Author: Kathryn & Rick World Travelers

I was feeling a little better but I opted not to go on the morning activity. They went to Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, his house, the one pillar pagoda and the presidential palace.

According to Wikipedia, Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese revolutionary and politician who served as the founder and first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 until his death in 1969, and as its first prime minister from 1945 to 1955. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, he founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and its successor Workers’ Party of Vietnam (later the Communist Party of Vietnam) in 1951, serving as the party’s chairman until his death. I watched Ken Burn’s documentary about the Vietnam War and there he was portrayed as very focused on unifying Vietnam and getting rid of the foreigners, namely the Japanese, French and Americans.

Here’s a picture of the mausoleum and the pagoda

After lunch they went to the Hanoi Hilton which people told me was very moving. Here are some pictures from the Hanoi Hilton.

After the Hanoi Hilton the group came back to the hotel and had a little down time before going to see the water puppets. I had been resting all day to make sure I had energy for the water puppets. We went to Phan Thanh Liêm’s house to see the water puppets. Water puppets are in his genes and he represents the 7th generation of his family making water puppets and performing shows. It takes about 6 months to make a water puppet.

His house was full of puppets and puppet parts. They are made from ficus wood and have many layers of lacquer to protect them in the water. It seems that water puppetry may be a dying art because it is not lucrative enough to attract new puppeteers. The puppeteers sit behind a bamboo screen and the puppets are on sticks that extend under the water into the area where the puppets perform. Here are some pictures and videos from the visit.

The first video is two water buffalo fighting and you can hear us in the background cheering on our favorite buffalo. The second video is very short but shows phoenix (as I mentioned earlier in the blog there are 4 imaginary animals in Vietnamese culture, phoenix, unicorn, dragon, and turtle?)

That evening some of the group including Rick went to the restaurant that Anthony Boudain went with Obama. I decided to skip it because I thought I should rest up for tomorrow.

The food was delicious!!!

I didn’t have a good night so I decided I needed to see a doctor. Mai called to get me an appointment but they were booked up for the day, so she sent us to the emergency room. She organized a taxi to take us there. It was very efficient and we got in quickly. Everyone at the reception area spoke English. The doctor was French but like the others also spoke good English. I had already tested negative for covid the night before so the doctor ordered tests for the flu and dengue fever. Both were negative. They sent me home with antibiotics and cough medicine. We were there for about 3 hours and the whole thing cost about $300. If only that was the case in the US!

We got back to the hotel and I spent the whole day in the room sleeping.

We had missed the orientation walk and the trip to the women’s museum while we are at the hospital. That afternoon there was an orientation meeting that Rick went to that talked about the logics of the trip. Then they went to the welcome dinner by cyclo-rickshaw through the old quarter.

They went to a restaurant called KOTO. The following is from the KOTO website:

KOTO stands for Know One, Teach One – learning should be passed on; knowledge is meant to be shared. This is the essential idea of KOTO’s Vietnamese-Australian founder, Jimmy Pham.

In 1999, Mr Jimmy opened a hospitality training centre in Hanoi, giving at-risk and disadvantaged youth the opportunity to break the poverty cycle by forging a better future for themselves, their families and their communities.  ​

Twenty-two years later, our over 1,200 graduates now include executive and sous chefs, hotel and resort general managers, business owners as well as university graduates.  All are contributing to their families and society. 

KOTO continues to be acknowledged as a leading unique not-for-profit social enterprise, not only in Vietnam but also internationally. Today, KOTO provides over 100 at-risk and disadvantaged youth per year in Vietnam an opportunity to undertake our 24-month holistic hospitality training program to end the cycle of poverty and truly empower our trainees to realize their dreams.”

The food was delicious, the service was impecable and the students were a pleasure to interact with!

