March 4th - it's still raining so we're still in Halong Bay

I did wade for a moment in the south China Sea yesterday - up to my knees. There was a terrible dog fight between 3 dogs on the beach they dropped us off at. I forwent the opportunity to go to the fishing village yesterday or climb through the cave today. I hate travelling in crowds & took the opportunity to be on the quiet boat & watch the flying fish. It was really the only time I saw birds - starlings out at dusk eating the insects.

We drove back into Hanoi. Thinh, our guide, stopped by a "pharmacy" and got us some antihistimines for my allergies which seemed to have kicked up. The pharmacy is in worse shape than many of the shops I've seen in the Old Quarter - a jumble of boxes & medications. They open the boxes, read the directions & point at my nose. These are not trained pharmacists. The baby is crawling around on the counter. More on medications & pharmacies later.

The Hanoi airport - internal departures gates / lounge is packed with people. The bar is a jumble of empty bottles of Johnny Walker & Hennessey. I order a drink. All they have left is Hennessey. I order a Hennessey - do I want a large or small. I start paying attention. They're washing glasses in a plastic tub on the bar counter. We're waiting on the bar stools - hoping that one of the comfortable chair / couches opens up. They announce the Saigon flight is boarding. The place clears. We take a couch.

A middle aged woman brings a spit of brownish liquid up in a cognac glass along with a water for Dave. I ask how much. She says 150,000 Vietnames Dong. We pay. The cognac is watered down, as in "I taste more water than cognac" watered down. Even Dave can take a swig. We ask to look at a menu from another person's table. The Hennessey was only 50,000 VD & the water was 20,000. We won't ask the "waitress" for "help" for the rest of the waiting. At least when I go pick up a beer and only have 20,000 dong for the 15,000 beer, the bartender offers me a bag of potato chips to compensate for the lack of any change coming. I tell her to keep the potato chips.

Our flight is to Hue, not DaNang like I've been thinking all day long. It's packed. There are only4 Vietnamese people. The rest are German, French, Swiss, Italian, Spanish, American, British, Australian, and if I've left a nationality out - I apologize.

March 3rd - if it's raining we must have arrived in Halong Bay

The "junk" was lovely. Only 10 cabins and no day trippers. There's 400 licensed junks to ride around in Halong Bay. Some of them carry more than 20 cabins + daytrippers. Not the Halong Ginger. We got one of the Deluxe Rooms - a room with a queen size bed. Our window opened up to right over the water. The karst formations were amazing. It was foggy & very romantic in a drippy sort of nose way.

Was up all night - couldn't sleep. I hadn't set the ac right, then I started sneezing, congestion... I'm going down down down

March 1st - I think

I'm doing quickie posts - reverse date because too much time has passed & I'm forgetting things. It's been a week, I see, from my last post. Connections in Hanoi were "difficult". The internet "shop" was the bottom floor of one of the Hanoi tube houses. The keyboards were scary, at the last.

During one of these days, either the first or the 2nd, we were taken on what was supposed to be a half day outing to a pagoda. It was a Monday. We went to a silk factory first, then the pagoda. The silk factory still had some of the original looms set up & working - looms operating off of cardboard key codes - the original computer program! You know I was so into how the 1s & zeroes created the beautiful patterns. Pictures of the mechanism to follow.

The pagoda - I don't even remember its name.

Cyclo Drivers - 2, Andrea&Dave - 0

We missed seeing Uncle Ho's body. We were going there first thing this morning. Out of the door, at the complex, before 8am and the crowds. We got in the wrong line and didn't check out the title on the tickets - Ho Chi Minh Museum - not Mausoleum. We should have pointed to the picture in the book, not just walked around saying, "Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh." But I'm jumping ahead now. I've missed two full days and one instance of "too tired to go out at night".

