My lovely friends Lauren Boyd and John Radke came to visit me in Vietnam and lived to tell about it! I've asked them to write guest blog entries sharing their favorite moments and memories. Thanks for your posts, and thanks MORE for visiting me! Love you long time.
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July 16th, 1am local time: Lauren and I get through customs and walk into the damp Saigon air to find Sam and her friend Janet waiting with our names on a sign. Success! We jumped into our first of many Vinasun cabs for a 30 minute ride to Sam's apartment where we promptly fell asleep.
Lauren, Sam, and I spent the next day with Janet and Sam's roommate Nick, gallivanting aroun
d Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon): shopping, eating, and a bit of sightseeing. That evening we sat down for probably my favorite part of Vietnamese culture: bia hoi. Meaning "fresh beer", it's kind of like happy hour back home. Overly attentive waitstaff brings you cheap beer (about 35 cents to a dollar per glass), often with an ice cube to cool it down. Afterward we ate pho (perhaps the best-known Vietnamese dish) and capped off the night at a rooftop bar.
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| Sam's street from top floor balcony |
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| Weird fruit at the stand where we got smoothies |
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| Typical Saigon street |
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| Uncle Ho watches over the post office |
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Dudes play da cau (like badminton except you kick the shuttlecock)
They were really good at it. |
The next day we said goodbye to Janet (who was headed to Da Nang and Hoi An) and Nick, and Sam, Lauren, and I jumped on a plane to Hanoi. Once there, we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake, browsed the sidewalk shops, ate bun cha, and then boarded an overnight train headed for points north.
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| Bun cha! |
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| Turtle Tower on Hoan Kiem Lake |
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| Bia hoi! |
Next morning, we said goodbye to our friendly French bunkmate, and disembarked in the city of Lao Cai (on the border with China). Some of the memories of the three days we spent there: 30km of hiking with our guide Hao, emerald green rice paddies, fickle mountain mist, water buffalo, fighting goats, bamboo forests, deafening cicadas, wading across a cold river on sore feet, going about 48 hours without seeing any other foreigners, Lauren sharing candy with some shy and curious local kids, dragging my exhausted body up the steep hill to our Red Dao village homestay, "showering" out of a bucket, tiptoeing across a narrow rusty bridge, tightrope-walking on the tiny ridges between rice paddies, Sam getting mobbed by aggressive Black Hmong merchants in Sapa, and, mercifully, a $7 massage after all that hiking.
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A view across the border:
the bridge on the left connects Vietnam to China |
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| We start our hike! |
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| Flooded rice paddy tiers |
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One of the porters shoots the breeze with our guide Hao.
Probably making fun of us. |
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| A Red Dao woman taking a break |
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| Switchback |
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| A school or government building nestled in the mountains |
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| Seriously, you guys. |
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| Water buffalo |
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| Schoolhouse where we stopped to eat lunch |
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| Making friends |
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| Hao walks under some rice paddy irrigation |
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| SERIOUSLY. |
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| THIS IS RIDICULOUS, SERIOUSLY. |
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View from our homestay after 16km of hiking.
Best beer I ever tasted! |
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| Front to back: concrete water tank, shower stall, outhouse |
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| Front of the homestay house (outhouse is behind you from this view) |
*(Our second day of hiking was really rainy, so I didn't have my camera out till we got to our hotel. Hopefully Sam got some good stuff!)*
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Accommodations after the second day of hiking
(Sam and Lauren's bungalow) |
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| View from the balcony in my bungalow |
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| Rainy day in Sapa |
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| Sam gets surrounded by Hmong merchant ladies |
Once back in Hanoi, we spent the day learning about Vietnam's national hero, Ho Chi Minh. We visited the mausoleum of Uncle Ho (as he's known to his people), explored the grounds of his former estate, and walked around the rather uninformative (at least for English speakers) museum about his life. Also visited the very cool Temple of Literature. We spent the night at the aptly-named Charming Hotel, and early the next morning we were on a shuttle down to Ha Long Bay.
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| Uncle Ho's palace |
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| Uncle Ho's mausoleum (from the back) |
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| Crazy old tree at the Temple of Literature |
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| Lanterns at the Temple of Literature |
We spent the next three days on a private junk-style boat in Ha Long Bay. The bay is strewn with incredible limestone formations - again some of the most beautiful vistas I've ever seen in my life. It rained on and off the entire time we were on the water, but it didn't screw up our plans too much, and gave us more time to nap. The most disappointing part of our entire trip was all the trash in the water - we literally paddled past a hypodermic needle while kayaking. It's rather jarring to watch the sun setting behind a lush green islet, and then look down at see all plastic flotsam in the water. But this trip was still incredible: the ship's cook overfed us at every meal, we saw monkeys on Monkey Island (clever name), biked with our guide Lu to a local farming village nestled in a valley on Cat Ba Island, and saw a little government-owned floating fishery.
