Phan Thiet

It still rained in Nha Trang with no sign of letting up, which was unfortunate because we were holding out to visit VinPearl Island, where the last Miss Universe Pageant was held. International events hardly ever come to Viet Nam, so being host to a show like that was something big. Another "appetizer" for the next Viet Nam trip, I suppose.




We decided to head off to Phan Thiet. On the way out of Nha Trang, it became apparent that we left at just the right time; rain water had flooded to as high as 3.5 feet.



Residents waded along the murky water to get to and from their houses. Motorbike drivers sported opaque raincoats and tried to navigate through the dry parts of the road. Larger tour buses and minivans sloshed through the water, spraying jet streams on both sides of their tires.



In Phan Thiet, the rain finally went away. We passed gardens of coconut trees and golden fields of grains, tended by rice farmers and their water buffalos.






The rich red soil and fertile green lands gave way to cool blue oceans and red sand.




Phan Thiet is known for its salt production, and along the road, we saw man-made ditches where ocean water overflow was left to evaporate until salt rocks formed, crystals of white lining the slopes and waiting to be harvested and purified.






We made a pit stop in Suoi Cat, whose natural peaks and valleys of dunes made a good environment for sand-sledding.



On a side note, the restroom at one of the roadside beverage shops was the worst I've stepped in, and by now I've seen a few. Ironically, the place served the best coconuts we've had, to date.




Young kids waited by the roadside with blue plastic boards that they rented out to any tourists who docked by. As soon as we got off the van, they swarmed in and invited us to rent the boards from them. They followed us all the way up to one of the lower sand peaks and offered us the plastic sleds for $10,000 dong each. Sensing our skepticism at the sharp incline of the slope, they offered to ride with us on the trip down. Our party wanted to head off and find a hotel before nightfall, so Tung and I didn't get a chance to ride the sand slopes.



We went bargain-hunting for hotels along the beach coast and finally settled on Hon Rom 2, which advertised $400,000 dong/night ($24 US), but we were able to get a rate of $300,000 dong/night ($18 US). I never thought we could bargain for hotel rates, but I guess in Viet Nam, anything's game. I bought a pack of 10 postcards for $30,000 dong (18 US cents a postcard), and the entire part screamed that it was a rip-off. To compensate for my initial bargaining ignorance, though, I got $6,000 dong off a whole soursop fruit (I bought it at $8,000 dong/kilogram instead of the original $20,000 asking-price. That's a whole 35 US cents off, mind you).

Nha Trang

After leaving Phan Rang, we arrived late in the evening at Nha Trang, the city of beaches. The hotel we meant to stay at, a 3-star called Hai Yen, was booked and only had a few rooms with twin beds left, and the wedding party doing karaoke at the hotel's restaurant didn't encourage us to stay. A little down the street, we found Ocean Hotel, a 2-star that had rooms with double beds for half the rate. The hotel offers a breakfast buffet for only $25,000 dong, less than $2 US. It also offers free but really crappy internet where common email sites are barred by privacy restrictions, but porn sites are easily accessible. Also available for our viewing pleasure are cockroaches the size of American mice. But all that aside, they do strive for good service; bellhops are ready and waiting to help bring our luggage upstairs without ever expecting a tip, and the concierge personnel are all very helpful. Here's the view of the beach from our hotel room:

Today, I battled the ocean and got a massage from a blind woman. In the morning, we went to Nha Trang's beach and braced ourselves against the waves as they rolled in to meet us. They say the salty ocean water cleanses the body's minor injuries, including the mosquito bites that had been leaving huge, red-purple scars on my legs.



I had reef shoes on for fear of stepping into something I wouldn't want to, but I eventually abandoned them to feel the gritty grains of sand beneath the soles of my feet and between my toes. Even the baby waves reminded me of the ocean's mightiness--they slapped at me and knocked me down until I was submerged in a flurry of sand and salty sea. I went out to meet the rolling waves on their way in, riding them to shore on my belly for an adrenaline rush. I cocooned myself in the waters like an embryo in a womb, letting them deliver me back to land.



