Saturday, Oct 29

We took a predawn flight from Danang to Saigon (now called Hoi Chi Mihn City, but I still find Saigon rolls off the tongue better), then a quick tour of the Chinese wholesale market.  We have been to local markets around the world, and seen wholesale food and flower markets before, but this dry goods market was unique to our experience.  

Rows and rows of hats in one stall, motorcycle helmets in another, and shoes in another.  We saw Doc Martin shoes there.  Or rather knock-offs of Doc Martin.  While the real thing might cost $100 per pair, here they could be had for as little as $10 per dozen…!

Our earlier Saigon hotel now provided a day room for us to shower and rest for a bit before our flight.  This was very welcome, as we were about to change from the tropics to San Francisco and needed to shift our luggage and attire accordingly.

The flight home started near midnight, and took 24 hours, including a 9 hour layover in Seoul, Korea.  The leg from Saigon to Seoul was crowded, cramped, and had no entertainment system to speak of.  5 hours of reading and waiting…

While in Seoul, we paid for the use of an airline lounge, which made it a lot more comfortable.  Buffet meals, along with beer, wine, ice cream, and just about anything else you would want were included in the lounge.  We also had internet access, so I was able to catch up on some of these blog postings during that interlude.

A British couple sat near us, and we started talking.  Turns out his wife is from Borneo, and they had just come back from a semi-annual trip there for a month.  After talking to him, we had all but decided that Borneo may be our next major trip destination.  We still need to do a bit more research before finalizing those plans, but you may see us writing from Borneo in 2012.

On the 13 hour flight from Seoul to San Francisco, we sat next to a Vietnam War vet who was returning from two weeks in Vietnam.  He told us he was traveling with a friend that had been shot down during the war, and had reconnected with the North Vietnamese pilot that had shot him down, and they had written a book together.  Made for some interesting conversation.

When we asked him about Danang, and Dog Patch plus CAP, he also said they were long gone and well forgotten.  No trace of them remained, and no Vietnamese wanted to remember those places.

The Asiana inflight entertainment included a screen on the seat in front of us, with a list of a dozen on-demand movies.  By the end of the flight, I had knocked 5 movies off my Netflix DVD list and had very sore red eyes.

We finally made it home, unpacked, caught up on the mountain of mail (most of it junk that got tossed without opening), and generally settled back in.  The next day I went shopping at the local grocery store, and almost went into shock!

After three weeks of walking around where everyone was thin, and round bodies were nearly unheard of, I was suddenly back in the land of Super Size Me.  I had to do a double-take to realize this was real. Nearly everyone around me was at least double the size of anyone I had seen in the past three weeks.

Oh well, America is a big country, after all…

Now I have to get down to editing those 10,107 photographs sitting in my Adobe Lightroom catalog from this trip.  That will take awhile yet.

Posted Oct 28, 2011

Etienne picked us for before dawn for another photo tour this morning.  We started by taking a local ferry across the river.  The ferry was an experience in itself, filled to overflowing with scooters and people, it recalled images seen in news images of overladen boats capsizing in Thailand or elsewhere in Asia.

We survived the trip and wandered through some tiny villages we would never have found on our own. Everywhere, Etienne knew people and would get them to pose.  In a couple of cases, his pictures were on the walls of the homes we entered, as the occupants allowed us to photograph them.  Etienne told us his secret is to come by many times, take photographs while alone, then later return with prints of the best images to give the locals as gifts.  The result is they then are more receptive to him bringing in his small tours for more photographs.

Unfortunately, we had decided to get some custom clothing while in Vietnam, and Hoi An is famous for its tailors.  We went, we fitted, and we were severely disappointed…

Well, Evelyn was happy enough with her new suit.  My two shirts and slacks were a disaster though.  The tailor clearly had absolutely no idea how to tailor clothes for someone not of the Asian slim build.  I am 30 pounds overweight, and they tried to tailor clothes for me as though I were underweight.  They hung so badly it was not even a joke.  They were nowhere as good as I can get off the rack anywhere in the States, even though they cost more.

