Ninh Binh Part Two

How time flies. This is the second part of our Ninh Binh story (see below for the first part) which covers the rather eventful day two of our trip. Sorry it took so long to post.

On Sunday, the second day of our trip, we awoke late-ish and had breakfast and coffee in our room. Around 9 or 10 o'clock, just as the sun was really starting to get hot, we hopped on our bikes and headed out of town toward the mountains again.

We hit a road which ran through small villages along the foot of the mountains before turning and following a series of roads that worked their through valleys back into the hills. We were looking for Hoa Lu, an ancient capital city of Vietnam (and big tourist attraction near Ninh Binh). Once again (unwisely) using the map that had been provided for us from the hotel, we figured we could find our way there, tour the place and be back at the hotel before lunch.

Our ride took us through green valleys between these amazing mountains--past rice fields and small lakes and villages. We marveled (as we sweated profusely) that such things could even exist. It really felt as if we were in a movie at times.


As far as we rode, though, we didn't come across Hoa Lu or anything that looked even remotely close to an ancient capital city. We were lost. Multiple times. By the time we finally started asking directions and made it to Hoa Lu, we had gone probably 5 or more miles out of our way in 95 degree heat. We were exhausted. It didn't help that our first view of Hoa Lu was a big, dusty parking lot with tour buses and rows of vendor's shops. No imposing battlements or ancient temples--just big ol' buses and chintzy merchandise. I'm sure there was more to it but, as I told Joelle at the time, Hoa Lu really needed to work on its curb appeal. By this time it was well after lunch and we'd only brounght snacks with us. We decided that walking around in the sun for another two hours looking at the remains of some old buildings wasn't what we needed. So we sat in the shade with a Vietnamese family, ate and drank a bit, and got back on our bikes.


We took a different road on the ride back to the hotel, which ended up being even more spectacular than the road there. Still, we managed to get lost again and by the time we made it back to the hotel we were truly wiped. We had a very late lunch, packed our bags and prepared to head back to Hanoi. This is where things truly got interesting.

Rather than walking a whole entire kilometer from the hotel to the station, we decided to 'go local' and wave down the first bus we saw pulling through town that was bound for Hanoi. We didn't pause to consider that, if the bus was going to stop for us, it most likely would stop for anyone and everyone else.

As it was, a bus did stop for us and we got two of the last seats available (fortunately) and settled in for the ride. The vehicle we found ourselves in could best be described as an "old jalopy." It was really more of an oversized van than a bus, it had no air conditioning and room for about twenty people to sit. Joelle and I were numbers 17 and 18, approximately. By the time we got near Hanoi, we estimated that we were sharing that little bus with 35 to 40 people, four of whose sweat I was able to feel personally. People were standing, sitting on laps, straddling the gearshift up front, and hanging out the door. Just when I would think "We can't possibly fit anyone else on this thing," someone standing along the side of the road would wave us down, the ticket taker helper guy would hop out, squeeze them on board, and we would oh-so-slowly get up to speed again.

But things were to get more interesting still. At one point we had stopped to pick someone up along the side of the road when another bus (much nicer and shinier looking--I think it was a Mercedes) pulled up and stopped just to the left of us, literally inches away out our window. I don't know if the driver of the trailing bus hadn't been paying attention and had swerved at the last minute and stopped, if he was planning on handing something out his window to our driver or just what, but there he was stopped directly next to us. We stared at the other passengers out our window for a minute. Despite their being on a nicer bus, they looked just as cramped and uncomfortable as us.

Our driver, for his part, was looking in his mirror trying to make sure that the newest passenger had found a spot on his already overcrowded bus. Satisfied that he had, our old jalopy started to pull away...and with a loud pop proceeded to shatter the Mercedes bus's right side mirror. Oops.

Quick cultural note: As we all know, minor accidents in the States are usually resolved by the drivers exchanging insurance information (maybe a few snide remarks) and going on their way. Very orderly, methodical...boring. This minor accident was to be anything but boring. In a flash, the driver of the Mercedes bus was out his door and standing beside our driver's door, shouting through the window at him. A large volume of rather heated words were exchanged (none of which we could understand, fortunately) and then the Mercedes driver stationed himself in front of our bus--presumably to keep us from driving away--and started dialing his cellphone with a shaking hand. Soon, both driver's assistants were out on the road as well, adding their pointed perspectives to the rapidly-developing argument.


Apparently the Mercedes driver's phone call didn't achieve the desired result because after a minute both he and his assistant were back at our driver's window, shouting again (our driver--wisely--hadn't left the vehicle). The other driver started to pound on the side of our bus with his fist. At this point Joelle and I (who were seated directly behind our driver) were starting to look for an easy way to exit the bus should we need to. There was no easy way and so we resigned ourselves to sitting and seeing what happened.

