trip to the Plain of Jars but it is not so easy. If you go by bus it takes one day each way and you spent one day there. I tried to go by minibus, just two days but I have to find other people to do it and it may be more difficult. So, if it does not work out I may skip it and do something else in the North in an area with markets and many other minorities. It is a great difference between Laos and Vietnam, a difference that the French tried to ignore and failed. The Annamite Line separates the two people and this mountain range is actually the demarcation between the Chine influenced people and the Hindu influenced people. In spite of the fact that Champas were Hindus they were complete absorbed in the Vietnamese state that had a huge Chinese heritage. Everything there is Chinese, starting with the temples that look and feel like in China, with the Buddhist tradition that does not have the Buddha statues we were used to, the Confucius influence that is the core of the belief and finishing with the people that act like the Chinese, but being more gentle and nicer that the Chinese, with the food that resembles the style of Chinese cooking, that after 3 weeks I could not take it anymore and I went for an Australian Steak…. Besides, the Chinese influence and the new market economy made Vietnam the new capitalist Mecca, and people act this way. Everything is business, calls for ” buy from me”, “cheap”, money photo”, “one picture one dollar”, “give tip”, “sama same…but different” are regular and all the foreigners are amused or annoyed by them. They made it as logo on T-shirts and the worst place is Sapa, where the Black Hmong are the most intense. The tranquility you expect in SE Asia has nothing in common with Vietnam and the worst is in the big cities where the traffic can make your life a hell. But after a while, maybe a little more than 1 week, you learn to walk in the middle of a hellish traffic thinking about your stuff, ignoring and being completely oblivious at the cacophony of sounds that surrounds you. Absolutely anybody who has any form and size of a horn, be sure that he will use it continuously and after a while in your mind the noise disappears… Maybe you were able to stop the world! When you land in Luang Prabang the shock is huge. The fact that the buses are not pressing the horns and nobody is peddling towards you is so surprising that you think that you landed in paradise. Everything is very slow, like the flow of the Mekong, people do not smile all the time but they are extremely nice and very polite, the time stops and you realize that you landed back in time, maybe sometimes in the 60s in a dreamy Thailand. Everybody who stays here, stays much more than they need, hang out, take a bike, nurse a beer, or chat with others. This looks to be the place where everybody comes to relax after a “tour of duty” in India, Vietnam or China. And me too also, because now my vacation starts from here!

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Last day in Hanoi was dedicated to the the Old Quarter, named also the “36 street quarter”, the old area of the city that housed the old time guilds of the city, 36 guilds in total that gave it its name. I forfeited the breakfast in the hotel and I went to a restaurant for a breakfast of fruits and a delicious shake of a mix of fruits, something that I don’t know if it can be so good in any country from the North. After that I started to walk the quarter. Each street that carries the name Hang, that means in Vietnamese “merchandise”, was the place where in the past that particular item was sold: there are streets for rope, clothes, shoes, religious items, silversmith, jewelers, blacksmiths, funerary stones, etc. I started the tour at the Hoang Kiem lake that sits in the middle of the city and it has on in its middle an island on which is located a temple dedicated to a national hero, this being very “in” in Vietnam, the same like in China. There are many temples dedicated to kings, generals, scholars and heroes. From that temple I started to walk the guild streets that now-a-days do not sell anymore always only that merchandise but for sure it exists a concentration. I followed a tour that is recommended in the book and I reached interesting places, and several temples and pagodas located inside the quarter. The streets are charming being shaded by trees in the entire Hanoi, but unfortunately the spring mist that started in the morning became more and more annoying and was becoming a real drizzle. I kept walking, arriving at one of the old city gates and following the street on which there were selling funerary items, I got to the mysterious place where they sell the fake money, stashes of copied hundred dollar bills that they burn as offering in temples in the main kang, oven. These and many others are part of the offering for the dead part of the famous Confucian tradition of worshiping the ancestors, the core activity during the Tet festival of the Lunar New Year. From there I went for a little longer walk to get on the famous bridge over the Red River that was the main target for the American aviation during the war. It is the major artery that connects Hanoi to outside at it was bombed 8 times but repaired easily by the Vietnamese. On the bridge was a group of “short haired” Americans that were on a tour to various sites related to to the American War. They looked like Marines and their guide was talking only about sorties and how many bombs can destroy an objective. He had also the same hairdo! The bridge is impressive, apparently was built by a student of Eiffel. Currently is still a main road, being in the center of the city and is crossed by train and motorbikes. It was getting late , almost 10:00am and I had to be back at the hotel at 12:00 the latest, when the taxi for the airport was coming, so I hit directly to see Uncle Ho laying down. The drizzle from the morning became rain and I did not have anything with me for cover, even a cap, but there were 21C so was no big deal. I thought that it was easy to see Uncle Ho, but the line was impressive even in the on and off rain. I checked the luggage, because you are not allowed to enter the tomb with any kind of cameras or cellphones and I proceeded to stay in line, sometime around 30 minutes. I was able to make it because the tomb is open only 5 days a week between 8-11, and I did it right before 11:00am. I got drenched in the rain and inside was AC but the view is very short trying to accommodate so many people that came in trips to see Ho. It is better done that the tomb of Mao in Beijing because you walk around the crypt. Ho was quite a character and no matter what bad things he may have done, he will remain in history like a great figure for Vietnam. Seeing the amazing cult for ancestors the Vietnamese have, especially the ones who made a difference inn the history of the country, you realize that Ho achieved both the independence and the unification of the entire country. So any missteps, and even disasters of the communist experiment, will be easily forgotten by anybody balancing these great achievements. And all were corrected now when the country is moving ahead to a market economy of the most capitalistic nature. From Uncle Ho’s tomb, that ended symbolically my visit in Vietnam, I went thorough the unceasing drizzle to the hotel but before I stopped to a store, in the way, where I bought something the other day to get a receipt. At the hotel, I packed and repack because the whole issue about this flight was that I must have 20 kg. So I took a lot of stuff on me together with all the books and I crammed as best as I could all the stuff in one bag hoping for the best. Besides, I had another package that I bought in Dalat. I paid the hotel and took some receipts from them, chat a little with some Aussies, originally from Vietnam whom I met the day before before I left to Tam-Coc and I got in the cab that was waiting in front of the hotel. The airport is far and it took him an hour to get there but the check-in went smoothly and it turned out that my luggage barely did it, being somewhere around 19kg. After quite a wait I got in the bus that brought us to a plane that looked tiny near a Boeing 777 but it did not look so tiny latter on. It was a propeller plane, the first time I flew one of these guys, ATR 72 made in France and did pretty good in the 1:15 hour flight to Luang Prabang, the old capital of Laos. The plane had 70 seats but I guess that there were maybe 20 people in it. We landed in Luang Prabang at 4:00pm right in front of the airport building and we got out and enter the airport and I got a 15 days landing visa on the airport. For the picture they scanned the passport… I did not catch in time because if I entered on the Romanian passport would have been cheaper…..The formalities were a breeze comparing with Vietnam and I found myself outside together with 4 French people with whom I shared a taxi-van for $1 each and we got into the city right away parking in front of a guest house. Right away you realize that finally you arrived in SE Asia. Vietnam it may be located geographically in SE Asia but culture wise is more in China, the 1000 years of occupation and the new economy of the country changing aggressively their culture. The tranquility of SE Asia does not exists there, everything is a rush and a humongous cacophony of sounds and noise that make people completely immune. In Vietnam absolutely everybody who has a horn is using it fully and the entire pedestrian, animal and motor traffic does not hear it anymore, because is more than a second nature, it became the background noise, so you can press the horn behind somebody and the person does not even flinch. We were surprised that the minibus that took us to Luang Prabang does not continuously press the horn and make a big fuss! I tried one guest house where the rooms were charming but they had only for one night so I left my luggage there and after a quick search I found a similar one, with AC and beautifully shiny floors, in all houses you have to leave the shoes at the entrance. I repacked my luggage and I went in town that is small and charming, similar with Sukhotai or Chiang Mai, the Lao people being named in history Thai that creates a big controversy nowadays. The culture is similar with Thailand and does not have any relation with Vietnam. I ate in a very nice Lao restaurant TamTam Bamboo, a dish of fish, chatting with Gunther, a German from Stuttgart who works for Lufthansa and here I am at the Internet Cafe to make a phone call (in Romania nobody answered again!!!!) at home.

