The Arabian desert

The Arabian desert. Not really, these are the dunes down South at Mui Ne. Apart from being the kitesurfing capital of Vietnam (random, yes) Mui Ne is famous for its beautiful white sand dunes – very Lawrence of Arabia. We took a jeep along a gorgeous coastal road to get to the dunes. It was a fantastic, windy ride.

Along the way, we stopped here, where we managed to escape from a crowd of children eager to be our guide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here, you can also participate in the relaxing adventure of riding an ostrich:

“Inviting you to participate a relaxing adventure of riding Ostrich. As skin conditions.”

When we got to the dunes, we opted not to participate in the very popular “eco tours” offered – on four-wheelers – and watched with slight horror as one of the guides went dangerously close to rolling his vehicle off the side of a dune.

 

Saigon, Saigon

Although the city has been renamed Ho Chi Minh, the official title is used only in the North, while Southerners still use the more evocative “Saigon”.

My first introduction to Saigon occurred several years ago in 2008, by accident. I was travelling to Laos at the time to meet a friend, and the cheapest flight to SE Asia happened to go to Saigon. It was a Friday night, and driving in to the city from the airport , I was greeted by a continual procession of happy young couples on motorbike dates. The young girls were dressed in high heels and colourful clothing, hands around their boyfriends’ waists. I had never seen so many motorbikes before, and the stream of colourful couples seemed endless.

My second memory is the terror of trying to cross the street. The streets seemed huge. In the end, I was luckily able to hide behind an old lady confidently crossing the road while the motorbikes zoomed around her. The third thing I remember is chatting with some young English students in one of the big city parks. It was just after Obama’s election, and there was an incredible atmosphere of excitement and hope at the election of a black president. This was of course all just before the GFC.

So, Saigon had a lot to live up to on my latest trip. As always, the real thing didn’t quite live up to my memories of it – compounded by a typical “two-men-on-a-motorbike” snatch-and-run theft of my kindle. However, here were some of the interesting parts:

Cholon

The “China-town” of HCM City, Cholon is a nice place to wander around, with temples and churches tucked unexpectedly along the street. It also has some interesting street markets, where you may witness the commendable escape efforts of catfish, which somersault out of their containers and into the air – only to be recaptured by their sellers. Notably, the more nimble eels have plastic sheets over their containers to prevent them from executing a Houdini-style getaway.

 

 

The Cu Chi Tunnels

The infamous Cu Chi Tunnels formed part of an elaborate network of tunnels which provided shelter to the Viet Cong. In this area alone, the tunnels are more than 200km long! On entry to the area, we were shown a 1970s black-and-white propaganda movie about the Cu Chi tunnels. The film features a very young, pigtailed girl as its heroine, who allegedly fought with the VC after the Americans killed her father. The young heroine is shown throwing explosives, and shooting a large rifle at the Americans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H_XVe-7DKU).

Next, our guide demonstrated with some glee the capabilities of an array of hidden traps used to capture American soldiers in the jungle (complete with spikes and springs). Last of all, we crawled through an enlarged version of the tunnels – built, as the guide explained, to accommodate Western beer guts. Even with their enlargement, the crawl through the tunnels was very claustrophobic, and if it wasn’t for the exits every 20 metres, it would have been a scary experience! The VC took shelter in these tunnels, sometimes for days at a time – with poisonous centipedes, spiders, rats and malaria to contend with.

The Botanical Gardens / Zoo

The History Museum is also here, which has an interesting collection of Cham and Khmer statues, ceramics, and even an ancient local mummy with wizened leather shoes.

A wander around the Botanical Gardens brought me to a waterfall – complete with gigantic plastic dinosaurs. There is also a nice temple…with this outside:

….scarily weird!!

