Vietnam and Singapore Travel Log

Choosing a country to visit is an investment. It has short term profits and long term profits. Vietnam is a country that pays off both ways. In the short term it is Asia. That means it is exotic and you will be seeing things you do not understand or expect. That improves the trip. The long term benefits come from how fast the country is changing. As one person put it, every year is like a decade of change. Food is cheap, plentiful, though frequently not quite so polished and good as on gets from Vietnamese restaurants at home. The dollar goes a very long way here. Three dollars for dinner is a lot. $50 for a hotel room and you can expect something very special because the price is unheard of.

There are negatives also. The travel industry has chosen the slogan "Vietnam: Destination for a New Millennium". There are some problems they may have to work on first. Evelyn claims the traffic here is not as bad as Bangkok. Another tourist says the traffic is actually worse here because of the chaos created by the motorscooters. She may have built Bangkok traffic up in her mind. Several people, myself included, do say that India is the standard for problems with the beggars and touts and it is not nearly as bad here. But I may have built up the problem of the India experience up in my mind. India may not be as bad as I remember it in this regard. I would say that Vietnam has a problem in the roads, or lack thereof. Bone-shaking roads in Vietnam are the rule, not the exception. There appears, however, to be a great deal of road repair going on. Another problem is that a Vietnamese accent may be the very toughest accent of any in the world to under English in. "Th" may be pronounced "y," for example. Frequently it is difficult to hear an English sentence and realize it was not spoken in Vietnamese.

I would say that as a travel experience Vietnam is a mixture of India and Thailand. I think Thailand was our best travel experience, India probably our harshest.

But there is an experience that is unique to Vietnam. It is the density of things to experience in some of the cities. One can walk down a Hanoi street and see women yokes and baskets in front of stores that sell DVD players. You can see a thousand years of World History and influences from all over the world. You hear the honking of motorbikes and see the cyclo drivers pushing people with only the power of their legs. You see beggars and Mercedes.

Vietnam has been very badly damaged by leadership that has not been very competent for many centuries. I would like to think they are getting on their feet now. You definitely feel the winds of change.

This log is composed of memories of how things were, facts which are mostly unchecked, and opinions out of my own imagination which has run even more unchecked. This trip was planned and executed by my wife, friend, helper, lover, mentor, and the most capable person I know, Evelyn Leeper.

03/02/01 New Jersey; Flight

Early in any trip log I try to answer the question of why did we pick this particular destination. Since most people do not consider Vietnam much of a vacation place, I will talk about that right up front. Evelyn picked Vietnam knowing that I liked Asia. On the surface Vietnam seemed like a good choice. But the research I did indicated this might be a particularly good time.

It is interesting that that going to Vietnam gets the reaction from people that it does. Americans have a sort of odd feeling toward the Vietnamese people that we have toward nobody else. Not all of us do, but some of us. After all we were embroiled in a long and painful war in Vietnam and militarily we lost, even if politically we won. (I will tell you a little further down why I think we won politically.) There is a sort of a grudge because we were beaten militarily. But if I said we were going to visit Germany or Japan there would not be the same reaction. But there no longer is the feeling that you are dealing with a former enemy in those countries. Not from most people. But then we get a lot of news from those countries. And we can see that they have changed since WWII. We don't get much news from Vietnam so our images of Vietnam come from the 60s. They come from that horrible war. And we think of the whole country as just a 1960s North Vietnam that is now twice as big. And there are certainly forces in Vietnam that want that to be what the country was. But if I read my World Press Review, that is not what is happening in Vietnam these days. Politically the struggle goes on goes on, but the military victory of the 70s became a political defeat in the 80s. Communism in Vietnam is a lost cause. Some Vietnamese pay lip service to socialism these days, but they have to survive in a Free Enterprise world.

When it was just the French or the American military the Vietnamese were fighting, they could use guerrilla warfare, much the same warfare Americans used to defeat the British in the 18th century in our war of independence. And the Vietnamese successfully defeated their enemy that way. But killing Free Enterprise is a different matter. Today there is a Vietnamese stock exchange. It has only four stocks for now, but its mere existence indicates who won the war politically.

There are nearly 80,000,000 people in Vietnam and about half was born after the war. The young people want prosperity, money, and careers. The Communist Party cannot provide that and finds itself outnumbered and in trouble. The symbols that inspired people during the war do not convince the young that Socialism is noble.

The great tragedy of the Vietnam War is not that we were defeated. It is not that we lost so many lives. That is a tragedy, but not the big one. With 58,000 dead Americans lost roughly the same number of lives they lost in three days of fighting at Gettysburg. The tragedy is that we just could not see that militarily we could not possibly win and politically we could not possibly lose. If we had walked away in the first days of our involvement, Vietnam would in all probability have gone the same way. There was in July a trade agreement with the United States cutting tariffs. and things will change quickly in Vietnam after that. That is one reason we want to go now. In 1982 we saw a China that was not there ten years later. The Vietnam we see in 2001 probably will not be there in 2011.

Tourists report that the Vietnamese are surprisingly sanguine toward American tourists. After all we were the enemy in the war. There are a number of reasons why this might be true. For 2000 years their real enemy has been the Chinese who wanted to dominate them. What we consider the Vietnam War was just the punctuation mark at the end of a long war against colonialism. Even during the war Ho Chi Minh told his people that the war was against the US Government, not the US people. That interpretation is further encouraged with the Vietnamese wanting to be helped into the international markets by the Americans. Today their biggest gripe against the Americans might just be "Vietnam is a country, not a war." So Americans are not the ones getting flak from the Communists in power. The Vietnamese who worked with Americans in the war are another story. Until now these people have mostly been kept unemployed. Now the government may be treating them a little better and efforts are being made to attract collaborators who fled the country back. This is just part of the immense changes in Vietnam.

Vietnam is picking up much from American culture including rock music. The standard joke we heard before going was to ask if Hilton had built a hotel near the old Hanoi Hilton POW camp. Actually it is the Hanoi Towers that runs a hotel there. Another account said that things are developing so fast in Vietnam that if you have an office in a building next to an empty lot, You can expect to get the noise of a building going up in next to you. Still foreign investment is not what they would wish. Foreign investors are wary of the traditional Communist bureaucracy.

This is a trip that started having bad luck before it even started. We are doing server transitions at work. Something went wrong. The last day I was not able to get access to my email. I was not able to set up a vacation message for people sending me email. Microsoft Exchange 2000 servers are not getting off to a good start and neither is this trip. Well, a co-worker says she will enter a vacation message for me. But I still missed my last day's email.

We left work at 5pm. The limo was supposed to pick us up at 6:15. Usually they are about 15 minutes early. When this one was ten minutes late I called. I was there about ten minutes while they tried to beep the driver. He's had a flat tire. Without telling anyone he just went about having it fixed. He just wanted to get back on schedule by skipping his 6:15 pick up. The company thought they could get another limo over by about 7. Evelyn did not want to risk being late. We canceled the two limo rides and took our car to Newark airport and long term parking.

We still were there in plenty of time. We wanted Air Singapore in the hopes that they would not have such narrow seats that most international flights have these days. They are known for having better service. Well, what we discovered is that they do indeed have a very high class of service, but they still have a 747 with ten seats across a row. Darn uncomfortable. With ten seats across the aisles are narrow. People keep bumping my elbow.

The first thing new is that everybody gets a little TV screen in the back of the seat ahead. Instead of a few controls in the arm there is a whole remote control unit on a phone cord in the arm of the seat. The passenger has a choice of about 14 different movies or there are also flight status reports and even a videogame or two. There certainly seems to be a recognition that boredom is really what people hate most about air travel.

As soon as you are in the plane they give you an Amenity Kit including socks, a toothbrush and toothpaste. The seats also have a pulldown foot rest like buses often have.

I probably dozed off at the time of takeoff.