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I woke up in the morning with the idea of posting the text about Halong Bay that I wrote last night but the internet was still not working, so I decided in the last moment to leave for the trip to Tam Coc in spite of the fact that the sunny weather predicted on weather.com did not happen. The group was very small, with two girls from Geneva and a couple from Saigon, very artsy , the guy trying to talk on a slik cellphone the entire trip. The trip, that took about 2-3 hours, no matter that they say that it takes mostly 2 hours, was to Hoa Lu, the first capital of the unified independent Vietnam, unification obtained by a king in the 10th century, after he was able to get rid of the Chinese who came in the 2nd century AD and forget to leave for 1000 years. So it can be worse than with the Russians! The unified part was just the north of the country after which they started to move south in areas occupied by Champa Empire and in the 17th century were able to absorb the entire Champa kingdom of Danang. Hoa Lu was the first capital, a citadel in those time with temples and palaces. The first king had three sons, and his beloved one, the third son, was killed by the first one out of jelousy and fear that he may lose the throne. So, at the death of the king the queen did a swift move and married the commander of the army who became in this way the king instead of the fraticidal son. This second king is credited also with major victories against the Chinese and is also commemorated in Hoa Lu. The only things that remains from the old citadel are two temples dedicated to these two major kings. The temples are interesting from the historical perspective more than anything else and they are restaurated in the 17th century. But people come here even today with offers and prayers. After the visit of the two temples we boarded the bus and went to Tam Coc for a mediocre lunch and right after that we got on boats to visit this site. Tam Coc is named also “Halong Bay on land” or on the rice paddies. It has the same limestone rock formations like the ones we saw in Halong Bay and is looking closer with Yangshou, being placed on a river. The river is smaller and to visit it you board a boat that is rowed by two women, that takes you through a stupendously beautiful scenery of peaks and green rice paddies tilled by peasants. The river crosses through some caves and the boat ride goes inside these 3 caves where you have to duck your head not to hit the ceiling. After about 1 hour you get to the end of the trip and you start touring back. The boat trip is popular both with Vietnamese and foreigners and the river is full of boats, the rowing women trying like in the entire Vietname to sell you something else while you are a captive audience on board. We arrived at the harbour and after a short wait for the two artsy Vietnamese, we left to Hanoi, where before we reached the center of the city we slowed down to look into the dog meat market, a specialty that only in Vietnam is consumed. However, even here it looks like is eaten only by poor people and is looked down on. The market was depressing, or this was our perception not being familiar with this type of food, but probabily the same would look any other meat market for a vegetarian! Finally, we arrived in the city and right away I started to pound the streets to cover some ground before the tomorrow’s departure. I shot some video in the center and I arrived in the glitzy part of the town, where the Opera built by the French is located surrounded by the best hotels: the old Metropole now owned and managed by Sofitel and the new/old Hilton. The area around them is full of chic bars and restaurants, and there are also all the label-stores. I entered Esprit that was full of employees and no customer and one T-shirt was selling for half million dongs, same price like in the US! From there I went directly to see the Hanoi “Hilton”, the way the POWs were calling the jail of Hanoi. The person who was named the first ambassador in Vietnam in 1994 lived there for a while. The jail is still there but only a fraction of it, transformed in museum, because most of it was demolished to make space for a highrise with conference centers and luxury apartments. Times change and the place was primary real estate! I finished my tour with a visit to the St. Joseph cathedral where I stayed a little at the mass in Vietnamese and after that I went to find Cafe des Arts, a glitzy French restauranbt were I wanted to eat in the last two nights in Hanoi but because I was too hungry I settled each night for a closer place to my hotel. The food was great, and the dishes were very interesting but I went for beefsteak tartar, something that rarely I eat but they boast that theirs is the best and it was!. All watered with a bottle of Halida local beer! After dinner I tried to call home but nobody answered so I gave up and now is late, and I am retyping this posting because I lost the first one, and I will go to sleep. Before going to the hotel I passed by a Frech pastry place and I got two great cakes and I stopped to ODC travel to pick up my plane ticket for tomorrow. It is very difficult in Vietnam to get exactly what you want because the command of the English language is very poor for the majority of the educated people. They are able to communicate but in simple lines, if you get them in subtleties they are lost and they don’t understand you at all. It turned out at the agency that the ticket is not on Vietnam Airlines but on Lao Airlines. First time they told me that is the same plane and they code-shared and latter they told me that they do have separate flights. Either I did not understand or they have no clue, and both are possible. In any case you cannot get the difference between: the same plane and the same flight! And they are completely lost in this! And this is ODC travel a pretty established agency but the employees are similar with many other agencies. The difference is made by the fact that some of them are more polite and look more professional in their neat offices.
Finally I got to the hotel and I was able to post the last night post and write and rewrite this one. When I was in the middle of the first draft, Emin, the Irish guy from the Halong Bay boat, just showed up from his third day on Halong Bay (we did not know that we stayed and stay in the same hotel) and told me that the weather today was even worse then the other days, the boats were stopping and had to honk in order to keep in contact with each other because of the heavy mist.

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Halong Bay is the jewel of the crown, the best site the Vietnamese have and for good reason. It is an area close to Haiphong, a bay in the Gulf of Tonkin, where the legend said that the dragon who left the land to go into the sea, smashed the earth with his tail and broke it in many pieces, before disappearing into the sea. So the bay has many island, somewhere around 1600, and it would take a long time to see all of them. There are trips of 1-4 days to see something and they cater to all categories of travelers on boats that sail the gulf. I left around 7:30am from the hotel, and in the bus I found an eclectic group, mainly French with some Malaysians, an American and an Irish. The bus ride to Halong City, the newly developed city that is the hub for the bay cruises, was about 4 hours with a stop in between. We arrived at 11:30am and at 1:00pm boarded the boat and after some unexpected delays we started to cruise. The weather was not good at all, something that we understood is typical for this time of the year, especially for the month of March where a sort of continuos drizzle is hanging in the air, but is so thin that you don’t get wet on your clothes just on your hair. The immediate effect is that the visibility decreases considerably and everything floats in a kind of mist. I knew about it, a very similar weather with the one we had in Yangshuo several years ago, and the landscape is identical. The boat was pretty big, with cabins for sleep, very comfortable and, as usual in Vietnam, very clean. We cruised for an hour, with limited visibility and we arrived at some beautiful caves and got down to visit them. All sorts of legends and stories abound about these grottoes , most of them fabricated by the guides, talking about dragons, princes and princesses and their 100 children, but the bottom line is that they are very beautiful limestone caves, unfortunately packed with all the tour groups that visit them in the same time. After this short visit we got on the boat again and we cruised to a floating fishing village, floating platforms in the bay where the fishermen live, the plan being to buy fish, but in the end nobody did it. We continued to a place where they were renting kayaks but again with no clients from our side and finally we stopped on an island, from whose top the visibility was great, or as great as can be in the misty weather. The weather started to improve and in the evening it cleared out, and you could see even stars on the sky. The entire landscape is made out of rock formations that sprout out of the sea, peaks, higher and lower, with vegetation on them and you navigate through this maze enjoying the beautiful view. In spite of the bad visibility, the clouds and fog gave a more mysterious look to the place, and you had more chances to see the dragon that people repeatedly said they saw coming out of the sea. I did not see exactly the dragon, but I have to check what is on video, and maybe, maybe…Meanwhile the crew of the boat fed us, gave us the keys for the cabins, and at 5:00pm we got electricity and hot water, so we went for a quick shower. Most of the people were intrigued about my camera, usually the Westerners are more intrigued than the locals who think only that is very expensive, and we started to talk, the French, from La Rochelle, proving to be very nice, however they could not stop mentioning the Romanian gypsies who are prowling the people in France. The two dinner tables were organized by languages, the French at one table and the English speaking at the other. Again, I was impressed with the Malaysian couple, Chinese descendant, who were speaking very well English, and he told me many things about the politics in Malaysia, where the Chinese and the Indians do not have too much of a say in politics, that is controlled completely and very authoritarian by Malay. This is the third couple from Malaysia I am traveling with and I cannot say how impressed I am with their command of English and I say this in comparison with the Vietnamese, who even if they speak very well, especially the guides, it’s almost impossible to understand them and nothing that require a little more finesse in term of tenses is understood by them. In the end, I chat with Emin, from Ireland, a very nice Irish boy who did not want to go to Sapa because there were no Irish pubs and Saturday is St Patrick’s Day, a very important event for any Irish person. He told me that he watches every year the NY Irish parade broadcast in Ireland. Also, it was Aaron from Boise. ID, who was happily traveling since April last year, part time in the US and part time outside, but he was feeling that the end is near and he should come back, but it was still a chance to extend the trip to meet some friends who were going in the fall in Nepal. We had a long chat followed by a game of Switch, a card game Emin taught us and we had great fun playing, sometime late after the French and Malaysians went to bed. But the fun had to stop because at 10:30 pm the engine was supposed to be cut off and we still can enjoy everything but in the dark. Emin and Aaron went to sleep and I got on the top deck of the boat. It was magnificent!. The clouds cleared and you could see far away Halong City. We were anchored in the middle of a bay surrounded by peaks that were poking out of the water, and also surrounded by other boats that all were drifting at anchor. It was so quiet and beautiful that it took me a long time to decide to go to sleep in my cabin. It was warm and you could stay on the lounge chairs on the deck, close your eyes and feel how the boat drifts. All the boats, or most of them , had the lights off. The whole experience was magical. Finally, I decided to go to sleep, not for any other reason but I got asleep several times on the lounge chair. After a night sleep in the village followed by another in the sleeper train, here I was sleeping on a boat. I went directly to sleep and I woke up in the morning, hopefully for a better weather but the clouds were even worse than the previous day, so after we ate our breakfast we cruised back to the harbor in Halong City where we arrived at 11:00am as scheduled. We had quite a long lunch and after some delays with the buses, during time the pearl sellers were prowling on us to purchase their wares, they succeeded to cram 21 people in a minivan and we got on our bus for the 4 hour trip to Hanoi, where we arrived at 5:30pm. Here the weather was a little better but not very different and in the evening the same drizzle came over the city. As a result I had doubts if to go tomorrow to a trip or not, but I checked the weather and tomorrow is supposed to be sunny, so I will go. Here , I had to solve several issues and the first was to see how I will get to Laos. Investigating further they told me that it may take 17-22 hours by bus and everybody gave me a different estimate, so I figured out that is not a pretty set deal and you may get stuck in customs for a long time. So I decided for a flight, that I’ve crossed it before from my options when they told me that I can have only 20 kg, but you can have more than one pack. But balancing with 22 hours, I went for the flight, and after doing a research on the Internet for the type of plane they use, ATR72 ( French) that in my mind was confused with IAR72 (Russian), I bought a direct flight to Luang Pabrang, Saturday at 3:00pm, for an one hour flight. Nobody knew what planes they fly and neither who makes them! This took a while, and after that I had to go to the store where I bought the jacket to ask them something and quickly to the Water Puppet Theater, a famous tradition in Hanoi, where by chance I was able to get a ticket for the 8:00pm show, everything else being sold out. The Puppets were very nice, the show was color full and entertaining. They have these puppets in a pool of water and they manipulate them horizontally from the back of a curtain, different that the vertical way that is in use everywhere. Stories, traditions, legends with music, etc. I was starving and from the theater I went and ate in a very nice restaurant on the shore of Hoang Kiem Lake that is in the middle of Hanoi, at the base of the Old Quarter. After dinner, it came the phone moment, unfortunately the connection was not great and, before I got to the internet in the hotel, I stopped to one of the many bootleg CD places and I bought 6-7 new CDs. Last night when I finished to write this I tried to post but the internet in the hotel died. I saved it and tried again this morning still to no avail, and I hope that now it will work.

