Letters from Vietnam - South to North and Back Again

At 12:01 am New Year's Day I was flying somewhere over the Bay of Bengal on my way to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam.  For those awake there were a few cheers, but mostly from the Westerners. The travelers from Asia were saving their celebrations for the Lunar New Year, the year of the Rooster, on January 28.

Vietnam has a special draw because, after living through the nightly news of the war during the 1960-1970's and then the vast immigration of refugees through the 1980-1990's, I wanted to see how the country has fared. I learned quite a bit about Vietnam from the perspective of locals and guides. It was interesting to learn (though it did make sense) that what we in the US refer as the Vietnam Warthey refer it as the American War . Also, that ancestral "worship" or reverence has had a stronger impact than Buddhism since the mid 1940's famine.

Streets of Ho Chi Minh City
It is amazing what peace can do for a country! Vietnam is vibrant, with a strong middle class, socialist government, mostly well-developed infrastructure (good roads, transportation, utilities), and finely-tuned tourist industry. All that and a population of over 93.4 million in a country slightly smaller than California with a population of almost 39 million. North Vietnam has 11% of its population below the poverty line while the US has 15%.  In spite of development the culture and traditions seem to be surviving and not caving in to an all-Western model.

My goal was to see as much of the country as possible during my one-month visa; to travel by land from Ho Chi Minh City to Sapa in the north. After a quick 2-nights in HCMC to get oriented I took off on a 7-hour daytime sleeper bus to the south central highlands and the city of Dalat.  The sleeper bus is a comfy option for very long trips - rather than being packed in like sardines, each person has their own cushioned "lounge chair" that stretches 3/4 length to accommodate sleeping.  There are 3 rows, double-decker & even a bathroom on some of the buses. Well timed rest stops are made to eat and take a bio-break (the Vietnamese call the bathroom a "happy room").

The country side of Vietnam is lovely - lots of very steep mountains covered in varying degrees of tropical foliage (bamboo, palm, ferns)  or forest (pine, hardwood trees). Interspersed are small valleys covered in rice paddies and  small villages with personal vegetable gardens. Water buffalo do the heavy lifting. Papaya, mango, pineapple, guava, lychee, coconut, and other tropical fruits can be found just about everywhere and are delicious. Vietnam is also a country of rivers and small lakes where fisherman casting their nets adds to the beauty and charm of the countryside.

Linh Phuong Pagoda
Dalat is known for its mild climate and is famous in Vietnam for production of flowers and even wine.  I'm drawn to temples so I spent my time exploring the two main Buddhist sites. The Linh Phuong Pagoda, built in the early 1600's  is a beautiful complex that is completely covered in mosaics of broken ceramics - it's really flamboyant but seems to exude the cheerful and whimsical nature of Buddhism. I found the most scenic way to get there and back to Dalat was to take the restored 1930's French built train, a short, sweet 20 minute clickety-clackety ride past hillside homes and gardens. 

The second stop was Thiền Viện Trúc Lâm Monastery, completely different in tone and architecture. It is a modern Zen monastery built in the early 1990's that provides a home to a couple hundred monks and nuns who also lecture on the teachings of the Master Trúc Lâm and offer guidance on meditation.
Thiền Viện Trúc Lâm Monastery

I had such an incredible visit to this Zen monastery. I wandered into what I thought was a little restaurant on the grounds & was served a delicious lunch only to find out the monks provide food to guests if asked. Wanting to reciprocate in some way I asked the Guest Master, Thich Tinh Dam, (the monk who is charge of public relations with guests to the monastery) what I could do and he was more than glad to accept my offer. I ended up spending over 2-hours with him suggesting vocabulary & grammar edits to the English translation of a spiritual guidebook he was creating, "Lightly Open the Dooor to Zen". What a thrill to see his translations of Buddhist teachings intended for novices studying Zen Buddhism at this large monastery. Typical to the communication style of many monks, he laughed quite a lot when explaining the Zen parables that were not always so easy to put into simple English. 

A gondola takes visitors to/from the monastery. My late, solitary gondola ride back created a perfect time to reflect on the experience. As the gondola flew over the tops of a beautiful pine forest, I thought back to the simple, yet poetic life & teachings of the kind charming monk I had spent the afternoon with. 

