Sapa is perched up in the northwest highlands of Vietnam. Peaks loom somewhere above the mist, but you can never tell how high they go. Occasionally the sun finds its way through and big spikes of marble are revealed growing out from the mountain at odd angles. Clouds roll over the cliffs like passing trains, flowing through the bamboo forests and on into town so thick you can’t see across the street. Stone footpaths wind about the heights connecting villages. There’s so much up and down you can sometimes find yourself only a couple hundred feet away from someone on an adjacent hill. Sound carries well through the cold air, so villagers shout messages between the vistas.

Aside from the gorgeous views, the chief attractions of the region are the many varieties of colorfully garbed minority peoples. These hill tribes are very poor sustenance farmers. They are short, wiry, and seem full grown at ten. They have the wide, muscled, almost hand-like feet that you get from carrying logs up mountains barefoot every day. The Zao women can fly past you up a rock face, even carrying their children. In one tribe the women chew a root that stains their teeth completely black. The women of the various tribes trek to Sapa to sell their detailed embroidery, jewelry, hashish, opium, and marijuana. Young girls sell a lot of the crafts. Toothless crones are the drug dealers.

The H’mong girls, in particular, are incredibly aggressive. The touchiness of the Vietnamese is totally eclipsed by the H’mong. Every tourist woman that enters Sapa instantly gains an entourage of adoring H’mong “sisters.” They cling, give hugs and kisses, and play patty-cake, punctuated with pleas to buy from them. Every time Mandy hit the the street, H’mong girls took each arm. While Mandy was plied with affection, I got punches to my floating ribs, shin kicks and bites. The H’mong girls were the first women I ever saw playing at kickboxing in the street. They are deceptively strong for their size. One girl threatened to knife me for not buying cloth from her.

We went trekking to the villages of the different tribes all around the area. Outside a Black H’mong Village we met this guy, Ju, who wanted to play with my camera. He wanted to take pictures of the irrigation system he built out of bamboo and his rice paddies. After fooling with my camera a bit, Ju gestured us down a path to his hut.

We crawled in and huddled around the firepit. With our heads bumping drying corn and the family shotgun, we met Ju’s eight kids and two puppies. Ju’s wife, Ku, cooked rice soup while Ju babbled H’mong at us. He offered us hot water and a strong rice wine. We managed to sign out a rudimentary conversation and then Ju brought out a bamboo water pipe. I accepted a smoke to be friendly, but whatever else was in the tobacco was too much for me and too much for Ju.

He started singing for a while and then crying. Confused and unsure what to do, we were rescued by Mao, Ju’s son. Mao knew enough English to tell us that this only happens when Ju hits the pipe and drink. Ju dragged us out to his anvil and signed as if beating his own arm on it and waved at the world around us. Mao thought it best that we leave, so we thanked everyone and Mandy led me away.

We took quite a few photos. Battered and bruised I fled from the H’mong Mafia into China…

Each street in the old city of Hanoi is named for the product that is sold there. Which doesn’t help at all if you don’t know Vietnamese. The roads weave around several lakes lined by cafes. Hordes of old people perform the local tai chi variant around the lakes well before sunrise. In the afternoon you can still find a few in meditation, running through a routine, or trying to convince incredulous youngsters that they won’t feel spry forever unless they start stretching. At night, lovers neck in the dark along the lake shore.

The streets of Hanoi are nonstop bustle, everything moves. People haggle over goods and spit. Basket ladies sing out their wares. Parked motobikes crowd the sidewalks, so you mostly walk in the street. That is, you try your best to skip between traffic and other pedestrians and step over heaps of rotting garbage and small fires. Everything is for sale at top volume and the air is blue with moto smoke. Often you’re dodging the remains of someone’s soup, carelessly thrown out the door. Chickens, roosters, cats and small dogs try to stake claim to a patch of ground. Only people are foolish enough to try to cross the street. Like in every town in Vietnam, twice a day the propaganda loudspeakers go off.

The baking is done twice a day and carried around the street in baskets. A German we met complained that the French bake six times a day. He didn’t really take to my suggestion to take the first plane to Paris and spend twenty times as much on his pastries.

