Good Morning Vietnam

We arrived in Hanoi to find that we had a day and a half here. Hanoi was much busier, louder and more crowded than I anticipated and I ended up enjoying the countryside much more than the city/. But our hotel here was again FIRST class and we were in the thick of the action in the middle of the Old Quarter and right by the lake. You could not ask for a better location. We were able to walk to almost everything.

Memorable scavenges from Vietnam:
#1: When you get close to the Perfume Pagoda, take a boat up to the temple area.
This one was a WOW… well, after the almost 2 hours in a taxi on a bumpy road to get there… which was not that great. When you arrive in the village, there are literally hundreds of flat-bottomed metal boats and villagers who row you forehand (yes, forehand.. facing the way they are going) up river. The countryside is exactly as you would imagine: the air so thick with humidity that you are damp before you leave the dock, rice paddy fields on either side, misty topped odd-shaped mountains all around. And on the river, villager after villager setting shrimp and crab traps from their boats.

AMAZING ...I cannot get my brand-new I-Phone to pick up a good cell signal in the middle of Houston but our Perfume Pagoda guide (who jumps into your boat whether you wanted her or not) got dozens of calls in the middle of the Vietnamese bush!!!

When we got to the temple area, it was a steep, difficult climb up but at the top – the reward was – an amazing cave temple. The Vietnamese have literally given every rock, stalagmite, stalagtite and outcropping religious significance. There is the corner where you pray for fertility and the column that is wet with dampness where you must touch the wet and rub it on your face for luck. We bought $10 of “gifts for the gods” and offered them up to Buddha (along with the mandatory three sets of prayers) – so we are covered on that front for the foreseeable future The most repeated offerings were custard cakes and cans of Red Bull. The question is.. who likes those??? Buddha or the Buddhist monks???

#2: Visit Hanoi Hilton
We went to the infamous prison, expecting to see gruesome photos of tortured American pilots during the war. Instead, we learned first hand that the people who win a war get to write the history. And here, history – according to the Vietnam government – is that the Americans were treated graciously and with great deference. There were photos and propaganda videos of the American POWs reading scripted messages about how great the conditions were in the prison, how happy they were, how tasty the food was…. You get the picture. There are photos of John McCain being given “medical treatment” for his wounds and his entire flight suit that was taken of him when they pulled him from the water.

#3: Find the artistic part of town and interview an artist who is creating “reproductions”: There actually is a part of town where you find shop after shop of artists “copying” famous paintings. This one is some well-known Chinese artist and it’s a pretty believable replica.

#4: Visit the body of Ho Chi Minh (which really is all preserved and on display). Apparently they send him to Russia (no idea why Russia) every year for a face-lift where his body is re-preserved and then he is shipped back and put back in his case. He literally looks like he died last week (not 5 decades ago). Lily’s shorts were too short for the government clothes police so Rainey pulled out some of his gym shorts from his backpack and she pulled them on to create a skirt-shorts very-fashionable look.

Much of our Vietnam visit was permeated by weird food experiences:

(a) We had dinner the first night with several teams. Joanne (of the Mad Dogs) ordered chicken (a seemingly normal choice) only for it to turn up with a full chicken head on the plate – beak and all. You got to love a country that includes ALL parts, even the ones you cannot imagine wanting to eat. (2192)

(b) By the Perfume Pagoda (where the boats docked), we saw hanging corpses in front of restaurants that turned out to be dogs all cured and ready for eating. By the time we came back down, the dogs had been hacked into and eaten for lunch (YUCK, YUCK, DOUBLE YUCK).

(c) One of our scavenges was to find the weirdest food and try it. I selected what I thought was a slice of fish jerky from a woman selling stuff by the lake. It was a thin cross-section slice of an entire fish (eyes, bones and all). The vendor wrapped it up in a piece of paper and sold it to me for 12 cents. When I unwrapped it and went to take a bit, she and 7 other people in the near vicinity jumped at me yelling “NO” in Vietnamese. Apparently this is the ONE thing in this country that you have to eat cooked (who knew there was such a thing in Southeast Asia). So the woman whipped out a frying pan, threw some rubbing alcohol in the pan, lit it on fire, dropped my fish jerky into it and returned a char-broiled slice of fish to me in 84 seconds flat. And yes, the answer to your question is .. it did taste a whole lot like fishy paper dipped in lighter fluid.

(d) And this one takes the cake… for the ODDEST eating experience ever. Bill made us find the “O Sin snake restaurant” which is actually just a family’s home where they cook up some fresh snake for you. You know it is fresh snake because you first have to go in the backyard and choose your snake from bags of snakes waiting out there. Then you walk through Grandpa’s bedroom, through the kitchen where granny is hard at work chopping up your snake dinner and into a small room where 1 table and 4 chairs represents the entire restaurant. Lily took a series of wet wipes and disinfected all around her part of the table (thus the wet spot) in reaction to the far-les-than-clean conditions. We laughed so hard throughout the entire experience that the family probably thought we were crazy. The snake arrived as snake meatballs cooked with HOT pepper pieces.

We are on our way now to Laos, which is apparently celebrating its “water festival” at the moment. We are expecting to have water thrown at us by locals at every turn. It is currently 95 degrees in Laos so a little wetting might be great.