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The plan for the last day in the North was to go to another market in Cok Ly. I pondered upon the idea because it was an alternative to go to another market that was different, in another province, but unfortunately, it was a slow day for that market, named Bin Liu, the high market days would have been between Thu-Sun.
There are many minorities in the area and it was fun to see their customs and the dress they wear. On one side of the mountain are the Flower Hmong, Liu, Tay and Dzay. On the other are the Black Hmong and the Red Dzao and in another province are the Red Hmong and the Black Dzao. Probably there are more of them but is hard to identify them, after just several days of walking in the area.
I was able to see the first group in the market in Bha Ca and Cancau and the second group in the market in Sapa, so Bin Liu market would have been perfect for the third group but in the end I decided to keep with the original schedule to go to Cok Ly. We woke up at 6:00am, said good bye to our hosts and left to meet the jeep (Russian) on the road. The village was awake and the water buffaloes were roaming the alleys. We arrived at the road but no sign of jeep, Bang called and eventually woke up the tour operator who sent a jeep with one hour delay. The way to Sapa is just 17 km from the place we were and we arrived when the clouds/fog started to lift and the views over the city were marvelous.
You could see the city out of fog but the fog was still lingering under the city. Great view!
I had breakfast on the Bamboo restaurant and left to the Sapa market, and do the last shoppings I planned for, some things that I already saw and wanted to buy and I had to pick up the custom made blouse-coat I got for Cristina.
I went again to the market, where there were not too many Red Dzao like the day before and I went to see the church and a local temple. At 10:00 I went to the hotel, pick up the luggage, got in the jeep and we left for Cok Ly market on a road that on its last 17 km before the market, was all dust and all our luggage and our lungs got dusted to a level like I never saw since I was in Tibet. The market itself was disappointing, very small with the same minorities. Organized travel in Vietnam is OK but the agencies do not have the creativity of advising people what to see and this is an issue when you don’t know the local customs. Instead of seeing three markets on the same side of the mountain, I would have opt for another from the other side. I walked a little in the market and I settled for some roasted peanuts for lunch, forfeiting my official lunch with Bang.
But still I picked up this trip because after the market it was a boat ride on Chai River that it turned out to be very nice. I was very lucky that the weather improved in the last two days, and the cold spell from the last week went away, so I did not need my newly bought Armani jacket at all. It was warm for T shirt and extremely pleasant on the boat, that was going through canyons with caves and we stopped eventually to visit a Tay village. We had tea with the people in the house, a custom here, and always when we stopped somewhere people were offering Vietnamese tea that like their coffee is strong and bitter. They showed me the upstairs of the house, the Tay house having a lower level for animals, that they partitioned and made a living room also, and a top floor for sleeping. I wanted to go to the bathroom but no matter that they showed me where the location was I could not figure it out. It was a pig style there and some other huts but nothing to resemble what I know to be a toilet. And obviously I did not expected tiled ceramic walls and toilet paper! But still I could not figure out which was the toilet!
We left the village and board the boat admiring the beautiful flowers of a local tree, called rice treat, and we rode the boat for another 30 minutes till we got to the road where the jeep was waiting for us. Another cup of tea in the shade, it was already very hot, and we left for Lao Cai on a beautiful sunset, cruising around the Vietnamese shore of the Lap River that is the border with China. In Lao Cai we went directly to the Chinese border and I looked to the constructions from the other side but I could not go there because I did not have a Chinese visa and neither a return Vietnamese one.
Bang showed me the market building in the Chinese city and told me that the first floor is occupied by merchants and the second and third by the “Meat market” , prostitution in China being legal, (not in Vietnam). All the girls are registered and pay taxes. Two full floors in a large building! The Vietnamese can cross the bridge anytime for a day trip and if they want to stay overnight they have to arrange for a permit. Bang said that is cheaper in China that in Vietnam, in terms of food, accommodation and transportation. The buildings in the the cities are impressive, the Vietnamese built a Commercial center, business center that looks very modern and on the Chinese side was built up pretty seriously.
From the border we left to the railway station, where I went in a hotel to change, arranged by Bamboo/Sapa, I tipped the driver and I had another discussion with Bang, who told me that he may try to immigrate to USA, the dream of any young person in Vietnam. I told him about the visa lottery, that he did not know about and we promise to keep in touch. One stop, after Bang left, was to the Internet to post my story and do the the email but the computer/network was so slow that I could not post, so I saved it, email it and posted this morning.
My stomach got a little upset yesterday, not bad but enough to have some shrills, and I got on my steamed rice and water cure that works miracles, better than any fancy drug, so till this morning everything was supposed to be in order. The train was leaving at 9:15pm. I got in the compartment with a German couple from Munchen with whom I chat for about an hour. Friendly! I told them that I lived in Munich a while ago and turned out that they live very close from where I used to live. We went to sleep, the same uneasy sleep of the sleeping couches, and we arrived in Hanoi at 5:30 am, took a motorbike and arrived in Camellia Hotel to wake up the host who was sleeping in the lobby.
I did all my repacking, because I bought a small backpack for local travel and I had breakfast, did my posting and email and I am waiting for the bus that will take me at 7:30 am to Halong Bay, a two day trip where I will sleep, tonight, on the boat in the bay. So no Internet!

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The crowd from the Trekking Cafe was very interesting: Daniella was from Australia and came in Sapa several days ago. The moment she was hitting Australia’s land she was getting bored right away so she traveled almost continuously for the last 10 years living 4 years in India. Roelf was from Amsterdam and he was the third time in Sapa. Mongolia was his preferred country of travel and in Sapa he was doing some voluntary work with the minorities who knew him very well so they invited him the next day to a wedding. Abas, or something like that, was Moroccan living in Switzerland and studying in Laussaune but mainly he was traveling and was in lots of places. I chat with them till 11:00pm when I had to leave and go to sleep. The plan was to leave in the trek early morning but I wanted to visit Sapa, so I woke up again before sunrise. The room I had was magnificent, covered in windows on two sides, like the entire hotel, The Green Bamboo. I had breakfast and I left for the market. Saturday and Sunday were market days in Sapa but still the market had plenty of Black Hmong and Red Dzao who were pounding the streets. I got inside the market where the local people sell and the view was fascinating with lots of materials embroidered and beautifully decorated dress, like I did not have a chance to see with the Flower Hmong, who may be a show in themselves but their taste is far from the European style. I bought more than I wanted to do and I kept walking the market and taking shoots. These tribes are more aggressive, being in constant move to sell and they harass foreigners to buy and also they ask for money to have their picture taken, so the task was not so easy but with the lot of experience I had in snatching pictures it worked in the end. I spent in total about 2 hours in the market and around and I was at 11:00 am at the hotel where I was supposed to meet Bang. We left for a walk, a trek they call it because the range of tourists/travelers is very large, and after a short walk on the road we started to go through rice paddies and beautiful landscape. The weather was sunny and the views were magnificent, with terraced valleys and hills covered in mist. We walked very slowly because I took so many pictures. On the same road we met an American woman from Seattle, whom I will meet latter in the village, and lots of Black Hmong who were going to and from work. Around 2pm we stopped at a beautiful hut located on a river cross and we ate some cold cuts and a beer that there costs more than in the most expensive restaurant in Saigon, 25000 dongs. We continued after lunch to the same slow pace and we arrived in the village. Meanwhile we crossed two villages of Black Hmong, in one of them I bought a water holder. The Black Hmong are very good artists but they are dirty and illiterate, based on what Bang said. They do not have electricity and are pretty impolite and aggressive. Basically they come after you and they keep pestering you to buy stuff from them, mainly cheap souvenirs. This is the reason they are not liked by the guides and all the accommodations, home stays as they call it, are done in the next village that is a Dzao village, another minority very industrious who send their children to school so they are smarter and better educated. The school is free for the minorities but not for the Vietnamese who pay a pretty hefty tax. The moment we got home, around 4:00pm, the guide and the hosts started to cook and the dinner that happened around 6:30-7:00pm was a festine with about 5-6 dishes. Obviously they are very generous and their tradition probably obliges them to cook so much but most of the travelers cannot eat the astronomical quantities they cooked there. Before dinner I went for a walk in the village in sunset and I kept thinking about our quick and constrained life in cubicles and theirs, outdoor. Obviously they would give it up easily for more cushy jobs but the atmosphere of the village was so idyllic that I could not stop thinking about this comparison. I sat on top of the hill and watched each household with its own flurry of activities, working in the garden, bringing back the water buffaloes, or planting on terraces and listening to the barking dogs or at one point monkeying with two girls from the village, a 13 year old that was as tall as Victor and the other of the same height being 8. I thought that the first girl was 8 but she was very mature for the age. After the walk I went for dinner and we ate, four of us, the owner of the house with his son, Bang and me, and drank a couple of glasses of Happy Water, the corn brandy they prepare in house. The dinner happened in the kitchen, on very low stools, maybe two inches from the ground and the kitchen was roamed by the house dogs and cats they were shushed outside when they were expressing their desire to have a bite. The after dinner tea is always a moment of relaxation in Vietnam and I had a long chat with Bang about all sorts of issues and about his travel groups and experiences he had with them: the most difficult by far are old Germans and Israelis. Germans are demanding and very impolite and Israelis want to get everything possible for the least amount of money paid. It was very interesting to hear this from a Vietnamese guy and to match in a way my impressions of travel, these two categories being the most difficult for me also to deal with. Of course there are exceptions, but they are just exceptions and not more than that! I had to cut short the discussion with him because I passed by before dinner to the nearby home stay where was a large group of travelers of all nationalities and I promised them I will join after dinner. When I arrived the discussion was in full swing with Kristin, a journalist from Seattle perorating about the American domestic policy and journalism in the USA. There were also two Danish boys who just finished high-school and they were traveling for the first time in life for 4 months, the last one being in the USA, so I obliged to give them some hints for which they were in desperate need, a very funny Spaniard from La Rioja whose dream was to go in the honey moon to Las Vegas, a guy from Manitoba who was going to teach English a month in Cambodia, a girl from England and two girls from Switzerland, all of them, except Kristin, traveling the following night with the sleeper train back to Hanoi. After Kristin gave up the podium, the others started all sort of more mundane discussions and I chat a little with Kristin. She came with her mom to Hoi An to make her wedding dress (it is very inexpensive there) and she was getting marry soon but her boyfriend had to work so he could not come with her in Vietnam. The discussions run late and at 11:00pm I went to sleep. The beds for the guests are in the attic, a sort of “duplex” apartment but basically like a barn. On this second floor there were about 15 mattresses each one with blankets, pillows and a mosquito net for the summer time. It was very clean and you have to take your shoes off when you got there. I slept till 6:00 but I heard all night the dogs barking in the village and in the middle of the night it became very cold. The walls are made out of lumber but not tight fit so you can see outside.