We packed up and left our hotel at 8. We went to the market. They were selling vegetables, meat and various packaged toys etc from China. We walked through one section that was selling animal organs. I wasn’t feeling well to begin with and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Here are pictures from the market (I’ll leave out the organ pictures but you get to see the dead chickens)

Next we went to a school for the local H’mong children. We talked to the teachers before going into the classrooms. There were 40 kids, ages 6 and 7, split into 2 classrooms. It’s mandatory for kids to go to school until the sixth grade. I tried to find out what happens to parents who don’t send their kids to school but didn’t get a good answer. Some kids walk as far as 7km to school, often alone. They are at school from 8 to 4 with a break for lunch and 2 recesses. They study 8 different subjects.

The kids were very well behaved and seemed a little overwhelmed to see us. Our guides had talked to the teachers before about what we should bring and they said socks and pens. We handed out the socks and pens to the kids. We sang “If You Are Happy And You Know It” to the kids. They followed with a song of their own.

After leaving the school we had a short walk to the bus. It was quite a nice day, one of the first days that we saw blue sky.

We got back on the bus. Our next stop was at the Chinese-Vietnamese border. Here are pictures from the border

While there we went to a temple. We have learned that a temple honors an important person such as a successful general. A pagoda honors Buddha. Here are pictures of the temple.

That evening we got back to Hanoi. Happily we arrived without having to face too much traffic. The remaining seven people had arrived for the second part of our trip. We met them and Mai took us out for avocado ice cream. I had coconut avocado ice cream and Rick had mango ice cream. Mine tasted mostly like vanilla but Rick’s was very mangoy. Both had chunks of avocado in the bottom.

On the bus back to Hanoi, Mai approached me and suggested that I go see a doctor the next day because I still wasn’t feeling well. I told her I’d let her know in the morning.

We had breakfast at the hotel. I still wasn’t feeling well and I masked up nearly all the time. The valley was socked in with fog.

We left the hotel at 8:30 and drove to Lao Chai where we were visiting the Black Hmong people. There are four subdivisions of Hmong – white, black, green, and flower; they are all distinguished by their clothing. The Hmong came from China in the 17th century. They live in the hills so their rice paddies are terraced.

They have a different engagement process from the Red Dzao but like them, they also get married very young. The boys and girls meet each other at the market. A boy evaluates the girl based on her looks, her embroidery, and the color of her fingers. They weave hemp (in facts the ladies’ hands were moving all the time, creating the hemp thread) and dye the cloth with indigo which turns their hands greenish blue. So greenish blue hand means the girl is hard working young lady – a vey positive attribute..

After a series of visits in which they express interest in each other the boy kidnaps the girl and takes her to his house for 3 days. During those three days he negotiates a bride price with the girl’s parents (no hanky panky during those three days). After everything is agreed he asks her to marry him and if she say no she has to repay his family double the bride price. They typically get married very quickly after that. Silver is very precious so the ladies get silver earrings and necklaces from their husbands when they get married.

If you enlarge the pictures you might be able to see circles on the ladies foreheads. Those are made from cupping with a goat horn to alleviate a headache. They claim it works.

We walked along the village path. May Linh found an indigo plant. She wet the plant, rubbed it between her hands and rubbed it on our hands. You can see the results below.

In the hills here they have one rice harvest per year. They will start planting about the lunar new year or Tet which is on January 29. They flood the rice paddies several weeks before they plant the rice to get the soil fully saturated. Then they spread the seed. They have to replant the seedlings when they are about 4 inches to get the proper spacing. They cut off the top of the plants to harvest the rice and use a machine to separated the rice from the chaff. Here are some pictures from our walk.

We stopped at a coffee shop for some tea made from lemongrass, ginger, and honey. It was very tasty. After our tea, our Hmong friends got their handicrafts out for some shopping but Rick and I didn’t buy anything.

Next we went to a Hmong house which looked similar to the other houses we have visited.

Finally we went to the house of a family that made incense out of cardamom, cinnamon, and star anise. They make a mixture of these three spices put it in a mold and voila incense. Here’s a picture of Mai Linh showing us the cardamom and you can see all the incense drying.

We had lunch in Ta Van village and then came back to the hotel. Rick went on an orientation walk of the town and I had a massage.