 

 

 

 

And finishing with some images of power safety in Vietnam…

Submarines around the world

Submarines around the world
Source: http://facebook.com/#!/undefendable?__user=548275625

One year abroad

Swan boats at Lenin Park, near my house

It’s almost exactly a year since I quit my job and moved to Hanoi. Here are some of the things I have been up to during that time:

Going on the Carnivore diet

Some of my friends may remember my first year of University, when I was vegetarian. If bad karma accumulates for every animal eaten, I have gathered a lot of bad karma in Vietnam. I hope I don’t come back as a frog, a pigeon, a cricket, a cicada, or a buffalo…on a plate. Having your dinner waiting patiently tethered outside your restaurant, looking at you with beautiful big eyes can certainly trigger a sense of guilt (to mention the goats at our favourite bia hoi restaurant). Jellyfish salad, fried cicadas, roasted sparrow…I have eaten them all.

When it comes to food, Vietnam has a way of making me feel like a cave woman – especially when sitting on a tiny plastic chair on a street corner tearing bites out of a roasted chicken leg with my bare hands. Meanwhile, oblivious free-range chickens roam the streets happily.

Henny, the cute chicken that lives next to Bret’s house

Riding a motorbike

Student: You should drive a motorbike. A motorbike is the best way to get around in  Hanoi.

Me: But isn’t it dangerous?

Student: Yes, it’s very dangerous! But I think you should drive one.

Finally, I have bought my own motorbike.  It’s not a cool motorbike – in fact, it’s the kind of motorbike that is usually ridden by the sensible fathers of my students.  But I like it. It’s slow. It’s sturdy. It looks like a proper motorbike…not like those newfangled Waves and shiny yellow Vespas.

Driving a motorbike in Hanoi is a bit scary. But somehow I have shifted from my previous position on motorbikes of “never!  I value my life! “, to repeating common expat sayings, like “it’s quite safe, because the traffic is so slow”, “it’s probably less dangerous than the bicycle, because it’s more solid” and “it gives me so much more freedom”. The students are right. It’s dangerous, but it’s just so convenient. Plus, it makes my friends back home think I’m super-badass.

Learning to speak Vietnamese.

It remains a bit of a challenge, but contrary to beliefs popularly held amongst expats, the ability to speak it is not magically limited to Men Dating Vietnamese Women. Sure, it’s took a while to manage even the basics, like “I’m from Australia, “how much is this pomelo?” and “no, I’m not married yet”, but in what other country would you receive so much encouragement and praise from the locals on your limited ability to speak the native tongue?

It has thrown light onto some of the things that my students say in English as well. For example, adult students often tell me that they like to “play with their friends” in their free time. Disappointingly, this does not mean that they play hide-and-seek or chasings, as I had envisaged, but is a literal translation of the phrase for spending time with friends in Vietnamese.

Using textbooks instead of making them

No regrets. Teaching is rewarding, often enjoyable, and challenging. I much prefer to work from a cafe/classroom than the office. It’s an independent job, where you don’t have to rely on anyone, and the time I spend at school outside the classroom is minimal.

Before I came to Vietnam, I was quite idealistic about the English teaching, perhaps envisioning it as a way of helping people. And it is, sure, but most of the schools are run as businesses, with education coming second. Most of the students are from the iPhone-toting, growing middle-class of Hanoi, so in that way teaching English for pay differs vastly from volunteer work.

Living in Hanoi has been fascinating and rewarding. There have been a lot of interesting challenges, and I hope that there will continue to be in the future.

A Hanoi street

My neighbourhood

Hanoi is not a quiet city. But by Hanoian standards, Kim Lien is pretty quiet. Instead of the hum of traffic, car honks and drills of construction typical of central Hanoi, I’m woken by a medley of more domestic sounds – could be a 5am rooster, the rattle of dish-washing, or the flat, nasal one-bar song of the street sellers as they pass by on their bikes – which sounds something like “o-blah-o-o-blah-dee” played on repeat.  Repetitive and unmissable, like the old Chickenfeed advertisements which used to blare off the TV – probably a great selling device (in the sense of “I will buy something so that you will go away”). I used to wake to repetitions of “Twinkle twinkle little star” played from some kind of electronic device next door, but fortunately I think the batteries ran out.

