The Reunification Express

The railway that runs from the north to the south of Vietnam is also known as "The Reunification Express". The total length runs 1,726 km. The railway also holds the dubious distinction of having the slowest trains on a major railway.

We took the overnight train from Hanoi to Hue, the former Imperial capital in central Vietnam. After being stuck in torrential downpours in Hanoi, we were excited to move farther south to a smaller, more relaxed town.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

After boarding the train, we had no idea how long the journey would take. Our ticket had the departure time (7:30pm), but no other information besides the number of our sleeper car.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

There were four bunk beds in the car, and we fortunately shared it with a nice Dutch couple (I can only imagine how long the ride would have seemed if we had to share our car with small children).

From K - Hanoi and Hue

No one else seemed to know how long the trip would take. I woke up around 6am and realized I had nothing to do besides shift around in our miniature train car that strongly resembled a prison cell, and read my Kindle.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

From K - Hanoi and Hue

I haven't mentioned it yet, but the Kindle has been invaluable to my trip. Before leaving, I loaded it with 150 books that I've been meaning to read. All the downtime we we have while traveling adds up - I've been able to finish 12 books so far.

However, a severe catastrophe occurred during the slow boat from Thailand to Laos. Sometime during the 8-hour trip, I realized my Kindle had become wedged in the seat. And I was sitting on it. Despite its protective case, my weight apparently was too much for Kindle to handle. Half the screen went blank! I was stuck on the slow boat with nothing to read. Not only that, but I was headed to Laos, one of the 20 poorest countries in the world. I was not optimistic about being able to replace my Kindle.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

Fortunately, after some interesting e-mail exchanges and one long Skype call to Amazon's customer service, I was able to secure a solution. After I told Amazon about the mysterious broken screen, they told me I could have a replacement sent to Vietnam, since it was still under warranty.

I arranged to have it shipped to a hotel in Hanoi, since we were flying to Hanoi after visiting Laos. I had to pay $20 in international priority shipping, and $30 in duty taxes. But a brand-new Kindle is now in my possession:

From K - Hanoi and Hue

From K - Hanoi and Hue

Best purchase ever - it even made the long ride on the Reunification Express tolerable. And the train ride was well worth it, since it brought us to the beautiful city of Hue - more pictures to come.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

From K - Hanoi and Hue

Arranged Tours: A Nutritional Nightmare?

As much as I like to wander around and explore a new place on my own, there are some destinations that are best reached via an arranged tour.

When we visited Halong Bay, a 3-day, 2-night tour arranged by a travel agency was the best option. Aside from chartering our own boat, we couldn't have seen the beautiful scenery or visited the national parks.

From K - Halong Bay

But there are some downsides to joining a tour group. Most notably, the food.

I've been pretty successful thus far in finding healthy, vegetarian-friendly food in most of SE Asia. But since tours cater to tourists, the food can be hilariously awful. Based on the food offerings, I would assume that most tourists refuse to eat anything that isn't a) deep-fried or b) stir fried in a vat of oil.

This can't be a Vietnam thing, as Vietnamese food is well-known for being fresh, light, and fairly healthy.

A recent tour lunch:
Unidentified Fried Meat

From K - Halong Bay

French Fries

From K - Halong Bay

Fried Tofu

From K - Halong Bay

Fried Spring Rolls

From K - Halong Bay

Fried Squid (center)

From K - Halong Bay

This lunch was an exercise in avoiding high cholesterol.

On the other hand, most cafes around SE Asia have healthy offerings.
Here's my standard breakfast: yogurt, fresh fruit, and muesli.

From K - Hanoi and Hue

Now that's more like it.

Trekking in Halong Bay

We should probably get a frequent visitor card from UNESCO because this feels like the 100th World Heritage Sight that we've visited so far on the trip.

Halong Bay is very deserving of its status as a significant natural sight - it features breathtaking limestone cliffs and almost 2000 small islands.

From K - Halong Bay

We arranged a 3-day, 2-night tour to Halong Bay, allowing us to stay on a boat (see below), and go kayaking and swimming in the bay.

From K - Halong Bay

Although some of the activities we did on the tour were too touristy to be truly enjoyable (picture walking single file through a cave with 200 other tourists), there was one moment that made the trip definitely worth it.

At sunset, we had free time and we were able to jump off the 3rd story of the boat (about 15 feet) into the bay and swim around. Floating around and watching the orange sun sink while surrounded by the limestone cliffs was amazing. I even managed to avoid the large white jellyfish that lurked around the boat.

From K - Halong Bay

From K - Halong Bay

Another part of the tour involved cycling and hiking around Cat Ba island. The island's scenery looked straight out of Jurassic Park. The similarities didn't end there - it seemed like there were a lot of dangerous creatures on Cat Ba as well.

Our tour guide affectionately called this spider the "Cat Ba Mosquito". It was bigger than my hand.

From K - Halong Bay

I also like trekking in these parts because it gave me the opportuity to wear this awesome hat. It may not look like the most practical item, but it served many purposes, including protection from falling bat droppings.

From K - Halong Bay

From K - Halong Bay

From K - Halong Bay

My only complaint is that the hat can't protect me from the other people on our tour. It seems that Vietnam is a popular destination for French families with very young children. Who takes a 3-year old trekking in Vietnam? And how did I end up behind them on the hike?

From K - Halong Bay

Visiting Uncle Ho

A visit to northern Vietnam would be incomplete without seeing some of the historical sights relating to communism and the Vietnam War.