Ho Chi Minh’s tomb is a quite a trip. The cult of Communism is alive and well in Hanoi. “Uncle Ho” has been preserved in state under an enormous columned mass of deathstar black rock. The entire affair is Very Serious. There are Very Serious armed guards in spotless white uniforms every ten feet as you approach the tomb. Once you enter its quite dark and there are even more guards with Very Serious looking shiny bayonets. Uncle Ho himself is very well preserved and given dramatic yellow lighting. You are forbidden from unserious expression and dress, and your arms must remain at your sides as you shuffle past. Outside there’s a nice museum that encourages you to do your part for the World Revolution. The second world lives! There’s even a great colossus of Lenin in the park. I hear they’ve still got some of this stuff in Russia, but it wouldn’t be the same now.

I’m getting really tired of being squeezed. The Vietnamese will just reach out and grab you. They’re a tactile culture and if they see something strange they want to investigate it with their hands as well as their eyes. I feel like an under ripe fruit. Speaking of which, unripe fruit is very popular all throughout Indochina. All kinds of green fruit are eaten, often with salt.

Things you can find being transported on top of motobikes weaving through traffic:

• Thirty live chickens hung upside down on the handlebars
• Baskets full of pigs
• Five foot by seven foot sheets of pane glass (no tape, totally invisible)
• Thirty foot aluminum beams
• Giant blocks of ice
• Ten large propane tanks
• Woman acting as a living hitch to a car sized trailer
• Trees
• Large truck’s CV joint manifold
• Other motorbikes.

Here’s some photos of Hanoi. Full of what Christmas cheer we could muster, we took our first ever sleeper train out to the hills of Sapa…

Its time to reach back into the big bag of superlatives we left in Europe. Ha Long Bay is one of the wonders of the world. Its a few thousand limestone islands sprouting up from the sea capped with greenery. Every island is riddled with caves and tunnels of all sizes. On our first day our boat took us through the bay amid red sailed junks and small fishing villages. We toured one of the bigger caverns and slept out in the bay under the twinkling stars.

The next day we kayaked through the islands from dawn till dusk. Big schools of fish would spring out of the water to fly from some unseen predator. Eagles lazily soared from peak to peak, lunching on whatever they spied below. Many of the islands were hollow in the center like doughnuts, harboring secret lagoons fed only by twisty sea caves. We paddled through several of these tunnels and found they were home to dark green clams, turquoise, midnight blue, yellow and red corals, sandy starfish, and orange sea fans. The lagoons inside were large and warm with soft sandy beaches.

Our guide led us to one island that was filled with monkeys. “Beware,” he said, “Hold on to your camera, the monkey he is naughty.” In fact, all of the monkeys were naughty. You can get away with doing a great many strange things in public if you’re a monkey.

These islands go on without end in every direction. It gives you beauty overload. Our friend Caitlyn was here and said you see so much eye popping scenery every second you almost get bored with it.

We hired a marvelous tour guide to see us around the islands named Dung, which means “Hero”. Hero, in his tour guide work, has noticed that the Europeans don’t litter, so he’s tried to adopt this very un-Vietnamese habit himself. He also likes the uniquely western idea of splitting the bill at the restaurant or the bar. “But don’t like the American idea, he eat so much and she eat so much.”

Hero says:

“Vietnamese tea very strong. Cannot sleep at night. Also, for many years Vietnam very poor, can only grow the sweet potato. The sweet potato also make you cannot sleep. Cannot sleep, that is why the many population of Vietnam. But now we grow rice, everything okay.”

After we snapped a bunch of photos on the water, Hero drove us to Hanoi…

Near the city of Hue, on the Perfume river, we toured a couple monasteries and the tombs of dead kings, but the real excitement for everyone else was the S.E.A. Games!

This year Vietnam hosted the SEA games. This is an Olympic style event, but not dominated by a greco-western motif. They play a lot of cool local games I’ve never seen before.

Snooker is really big, so is table tennis and chess. They have several fin swimming events: two fin, one big fin (mermaid suits), snorkel and scuba. They also play all kinds of kick-volleyball variants with the woven wicker ball and shuttlecock.

One day is Saigon we saw a group of 7 girls and guys standing in a circle playing this hacky sack type game with a shuttle cock. The birdy fell behind them and they each did did a no-look kick with their heel, back over their head to the next person. The thing never hit the ground and they would whack it twenty feet up into the air. In the SEA games, shuttlecock is played by mixed gender teams over a net. Nearly every kick is a full stretch, above the head whack and spikes are whirling cartwheels of doom.

A great variety of martial arts are represented: Penjack Silat, Taekwondo, Karatedo, Wushu, Jujitsu, etc.. Sanshao, Thai, and Western boxing are there too. Sanshao is full contact Chinese kick boxing with stand up grappling and throwing allowed.