We are the only foreign household in our area, and as such caused something of a stir to begin with, to the general entertainment of most of our lane. Our immediate neighbours seem very well off – in contrast with poorer households in close vicinity, which often combine a public restaurant and private living room into a single space. In the evenings, the neighbours play badminton in their pajamas on the street, while their children cycle round on bicycles. It is not uncommon to see groups of middle aged women walking down the street backwards. This would appear to be for exercise.

Madam Nga often walks around the street with her 13-month old granddaughter. Silver haired, she is still quite striking, and must have been beautiful when she was younger. Initially, she would encourage her granddaughter to blow air kisses. After a couple of months, to my surprise, she struck up a conversation in English, explaining that she wanted to practise speaking and listening to English. Like many older Vietnamese, she had also learnt some Russian and Chinese. But in the time that she learnt English, there were no foreigners to practise with – so while her reading and writing had reached a good level, she found it more difficult to understand spoken English.

One day, M. Nga invited me in for tea. She brought out some Vietnamese doughnuts that she had made earlier, some sweet and some filled with meat. She told me a little bit about the war. M. Nga used to work for what I think was a telecommunications company. But to escape the bombing of Hanoi, she went to live in the forest with her young child for four years. She was not alone – in fact, her entire office of 80 people packed up and relocated the forest, built some bungalows in some hills near a river, installed electricity, and went back to business as usual. Which I think pretty much illustrates the attitude of the North Vietnamese…bombs, forest, bungalows…no problem! The Americans stood little chance.

In fact, the office continued to function for the next four years…in the forest! Each bungalow had three rooms – two of which were either male or female-only sleeping quarters – with a mixed-gender office in the middle! Food was brought in on trucks from Hanoi. However, if somebody wanted to go back to Hanoi to visit their family, they would need to cycle the 200 or so kilometres back by bicycle.

Importantly, my neighbourhood also includes a good local coffee shop. It is called “Cafe Pharma”, which is appropriate, as it appears to be frequented almost solely by young male pharmacists, most of which seem very keen to practise their English with foreign girls. My housemates also come to the same cafe, to the point where the owner can now tell each customer all about us and our relationship to each other (with information pieced together from our respective conversations with the pharmacists). He greets us by name every time we come in. “Ha-na!” “Eloise!” “Fiona!”

My excuse for lack of blog activity is that last time I tried to write this blog, I was distracted by a customer who engaged me in Vietnamese conversation, via google translate – I knew I had the laptop for a reason.

Today, the Cafe Pharma owner is playing classical guitar and singing in an operatic style. Surprisingly, he is a pretty talented singer – I would say that his singing is even as good as his sua chua dinh da (an iced yoghurt drink with lime and honey), although I would not want him to give up the cafe for a singing career, as I would then be without my favourite local cafe.

Step by step

Picture a Hanoian street. You can see about a hundred motorbikes, interspersed with cars and SUVs, as well as the occasional ageing bus. Some of the traffic flows one way, some flows another. Some of it even flows onto the sidewalk. Stopping at a red light is optional. Driving on the right-hand side of the road is also optional. The only rule is: DON’T hit anything in front of you (but if you do, keep going, because you do not have

insurance to pay for any injuries or damage).

A traffic intersection

Baby steps

Crossing a road has been compared to the “parting of the Red Sea” by Moses:

“And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left” (Exodus 14:21-22).

The wall, of course, being a wall of motorcycles, streaming to your right and to your left. Forget all that you have learnt about giving way to traffic: the only way to get across the road is to navigate slowly, one foot at a time. After a while, this becomes almost normal, and you can handle motorbikes whizzing within inches of your body without even flinching.  And you can bask in the sense of achievement that comes with each safely-navigated road.

My street

Catching a xe om

The second thing to learn is how to catch a xe om (motorcycle taxi) around the city. During my first few weeks, I was constantly terrified by my xe oms accelerating along the highway on the wrong side of the road, weaving in between narrow gaps between cumbersome buses and SUVs. Now, I seem to have lucked out more with my now regular xe oms, and also have greater trust, now that I am more familiar with the way the traffic moves. Note: cars do NOT move to the right or the left sharply, as this would be 100% likely to result in a collision with multiple motorcycles, and possibly in injury or even death.