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I woke up in the morning in the first horn of the traffic before sunrise and after packing and a quick breakfast where I was joined again by the Aussies I left for the market.
The market was a little slow at 8:00 am but started to get animated a little latter and around 10:00am was bustling with activity. The tourists were in a row with lots of cameras and tripods and early in the morning it looked like a shooting stage with lots of Flower Hmong women on one side and photographers on the other side. Latter on the number of Flower Hmong exceeded the number of tourists by a comfortable margin so the westerners and local photographers were lost in the crowd.
The market sells everything, there are blacksmith making hoes and carpenters making the plouws, Flower Hmong buying and selling embroideries, Vietnamese selling dogs, pigs, cows, water buffaloes, horses, etc.
I took lots of beautiful pictures like everybody else and I tried to find vantage points for great shoots but most of the time I admired the hustle and bustle of this magnificent market. The Cancau market was smaller but it had the advantage of being almost completely populated by Flower Hmong, here you find all sort of other vendors. I saw also Black Hmong but very few because most of them live in Sapa on the other side of the mountain. At 12:00 I left the market, I met Bang at the hotel and we left in the afternoon for a trek to see a village that is very close to Ba Cha. The village has all the mountain cut in terraces for cultivation and the landscape looks very interesting. We were able to get inside a house, something that the agency has arranged with the locals in advance, and the owner, who was Flower Hmong, gave us to drink something that he calls corn wine but is actually a very perfumed corn brandy, very strong, a sort of palinka, that I could not have thought that you can do from corn. Also, he played for us from pan flute a traditional song and dance and gave me a tour of the house, the major production being the corn brandy. After that we continued to another part of the village where there were houses of another minority named Tai. We returned to Ba Cha for lunch and we left at around 4:00pm with the jeep to Sapa on winding roads crossing rice fields where people were working their fields with water buffaloes or planting rice. Great views! The road takes about 2 hours from Ba Cha to Lao Cai and another hour from Lao Cai to Sapa, crossing the mountains that they were still covered in clouds and when we arrived in Sapa the fog/clouds was extremely deep that we could see only at 3-4 meters. I got a room in Green Bamboo Hotel and I went for a walk in town, a stark contrast to the other villages, with lots of sleek stores catering mainly for tourists, selling nice weavings all priced in US$. The people did not looked so friendly, probably fed up by the number of tourists and Black Hmong women were pacing the streets and asked everybody if they want to smoke ganja. A sort of Jamaica in the mountains! I went a little to some of the stores, had my dinner and tried to find a internet store to make a phone call home. Tomorrow I will leave in a trek that will end up with a night sleep in a village house watching what the local family does in the evening and morning. So no internet at least for tomorrow, if not for the other day also when I will take the night sleeper train to Hanoi.

The tourists that travel Vietnam are a different crowd that the ones in Burma, Tibet or even Cambodia. There are backpackers and travelers but most of them are on tourist groups. A lot are French looking very bourgeois and their age is the best in the 50s but mainly in the 60s, comfortable tours with all inclusive. Travel in Vietnam is organized very well and I think that exists tons of tours offered in the Western countries. So the interaction with other travelers, caused also by the magnitude of the two main cities and the main attractions that are around Hanoi, is smaller, not like it was in Burma or in the village of Siem Rep. But still I was able to find lots of people I interact with and Sapa I think is such a place where you can make contacts. I am now in this Internet cafe called Traveler Cafe, surrounded by travelers that just chat exchanging all sort of stories of travel.

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We walk up around 6:00 am when the train got to Lao Cai, a city on the Chinese border. A guy from the agency was waiting for us in the train station with large billboards carrying my name, and they brought us right away to a restaurant for breakfast, that like any other meal in this trip is included. The surprise was that they did not gang us up together but there were two jeeps with two drivers and two guides, one for me and one for the Aussies, so after the breakfast we said goodbye, starting to drive over hills and mountains to the first market in Cancau. We stopped several times to take pictures of fields full of rice and of peasants plowing their fields with water buffaloes, the main mean of subsistence for these families. Nothing is mechanized and it looks, watching them work and barter, like we live hundreds of years ago.
The clouds were very low and it was a little chilly but not colder than Hanoi. The area where we are now is lower than Sapa, the main town from the area and the main touristic center, that being at 1600m may be very cold, but supportable in March, this being one of the reason that I did this trip starting in Saigon and going towards the North.
The Cancau market was in full swing when I arrived with almost no tourists, that started to come latter, and lots of Flower Hmong people that were selling their wares and produces.Their customs are spectacular, completely embroidered in joyful colors that makes them the major attractions of these markets. There were some other people, like Black Hmong from Sapa and Dzao. They were selling also dogs, horses and water buffaloes, and the women were carrying their children on bundles stuck to their back. I spent at the market about 3.5 hours and left to Bac Ha, the major village in the area where tomorrow will be a major market. In Bac Ha we stopped to the house of the old ruler of the village during the colonial times, a large and elegant French Mansion. The Hmong ruler named Hua, was called by its people The King and he left with the French in 1954, probably in France and latter in California where his descendants are living nowadays. Again I spoke with Bang, my guide, about the American war and I got more or less the same answer. “The past is the past and we are looking into the future”. They love Clinton who did the opening with Vietnam. We came to the hotel where I booked a room, included also in the tour, and I left my luggage inside, after that coming downstairs for lunch. It came to be around 2:30pm when I finished lunch so it was no time left to go around so I went to the internet and I checked the email and do the blog from yesterday trip, hoping that later in the day I’ll do the second part. I went for a walk in the village, that is very basic, with some hotels and restaurants for tourists, but not too many tourists come here; they prefer to stay in Sapa and come here just for the market. I went to the market, bought some mango and when I was going to the internet I met some Dutch people and we had a very long and interesting chat about travel in Southeast Asia. They were also on a tour that went in China also, and they did not have too many good things to say about China, but they enjoyed Vietnam and Laos, who they told me that became the newest backpacker paradise, with places la Vang Vieng full of shops, disco music and large TVs in outside lounges.
Finally, I got to the internet and I published part of the story but I had to go to the hotel to meet Bang at 6:30pm for dinner. In the hotel I bumped into the Aussies, with whom I had dinner, and latter on the Dutch guys and their wives showed up. I tried to go back to the Internet but I was up for a big surprise: both internet places in town that have in total 30-40 computers were completely taken over by the village’s kids who were playing games and chatting. I tried to go from one to another but the girls who were managing the places told me that is “Full” and is nothing to do….Latter! So I watched a typical touristy traditional dance show in one of the hotels and I got the idea to check in the hotel where I found out that they have an internet computer (only one!) and is working but very slow. Hope tonight to go to bed earlier, maybe 10pm.