I woke for the meal: Braised chicken with pineapple and ginger, egg noodles, salad, cheese and crackers. I thought the food was not bad. They needed a sweet of some sort to finish the meal. A few minutes later they came around with Klondyke bars, basically a very good ice cream bar without the stick. With the meal I figured how to use the controls well enough to watch OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU. Sporadically it is a very funny film.

03/03/01 Flight; Schiphol

After dinner I fell asleep on THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE. I was trying to write and watch at the same time and gave justice to neither the movie nor the log. I woke up to a small breakfast of roll and muffin.

After breakfast the film was THE SIXTH DAY, and Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi film, supposedly about cloning. They got the concepts all wrong and ended up with a technological INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. The film never had time to complete. About 77 minutes into the film they collected earphones and we started landing at Schiphol outside Amsterdam.

I notice that Singapore Airlines has taken as their symbol the kris. A kris is a Malay dagger usually with a wavy blade or an angular handle. Their Singapore's magazine is KrisWorld. Their duty-free catalog is Kris Shop, their phone service id KrisFone. But nowhere do they have an image of a Kris.

Evelyn decided to stay on the plane and sleep. I left her on the plane and went to explore Schiphol airport. Might as well do everything we can. It is a pleasant airport. What struck me as unusual were the flower shops. I never see flower shops in American airports. Also there are clocks up. American airports no longer put of clocks, to avoid legal responsibility, I guess.

They hand out hot towels. In the cramped space I had dropped a piece of chicken on my shirt at dinner. The hot towels have other uses after you have freshened up.

As we get east the snacks on the plane get more Asian. They hand out Japanese snack crackers with fried peas and beans. It is just a touch of Asian and it even is junk food, but I am getting anxious. Most cuisines are good, but I have a particular taste for East Asian foods.

Lunch was filet of flounder, salad with anchovies, Gouda and crackers, and creme d'caramel. It was fairly good. All the fish reminds me of AIRPLANE!.

I am living now on destination time and at this writing that makes this 10:43 PM. I watched THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE reading a news magazine at the same time and even dropping off to sleep a little. It is really the sleep I want. I have not gotten a whole lot of sleep. As for watching movies on a plane, I would rather watch a film I have already seen. Even with conditions as good as they are on this plane, it is not ideal. BAGGER VANCE is a mystical parable and is also a bit sanctimonious. That means conditions have to be right for it to work. Watching it on a plane you can see just enough to see what it was trying to do, but not if it did it. I had some misty moments and some moments when I felt it was talking down to me. Would the film have worked in a theater? Now I will never know. I admit I am not that keen on golf or any sport. Some sports films transcend being about a sport. That was true of THE NATURAL starring Robert Redford. It is certainly what Robert Redford, the director, was trying to do with this film. My advice is don't watch a film you might like for the first time on a plane.

Somehow on a Singapore Air flight you eat and watch a lot of movies. It is like a Toronto International Film Festival in which you miss the beginning of every film. And the films are not as good.

Well, so we don't waste this time, how about if I say more about Vietnam. The name is Viet (Distant or foreign) Nam (South).

In the early 19th century the emperor wanted to name the country Nam Viet Dong. This was the name the kingdom had in ancient times. But naming the country required the approval of the Chinese court. Remember for 2000 years Vietnam, whatever its current name, was under the thumb of the Chinese. The Chinese balked remembering that China had taken two provinces of the ancient Nam Viet Dong and restoring the name might lead to restoring the country. They counter-proposed the name Viet Nam. That is the Far South.

03/04/01 Flight; Singapore Airport; HCM City

It is now about 4:45 AM Hanoi time. More time spent eating, sleeping, watching. Breakfast is a choice of omelette or seafood noodles. Guess which I chose. Sadly they have about equal flavor, though I am guessing on the omelette.

A steward asked how we liked the noodles. We said they were OK. I thought I quietly said to Evelyn that they could have had more flavor. He must have had acute ears since he heard me. He said in Singapore the food would be much better. We said we would be there for three days at the end but were going to Vietnam. He has been there often and like it. He liked the food, the price, and the nature. Just talking to him brought back memories of Thailand. Just being on the street is exciting there.

We landed at Singapore at 5:45 Hanoi time. That is 6:45 local time so we must have gone further East than Vietnam and will go west to Saigon. Everybody calls it Saigon, though the current regime officially calls it Ho Chi Minh City. I suspect that like St. Petersburg the name will eventually go back to what people like to call it. The name Leningrad was even easy to say. Ho Chi Min City takes too long to say. Perhaps they should have called it Hoville or just Ho. I doubt that George Washington City would still be called George Washington City. It would have gone back to being Columbia or DC. The name George was left out. Of course the communist regime felt it could not shorten Ho's name. Communism generally represents the victory of the practical and the logical over human nature. The State needs Ho's full name and they need the city name to be changed as a constant reminder of Ho's victory. But whenever you fight against nature, human or otherwise, without vigilance nature starts encroaching back. Eventually the jungle out there will come back. The city will probably be called Saigon again.

We have two hours wait until our next flight takes off. We have been traveling for 23 hours now. There were times I wished the flight was over, but there was not the usual boredom. We currently have landed and people are getting up. I told Evelyn that we have two hours, we can just sit and wait rather than get in someone else's way. Even if we end up just sitting and waiting in the airport, we will be able to stretch out a little. Right now I feel a little tired and a little full.

OK, we are in the airport. No special flavor to the decor. It could be in the US. Now I see a Chinese herb store. In a center section there are some tropical plants. The bookstore is W.H.Smith, popular in English colonies and former English colonies. Our gate is not open yet so we staked out some seats outside of it and I went off in search of a rest room and water fountain. The sign over the restroom says "Drinking water." We are in a part of the world where a distinction is made between drinking water and non-drinking water. I must be careful, though it really is fairly easy.

I see some Singapore Air stewardesses walk by. The uniform is a wraparound silk skirt and a silk blouse. The wraparound skirt frequently shows the leg to fairly high up. It makes the passing stewardess more--shall we say--distracting. A former co-worker said that in Vietnam there are a lot of women half French, half Vietnamese, a combination that tends to make women distracting. Also there are a lot of Indians, the women in traditional dress. But mostly you see Western dress. (I don't mean cowboy.)

I hear over and over the public address system paging tone. It is a chime that is the same three bars and tempo that begin the bittersweet "Karen's Theme" from EXODUS. Since they play the tones every couple of minutes or so, I cannot get the melody out of my head. The way the announcer says Malaysia Airline it keeps sounding like Militia Airlines.

I am reading about possible scams. Apparently there is begging and a lot of people trying to get kickbacks. Hopefully this will not be as much of a problem as it was in India.

I see some people waiting who look distinctly Vietnamese. They are a little darker than Chinese and more compactly built. Frequently there is sort of an intense look.

The flight is not for another hour but there is a lineup for the gate. They let us in and put us through the metal detector. Now we are in the waiting room. I would chew gum, but I am not sure it is entirely legal in Singapore. I am told it is no longer as illegal, but why chance it? The TV seems to running some sort of variety show. Somebody is wearing humorous cardboard cutouts that illustrate the music. A Dolly Parton song is illustrated by a big busty blond on a horse. Earlier there was an image of King Kong on the Empire State Building.

On the plane there is a lot of effort by the crew to get baggage to fit overhead.