We started by visiting the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, modeled after Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow. The building serves as a memorial to the Vietnamese Marxist revolutionary leader who served as PM and President of North Vietnam, and led of the Viet Minh independence movement.

From K - Halong Bay

Ho Chi Minh also approved the Tet Offensive, a gamble taken by the North Vietnamese army to defeat the South, eventually breaking the US will to fight the war. There's still a strong cult of personality surrounding Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and people refer to him as "Uncle" or "Uncle Ho".

From K - Halong Bay

We didn't actually go inside the mausoleum - we would have been required to wear long pants and long sleeves. That may sound like a pathetic reason, but if you consider the fact that it was almost 100 degrees and very humid, the idea of bundling up to see the embalmed body of an old communist leader did not seem very appealing. Instead we wandered around the complex, observing the army marching and being stared at by the large numbers of Vietnamese and Chinese tourists.

From K - Halong Bay

From K - Halong Bay

For some reason, Dana and I are much more of an oddity in Vietnam than in Thailand or Lao. This means being asked to be in a lot of random pictures. But everyone is pretty friendly and it is mostly humorous when people ask us where we're from or surreptitiously take pictures as we walk by. One of the best things was when a man asked Dana if she knew Mr. William. We were confused until he said, "you know, Mr. Willam, from England!" and then pointed at Dana and shouted, "It's you, Kate!".

From K - Halong Bay

We also checked out the One-Pillar Pagoda, one of Vietnam's most iconic temples.

From K - Halong Bay

From K - Halong Bay

Working Out in Vietnam

In my last post I mentioned the lake in Hanoi's city center - Hoan Kiem.

Aside from being the city's saving grace for clueless Western navigators such as myself (the old quarter's streets are so confusing that I just use the lake as my landmark), the lake is also a popular place for excercise.

This type of exercise is different from what I'm used to. It seems like (mostly elderly female) Hanoians like to head to the lake at sunset and swing their arms around in various directions, sort of like Tai Chi.

From K - Hanoi I

From K - Hanoi I

Also at the lake, Dana and I were approached by a group of young Vietnamese wanting to practice their English. We asked them if most people do this kind of excercise and they laughed and said "only old people". Must be sort of like aquajogging in the US.

From K - Hanoi I

Another thing that I've noticed everywhere in SE Asia is people's tendency to squat. It could be that Americans are too fat to squat, but I've never seen people sitting comfortably like this at home.

From K - Hanoi I

Braving the Streets of Hanoi

After some days of leisure in Vang Vieng and Vientiane, Laos, I flew to Hanoi, Vietnam.

Two weeks in laid-back Lao PDR made the transition back to Hanoi a little overwhelming. We're staying in the old quarter of Hanoi, filled with narrow streets teeming with motorbikes, bicycles, taxis, and pedestrians darting in and out of the traffic.

From K - Hanoi I

I think survival of the fittest is central to Hanoi's operation. You really have to keep your head on a swivel (to quote most coaches) in order to ensure your toes stay intact.

Like most of SE Asia, Hanoi has no known traffic rules and very few streetlights. You could spend time trying to figure out exactly what is going on (see below), or you could pick a random Vietnamese person and tail them across the street, because they probably know what they are doing.

From K - Hanoi I

Hanoi is bursting with energy, commerce, and pho (noodle soup).

From K - Hanoi I

From K - Hanoi I

From K - Hanoi I

Luckily, the Hoan Kiem lake lies in the middle of the old quarter. It's an excellent place to walk without fear of motos, do some people-watching, or sit and have some Vietnamese iced coffee.

From K - Hanoi I

From K - Hanoi I

The Plain of Jars

Visiting the Plain of Jars in eastern Lao was an amazing experience.

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

The history of the area (heavily bombed by the US in the 1960s and 1970s during the Secret War), combined with Lao's natural beauty and the mysterious megalithic Jars, make the Xieng Khouang province an incredible place to visit.

However, our voyage here was well away from the beaten path. It was hard to believe, but we were only a handful of tourists in the area. Our tour group to the jars was only five people, and we only saw a few other tourists the entire day.

There are over 50 sites in the province where large stone jars from the Iron Age (500 BC) lay in fields. To this day, archaeologists and researchers do not know what the jars were used for, or precisely how they were made. Some think that they were used in burial rites. There are jars all over eastern Lao; however, only a few of the sites are safe to visit.

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

That's because all of eastern Lao is riddled with unexploded ordnance (UXO). During the 1960s and 1970s, the US carried through over 500,000 bombing missions in Lao in an attempt to disrupt the Ho Chih Minh trail. Operation Lam Son 719 was intended to cut off the People's Army of Vietnam (North Vietnam) from its logistical system running through Lao.

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

However, about 30% of the bombs and cluster bombs dropped on Lao did not detonate. Consequently, Lao people living in the area today are faced with constant danger every time they dig in a field or farm new land. The UXO is holding Lao in its place as one of the 20 poorest countries in the world, because people are unable to farm or use the natural resources of the land. Since many people are subsistence farmers, they try to supplement their income by collecting and selling scrap metal collected from bomb craters - a dangerous pursuit. Some NGOs are helping with the removal of UXO, but it is a very slow process. When we were visiting the remains of an old Russian tank, we heard a large explosion as a nearby removal team detonated one of the leftover bombs (on purpose).

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

Despite the sobering history of the area and the fact that the Jars sites were riddled with bomb craters, the scenery was vivid and beautiful.

To get to Site 3, we hiked across some rice paddies.

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

The view was incredible:

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings

From She Flies With Her Own Wings