Tet Holiday - Tiger Year

I was very privileged to again spend Tet with Bao's family. They are always so welcoming of me. When I discussed this with Bao, he told me that even though they have now lived in HCM City for so long, their most significant friends are elsewhere, and they do not have close family to visit. At Tet I am their honoured guest. So much so that this year I've been included in the family portrait which now sits on the wall in their home.

Bao and I returned to HCM City on the last day of the Buffalo Year. We again visited the Flower Festival in Nguyen Hue Street in District 1 and waited for the fireworks at midnight before tackling the traffic to drive back to Binh Thanh District. In Bao's view the quality of the flower festival has gone down over the last couple of years. Major storms and typhoons in the months leading up to Tet destroyed many of the flower crops, and increased demand in the market by both city authorities and private consumers.

We spent part of first day at home, but also took a ride around a much quieter city, and stopped to watch one of the most famous dragon dance troupes in HCM City perform.


After exchanging li xi we headed out to visit some pagodas in the late afternoon. However, the big mission of visiting pagodas was scheduled to start at 4am the next morning. We joined a cavalcade of buses (at least 15) to travel to 10 pagodas. A few were in HCM City but most were outside the city on the road back to - guess where?! Vung Tau, hahaha. We came as far as Long Hai, where we had lunch and could look across the sea to see Small Mountain in the distance.

The temples were all very different. Some very large and well-endowed. One which is a major learning centre, not just for monks in Vietnam, but from around the Buddhist world. Some were very poor but still active in community work and supporting children without families. These children live and study at the pagoda as novices and have the option of joining the fraternity when they are 18 or going out into the larger world to work. During the trip money was raised for these pagodas.

It was a very long day, and although I am grateful for the experience - plus have now completed the Nguyen family commitment of visiting 10 temples each Tet - I don't think I will do it again, or at least not until I have become more competent in speaking Vietnamese. During the day in which we encountered thousands of visitors - we were not the only cavalcade involved in this significant pursuit - I saw just one other foreigner!

Bao Loc
For the remainder of the Tet holiday, before I had to return to work, we planned a motor cycle trip to go to Cat Tien National Park in the foothills towards Dalat. We were discouraged, though, when we arrived at the park headquarters to find that there are two price scales for accommodation and just about everything else, and that because he was with me Bao would be subjected to the same exorbitant prices as I would be forced to pay as a foreigner. In most places I've been to in Vietnam over the last 18 months this practice has been abandoned, but the management here were insistent. Bao was so disgusted that he refused to look at any part of the park.

So we came up with a plan B, of continuing on the highway towards Dalat and staying at Bao Loc, the tea and coffee growing town which is on the first plateau of the mountain range (see blog about Michele, Chaska and Killki visit). The main tourist attraction here is Dambri Falls,which Bao remembers from a previous visit as being a natural and quiet place, but which is now so heavily developed, beautified and concreted over that we were very disappointed. We also took a bit of a sidetrip to a minority village and interesting pagoda community. We also stopped off a large temple, before returning to taste and buy some excellent local coffee in the town.

Arriving in Bao Loc we had no knowledge of where to stay, though we could see plenty of hotels and guest houses. We decided to ride into the market area where we saw a number of nha nghi, guest houses. We chose one and discovered that in an equally random way it had been selected by another Australian visitor, who was on his way south but had stopped in Bao Loc to meet a girl (and her boyfriend) with whom he had been communicating over the Internet for some months. What a small world!

During this trip we arranged to meet up with one of the guys we had shared the ardours of climbing Nui Ba Den with. He works in the area and was on his way back from his family home to the town he was currently working in, and stopped off to spend the night with us, before sharing part of the journey back to HCM City. During the journey back I also finally got the chance to look more closely at something that has caught my attention every time I've passed through the town of Dinh Quan - the Buddha built on one of the massive granite boulders around which the town is built.

Tet Holiday - Hoi An and My Son

Hoi An
Hoi An is generally regarded as the must-see town in the centre of Vietnam, even ahead of Hue. This is because of the historical record that the town forms, and for more consumer-driven reasons: Hoi An has built a reputation for 24 hour tailoring. This was not an attraction for us. We were there to take in the ambience, visit the nearby beach, and make the trip to My Son, the most intact vestige of the Cham civilisation.

In fact, we elected not to even spend much time in the museums, temples (visited one) and old houses, but just to walk and cycle around, and relax! So the record I have of Hoi An on this occasion is not the typical tourist experience, but enjoyable none-the-less, and informed by the advice of Tiep, a friend we made one night at the restaurant he manages. So here are some pictures of our time in the town, with a focus on food and lights! We also managed to find the Ba Le well, the water from which is an essential ingredient in cao lau noodles. Without this water, the noodle is not considered to be authentic. We also enjoyed black sesame porridge (a dessert) which left the watery substance I've eaten at yum cha in Sydney for dead. It was so good I had two bowls, and we tried in vain to convince another foreigner to eat it.
We cycled out to a pottery village, and during the boat trip back from My Son, visited some high quality wood carving shops. We did make it to the beach, one we were taken to by Tiep, where we enjoyed some local seafood for an early lunch. I was the only one to go in the water, though. The beach was almost deserted, though in a few days time it was likely to be crowded with holiday-makers.