These are all entertaining, but it was clear that no one in Vietnam cared about anything but the soccer. When the football was on, cafes were packed and squares got filled with motobikes watching jumbotrons. People who had to travel, did so with radios glued to one ear. Vietnam beat Malaysia to get to the final and the streets went absolutely crazy, you couldn’t go anywhere for the remainder of the night.

We ended up buying handmade Vietnamese flag stickers from street kids, just because of the positive reaction it got us. If you support the team, you’re good people. Go Vietnam!

One evening we gradually became aware that the final football match was taking place. All around us we could hear women screaming ecstatically every time the ball changed possession. We finally turned on the game in our hotel room when the sounds from the street got positively orgasmic. The Thais were up one nothing and the game was coming to a close.

In the last seconds the Vietnamese tied it up and the country exploded. The TV kept switching cameras trying to find one that could keep a picture in frame as the stadium rocked up and down with half a million jumping fans. The streets roared with horns and voices.

The noises outside got even more frantic as the overtime progressed. Suddenly, the Thais got off a brilliant kick and won the game. The entire stadium froze. Not one person was moving, maybe even breathing. Except the goalie, who took a moment to realize what had happened, then tried to claw his way through the soccer pitch to his grave. The Thais looked scared. Mandy and I noticed that not only was the TV silent, but outside was too. You couldn’t hear one motobike, even one voice or beeping horn. This is impossible in urban Vietnam. Even the dogs didn’t dare bark. Slowly the people on the television began to cry and call their friends. I was almost scared to go out. Its was bad enough when they won. The sports announcers could barely do their job through the tears. The national depression lasted for days.

Some photos of Hue.

After many miles we found our way to Halong Bay and would’ve caught up on sleep if we could keep our eyes closed with all the eye popping scenery…

There seem to be a fair number of Vietnamese books and dubbed American movies about the USA’s own civil war here. More than once I’ve been reminded that my own country had a civil war, “but ours was very different”. It hasn’t even been thirty years here.

Northern and Southern Vietnamese language and pronunciation is different. When we use southern phrases or terms for things in the north we get corrected because we’ve learned “improper Vietnamese”. We’ve been reminded more than once that Northern Vietnamese is the official language, no matter how the southerners talk. Everyone in the south called Ho Chi Minh City “Saigon”. When I accidentally used that term in the North, people got annoyed.

The attitude towards the American war is also much different in the north. The southerners wanted to pal up with their old friends the Americans and tell stories about the good old days shooting their countrymen. The northerners treat the war as a touchy subject and try to assure you that no enmities still exist. The overall impression we got from talking to people was similar to the revised propaganda presented in the “Museum of American and Chinese War Crimes”: The American soldier (while the perpetrator of numerous atrocities) was as much a victim of Diem, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon as the Vietnamese.

Rather than take a plane up to Hanoi like any sane person might, we decided to brave the suicidal roads

As we travel up the coast it just gets colder and rainier. I’ll spare you repeat anecdotes. More enthusiastic locals, more grizzled southern fighters, more frustrated people with great English who can’t find good jobs.

Hoi An is a nice old city filled with charming 200 year old French and Chinese houses. Orchids grow like weeds on the power lines. We ate lunch in a wonderful cafe by the river, watching the wide eyed boats go past. The cafe played flamenco and orchids overhung the cafe window. We listened to the clear steel notes and dined on the house specialties suggested by a friend of the cafe: lemon shrimp and chicken cooked over bananas with shredded papaya. He also fed us “Cao Lau,” a delicious soup made only in Hoi An with water drawn from a special tasty well.Later we had French desserts while the friend of the cafe played melodies for us on his guitar. We’re enjoying this as much as we can.We’ll be back eating peanut butter and canned tuna in a hostel before long.

We talked to Monsieur Duong, a mathematics teacher, who has a lovely old house filled with ornate golden mother of pearl inlaid furniture.His father was VP of Hoi An and helped the Americans. After 10 years of re-education camp, poppa was exiled to the USA, where he lived in Worcester, MA! He came back to Hoi An to die and Msr. Duong keeps his shrine well stocked with scotch.

We continued to careen up the thin slice of land between the ocean and mountains, prisoners to Buddhist bus drivers who believed accidents were caused by ‘karma’ and not their own actions.

Around this time the country really started heating up over the S.E.A. Games!