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Hardly you can find such a great day trip like the one I did today at the Perfume Pagoda. Everything is spectacular and by being in the full festival of the pagoda it made it ten times better.
After I finished all the dealings with the travel agents to see what can be done and how, I went in the evening to the hotel and I booked a day-trip to a place outside Hanoi, called “Perfume Pagoda”. The next day, promptly as usual, the minibus came and picked me up at 7:45 am from the hotel and we drove for about 90 minutes plus a short stop to a place from where you have to board a boat The canal, where the boats are located was packed with small boats, hundreds of them easily, that were carrying people to the base of the mountain where the pagoda is located. The place is an important pilgrimage place, and it happened that one month after the Lunar New Year, called Tet here, is the festival of this pagoda and everybody flocks there in hordes. Even if this is a major tourist destination, barely you are able to see the foreigners in the mass of Vietnamese that pack the shrine.
When arriving at the harbor, everybody boards boats that are rowed by two women , one in front and one in the back and the river gets crammed with row boats in the most spectacular show. Some boats have 2-3 people but some can have over 30 people. The boat ride went for about 1 hour and we arrived at the entrance of the park, where we got a ticket, paid in advance by the agency and started climbing the mountain. The climb is also packed with pilgrims and aligned on the sides by stalls selling everything imaginable. It is a typical pilgrimage place, with religious artifacts but also all sort of food used also for religious offer. It exist also a cable car that does the up and down rides, but I preferred to do the walking pilgrimage for the uphill part. The bad part was that the rain of the past days made a slimy walk and I got mud caked on the sneakers and pants. After the one hour walk, that you cannot shorten because the road is packed, I arrived at a point where I had a stalled humongous line in front of me that was waiting to reach a gate in front. Eventually, this happened after about 30 minutes when I saw that after the gate there were steps going down to a cave, where in about 15 more minutes I found a huge crowd. All the pilgrims congregated there with offers that were brought to the three altars inside the cave. They were making the offers, praying, giving money to the shrines, they were rubbing money on the rocks and wash with the beneficial water drops from the stalactites in the ceiling. The spectacle was astounding and I watched it for more than half an hour and shot lots of video.
At around 2:00 pm, when I was supposed already to be down in a restaurant with the group, I left and I rushed to the cable car, that brought me fast down the hill. We ate in the restaurant and we chat about the events and the whole experience with the guys in the group: a couple from Amsterdam traveling 3 months, another from Switzerland biking Laos and Vietnam for about 4 months, a couple from Malaysia who showed to uss all the animals that were ready for dinner, like deers and mountain mouse, etc.
After lunch we left for the boats, where the water rides increased because most of the pilgrims were leaving and the river was even fuller of rowing boats, and further to the bus that brought us to Hanoi and dropped us in the center. Priority number one was to go and buy a jacket because everybody in the group told me that in Sapa is very cold and I did not have anything with me except a sweatshirt. China and Vietnam are the major countries for manufacturing western goods, so I got in a store, like in China, that were selling excess production for North Face, Armani, Tommy Bahamas, Polo, Lacoste, etc. After I pondered with a North Face jacket, I found a very slick Armani jacket made out of silk and I don’t know what else, and I decided to get it and got dressed with it, a perfect match to my mud caked sneakers and my dirty pant. Armani himself would have had a heart attack if he saw me! I went to the agency to be sure that they will not forget about me, especially that half of the city, but not on contiguous blocks (!) was on blackout and I checked again with them for a flight to Laos, that I found out that is code shared between Lao and Vietnamese aviation and they fly with small propeller planes (70 max), but they have flights directly to Luang Pabrang that is something, saving about 32 hours on the bus. I don’t know yet when to do and I still have to do a little more research about this issue. I went to my hotel, that was in blackout also, (so no internet!) and I booked my Halong Bay trip on Wednesday morning, two days on the famous bay so beautifully depicted in the movie “Indochine”, with one night sleep on the boat. So, the plan is to arrive from Sapa on Wednesday 5:00 am and to leave at 7:30am to Halong Bay.
The minivan from ODC Travel came to pick me up and dropped me and two Aussies at the train station, the guide giving us the tickets and asked us to be very careful about them because you hardly will be able to find others. The trains are packed and the agencies have their share of the seats. As a a matter of fact, I did some research about this trip and it turned out that the deal I got from ODC Travel was great. Sure, $222 for Vietnam sounds very high (only if you are here you understand this statement, it’s very hard to spend money in Vietnam everything being extremely inexpensive so $100 has a very long run here), but counting that is very hard to get soft sleeper seats and you have a guide for trekking and a jeep that carries you everywhere all the time is very helpful and makes your life easier. Other agencies or individuals that try to arrange the trip made higher offers with lower services, and investigating locally in Bac Ha for the price of a jeep it came with astronomical numbers.
The train ride was good, the sheets clean, no matter that the sleeper carriages, even being privately owned and invested, were kind of dingy, old and rugged. The Aussies, at their first outing abroad, were terrified of theft and they were locking themselves completely inside. We traveled also (4 in a compartment) with a Vietnamese who was living in Lao Cai and who studied in Sorbonne social studies. Extremely educated, it was a pleasure to talk with him, unfortunately the Aussies were not so enthusiastic about him and it was late and we went to sleep, the rough sleep on the sleeper carriages.

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I booked one night in Hotel Camellia ($13) and I went directly to investigate what trips can be done outside of Hanoi. I saved my days during the entire trip because in a trip like this you never know what may come up and the most important asset is time. Even if I wanted to stay an extra day for leisure or extra visits in one place, I still decided to leave in order to save time. And it was worth it because in this way I had time for trips around Hanoi that were really worth doing. I asked the girl from reception of the hotel, who was a little lost in the landscape, about the available trips and she was able to make a list for me for the trip in the North, in Sapa and Ba Ca plus a little trekking, something that is not easy to arrange because you have to visit some markets open only in some particular days of the week. This was the reason I wanted to arrive here on Thursday because the markets are happening mainly during the weekend but I found also an extra market on Tuesday. The girl said that she will give me a quote for the trip but when I came in the evening she was not up to snuff, and obviously she did not know how to do it. Luckily, I contacted another agency on the way back to the hotel, that had exactly what I wanted to do and in spite of being a customized trip, and implicitly more expensive they arranged it and hopefully I will leave tomorrow at 8:30pm; four days in the North, 3 of them in different markets and one on hiking, with 5 nights, 2 of them with sleeping coach on the train. Beside this trip, I had to arrange two other one-day trips and a two-day trip to Halong Bay, the place that I saw first time in the movie “Indochine” with Catherine Deneuve. Also, I had to make arrangements for going into Laos, the bus being somewhere around 20 hours, so a flight would be advisable. Plus visa for Laos, plus, plus…..So, I spent in the morning and in the evening a lot of time with these arrangements, at least with the research and, finally, in the evening I paid $222 for my Sapa trip, in the North with the minority tribes, the highest amount I spent in Vietnam till now! You cannot spend money here, everything being so inexpensive! Meanwhile, I visited the main sites in Hanoi, that has some interesting things but less than expected. I will spend another day at the end in Hanoi, probably next Saturday. I went to see “The Temple of Literature”, that is a temple dedicated to Confucius but also the siege of the first University, the school that was producing mandarins, the representatives of a meritocracy imposed and introduced by the Chinese for administering their country and foreign provinces. This university was founded in 1070. I wanted to see Uncle Ho in the mausoleum but it was closed but I visited the Ho Chi Minh Museum, pretty interesting if you see it as a tourist and not involved in the local politics, and a set of other pagodas and temples located near by. The terms of pagoda and temple is reversed in Vietnam: pagoda is a place of worship and the temple is used to worship the ancestors. A family may have a temple and a village may have a pagoda for worship. I walked a lot and ate some veggie lunch and in the evening, after I finished my bookings, and after I ran around to no use to find a internet phone (because only Maria picked up and she was in a rush to wake up Guvi who was still sleeping at 7:55am), I went to have dinner of fish with ginger in a fancy restaurant. I tried to reach another restaurant, Cafe de Arts, pretty fancy, but I could not find it quick and I was hungry and, as usual, I did not have time. During dinner I started to study about Laos from a Lonely Planet in xeros copy bought in Nha Trang, these copies widely available in South East Asia, to see what I have to do there and if I have to skin a day from Vietnam to add it there, but I think that I am OK. It’s late and I am sleepy.

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By reaching Hue I left the tropical area of Vietnam. It is raining, sometimes extremely intense and the palm trees disappeared. It is slightly cooler.

Hue was the imperial capital of Vietnam and the first question was if you can visit it in only one day, but because a lot of people do not even choose to stop in the city I thought that this may not be a problem. During the previous night dinner, that ended majestically with the flaming banana, I spoke with one of the guys from the restaurant who said that they do customized tours in town on motorbike. The next morning after I read more attentive the guide book and I noticed that most of the visiting sites are actually not inside the city but some of them are far out, I went to him to make arrangements. It exists also a tour by bus but I tried to avoid that, and I still don’t know if this was a good idea. The guy I spoke with was busy but arranged with a friend of his, and meanwhile I did my email and checked the blog and saw a show done by Victor and Claire after I emailed Cristina that I am looking at them. This is not easily done everytime because very few computers have Java installed. My guide came and first brought me to the post office to call home and I talked with both Victor and Claire. After that I mount the motorbike and rode through rice paddys worked by peasants, to a Japanese Bridge, similar with the one in Hoian, but its location was very pleasant. Latter, he brought me to a pagoda that had a mass and the chanting and the atmosphere, with lots of believers swarming the place who came to pray, was very interesting. Here, Buddhism is the major religion and is very baroque, sometimes too baroque for my taste, extremely flamboyant and visual, so is good to shoot it on video. Buddhists are a majority and this was the reason why they entered in direct conflict with the Diem administration of South Vietnam who placed in top positions the Catholics. The mass was very interesting and from there we went to visit one of the imperial tombs. The emperors from Nguyen dynasty , began at the beginning of the 18th century to built majestic tombs outside Hue. They built them in places they enjoyed and frequented during their lifetime and this lasted till late in the 19th century, before Bao Dai, the last emperor, came to power. He died in France in 1997 so he did not do anything like that. The tombs are impressive and is hard to believe that these were done so recently. The funny part was that the royal tomb is a very complex assembly with walls enclosing other walls till you get to the coffin, but the emperor is buried in another unknown place because he was afraid of theft, and all 200 people who help in the burial were killed. Unfortunately, I was able to visit only one tomb, the other being further away, and this is common in many day trips, you may have to choose what you see if you don’t want to stay more days. From there, we stopped to some Chinese tombs located nearby and further we visited a pagoda, where the monk who self immolated in 1963 lived. He was protesting against the Diem Regime in South Vietnam and his act was on the front page of all the newspapers in the world. We visited a fishing village and another pagoda and finished with a visit to the citadel, that was originally large and it had its own Forbidden City, purple, for a particular reason, nowadays disappeared completely. The citadel named “The Imperial City”, was bombed heavily by Commies in the Tet offensive in 1968. Whatever was left intact, the Americans bombed at their turn, trying to dislodge the Viet Minh from the citadel, because they were able to hold the entire city under their rule for 3.5 weeks following the offensive. This bombing campaign happened during the battle of Hue in the American War. Still , the Vietnamese restored a part of it and is still enough to see but on the location of the Forbidden City Purple and two other palaces in the back is just grass and some bronze jars left. After the citadel we returned to the hotel , around 5pm, because at 6pm the bus for Hanoi was supposed to leave.
I went to eat right near the hotel, some fish, and when I was eating somebody came to me and told me that the bus broke on the way from Hoian to Hue and we don’t know when we leave. I kept eating my fish when another guy came to me and told me that we should get quickly in a bus to go to another part of town to board the bus for Hanoi. I ate quickly the fish, the chips and the beer and jumped in the minibus, with the same group that followed me more or less : the girls from Malaysia, Sarah from London who was traveling now with an American girl and two boys from England. All 7 with lots of luggages in a taxi: you could not breath. The taxi brought us somewhere else in Hue and we boarded a bus from another company, that amazingly did not break. It stopped 3 times in the night, for dinner, pause and breakfast and brought us in 12 hours in Hanoi, but dropped us not in the Old Quarter but somewhere near the University. So, again we boarded a taxi all 7 and we got in the Old Quarter where we dispersed in various places and we may meet again. The way to Hanoi showed that we move towards North; it rained and it was cold and here people are dressed with scarves, jackets and cover their faces but is not so cold. It is chilly but not so bad, probably in the 16-17C.

