Vietnam - Ha Long Bay

So pretty much everywhere you stay, and several hundred stands you pass on a daily basis in Hanoi and major areas in Vietnam in general, offer tours to different places of particular note, namely Sapa Valley and Ha Long Bay. Ha Long Bay is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world, so it's needless to say that not going to see it would have been a dumb move. Being one who tries not to make more than three dumb moves a day, and having filled my quota already before breakfast, we decided it would be a wise choice to invest in a two day boat tour of the bay. By all accounts it was a good trip to take, and the single day version was reportedly too short, while the three day venture was too long. It was about eighty dollars each, so it sounded like a deal. I should note that I do not like group tours one bit. I hate them. But there are admittedly some things that are just better to take tours for, be it for locations found in especially rural areas, or for a string of sights and activities that are hard to squeeze into a shorter time frame without tour organization. Some sacrifices are made from time to time. The real downsides are that you can't choose where and when you want to spend more time doing something you like or haven't seen enough of. The tour goes on like a death march. Also, they're often populated by "tour people", and while the hypocrisy of that statement does not escape me, I don't care, because so lame are group tours that I feel the need to make a mental distinction between myself who goes on them for specifically calculated reasons, and those who only travel in tours. They like being herded around, I guess. It's just too passive a way to travel.

Anyway, Ha Long Bay is on the eastern coast of northern Vietnam and contains roughly 2000 islands of various sizes. It's hard to describe properly because it's just so vast and being in the middle of it standing on the top deck of a junk isn't translatable to camera. We didn't get too far into it (a few hours of cruising), and the pictures don't completely capture it, but many turned out okay. Also not a Chinese pirate to be seen, which our guide was sure to tell us about.

The tour group picked us up from where we were staying early in the morning and we got on this little sort of bus that took us on the four + hour ride to Ha Long Bay from Hanoi, with the scenery being an amazing contrast to what we had seen already. Fields and dusty dirt roads for miles and miles with jungle foliage, crumbled buildings, workers in those Vietnamese cone hats plowing fields behind water buffalo, and temples scattered here and there. This was an area that felt like the Vietnam war had only finished yesterday, and it was more than I could do to keep myself awake to see it all (buses put me to sleep).

Anyways our tour guide was named Ten (not sure on the spelling) and he spent the ride fighting like a trooper to get responses out of us as we nodded off and had none of his attempts at joking around. Command of language is the cornerstone of joking, so if you don't know the language every attempt you make will fall short each time to painful effect that rivals The Office in discomfort [BBC version].
The guy was nice enough, but man, he didn't know when to quit (there's always a time to quit), and he kept asking us what we liked or were interested in. That doesn't sound bad at all, downright friendly if you ask me, but here's the thing, he kept asking us if we wanted to try different aspects of Vietnamese culture as well as activities the tour had said we might do (kayaking, swimming, beaches, etc.). He asked if we would like to try snake wine (wine in a jug with a dead cobra/scorpion inside) and of course, yes, yes we would like to try snake wine. To this enthusiastic response Ten would simply give us a knowing smile and wink, then proceed to asking us about other such activities or experiences that might titillate and enthrall our sense of newness and adventure. It felt sort of like when your parents would ask, "What will you ask Santa for Christmas?", while possessing the knowledge that you were in fact in the know on how the Santa game worked, and that this game was an indirect way of both asking and being told just what the hell it was that you wanted without blatantly killing the magic. Well Ten was like Parent-Santa, and he was putting out the vibes of one who wished to impress and wanted us to know that he wished to impress. Ten was going to make all our dreams come true.

Not at all though, actually.

Ten was an awkward sort of fellow, who upon being aware of the inability or absence of intention in fulfilling obligations, would sort of joke to your face that you weren't going to get anything you paid for. Thanks Ten. Just about the only thing we did that he talked about was kayaking, and we only did that for 45 minutes. Turns out everything else was just him asking if we'd like to do or try things. He banked that information for the greater good of the nation perhaps, but we never saw anything from it during our time there. It was like his inner monologue was something like this - "Want to try some traditional Vietnamese snake wine after I go to lengths to explain its history and uses to you, as well as the unique taste and experience of drinking it? Well then go buy some somewhere. Want to jump off rocks into swimming holes in the beautiful splendor that is Ha Long Bay? Yea? You should probably plan some sort of excursion that allows you to do that, one which accepts a fee in return for experiences that you wish to fulfill. Some sort of tour perhaps. A tour of Ha Long Bay, if I was a betting man".

So Ten didn't pan out, but the tour was still beautiful, and the kayaking was pretty awesome, short as it was.

A bit foggy

We stopped on an island to check out a popular cave, and man, the place was just packed with tourists. Supposedly it was once a shelter for the locals when big storms hit, and perhaps at one time was a very beautiful cave. Unfortunately, in the name of safety they cemented the ceiling and removed any rock formations that might have been dangerous to any degree. All that's left now is a cavern with artificial coloured lighting and a lingering sadness for what it could have remained to this day had people not insisted on making it "safe" for the solidly packed lines of plodding, out of shape tourists who gape in wonderment at their own keen sense of adventure in daring to wander into the depths of a cavern with handrails, stairs, and a snack stand. "Cave exploring" sounded better on paper, but hey, at least Ten tried to make it up to us by pointing out distinctly sexual rock formations, slyly asking us what we thought they looked like, then changing it to something like "it's a canon", or "it's an ice cream hole". Not sure if he was being coy or not. He seemed pretty out of the loop in general, but in that awkward way where you're never sure whether it's intentional or not. 