That evening Rick went with the group to a hot pot restaurant where he cooked salmon and sturgeon in a hot pot. He said it was delicious. I stayed back because although I’m feeling somewhat better, a little extra rest will do me good.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

We were up early and left the hotel at 7. It was tough for the New Year’s Eve partiers, but we had gone to bed fairly early, long before the proverbial ball dropped. While I still wasn’t feeling great at least I’d had a good nights sleep.

We are on the way to Sapa for two nights near to the Chinese border and the primary home to 5 of the hill tribes.

One of the tribes that we are visiting is the Hmong. There are Hmong in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. During the Vietnam war the Hmong in Loas cooperated with the CIA so when the war was over that they fled to Thailand for safety. Several waves of Hmong immigrated to the US from Thailand so today there are close to 400,000 Hmong in the US.

Durning the bus ride we also learned that there was a border war between Cambodia, China and Vietnam after the war with the US. Much of Sapa was bombed so it was mostly rebuilt after the late 80s. Sapa is very popular with Vietnamese and Chinese residents as a vacation hotspot. It’s high in the mountains, about 6,000 feet, so the weather is quite cool, foggy and , on occasion, rainy. It seemed a little honky tonk when we arrived (but I’m getting ahead of myself).

On the way there we stopped at a cinnamon farm. Vietnam is the second largest producer of cinnamon in the world (Sri Lanka is the first). The cinnamon we cook with is from the bark of a cinnamon tree. Cinnamon trees are very finicky and they have to have very pure water and to grow on the hillsides where they reside.

We met the cinnamon farmer. They have a cooperative and get orders for the bark through the cooperative. They don’t grind the power here. They must cut down the tree (typically when it’s around 7 years old) to harvest the cinnamon. The harvest is in the spring and fall months of the year. The farmer gave us a leaf to chew on and, not surprisingly, it was very cinnamony.

After looking at the cinnamon trees, the farmer invited us into his house for cinnamon tea. It was very tasty.

We continued on our way and went to Lao Caí for lunch. We had pizza and several other dishes including luffa or loofa, which is a vegetable. When loofa is dried out it’s a scrubbing sponge. Taste wise it wasn’t bad, a lot like zuchini.

After lunch we returned to the bus for another hour’s drive to Sapa. We got stuck in a very bad traffic jam. A truck seemed to have lost its load of long aluminum extrusions. The truck was by the side of the road, the extrusions were in a ditch and ladies were loading it back onto the truck while men were standing around, maybe directing, mostly gawking.

Eventually we made it to a location where we needed to switch buses. Our bus was under-powered for the steep roads and the switchbacks required familiarity and an extra level of expertise. At nearly 6,000 ft it was getting a little chilly.

At the switch we met our local guide, a very spunky woman named May Linh. She is from the Red Dzao tribe and she took us to her village.en route to Sapa The Red Dzao came from China in the 18th century and the women wear red scarfs on their heads. They marry very young, as young as 14 and have arranged marriages. Traditionally they don’t educate the girls so May Linh initially didn’t go to school. Her English is quite good. She says she learned it mostly from interactions with tourists.

We pulled up to her village, Taphin, and there were ladies there who escorted us around the village, wanting to sell us some of their wares. We learned about the wedding practice in the Red Dzao culture. The girl gets engaged and gets married 1 year later. During that year she must make 1 outfit each for her in-laws, an outfit for her husband, and 7 for herself. She wears all seven outfits on the day of her wedding. Each night after her wedding she takes off 1 outfit until all the outfits are off on the seventh night. After the lady is married she plucks her eyebrows and her hairline.

The outfits you see here are typical of the Red Dzao ladies and the patterns are all hand stitched.

The first stop on our village tour was to see a man making knives. It takes him about 1 day to make one complete knife.

May Linh lives about 4 hours away in her husband’s village so we went to visit her mother’s house. It was large but quite basic. It had a dirt floor. It had three fire pits, one for warmth, one for cooking, and one for making corn whiskey. There she dressed members of our group in her parent’s wedding clothes.