We took off about 9:00. Next stop is Vietnam. I nodded off a little and woke when they served breakfast. It was omelette or something with chicken. They called it radish cake or carrot cake. I don't get a lot of comfort from so-called comfort foods and chose the carrot cake. The material they were describing I know better as turnip cake. I have gotten I fried in Dm Sum restaurants where I try to impress the servers by calling it Lo Ba Goh. This is the first I have seen it out of a dim sum restaurant. It is beige and has a consistency closest to jelled cranberry sauce. To me the taste is like turkey stuffing. If that sounds repellent, I am not describing it well. Most people whom I introduce to it at dim sum order it repeatedly.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw the pronunciation of a Vietnamese word. It is spelled with a D. But the note said that the D is pronounced Y in one part of the country and Z in the rest. Nowhere is it pronounced D. Why is the phonetic spelling D? I have no idea. I worked with a Vietnamese man. I always had a great deal of difficulty making out what he was saying. I once asked him to write out a word he was saying. On paper it was a very familiar word. I asked him to pronounce it again and I was totally unrecognizable. I could never find out why he pronounced it that way. Now I know. He would pronounce DEAD as YEAY. I am concerned this will make communication difficult. It was a serious problem with the man I worked with. Nobody could work with him effectively and he eventually had to find other work.

We landed about 10:37 AM. We have been traveling 28 hours but the time just does not seem real. We are sitting on the runway waiting for a gate. The ground around the airport looks like prairie. We see where small building are being built, mostly of utilitarian poured concrete. The runway seems in large part to be under construction.

We disembark. The passport check is slow and controlled by decidedly unfriendly officials. Whether you are single or with a group you come through one at a time. After I have gone through and Evelyn comes and the official tells me I am standing too close to his desk, even if it is on the other side of the gate.

Then we have to turn in our customs declarations. The lines are long. In front of us in one line a tiny attractive aunty from another country fauns over a niece and nephew who struggle to pull away. We find a line that is moving faster. They x-ray our luggage one more time as we leave and we are through customs. Coming out there is a crowd of about 500 people waiting for arrivals. Some hold up signs, some gaily wave to relatives as they come out. We are supposed to be met by a driver from the Giant Dragon Hotel. We look all around for 10 minutes and he appears not to be there. We pull to the side to wait. Evelyn does not want to take a taxi. It seemed to me from the beginning that a taxi is our only choice. I like to quote the factoid that only 37% of all rendezvous work out as planned. I hasten to add that the statistic is a total fabrication. There is no data behind it at all. But nobody ever tells me it seems inaccurate. Intuitively people think it is about the right number. After about 15 minutes of standing in the heat, Evelyn agrees. A cab says it will take us for $10 American. We are obviously over a barrel. It is probably a rip-off, but $10 is certainly reasonable by standards we are used to.

The roads are filled with cars motorbikes, and bicycles, all honking horns. They love honking horns. The loudest honk wins. On the motorbikes and bicycles nobody wears head protection. Two parents and a child may ride one motorbike and none are protected. Some wear kerchiefs over their nose and mouth.

Much of the city looks like a big run-down neighborhood. Buildings look abandoned, some while being built. But the city goes on. You see old women in traditional cloths and shallow conical straw hats.

Any building for something scientific has the name of some famous scientist. There is the Louis Pasteur Institute and another one named for Marie Curie.

We get to the Giant Dragon, sign in, and go to our room. It has a nice couch and a refrigerator. In addition to the air conditioner there is a fan that helps a lot. The plumbing all seems to work. The toilet flushes toilet paper. It is a large room for $40/night. The TV gets CNN and MTV but not much entertaining. The bellboy tell us that $10 was really too much for the cab.

Evelyn wants to take a nap until it cools off outside. She sleeps from about noon to four when I wake her up. I had slept an hour myself. At about 4:30 we go out to walk the streets. With shop-houses, armadas of motorbikes, kids touting on the street, pedidcab drivers offering to pedal us somewhere. While the area looks low-rent it seems to be thriving economically. One tout asks us if we want to buy a string hammock.

I buy a collection of stories by Roald Dahl.

We check out a shop that has tours and then look for a restaurant recommended in the book. It is about a ten-minute walk. It is worth your life to cross a street. The restaurant is the Le Lai. We find it and it is just another humble shop house. It is probably run by one family. There were three people sitting around but when they see us they spring into action. while everyone was sitting around, as we each pick a dish. I have braised mushrooms with squid, Evelyn has chicken braised in citronella and hot pepper. Actually we share both. We ordered Coke. The waiter came back in a few moments trying to tell us something we could not understand. I picked up the words Coke and ended. "They are out of Coke," I tell Evelyn. We tried to order a local brand of soda, but end with 7up.

The problems we have eating the chicken are ones we had eating chicken in China. Bugs and bones. This is an open shop house so the food attracts some flying insects. Chicken is cut up like a loaf of bread without regard to bones. Let the eater beware. That makes the squid a lot easier to eat. Incidentally the rice is really the main part of the meal. The dish is really a topping. It is like vanilla ice cream and hot fudge. The table has a napkin dispenser which really dispenses toilet paper. That saves money. They also have condiments of garlic, scallion, and hot pepper. There is also a sauce, probably soy, but it might be their fish sauce. They serve fruit for desert. Then they put a bunch of extras on the bill. I am not going to get up tight. The meal comes to a total of 64,000D. That is about $4.60 for a complete meal. It is 14,000D to the dollar. That is pronounced "fourteen thousand Dong."

Back near the hotel we book a tour and buy some water and bring it back to room. Back in the room I pull out the Dahl book and fin out quickly it is a brazen bootleg and there are pages out of order. The cover is a complete mess of photocopying a Penguin Books cover. They even cut off the Penguin's head.

I suggested to Evelyn we could put on the news and break out the water. "Let's party." It is now almost 9:00 and the street below is filled with honking cars and motor bikes.

I am trying to stay awake to a reasonable hour but keep dozing off for seconds.

03/05/01 HCM City, Mekong Delta

There are two or three portable lights in the room. They are all unplugged and placed where they are mostly for decoration. If you try to plug them in, and you have to unplug something to do that, the bulbs are burned out or for some other reason they do not work. I say for some other reason because there is a complex scheme of power switches that have to be in the correct position for things to work.

These logs frequently have discussions of what I am thinking as I travel and the thought frequently are negative on problems created by misguided religious beliefs. Let me weigh in on the side of religion on this one. There was a story on CNN about the Weigh Down religious diet. The AMA is negative on it. I poked fun at the concept of a religious diet in a previous log. I have investigated it since and I think that the AMA is being cynical and hypocritical to oppose this one. The Weigh Down diet the world's simplest diet packed with some religious folderol. The diet is simply this, if you are not hungry, don't eat. Mouthful by mouthful, take a new mouthful only of your stomach tells you to. This is extreme common sense but it requires a lot of willpower. The willpower is where the religion comes in. They say that whether your stomach says it is hungry or not comes from God and it dishonors him to eat when you are not feeling you need to. God will reward you in the next life if you just listen to your stomach. But, as I say, the diet requires willpower. One thing I will say for religion, it gives one willpower. In the Crusades it gave people the willpower to march across Europe and get involved in wars they did not understand. That took incredible willpower. Using religion as the motivation in dieting is a smart move.

I slept pretty well. I woke up a few times but got back to sleep quickly. Evelyn was up for an hour.

The big news story yesterday and today is about the Taliban's plans to destroy some colossal Buddha's in their country, Afghanistan. When I was growing up there was a woman who we knew who before Passover would follow the precise word of the law and collect the last chumetz in the house, take it to the end of her driveway, and burn it there. She wanted everybody on the street to see her piety. It may not have been her only motivation, but it made it more worthwhile. The more international attention the Taliban gets, the more likely it is they will go ahead and do the action.

For breakfast we found a street merchant selling soup. There are restaurants everywhere you look, or street merchants. We had a clear soup with noodles and chicken, bean sprouts, carrots and raw greens. The condiments were seasoning sauce, red pepper slices, and limes. The lime juice really transformed the flavor. Price for two soups 10,000. That is about 36 cents each.

We were done in plenty of time so we thought we would top off breakfast with something to drink. I got a mango shake and Evelyn got iced coffee with milk.

As in much of Asia you do see that people are not so shy about when they do in public. You see people on the street cleaning out their noses. You just look the other way. The place we stop for drinks is mostly a tourist stop. My shake will cost more than the soup, but still only about 56 cents. It is quite good even if not authentic Vietnamese. Ah, the shake is good. The straw keeps jamming because there is a lot of real fruit in the shake.