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I booked for the 8:00 am tour to MySon, so I woke up at 6:00 am, packed my stuff, left it in the hotel and I went for a walk in Hoian before the tour left. The target was the market , that in early morning was buzzing with activity, the women, all wearing the Vietnamese pointed hats were packing the fish market. I spend a lot of time there and I shot lots of video but it was hard because there were so many women there and so busy the market that they were bumping into me with baskets full of fish and shrimps. After a while I realized that is late and I had to rush to the hotel, where in the lobby I found the Italians, father and daughter, from the Nha Trang trip. It turned out that he, Leandro, knew Romania very well because he lived 4 years there. He knew far much more than me about the country and he was in places I never wanted to go. But he was there for business, apparently he was dong some exports. I did not ask him more but I may meet them again on the way. This is typical in travel when people follow the same itinerary. As a matter of fact, today I met Sarah, from Mekong/Cambridge, we rode in the same bus, and also a old lady from Wisconsin that I met before and two girls from Malaysia, one living in Australia and the other in Singapore, with whom I was in the broken bus the other night. So I talked with the Italians, Leandro and Medea, and had breakfast together and waited for the bus to bring me to MySon. It started to rain, pretty serious at times, but it turned out that was a short rain and the weather became OK latter on. The bus came at about 8:30am and after a heartful goodbye to the Italians, I started to MySon. Myson was the religious center of the Champas, the population that occupied this central area of Vietnam between 2nd and the 15th century. They were pirates, mainly, and because of this unfriendly job they were in constant conflict with the Vietnamese and the Khmers, being assimilated latter on, in the 17th century, by the first. They built impressive monuments, tombs for their kings and MySon is their center, a center that lasted between 4th and the 13th century far longer than any of the other centers in SE Asia, Angkor, Ayuthaia, Bagan, Borobudur, etc with which they were on par. Angkor in comparison lasted only 300 years. Unfortunately, after great efforts were done by the French to restore the monuments, the area was a free range zone during the American war and many bombs were thrown here destroying most of the monuments. The trip was interesting and short, just one hour inside the monuments but enough for what is there. I expected much less than what I found and, no matter that there were many tour groups, I was able to see and walked unhindered by others. The rain stopped and the sun came out timidly. On the way back to Hoian I was pondering if to stay the afternoon the Hoian, that is charming but basically was not much else to see, or to go with a 2pm bus to Hue. I arrived in Hoian at 1:20pm and eventually I decided to move ahead and I booked for the 2:00pm bus. The open ticket system works very well , especially in a country long and thin like Vietnam. Also, they arrange tours and trips like a science, and all the tours are arranged , or can be arranged in such a way to match the departure of the open buses. Also, there are more than one open bus system, and this should be checked because some of them are offering a much larger flexibility, schedule wise, with more than one bus a day. I returned to the hotel , got my backpack and left it in the bus office and to town, to get a receipt from the travel office for MySon and to visit a little more for the little time I had left. So I took several pictures on the river, and I went quickly to a folk museum and got back to the bus right before it was ready to leave, and I just been able to buy a pineapple and some water and peanuts. The road was beautiful, most of it being right on the coast from where you can see empty beautiful undeveloped beaches. We stopped at one of them Lo Cai, very beautiful in the shining sun, and this just after we crossed a 11km tunnel that I thought that will never end, like in the Durenmat story. After about 5 hours we arrived in Hue, where the bus brought us in front of the hotel Thang Long and they invited us stay there probably getting a pretty hefty commission, this being a common scheme in Asia. But, it is between them so the travelers are not bothered. I got a room with a beautiful bathroom and AC for $10, I took a shower and went in the lobby where I bumped into the Malaysian girls. We decided to have dinner together in Xuang Trang cafeteria, famous because they posted a sign in the 90s saying ” It should be in Lonely Planet” and they got there eventually, so now they changed the sign to “Listed in Lonely Planet”. The girls told me a lot about Singapore, where people work a lot, 12-14 hours a day and Australia, where life is great and sunny. But the funny part was that we tried to find a restaurant, and we wanted to go to the river. Unfortunately, not knowing the city, we got in the wrong direction and the rain started heavy on us. We got drenched and we could not find a place to eat and after an intense walk, we realized in shock that we arrived in front of our hotel, exactly from where we started, so we ate in Xuang Trang that was great and I had fish cooked in a clay pot and flaming banana, something that was great. The rain stopped during dinner but now, the girls went to do some shopping and I write this blog and it’s pouring like in the movies or better say like in Asia moonson time, but this is typical weather for Hue.

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There were not 10 hours. There were 17 because the bus broke in the middle. This is a common thing in SE Asia. I read about long trips like this many times, on blogs, travelogues, travel books, etc. but is the first time when I experimented directly. The bus had something when we left around 8pm and it stopped after a while to fix it. I got asleep almost from the beginning and I just sensed what was going on. I sleep well in these buses because I don’t have any worries and they are comfortable. I woke up when he stopped again at 12:30 am for the late driver’s dinner, in one of the bus stops in the way. There were two other buses and another that came after us, and all of them left and we stayed. At one point I got upset and I went to press the horn to call the driver to senses and just then another bus came, who was heading to Nha Trang. The driver asked us to exchange the buses with the other passengers and we hoped that he did this because we had problems with ours but the surprise was ours when the new bus we mounted could not start. It had something with the transmission. The driver tried several times to no avail and went to work on the transmission. The results were not positive, and he gave up and went to sleep showing me on his watch something like 6:00 am. I hoped that he talked with the office to send us another bus but , probably in Vietnam this is not an option. So, all of us, Vietnamese and westerners went to sleep in the bus and we slept very well and I woke up at 6:00am. Right away I went on to wake up the driver because the others were quite shy and I asked him to give me his cellphone to call the office. He was not happy but complied and I told the guys from the office the situation we were in. The driver continued latter to talk with them and I don’t know what they talked because he started again to work on the transmission and and to our surprise he fixed it in 15 minutes and at 6:45am we left to Hoi An where we arrived at 1:00pm. We lost 1/2 day but it was no big deal because the city is small and manageable in 1/2 day. The advantage was that driving on day we were able to see the rice fields and also I could read a lot from my book, Sacred Willow, that gave a little more insight in the history of Vietnam.
HoiAn is a port and used to be an important harbor and city at the par with Melaka, and Macau. It is the only city in Vietnam that preserved its old architecture, sometimes altered by the French colonial buildings. Otherwise, is a town left behind in time, that makes it very charming. Is also the capital of the tailors, having lots of shops that make suits and shirts. It’s an artistic city also with lots of galleries catering for the immense number of tourist who come here in huge groups. It is the first time in this trip when I see so many tourists and so many groups. I strolled the city’s alleys and small streets looking for the old houses, assembly halls and pagodas that were marked in the book to be visited. In town they have an interesting scheme: you pay 75000 dongs and you can visit one of each, but if you want to visit a second of the same, let’s say another old house you have to pay again. But everything has a work around and there are several ways to do it here also. So I visited several assembly halls , one 200 years old house owned at the 7th generation, temples and pagodas and lots of stores. I went to the market that is spectacular, being, beside others, a fish market and I paced the streets looking for an internet phone, this time discovering the post office and finding out that the regular call on land line is almost 10 times more that an internet call. It is still not expensive!. I called home, I ate some Lau Cao that is a specialty on Hoi An, a sort of noodles with meat and crumb bread like a cracker, all in a 5 course meal and I chat with some older Germans who were traveling with a group. Tomorrow, I wanted to wake up at 5;00am to visit My Son, the old capital of their Chama kingdom, but the minibus was full so I will go with a regular bus at 8:00 coming back at 1:00 and, if i do not change my mind, get a 2:00 pm bus to Hue.

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I had to see the sunrise if I stay so close to the beach, so I woke up at 5:30am and went to the beach. I thought that I would be alone but the surprise was beyond me to find, before the sunrise, the beach and the waterfront full of people who were jogging, caring their squash rackets, playing soccer and doing Tai Chi. It was a rush of activity that hardly you see later in the day when is hot and everybody is dozing in the shade. I watched the kids playing soccer on the beach in the morning dark and latter I watched the sunrise and went to eat the same delicious omelet with crusty hot French bread and crepes, all with a fruit shake, for a good morning start. Packed my stuff, paid for the room and got in the bus that took us to the boat with which we went in a tour of several islands ($10) where we will see some touristy stuff, but over all the whole experience being in on the water was great. First stop was to to see ostrich that we fed and we took lots of pictures of them to show Victor the bird. Latter we moved to see some white spotted deers. Again a close-up on ostrich! We saw an elephant and a walked to a waterfall on the second island and we had a great lunch in an international companion. But before lunch we went swimming in a water so warm like I never experience before. These seas are warm and extremely pleasant. I used my short/long pants for this deep, like I did in Easter Island and it worked again like a charm and getting dry back in no time. After lunch we went to the third island of the day: The Monkey Island, an island full of monkeys that were eating from your hand where I took lots of pictures again , to show both Guveti. They had also a show with animals, kind of a circus but I don’t like these kind of things. At 4:00 pm we were supposed to be at the hotel, but I stepped down from the bus earlier and I took again a walk on the promenade of Nha Trang, a very pleasant walk where you can see how the city grows but also you can see the slums creeping by the water. Paradoxically, in Asian underdeveloped societies the rich are on the hill and the poor have waterfront properties! I had some great chats today: two Russian guys from Vladivostok who told me that is cheaper to get a flight to Asia than one to Moscow, with an Italian father who came to join his 24 year old daughter in Vietnam to do a vacation together, the girl traveling in South America for 1.5 years. The guys were from Bergamo and the father, who was older than me took a two months vacation, “a normal thing in Italy” and he gave me important tips for Laos travel, including the Plains of Jars and the Hanoi connection. Apparently it takes shorter than I expected for the bus rides, or he is just optimistic! Further I met a Vietnamese from Saigon TV, Diem, who has a weekly show on air. He came with the girlfriend for a stroll in Nha Trang. Finally, I met an Amerasian, a daughter of a Black Vietnam vet with a Vietnamese woman, who left Vietnam in 1989 after she finished high school to come to the USA to her father who was living at those times in Philly. Now, the woman came back to Vietnam to visit some relatives. But the major event of the day was that I was able to fix my travel book pouch I bought from Lijiang in 1999. It was ripped for a while and I saw last night a shop that had a sewing machine so I gave it to the lady. Today was done and it was so insignificant for her that she did not know what to charge me so I gave her 5000 (30c) and she was very happy. This was great because I walked with the bag ripped for days and things were falling thru. Now I am waiting for the bus and hopefully a good night sleep. 10 hours to Hoi An.