While we were looking around the ladies spread out their handicrafts and the group did a little shopping. Rick and I didn’t buy anything. After the visit to May Linh’s parents home we drove to the hotel and got checked in. Rick went to dinner with the group in the hotel dining room and I went to bed. I really wasn’t feeling well.

The night went much better than I thought.  I expected no one would sleep with all of us sleeping together.  I expected that snoring, bathroom trips and very thin mattresses would keep us all awake but it didn’t. I had the best night’s sleep so far in Vietnam except I woke up not feeling very well.   

Most people were stirring by 6:45 and we went to breakfast.  The owner of the home stay went out to cut herbs and we had a brief discussion about their medicinal benefits.  

After breakfast we went to Hieh Village which was about 10 miles from the home stay.   On the way to the village Mai told us about some of the practices of the Thai people.  In the Thai culture the man comes to live with the wife’s family after they get married.  They stay there until they have their first child or three years whichever comes first. This is to make sure the husband treats the wife well.  Hopefully during those three years the man builds a house for the couple to live in.  

 We walked through the village.  Most of the houses are traditionally on silts. This was to keep wild animals out of the house.  Nowadays it is used for storage or sometimes they have a fish pond under the house.  They scrape their leftovers into the fish pond to feed the fish which they eat once they are big enough.  

Mai approached a gentleman and asked if we could walk around his property.  It was very clean and tidy.  The bathroom is separate from the house because you can’t have the bathroom under the same roof as the ancestral altar.  The kitchen was also separate from the house.  They had a machine to separate the rice from the chaff which is used by the whole village.  

After walking around the gentleman invited us into his home.  We entered a big fairly empty room which served as their living room and sleeping quarters.  The gentleman was 76 years old and he lives there with his wife and his 40 year old daughter. The wife had lost her thumb and pointer finger in an accident with the machine that separates the rice from the chaff. The daughter was very small and I think she was intellectually challenged.  Her handicap was caused by her dad’s exposure to agent orange.  The gentleman was a soldier for the Viet Cong and he went south to fight in 1970.  He had many medals as a result of his service.  He did not fight to spread communism but rather to unify Vietnam and to free the country from foreign domination.  He’s not upset about his daughter’s condition because it allows her to stay with her parents.  Also he doesn’t feel hostile towards the Americans because he says that blood is blood and he wants to be friends.  It was a very powerful discussion and his attitude was inspirational.  We said goodbye and thank you.

We continued on our walk and saw many beautiful sites and interacted with some of the village children.  The village population is only 400 people and can only support a primary school.  I wrote earlier about the cost of school in Vietnam.  The hill people do not have to pay for primary education and the threshold for test scores needed to proceed from secondary school to college can be lower for hill tribes because of the inequality of the school system.  In order to go to secondary school many of the hill tribes families must move to a larger town so their kids can go to school.  Of course this is very expensive and it limits the number of kids who can go to move on within the school system.  

We passed a cemetery.  In the Thai culture they bury their dead and then they built a small house from bamboo on silts over the grave.  The house stays there for three years for the spirit to reside in. Then the family’s comes back and burns the house, burying the ashes with the body. 

Here are additional pictures from our walk.  

We went back to the homestay and the “madame” had brewed the herbs that she picked earlier into a hot potion.  We soaked our feet in the potion. It’s supposed to relax your arteries and veins and improve your blood flow.  I don’t know if it worked but it was very nice.  After our foot spa we had lunch and then prepared to leave.  Before we left the “madame” presented us with string bracelets and wished us good health and good wealth.  She was really very sweet.  

On our way back to Hanoi we stopped at the top of the mountain and could look down into the valley where we just stayed.  It was pretty foggy so the pictures aren’t great.

We also stopped at a rest stop to use the happy room, AKA the bathroom where we got some ice cream which wasn’t so great. The traffic in Hanoi was terrible. Apparently the government had built large apartment complexes without considering the impact on the traffic. We got back to the hotel around 7 and Rick, Mai, and I went out for beef pho.