It started to rain in Nha Trang shortly after our beach trip, so we found ourselves stranded in the hotel room most of the time. Di Ha wanted to try the massage service, which we had to call for. About 20 minutes later, two young ladies came to our hotel room, one of them blind. It cost $60,000 dong (about $3.50 US) for a full-hour massage, a service offered by the hotel to help the visually-impaired find work. The blind girl ended up giving me the massage.

What must it feel like to see more with the hands than with the eyes? Right away, I sensed the difference in how she'd probe first with her fingers to get a sense of my body's terrain and my position on the bed. She'd tuck her knees close to my side to better orient herself, skipping her fingertips down my spine to see how tall I am. The massage itself was a mixture of relaxation and pain, because sometimes she did press and squeeze really hard.

Nha Trang's main commerce is fishing, and the city is known for its fresh seafood. In the early morning, men would take their tiny tub of a boat out to sea and then come back in with their catch and sell it to the restaurants lining the shore.



We ate lunch at Ngon Hai Dang Restaurant, where the seafood was so fresh that we were asked to come select our choice of crabs and then choose how we'd like them prepared. The restaurant's pricing is considered ritzy by locals, but it's still cheaper than in the US. We ended up ordering 5 crabs, prepared different ways. My favorite was sauteed in tamarind sauce. By the end of that lunch, I had had my fill of crab for the year.






The breakfast buffet at the hotel was one of the best parts. There was a modest selection of food choices, but each dish was freshly made and tasted so much better than a lot of US buffets. The hotel chef cooked sunny-side-up eggs and the main hot dish of the morning on the spot. During our stay, it was "bun bo hue" (spicy beef noodle soup) and "bun cha ca" (vermicelli in fish stock). The chef was curious how his culinary skills compared to the chefs in Saigon, the "big city," and asked our opinion on his dishes.


During our stay at Ocean Hotel, a historic even occurred. Viet Nam beat Thailand 3-2 in soccer in the Southeast Asia Championship game, winning the country's first international title. I'm not a sports person, but it's "the thing" in Viet Nam, and men are more riled up over a game of soccer than US football fans around Thanksgiving--to the point of being zealots. My mom knew an old man whose death wish was for his sons to carry him to the soccer stadium to see one last live game.

Life visibly stopped as the game drew to a close--people gathered around TVs in homes and in public. Anyone's TV could become public property as people magnanimously left open their front doors so complete strangers could mosey in and watch. The flickering blue glare from TV screens could be seen on spectators' hypnotized faces as we drove past; the entire city held its breath for an outcome that would go down into the small country's sports history. Even our taxi driver couldn't wait to park the van back at the hotel after our dinner. He jumped out to join the gathering crowd of fans clustered around the TV in the lobby.


The smell of smoke hung thick in the air as people continually lit cigarettes in nervous anticipation. And when victory was secured, such a collective cheer rolled through the streets that it truly sounded like the Norse gods bowling. Everyone celebrated through the night, riding through the streets and waving Vietnamese flags. It didn't take long for traffic to come to a complete stand-still. The next morning, everyone was hung over from celebrating, and every newspaper in the country ran the story on its cover page.

Phan Rang

Phan Rang is an agricultural community, and whereas Catholicism is the main religion in Da Lat as apparent by the cluster of churches, Phan Rang contains a lot of Buddhist residents. Temples line both sides of the road as we drive in to pay a visit to Tung's grandma's relatives, and to drop Anh Tinh back home. The few paved roads are cracked and pot-holed from the abuse of large shipping trucks driving on them. Rice paddies with young green shoots lay seeped in muddy brown water, marked off by even squares like a checkerboard landscape.

Most houses are developed enough to look modern instead of the thatch-roof houses I was expecting to see. Anh Tinh's house has electricity, a ceiling fan in the sitting room, tiled floors inside and out, and a hammock strung to one side to catch the breeze from the fan and from outside.

Phan Rang is hot, but very tolerable and even cool in the afternoons because of the constant breeze. At around 3:30PM, the goats are herded home in flocks; at 4:00PM, the sheep come home, bleating and marked off by blue dye on their fleece.

Cows roam near the houses, chewing their cud and munching grass, the protective mothers nipping at the family dog that comes near to play with the calves. The idyllic scene is quiet and peaceful, the hazy, slow-going day's time marked by repetitive farm chores.

