To Hué and then Away

Can Tho, Thursday, January 16, 2025--We hadn't had good weather till now, mostly cloudy, but we left on Tuesday morning for Hué, the old imperial capital, and the weather decided to turn quite nasty.  It got colder and began to mist and then on Wednesday the heavens decided to open.  Ben had come down with a norovirus that kept him slow and inactive--John caught it yesterday and is over it too.  But though it was raining most of the time, the visit to Hué was fascinating.

The town of about 1,000,000 was the capital from about 1800 to 1945 during the Nguyen (pron:  Win) dynasty.  The last emperor to live there in his French chateau style palace was Bao Dai.  He abdicated in 1955, after the capital had moved to Hanoi.  The city is a bastian of forts and palaces with extensive walls.  Hué also has French style grand boulevards and has a more sophisticated air than Hanoi or Danang.

We walked extensively through the old Imperial citadel, palaces and walls, moats and dragons.  By then it was misting.  We both had our own rickshaws back to the hotel.

Wednesday, the heavens opened and it poured during the time we had to visit a huge pagoda and then the tomb of Minh Mang.  This is a magnificent set of structures, with his mausoleum.  No one has found his body, though; much like a pharaoh it is hidden.

John took a boat ride down the Perfume River before heading back into the city.  He passed on visits to other tombs.  Part of the evening was a music concert with traditional instruments which the small chamber group used to play Happy Birthday!

This morning we got up very early (5 AM) to catch a plane to Saigon and then a three hour bus ride to Can Tho, in the Mekong delta.  It's an old French hotel from colonial days, very pretty.  

Hoi An's new Farmer

 Hoi An, Vietnam, January 13, 2025--Who would believe that Benjamin Diamond, JD, would find a new career!  Well, looks like he did:

Ben was fortunate to be taken under the care of excellent 62-year-old farmer at a Farmers Village in Hoi An, in central Vietnam, not far from our hotel.  His new job probably won't require his presence at the farm often, probably no more than today, but John wonders if the enjoyment he had today will extend to doing remote work in the Washington, DC garden.

The Farmers Village included a lovely reflexology massage, lunch, and an exploration of the farm's herbs garden, suitably be-hatted and smocked.   John learned that chrysanthemum leaves and morning glory leaves can be used in a variety of dishes.  Chrysants go into vegetable dishes like mint or basil, while morning glory leaves can be boiled like spinach or stir-fried with garlic-like sprouts or other Asian veggies.  Looking forward to trying them come Spring when they grow on the fences.

John, on the other hand enjoyed the company of tradition in Vietnam.  Hostesses.

Hoi An, and some occasional sun

Da Nang, January 12, 2025--A morning and afternoon of sight-seeing, and a lunch- time lesson, where, amazingly, John actually learned a new cooking technique!

We bussed into Hoi An, a really cute, but quite touristy town, with an historic center where you even have to pay to enter ON FOOT!  Once in, there are streets of shops, but temples and antique homes, and a really attractive riverfront.  Our guide, Chung, walked us through the town explaining very well the historic value of Hoi An, a major port, even before French times when it was named Touraine.   We had the pleasure of visiting an old home, about three hundred years old, a temple which had an interesting boat lined with tea pots, and a silk factory with its own silk worms. Then we went shopping.

Ben acquired an attractive pair of pull on pants, while John invested in two custom-made cotton sports shirts.  They will all arrive tomorrow at lunch time, measured to fit.  John also bought a water buffalo belt with a very attractive simple buckle and stitched sides.

The main event, though, was the cooking class.  Taught by Miss Vy at a huge restaurant in the old town section, we learned how to make cold spring rolls--a technique John had never mastered, marinate chicken thighs in a variety of spices--omewhat different from Thai and Chinese techniques, and, then make a green mango salad.

John never used green mangoes in a salad before.  The technique is the peel the mango and then slice the somewhat hard fruit into slivers about two inchese long (5 cm) and a quarter-inch (40 mm) across.  Mixed with a variety of spices this gives a crunchy body to the salad.  That would be lost if the mango were ripe.  Miss Vy, about 30, I would think, has been teaching this technique with a fine sense of the theatrical apparently for quite some time.  

Now we are resting.  Nothing going on till about 10:30 tomorrow morning.  Books to read, waves to hear in the background for John and sand for Ben to kick around on the beach.  It's too cold to swim 68F, 20C, and the ocean currents are too strong to swim out in the South China Sea.