From Dalat I continued on by bus northward, descending over 5,000 feet  through incredibly steep lush mountains to the seaside town of Hoi An. Hoi An is one of the major tourist attractions in Vietnam and, though crowded with international and local tourists, it is old-worldly and lovely. The small old-town  is a World Heritage site as it has kept so much of the architecture of its glory days when it was an important port. The old buildings are packed with great shopping so it was really a bit of an effort to keep looking upward at the beautiful 1600-1800 era buildings.  The streets are cleared of traffic for portions of the day and evening so everyone can walk about easily under the hundreds of paper lanterns that  decorate the shops and hang over the streets. 
Hoi An at night

 Come nightfall, all the lanterns are lit and even lighted paper lanterns are placed to float in the waterway that leads to the sea. It's really charming.


The town is a center for tailoring, shoe-making, and very cool ready-made cotton/silk clothing. I finally found some clothes to replace the remaining few funky & well-worn Peace Corps remnants I had been traveling with. I even had a pair simple, purple, sandals custom made for me! Finally - I felt a little more presentable!!

Hue Citadel
From Hoi An I traveled by train along the steep cliffs of the coast to the next stop of Hue - an historical capital with a Citadel (palace and administrative center) and several important religious sites and emperor tombs. Then on to the Phang Nha national park known for caves. Supposedly the world's largest known cave is in the area but only very high-end private tours are available. I made friends with a German couple & we rented motorbikes for a day of exploring the park and the caves available to the public. It was great to be out on quiet roads & passing through small villages and away from cities at last. 
Phang Nha

Ninh Binh

After a short stay in Phang Nha I was off by an overnight  sleeper bus to Ninh Binh which is known as the Ha Long Bay on land because the karst peaks are scattered across paddy fields and along the river banks. This time I just hired a driver & motorbike to take me on a daylong tour of the area.  We stopped at all the major pagodas & temples (of course) and I had a really great tour of more caves that were only reachable by rowboat. Vietnam seems to everything so well organized - the rowboat site is set up to handle hundreds of tourists flawlessly without quite seeming to be overly like an amusement park.  Helping our female "captain" row (we paddled) and ducking as flat as we could possibly get to float through well-lit caves was really a distraction & so we hardly noticed all the other boats cruising along.



From the peaceful countryside I traveled on to old-town Hanoi. What a great place old Hanoi is!! Narrow windy streets, packed with motorbikes, sidewalks packed with street-side eateries (noodles galore!), shops teeming with locals and foreigners. The Vietnamese keep all the coffee houses & restaurants full throughout the day & into the late evening.  The street around a central lake (a bit smaller than Merritt Lake in Oakland) really comes alive at night as families and young singles go out to stroll, visit, and eat. The Vietnamese don't seem affected at all by tourists & foreigners - they take it all in stride and get on about their business. Sure they are kind & willing to help but in no way impressed by the multitude of foreign languages and personalities of us travelers.

Since I had to traverse part of the city to get  to the Indian Embassy to apply for a visa I had to take a motorbike taxi.  I was able to see quite a bit of Hanoi from the back of a motorbike & experience the sensation of gliding through the crush of motorbikes. The city has its own rhythm and flow that just seems to move without chaos or even too much noise (Sri Lanka & Lesotho have so much more noise). 

Each day the city's preparation for the Tet Lunar New Year
Tet Festival Preparation - Hanoi
celebration expanded - street vendors selling everything from red paper lanterns to fanciful dressed chickens to paper ancestral offerings being burned in little stoves along the street. Food & restaurant prices were going up while big big sales brought clothing prices way down. I even picked up a $12 down jacket to take with me to the cold northern region of Sapa.

I made Hanoi my hub so I could take a couple of  short trips out to Ha Long Bay in the east and Sapa in the north. It was great to leave my suitcases in a Hanoi hotel & just carry a daypack. Ha Long Bay is gorgeous. Though I was there in winter with mist and fog it was still absolutely beautiful. 
Ha Long Bay


The trip to Sapa meant more cold and more mist and fog but it was charming.  Sapa is one of the regions that is home to various "hill tribes" such

Sapa Trek with Hmong
as the Hmong. I joined a small group for a 2-day trek up and down pretty steep and muddy trails to several villages in the remote countryside. Hmong ladies typically follow along with the trekkers and are ready to jump in as "porters". I had no problem hiring a porter to help me keep upright along the slippery trail. I was one of the few who made it without earning a badge of honor - a big fat swath of mud on my rear from falling! We spent one night in a village guesthouse where I had the best dinner yet.  It was a lot of fun for me to join a group of travelers (all 20-something) from the Netherlands, Germany, and France. The guesthouse served us plenty of homemade local rice wine that made us all toasty! After the wine wore off I still survived the cold night by filling up 7 plastic water bottles with hot tap water and putting them in my bed - a trick I learned in an even colder guesthouse in Tibet!
70 year old Hmong woman along for the trek