They said they would fix the problems and to come back later. We did, and the result was no better.  After much shouting and threats, they finally refunded my money. Had it not been for Lan (our guide), they would have stiffed me completely, claiming it was my fault the clothes did not fit.  I would not have even bothered putting that junk in our suitcase to take home for Goodwill.  It just plain looked terrible. No other way to begin to describe it.

This was a very unfortunate way to end our trip, as it put a final sour taste in my mouth.  If you ever venture this way, and have a few extra pounds on your frame, avoid Thang Loi tailors like a plague.

Warren took us out to dinner for our last night in Vietnam, again to a small local restaurant where he was friends with the owners.  One of the highlights of the menu was the “Fresh Beer.”  It is a local blend that has not been fermented very long (I forget just how long they said), which tastes quite good — and costs 3,000 Dong per mug.  In case you forgot the conversion, that means 15 cents per mug…  The excellent dinner with 2 mugs of beer per person cost $12 for the three of us.

At Hoi An, we stayed at the Palm Garden Resort, a 5-star hotel.  We had a very nice room with a view of the beach.  It was perfect in almost every way.  Unfortunately, it was also way out of town.  The taxi ride was only $5 each way, but took about 20 minutes and meant you had to really plan to go into town.  Though it is nice to end in luxury, we usually put being in the center of a walking downtown as a higher priority.  Had we known the location was so far out, we would have changed hotels ahead of time.

The hotel location also reinforced the idea that we should have come to Vietnam 10 years earlier.  It was near the end of a very long stretch of luxury condos and resorts that made us think we were driving down Miami Beach.  Or course there were also lots of signs for new resorts still being built, so it will only get worse.  

It did make us glad that we travel off peak season though, as I shudder to think what the city would look like with all those places full.  One benefit of traveling when we do — and risking the occasional bad weather — is that there were not very many other tourists around.  We were certainly not alone, and the behavior of the locals (particularly in North Vietnam) made it clear that they were used to people like us invading town.  However, we only rarely came across busloads of other tourists, and could usually make a hasty retreat when we did stumble across them.

Lan took us on a tour of the Hoi An Old Town (a UNESCO world heritage site) in the morning, which was interesting. We wandered among the street vendors, and Evelyn finally bought the Vietnam Red Star hat she had been looking for over the past two weeks. My head is too big to fit most Asian hats — it took several vendors before we found one that would do more that perch on top of my hair (my mother always warned me my head would swell up, but I insisted it just needed to be this big to hold all those brains — how else could I excel at World of Warcraft?).

We had the afternoon off, and walked along the beach to find a restaurant for lunch.  As usual, the food was excellent. Afterwards, we started to wander the beach front exploring the round coconut-shell shaped fishing boats… and almost immediately saw the wind start to whip up a fury, followed within a few minutes by a few raindrops.  We ducked into a nearby beach restaurant for another of now habitual fruit smoothies, just as the sky opened and the gods dumped a full bucket of water on us.  As usual, it all cleared up in less than half an hour, and we continued our beach walk.

That evening we linked up with Etienne Bossol, a professional French photographer who now lives in Hoi An.  Along with his professional local photography, he leads photo tours.  I would definitely recommend him if you ever decide to visit this part of Vietnam and want a photo tour, complete with local models and very helpful instruction:

     http://www.hoianphototour.com/
     http://www.hoianphototour.com/our-tours/customize-your-tour

He took us around town for the evening tour.  He would go up to an old woman with an interesting face, talk to her in Vietnamese (he claimed to only have primitive language skills, but I never saw any sign of them not understanding him), and get them to model for us.  He would always pay them a small sum at the end, and demurred when I asked how much he was giving them.  

The result was that we no longer had to do grab shots of these people. They were now willing models.  The downside was that these people had no concept of modeling, and tended to freeze up in front of the camera. Etienne helped overcome that by talking to them and getting their mind off the cameras, resulting in some of our best people photographs of the trip.