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The minibus was extremely punctual. At 7:30 am when I was finishing editing the blog was right in front of the hotel to pick me up from Dalat and bring me to the main bus office to leave for Nha Trang, a city on the coast of the South China Sea. The road was through mountains and pine forest for a good part near Dalat and it took 4 hours to reach the main highway of Vietnam , Route 1 that crosses between Hanoi and Mekong. Those 4 hours plus another 2 hours made the six hours that takes to get to Nha Trang. On the way we stopped 3 times, one of the times to visit some Cham towers, Cham being a civilization that flourished here between the 2nd and the 13th century being absorbed latter in the 17th by the Vietnamese. It was influenced by the Hindu civilization, who made South Vietnam in those time a Hindu area, latter being Sinizate. The Champas adopted at the beginning Hindu religion, Sanskrit as language and Shiva as a deity, that you can see on all their towers/temples. It was quick visit but the towers were close by, 5 minutes walk and I went in the close to 100F heat. We arrived in Nha Trang at 2:00pm and I got a room in a hotel, incredibly spotless with all the amenities and a view to the sea, just 2 minutes walk outside to the beach, for $9/night. I started my quick visit quickly by going to the tour agency to find out about the next day trips for tomorrow. I booked my bus for tomorrow night, a 10 hour experience arriving in Hoian at 6:00am and I jumped in the back of a motorbike with a guy who was waiting in the front of the hotel to visit the several sites in town I was interested in: a temple, the cathedral that is impressive and you think that was built in medieval times, and a set of Cham towers located in town built in the latter Cham centuries. The temples were magnificent and they were full with believers who were burning incense inside making the atmosphere almost impossible to breathe. But the smoke and the fire gave a good background for shooting so I stayed inside breathing when I got a break from shooting. I went to visit all 4 of them , but one of them is the most important and large. There are one near each other in a complex located on a promontory that confer a great view over the sea and the harbor. The motorbike guy dropped me to a far beach after I told him, to his surprise, that I want to walk back to town. They do not think that foreigners can walk! I stayed there till the full moon rose over the sea and chat with a group of guys and girls who came to chat with the “foreigner”, in spite that they did not speak English. But we made jokes and had a great time in spite of limited communication. People are so nice that sometime you are embarrassed that you cannot treat them with the same openness and joie de vivre that they have. You are rushed, between trips and tours, buses and planes, with the time on the limit and sometime you forget that the most important thing is to smile. The globalization works, and a guy, looking like a peasant boy, (not a city slicker, that you are able easily to recognize even here in Vietnam) came to me and said “Hello Motolola” and when I answered to him “Hello Moto” with the accent of the cellphone, he was delirious with laugh. So, here are two guys from two parts of the world communicating through the gadget language of the gizmos. Cellphones are everywhere in Vietnam, practically everybody has one, it’s just unbelievable because people do not make a lot of money but all talk on the cellphones. The greatest joy I had in Vietnam is to hear all the phones ringing and to know that none is mine…. At least this means to be in vacation! Also, I spoke today, in one of the bus stops, with a Vietnamese who left the country when he was 6 and lives in Australia and he told me a lot again about the corruption and about the money the rich guys have in Vietnam. It is unconceivable for the western mind to understand it how the Commies were able to transform the society. People are paid almost nothing but when you see the quality of the hotels, restaurants and many other places you realize that somebody is making tons of money that do not even trickle to the poor masses.

Anyway, after the chat with the Vietnamese guy I went for a stroll on the beach back to my hotel and I stopped to eat some fish at one of the Four Season restaurants on the beach. There are no other restaurants on the beach but these four and all are named, extremely creatively, “Four Seasons 1,2,3,4″. This is a pattern because you see hotels named like this everywhere. Not too much imagination! In front of the restaurant is the Casino named Gold Coast where I was shocked to see that the gambling is done exclusively digitally. The cards are generated digitally and displayed in front of the player both for blackjack and baccarat and in roulette you have both a display of your bets and a exact digital replica of the betting table in front of you, where you put your fingers and touch for your bets that probably are taken directly from an account. A little weird but I think Asian, who are number ONE gamblers in the world know better. In ten years in Vegas I did not see this. For the end of the tour, between telephones and internet, I strolled the city streets and I chat with a great painter. I would like to buy one of his painting but when I think about carrying them home I may give up. But I have his card and can get them on the Internet. Tomorrow I booked a tour to some islands, one of them has monkeys on it, I try to wake up at 5:00 am to see the sunrise, leave in the tour at 8:30 am and come back at 5pm to catch the bus to Hoi An at 7:00pm.

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Dalat is a town at 1450m, developed by the French in the 19th century as a hill station, to get them out of the sultry weather of Saigon. The town is charming and is surrounded by so many interesting things like I never saw before. Trying in the morning to call the agency from which I had a brochure, I could not get through and one of the guys from the hotel ask me to mount his motorbike and to go to Kim’s cafe. There, the tours already left but this turn to be for the best because for several $ more I got a customized tour on motorbike and I was able in this way to go wherever I pleased. This was an important issue because none of the tours were stopping in all the locations I wanted to visit. I had a great time riding the motorbike through pine tree forests with Huang who was my guide and motorbike driver, a graduate in tourism from University of Hanoi. The sites we saw were stupendous, Valley of Gold, a beautiful lake and forest that is the reservoir for the city, an embroidery historic/traditional village built by a doctor and artist, who I happen to meet and congratulate because I like enormously his place. He put his own money to built something that in any other country would be done with absolutely huge government funds. He created a museum/collection/embroidery shop in an ambiance that recreates the old Vietnam , so serene and exquisite that is hard to explain non-graphically. it is the closest to the old literati places I ever got to see. It has a shop and I decided to buy an embroidery that is astoundingly beautiful and the effort these girl are putting into it is immense. Waiting for the packaging, that is quite big, I started chatting with Huang, and the first topic was obviously his thoughts about USA and the American war. He laughed because he said that everybody ask this question and he explain that for them that war is just history. He explained extensively and after a while I realized that for him that war is what is for me the first or even the second world war, a sad event but not of any concern. As I may drink a beer with a German and chat about soccer with no second thoughts about the past is for him the relation with the Americans. As a matter of fact, every time when I was asked where I am from and I responded, USA, the answer was “USA, Great country”. He said that even people who are now older and they were part of the war feel in the same way. He found funny that Vietnamese who left and marry Americans are baseless terrified to return in Vietnam being afraid that they may face retaliation, but it’s no resentment, in his view, and as usual as in many other parts of the world, the youth would like to go to America or Canada if possible. Unfortunately, this is not possible because the government ask for a bail of $35000 for granting them a visa, beside a hefty tax of $500 for the visa itself and these money are out of question for most Vietnamese. A good salary in Vietnam is around $600-700/month with architects, doctors, lawyers making over $1000/month.We talked a lot about the current politics and the Communist Party that like in China transformed the country in a super capitalist state where the social net is ZERO. If you lose your job you have to stay home with family and hope for a new job. No social security, pension, free education, free health, etc. University costs around $1000/9 months, an astronomical sum in Vietnam considering that the Cambridge chick, Sarah, told me that tuition used to cost in the UK &1000/year and now they raised it to &3000 and everybody is up in arms. However, corruption in Vietnam is rampart and if you need anything from the government you have to pay a lot to get, the example he gave me was about permits to build a house. If you don’t “oil” the officials you will never build anything and just stay with the land. Sound familiar, isn’t it? So for the Commies in general, they have just contempt but as a matter of fact they don’t care about them as long as they they can make money. Exactly, like in China! After we got the embroidery we biked to a Koho village where the head of the village, dressed in traditional dress, gave me an entire spiel about all the minorities in a combination of English and French and I was able to tape the entire “deposition” on tape. The guy was very cool. We roamed a little the village towards the church and such to find stuff to shoot and bought a nice traditional manually made embroidery, but with a device whose name I don’t know in English. From there we went to see a pagoda, and I expected nothing just the regular, another one. Same, same. The shock was immense the the only thing I can say is that pagoda is absolutely spectacular , and this word is a major understatement. Snakes and dragons were covering the entire interior, exterior and roof with a huge dragon made out of 10000 beer bottles but if he did not point out I could not have figure it out. Inside was a mass, that happens once a month and he said that we were very lucky to see it because he never saw it before. Most of the attendees were old women with interesting faces, singing Buddhist hymns. I shot tons of video with music and I barely was able to leave from there. I saw many temples in many parts of the world but nothing like this. We continued our bike exploration by seeing a beautiful cascade, the place being full of them and from there we went to another monastery built by a very driven Buddhist monk who was also the abbot. We were supposed to go tomorrow morning at 3:00am for Zen meditation but the monks could not receive us because they have a mass and they were busy to prepare food for the people. From there we shot directly to the last stop, the most famous in Dalat, “The Crazy House”. This place is hard to explain. It was built by the daughter of the second president of Vietnam, Thun Chu, who studied in Moscow 14 years architecture where he got a PhD, and returned to Vietnam and settled in Dalat. Now, she is 67 and she started in 1998 this house that is used also as a hotel, and is build like a huge tree with no straight walls. She is heavily influenced by Gaudi in the architecture but she does not have the his elegance, all the walls being curved and “pouring” the place looking like a combination of fairy tale, grottoes and tree. The house is remarkable and, besides this one, she did several other very controversial things. She lives inside the house and the entire project will be finished in 2010. This is quite a place.