Although riding a xe om remains a slightly terrifying experience, I have expanded my repertoire of motorcycle positions to:

standard xe om: the preferred position. Holding on to the motorcycle is optional, but can be extremely useful. Take care not to burn yourself when you dismount the motorcycle (also known as a “Hanoi kiss”)

side-saddle: popular among fashionably dressed Hanoian women, and handy when you are wearing a pencil skirt to work

My friend Hannah in action

threesome: involving sitting on the very end of the motorbike, behind two other passengers or being wedged very intimately between your xe om driver and your friend.

In Sapa

After a week in humid Hanoi, Sapa was a welcome break. Having survived the extremely rickety overnight train (and having spent most of the night half-awake, expecting the train to fall apart) followed by the slightly terrifying drive up the windy mountain road – which involved a significant proportion of time spent on the WRONG side of the road, and the not-so-nice incident of hitting a large dog – I was very pleased to get to Sapa in one piece.

Sapa

I had heard a lot about Sapa, and had high expectations – I was not disappointed. Sapa is a little European-style alpine village set high up on the mountain, above a steep valley which goes for kilometres, and is home to a congregation of hilltribes including the Flower Hmong and Red Dzao. The outfits of these peoples were as colourful and exotic as their names. On arrival at our hotel (booked for $5 for a one-hour, much needed nap), we were greeted by smiling Hmong women dressed in indigo garments, with elaborate headdresses and dangly silver earrings.

At 10am our small group set off for our trek to the Red Dzao village. I was a little surprised that our company was trailed by an equally large group of friendly Hmong women, along with our guide. Why so many of them – were they a part of our tour? We were soon intercepted and paired off by the women – “where do you come from?”, “Sydney or Melbourne?” (other parts of Australia unthinkable!) “how old are you?”, “do you have children?”.

I was Shu's adopted tourist for the trek

The trek

Looking across the valley, all I could see was mile upon mile of rice paddies cut steeply into the slope. As we began to descend the muddy slope, the purpose of our additional company soon became clear. While the Hmong women nimbly pattered down the slope in their plastic sandals and gumboots, the tourists quickly began to stumble and slide down the mud. Quickly, the tiny Hmong ladies came to the rescue. At first, the larger guys declined the help – some of which came from little old ladies – but after a few slides, eventually each tourist had a minimum of one Hmong helper holding their hand (some with two!).

One of the more graceful and coordinated moments of the trek...

The price of the Hmong ladies helping us was simply for us to buy some of their products at lunch stop. I was very happy to enthusiastically deck myself out in silver ethnic earrings, ethnic rings and ethnic bracelets, and a Hmong bag… The Hmong ladies make and dye their own clothing, and weave the bags, while the men look after the buffalo, and make the metal jewellery. The women seemed also to work in the rice paddies. Life seemed quite hard in the village communities, but also very family-centred. Tourists offered an additional source of income for the women. Our Hmong guide Paung – who we mistakenly addressed as ‘Pam’ for most of the trip – explained that she used to be a seller, but preferred guiding. The “selling” process – with all the wheedling and coaxing that goes along with it – was unpleasant for both the sellers and the tourists.

Paung was rather amazing. At 25, she had two children, and seemed older. She had a great command of English, which she had picked up purely through practice with tourists – Paung had never been to school, or even outside of Sapa. But she told me that she was going to visit Hanoi in a few weeks time to stay with a foreign friend.

Paung, our guide, is second from the left

We stayed overnight in the Red Dzao village. We were hosted by a village family, and slept upstairs – the room had been set up with around 30 mattresses, although there were only four of us. Paung told us that up to a couple of hundred tourists stayed in the village some nights, though we saw only a few other groups.

The best thing about staying overnight was that we had some quiet time – away from other tourists and sellers – to enjoy the gorgeous views.

Enjoying the scenery and some quiet time, end of Day 1!