Ho Chin Minh and then Danang

 Hanoi, January 11, 2025

An early morning today, to avoid the crowds at the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and presidential home.  We arrive and the lines are a mile long.  In about forty minutes we are marching through the mausoleum, viewing the Lenin-like man in  his glass case.  What a way too spend eternity.  Ben swears that Uncle Ho (as he is called) winked at him.

Apparently he had asked to be cremated, the founder of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s staff had other ideas for their hero. 

He is beautifully mummified, but still a mummy.  His grounds however are quite a site.  They would put many an American billionaire to shame.   

The presidential palace was the home of the French governor-general, all painted a bright ochre yellow, along with other buildings in the compound.   The mausoleum, of course, is Stalinist brutalism.  

Of most interest though is his stilt house.  This is a Frank Lloyd Wright-style structure with a mere single bedroom and office on the raised part and a conference room for meetings  on the ground floor.  It’s not Swiss Family Robinson, but it is certainly simple home for the country’s beloved leader.  And of course, there is the Russian Zil he used.

From there: To Danang, the former US military center mid-coast to Saigon.  The flight was unremarkable, the town has broad avenues with far less unmanageable traffic than Hanoi—which really is quite worn and grubby—and John writes this as he sits on a gray day watching the magnificent waves at the Hyatt Resort and Spa on the beach.  Today we are off to explore Hoi An, an older city founded by the Champa ethnic group, and learn how to cook a Vietnamese lunch.

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Danang, January 12, 2025--Last night’s dinner was superb at the hotel’s Italian restaurant.  An excellent salad, with sun-dried tomatoes, minestrone, and a superb sea bass steak that was so deliciously naturally sweet on a bed of polenta, followed by excellent ice cream.  We joined it with Ben’s choice of a white Bordeaux, semillon-sauvignon blanc, Chateau Foncrose.

After an hour of listening to the waves from our second floor balcony, off to bed.  And a full night of comfortable sleep,.  John is currently listening to birds that sound similar to Australian kookaburras, but perhaps a bit more melodic.

Halong Bay

Hanoi, Saturday, January 11--Yesterday was five hours on the bus, but it was worth it to see the magnificent rock formations in Halong Bay from the deck of tourist boat traveling around them.  They are really quite incredible, though we were told that they are not at their best.

The recent typhoon that trees and split along the roadsides from Hanoi to Haiphong to Halong also damaged the formations.  Most of the bushes and trees that sided them and provided interesting color and variation were blown off, along with moss and lichen as far as we could make out.  This means the formations lack a depth of character that we had expected.  Nonetheless they were worth seeing.  Ben found the caves particularly interesting, some of them raised from the bottom of the sea millions of years ago.

The food on the boat was typically Vietnamese.  The style of presentation is Chinese, with family style dishes that are split among diners.  However the food is interesting in presentation but it is not, in any way, highly spiced.  The dipping sauces also tend to be bland to us whose main knowledge of East and Southeast Asian food is Mandarin and Thai.  Good tasting but not enormously interesting.

Last night we stayed in at the hotel and had pho for dinner.  Very nicely done.  A big bowl of noodles, broth and beef bits for John and chicken bits for Ben.  We found out from a server at breakfast that pho is pronounced, not Po, but pfoe, with a only a slight mention of the p sound.

We are off to our last breakfast at the Westlake Intercontinental, a superb hotel, with a magnificent breakfast buffet of Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Indian tables, and, of course, a Western breakfast chef, which looked so ordinary.  Dragonfruit, by the way, is superb.  We must find it in DC.

The H-towns

January 9, 2025

 Hong Kong and then Hanoi--Hong Kong has been on our bucket list infrequently.  But when a chance to spend a day there appeared because of air schedules, we jumped at the chance.  It’s a magnificent place, very fashionable, and full of good food.  Its transportation system is first class and getting around is relatively easy.  Since most signs are in both English and Chinese it was very easy for us to move around the city.

Our list included a few musts, all of which we accomplished.  First, we had to take the Star Ferry across the harbor.  We did this over and back to Kowloon on the north side from Central on the south.  For 13 cents (HKD 1) it’s a great way to see the city’s skyline and all the activity that goes on in the harbor.  The buildings that make up HK’s skyline are quite magnificent.  From the round windowed skyscraper, that we were told years ago was the tower of 1000 a-holes, to the ads mounted on their tops and their street-side shops, they’re much like any grand city, though slightly different because they are backed by real mountains and sit right at waterside.

 

   

Second, the tram line.  