Our destination today is them Mekong Delta. Vietnam is a scythe-shaped country as if someone tried to buy up all the waterfront property on the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea. It widens toward the bottom to form a triangular piece of land jutting into the South China Sea like a small India. This is the Mekong Delta. Whether it is a delta literally or just called a delta because it is triangular I am not sure. The Mekong river does have a delta, but the triangle of land called the delta is much bigger.

The bus came on time and our guide is Pha. (It must be Pha, though he says it is part of the musical scale. Do. Re. Mi. Fa.) He is a bit of a character and since we are right near him in the bus we can throw him lines. He said we had to leave two people behind because they were late. I gave him a thumbs up and said "Right decision." His English accent rates an unusual A- for clarity. Vietnamese have varying degrees of clarity. Many try to speak English and are very hard to understand. Vietnam has very low standards for English elocution. This is NOT to make fun or deride anyone. Some languages are very different from English, some are not. German and Hebrew have a guttural "ch" Americans have to learn. There may be many sounds in English that are not in Vietnamese. In addition Vietnamese is a tonal language and English is not. This makes it very hard. I may not really good at picking out words, but I find native speakers of Vietnamese the hardest to understand when they speak English.

To give you an example of the problem, this string of letters was seen in a museum. "oet mo len" If spoken it would be pretty much the way it is spelled. "o-et mo len". But it is not supposed to be Vietnamese. That is English with a Vietnamese accent. What is it?

I guess I will rate guides as A if I can make out every word they say as well as talking to an American. An F accent is one where you cannot tell for sure that it is English they are speaking. I do this not to make fun of these people, but as a measure of an aspect of the tour that really is important to the consumer, but that just about no tour books talk about. But with Pha it is not really a problem.

Oh, what is "oet mo len?" That was one of their enemies during the war against the Americans. That was the surname of William Westmoreland. But in conversation a Vietnamese will be speaking English and much of the conversation will be that far off. No other accent I have ever heard is so impenetrable.

Pha says that food is now very cheap in Vietnam and that is making for prosperity. He says that after a hot day he goes to a supermarket and just walks around for the air conditioning.

Motorbikes were expensive, about $2000 before. Now they get Chinese motorbikes, $550 and there are so many they are causing a pollution problem. They are taxing gasoline to control the pollution. You see a lot of people wearing surgical style masks, maybe in plaid. This is to counter dust and pollution.

We pass a military statue. I ask about it and it is a statue of Lei Lai, a hero of 200 years ago. That must be why the streets are called Lei Lai. The biggest religion is Buddhism, followed by Catholicism. Cao Dai religion is strong, though not that big.

We have to stop the bus. The air conditioning has gone out. It takes about 20 minutes to get it fixed. I guess in the heat it is important.

Snake wine is popular. 90 proof rice wine with a snake in each bottle.

We see a lot of small white tombs by themselves. They are graves on private property. You put a grave on your own land it makes it easy to visit. Also it is a strategy for keeping the young on farms. The land has much less sale value with a grave on it.

Much of the way we are passing restaurants and public establishments. It takes a long time to get to an area that seems really rural. Eventually we get to some farm land.

As we go through the countryside there are motorbikes on the shoulders and truck ands busses on the roads. As we approach any tight places the bus driver has the horn singing out to warn others that we are a really big bus. We are frequently on the wrong side of the road negotiating the way. A loud horn here and now is more powerful than a traffic law in some book.

Some chickens you see here have really nice plumage. You rarely see that in the states. Here "free range" means all over yards, occasionally the roads, and sometimes under tires.

There was a 20-minute stop at a Bonsai park/zoo/topiary. As we get off the bus there are kids trying to sell postcards, but they take no for an answer. There were pythons, spider monkeys, and several breeds. We talked to an American couple, Mark and Debbie, now living in Japan. Make is a couple of years older than me. He said he was nearly drafted but as he put it his father bought him out. I am not sure how he did that. I had a low draft number and was very nearly drafted. I didn't get drafted because my year of eligibility was 1972, an election year. Nixon kept the draft numbers really low to improve his chances of winning. That was the year he also did other dubious things to get elected. I commented that in some ways it would have been nice to see the world at that time. The other Mark says not to think that way. People really had their minds screwed up by that war. I have known some people who went who did not get screwed up and who clearly held their balance. But there were certainly those who came back a little funny. I think generally we fought World War II honorably. We just were caught off balance by a dirty guerrilla war. Our first responsibility was to win, but we used tactics unthinkable 25 years earlier. Evelyn was telling me about an exchange of commanders. I forget who they were. The American pointed out that the US never lost a battle. The other pointed out "Yes, but that is pretty irrelevant, wasn't it." We won the battles, they won the war, and we won the fate of the country. I guess unlike what will probably happen in Cuba, Communism outlived its founder by some years. But Communism is surviving only by making monstrous compromises to free enterprise.

We went overboard because we were afraid that Communism was going to beat out capitalism. We still are. The truth is it was only half-hearted in ever trying. We built up the threat in our minds. Nikita Krushchev said "We will bury you." He meant only that Communism will still be around when Capitalism dies. We interpreted it he was saying his country's economic power would crush ours. He liked to brag, but I am told he never meant the other meaning, but we interpreted it as a call to war. Communism was aggressive, especially in Southeast Asia, but when we were afraid of the domino effect, we were the ones over-rating it. Systems that turned to try Communism did so because they were rotten on the inside. When we fought Communism we were fighting the symptom, not the ill.

We see a lot of young women in the traditional "ao dai." This is a silk pants-suit. It is silk pants and a floor length tunic split up the side. It is warn with the conical hat. Quite attractive.

You see some Communist posters reminding you that there is still a state ideology, but it is a pretty loose form of Communism. Thank goodness. There seems to be less muscle behind the Communists and they have to loosen their grasp.

We get to the boat dock and get off the bus. We have a few minutes of standing around. I go to the street to take a picture and turn around to find the group is leaving without me. I rush to get a seat as everybody gets on the boat.

We are first going up river to see Dragon Island. Islands in the Mekong river are given animal names, real and fanciful. There is Dragon Island, Phoenix Island, Tortoise Island, and Tiger Island. We go upriver and take a look at Dragon Island, then down to Unicorn Island. Dragon Island is residential and has a large number of houses right on the water. I mean right on the water. Or a foot above it. These are houses on stilts. There is no dry land to build anything on.

The houses look a little ramshackle by most standards. But they hold off the forces of nature. On these islands boats are how people get around and each home has a boat and the ferry is the major form of mass transit.

Continuing to Unicorn Island we find a rendezvous spot and in groups of four are taken by rowers in smaller boats. The path takes us through in-land channels six or eight feet wide, with high growth of vegetation on either side. Frequently the two sides grow together on either side forming a tunnel. It gives a very mysterious mood to the travel, reminiscent of the movies about the war. It felt like we were in something like APOCAPLYPSE NOW. After about 20 minutes we form up again and walk over the land to a pavilion where locals come to here traditional Vietnamese music played on Chinese instruments. The real purpose was to get us to buy music tapes, candy, etc. That we were given samples of. By general consent we missed the point. This is music from a very different tradition from what we are used and while we were willing to clap enthusiastically it was probably more out of politeness. I have a couple of dozen cassettes of similar music at home and I listen trying to get used to it and to understand it, but I have no gotten to a state that I understand much.

After a walk a little further in we went to another pavilion and were served lunch of Spring Rolls, soup, and vegetables. The nifty thing about the meal is that we were unsure how to eat it. It was not clear what went into the soup and what was to be eaten separately.

After lunch we visited another small zoo associated with the pavilion and saw gibbons, turtles, and a cobra. Following that we returned to the original boat and the main waterway of the Mekong.

