Vietnam Adventures, Continued

Continuing about Vietnam…

Our next few days were intended for soaking up the sun on the beaches.  However, Vietnam’s rainy season chose to continue into December this year, so instead we enjoyed Netflix a little more than anticipated as the ocean waves looked rather treacherous.  Thankfully, the rain cleared every once in awhile, and we were able to check out a mountain of marble as well as meet Ngan, one of Liban’s friends from MSU a couple times.  We ate delicious seafood and explored a little bit of Danang’s coast and sights with her and another friend.

We’d enjoyed our travels thus far, but the absolute best part was getting to see Courtney & Caleb.  Courtney was one of my OT classmates and is now living in Cambodia, and it was SO GOOD to get to spend time with them and learn about their new lives and adventures.  I am sure she and I are probably the only two weirdoes who have graduated Mizzou’s OT program dreaming of the day we would use our fancy schmancy OT degrees to live in Asia and make no money, and this trip just made me realize how thankful I am that God put us in the same class.  Hearing about their experiences, struggles, and victories was a much-needed encouragement to us, and it came at a perfect time.

One place we were all able to go together was My Son, which is a stretch of ancient Hindu temple ruins built in/around 700 A.D.  It was pretty cool and especially interesting to see the similarities to the temples in India, and it struck me as the type of temple and setting in The Jungle Book, just much, much smaller.  

Even at these beautiful, old temples, there is the tangible presence of the Vietnam War; this is true for the majority of what we saw throughout the country.  Feet away from each of these temples is a 10-20 feet wide crater from the bombings, and the ruins reportedly went from 70 temples to about 20 remaining standing.  

We saw the same remnants of bombing at Vinh Moc, a small town about 20-30 minutes north of the border when the North and South were divided. The entire town of Vinh Moc literally went underground for years during the war.  Children and elderly were often sent to safety further north, but the rest of the citizens used shovels and their hands to dig a network of tunnels that they lived in.  They did so with good reason, as the grass and dirt on top are peppered with craters about every 20 feet from the B-52 air raids.  

Trenches that connected with the tunnels

Filling up a family room in the tunnels

The network of tunnels is a total of 35-ish miles long and is down to three levels deep in places.  The tunnels were tall enough for us to walk in with hunched backs and necks, and I’m grateful the people preserving the tunnels have added electricity because walking around with only one flash light would have been a little scary.  (Coming around the corner to find a statue replicating daily life was at times terrifying on its own!)  

When I read online about the tunnels, I think I was expecting each “family room” (aka totally open room on side of tunnel with zero privacy) to be about the size of a queen size bed.  Instead, it was about the length and width of a loveseat.  Yes, the Vietnamese are a shorter people, but there is no way that 3-4 people inside one of those “rooms” was comfortable.  Liban and I just squatting in one of these rooms was a bit squished.  Realizing that people lived underground like this, children grew up like this, for literally years at a time gave me a new perspective on America’s history.

The Vinh Moc tunnels’ 12 entrances have been rebuilt to accommodate tourists’ statures and withstand weather, but they are spread out all over the area.  Some exit on a hill by the beach, where the townspeople smuggled weapons and resources out to Viet Cong boats, others exit by what was probably once rice fields.  All of these areas are covered in bomb craters.

I cannot think of a single class in my education where the Vietnam War was discussed for more than a few minutes, and even that mainly focused on the protests.  The rest of it was swept under the rug with a discussion of communism and Karl Marx’s theory vs. reality.  (Sadly, I probably learned more about America’s involvement from watching Forrest Gump!)  But it’s interesting--there has to be a better word than that, but it’s all I have now--to go through not one but several museums and read about American Imperialism, read about how the Americans shouldn’t have been involved, see the torture devices and "tiger cages" Americans used for Viet Cong prisoners, see the palace where the American-supported president of South Vietnam surrendered to the North, and walk past “victorious” photos of American pilots being captured and taken to prison.  The amount of propaganda present was also a little eerie and something that cannot be objectively ignored (and made me wonder how much more must be present in North Korea); regardless, I appreciate being able to see another perspective not shown in my high school history books and learning general information.  Unfortunately, I feel just as confused about it all as I did when we arrived in Saigon.