Photos of Nah Trang and Hoi An.

After a few days in Chau Doc, our friends the Australians were called home for a medical problem in the family, so we made our way to Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) by ourselves. We were kinda fearing Saigon. We’d heard it was a nasty dirty place filled with swarming child pickpockets, deadly traffic,and sophisticated moto bag snatcher gangs. We saw none of that and we met some nice people there. I was just a sprawling city. Only Europe seems to do big cities right.

One day Mandy saw a guy holding a bamboo ladder out the second floor window. A guy climbed up the ladder, supported only by the other guy’s arms and began to paint the building on the fifth floor.

Down in the south we meet lots of ex soldiers our parents age. Many of them have frightening war stories, but they all end the same:Re-education camp. If you were unlucky, after your 2-15 year jail stint, you got your citizenship revoked. This means there’s thousands of well educated professionals in Vietnam that are forbidden from holding official jobs. These are your cyclo and moto drivers, your street vendors. They’re ridiculously well educated, but its all they’re allowed to do. They’re also pretty damn smug about the success of economic liberalization in the new Vietnam, but they lower their voices and dart their eyes around when they tell you so.

Photos of Ho Chi Minh City.

We came off the Mekong into the little fishing town of Chau Doc. The border to Cambodia has just opened up and foreigners are a new phenomenon. Walking down the street we were minor celebrities. Everyone who could shouted “hello!” at us. Mostly children, who run up just to touch us. I think if you tag 10 foreigners you get a prize. Even grown men charge up to shake our hands. I got offered some rice whiskey by a group of tough guys sitting for cards and drinks. I think I was supposed to be overpowered by its strength.

We’re often asked to stop to chat with people with no English. They don’t want to learn like in Cambodia, they’re just enthused with being near a foreigner. They pull up seats for us and stare, sometimes signing madly at us, sometimes we get a precocious kid as a translator. People don’t understand not having children, so we say we’re married and going to have children later.

Every day at three in the afternoon the schools let out and the girls bicycle home by the hundreds. The girl’s school uniform is a brilliant white silk ao dai. They look like a flock of ghosts, riding home in the sun with their perfect posture and garments streaming behind them.

Some photos before we move on to Saigon…

Cambodia is pretty drab, so the first thing we noticed coming into Vietnam was all the colors. The women wear brightly printed pajamas that make crowds into bouquets. In the provinces, every other woman wears a conical hat and everywhere they religiously cover up their faces and arms to avoid tanning. They look like bandits or incognito movie stars.

The Vietnamese have the Chinese habit of spitting and coughing with the mouth open. Its a very touchy society. Friends are often cuddling and strangers will place their hands all over you when they talk.

Vietnam is neo-communist, coming to grips with free markets. While not wealthy, Vietnam has an intact culture and functioning economy. These things are indescribably valuable. The French influence hinted at in Cambodia and Laos is much more pronounced and China, rather than India, is the dominant cultural parent. Replicas of French villas abut ornate pagodas and there are manicured public parks. Vietnam is nowhere near as well off as Thailand, but the wealth is much more evenly distributed.

The most obvious sign of wealth equality is the lack of cars. Cambodia was dirt poor, but the ultra wealthy had SUV’s. Here, despite the substantial average wealth increase, the only cars on the roads are mini-vans being used as taxis. Everything else is a scooter or a bicycle. Like in Cambodia, no traffic rules are observed. But here there’s pavement, so the motos and vans can make speed. People rely exclusively on the sonic bumper for safety. The highways are very perilous.

Good local food is back! In the streets you can find steaming rice cakes filled with spotted eggs and veggies sold next to cream filled croissants. Vietnamese steamed spring rolls, lemon grass frog, and fried eel have all found their way into our bellies.
We’ve seen several restaurants that claim to serve puppy. The dogs on the street are all much smaller than anywhere else in Indochina. Maybe a big dog looks too appetizing?

Many of the people are spotted. There’s a health practice called Gao Ya where they scrape circles and lines on the body with a palate to cure illness. Particularly nasty illnesses require an oily poultice to be scraped off. Its supposed to regulate the body heat or something. Television advertisements are always claiming their pill or potion works better than Gao Ya.

For some gorgeous images of modern Vietnam go download or rent the movie Three Seasons. Its one of my all time favorite films, its very well crafted and it will give you a good sense of where we are.

We entered this country on the newly opened Mekong border crossing at Chau Doc…