We went to the side of the river opposite where we started and went onto this Mainland where we trudged on a path through more tropical growth. Our next stop was a coconut candy factory. To say they wanted to show us how coconut candy was made is a bit of an exaggeration. Pha took us around to two or three station and showed us where the coconut milk was boiled down, where the next room where it was poured in strips, cut, and hand-wrapped. And of course there were opportunities to sample the candy, other kinds of candy, and banana wine, and to purchase any of the above. The most interesting piece was the wrapping table. Pieces of candy were hand-cut by knife and dropped on a table like chips at a casino. Five girls sat around the table, each with a straight stick. With the stick they would pull candy to themselves. They would grab a wrapper and with a fast very mechanical motion they would have a piece wrapped in under what must have been about a second. It must be incredibly mind-numbing work.

Evelyn and I had never had had fresh coconut so we bought one. The price must have been under $.25. Coconut milk is well-named. I had had it in cooking, and thought I knew what it tasted like, but this tasted a lot like cow's milk. Perhaps a little sweeter. And there was a lot of milk in the coconut. I think it must have been about 12 ounces at least. When we were done they cut open the coconut and ate the contents. Eaten this way the meat is soft and moist, like a lychee nut. Actually it is also somewhat reminiscent of egg white in a fried egg.

After we were done there it was a half-mile walk to the boats. Motor-scooters came along the narrow path and happy to find something on the road that they outranked, honked their horns loudly. These were motorized boats. It is surprising how many different boat we rode in the tour. And again we went down narrow channels. We hit a branch overhead and the plastic canopy over our heads collapsed and we had to straighten the stiff cable arches that held it in place.

Bee farming is the next demonstration. Most of what keeps this going is the natural fear people have of bees. A boy pulled wooden frames out of a case. They were about one inch by eight inches by twelve inches. Each held a slice of beehive that could barely be seen because it was solidly covered with bees. The boy offered to let us touch the hive and only Evelyn volunteered at first. Eventually we each did and each got a taste of honey on his finger. The boy looked to try to find the queen to point out to us, but could not. I made the comment that these must be masterless bees, ronin. One of the Japanese girls on the tour said something to the other with the word "ronin" in what she said.

They served us tea with honey and what might have been little oranges maybe an inch and a half in diameter that tasted like limes. A bee flew into a cup of hot tea and saving it became the center of attention at our table. People insisted on calling it "he" even though we had just been told that the male bees do not forage.

There was more walking in the tropical area until we got into motorized boats and again when through the channels in the foliage. By now it was about 3:30 and I turned to Evelyn and asked her how long did it feel like we had been in Vietnam. A lot more than a day. 24 hours earlier we had gone from the airport to the hotel room and Evelyn was still napping.

We docked with the big boat that crossed the river and headed back to the dock and the bus. Next stop was the Vinh Trang Pagoda, an old and respected temple. We entered and looked at the carvings and decoration. There was a monk chanting in a way that was oddly hypnotic. Another monk bantered with us. He served us tea. The Buddhists certainly have the Serenity thing down pat. However walking to and from the temple is anything but serene. Aggressive touts, children mostly, try to sell postcards and caps. Back on the bus one of the women says it was like being in India again. I made a face and said the touts were far more aggressive in India.

It was better than a 100-minute ride home on the bus and I must have been tired. The honking of the bus really started to irritate me. Whenever there was anyone around who remotely challenged our bus's dominance of the road, our bus would trumpet a warning.

The whole day exclusive of drinks with lunch and guide tip cost $7/person. Australia advertises the American dollar goes a long way there. Try Vietnam.

The tourist place is just around the corner from our hotel so we went back to room to freshen up. We did get a station that though usually in Vietnamese, picks up movies from HBO and Cinemax. I was not desperate enough to watch a police action film that had Chou Yung Fat on the NYPD.

At 7pm we go to dinner. After looking around we found a small place and ordered nearly identical dishes. I had noodles with seafood, Evelyn had crispy noodles with seafood.

After dinner we went to some bookstores hoping to get phrasebook or tourist books. One place offered us two copies of the Lonely Planet Vietnamese Phrasebook. One was 15,000D one was 70,000D. (Lonely Planet is the most popular publisher of guides to Asia. They have a big thick book on Vietnam and smaller associated books like this phrasebook, or rather the book it was photocopied from.) I was surprised to see how brazenly they showed side-by-side a real copy and a bootleg. I guess they have not signed the copyright agreement and bootlegs are perfectly legal here. The real problem with the bootlegs is on some they use cheap paper and the ink goes right through the page and leaves a ghost image on the other side. They are actually nicely bound in signatures, not pages glued in place like some cheap books in the US.

Back at the room Evelyn zonked almost immediately. I wrote for a while but was really too tired to write well.

03/06/01 HCM City: War Museums

I was up at about 5am. Evelyn had already been up for a half hour and was in the process of going back to sleep. I appreciated the time to get caught up in my log. I do my best writing just after I wake up. Last night it was hard to get a paragraph out before having to shift position or nod off.

About seven we went to the restaurant just outside the door of our hotel. The selection is disappointing, mostly gringo food. Sometimes strange gringo food. Hot dog for breakfast??? I think we have to go a little further afield.

A kid with the party at the next table plops herself down at our table, still facing her mother. Then she sees the computer and that fascinates her for a little while.

The noodle soup comes and it is Raman like we get at home. I am less than impressed. I think we have to walk a bit more if we want decent food. Actually the next table they got baguette and jam. I think I prefer to eat Asian, but that does not look bad. You see a lot of venders selling baguettes.

The people at the table next to us are having a conversation in boisterous conversation in German. As yet we se few Americans here.

The little girl, who may be a little retarded from the way she acts, walks up behind me and puts an elbow on my shoulder and watches me type. Evelyn is more nervous about this sort of thing than I am. As I get older I get more patient with children.

Our first stop is the War Remnants Museum. Evelyn is not sure she wants to go. It promises to be a guilt trip. We walk which is always a bit of a problem in Vietnam. There seems to be very little effort to keep walkways clear. Walking down the street is a process of constant zigzagging and looking for open spaces. it is safer than crossing streets, but still a constant effort. It is however, really dangerous to cross streets. No provision is made for pedestrian crossing hat I can tell. You wait for it to look safe for you. On busy streets it takes some courage. It never looks safe. There is a policeman conducting traffic on one busy street by hand-controlling lights. But there never is a safe time to cross. He watches concerned as we cross weaving around motorbikes. I make a face of relief when I get to the far side. Generally on corners I try to cross with a local and watch his or her feet. If I watched for traffic I would lose my nerve in the middle and be really stuck. Evelyn is trying to decide if the traffic in this city is better or worse than that in Bangkok which for years she has been telling people is the worst in the world. I don't remember Bangkok traffic that well.

So we make it on foot to the War Remnants Museum. This is a strange museum. It was originally designed for propaganda purposes to show how powerful and evil an enemy the Vietnamese people overcame. Then they started accepting donations from the powerful evil enemy to also show how terrible was their experience. They have decided to follow a lead supposedly from Ho to say that Americans as well as Vietnamese were victims of this terrible war and the US soldiers were victims of their own war machine. At times there is almost a GETTYSBURG sort of feel that both sides were noble victims.

As you enter you walk through a garden of nasty looking pieces of American war equipment including tanks, planes, and the centerpiece is a seismic bomb. This looks like something out of a Japanese sci-fi film that you would drop on the Mysterians. All the equipment is labeled with every caption having a propaganda twist. Well this was their war of independence and like our Revolution, they want to make themselves out as the David who slew the Goliath. Hence they make the most of this formidable weapons display. In the indoor portion the first room you enter gives a history of the war against the French and the Americans. The second room is dedicated to war atrocities. Most effective is the photos of deformed babies and actual babies in jars showing horrible birth defects putatively the result of chemical bombing. There are horrific pictures of burns from napalm. Pictures of people injured by fragmentation bombs.

