Today we left Hue so bags out at 7. On the way out of town we stopped at Thien Mu pagoda. This is the pagoda of the monk who self immolated in Saigon in 1963 to protest the governments treatment of Buddhists. Here’s a video of the monks chanting in the pagoda.
Here’s some pictures of the pagoda.
Next we took at 45 min boat ride on the perfume river. It’s called the perfume river because in the autumn flowers from orchards upriver from Hue fall into the water giving it a perfume-like aroma.
Then we got back on the bus to go to Hoi An. In the parking lot, we saw a sleeping bus. We have seen them on the highway but I haven’t been able to get a picture to include in the blog. So here is a sleeping bus which seems like a very popular way to travel for Vietnamese.
We stopped for lunch at a large pond where they were raising oysters. Our restaurant had tanks of fresh fish that you could purchase. Our meal was already cooked so we didn’t have to deal with that.
After lunch we continued. We went through a long tunnel to avoid going up and over a mountain. It took 6 min to get through the tunnel, we felt like we were back in Switzerland.
On our way to the next stop Mai told us a very emotional story. I had asked her about the mixed blood children that were left in Vietnam after the war. It turns out this affected her personallly. Her beautiful aunt was raped by an American GI and ended up pregnant. The mother had a girl baby 9 months later and the GI was long gone with no consequences for his action. This baby was largely raised by the girl’s grandmother. She was shunned and often assaulted during to her origin (she looked big compared to the other children and had very dark skin). Eventually the US government realized that the GIs had left behind about 100,000 children and started to bring them back to the US. All of a sudden this girl who was undesirable became desirable because she was a ticket to the US. People actually tried to buy her. Her grandmother didn’t sell her. In 1989, the girl was 14 years old. The government asked if her mother wanted to go with her but her mother had recently had twin babies so she decided to stay. Therefore Mai’s cousin went to the US by herself. It’s not clear how she survived in the US but she learned to do manicures and pedicures and worked in a nail salon. She came back in 1998 and it was a very emotional time for the whole family. Today the government has awarded these children of GIs Vietnamese citizenship because there is a lot of wealth in the states, a percentage of which ultimately makes its way back. Mai got very emotional as she was telling the story and so did the rest of the bus.
Shortly thereafter we arrived at Danang Beach where we got out of the bus and walked along the beach. This was a very popular spot for R&R during the war. They have had 8 typhoons so far this year and the erosion on the beach is a big problem.
We traveled for about another half hour to our hotel in Hoi An. During the afternoon some of us went shopping. Hoi An has a large shopping district. Rick and I considered getting eye glasses but couldn’t find any we liked. Then we went to tailoring shop. It was chaos. They had books we could look through for designs. Then we were able to pick out fabric of our liking. They measured us and we were to come back the next day for a fitting. They must have an army of seamstresses sewing these clothes. I got a traditional Vietnamese dress.
We had dinner that night at a very interesting restaurant called Rêu that does farm to table dining. It was delicious. The trip to the restaurant included some very narrow streets that could not fit our bus so we needed to switch to little tuk tuk like trucks. It was a fun but bumpy ride.