Earlier, we visited the graveyard, where a swarm of local kids followed us to the three graves of Tung's maternal great-grandparents.

They put bricks down on mud-seeped paths for us to step on, the older ones making a show out of telling the younger ones to shut up and stop singing for our prayer session. The gang of kids then escorted us back to the car, and as we neared, they started screaming for us to give them money out of charity. We could easily get swarmed by the whole horde if we so much as reached for our wallets, so we hurriedly drove off while they whipped the car with bamboo switches.

Da Lat

The weather in Da Lat is quite cool compared to most of Viet Nam. It feels around 60-75 degrees Fahrenheit. Even locals occasionally vacation to Da Lat to escape the heat, especially in the summer months. Besides its nickname, "The City of Fog," Da Lat is also dubbed "The City of Year-Round Flowers" because the cooler climate is more suitable for fresh flowers to stay fresh. Certainly the marketplace boasts of more fresh-flower vendors than other south-Viet-Nam cities.

Today I had a little adventure running around Da Lat's marketplace by myself while Tung's family went to church in the morning. Tung left his toothbrush back in Saigon, so I had our taxi driver take me to the city's main market and wove my way through stalls and squatting merchants, navigating dried preserves, fresh vegetables, flowers, and cookware to finally find a "general store" stall that sold toothbrushes and nail clippers.

I then dropped by the post office so I could pick up a new calling card to reload minutes onto our cell phone. The phones here, whether cellular or land-line, are really a hit-and-miss situation. Different districts have different "area codes" that precede the main number--fair enough. However, that code is subjected to change at the discretion of the Telecommunication Powers That Be. Even a government-owned, reliable taxi company such as VinaSun sometimes changes its district code in the middle of nowhere so that calls could not go through. And the phone numbers do not always contain the same amount of digits. Using a SIM-loaded cell to call back to the US is not always guaranteed to work.

After I finished my errands, Anh Hoang drove me around Ho Xuan Huong, "Perfume Lake." Tung said it ironically smelled awful the last time he visited 7 years ago, but they must have cleaned it up since then; in the lazy hours of the afternoon, tourists could take a swan-shaped paddleboat around the lake to catch the breeze.

I also swung by the botanical garden, a well-kept landscape of potted plants and clipped bonsai. Horses drawing carriages decorated with fresh flowers stood ready to take visitors around the park. I think it was the first time I've ever been the only person in a park where you had to buy a ticket to get in; it must have been too early (and slightly drizzly) for sane tourists to venture by.

Later, I met up with Tung's family when they got out of church. Boy, was Tung happy that I found him a toothbrush. One of the attractions in Da Lat is to take a gondola (suspension-cable car), overlooking a scenery of wild forest, groomed farmland, and hills laced with fog in the distance. A one-way ticket costs $40,000 dong. Anh Tinh, Tung's cousin, took at bus to Saigon to meet up with Tung's family half a week after our arrival to Viet Nam. We went with him to South-Central to eventually drop him off at his home in a village in the city of Phang Rang. His family members are farmers, and by normal standards, $40,000 dong ($2.35 US) is enough to buy 4 good restaurant meals. Therefore, it was simply impractical to spend that kind of money on a 15-minute entertainment. Anh Tinh is in his 40's and had never, to-date, taken a gondola ride.



So Tung and I treated him for his first one, and together the three of us stepped into an enclosed carriage. Suspended on a cable, we soared over the lush landscape of leaf-greens, lake-blues, and colorful houses dotting the scene.

The gondola let us off near Thien Vien Truc Lam, a serene Buddhist temple built on a hill, overlooking the beautiful city. In the picture below, from left: Di Ha (Tung's youngest aunt), Tung's grandma, Co Xuan (our unofficial tour guide), Tung's mom, me, and Anh Tinh (Tung's cousin). Tung is the great cameraman behind this awesome picture.

Exotic flowers dotted the gardens, planted in neat boxes or urns with names clearly labeled on blue signs. Bamboo trees and camellia shrubs partially enclose stone benches where people can retreat and relax.

The roofs of the main temple and nearby structures curved up in the classic Chinese design.