There was a report of atrocities said to be taken from the January 19, 1970 issue of Life Magazine. One problem: that issue of Life Magazine never existed. Life Magazine I remember always came out and was dated on Friday. In any case that was certainly true in 1970. The idea was it was a magazine to linger over on the weekend. They have a cover of a different issue of Life in another room from 1964 and it has a date that was a Friday. January 19, 1970 was a Monday. [Postscript: I have found an ad for a used January 23, 1970 issue of Life magazine confirming that 1970 issues were dated on Fridays.]

The third room was devoted to weapons, mostly guns. This does not tell a whole lot.

The fourth room was devoted to photography of the war. Much was from Life Magazine. By a ratio of ten to one the photos were of Americans. This room is funded by American countries to document the American experience.

On the wall are lists of some of the dead from each side. After being so negative on the Americans the museum's tone becomes one of what a terrible event this was for both sides. It is true that I was negative on the war.

I was part of a generation on the right side of this conflict in large part for the wrong and the most selfish reasons. Sure, if we were sent to Vietnam it would damage and possibly destroy our lives. And that is assuming it did not kill us. But deep down there was also the feeling many of us had that we really were on the wrong side. And certainly that was the reason we claimed we were against the war. We could not distinguish what protest was done for the wrong reasons, what was done for the right reasons. It was convenient to pretend it was all for the right reasons. We could not tell the difference then and we still cannot. In the end all our motives were suspect and we probably should have done more protesting anyway. Chance had made the selfish side the side of good. And I did not protest more because I suspected my own motives.

Next stop is the Reunification Palace. There was originally a palace built here for the Governor General of French Indochina. It was built from 1868 to 1870. In 1954 the French gave it up to the Vietnamese on their exit. It became the residence of President Diem. In a coup attempt in 1962 the palace was bombed from the air and partially destroyed. The building had to be completely destroyed and rebuilt. Diem was eventually assassinated, but it became the palace of the ruling Saigon regime. On April 30, 1975 the forces of North Vietnam had taken the city and a tank crashed through the front gate as a major photo-opportunity seen around the world. A guide with a translucent accent took us around and showed us the sights. I would rate her accent a D.

There are a lot of people who think they speak English clearly who are very hard to understand and I think the problem is worse in Vietnam than other places.

This is nice and reasonably ornate and attractive but except for radio rooms for intelligence beneath the building, there is nothing much out of the ordinary to concern the reader. I mean, do you really need to hear it has dining rooms and libraries? From the roof we could see a small zoo on the side including a bear.

When the tour was over we saw a video recounting in English the war from the current regime's point of view. There was mention on how bad the war was on the Americans.

The Palace closes at 11 for lunch, but we exited somewhat later. We went to a pavilion near the zoo and wrote in our logs for a while drinking soda and taking a time-out to visit the bears and the monkey. These tiny zoos are depressing prisons for animals in small cages. The monkey sits watching the birds as his only entertainment and occasionally gives out a howl of despair. What a symbol of liberation! Small zoos seem to be very popular. this is the third one I have seen. How the world dearly loves a cage.

Our next stop is the Revolutionary Museum. On our way we stop at the Post office to pick up a gift for a friend. On the way out a tout tries to sell us some stamps and I think they will make a nice gift so I get a set. A cyclo driver sees this and decides we are easy marks. He latches on to us and keeps following us, in spite of our repeatedly saying no. (A cyclo is like a rickshaw crossed with a bicycle. They are very popular as a mode of transport.)

We continue to the Revolutionary Museum. We think the museum does not open until 2 PM, 15 minutes away. And we don't want a 15 minute sales pitch from the cyclo driver. I suggest we try to go into the public park. Perhaps they are not allowed to bring cyclos into the park. I don't know what he is allowed but he follows us with a friend now. Are we going to the Revolutionary Museum? It is open, you know. Do you want an hour ride for $2? We go to the museum. Sure enough the driver was right and it was open. In we went.

The Revolutionary Museum is now also a city museum. The downstairs is a city museum. The lower level features minerals, items of local interest, and horribly mis-taxidermised animals. The taxidermy was so bad that if the animal's family sued in the States it would have been awarded millions for malpractice. I stood and cruelly laughed at a poor unfortunate deer who looked like his head had been pulled through a bottle. The problem is that first the taxidermist seems to have changed the shape of the heads, then generations of hands have worn part of the faces away. Across the way was a room of statues of the Buddhas. There were also a nice lion and a tiger, but the pieces were mostly Buddhas.

Upstairs most of the exhibits were more related in one way or another to the wars Vietnamese fought against the US and France. The exhibit starts with a boat made tall with false bottom. That would make it ride high on the water and would be suspicious. It needed weapons as ballast to look normal. This made it a perfect blockade runner.

A lot of the things were perfectly normal objects that were given a war context. There was a sewing machine used for flags. How do we know it was used for sewing flags. Well, you don't. There were some things that were obvious war materials, but a lot probably were not. There is a little display showing hill tribesmen happily and industriously making weapons for the Viet Cong.

(Side note: "Viet Cong" began as a derogatory term. It mutated to "VC," "Victor Charlie," and "Charlie." Eventually the people themselves took it as a mark of pride and it lost all its negative connotations. Museums now have captions that refer to them as "Viet Cong." And to get the terminology right, they are not the invaders from North Vietnam, they are the South Vietnamese underground--sometimes literally--resistance fighters. They are like the people with the funny double-F rings in CASABLANCA, but it is a different war.)

Some city displays went upstairs. There were handicrafts, musical instruments like the "Chinese piano" and local string instruments. We saw also farm implements on display.

In this heat I am pretty constantly thirsty. I wanted to try a local soft drink, Tri Beco. It looks sort of milky. I tried it and found it tasted like a sort of sweet milk or a non-sour lassi. It has a quite likable flavor. It is not as sweet as soda so it leaves less after taste. It may be made from coconut milk.

As we were standing there who should find us but our two cyclo drivers. They had waited for us the whole time we were in the museum. Evelyn had been thinking of looking at a local market, but it would have been an unpleasant walk. We negotiated a rife, each in a different cyclo. 30,000D. Admittedly the ride was a lot of fun.

The market was smaller than we expected but Evelyn bought herself some sandals and I got some tamarind candy.

For dinner we stopped at a restaurant on the way home from the market. The Lotus was recommended in the Lonely Planet. It had a bunch of gringos sitting around. I wasn't so much hungry as very thirsty. I perspire a lot, a family trait. That means I frequently need to replenish water. On our trip to Southeast Asia Steve Goldsmith used to comment on what a good sweater I was. I knew I would get very thirsty, but assumed each of us did and most were able to ignore it better than I did. It occurs to me that if I lose so much to perspiration, I may actually be getting thirstier than other people.

Evelyn got a spicy chicken dish and I got squid curry. If you see a pattern forming, like that I get squid every night, well maybe there is such a pattern. They were pretty good. It turns out that we have been near the Lotus restaurant all along. They are on the corner of the street where we book trips. We have walked by it without noticing it. Before returning to the room we booked our tour for tomorrow, our bus trip for Friday. I bought a book about our destination the Cu Chi tunnels.

We were back early, but basically worked on logs, and did other administativa. Tomorrow will be a tougher day.

03/07/01 HCM City; Cu Chi

I must have dropped off to sleep about 9pm. I have woken up once or twice because of noise. It is now 3 AM and I am up because of a combination of noise and all the water I drank. Somewhere it sounds like there is a large party going on. I guess this is a city that does not sleep. I hear a lot of voices including children's voices. Soundproofing is not a well-understood art and neither is keeping normal hours.

There is a party going on outside out window. People are applauding and laughing at 4 AM. I cannot figure what that is about. Evelyn thinks they are tourists.