These people live on the water, selling people food and whatnot while they rent kayaks to go around the islands

Sadly past this point I don't have any photos of the actual kayaking, owing mostly to the fact that the kayak didn't strike me as being the most seaworthy thing to rest upon the surface of water, so I left my camera with Ten. I wish we'd had more than 45 minutes allotted for it, as I could have spent hours doing that

These guys came prepared. Kayaks AND potted plants. 

All in all it was worth it, but I guess the moral is that it depends entirely on the guide you get and the mix of the group, which for us was a pretty good one, having Australians, Italians, Argentinians, and British. Should'a brought some snake wine though.

Hanoi - Part 3 (I've Forgotten How This Goes)

I've forgotten what order some events occurred in, so here're some photos with explanations. As I recall we woke up one day and went to some museums for a while, so here's some of that.

I think this is where we ate the first day in Hanoi, but here it is now. Nice place, a bowl of pho with a beer for about $2.50

My finger at the bottom there. Not sure what or where this was

Museum of Revolution, containing a lot of the weaponry of a few different factions of uprisers, as well as a good bit of captured war prizes like vehicles and uniforms

Captured American military planes and artillery pieces, including the tail-up one in the back there that crashed at some point and was collected and scraped together. A symbol of American defeat I suppose, because they're big on that over there

Before continuing it's worth noting that all in all, Vietnamese museums are a strange cultural experience. While pretty much every form of historical documentation is propagated to some extent for every country, in Vietnam they unabashedly take the opportunity to weigh their displays and commentary on the side of justifying the position and legacy of the current Vietnamese state. That's fine and all, it's their history to write as they see fit, but it's unusual reading the signs for the collected weaponry used by Vietnamese revolutionaries that detail how many people ("enemies") they were used to kill (or "annihilate" as the signs would often read). It was how precise their numbers were that was even stranger, like the combatants were all keeping strict score like a game of laser tag and then handed their weapons in immediately for induction into the museum, lest they be mixed up somewhere along the way and assigned the incorrect kill-count. Needless to say it all felt very artificial and "state approved". 

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum

At this point we got talked by a xiclo driver (see previous post here) into taking a ride around the city, and it turned out to be worth it not only for leisurely reasons, but also from the unique perspective it gave us of the city during rush hour. None of the following picture from street view do it justice, but it was madness, and with Vietnam having barely anything resembling traffic rules, every turn and merge was a front row seat to their unique brand of chaotic order. I put off discussing it until the pictures were here to provide a visual element, but crossing the street or being driven around in Vietnam is an incredible experience. There are no such things as lanes or even proper directions, there is only functionality in the immediate moment. I never once saw an accident, or felt unsafe crossing the streets once I'd gotten used to how it works. You just sort of walk out into the stream of traffic and assume it'll all work out, which it does. Almost everyone drives around on a moped, and there're thousands of them everywhere at all times, so it's total madness everywhere you look, but because it's so unbound it also feels much safer. In Canada, if you walk out into the road there's a good chance you'll be hit by something because we're very passive drivers most of the time. We have lots of rules regulating how fast we go and where we can be and where we turn, but in the end that just seems to lure us into a state of non-vigilance. We assume everything will be fine because there're rules in place, and surely everyone will follow them, so we're less reactive to the unexpected. Vietnam is hectic, sure, but if you suddenly wander into the middle of a busy road they'll all avoid you without batting an eye, reacting in a group mentality like a skoal of fish. It also helps that they're on mopeds going 40 km an hour, so even if they hit you it's probably not going to kill you or anything. I believe it was the second or third day when an old lady with a cane and traditional Vietnamese dress saw Harrison and I waiting to cross the street, perhaps looking somewhat uncertain as to whether or not we should make our move, and took Harrison by the hand and guided him through the oncoming traffic as if he were a small child. 

Here's a pagoda we visited on our xiclo adventure as it started to get dusky

These are awesome and were pretty common in museum, government, or historical areas. It's basically a big bonsai in a stone trough, but the interesting part is that they make little shrines and steps on a lot of them

Back to the madness. This accurately sums of the experience of being in a xiclo or on a moped

It was getting dark and everyone was heading home from work, and I'm actually surprised by how the pictures do no justice to just how populated the road was at the time

Earlier that same day (because linear time in the blog world, much like that of the waking world, is an illusion) we saw this statue

And this guy, who was friendly and perhaps quite proud of the statue

Him and his buddies were having lunch or something. Perhaps they were working. It's hard to tell in Vietnam sometimes from what I saw. Lots of napping going on

Not sure what this was, but the lotus was a nice touch

The most empty street there ever was

This was the history museum, which contained artifacts from prehistory to the early 20th century. Some of the things on display were suspect as to their authenticity, but that's only because when I see what's purported to be the jaw bone of early man, I have just enough education under my belt to know that we were not at one time horses