Friday, January 27, 2006
Back in Nam, man. All the way from China, Doll.
Well, we are seriously back on the tourist trail, half way down Vietnam, in Hue, imperial city on the perfume river. It is still grey and misty, which is really annoying but not unsurprising, and at least it is warm. Which makes a change.
Well since Shanghai, at the begining of January, we trundled down to Hong Kong. I like Hong Kong. It was warm, it was expensive. In fact it seems that this could be the city that London wishes it could be. Spotless, efficient, and full of diamond Geezer fancy a rolex got it on the blag merchants. Mostly Indian. Interestingly enough.
We stayed in a legend of a place called Chongking Mansions which is 17 floors of labyrinths of Indian restaurants and hostels, immigrants houses and back packers looking for a bargain, and still looking for a bargain after 2 weeks lost in the corridors. The Hyatt accrss the road had just closed and everyone was queing up outside to buy its contents. I imagine most of it will transplant itself accross the street into the myriad of living rooms and and guest house bedrooms in the Mirador and Chungking buildings. They are all in Kowloon, the city on the mainland that looks back accross the strait at the peak and the ever changing skyline of Hong Kong. A short Star Ferry ride away. Reason enough for coming to HK. I love ferry commutes to work. I used to take one occassionally in San Francisco and the one accropss the Ij in Amsterdam. It got us in mind of our job prospects in China again. Unfortunately that trail had gone cold as they were asking us to sort out our own work visa, which is probably a polite way of saying no thanks. Ah well. It was bloody cold in Zhengzhou...ah architecture.
I remember when IM Pei's Bank of China and Fosters HSBC were the Skyline, but there has been considerably more since, noticeably the absolutely massive 88 floor 400m plus IFC 2. I cant remember the real name of it. It doesnt really matter, you cant miss it.
Deirdre Walsh is a champion guide, gave us top recommendations on where to go and good walks around. We sauntered around Lamma island and down to Big Wave Bay and Sheko, wandered around Aberdeen the original Hong Kong, now almodt completely devoid of its boat people.
After our last night in HK and a splendid evening with friends' of Deirdre, it was a trip to Shenzen, back in the old PRC, -not that you'd know it was the people s' republic. It was every man for themselves on the 5 stories of craziness that was shopping in this tax free zone. Interestingly enough, we had seen a lot of the wares on sale in Shenzen special economic zone cheaper in the street markets in HK. I havnt worked that one out yet. And then.....
.....we had our first and only experience of a night bus in China. It was actually pretty cool, if not insane. It was a fairly new Volvo bus, ironically, fitted out with stainless steel bunks, three accross with two aisles. I am sure that if we stopped too suddenly the passengers would all be wedged between the bars of the beadhead up to their knees. OR maybe it was a more sophisticated design intent - that each bunk was actually an individual roll cage, and that in an accident that all the windows would fly open (well - it was a Volvo bus) and all the bunks and passengers would be ejected to safely clatter onto the grass verge or through the window of a roadside cafe. Or more likely that the bunks/rollcages would remain tethered to the bus and act as a drag anchor for slowing the bus down. Well. I had a lot of time to think about it.
I like the idea of a sleeper bus though. How many times as a kid coming back from Tramore to Dublin would I have loved to have a bunk to stretch out on and look out the window, although having pillow fights with my three brothers in the back of an Opel Corsa was always part of that particular journey anyway.
I am still fairly amazed that we were never ejected as ballast by my Dad or Mum.
Yeah, anyway, buses, Shanghai to Yangshuo, a grand town surrounded by those amazing limestone peaks that you get in southern China, with a river running through it and about 1200 geezers with 2400 fishing cormorants vying for cover photos of the next National Geographic. It is pretty toursitic, but in fairness it is a lot better that Guilin up the road apparently. Of course all the amazing peaks were completely shrouded in fog for the two days we were there, so we pressed on south for the better weather.