The bathroom is actually fairly functional here. The hot water is really hot. At first I was skeptical about how good this room is. Certainly at $40 a day it is expensive by Vietnamese standards. And a lot of the features do not quite work. But I can easily see that we might not do as well elsewhere.

The most powerful weapon that the Vietnamese had was their system of tunnels. In the forties the French used sweeps and spotter planes to find nationalists communicating with each other. To avoid them the tunnel system was built. By 1948 the system was built with each family having a tunnel to get to the center of their hamlet and each hamlet connected to every other. Over the next 25 years the system was improved and extended. It proved to have strategic advantages far beyond its original ones. The wrong tool sometimes can be much more powerful than the right tool. Lieutenant Nguyen Tranh Linh who orchestrated the use of the tunnels said "Thanks to the tunnels we could remain with the [invading] Americans, se how their troops behaved and reacted, watch their mistakes. Our observations helped us decide what kinds of booby trap to set and where to set them." It is the tunnels of Cu Chi we visit today.

We head out for breakfast. There is a shop-house right near us Evelyn wanted to try. I got a really good bowl of soup with a lot of noodles and chicken. Pho, pronounced "fer," is soup and their most popular restaurant item I think. In the Southwest of the US you saw a bunch of Pho restaurants run by ex-pat Vietnamese. They serve a good hearty soup. Probably my favorite breakfast here. The problem is that you have a lot of beggars and cyclo drivers coming by. We have breakfast and then head over to the travel office.

Today we are riding a minibus. These are roads with more private homes than our trip two days ago. Much more is private and rural. The roads are still full but not so many motorbikes. Probably there are more private houses. International brand names are all around: Castrol, Honda, Shell, Coca-Cola, Colgate, DAP, and Pepsi. There are more nice houses. Many have thatched roofs, some have tile, some corrugated metal.

We see some very green rice paddies. They are green just two months a year, but they look lush and verdant.

We stop for a 15 minute rest. Evelyn and I each get an ice cream on a stick. Mine is green and has pieces in it. Evelyn thinks it is Pistachio. Hers is lavender. 2000D each. That is about 15 cents. We looked them up in our phrasebook. Mine was green bean, Evelyn's was Taro.

We pass over a road most of us have seen in photos. One of the most famous shots of the war is of a naked burned girl running down a road crying. It had a very strong emotional effect. The girl survived, by the way, and according to the guide currently is over 40 and works in New York City, though she does come back to visit her brother.

At 11:30 we got to the Cao Dai temple.

Cao Dai religion was founded by Ngo Minh Chieu born 1878 and who founded the religion in 1926. It was an amalgam of just about every religion then in Vietnam. The goal for a worshiper is to avoid the cycle of reincarnation by being good and leading a parsimonious life this time around. You eat vegetarian six days a month. (I probably do that at home. That's not so tough.) While the various governments have officially discouraged it, there are a lot of members in government and it has power out of proportion to its numbers. The name Cao Dai means the high tower or the high palace. It means God in the same way we use "the White House" to mean "the President."

The acolytes are dressed in bright colors. The robes are red, yellow, blue, and white. The white is for purity and the other three are each for a major religion. Red is Taoism; Yellow is Buddhism; Blue is Confucianism. We left our shoes at the side and walked into the temple and around the main floor. The roof was held up by ping and green columns. They represented green serpents curled around the column. At the far end of the hall from the entrance is a large ball with an all-seeing eye. There are Chinese style chairs in front of the sphere.

There was a ceremony at noon so we climbed to the balcony to watch. There was a procession of monks, each in robes of one of the four colors, each with a chest decoration showing the all-seeing eye. To the sound of very Asian-sounding religious music monks marched into the temple. The whole ceremony looked like something from THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. The music and singing were live. Oh, did I say their Saints were Victor Hugo, Su Yat Si, Napoleon Boneparte, Joan of Arc, Louis Pasteur, and Winston Churchill. They didn't get any of these people's permission to make them saints, but then nobody in Vietnam got Lonely Planet's permission to reprint their book. Permission is sort of irrelevant.

I would point out that this seems like one really wacky religion, but 1) everybody's religion but my own seems wacky to me and 2) my own religion has its wacky moments. Did I ever tell you how the fate of the world rest on three white hairs in a calf's tail?

After about ten minutes we had to return to the bus. From there we went to a restaurant where we had reservations. I wanted something I could not get at home so got the one snake dish on the menu. The guide amused us by giving us math puzzles while we waited. Most either I got or Evelyn got. We made excuses to the table that we were mathematicians. By about 50 minutes into our visit everybody had been served except me. I pointed this out to the owner. She said it would be ready in a minute and yelled at the little waitress in Vietnamese. It came out and was mostly deboned (thank goodness. Otherwise snake is really hard to eat.) It was minced with peanuts and spices. It came with shrimp chips. The drink I had ordered, cold chocolate, was already gone by this point. I had to eat quickly and dash to the bus.

Our next stop is Cu Chi. You might expect that in this area there would be a strong resistance movement. From the earliest years babies are indoctrinated to resist. Mothers tickle their babies and say "Cu Chi coup." Actually Cu Chi was where the tunnel system did a great deal to contribute to Vietnamese Independence.

One of the accounts in THE TUNNELS OF CU CHI by Tom Mangold and John Penycate tells of how the Army fortified a rubber plantation. Still snipers seemed to be coming from nowhere. Then there was an explosion from inside the fortification. A soldier reported that Charlie popped his head out of the ground, threw two grenades. After that he reached down and pulled out a carbine and sprayed the area with bullets. Then he was gone down the tunnel before he could be caught. This was an extremely effective form of warfare. It was very intelligent. The only way to control9it is to go into the tunnels and face the enemy on his own turf. You can try carpet bombing the surface to collapse the tunnels, but that is very expensive and you have the problem that there are villages above the tunnel system. It is very difficult, but also a very effective form of warfare. Now the tunnels are a tourist attraction.

We arrived and I went to find a bathroom. When I returned the guide was already showing a documentary about the tunnels. It was terrible. It must have been made by a government propaganda team who did not care about how the result turned out. It consisted of footage about the tunnels, mostly, a narrator telling something, and loud sound effects sound of gunfire. Every once in a while you could almost make out what the narrator was saying if there was a lull in the gunfire. The photography was dully shot and faded. It looked like it could come from World War I and was slightly undercranked. It was a subject that interested me, but the documentary told us very little. Then Our guide got up to explain things, but his accent has only a C+ for clarity. In any case Cu chi is a neighboring province to Saigon, but because of the tunnel system the war was fought entirely differently there. The Viet Cong had the upper hand.

The first stop is to see an exhibit of homemade weapons for the war. These are low tech weapons but very nasty. Most are traps to step in that drive metal into the feet and legs of the hapless soldier who encounters them. Examples of the traps are lined up in a row and behind them is an illustrative mural showing a soldier in American uniform in the process of being maimed by the trap. Various ground traps try various clever ways to drive spikes.

This site is an interesting counterpoint to the War Remnants Museum. You come away from that thinking how barbaric the Americans were to use all these high-tech weapons against a low-tech people. Then you see this museum and it seems nearly as barbaric even if the weapons are of lower technology. Suddenly the people the Americans fought do not seem so much helpless victims. Some of the weapons used by the guerrillas seem no less vicious than the American weapons.

I am sure from the Vietnamese point of view the Americans were using high-tech weapons and so they had to fight back any way they could. From the American point of view they were fighting an enemy who seemed anxious to horribly maim and painfully kill Americans and Americans had to fight back in kind. High technology is not more fiendish, it is just easier to put in place. That mural is ill-considered if Americans are going to be coming here as tourists. It really counters the sympathy for their side that the War Remnants Museum created.

I may be willing to accept that the US was wrong in this war. I am a long way from having positive feelings about these slow motion painful weapons being used against my countrymen. I wonder if I was "in country" facing weapons like these, having friends killed by weapons like these, if that alone might not push me to favor vicious vengeance. The Vietnamese communists claimed in their propaganda that the US military was screwing up people's minds. But just maybe it was this kind of conflict and much of it was what they were doing themselves.