It's Saturday, 3:30 pm here. On Thursday we went to the "village" of Bat Trang. Bat Trang village has been eaten by the export shops. We walked down one little alley area and watched someone pour the slurry into molds. More interestingly, we got to meet two families which make the ceramics. Our guide, Thin, actually knew them. Apparently she, a brother and her sister-in-law had worked with them at one time. One family created pieces for internal use, another family made work for export.

During the purchase process, they served us green tea, we played with the baby, and they prepared and served me an areca nut wrapped in a betel leaf. This is what makes for those fantastic pictures of the smiling old woman with the black mouth & red lips. I bit down and the nut broke apart into a woody mass. It was a peppery taste, but I didn't want to swallow. I also didn't want to spit it out on their floor. The whole family - grandmother, husband, sisters, brothers, babies, just about died laughing. I was smiling a bit too hard and worried about drool. Luckily, there was a garbage can near by. I spit out the mass into my hand (because I dont' spit very far or very well). My spit was red, which meant I'd just made my hand & fingers red. (I always carry wipes with me when I travel, so "tragedy" was averted.

Bat Trang is down the road from Hanoi, so we actually made it out of town. The "highway" was actually wider than those we'd driven in Croatia or in the Italian alps. That said, there were more bicycles, farm stands, people walking, cows, and motorbikes than cars. The paved portion of the road was actually quite narrow - the sides eaten away into potholes and dirt. The driving was slow and comfortable. It's the dry season here. The Red river is down, and people have moved into temporary shelters to plant in the alluvial soil that's bared during this time. When the rains come, the fields will be covered and they'll move on. There's no houses allowed to be built in this planting area, however these temporary shelters exist so that people can guard their plantings. Apparently agricultural theft is common.

The temperature's dropped down to the 70's. It's been grey every day here. We did see some blue sky yestrday, but we could hear someone yell "Fake!" Good thing too because this humidity is curling my hair. There's quite a few tourists here - Indians, Germans, French, English, Australian. We all seem to be walking with a glazed look across our face, ignoring each other, as we all wander through the Old Quarter eating at the same twelve restaurants recommended by Lonely Planet. Dave & I haven't braved sitting down at one of the street vendors, but we're not the only chickens.

Yesterday, Friday, we had our cooking class. It was really quite the surprise for us. We didn't understand what we'd signed up for. It started out with Thinh and our driver picking us up at the hotel & taking us to La Verticale. There we met Didier Corlou, the chef and owner. He'd been head chef at the Sofitel Metropole before he opened up his own restaurant. I'd heard about him from the Food Network. Dave (yes, my Dave) took to him right away. The man collects spices, has a 15 year old Nuoc mam. He let us sniff his tumeric and taste his 5 spice. He took us shopping at the December 19 market (no the fat lady in the cyclo isn't me - startling resemblance though ain't it?). There we wandered the stalls while he spoke about the variety of spices and herbs in Vietnam. Dave & he talked about different kinds of preparation. We watched catfish being clubbed, squid being cleaned, ofal separated. He's interested in preparing all parts of the animal for consumption. Alot of this he learned from his wife, Mia, who's Vietnamese. She'd dropped us off & then picked us up. It was with her that we had the cooking class.

She took us back to their house. Again, we left Hanoi and crossed the Red River. This time we stopped at a "suburb" just out of Hanoi. Behind high walls, their home was the ideal of a tropical house. The first floor was one great room with huge glass doors & windows which would open up to capture the breeze. After that was a small courtyard with two different kinds of alcove and an oven. This cooking "wall" was made out of brick Both alcoves were vented with chimneys. We came to find that the one alcove which had a shelf at waist height was there to take a charcoal brazier. The other one opened up for even more cooking surface. Behind this, they had their catering kitchen. The catering kitchen had a roof and monster / professional cook stoves & wok burner & baker's area, but they weren't enclosed with walls on all sides, they were open to the air in traditional Vietnamese kitchen style. Makes a lot of sense when it's 90 degrees in February.