Another long bus ride back to & overnight in Hanoi & ready for my flight back to HCMC. My last couple of days in HCMC were spent with a former Peace Corps Volunteer I had met in Lesotho; I was just arriving as she was ending her service but we remained Facebook friends and followed my travels. She has been teaching English and trying to make a life for herself in HCMC. It was great to have her show me various neighborhoods that I would never have discovered on my own. She even took me to a natural healing institute for a traditional foot treatment that included an herbal soak and acupressure massage and then took me to a couple of small tucked away restaurants for some interesting  & delicious new southern Vietnamese dishes.

And so, after 25 days, I had traveled overland more than 1,600 miles from south to north and now back again to see the beautiful lowland countryside, the highlands and mountains, beaches, and bays. I even reached my 6-month mark of travel since leaving my home in Lesotho. Tired of travel you may ask - well no actually!  So on to the Philippines!


Vietnam… a few stats from the  2014 Census,  INDEX Mundi
Population (of 242 countries): ranks 14, over 93.4 million (USA ranks 3, almost 320 million)
Population density (of 242 countries): ranks 44, 282 people per sq. km;  (USA ranks 176, 33 people per sq. km)
Poverty (of 215 countries): ranks 138, 11% (USA ranks 127, 15% ), population below poverty line
Literacy (of 215 countries): ranks 118, 93.4% (USA ranks 45, 99%)
HIV adult prevalence (of 169 countries) ranks 84, 0.4%  (USA ranks 62, 0.6% )

Life Expectancy at birth (of 221 countries): ranks 127, 73 yrs. (USA ranks 41, 79 yrs.)

Philippines - sea creatures great & small



I left the craziness of Ho Chi Minh City and landed in the laid back island of Malapascua, a tiny island just off the northern coast of Cebu, an island in southern region of the Philippines.  I arrived just a couple days in advance of friends & SCUBA buddies Carole & Barry - so I had a couple days to adjust to the humidity and longs days at the beach. The island is very tiny, it takes only a couple hours to walk all the way around it. Perfect tropical island of clean white beaches with fishing & dive boats scattered about, coconut palms, simple wooden homes in dense neighborhoods. There are still signs of recovery as the residents continue to repair the larger structures still showing sign of damage from Typhoon Yolanda (also known as Haiyan) that hit in November 2013, one of the most severe on record in the Philippines.
Coming in to Malapascua

Blue Coral Inn and our beach


View from Blue Coral Inn

Seeing Carole & Barry again was a real delight!! It hardly seemed like almost a year had passed since we had seen each other; we quickly got into our dive buddy roles and enjoyed a week of diving with the Thresher Shark Dive center. The days passed lazily - even more so because TSD starts their dives later than I'm used to.

The dives were good - the visibility a little poor, the water temps a little cool but not too bad with an extra few millimeters added to my dive suit, and the fish a little sparse. However - the sites I saw made it all worthwhile. Pygmy seahorses!!!! Incredible and so much smaller than I ever imagined just hung tenaciously to the thin lacy branches of colorful fan corals. Thresher Sharks!! Very large (up to 20 feet), majestic, graceful sharks that come up from their deep feeding grounds to 50-90 feet to be attended at cleaning stations by little wrasses whose job is to dutifully pick off parasites and what-not from any and all locations on their huge bodies.




In between & after dives we sampled local foods (I admit there was one a fairly authentic Italian dinner!) and we resumed the Bubbly 6 happy hour tradition of past dive trips with the whole gang. It was great way to break up the routine I have established with solo travel and reconnect in person with dear friends.  But - the easy beach & diving life had to end and we had to make our way back.  Carole & Barry headed home to California while I was venturing off to Myanmar.

 Philippines… a few stats from the  2014 Census,  INDEX Mundi

Population (of 242 countries): ranks 12, over 102.6 million (USA ranks 3, almost 320 million)
Population density (of 242 countries): ranks 34, 358 people per sq. km;  (USA ranks 176, 33 people per sq. km)
Poverty (of 215 countries): ranks 79 26% (USA ranks 127, 15% ), population below poverty line
Literacy (of 215 countries): ranks 95, 95% (USA ranks 45, 99%)
HIV adult prevalence (of 169 countries) ranks 150, 0.1%  (USA ranks 62, 0.6% )
Life Expectancy at birth (of 221 countries): ranks 132, 72 yrs. (USA ranks 41, 79 yrs.)

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