This runs through downtown with narrow double-deckers.  HKD 1.31 (20 cents) make this a cheap way to get around.  We rode it almost end to end.  The thought was we would ride it to a distant neighborhood and accomplish goal number 3.

Third, find some really good and interesting food.  We did.  A tiny little place that offered magnificent Shanghai style fried dumplings and a tofu dish we’d never encountered.  Start with the tofu:  dark brown, dried and fried, then covered with a fresh mushroom sauce with a deep soy base that might have been oyster sauce.  Then the dumplings:  we enjoyed two of the varieties they offered.  The first was a dumpling with a fried bottom, full of juice (which we got on our clothes unfamiliar with the dish) that was full of a pork ground meat base lightly spiced.  The second, and to John the piece de resistance, was the crab roe dumpling.  We watched the owner make them by hand and then sauté them.  They are sealed, full of juice from the crab roe and full of a fishy crabby caviar taste.  Amazing.  No way to make them at home.  

That done, we felt we had enjoyed our visit with only six hours to accomplish them.  A quick train back to the airport and the hotel and then off to Hanoi.

Hanoi is only 525 miles from HK,  It’s quite different from many cities.   Their are no crowds, no demonstrations, but fashionable young people aboard 12 million scooters, and street activities that are unbelievable.  It is necessary to be careful about what you say in public, but the goal appears always to make as much money from whatever raw materials are available.  This ranges from tiny square footage fronting a sidewalk to the insides of buildings where access is from a 2’-6” corridor.  This was shown by the meal we had for lunch:  egg coffee, fried spring rolls and a half a banh mih each.  The restaurant, the Hidden Gem 

Coffee Shop, in the old French Quarter, takes up three floors of interior space where the decoration is late-high automobile parts—from old car seats, the stools topped with scooter tires, the old bottles reused as light chandeliers.  The coffee, sweet like most things in Vietnam, covered with a frothy confection of condensed milk and egg whites, was great fun—very similar to a caffe Cubano.  The banh mih and the spring rolls outstanding and the atmosphere almost like a car repair shop!

We spent part of the morning at the Hanoi Hilton, the Hoa La prison, where John McCain spent years.  It’s interesting to see how the Vietnamese paint in film and photographs the prison as a model of comfort for  American POWs—much like the Nazis with their showcase concentration camp.  But at the same, it makes the visitor realize the damage done by the war that went on in Vietnam from the time the French returned in 1945 with the exodus of Japanese, and the end of that war and Ho Chi Minh’s victory establishing North Vietnam ….and then the horror of what they call the American War.  Seeing their side was interesting,  much as every country paints its victories in glowing terms!

A visit to the Confucius Memorial was fascinating.  It's the original building for the university founded in the 11th century, now mostly a temple to what seems to be a deified Confucius-

Our tour group are mostly people in their 60s and 70s who remember the Vietnam war well.  One of the group even served here.  This visit stirred up lots of emotions and memories of the draft, anti war protests and more.

A Long and Snowy Road

Hong Kong, January 8, 2025.  

Our plan today is to spend the morning and early afternoon in the center of Hong Kong.  We'll have pictures later today or tomorrow, depending on access to internet. 

Let's say snow can be a detriment to travel.  Instead of leaving Monday, January 6, for Hong Kong, we managed to get two last seats on a flight to Chicago on Sunday night, before the onset of snow that shut down DC.  No snow on departure. but that flight was delayed because American Airlines needed to find a fourth flight attendant before takeoff.  The flight attendant was en route, supposedly from LaGuardia, but didn't arrive before 11 PM (for a 9:39PM departure).  Our backsides began to take on Reagan Airport chair shape.  We arrived tired and warn, but in one piece in Chicago and managed to check into the hotel around 2:30AM CST!  The Hilton at the airport, right there, was fine.

Coming here, Cathay Pacific did its best with its 7800 mile trip from Chicago to Hong Kong.  Ben remarked on looking at the inflight map that we were going east!  Turned out it was east to Lake Michigan then north over Lake Superior, Canada, the Arctic Ocean and south throught Russia, Mongolia and China.  It took 15 hours--the longest flight we've ever taken.

The seats were standard small size, a bit more leg-room than normal, but John's next-door seat-mate was a very large gentleman, about 6'6" and rounder than him.  He barely fit.  A bit tight for all concerned, but we did manage a few hours sleep, probably four, and the food was better than most airline food.

Arrived in Hong Kong about 9 PM, and spent the night at the Regal Hotel which is attached to the airport.  A bit jet-lagged and not too much sleep, but we tried.  Now to find a nibble and then a train to Central.  More to come.