Wrapping it all up

Well, it looks like I won't have time to catch up on every day of this trip with a full post before we all get home and start telling stories in person. Instead, I'll give you some of the highlights of Vietnam, so you know what to ask us about.

• Getting tailor-made clothes from the eccentric Mr. Xe in Hoi An.


• Exploring the imperial citadel in Hue (including the imperial tennis court, which was one of the first few things to be rebuilt!) and eating the local specialties (seafood and vegetable pancakes and grilled beef wrapped around lemongrass) in a tiny restaurant inside the walled city.


• Touring the DMZ on motorbikes with the son of a South Vietnamese soldier and exploring the Vinh Moc tunnels.


• Meeting some rather interesting bugs in those same tunnels...


• Taking the Reunification Express north to Hanoi, and making Harry Potter jokes the entire time.


• Catching the last bus and boat to Cat Ba Island, in Ha Long Bay, and enjoying a speedboat ride out to the island at sunset.


• Going kayaking between the karsts of Ha Long Bay in the morning and rock climbing up them in the afternoon.


• Going out to a Mexican restaurant in Hanoi just for the heck of it, all dressed up in our fancy new clothes. Being asked if the guys were teachers, because no one in their right mind goes backpacking with a three-piece suit.


• Sitting in a cathedral in Hanoi when a group of old ladies began to sing pentatonic hymns.


• Eating our last dinner in Vietnam on a fifth-floor balcony and watching the traffic below us.

And from Japan:

• Going to Ueno Park and Shibuya Park and wanderings through the Japanese maples and the gingko trees as they changed color.


• The view of Tokyo from the 52nd floor of a tower in Roppongi Hills.


• Going to Kamakura with Hiromi and Ando-san and seeing the giant Buddha statue there.


• Riding the trains through the Japanese countryside to Kyoto and seeing Mt Fuji out the window.


• Seeing the Golden Pavilion and the Zen rock garden in Kyoto.
  
  
• Staying at a ryokan in Kyoto and enjoying a ten-course meal and hot baths.


• The JR train museum and karaoke in Nagoya.

We're almost home, with backpacks full of souvenirs (and presents!) and heads full of stories. See you soon!

Motorbikes!

(Text by Rachel, pictures by Ian Darr)

After our nice jaunt to Cambodia, we caught a bus up to the highlands to escape the heat and humidity in HCMC. The driver certainly was a member of "the nation's kamikaze bus fleet," as Lonely Planet so accurately described them, but the ride itself was pleasant, aided by the consumption of the miniature bananas and tiny tangerines that were sold all over Vietnam. In Dalat we stayed at the Pink House Hotel, where we were greeted by a small, effusive man who greeted us by name and hummed "Here Comes the Bride" as he led us up the stairs to our fourth floor rooms. (I don't know how this happened, but we ended up staying on the fourth or fifth floor of just about every hotel we stayed at. This meant that we hauled all of our stuff up and down an average of three flights of stairs per day.)

Figure 1.  Shit-eating grin

The owner of the hotel also offered us a personal motorbike tour around Dalat, and after a brief consultation we took him up on the offer. The next morning we set off with our guide (the owner's sister) and four motorbikes for the five of us. This arrangement turned out to be great because we always had one person chilling on the back of a bike and taking photos.

KID DOESN'T GO FAST

FOREST GOES FAST

The great thing about motorbikes is that you always feel like a badass riding one. But then somebody pulls up next to you and you realize that no, you don't look like a badass. You just look slightly ridiculous.

We had a full day on our bikes, roaming across the mountains of the highlands. Dalat was originally a place where the wealthy went to retreat from the heat of the lowlands, and it cretainly retains that feel.

Righto.

Our tour focused a lot on how things were made: we stopped in coffee orchards and rice fields on the side of the road, and our first stop of the morning was at a cricket farm. In Vietnam they eat fried crickets as a treat, and they raise them in famrs where they are fed clean leaves to ensure that there is nothing nasty in their insides. Our guide took great pleasure in offering us live crickets, which she ate when we declined. Then she sat us down at a table with a bowl of fried crickets and sauce, and we slowly peer pressured each other into eating them. Forest surprised everybody by being the first one to eat!

Breakfast of champions

Crickets turn out to be crunchy and tasty, but the legs get stuck in your teeth. We decided they were too much work and moved on to our next stop: a silk factory.

Silk production is kind of wild. The cocoons are unwound just by putting them in hot water and using chopsticks to grab bunches of thread when they loosen. Those threads are draped over spinning pices which miraculously grab them and turn the individual pieces of silk into silk thread for weaving. The spinning of the machine keeps the cocoons moving and causes them to unwind even further.

Cocoons

Waiting to be unspun

After the thread is made it is woven into patterned cloth. This is done with paper punch cards, of all things! The punch cards tell the machine which threads to raise and which threads to lower for a given line of weave. Pictures speak louder than words here:

Paper punch cards for patterns o.O

"CNC" loom

After weaving the cloth is dyed. We asked how the cloth can be two colors when it is dyed in one cloth, but this is apparently a trade secret. So we looked around their shop for a bit, then moved on with our ride.