We were supposed to go the New Year’s Eve party on the roof of our hotel to watch the local fireworks but I didn’t feel well and Rick was tired so we just went to bed.

We were up early because we were leaving by 8. We are spending the night in someone’s house so we packed an overnight bag and checked out of the hotel. It was a 3.5 hour ride to Mai Châu, which is west of Hanoi.

Along the way Mai told us that Vietnam’s population is 100 million. There are 54 tribes. 86% of the people are considered Viet, and the rest of the tribes are fairly small. Today we are visiting the Thai people. This tribe originated in Tibet, then moved to Thailand and about 8,000 years ago they migrated into Vietnam. There are two Thai tribes, the white Thai and the Black Thai. According to legend, 2,800 years ago the king was trying to decide which son would inherit the kingdom. He had two worthy sons so he ended up splitting it. That’s why there are two Thai tribes.

We stopped to use the “Happy Room”, aka bathroom. We had to buy coffee in order to use the happy room. Rick had the coffee, it was very sweet because it had evaporated milk in it. The family who owned the rest stop supplemented their income by growing pomelos so Mai bought some for us to try. It was similar to a grapefruit. She also bought us some peanut brittle to eat on the bus. It was very similar to our peanut brittle but it had some sesame seeds. Mai introduced us to the owner of the restaurant stop who invited us into her home. There, she had a picture of her family. You can see many members were in the military. One of the woman’s sons was intellectually challenged as a result of exposure to agent orange.

We got back on the bus and our next stop was at a roadside market. There we tried two types of sticky rices cooked in bamboo tubes. Here are some pictures from the market.

Finally we arrived in the village of Pom Coong which is in the ward of Mai Châu. We immediately had a lovely lunch of squash soup, deep fried chicken, fish cooked in bamboo, garlic green beans, and cucumber salad.

While eating we talked (though Mai) to 78 year old woman whose family owned the guest lodge. Her husband fought for the north in the war and injured his leg. Each time he came home for a visit she ended up pregnant. Today they have 6 daughters. She chews betel nut so her teeth are all black. She also weaves and sell her wares but we decided we didn’t need anything.

After lunch we were shown to our sleeping accommodations. We’ve stayed in some unique places but never anything like this.

After we got “settled” we walked through the village. Everyone in the village has a rice paddy. They had already harvested the rice and were preparing the paddies for the next season. In the north they get one or two harvests per year; in the south they get four. We stopped to talk to a man who was watering his garden and he offered to show us his house.

Here are some other pictures from the walk.

We came back to our home stay and relaxed for a while. Before dinner we had a show of some of the local music and dances.

The last dance ended with us all up dancing and then drinking from a jar filled with liquor. This picture is one of our trip mates acting silly.

Our tour officially starts today. It’s been good to have the time to recover from jet lag but it will be nice to have someone tell us what we are seeing, where we can eat, and just generally answer our questions.

At breakfast we selected a bigger table so Dave and Cheryl could join us. We met other people from our group and asked them to join us too so we ended up meeting most of the people at our pre trip; Nine in total.

At 10:30 we had our welcome briefing. Our guide, Mai, pronounced My, described what we are doing on the pretrip. Mai has been guiding OAT tours for six years so she is very experienced and her English is excellent. We also got some rules, for example we are not supposed to talk about American politics.

Then she took us out for some street food. We went to a place right across the street for chicken and noodles. It was very authentic and tasty. In the corner of the restaurant was a small altar to Buddha and Mother Earth. Here’s a picture of the “restaurant”.

After lunch we relaxed on the roof deck for the afternoon. Here are pictures of Hanoi from the roof deck.

We met at 4:15 for our orientation walk. Mai showed us some local resources, like the ATM and the convenience store. Then we went to a restaurant for our welcome dinner. It was Vietnamese fusion food. I ate tried almost everything and even ate spring rolls with mushrooms! A good start to our trip!

