Ugh...

In case anyone asks why businesses shut down and people sleep through the afternoon in Vietnam, three to four months of the following should provide sufficient reason:

Ninh Binh Part One

Okay, the long-anticipated narrative of our trip to Ninh Binh is here. You know you've been waiting for it. This first part will detail our first day in Ninh Binh and the second part will, predictably, detail our second day there.

The Ninh Binh trip came about primarily because Joelle and I (being the small town folks that we are) occasionally feel the need to escape from the noise, bustle and crush of humanity that is Hanoi. It was also high time for us to finally take the leap of journeying outside of Hanoi on our own. Ninh Binh was far enough away to warrant an overnight trip, but not so far away that we couldn't call for help and have one of our friends from Hanoi come find us if we got lost, incarcerated or otherwise waylaid.

Our adventure began on a Saturday morning as we shouldered our backpacks and climbed on the city bus that would take us to the Giap Bat long-distance bus station on the south side of Hanoi. A brief description of Vietnamese bus stations because they're a bit difficult to fathom if you haven't been there: The first (and arguably most important) challenge of riding bus in Vietnam is to get yourself to the right bus station. Larger cities will sometimes have three or more distinct stations, depending on which direction you will be travelling. Thanks to some Vietnamese students we had met the week previous, as well as our trusty guidebook, we knew the correct station to head to. First hurdle overcome.

Another interesting feature of bus stations is that from the moment you set foot in one, you will be assailed by different people shouting names of destinations. These are touts, recruiters or whatever you want to call them. They're trying to get you on their bus, for which they will be paid a slight commission. We had been warned by various knowledgeable sources not to go with the first person who shouted 'Ninh Binh' in our ears, but instead to proceed to the ticket counter and purchase a genuine paper ticket for our desired destination, the reasoning being that the ticket counter has clearly marked prices while the prices on the buses themselves often depend on the mood of the driver and the amount of Foreigner Gullibility you exude. So we bought our ticket at the counter, hopped on a minibus marked Ninh Binh, and waited our turn to leave the station. Second obstacle cleared. We were doing well.

The trip to Ninh Binh was faster and more comfortable than we had imagined. The only slightly disturbing part of it was the brother/sister combo in the seats across the aisle from us who took turns heaving into plastic bags for the majority of the trip. (To read more about the Vietnamese propensity for motion sickness from a teammate of ours, click here.)

An hour or so out of Hanoi, we saw something novel and exciting appear on the horizon: mountains. Having spent most of our lives in the Pacific Northwest, mountains or foothills have been an ever-present fact of life for us. Living in Hanoi on the flat-as-a-pancake Red River delta the past four months we've been missing the presence of un-flat land, and were gratified to recall what it looks like. Ninh Binh province is known for its crazily-sculpted limestone mountains, and it was to those mountains that we were headed.

Arriving in Ninh Binh city from Hanoi felt a bit like walking from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange into a public library. Other than the occasional truck or bus rolling down the town's one main street, the place felt deserted. It was heavenly. We found ourselves a quiet hotel, had a quiet lunch at an exceedingly quiet restaurant and prepared to head out into the deafening silence of the surrounding countryside.

For the purpose of exploration, we rented bicycles from our hotel and took a hand-drawn map of the area with all of the relevant attractions duly noted in something resembling English. Our first destination was Tam Coc, a river that wound through the mountains and actually worked its way under three of them in caves. The map made it look easy: Go down this road for a ways, turn left, go straight for a ways, turn right and you were pretty much there. That was where we made our first mistake.

The map, we soon discovered, could just as well have been showing us the way to Prince Caspian's summer home as to the Tam Coc caves. Its correlation with reality was, we later decided, mostly coincidental. As we pedaled the back roads outside of Ninh Binh in the heat of the day, we found ourselves tracing and then retracing our path through rice fields and villages, past a pagoda where a man was stalking something in the trees with rifle in hand, over village streets that were covered in a layer of rice stalks drying in the sun. Every three minutes or so we would stop to ask where Tam Coc was, and would usually be answered with waving arm motions indicating a general direction and maybe a turn or two to take. Thus, by a terribly circuitous route, we eventually came to Tam Coc and found ourselves in a small boat being paddled up the river by a lady who used her feet to row about as often as she used her hands.