Next port of call was Nanning, all for to strike for the Vietnam border. I liked Nanning, maybe only because we only spent a night there and it was already considerably warmer. It is a large ish provincial Chinese city famous in History as the base for the supply of weapons to the VC during the 'American War'. I only discovered recently that it played a role as a starting point for a Chinese attack on Northern Vietnam in 1978/79 after the Vietnamese routed Pol Pot and the Khmer ROuge in Cambodia. The Chinese were incensed by this and set out to teach the Vietnamese a lesson. Well away from western press and interest the conflict was little heard of until recently, which was good for the CHinese as the got absolutely hammered. Some accounts say that as many as 17,000 Chinese soldiers died in the short conflict. Still some conflict remains between Vietnam and China over the Sprately islands, the usual non descript archipelago of sand and Coral that may or may not yield oil, but certainly at present only yields coconuts. Vietnam seems to have the best territorial claim through proximity alone, but Indonesia and CHina and I think a few others hotly dispute this.....
Other than that they are on friendly terms and cross border trade is booming. There were hundreds of Vietnamese students returning from study in Kunming at the Friendship pass. The border frontier is the site of the nearly ubiquitous brand new 6 lane Chinese highway and tunnel. Everybody was generally getting on with it and customs and immigration. The crossing wasnt a problem at all and by accounts rather quick in comparison to the usual nightmare stories we hear about.
We had the usual border taxi fandango, our first trip in a Honda Xe/Om and delivery to a bus in the middle of nowhere that was to take us to Hanoi. We demanded lunch (we were famished, having been on the road already for 8 hours) and to be brought to the bus station. After a bit of face losing we got our way and got a grand mini bus to Hanoi.
Hanoi, is wonderful. Or, more accurately, it is hell in a handbasket. A very small place filled with many many many fiercly buzzing creatures that take the form of evil scooter drivers and their steeds. My first instinct was to recall that excellent video game of yore- Frogger - where the aim was to get the frog accross the road without getting squished. WHo said that video games serve no practical use? I just wish I still had three lives.
Hanoi is a city full of smiles and sales people, and a lot of them are not the charming indivivuals that I remember Hugh and Eithne (seasoned Vietnames travellers) telling me about. But all taken in good fun. We only got told to F*** off twice, and the other 99.9 percent of the time it was all smiles, and at last we were in a country where we could nearly afford to buy things, so we could at least oblige some of the time.
Went to see Ho Chi Minh, at least from the outside. We have visited but not seen the big three now, Lenin, Mao and HCM. There is a giant poster of them standing shoulder to shoulder together in Nanning, although I am not sure that they would have all have been bosom buddies. HCM set up the french communist party which is something I didnt know.
But back to the traffic. Mainly Hanoi is traffic - for get the culture - 3 million people with 1 million scooters. Footpaths are for parking your scooter and roadside restaurants - when there are neither of these things on the pavement this allows you to drive your scooter on it. IN Hanoi, nobody is a pedestrian. (This is a line that belongs in the pantheon of other great truths like 'In space, no one can hear you scream'.) Trying to walk around town is not particularly pleasant - I can imagine it being even worse in summer. My sleeve was caught in the brake handle of a scooter as he zipped past me on the footpath, with near disastorous results. But anyway. You have to walk on the road most of the time in the Old quarter. It's safer.
The french remains and the little nuggets of French cuisine and culture that remain are quite snug in the Vietnamese landscape. Wonderful coffee, cafes, baguettes and bittet, a variation of the french bifstek and chips. A wonderful find.
We headed off to the north west on the train with the nice lady who showed us our seats and took a dollar from me to get me a beer and the obviously missed the train as we headed off to Lao Cai and Sapa, without my beer!
Bac Ha and Can Cau were an amazing experience. It was the first time I have seen so many people wearing their local finery, enbroidered shirts, skirts and aprons in incredible colours and amazing numbers. The Flower Hmong stole the show - the most populous and hospitable of the local peoples (although the Dai would give them a run for thier money in the hospitality stakes).
We spent two glorious rainy mornings trudging around in the mud thourgh the last markets of the year, watching Blacksmiths making plough blades, hoes and rakes, livestock being sold and eaten, incredible arrays of eyecatching coloured material and costume, accoutrements for the horses, corn whiskey everywhere and about 40 big lensed tourists getting up close and personal, all wishing no doubt, that they were working National Geographic. I ended up taking as many photos of foreigners taking photos of locals as of the colourful locals themselves. It was a bit on the outrageous side.
Still we managed to escape all that when we trekked to a Dai village (I only fell in the mud once, which wasnt bad), where we had an incredible meal and slept boys with boys and girls with girls as is the tradition. Of course I did manage to find the one snorer of the valley again, and this time I had to share my duvet with him.
I must have done something terrible in a former life for all this bad Karma.