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| COME ON. |
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| What a dump |
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| Shot of our junk boat (the brown one in the back) from the fish farm |
After our boat trip, we made our way back to Saigon, where we had a mellow day of shopping, coffee, and a couple rooftop beers. We topped off our unforgettable trip with some amazing vegan food.
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Rice at the weird food market by Sam's house.
These are all different, I guess? |
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| Pagoda near Sam's house |
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| Bonsai garden by the shore in Saigon |
Overall trip: total success. Amazing sights, good food, new experiences, and most importantly, good friends!
--John Radke
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Another Asian adventure with Samantha Baker! I, Lauren Boyd, am guest-blogging to relate to you the amazing trip I took in July with John Radke to visit Sam. While I was constantly making comparisons to Taiwan from my trip there last summer, the two countries were very distinct. Vietnam had a edgier, more hectic feel to me, compared to the loveable, slower-paced Taiwan. Don’t get me wrong- I loved the hurried Vietnamese bustle of motor bike traffic, markets with haggling vendors, and streets full of people drinking bia hoi (more on that later).
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| Bui Vien, the main backpacker/tourist street in HCMC |
After one day sightseeing in Ho Chi Minh City, the three of us boarded a plane northbound for Hanoi. From Hanoi we embarked on an overnight train trip to Lao Cai, where our tour guide was to pick us up for our 3-day trek through the mountains around Sa Pa. Sa Pa is a touristy small town atop mountains with terraced rice fields and indigenous villages. We arrived at 5am into Lao Cai, and bid au revoir to our cabinmate Jacques. Well, maybe we weren’t sure his name was Jacques, but he was French- so that was the obvious name we chose for him as we recounted our daily adventures.
Our trek began with an introduction to Hao, our guide, and the two porters who would be hiking alongside us while carrying our stuff for an overnight stay in the villages. As I was huffing it up hill after hill along our 10-mile route on the first day, those porters were speeding past me in their cheap plastic sandals. The beauty of the rice fields was so incredible and serene. Every so often I would stop dead in my tracks and look around me thinking, ‘Wow! I cannot believe I’m here right now’. What made it feel even more special is that we were experiencing this trek alone, not in a massive tour group with twenty other foreigners. We hiked through many villages along the way, and we met some of the indigenous people who live in these mountainous regions. My favorite were the Red Zhao people; they are a matriarchal society, meaning the women are boss. And these are not women to mess with- they have a striking physical appearance with their traditional shaved eyebrows and foreheads, and could be seen doing physical labor in the fields right alongside the men.
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| Hao and the porters |
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| Mountains and rice fields in Sapa |
After hiking 18 miles in two days, it was time to slow down the pace. We bid farewell to Hao, and took the night train back to Hanoi where we were picked up for our next adventure. We took a van to Hai Phoung, then a hydrafoil boat to CatBa island. In CatBa, we met Lou- he would be the guide for our private boat, home for the next 3 days and 2 nights. Accompanied by the boat captain and cook, we embarked on a cruise through Halong Bay. Halong means descending dragon in Vietnamese; the bay got this name for the nearly 2,000 islands there that look like the back of a dragon diving into the sea. We ate like royalty on the boat, went kayaking through a cave, and explored a government-run fish farm in the bay.
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| Ha Long Bay! |
Food! I cannot say enough good things about the delicious Vietnamese food. Delicious seafood along the coast, fresh exotic fruit, pho, spring rolls…..the list goes on. My favorite meal experience was when we had bun cha for the first time. We walked into this packed restaurant, and were led up two flights of a winding staircase where we were then seated elbow-to-elbow with two other groups of Vietnamese people. I figured they were there because they know how awesome the food was, and I was right! Heaping piles of rice noodles, a mounded plate of fresh greens, and a bowl of garlic and chillies were brought to the table, and then each of us were given a bowl of meat and broth. Put those things together in whatever way makes its way best into your mouth, and you’ve got pure Vietnamese bliss. As previously mentioned, bia (beer), washes down any and every great meal. Now, don’t go expecting some craft beer, or anything other than an Asian Miller Lite. Maybe an Asian High Life, but let’s not go crazy. The best way to drink your 50 cent beers though is called bia hoi, also known as drinking beer while sitting on a sidewalk in a kiddie-sized plastic chair. When I call it kiddie-sized, then you know it must be a SMALL-ass chair. What better place to take in the buzz of the streets, and people watch.
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| Elbow-to-elbow and up to our elbows in bun cha |
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| Bia hoi in small-ass chairs |
I’d be remiss if I did not mention our dear friend, Samantha A. Baker. She was a fabulous hostess and tour guide while we were in Vietnam, and showed us a truly awesome time in her new country of residence. I am inspired by the ease in which she has moved to yet another foreign country, and has figured her way around language/culture barriers to establish a life full of adventures. She makes friends, and drinking buddies, wherever she goes- thanks for doing your part to improve the world’s opinion of Americans. I can’t wait to see where Samantha’s next adventures take her!
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| Happy hour / happy days |
--Lauren Boyd
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