Our guide pulled a fruit off a tree and used it as lipstick.

Drying coffee beans

One of the other very cools stops was at a minority village. Vietnam has many hill tribes that are not related to the main family of the Vietnamese people. Vietnam has not dealt with its minorities as well as New Zealand has: when we visited we sat in a ramshackle wooden hut that was canted slightly to one side, and all of the women we talked to were very small. On the other hand, this does not appear to be through a complete lack of effort. Our guide said that the children all go to school and learn Vietnamese as well as their own languages (each tribe has a different language, unrelated to Vietnamese). There are houses built and paid for by the government as well as a nearby hospital. Our guide could speak the language of the people we were speaking to, so she acted as an interpreter for them. They said that they do not want to go to the hospital for care or to give birth because they did not like being asked to take their clothes off for the doctors to look at them, especially if the doctors were male.

Previously we learned how silk was made; this time we learned about cotton clothes that the women of that tribe wore. They showed us the whole process, from flattening the cotton fluffs and extracting the seeds to spinning it into thread and then weaving it. The process was similar to that for silk, but at the same time very different: the silk was being made in a factory setting, with rows of women tending the machines. The cotton was worked by hand with wooden instruments and also woven by hand, not with machines. In both cases the end result was beautiful.

Cotton thread being spun

Rice

We made a few other stops at some tourist places and a mushroom farm, then spent the rest of the day driving and made it back in the evening just as it was starting to rain. Riding motorbikes was really fun. They're light and easy to use, and they make you feel like you're going really fast. Riding them on mountain roads was an added challenge, since the road with can be derived as follows:

Take one truck. Have it pass another truck with less than a foot between them, honking all the way. Add a bend in the road and a motorbike almost off the road on either side, then throw in a bike for good measure. You have to keep your eyes and ears open at all times. All in all, it was great fun.

The last thing we did in Dalat before catching a bus out of the highlands was visit the Dalat Crazy House.

I always knew there was a place for people like me!

Forest found a linking book !

Forest says: In my opinion, it was one of the most inspirational bits of architecture I have ever seen. Even with the construction being quite low tech (chicken wire, rebar, bricks, and cement) it turns out crazy. All loads of crazy artsy touches everywhere, be it neato wood round floors, stairs and ladders looping every which where - in general, looking like the Myst games.

Easier than Riven

Cambodia and Angkor Waaaat?

The last post left our crew in a retro bus for a 13-hour trip t o Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Thanks to either sketchiness or derpage on the part of the bus company, the trip ended up taking closer to 19 hours. This made us more than a little bit cranky; on the other hand, it added to our already extensive list of crazy transportation stories from Vietnam. Getting from point A to point B here is fairly simple, thanks to the universally helpful hostel staff that we have encountered. On the other hand, placing your travel plans in the hands of the front desk when you ask for a bus reservation sometimes means getting crazy buses or bus drivers--which gets us back to our first night bus, the purple bus with the lace curtains and the bathroom (read: bucket) under the stairs in the luggage compartment.

We left HCMC after a long day of eating and lounging around--we went to at least five restaurants or cafes over the course of a day, then sat around the hostel waiting for our bus to depart. The hostel owner said that the bus would come to us and did not get more specific when pressed. As our hostel was located in a warren of narrow back alleys, it was not entirely clear how our bus would find us. Personally, I was hoping for the Knight Bus of Harry Potter fame, but instead a man came weaving through the streets to find us and take us to...a curb. Where we sat with everybody else waiting for the bus, hoping ours would not be the purple monstrosity across the street.

The bus departed at midnight and arrived at the Cambodian border some time around dawn, but we never figured out why we stopped for several hours on the side of the road in the middle of the night.  Getting through the border could charitably be called a Vietnamese fire drill: we exited the bus when the driver started yelling at us, stood in line to get our passports from the driver, went through Vietnamese customs, and got back on the bus to curl up and try to go back to sleep.  We drove all of 100 meters before the driver was once again yelling at us to exit the bus, this time to go through Cambodian customs.

The rest of the trip was uneventful if long, but it was interesting how apparent were the differences between Cambodia and Vietnam--visible even from the window of a bus.  As soon as we crossed the border the towns looked poorer, with more bicycles and fewer motorbikes.  Children often were not wearing shoes in Cambodia, where in Vietnam almost everybody was.  There were also pools of muddy water everywhere, some with water buffalo sitting in them, which answered the question of why malaria would be such a big concern.

The next day we hired a driver in Siem Reap and went to visit Angkor Wat.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and the ruins at Angkor Wat would honestly be hard to describe even with a thousand words.  So here are some pictures, possibly with witty comments in small fonts underneath!

We call them the "Nathan Team"

I'm not short, I'm fun-sized!

You want me to eat what?

This is a temple in the Angkor style before carving - they would build it out of square blocks and then  shape everything.