Ah well, so long as it isnt mosquitoes, I dont mind. well actually I do. But anyway...:)
Well since Shanghai, at the begining of January, we trundled down to Hong Kong. I like Hong Kong. It was warm, it was expensive. In fact it seems that this could be the city that London wishes it could be. Spotless, efficient, and full of diamond Geezer fancy a rolex got it on the blag merchants. Mostly Indian. Interestingly enough.
We stayed in a legend of a place called Chongking Mansions which is 17 floors of labyrinths of Indian restaurants and hostels, immigrants houses and back packers looking for a bargain, and still looking for a bargain after 2 weeks lost in the corridors. The Hyatt accrss the road had just closed and everyone was queing up outside to buy its contents. I imagine most of it will transplant itself accross the street into the myriad of living rooms and and guest house bedrooms in the Mirador and Chungking buildings. They are all in Kowloon, the city on the mainland that looks back accross the strait at the peak and the ever changing skyline of Hong Kong. A short Star Ferry ride away. Reason enough for coming to HK. I love ferry commutes to work. I used to take one occassionally in San Francisco and the one accropss the Ij in Amsterdam. It got us in mind of our job prospects in China again. Unfortunately that trail had gone cold as they were asking us to sort out our own work visa, which is probably a polite way of saying no thanks. Ah well. It was bloody cold in Zhengzhou...ah architecture.
I remember when IM Pei's Bank of China and Fosters HSBC were the Skyline, but there has been considerably more since, noticeably the absolutely massive 88 floor 400m plus IFC 2. I cant remember the real name of it. It doesnt really matter, you cant miss it.
Deirdre Walsh is a champion guide, gave us top recommendations on where to go and good walks around. We sauntered around Lamma island and down to Big Wave Bay and Sheko, wandered around Aberdeen the original Hong Kong, now almodt completely devoid of its boat people.
After our last night in HK and a splendid evening with friends' of Deirdre, it was a trip to Shenzen, back in the old PRC, -not that you'd know it was the people s' republic. It was every man for themselves on the 5 stories of craziness that was shopping in this tax free zone. Interestingly enough, we had seen a lot of the wares on sale in Shenzen special economic zone cheaper in the street markets in HK. I havnt worked that one out yet. And then.....
.....we had our first and only experience of a night bus in China. It was actually pretty cool, if not insane. It was a fairly new Volvo bus, ironically, fitted out with stainless steel bunks, three accross with two aisles. I am sure that if we stopped too suddenly the passengers would all be wedged between the bars of the beadhead up to their knees. OR maybe it was a more sophisticated design intent - that each bunk was actually an individual roll cage, and that in an accident that all the windows would fly open (well - it was a Volvo bus) and all the bunks and passengers would be ejected to safely clatter onto the grass verge or through the window of a roadside cafe. Or more likely that the bunks/rollcages would remain tethered to the bus and act as a drag anchor for slowing the bus down. Well. I had a lot of time to think about it.
I like the idea of a sleeper bus though. How many times as a kid coming back from Tramore to Dublin would I have loved to have a bunk to stretch out on and look out the window, although having pillow fights with my three brothers in the back of an Opel Corsa was always part of that particular journey anyway.
I am still fairly amazed that we were never ejected as ballast by my Dad or Mum.
Yeah, anyway, buses, Shanghai to Yangshuo, a grand town surrounded by those amazing limestone peaks that you get in southern China, with a river running through it and about 1200 geezers with 2400 fishing cormorants vying for cover photos of the next National Geographic. It is pretty toursitic, but in fairness it is a lot better that Guilin up the road apparently. Of course all the amazing peaks were completely shrouded in fog for the two days we were there, so we pressed on south for the better weather.
Next port of call was Nanning, all for to strike for the Vietnam border. I liked Nanning, maybe only because we only spent a night there and it was already considerably warmer. It is a large ish provincial Chinese city famous in History as the base for the supply of weapons to the VC during the 'American War'. I only discovered recently that it played a role as a starting point for a Chinese attack on Northern Vietnam in 1978/79 after the Vietnamese routed Pol Pot and the Khmer ROuge in Cambodia. The Chinese were incensed by this and set out to teach the Vietnamese a lesson. Well away from western press and interest the conflict was little heard of until recently, which was good for the CHinese as the got absolutely hammered. Some accounts say that as many as 17,000 Chinese soldiers died in the short conflict. Still some conflict remains between Vietnam and China over the Sprately islands, the usual non descript archipelago of sand and Coral that may or may not yield oil, but certainly at present only yields coconuts. Vietnam seems to have the best territorial claim through proximity alone, but Indonesia and CHina and I think a few others hotly dispute this.....