Tam Coc was glorious. The pictures speak for themselves, I hope, so I won't waste too many words trying to describe it. The mountains were like none we had ever seen, and the abruptness with which they shot out of the rice fields was something else. We'd been warned that the place could be a bit of a circus but it really wasn't too bad. There were a fair number of folks there with us, also being paddled in their own little boats, but everyone's view was so often fixed upward at the mountains around us that we really didn't notice the crowds.

As we returned from our boat trip, the sky behind us was growing dark with clouds, and a few distant rumblings of thunder could be heard. We climbed on our bikes and headed back, trusting to our sense of direction rather than the map this time. Partway back, a valley opened before us, at the far end of which we could see a stairway climbing the face of a mountain to a pagoda at its peak. The hour was growing late, the thunder was moving closer and we had almost no water…but it looked beautiful. We had to climb it.

We bought some water from a nearby village store and started our ascent. As we climbed, the lowlands spread out below us like a patchwork quilt of different shades of green. We found ourselves looking across rather than up at the peaks of nearby hills and mountains, and as we gained the summit we were able to look down the other side and see the river we had just come from, winding its way through (and under) the mountains. All this happened as the sun sank behind the mountains and lightning flashed from the dark bank of thunderheads across the valley. The top of the mountain contained a shrine to some minor deity or another, but in our hearts we knew Who was truly responsible for such incomparable beauty, such unbounded creativity.

Our reluctant hike back down the mountain and the twilight bike ride across the flats back to Ninh Binh brought a fitting end to a beautiful day.

A ridiculously beautiful weekend

This weekend we took the plunge and actually ventured out on our own for an overnight trip to Ninh Binh, a place that's a couple hours south of Hanoi by bus. This was our first time venturing out of Hanoi by ourselves, and it was definitely worth it. The scenery was spectacular--like nothing we'd ever seen before. Big limestone mountains jutted straight up out of bright green fields of rice. We rode bikes through the villages and valleys and just marveled.

The trip warrants a much more complete description than I'm able to give it here, but if you're like me then all you really want to see are the pictures. So click here for a link straight to the album. A more complete blog entry about the trip will be forthcoming as time allows.

The New Casa

This might be old news to some, but we moved from our apartment into a house a couple of weeks ago. Here's the scoop: many of the folks from our organization go back to their home countries over the summer but since we arrived mid-year we'll be staying the whole summer in Hanoi. There was a family heading back to the states that asked us to housesit for them for about three months, and we consented. Given that we would be upgrading from a one room apartment to a three storey house without having to pay any rent, they didn't really have to twist our arms.

Thus it was that we packed all of our worldly belongings (which amounted to a couple backpacks, a couple duffle bags, some inherited wicker cabinets and a few assorted odds and ends) into a big taxi and made the mile and a half jaunt across town to our new digs. All told it was the easiest move I've ever made.

The new place is…well, it's great. It's quite nice--about five times the size of our old place--has three bathrooms, a full-sized kitchen (rather than the one person "closet kitchen" in our apartment), three bedrooms, an entertainment room with comfortable furniture (a huge bonus), an office and a formal living room that we refer to as the "throne room." The landlord happens to be the Vietnamese ambassador to Canada. And we get to live here for the rest of our time in Hanoi without paying rent. Crazy.

It's been an interesting lesson on perspective for us. If we had moved straight from the states into this house it's likely we would have thought, "Well this is a pretty nice place," and left it at that. But after three months of living in a single room (albeit a fairly large one) it feels a bit like we've moved into Buckingham Palace. We never knew that something as simple as a showerhead that hangs on the wall, a stove with more than two burners or a kitchen that fits more than one person could seem like such a luxury.

We'll try not to grow too accustomed to luxuries like full-size kitchens, however, as we'll soon be moving to Quy Nhon where word on the street is we'll be returning once more to one-room apartment living. But for the time being we'll live it up, enjoy the soft full-size couches and appreciate what we can only describe as a lavish and undeserved gift.