Mia took us through the steps to prepare what we'd been eating on the streets - bun cha with nem - the grilled pork meatballs in a sauce along with fried eggrolls. We also made a chicken wrapped in lemon leaves. The whole cooking process was very well organized, enjoyable to watch & participate in with tasty results. Yes, we brought the recipes home with us. And if you're good little girls & boys we'll prepare some for you when we get home.

The hour is up. It's time to go. No pictures due to slow connection speeds to U.S. sites.

Hanoi

is a city the way cities were meant to be: they eat strangers. It smells of charcoal and burning money. We walk in the streets with the mopeds, buses and cars now. It's amazingly clean even while women hack the nails off of pigs' feet and eels squirm in their plastic bowls. Hanoi howls and honks. It's life lived on the sidewalk. The bolts of silk and bags of buttons, zippers, sheet metal furnaces, steel pipe, silk lanterns, wrapped reams of paper, embossed invitations, candy offerings formed like flowers, three foot talk candles, all spill out onto the sidewalk. There are no lines to draw or drive between here. It's woven movement. There's chicken soup and there's charcoal braziers. Roosters run beneath the grills. You look into a doorway and see someone's bed. The brick pavement has collapsed into holes, or heaved itself with the roots of the banyan tree. There's cigarette smoke and incense. They paint their gods blue here.

We arrived here on Tuesday afternoon just fine. Our guide, Thinh Thi Le, met us at the airport. Seattle to Taipei was a 13 hour flight, then we had a 3 hour lay over. We have pictures of the Taipei airport, including the "Hello Kitty" gate. The drive into the city was uneventful, until we hit the Old Quarter. The traffic is stunning. No one stops at the red light to wait for the green in this district. Mopeds come at you down "one-way" streets. Everyone merges on a right had turn.

After we unpacked, we decided to go for a small walk to find a restaurant recommended by everyone & the guide-books. It was supposed to be "right" out of the hotel, then take a left. We found the restaurant four clover-leaf's later. We walked for nearly two hours to make the four blocks it should have taken us. The streets change their names from one shop to the next. We decided to try to follow the map, again, back to the hotel before it got dark. We should have left bread crumbs for all the good the map did us. We wandered the streets parallel & perpidicular to the one which has our hotel on it. We walked back to the restaurant for fried fish. It only took half -again the time this third trip. After dinner, we knew to keep walking when we passed the hardware street. You can build a house with what you find on the sidewalk.

We've begun to take pictures of our food, but this first night we forgot. We had the fried fish at Cha ca La Vong. They have little hot plates set at the tables. The front part of the restaurant, the part straight off the side walk, is where you pull your motorbike in. That's also where they keep their coolers. The restaurant has its whole front wall made out of glass, but this isn't a glamorous joint, it's to keep the air conditioning in. There were a few tables. We sat down at one next across from a family of six. They brought out a small skillet with the fish. They brought out a bowl of dill, a bowl of onion & cilantro, a plate of rice vermicelli, one of peanuts, one of thai peppers and a bowl of dipping sauce. They heated the skillet with the fish & oil & then placed a goodly amount in with the fish. In an empty bowl, you place a good grab of vermicelli, then put some of the onion & cilantro, peanuts, & pepper in it. Then you grab the cooked dill & fish & put that in the bowl. Then you pour the sauce over all. We don't know what the sauce was made of, but it was grey & had a frothy skin of some kind of on the top. It was more on the sweet than on the savory side. This is the only dish they serve at Cha Ca La Vong. Tast-eeee...

We walked back to the hotel through a dark Hanoi. Light flickers red because of the charcoal braziers at night on the street. I walked back to the hotel in a daze, holding on to David for balance I was so tired. There's no even pavement, or if you think there is, the next step will prove you wrong, or you run out of sidewalk & have to walk back into the street.

