Hanoi II

Photos: Bridge to small island in lake of Old City Hanoi. A day trip which requires a two hour drive out of Hanoi brings us to a place referred to as 'Halong bay without the water,' which is more karst formations having a 3 kilometer canal running thru them, which tourists are paddled along in a genuinely serene and lovely tour. Our guide was trying to tell us some history while standing in front a water buffalo in its tiny pool of water/mud with face even Joan Rivers would envy. This flower seller on a bike in Hanoi actually shows the area behidn that should be sidewalk, but it is covered in motorbikes and merchandise, so pedestrians have to dodge traffic to walk. Because Lunar New Year was a week away, flowers were for sale everywhere.

It is somewhat surreal that you can be in a beautiful place out in nowhere and see a hole 35' deep and as long and realize it is the hole remaining from a single bomb from a B-52 and that after almost 40 years of slowly filling in, the hole is still that big. Pilots who expected to be promoted never returned to base with napalm, bombs or shells on board. They just dumped them anywhere. One pilot had a load of napalm which he was not able to drop on the intended target, so he looked for a secondary target (means: whatever - just get rid of it). He spotted a cave in the side of a mountain with a good sized opening and shot the weapon into it. Inside were hundreds of frightened civilians hiding from the planes, and they were all burned to death in this one pointless and fatal gesture.

Hanoi, Uncle Ho's House, Halong bay

Explanation of photos starting at top: The tiny 2 room house on stilts Ho Chi Minh lived in the last 14 years of his life. He always refused to live in the big yellow palace - shown down 4 pix, but he had lived in a small house which had a bathroom and was attached to the garage with his cars (the bright sign over the garage reads "Ho Chi Minh's Used Cars"). Then he moved into the tiny house without a bathroom - altho he did have a bomb shelter next door- which only has a small bedroom and a room with a desk upstairs and a dining table on the main floor. Agter garage are Halong Bay pix with cave opening at tips of sails in 2nd photo. Two thousand people hid in that cave from 1949-1969 to escape the bombs. The only fresh water available seeped into the cave through the limestone. As a result, the heavy content corroded their internal organs and most died miserably until the govt moved them out and created a tourist cave.

Arriving in Hanoi even more than 30 years after the end of the war was somewhat emotional for me. My own nation perpetrated one of the most barbaric, idiotic and criminal wars in the history of mankind, was defeated and learned nothing at all from it. To visit Vietnam now is to ask constantly 'The Communists won, and here we have an apparently happy population in a nation that has become an industrial powerhouse actually competing with China, and we wonder what was the point of the war? Where are the horrors of Communism?" In fact, much of the horrors remaining are the millions of unexploded bombs and landmines which will still take another century to completely remove.

Most Asian cities are architecturally hopeless and chaotic mazes. But old Hanoi retains some French style in buildings that make it more attractive than most cities. It is also a city of several lakes large and small and the relieve the congestion and create some serenity. Until about 1990, Hanoi was a pretty quiet town mainly packed with bicycles. But about that time, China (initially) began to build a much cheaper motorbike that Japan had been selling (but the Japan version lasts much longer). As a result, people bought motorbikes so rapidly that there are now almost as many of them as there people in the city. The result is traffic chaos, noise and pollution. Plus there are no parking lots so drivers park them on the sidewalks, which means pedestrians are forced to walk in the street alongside traffic anarchy. The noise is so overwhelming that few tourists stay in the city very long. The way to do that is to take day trips out of the city - or even 2-3 day trips out and then come back. We come back because Hanoi has nice restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels and life is inexpensive.

Of course, everybody going to Hanoi goes to Halong bay. It is a 3.5 hour drive out there, then an overnight stay on a pleasant boat, together with cave visits and water activities. Many people really enjoy Sapa which is an overnight train ride north to the Chinese border. But some leave Sapa by riverboat and end up in Luang Prabang - a very nice idea.

Siem Reap & Angkor Wat

The 1st time I heard of Angkor Wat was when Jackie Kennedy visited there about 50 years ago. The little town of Siem Reap must have been a dusty village then, and much jungle had still overgrown some of the distant temples. Now it's a must for the wealthy and status-obsessed to have that visa in their passport. As a result, the big five stars like Raffle's and other major hotels have moved in - otherwise it would still be a sleepy small town atmosphere. I have to mention what "sleepy town" meant on this trip - one had to go wake up the person on duty for many of the things needed - retail, travel agencies, cab drivers, all asleep - constantly.

Despite all the photos of AW, I never realized how widespread the temples are. They are in a National Park which is lovely and quiet and protects the objects and temples from poachers. You must buy a ticket daily for $20 which even includes your photo. If you want a car with AC, that is another $80 a day and a guide is $36. But I only wanted a Tuk-Tuk (shown here) which was driven slowly and sensibly by Mr. Wan Kai for $12 one day and $18 the next (we drove a greater distance the 2nd day). His TT was comfortable and in the cool of morning it was lovely to smell the flowers and trees and air. In the heat of the day, it was breezy and so nice. It was just like riding a bike (which reminds me - my Dr. Keystone & her partner rode their bikes through Cambodia and Laos rode through AW - for which I admire her so much).