In one interesting scenario, Etienne convinced a very beautiful girl in an art gallery to pose for us.  It took him awhile to convince her, since she was nervous and did not consider herself sufficiently good looking to model.  Etienne finally won her over, and she moved into the doorway that Etienne had suggested. Just them, the young woman’s husband came in and she froze saying (in Vietnamese) “I can’t do this. My husband is here and does not want people taking pictures of me.”  Sure enough, the husband was adamant that no pictures were to be taken.  Even though Etienne knew the husband and had done work for him before, the man was determined that nobody take his wife’s picture.  Moving on…

We flew from Hanoi to Hue last night, and were met by Lan, our final Vietnam guide. The Gerbera Hue hotel was rated 4 star, but felt more like 5 star, and had a river front view. One surprising feature was the shower, which had a large glass window separating it from the bedroom, giving me have a nice view while Evelyn showered… 🙂

We were two blocks from a large city lake, and right in the downtown area, perfect for evening strolling.  Unfortunately, we arrived nearly at midnight and had an early morning start, so we went right to bed. Checked out the next morning, so we really didn’t get as much time here as we would have preferred — one of the hazards of trying to fit two countries into three weeks.

This morning Lan took us to The Citadel first.  Lan has no photographic experience, but was a quick study in what kinds of things we wanted to see.  She is also quite beautiful and not camera shy.  It was only after I got home and reviewed the photos that I realized I had not used her as a model as much as I should have.

Hue is in Central Vietnam, but was south of the DMZ during the war.  After Hanoi, it felt positively quiet. The incessant beep, beep, beep of Hanoi had been left behind.  The scooters were still everywhere, but they were not honking incessantly.  When I commented to Lan about entire families riding on a single bike, she explained that it was legal for kids under 5 to be on the bike with their parents without a helmet. That 5 y/o age limit is surely flouted, but seeing up to 5 people on a single scooter was always an amazing sight.

In the afternoon we drove to Hoi An, where we would spend the next few days. Enroute, we passed through Danang. We had asked earlier where Dog Patch and the CAP school had been — both of which figured large in the Vietnam war (or, as they call it, the American war).  Both those locations had been completely obliterated though.  There was a monster Crown Plaza resort there, as well as a Hyatt, a Greg Norman golf course, casinos and other chain golf resorts. Only the American airstrip remained, behind a high fence.  We were told that land had been purchased recently by Korean developers and construction will soon begin on yet another golf resort there.

When we arrived in Hoi An, we saw a small demonstration of rice farming done by a wizened old woman of 90.  She went around the display showing how the rice was planted, harvested, processed, etc using “the old ways.”  It’s the kind of show I normally sneer at, but it was oddly interesting. It was also apparently this woman’s sole income.

We were taken to a very nice restaurant for dinner, but it was much too loud for our tastes.  We were not able to hear instructions from Lan and, once she saw this, immediately arranged for us to move to a different table.  The restaurant set up a table on the patio for us, which was perfect in the warm evening.  It was only later that we realized the table had been set up just for us, and that they normally do not even serve out there.  That was typical of the type of service and instant response we saw throughout South Vietnam.

We spent last night on the sleeper train from Sapa back to Hanoi.  “Sleeper” is a bit of a misnomer, as it is pretty hard to get much sleep while being nearly tossed out of your bunk each time you pull into or out of a station, which happens a couple times an hour during the night.

We were met at the door of the train by Qyuet (“just call me ‘Q’), the True Believer who had led us in Hanoi earlier.  While other tourists were forced to navigate the rather awkward way back to the station on their own, it was nice to have Q there, helping us with our (way too much) luggage around the other trains on the tracks, and finally into our waiting car.

If you remember, Q was giving us The Party Line so solidly in Honoi that I quickly began to discount most “facts” that he told us (Vietnam has zero unemployment, zero poverty, perfect health care, and its people are always kind and stop for pedestrians crossing the street, etc).  After leaving the train, we immediately left Hanoi for Halong Bay, several hours drive from the city.  As we left Hanoi behind, we seemed to also leave the True Believer.  To my surprise, we started hearing a more believable story of the country from Q.

