I'm in Vietnam at the moment.
Hanoi was our first stop. It is incredible exhilirating disgusting aromatic and noisy and after five days we were both mad. To get out of there. Was great. The hub of pleasure for us in Hanoi was the eating of the food. Everybody eats everywhere all the time.
The food like the city is disgustingly excitingly delicously aromatic but unlike the city it is good for you. We sweated our way around the city's old quarter which is apparently one of the most densley populated regions of any city in the World. Including Sneem. Kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, all spill onto the side of the street in a mad edible chaos as families sell some of their sunday lunch to you as you pass by, sweating. God, my palms were sweaty. So was my forehead. And also my ankles and my elbows and the bottom of my knees and between my nails and my fingers and inside my ears. Id swear my eyeballs were sweating. But it was just the heat. Nothing to worry about.
So then we left Hanoi in a little tourbus with terrible gap year students with magnificent complextion and friendship bangles and awful enthusiasm. We took a trip with these lovely awful people to Halong Bay which could for the sake of explanation and because we are mostly Irish here be decribed Vietnams answer to the Cliffs of Moher. The place was enourmously beutiful, but the three day trip was for a large part tainted by a sense of being sheperded and looked after in a strangely numbing way. The strange thing was that the place had not much more reality than the pictures of the place that we saw in the guidebook, and I attribute this (and the old doll agrees, mind) to the school tourishness of the experience. It was lovely really, and if I put enough effort into it I could probably convey some sense of the surreal exceptional beauty of the place, but I lack the enthusiasm.
So back to Hanoi then and more decisions to be made. God we're so busy with this travelling that we hardly have any time. We are thinking of taking a little break, maybe two weeks in Cork. We really would like to get away you know.
So we took a night train to Sapa which was sopping for the three days we were there. These experiences sound alot less appealing when theyre summarized like this, I think, but they are in fact all delightful, even the rain and the buses. Sapa is a place where there are lots of the indiginous hill tribes of the area still living and breathing and working, even. They're sound out, and there's millions of them. They are not wax figures or museum exhibits. They are incredible strong looking and beautiful, and the people amoung them who have cottened on to the tourism thing have a real seductive charm and very good english. The town of Sapa is about 1500m up in the mountains, and even on the cloudy days its stunningly picturesque as the clouds roll in over the rice paddied fields. Rice, paddy?
Were getting close to the present. About two days ago we returned to Hanoi on a day train. A Whole Day train. We had slatted seats and slatted bums by the end. Trains are very cheap and very slow and land you right inside the lives of the Vietnamese in a way which is difficult otherwise because of the challenging language barrier. The kids in particular stand out for their absolute beauty and friendliness, and we had some lessons on how to eat small fruits on a train in return for being white. It is strange to be strange. I’m so used to other people being strange and not western. Sounds obvious, but the experience of it is so much more effecting than the thought.
So from Hanoi then to the place we are now, Ninh Binh. You don’t pronounce the h's. This place feels like a real find. The luxury of having a long time to spend in this place is that we can afford to have three days under tarpaulin and then still know we'll find the likes of ninh binh (silent h). We have spent the past two days exploring the surround countryside which is like the kind of dream landscape that I never thought Id pass through. This is one of the poorest areas in Vietnam apparently, but its is choc a bloc with happy looking people farming tiny holdings with bamboo tools and rusty bikes and plastic flip flops and no real interest in tour busses. We have been exploring the tiny roads and stopping for iced coffees in little family run family houses with coffee to sell. Today a storm threatened our sunny discovery but I think that we will stay here and see it through if it comes.