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.