I think the park must be 100 sq. miles, and there are endless temples. Some are in pretty good condition for being 800 years old, others are just piles of stones collapsed on the ground. Many universities internationally have measured loose blocks and are trying to design computer programs on how to assemble temples. Some have been re-assembled and re-constructed well. One disaster - in my view - was re-assembled badly - as in VERY badly - by the Chinese Government and it is a mess. Everything is sticking out everywhere and it does not look like anything else out there - which seems to have missed the Chinese volunteer's attention.

What a grand effort it must have been 800 years ago to cut away jungle and hack away at the blocks and build such remarkable structures. I thought they would be repetitive and boring after the first few, but not the case - there is an astonishing variety of styles and sizes.

I really enjoyed AW - it is not the buildings and hard and clever work of saving the place as much as the setting, the whole environment and ambience.

I had a nice hotel there (shown here). It was about $70 a night (rack rate $110) and was pretty and very comfortable. But all visitors were tethered to their own groups and so many are sealed into I-pods, blackberries, and computer screens that I did not meet anybody here at all. Most unusual. Need to stay in poorer hotels where people are more fraternal.

A couple of photos

When you travel Asia, you realize that the childen are the heart and soul of every place you visit. I hate people asking "Why do you photograph so many children?" Just look at National Geographic or Professional photographers and you will see that their best photos are children, or babies held by a parent. In Asia, kids who are still infants are propped up in the front of the motorbike and usually motorbikes carry four people at a time with one baby always up front. The close-up was of a boy in the temples at Angkor who obviously should have been in school, but was too poor. What a bright kid. He spoke English, German, French and Russian. As there were not many tourists, he followed to the outdoor restaurant trying to get me to buy some trinket - speaking beautiful English. When I sat down to read the menu, he told me not to bother as he could recite every item from memory in any language. He asked me what I was looking at, and I said "noodles," and then he recited about 10 noodle items and the prices and told me which was best for me. Of course, I bought something from him.

The two little ones on a bike were heartbreaking. Obviously mom was working and the big boy had charge of the little boy all day and they were out in the trees - near nothing but a path - in Angkor trying to sell some miserable bananas they got off of some tree to have enough to eat food that evening. I didn't want their products, but they were so sad and cute that I wanted to photo them, so I did and slipped them a dollar. They were so appreciative.

It is a constant contradiction in travel that we see people living in a kind of paradise of sorts in great misery. I hope fate looks kindly on these kids.

Crashed UFO, what is this mess?

One early Vientiane morning I was on my way to find breakfast when I passed a lady with a huge mess of disorganized, dirty and curly fur on her lap in what would be a street restaurant shortly. I looked several times before I located a set of teeth, and two happy and beady black eyes. I shot three photos before she saw me and laughed. She tipped her baby upright to show me what a nice dog it was. She had been removing burrs or something from the undercarriage of her friend.
There were a lot of small dogs in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos which always indicates a population that is no longer grindingly poor. There were few strays, probably because of Asian worries about several diseases that has had them executing strays this year. The pets seem fit and well cared for. They seem to be permanently unleashed and free to run about the neighbourhoods. In the cool mornings, it is amazing to see dogs trotting off in every direction to look for a handout or to see their friends or even up a score somewhere. There are dogs running thru traffic and on every sidewalk. Then about 10:30 or 11:00 the heat comes on and most days are minimum 80 f. at that time and many places I was get up to 95 f. or 100 by noon and it stays that way until about 4:30 when it cools right down. Just about 10:30, the dogs sprawl down on the sidewalk or in some driveway or courtyard for the day, and all the previous dog motion everywhere suddenly terminates for the day. It is funny to watch.

Saigon flower wars

(Note: the photos went up in reverse order, so read them from the bottom up)

I thought it might be nice to be in Saigon for the Chinese Lunar New Year - Tet. Wrong. Everything in Saigon had nearly doubled in price, most hotels were full, and I didn't like the city at all. I took a Jr. Suite facing a park & could look down on the craziness of dealing in trees/bushes and flowers for the New Year. For a couple of weeks, every roadside, every park, every previously empty space was occupied by sellers of mainly dwarf orange trees, and a kind of bush like an apple or cherry in blossom without leaves, followed by many other kinds of flowers. Below my hotel window, in the park were acres of thousands of plants/flowers. Of course, the buyers all wanted to haul them away on their motorbikes, and they would refuse to get off of their bikes to shop - instead lines of scooters pushing their way between pedestrians and sellers and flowers. The law is that all selling must be completed by noon on N.Y. day, so on the morning I took these photos, they had only three hours to sell all these plants. I think a lot of the obsessive bargainers and cheap wait until that last a.m. to go in an bargain. You can see in the photos, buyers trying to ride with plants fore and aft and the frenetic attempts to secure the unsecurable on a two-wheeler.

After the initial 0900 photos, I went for a walk and saw among other things, the very colonial main post office with the big photo of Ho. When I came back to my hotel at 2 p.m. garbage trucks had arrived accompanied by police, to seize every plant left in the park and toss them into the garbage. Naturally, there were a group vultures who knew this would happen and they could rush in and grab plants in the turmoil of resistant retailers and determined garbagemen and cops and get something for nothing. After the screaming and fighting, there were a bunch of happy, tho wretched looking (out of Dickens) winners of free trees trying to figure out how to transport their spoils, and dejected retailers fleeing the battle to avoid a ticket for breaking the law. It was truly unbelievable that when the garbagemen left and peace returned, there was not one leaf, not an errant orange from the millions that had existed only an hour earlier.