Other than that they are on friendly terms and cross border trade is booming. There were hundreds of Vietnamese students returning from study in Kunming at the Friendship pass. The border frontier is the site of the nearly ubiquitous brand new 6 lane Chinese highway and tunnel. Everybody was generally getting on with it and customs and immigration. The crossing wasnt a problem at all and by accounts rather quick in comparison to the usual nightmare stories we hear about.
We had the usual border taxi fandango, our first trip in a Honda Xe/Om and delivery to a bus in the middle of nowhere that was to take us to Hanoi. We demanded lunch (we were famished, having been on the road already for 8 hours) and to be brought to the bus station. After a bit of face losing we got our way and got a grand mini bus to Hanoi.
Hanoi, is wonderful. Or, more accurately, it is hell in a handbasket. A very small place filled with many many many fiercly buzzing creatures that take the form of evil scooter drivers and their steeds. My first instinct was to recall that excellent video game of yore- Frogger - where the aim was to get the frog accross the road without getting squished. WHo said that video games serve no practical use? I just wish I still had three lives.
Hanoi is a city full of smiles and sales people, and a lot of them are not the charming indivivuals that I remember Hugh and Eithne (seasoned Vietnames travellers) telling me about. But all taken in good fun. We only got told to F*** off twice, and the other 99.9 percent of the time it was all smiles, and at last we were in a country where we could nearly afford to buy things, so we could at least oblige some of the time.
Went to see Ho Chi Minh, at least from the outside. We have visited but not seen the big three now, Lenin, Mao and HCM. There is a giant poster of them standing shoulder to shoulder together in Nanning, although I am not sure that they would have all have been bosom buddies. HCM set up the french communist party which is something I didnt know.
But back to the traffic. Mainly Hanoi is traffic - for get the culture - 3 million people with 1 million scooters. Footpaths are for parking your scooter and roadside restaurants - when there are neither of these things on the pavement this allows you to drive your scooter on it. IN Hanoi, nobody is a pedestrian. (This is a line that belongs in the pantheon of other great truths like 'In space, no one can hear you scream'.) Trying to walk around town is not particularly pleasant - I can imagine it being even worse in summer. My sleeve was caught in the brake handle of a scooter as he zipped past me on the footpath, with near disastorous results. But anyway. You have to walk on the road most of the time in the Old quarter. It's safer.
The french remains and the little nuggets of French cuisine and culture that remain are quite snug in the Vietnamese landscape. Wonderful coffee, cafes, baguettes and bittet, a variation of the french bifstek and chips. A wonderful find.
We headed off to the north west on the train with the nice lady who showed us our seats and took a dollar from me to get me a beer and the obviously missed the train as we headed off to Lao Cai and Sapa, without my beer!
Bac Ha and Can Cau were an amazing experience. It was the first time I have seen so many people wearing their local finery, enbroidered shirts, skirts and aprons in incredible colours and amazing numbers. The Flower Hmong stole the show - the most populous and hospitable of the local peoples (although the Dai would give them a run for thier money in the hospitality stakes).
We spent two glorious rainy mornings trudging around in the mud thourgh the last markets of the year, watching Blacksmiths making plough blades, hoes and rakes, livestock being sold and eaten, incredible arrays of eyecatching coloured material and costume, accoutrements for the horses, corn whiskey everywhere and about 40 big lensed tourists getting up close and personal, all wishing no doubt, that they were working National Geographic. I ended up taking as many photos of foreigners taking photos of locals as of the colourful locals themselves. It was a bit on the outrageous side.
Still we managed to escape all that when we trekked to a Dai village (I only fell in the mud once, which wasnt bad), where we had an incredible meal and slept boys with boys and girls with girls as is the tradition. Of course I did manage to find the one snorer of the valley again, and this time I had to share my duvet with him.
I must have done something terrible in a former life for all this bad Karma.
Ah well, so long as it isnt mosquitoes, I dont mind. well actually I do. But anyway...:)
// posted by Dub @ Friday, January 27, 2006 
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