Another full night’s sleep, better living through drugs! After breakfast we walked to another Hanoi park/lake. Today we could see blue sky which was the first time since being in Hanoi! Pretty much every street looks the same, lots of motor bikes, lots of street vendors selling product and serving food. They were roasting pigs on the side of the road which was unique. We also saw them killing a couple of chickens, but I’ll spared you that picture.

The park turned out to have a little carnival for kids. I think it was permanent. So we enjoyed watching the kids.

We walked further to the lake and sat to enjoy the sun and the sights. Here are a couple more pictures from the park.

By this time we were getting hungry. We have been very uncertain about food. There are lots of street food vendors but the hygiene is very questionable. It seems that meat can sit out cooked and uncooked for a long time, the dishwashing often seems a little sketchy, and for us anything uncooked should be washed in bottle water which they definitely aren’t doing. We want to eat street food but don’t want to get sick so we have been avoiding it. Our plan for lunch was to find a western looking hotel and have lunch there. We ended up at a Hilton Garden Inn and had a lovely safe lunch.

We got back to our hotel around 2 and had a brief time to relax/blog before getting picked up at 2:50 for our cooking class. Cheryl and Dave accompanied us. We were picked up first and then proceeded to pick up 8 more people. We were a very diverse group; we had people from England, Australia (originally from South Africa) and Washington DC. Our chef/guide was a lovely animated young woman who really made the evening fun. We started by going to the market and she showed us fruits and vegetables that we were not familiar with. She also had us buy/negotiate for some the food. Here are some pictures from the market.

Then we headed to the kitchen where we donned aprons and she set us to work. We made banana flower salad, spring rolls, pork meat balls, and egg coffee. Everything was delicious.

Overall a wonderful experience! We went back to the hotel in a taxi with Dave and Cheryl. The traffic was terrible. There was a little roadwork being done so everyone had to squeeze left. It took about driver about 10 minutes to go 0.1 mile because he had to inch forward to push the motorbikes over. Crazy!

Finally we slept until about 7 (with the aide of drugs). We had breakfast at the hotel and sat next to a couple who we were pretty sure were part of our tour. So I struck up a conversation. Sure enough they are on our tour. Their names are Cheryl and David and they are from Washington and North Carolina. We enjoyed talking to them for a while.

Returned to the room and Rick found a place for lunch on the CNN website so we figured it was safe. We started walking in that general direction. It’s another overcast, smoggy day with temperatures in the low 70s. On the way we stopped in the Metropole Hotel where I stayed when I was here 25 years ago. It’s a beautiful hotel, very calm compared to the frenzy of the Hanoi streets.

Today we really felt the chaos that is Hanoi. The traffic was gridlocked in some places. Often we had to walk in the street because the sidewalk was crowded with product for sale, little tables and chairs for street food vendors or motorbikes. Here are some pictures of the sidewalks to show you what I mean.

Crossing the street is an experience. There are motorbikes everywhere. Often the stop lights are irrelevant for the motorbikes. Here are the instructions from our guide. “Crossing the street is not so difficult as it looks. You wait for red light when most of them stop, and raise you hand to cross steady, don’t go too fast or too slow, they will go around you. You also can join a local when she/he crosses the street.” By now we are getting pretty good at it. Here are a couple of short videos from YouTube about crossing the street and the traffic in general.

We decided we’d had enough and would just head to the restaurant. Here are just a few pictures from our walk.

It seems these little restaurants/street food vendors often sell just one dish and often the restaurants offering that dish are clustered together. So we thought we had found the CNN recommended restaurant because it was serving the dish we wanted. We went in, ordered and the food was quite good. On the way out Rick was trying to show the restaurant staff the CNN listing. It turns out that the restaurant we were looking for was 2 store fronts over. The issue is the hygiene is questionable. We can’t drink the tap water so if they use tap water to wash the vegetable s or to cook with we could have a problem, I guess we’ll find out if the food agreed with our taste buds as well as our stomachs.

After lunch we walked back to the hotel and a stop at the lake for a cop of coffee for Rick.

We returned to the hotel and Rick relaxed and I took a nap. It was very hard to get up for dinner but I did. We actually went out for pizza and it wasn’t bad.