The orchestra/actresses on the left, with the fire breathing dragon puppets in the water :)

To end on a lighter note, we saw a water puppet show in Hanoi, and it was delightful.  Also in Hanoi, we had our only bad meal in-country at the restaurant Anthony Bourdain visited on "Parts Unknown" with Obama.  I feel a little slighted by Bourdain for the bad recommendation...

Vietnam Adventures

Less than a month before we left Missouri, Liban’s travel bug flared up, and he suggested we spend the majority of December traveling in Southeast Asia somewhere.  Who was I to say no?  By the next day we had plane tickets.

At that point we really had no clue as to what Vietnam offered, so we decided 10-11 days was good enough.  (It’s not.) Upon actually researching the country, we quickly realized that although Vietnam is a smaller country, it’s very long and the geography makes traveling by train and bus quite time-consuming.  So, our “things to do” list was halved for sanity’s sake.  

Unlike all of my previous travels, I didn’t really have expectations for Vietnam.  I had places I’d wanted to see, but it’s not a country often depicted in fine art, books, or movies--unless it’s war-related.  As a result, the image in my mind was limited to “jungle, war, beach, tropical weather, Asian city chaos, pho’.”  

I can happily say that it blew away whatever measly expectations I did have, and I loved our time there.  

We started in Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon) and met up with a university student who offers free city tours in exchange for meeting foreigners and improving her English.  Liban’s favorite part of traveling is food, and she took us to some great local restaurants which let us experiment with confidence.  We tried snails cooked in a coconut sauce; the downside of this dish being that you suck the snails out of the shells rather than pull them out with fingers or a fork.  I kept hearing Mom’s voice in the back of my mind telling me not to slurp my food, Liban got scolded by a waiter for trying to use a fork, and I ended up placing my thumb at the back hole of the shell to create more suction pressure. . . consequently giving my thumb a hickey.

One thing that surprised me the most throughout our entire trip, but especially in Saigon, is the French influence from its colonial days.  Some of the old French buildings have been kept up to such an extent we thought they were newly built, others are noticeably aging homes with balconies lining the rivers, and yet others have a unique combination of French and Vietnamese styles.  (I realize that most every country was once a European colony, but India has set my sights awfully low in the maintenance of old structures and aesthetics as a whole, so I find this worth mentioning.)

A small city in the mountains, Dalat was our next stop and our only stop said to be “off the main backpacking trail.”  But whoever wrote that either lied or started a whole new trend because the number of westerners proved otherwise.  We had a couple of guys give us a motorcycle tour around the mountains and to a waterfall, all of which were beautiful--although the pouring rain made it for a very chilly afternoon.  We also visited a silk factory where mass amounts of cocoons are attached to and unraveled by machines.  Naturally, this factory also sautees the silk worms to ensure they don’t go to waste, so we each ate one but turned down second helpings!

At a rice wine factory, we tried a couple drops of a rice wine with 65% alcohol content.  (If you need help imagining that taste, just imagine your mouth puckering up yet being on fire for 5 minutes.)  Snake wine is another popular thing in the area, and seeing the cobra with its hood up, ready to strike--inside the massive Mason jar of wine--was definitely cool.  They also had jars of smaller snakes and even one of a Komodo dragon.  Snakes are also a delicacy here, so we saw a rather large, caged boa constrictor whose future is likely the main dish at someone’s party.  I wanted to try the meat, but after looking at the prices on the menus, we decided chicken was more affordable!

Dalat’s main other attraction was its nearby coffee farms.  The farms alone are beautiful because it’s built on the mountainside, but these farms are particularly unique because they use weasels for processing the coffee.  My basic understanding is that the farmers collect the red coffee berries and feed it to their weasels, which are kept in cages surrounded by fairly aggressive guard dogs.  The weasels digest the berry part but not the bean, and the beans are excreted before being cleaned, roasted, packaged, and sold in stores.   I have no idea how someone looked at a weasel’s excrement and said, “hey! Let’s boil this and drink it!” but someone, somewhere apparently did, and now weasels are worth a heck of a lot of money in Vietnam.