Suddenly in the midst of the shouting, a hand--either the Mercedes bus driver or his assistant's--reached through our driver's window and gave him a solid slap across the cheek. Now other people on the bus were starting to look for a way to get out as well, and an elderly gentleman who was sitting next to our driver stood up, looked around for a second, and apparently for lack of anything better to do hurriedly buckled his motorbike helmet on his head.

A split second later another hand--this one a closed fist--made its way through our driver's window and connected squarely with his eye socket. Just when it was looking like our two buses might empty out and a full-on street brawl would ensue, our bus's assistant stepped in and pulled the Mercedes driver aside, calming things for the moment.

In a flash, our bus was rolling down the road again, with our driver nursing a bleeding gash under his right eye (his assistant had hopped back on after separating everyone). We continued on as normal to Hanoi, except that about a mile from the bus station our driver pulled the bus over, said something to his assistant, hopped out and walked off down the street wearing his dark glasses. The assistant climbed in the driver's seat and drove us the rest of the way to the station. Odd, we thought, but maybe the driver needed to get to a doctor or something.


When we pulled into the station, the full extent of our driver's wisdom became clear. No sooner had our bus parked than the Mercedes bus driver (who had also been going to Hanoi) and several of his friends came sprinting over to settle things with our driver. They were surprised and, perhaps, a little disappointed to discover that our driver was most likely already home and watching TV with an ice pack on his eye. Quick as we could, Joelle and I grabbed our things and exited the premises, glad that that part of our trip was complete.

All in all it was a wonderful--if partly uncomfortable and terrifying--trip.

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.

New pictures

We've (finally) got some new pictures up on our photo album. Mostly it's just regular life stuff in and around Hanoi. We also took a trip across the river to Bat Trang, a village known for its handmade pottery and we took a few pictures there as well. To see them, click here.

Celebrate your Vesak

Banners are a big thing around here. If something even mildly exciting or out of the ordinary is happening, most likely it will end up on a banner somewhere. Most of the time, these banners are in Vietnamese and, therefore, basically inaccessible for us. But over the last month or so, a number of yellow and red English banners have been popping up all over town, usually strung across main avenues or near traffic circles.

Here's what the banners say: "The 2008 United Nations Day of Vesak Celebrations." Eh? While it's nice to have a banner to read in English, the main purpose of translating something into English (i.e. communicating something meaningful to English speakers) was lost on me. I understand what the United Nations is, and I understand what a day of celebration is, but I'm at a loss as to what a Vesak is or why on earth I should celebrate it.


I began to grow suspicious that perhaps this was just a made-up holiday--a ploy by greeting card makers and knick-knack vendors to get people to purchase their wares ("Have you bought your parents a Vesak Celebrations card yet? Did you see those cute new Vesak dolls in the market?") I decided to start doing some investigating. First, I asked people from our organization--Westerners who had spent a good amount of time in Vietnam and would likely be able to explain why these banners were up all around town.

The answers I received generally amounted to this: "I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with Buddhism." Not terribly helpful. So much for my Western experts. What I needed was a Vietnamese perspective on the Vesak issue. Things being what they were, though, I forgot all about Vesaks for a while until yesterday afternoon when we were chatting with our language tutor (in English) before our lessons started. Our teacher often has interesting life stories to share and has been a great source of knowledge about Vietnamese culture. Somehow during our conversation one of us mentioned a holiday and her face suddenly brightened.

"Oh!" she said, as if remembering something important. "Did you know that Vietnam has a holiday tomorrow?"

Seeing my chance to learn from a local expert, I sprang on it. "That's right. I've seen the banners up all over town. The 2008 United Nations Day of Vesak Celebrations, right?"

Our teacher nodded and smiled, clearly pleased that I knew what she was talking about. "Yes, yes." I waited for an explanation, but none was forthcoming. Perhaps, I thought, she assumed I was aware of all that a Vesak Celebration entailed.

After a bit of a pause, I continued. "Sooo....what is a Vesak Celebration, then?"

There followed a silent, thoughtful look from our teacher. Finally, an answer: "I'm not sure. I think it has something to do with Buddhism."

P.S. In desperation I finally turned to my knowledgeable friend Google and discovered that Vesak Celebrations indeed have to do with Buddhism. It's kind of a birthday/life/death celebration for Buddha himself. So there you go--no having to scratch your head in confusion if similar yellow banners start appearing in your hometown.