Yesterday Thinh took us for a walking tour through the old quarters. Once Dave & I figure out how to hook up the usb to the camera we'll try to upload pictures - or maybe those will just have to wait until we get back. We walked through the markets with someone who knew how to find our way home. We gave in to the smells, the sights, everything which was strange. We ate sugar cane from a woman who hacked the bark off with a ancient steel cleaver. The cleaver didn't gleam, it was black and she wielded it in sure strokes down the stem. Then when the stem was bare, she started shearing it into sections - her fingernails were black, but her fingers knew exactly how to move across the branch. She split the sections into half. I ate my first cane and it was clean and only a little sweet. It killed my thirst without sticking to my throat.

Thinh took us for Bun Cha - a specialty of Hanoi. This is pork grilled over one of the charcoal braziers. We walked up stairs to the private quarters of the family. Additional tables had been added, but they cleared the family table for us. Dave got pictures of this meal. It starts out like a bowl of pho with plates of vegetables around. You put your pork in the broth, add the vermicelli, a little bit of fish sauce, et viola - bun cha! Amazing pork. We've never had anything like this. I think it was marinated for at least a year it was so tender. The broth was dark and rich without being thick. It had a generous amount of pepper.

Dinner was at au Lac in the French Quarter. We took cyclos across the town - $3 and the fat lady sang. It was the perfect pace, but yes, we were riding in the front of a bicycle through metropolitan traffic. Remember: red lights do not mean "stop," they mean - get the hell merged before the bus eats the bicycle. We tapped the bus once or twice. Motorbikes flew around us like raindrops down a windshield. Hanoi is a beautiful city at night.

Pictures next time - hopefully!

Things Which Go Wrong Before and During "The Dream Trip"

Day 3 of the 5 week vacation in Italy - I sneezed & I couldn't straighten up.
head colds
sinus infections
blisters
popped ear drums b/c of aforesaid head colds while driving through the Italian alps as well as from descending airplanes after other passengers spritzed a fresh layer perfume over their otherwise travel-stinked body.
sore legs & thighs
vomiting (projectile & otherwise)

traveler's trots (including the explosive kind)

This time:

Friday evening our dog, Honey, climbed the stairs to the office. I was finishing up work. Dave had come home & was checking stuff on-line. Thirty minutes later, she's trying to stand up, but can't get out of a sitting position. Her head is canting to the left. Then her left front leg jerks up like she's going for a hand shake. Her rear right leg splays out from under her. She can't walk. We think she's having a stroke.

We took her to the emergency vet. There's a name for it, but "dizzy dog" is a simple name for something which apparently is like losing your inner ear balance. She actually spazzed out with so much force she flipped herself over. Her legs go everywhere and her head continues to twitch her to left. She won't drink, hasn't drunk since Friday. She won't eat. She's 16 1/2. She's older than our nephews.

We're headed back to the vet.

Where in the world do you want to go?

What do you want to do when you get there?

What do you expect to see?

Do you want to be in a crowd of people, or do you want to walk the streets by yourself?

Will you stop in cafes & eat or drink, or is your destination more remote than that, or are you a volksmarcher!

What's the most exotic spot you've ever been to? Did you find it tame, or exciting?


Do you like being able to read and understand the menu?

Do you enjoy driving? Riding trains? Flying in red balloons? What's the setting of your favorite tv show or book?

What strange thing, or sight, would you like to see with your own two eyes? Or smell with your own nose? What about sounds? What would you like to hear?

How does the word "pilgrimage" make you feel?

Have you ever been bored while traveling? What are your complaints about while traveling?

Do you want to sleep in the same bed every night?

Do you like meeting new people, or not?

How long would you like to stay? Not, how long can you stay, but how long would make you just a little bit homesick?
You have lots of reasons why you can't travel: kids, money, time. What's to stop you from reading, researching, planning, budgeting, thinking about how you could make it work for you?

How many times have you traveled to the same place? What are the characteristics which make you return again and again? Is it because of obligation or love? If it's love, what other place in the world would have similar characteristics?

Leave the name of a place you'd like to visit, a budget, and an obstacle you've got to visiting it.