A large golden Buddha sat in the main temple, behind an urn holding clusters of burning incense sticks.

Perhaps the most breathtaking sight is the view of the lake. Rumor is, the government may be planning to take over part or all of the land surrounding Truc Lam temple to build roads. I hope this isn't true, but this may be the first and last time that I get to see the lake this way.

Flanked by crisp green pine, dotted with islands of trees, backed by gentle, rolling hills misted at the top with a veil of fog--the serene lake sits, a placid body of water with a smooth, glassy surface.

A picture hardly does it justice--I stand on sacred temple ground, looking out at pure, natural beauty, and I forget that I am a Technical Writer in the busy hub of Silicon Valley. Stress melts out of my pores, and all worries evaporate from my mind. It must be scenes like this where it's possible for monks to fast and lose themselves, where even the most troubled heart can find refuge and retreat into a sea of meditative calm, where we humans are reminded that we come from Nature, and to her we will ultimately return.

Journey

We amazingly were able to book a last-minute taxi driver; Co Xuan secured one for us through her connections. At 9:00AM, we headed to Da Lat, "the city of fog" in south-central Viet Nam. The distance from Saigon isn't very far, but the entire trip took the whole day because the traffic and roads were so bad. The highway was two lanes going in different directions with a barrier in between (which ended once we got out of Saigon). Potholes riddled the road, and our Viet-Nam-manufactured Toyota van wasn't built with full shock absorbers, which became immediately apparent if you sat in the back. We dropped by a few churches and Virgin Mary statues reputed for miracles performed or witnessed around the area.

The homeless in Viet Nam are so often more pitiful than many in the US. There aren't any soup kitchens are shelters, no relief funds or aid programs. They rely solely on panhandling and the occasional help of others. Our driver (Anh Hoang), Tung's cousin (Anh Tinh), and Co Xuan are natives here and are used to it, but the sight still breaks our hearts. Crippled and handicapped people crawl along the streets among crumpled napkins and carelessly tossed-away chicken bones in the restaurants that line the street; they reach up and stretch out a palm to beg for money from people who barely give them a second glance. Young children double over themselves, struggling to find sleep from the cold that seeps into the late night; then they strive to find their way out of the momentary comfort of sleep to continue living another day. Compared to these street beggars, the lottery-ticket sellers around Ben Thanh market seemed to have established a comfortable living.

At a famous church where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have been seen clapping her hands during a prayer session, there was a crippled man panhandling at the base of the steps leading up to the pews in front of the statue. The man's left arm was shrunken and shriveled in a twisted deformity. I gave him all the change I happened to have on me--only $1,500 dong (not even 10 US cents)--but he bowed low out of gratitude and said a short prayer for my generosity. Co Xuan said that sometimes, parents cripple their children on purpose, just to have them look pitiful enough to go out and beg for money. Sitting at one of the pews and waiting for Tung's family to finish their prayers, I felt humbled to tears, thinking about how much I have back home--and how much they lack here.

And yet that same ambience of poverty, lots of physical labor, and lack of stress from living a simple life and from a simple diet, makes most Vietnamese who live in the rural areas quite healthy. In some places, our taxi driver said, men live up to 180 years old and can still walk. The rich-red earth of Viet Nam is the remnant of volcanic soil, extremely fertile and conducive to the growth of vegetables and exotic flora. With just a square patch of land, a family can grow its own food and live off this for many generations. Despite the lack of smog-check regulations and an immense amount of vans, sedans, and motorbikes on the road, the humid air seems quite healthy. My dreadful, endless winter cough went away after just several days' stay in Saigon, and that's one of the more heavily populated (and heavily polluted) cities.

We dropped by Thach Prem, a waterfall housed in a little park, just as the sun was setting. Regrettably, we didn't get to tour the park, but we did snap a few pictures before it got impossibly dark. Co Xuan said our brief walk inside was the "appetizer" to entice our next trip to Viet Nam.

Towards the evening, we dropped by Da Lat Su Quan (Da Lat Historical Village), a newly-built tourist attraction.

The place was famous for its beautiful silk-screen embroidery. The threads were so fine and tightly woven together that from afar, the whole picture looked like a painting, irridescent threads shimmering like silky gold underneath the light.