From there we went to the agency and after that, quickly to eat because neither of us ate that day, neither breakfast nor lunch. I invited Huang to a restaurant and he picked a Vietnamese restaurant, where we had a hot pot of fish soup and Vietnamese medicine wine, something that is not served to foreigners or you can find in non vietnamese restaurants. Extremely interesting. The soup was delicious and we kept chatting for an hour keep adding medicine wine, that is made out of roots besides many others.

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Last day in Saigon. Great city and leaving it is done with sorrow. I left in the morning to see the two main sites related with the past. The Independence Palace was the seat of the South Vietnamese government, where the first North Vietnamese tanks went through the gates on 30 April 1975. It is a modern palace built in the same style as Palace Hall and the TV Station in Bucharest, the architectural style of the time, being built between 1962-1966 on the location of the old French colonial palace. Diem who ordered the construction did not live there being ungraciously shot in the church where he hide in 1963, so it was only the residence of President Thieu till his unflattering departure on April 18, 1975. He died in Boston in 2001 and the Viet Minh would have shot him on the spot if they have caught him. The palace is frozen in time, kept exactly how it was when the Viet Minh conquered the city, with the war maps, the bunkers, and the halls for receptions, bedrooms, etc. It is a little eerie but it is a great relic. Now is used as a museum and for some receptions but the new openness in Vietnam took all the propaganda away and is just history. Next stop of my visit was to the War Remnant Museum, a museum that has pictures of the atrocities from the American war. It used to be called the Museum for the Crimes of the Chinese and Americans but nowadays it blandly shows pictures from the American War skipping the atrocities the North Vietnamese did against the Southerns and reverse. It is impressive till the level of tears and makes well the point that war is senseless and it is just destruction for both the winners and the losers, if they are any definable. Actually it creates just losers. There are pictures of persons affected by Agent Orange, phosphorus bombs, killing and destruction in a stupid war. If the Americans would have figured out that Mao would die and China and Vietnam would change to the worst capitalism that exists on the planet they may not have sent their boys to die there. Because nowadays, Vietnam is growing on an unbelievable pace, with lots of investments from all over the world being poured here, US being one of the most desired investor. The country does not have any resemblance of the poor nation many people associates with. In any way, after you leave the museum you start question the soundness of the human mind, how can sentient humans can do this to their own kin, what can drive them so mad. And here are not described the atrocities committed by the Viet Minh to the southerners and reverse. In any way when you think at Iraq and senseless killings that happen there you realize that the humanity is as stupid as a doorknob, nobody freaking learn anything out of what was going on in the past.
I left from there to see the most beautiful pagoda in Saigon, (the city is called by everybody Saigon, except the official name changed to Ho Chi Minh City after the takeover), Jade Emperor, an astounding place even after the Cholon tour gave me a pretty good idea of the style. It is located somewhere in the northern part of the city and is quite of a walk or motorbike ride till there. I spent some time among incense sticks and fumigating sticks clearing my mind of the evil, admiring the superbly carved statues and decoration. The atmosphere in these temples is heavy with smoke hanging constantly in the air from these fumigating sticks, very eerie.

From there I walked back to the Center, through the hi-rises of the new Saigon that eclipse the old French building, most of these investments being probably mainly Asians, HK Singapore etc. but also American, USA after the openness in 94 being one the best partner with Vietnam. The Commies courted the Americans a while before Clinton gave the green light in 1994, and surprisingly like anywhere in SE Asia being American is as cool as before the war. Go figure! These guys turned the other cheek in an amazing way! And not all of them are Catholic, not that Catholics do this, except on paper. People are so nice that sometimes is embarrassing especially when you figure out that they don’t want anything just to chat and help you. (One guy just brought me a coffee when I was writing this, for no reason….). We are freaking conceited and self-centered in an fake universe that we surround ourselves with, in our “civilization” of papers and money and no soul. I passed by the new American Embassy, the old one was razed and a brand new one opened on the same location and is surrounded by the typical anti bomb blockers, the only site in Saigon I could not take pictures of. There were guards in front, who when they saw me coming with my big camera started to freak out. Quite embarrassing! From there, I went to walk and take pictures in the center that is so clean and glitzy that is embarrassing to think about Bucharest. Huge new building sport on their facades, “Gucci opens soon”, Louis Vuiton and FCUK are there and all are coming to embrace the new opportunities. I stopped in a new cafe Coffee Jean’s, a type of Starbucks with atmosphere and good coffee, to get away of the sweltering heat, and the surprise was immense. The coffee was wonderful, ten times better that Starbucks, a place that I enjoy, (OK, everybody has its weakness!) and MORE expensive! In Saigon when a dinner with beer can cost 30-40000 dongs(16000=$1) a coffee was 70000. And the place was packed with several foreigners but mainly with cool Saigonese. But again the coffee was so good, because was not made with ice and mix, but with coffee ice cream and coffee. I really enjoyed the place and shot video inside and was able to cool off the close to 100F that were outside. I strolled through the center, on the river among the nice cafes and hotels all looking like being brand new or yesterday renovated and ended up for a beer on the terrace on top of the Rex, regretting that I have to leave such a great city, and quickly to Pham Ngu Lao to get my backpack and zip to the bus that was leaving at 5pm. I bought a ticket to Hanoi on a Open bus system with Kim’s after I looked again to some other guys who sell it but they all pool together and commission other company to do it and they just skim on this. The open bus system gives you the opportunity to stop for how many days you want in the core destinations on the way between Saigon and Hanoi. There are about 5-6 spots to stop with variances and in any case you would not have times for more or anything else is secondary to be seen. The ticket is somewhere between $20-25, again prices in US$, for the entire route and you can see with it all Vietnam. My stops are Dalat, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hue, Hanoi. There are day and night buses and you can customize the way how you want to go and you just have to tell them one day in advance that you want to book a particular bus, for them to come and pick you up from the hotel the next morning. Is is a great system. The bus ride was very good, comfortable and got asleep being in AC after the 100F and got in Dalat at 11:30 pm and in the hotel , they book it in Kim’s for me, at 12:00. The hotel is impeccably clean and nice, typical Chinese/Vietnamese hotels, no European frills but everything is there, with TV and fridge stashed with cooling drinks and snacks, free internet access, like the one I stayed in Saigon and all for $14/night. Now I have to go to book a tour in the city, I woke this morning at 5:30am and now is 7:10am.

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Today was great and it compensated for yesterday. Not that yesterday was bad but it was not my style, too relaxing and less involving. All day eating, biking and admiring palm trees, maybe sounds good by not for me. In any case the Mekong Delta, that in my imagination looked something like in “Apocalypse Now” is completely different. The Americans never bombed here because it was super populated and it still is, Cantho being a huge city, with university and such. It is not by any means the tranquil and isolated place that was in my imagination. I left in the morning from my hotel after I fought last night with the guy from reception because he wanted to overcharge me for the AC. I went to see the sunrise, but not a clear one,and a lot of action on the Mekong at that hour. At 7:15am we got into the boat and we arrived at the Cai Rang floating market at 7:45am. Great market! Full of boats and great commotion around them. They put us on a small boat to go through all the anchored boats and after that we took a panoramic view from the top of the large boat we were in. Great footage!. There are hundreds of boats in a market that aggregate every morning of the entire year, with the exception of 3-4 days during Tet festival. Everybody buys ans sells and there are no souvenirs or any kitschy stuff, just veggies and lots of fruits. What they sell is displayed on top of a bamboo stick planted on top of the boat. The boats are mainly motorized and large, but there are also standing row boats. Very nice and interesting! We stayed there for about 2 hours, I guess, and latter we went again on the canals to a rice mill where they explained how the rice is getting cropped and refined. We returned for lunch in Cantho where I chat with an Aussie, Ralph, teaching English in Cantho for a number of years already, and with a guy from Paris studying law here for one year. Also, on the boat I chat with two guys from Berlin, one of them is a project manager for Daimeler-Chrysler in Stuttgart and they told me lots of stories about the brands and the emergent possibility of a split between them. Yesterday I met two couple from France, one being the typical French, and a Kiwi girl named Rachel, speaking with British accent.

The bad part is after lunch nothing more happened and we took boats and buses and arrive in Saigon at 7:30pm after about 5 hours in the combinations. The traffic on the outside roads is very intense and they drive slow being afraid of the police, the fines for speeding being very high for the income, the vicinity of $50-100. When I got back, I called home, I went to my hotel where the lady held my luggage, got back in my room, and I made my arrangements for the bus to go North. I need for the first leg a bus that leaves later in the day and I found two agencies that have some and even more so I will go with either of them, most of them having just a morning bus to Dalat per day. The plan is to visit Saigon’s center tomorrow and to leave around 3:00pm to Dalat, a 5 hours ride. After all these, I left again in the center, where it was an amazing Chinese festival with lots of lights and music, in front of the Independence Palace, the old residence of the president of South Vietnam. Pretty active! I walked near the palace that I want to visit tomorrow and to the American Embassy now Consulate, the famously infamous one, that Americans razed it completely after reestablishing new relations with Vietnam and built it fresh. But you cannot see anything inside, the fence being too high. It is impressive how the center looks, new large hotels, chic bars and restaurants, all these being built and developed since 1984 when Vietnam opened for investments. People look happy and extremely friendly. The Commies failed in their known style bringing the country to famine and changed gear meanwhile filing their own pockets to the elbow. I ate somewhere outside in the market some Thai clams with Saigon beer and got back in the backpackers ghetto for the internet nightly activity.

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