My Son
Bao and I have both been to Angkor Wat and knew that My Son would not be on the same scale as that site. It's older and smaller, and suffered extensive damage during the American War. There is still unexploded ordnance in the vicinity, and it is very important to stick to the trails. Parts of temples have been obliterated by bomb craters.

These things aside the visit was still interesting. The temples are located inside a verdant valley overlooked by Cat's Tooth Mountain (Hon Quap) and other high peaks. Unlike Angkor Thom next to Angkor Wat, My Son was not a major residential centre. The Hindu priests lived here, and the king would visit to conduct annual important ceremonies. The kings were also buried here, but eventually the site was abandoned as the Cham people were forced to move south by Vietnamese, Chinese and Khmer invaders.

We had booked to go and return to Hoi An by bus, but took the opportunity to switch to a boat trip back that brought us down the river and around some of the islands that make up the greater Hoi An town.

Tet Holiday - Danang

Back in August, Bao and I decided to take a holiday before Tet, and go to Danang and Hoi An. Arranging travel at Tet gets very difficult and planes and trains get booked up quickly. However, I was able to get a discount fare on Jetstar for the return leg easily. We had decided to travel to Danang by train, but ...

Train tickets can only be booked 2 months in advance. Not a problem, I thought. Just come back to the booking office on the right date. So I returned, only to be told there were no tickets available. To confuse things further, Bao had been told by a booking agent that there were tickets, and we had read in the Vietnamese and English language newspapers that to cope with demand the VNR had introduced an SMS booking system. All the information on all the steps to take was set out clearly in the papers. All except the number to send an SMS too!

In the end I was able to get the last two seats available on the last plane available travelling from HCM City to Danang, but at full economy fare. Here we come!

Danang
Danang is in the centre of Vietnam, a few hours drive south from Hue, and is the fourth-largest city in Vietnam. The government has always targetted the city for economic development, and it holds a major port as well as many factories and production facilities.

However, the main attractions for us were visiting the Cham Sculpture Museum, Hai Van Pass, the Marble Mountains and the beaches, which leave Vung Tau for dead. Danang is also the access point to Hoi An when travelling by plane or train. We had also hoped to visit Ba Na Hill Station but the road is very steep, and the chair lift which completes the journey was already closed for Tet. So that will be for another time ...

We spent the first day on foot. By the river we came across a large number of sculptures. Unlike Vung Tau, where the sculptures are in the park at Front Beach,this installation seemed temporary. We also visited the Museum of Cham Sculpture, which was established by the same French School of the Far East that initiated the explorations and restorations at Angkor Wat. The two civilisations were linked by religion and tradition, but the Cham civilisation in Vietnam actually predates the Khmers.

From here we crossed the river to visit some pagodas mentioned in the guidebooks and take a look at the beaches which stretch from Nui Son Tra (Monkey Mountain) at the northern end for 30km down to Hoi An. Westerners know parts of this beach as China Beach, which was a major R&R station for the Americans during the war.

Danang is a large city, and the weather was hot even though it was nominally winter. Actually Danang is right on the point where Vietnam's climate changes from two seasons in the south (sunny and rainy) to four seasons in the north. We decided that we'd had enough of walking and opted to rent a motorbike from the hotel for the following day's trip to ...

Marble Mountains
David and I made a fleeting visit to this popular tourist destination in 1999. Fleeting because we were en route from Hoi An to Hue, and because the moment we got off the bus we were swarmed by touts and kids, eager for money through legitimate and not-so-legitimate means. We abandoned all thought of visiting the mountains which are made of limestone and marble, and are full of caves and temples.

This time Bao and I rode south from Danang and had a completely different experience. The first thing that struck me, though, was that the small village of Non Nuoc has grown considerably and is just about absorbed into greater Danang as one long contiguous settlement from the city to Hoi An. There are still fields under cultivation but as you look out at the beach area you can see the sand dunes rapidly being subsumed by resorts and hotels, some of them massive piles. The other thing that we learned is that the marble that makes the site so miraculous has been so extensively exploited for sculptures and souvenirs that it is no longer used, for fear that the mountains and the tourist attraction will be gone. Instead the marble is now imported.

There are five mountains, each named for one of the elements in Eastern philosophy: water, metal, fire, wood, earth. The largest mountain is water - Thuy Son - and it is this one that we explored extensively through the caves and temples and climbing up to the highest points to look out over the landscape. Because it was a relatively clear day we could see way back up the coast to Nui Son Tra. The most recent cave development takes visitors deep inside the mountain and takes advantage of ups and downs to present the deepest hells and highest heavens in the Buddhist world.

Nui Son Tra and Hai Van Pass
In the afternoon we drove back north to visit Nui Son Tra, nicknamed Monkey Mountain by the Americans. We spent part of the time lazing beside a stream before driving around this massive peninsular that forms the bay of Danang, along with the Hai Van mountains on the northern side. Later we visited the gigantic statue of Quan Am that we could see facing the East Ocean.

The next morning we drove up the Hai Van Pass. This used to be the only route north, but in 2005 a tunnel was built under the mountains. This is now used by cars and coaches, but motor bikes and trucks must still use the pass which gives majestic views up and down the coast, and which had been a strategic military post throughout Vietnam's struggles for nationhood.