(Objects not to scale)

Extreeme!

I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts.

The inner sanctuary at Angkor Wat

You did wat?

Rule #1 of famous monuments - they must always be under construction.

Angkor Wat made me feel time more acutely than almost anywhere else that I've been.  Some of the temples are in ruins, with the jungle encroaching and vines climbing over the stones.  Others are actively being restored by the governments of nations from across the world, including India and Japan.  The temple at Angkor Wat itself has been in continuous use almost since its construction, and is absolutely magnificent.

All of the descriptions of the temples include a bit of history about when they were built or rebuilt, and by which kings or princes.  After restoration those buildings will probably be there for centuries more, and someday more people will stand there and read about how "after the temples fell into disrepair they were eventually rebuilt by the Japanese in the 1990s, before subsiding into the jungle again..."

And the cycle continues.

Vietnam!

Welcome to Vietnam! This is the first post with a bunch of photos - we've been trying to find enough internets to upload these - now, two weeks in, here they are!

We arrived late at night, dodged scammer taxis, and found a driver to take us to the hostel, My My Arthouse in the backpacker district of HCMC. This hostel was situated in the middle of a city block, meaning that you have to take at least four zig-zags through alleys barely wider than our backpacks to get there. The next morning, we had our first standard Vietnamese breakfast. There are two options for traditional breakfast - pho or french bread with omelet, always with sweetened tea or coffee - since we avoid pho (at least in the mornings), we've eaten bunches of baguettes so far.

Notice the bike on the right moving against traffic.

Rush hour on a small street

The first step to getting anywhere in HCMC is crossing a street, which is listed as the #1 attraction in the city. It takes practice and a bit of reckless abandon - you just start walking out into traffic at a slow, constant speed, and allow traffic to flow around you. If you change speed or stop, be prepared to have a pile of motorbikes honking at you.

We don't understand this fruit.

Bonus points if you can find a fruit you recognize!

We hit up some local markets to check out local foods - it's always exciting to see the raw materials and dubious sanitation techniques that are going into your food - we saw fish, squid, and entire pigs being hacked apart by old ladies with unnervingly large cleavers.

At this point, we started hitting up the local sights, pictured below:

A generic sidewalk in HCMC. Large sidewalks allow street vendors to sell all kinds of stuff without disrupting traffic.

Tank of lucky turtles at the Jade Emperor Pavilion - for good luck, locals feed little fish to the turtles, which amuse themselves by eating all day long. Like us.

This could be a city library in anytown, USA. But most city libraries don't have American War helicopters on top.

We visited the Reunification Palace, the center of the South 

Vietnam government until the invasion of the VC at the end of the Vietnam War. The palace was preserved with original items from the era - in particular, the furnishings were fascinating, reflecting influences from both Vietnamese and Chinese styles as well as the jet-set international cycle of the 50s. 

Note the black line drawn through the military insignia on the side - they take national military pride very seriously here. This is one of the Viet-Cong jets that bombed the palace in 1962.

After this, we visited the "War Remnants Museum," a several-story museum dedicated to artifacts and pictures from the American (Vietnam) War. This was such a powerful museum that we have a separate post for it that we'll publish when we can recover it from Nathan G's computer.

The HCMC cathedral (officially Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica). Built by French colonists in the 19th century, this medium sized cathedral was a highlight, mostly because of the madonna statues with fantastic neon-light halos.

After we had our share of markets and war-related spots, we decided to take advantage of the great exchange rate, and spent a day relaxing (eating) and drinking. We hit up bakeries, ice cream places, pho shops, trying all sorts of tasty items.

Is that a pineapple in that pina colada?

Damn....that was a strong singapore sling

Forest likes green things!

After three days in HCMC, we got on a soviet-era night bus (purple with polished aluminum accents and lace curtains) for our trip to Angkor Wat. Hang around for pictures from Cambodia!

Ian and Nathan's New Zealand Travels, Part 3!!!

In the interest of revealing what Ian and I were up to in New Zealand, we have a final set of photos from our trip! After Abel Tasman, we headed South to Nelson for a day - we spent a day recovering, taking showers, and finished off the day with a very tasty Indian meal and some local micro-brew pilsner. After a few beers, we decided it would be a good idea to climb one of the higher mountains on the northern part of the South island, Mt. Owen.

We packed our bags again, headed up a muddy canyon (into the rain), and camped at the trailhead (in the rain), preparing to start the 5000 ft ascent the next day. The next morning, we started out on the hike, which was actually straight up.

Most of the trail was marked with orange triangles. There's always an orange triangle about 500 ft higher than you are.

We're not going up there, are we?

Yeah, we are going up there.

We went to the "Mt. Owen Massif"

Hiking through alpine fields

This is the unmarked way to the peak and the path we took.

One of Ian's sweet nighttime photos of Mt. Owen. Check out the stars.

Taking a break in the middle of the granite maze.

We had to watch out for these sorts of things - 25 ft pits randomly interspersed in snowfields. They hurt.

Ian celebrates.