The front windows also showcased enbroidered robes worn by the past emperors and empresses of Viet Nam.

The lighting and ambience and ornately-carved wooden door frames gave us the sense that we had gone back in time and were pacing the grounds of a palace. A wood-burning hearth gave off the smoky smell pervading the entire area. The young ladies who worked there were all so beautiful, soft-spoken, and helpful. Except for one incident at Do Huu restaurant when I was trying to purchase a SIM card for my cell phone (we ate there, they happened to sell calling cards, and apparently they didn't know enough about what they sold to patiently explain it), I'm surprised to find how serviceable the Vietnamese are. It seems like the owners of every Vietnamese-run shop I walk into in California try to rip me off or are really rude to me.

We did some souvenir shopping for hair clips and were about to eat Hue regional food, but it was already late, so the kitchen had run out of the "mi quang" noodles we wanted to try, along with a lot of other foods. It would have been fun to try our hands at the cook-it-yourself dishes in the kitchen, but we only stayed long enough to experience a little of the cultural singing by the soft-voiced Hue ladies.

At around 9:00PM, most of the eateries had closed or were getting ready to close up shop. After a dinner of "mi thap cam" (combination egg noodles) at a restaurant in town, we headed to Co Xuan's good friend's house to sleep for the night. It was a big, multi-story house with modern plumbing and many rooms on each floor, big enough to hold two full-sized beds. We spoiled Americans took turns showering while Anh Tinh and Anh Hoang called it a night in their own room, in the clothes that they traveled in.

Here's a view of Dalat, a picture I took the next morning, standing on the second-floor balcony of the house in which we stayed:

Rain

We are currently rained in. Rain in Saigon comes out of nowhere, suddenly appearing like pinpricks of needles, straight down in torrential downpours. Yesterday was Christmas, and we spent another full day shopping for fabric at Ben Thanh. Co Xuan then took us to a tailor to get measured for our "ao dai's."

In the evening, she invited us over to her house for dinner. There was more food than 10 people could possibly eat: "banh xeo" (Vietnamese crepes), "cha gio" (eggrolls), "banh hoi" (angel-hair rice rolls with meatballs), "banh tet" (cylindrical sweet-rice logs with pork and mung bean filling), a thick seafood soup, a hot-pot soup with bitter greens, and fresh salad. For dessert, there was custard apple, papaya, and a "buche de noel" log cake that no one actually made it to, which ended up as a centerpiece display.

This morning, we went once again to visit Tung's grandma, where we got a lunch of rice noodles or egg noodles with chicken.

I took a little tour of the marketplace near Tung's grandma's, another interesting scene of merchants squatting by their merchandise: fresh fruits with a glossy luster to their peel; shoes in a massive pile, the left and right separated from each other; bunches of fresh leaf lettuces with their roots still intact, glowing green in the slant of sun; my favorite "chuoi xiem" bananas in various stages of ripeness; silver shrimp still jumping and twitching on the metal tray that held them; dried cuttlefish and anchovies displayed in piles on newspapers. These people live day in and day out with the same scene playing in front of them, the same neighbors to their left and right, selling the same foods day after day, most of the same shoppers from the nearby houses going to market in the early morning to buy the freshest fish and meat. But to me, it was an overwhelming rush of interesting sights, sounds, and smells; my senses were assaulted with the scent of fresh vegetables and dried goods, the sound of merchants inviting passersby to come look at what they sold, and of customers haggling for a better price, the feel of the warm sunshine on my bare arms, reminding me of all the goodness life still has to offer.

One of Tung's aunts took us to the jewelry shop to get measured for rings for the loose pearls that we brought along. I brought two pearls, gifts from Tung's mom when she traveled to China, to be fashioned into jewelry here in Viet Nam. I wanted to go to a temple after docking at home for a brief rest, but that's when we got rained in.

Today I got to really flush a toilet--and by that I don't mean pushing the silver lever and walking away, forgetting about it. I mean gather a plastic bucket full of water from a barrel under a lone faucet in the wall, then pouring it down the toilet until the water became clean. Accidentally throwing toilet paper down there instead of in the accompanying waste basket sitting near the toilet is, apparently, a big no-no.