First, Q apologized for the condition of the trains (before we said anything about how rough the ride was), explaining that they were made “during the French period” (a phrase we heard a lot, which meant before 1954, when Vietnam was a French colony), and has not been maintained since.  He then also told us of a project he did in college in the hill country (where we had just left, and which I found largely distasteful), in which his team taught them how to create homestays, and how to create an economy that would build for the future.  He helped teach them the importance of education for advancing the family and the village.

He then said that after a few years of project completion, he went back and saw they had reverted to their old ways, and had mostly lost the benefits of the training.  He lamented that the hill people were only concerned with “making the most money today” while ignoring “the value of building a stronger village for the future.”  Unfortunately, that coincided very closely with what we saw the prior two days up in the hills.

He also told us that all kids went to school in the hills.  However, he said most kids wait for the morning snacks that are given free, then immediately leave after being fed, having no interest in actually learning anything.

We stopped at an artist workshop manned entirely by disabled people, and found the work to be absolutely astonishing quality.  We are not in the market for anything like this, but there was stunning statuary, embroidery, lacquer work, and fabrics.  We watched women creating embroidery of photo-realistic images that I would have been proud to produce with my camera.

Tuesday, Oct 25

We went to Halong Bay and spent the night on a junk named Hsiong Hai.  The food was gourmet, and looked as good as it tasted.  Only after the fact did we realize we should have been photographing the food.  It was a treat for the eyes as much as the tongue.  After missing photographing both lunch and dinner, we decided we would bring our camera to breakfast.  Unfortunately, that meal was more ‘normal’ and not really much of a photographic topic, though it still was quite delicious.  Opportunity missed…

The tour description had said we would visit a “fishing village” the next morning, and I had several images in mind that I hoped to capture, of fishing boats with nets extended, and fishermen throwing their nets.  Unfortunately, this was one of those cases of poor translation.  It was not a “fishing village” but rather a “fish farm” with a couple dozen ‘holes in the water’ where different fish were being farmed for restaurant consumption.  Very little to photograph.  Kids came up on boats and then rubbed their fingers together to indicate they wanted us to pay them.  Begging even here out on the water… (Something we only saw in North Vietnam — never in South Vietnam or Cambodia)

There was also to be a “large cave walk.” I guess ‘large’ is a relative term though, as we have walked through much larger and more impressive caves elsewhere in the world.  That walk did not result in any ‘keeper’ photographs either.

All in all, it was a pleasant overnight on a boat with excellent food, but pretty much a loss for photography.  We were told that the actual fishing boats have been gone for years as the tourist boats have made the local waters no longer good fishing grounds.  Another example of where it appears we are a decade too late for visiting Vietnam.

While on the junk, we asked the manager for suggestions on where to stop on the way back to Hanoi, since we were looking at several hours waiting at the airport if we just drove straight there.  We could not get him to give any suggestions, and instead he kept saying he wasn’t sure what our guide had arranged.  We didn’t really understand the issue until later.  When driving back, we told Q that we wanted to stop by a village to see rice farming, since the crop was being brought in that day.  

That was when it finally became clear — we were not allowed to visit any village or store unless we first had clearance and permission from the government.  We hadn’t even realized up until then just how constrained our travels had been.  As we later confirmed with other guides, the Vietnam government only allows foreigners in select locations, and any deviation requires advance permission from the government.  Quick reminder that this is a fully Socialist government, with the same restrictions we saw in Russia, China and Burma in the past…

I asked Q about the odd shape of most homes we passed.  There were wide fields with lots of land available, but the homes were very narrow.  They went deep, and were often several floors high (2 or 3), while only 16 feet wide (4 to 5 meters) at most.  Seemed bizarre from American housing standards.  Turns out the homeowners have to pay a home tax based on the width of the house.  Not on the livable space, but on the width.  Thus, people make their houses as narrow as possible. Another humorous example of unintended consequences, and how people will always find a way to minimize taxes, regardless of where in the world they live, or under what government structure.