I guess in our own revolution the British thought the colonists were really fighting dirty and there were British advocates of fighting back just as dirty.

The tour shows you more traps including a door fall with spikes. Walk through a door and it swings down stabbing the GI with many spikes. It is hinged at the middle also so if the quick-thinking GI stops the whole thing from falling, the bottom half continues to swing forward stabbing the legs. The points are poisoned so that any stab is deadly.

They walked us through a minefield with nearly invisible tripwires. They had noisemakers with caps instead of mines.

They shoed us a patch of leaves and told us there was a tunnel entrance in there. Even knowing there was a tunnel entrance it took us a few minutes to find it, and this was a patch of leaves no bigger than our bathroom. The entrance itself was a rectangle maybe four by seven inches. He suggests one of our group try it and to our surprise he fit through. They told him to go to an exit nearby. We waited and waited. After about four minutes we sent someone in after him. He thought we all were going to go down. But the guide had really been scared that something had gone wrong.

They took us to a shooting range where you could shoot AK-47s at a dollar a bullet. A couple tried it. Evelyn and I replenished our water.

Next was where we all tried going through a tunnel, a moment I was secretly dreading. This was a widened tunnel and we were going only a short distance. Evelyn duck-walked, I walked on hands and knees. Either way, going down steps underground was not really much fun. You could go a short distance or one about three times as long. I knew I would go only the short distance except for one moment of indecision when the exit showed up sooner than I expected. But I am getting older, why prove something?

We had a chance to try a real tunnel, not one of the widened ones, and only a couple of people were willing.

Other exhibits included an underground kitchen, not quite underground. It had a long table. The heck they had that underground. We were given samples of raw manioc, the sort of food the VC would have. The final exhibit showed uniforms of the VC.

Among other things this was a long hot walk in the woods. We were tired from the strain of going through the tunnel and of just climbing in general.

We come out of the woods and what do they have? They have a small zoo. A bear is I a cage maybe six feet wide. What a symbol of the government's respect for independence and individual rights. The bear paced back and forth from the bars on one side of the cage to the other. His back end hardly had to move. I am not sure I hate all zoos, but if you are going to keep an animal it should be in near natural conditions. If you are going to do this to a bear you should just kill him right out and do him the favor of saving him the boredom.

A billboard on the way out labels a site we visited the "National defense sports shooting range." Since when is national defense a sport?

The ride back was quiet and almost two hours. Just before they dropped us off we passed an Indian Restaurant. It looked good.

Evelyn was watching and we were only ones who tipped the guide. That may have been his accent or they were less than thrilled with the Cu Chi experience. We went back to the room and freshened up. From there we went out to dinner.

We tried to find the Indian restaurant we had seen but failed. There was however an Indian restaurant on the street we were searching and we decided to try that instead. I had Chicken Tikka Masala, Naan, and a lassi. Evelyn had Palak Paneer. I was not keen on my main course, but the naan was pretty good. And the lassi was terrific. Probably it was massively inauthentic, but it was a really good hot weather drink. They thickened it with pulverized ice like a misty. It made for a drink that tasted like sweet yogurt, but it was thick like a sorbet float. It was really cool and refreshing.

Back at the room Evelyn went immediately to sleep. I tried to stay up until 9, but was conking out.

03/08/01 HCM City

I cannot claim that I am actually getting into the proper time swing, but it does not bother me a whole lot. I am going to bed at 9 PM and waking up at 3 AM. That is fine. We are getting back exhausted each day and Evelyn is going to bed at 8 PM so there is not a lot of reason for me to stay up later. It is tough to tell what time I wake up by the signs of the room. It always looks like the sun is just starting to come up. I wake up and by the time I look at the time, I am fully awake. Usually the time I see is between 1 and 3 AM. If I wake up early I try to get back to sleep. But I do my best writing in the early hours when I am rested.

I went back to sleep at 5 AM and slept almost until 7. Two days ago we had tried a not very good food stand just outside our hotel. The one right next to it looked like it had better soup. We try that today, but it turns out the soup was not brought here. They have one dish. Meat wrapped in rice noodle, lemon grass, and turkey loaf. The rice noodle dish is right out of dim sum. We get that and two Tri Because. Tri Beco, now that I think of it, tastes somewhat like chocolate milk. There is an added advantage. This is the first restaurant that chases away touts. Tomorrow is our last day here. That gives us one opportunity for a return visit, but I think we will be back.

The touts are pretty bad here. We walk on the street and you cannot stop them from trying to sell you cyclo rides. The difference between here and India is that they do it only one or (because cyclos are only one passenger) two at a time. In India ten come. The tenth has got to be some kind of optimist to think you will turn down the other nine and pick his cyclo.

Another problem for tourists is the public urination. There seems to be a lot here. You walk by a wall and it smells like a urinal. Vietnam is hoping to become a popular tourist destination. Well, it already is internationally, at least in a modest way. They hope to attract more Americans. They are not doing a very good job of it. They need to control things like public urination. They also have to decide if they want to appear friendly to have let go of the war or if they want to lecture Americans. The Japanese have all their negative on America material at Hiroshima. Elsewhere there is no reminder that they were ever in a war with America. The news stories we have seen say that it is amazing how much Vietnam has let go of the war unlike the US. At least over here it seems they have it backward. The Americans are trying not to think about the war and the Vietnamese keep rubbing our noses in it. They seem to be the ones who are not letting go. In any case, no country in the world ever built a tourist market by showing people the clever ways they found to drive metal spikes into people's legs.

I am irritated at my new camera. It takes a long time to decide to take the picture as it tries to be sure of the focus. I have lost some pretty terrific pictures because it was a second or more too late. It has a setting for "just take the damn picture." I will probably use that from this point forward.

In Ireland I took fewer pictures per day than usual. I figured I just was losing my enthusiasm. That was not the problem. The problem was that there was less to photograph. This is a very different culture from my own and there is a lot I would want to record.

I thought I had seen an art museum that we passed. I suggested we go there today. There is one listed in the guide book, but it is not on a street we would have passed. Could I have imagined it? Anyway we went to the one listed. The book says it opens at 7:30. Naturally when we got there an hour later it wasn't open yet. We asked at the door. 9:00 it opens these days. The bottom two floors contain mostly modern are with unclear meanings. There are some works whose meanings are clear. One shows a protective Ho Chi Minh and it is titled "Uncle Ho, Do Not Sleep Tonight." A sculpture show a younger man being given the Vietnam flag by an older one. It is titled "High Responsibility." On painting shows people rejoicing and downed B-52s. The title is "Ha Noi Win America." I think they mean "Wins Over." Lots of war scenes, pro-Ho, and anti-American art. Maybe one piece of art in ten is propaganda.

Side comment here. Frequently in Vietnamese it does not seem to matter if single syllable words are combined into longer words or not. Is the city "Ha Noi" or "Hanoi?" Is the country "Viet Nam" or "Vietnam." It shows up both ways. But you would never say "Viet Namese," as far as I can see.

You would think that after 2000 years of struggle for independence, much of it at war, that the art would be about peace and independence. Instead you get art like the single woman standing up to a huge armored vehicle driven by faceless Americans. The Vietnamese need to feel fierce. There are also a lot of paintings of gentle Uncle Ho among the peasants. Basically they are updating of Jesus paintings. This is not to imply most of the art is political. Only about one in 20 is political. Many are domestic scenes. Some are abstract experiments. A lot just show military people with guns.

This heat is really oppressive. We have to stop every few rooms to drink water. They have some fans going, but not in every room and I am sweating profusely. This raises the crucial artistic question, "Can art really be appreciated at 92 degrees?"

One medium for art is used frequently A piece of wood is finished, then used as a scratchboard as a picture is scratched in. Then the revealed wood is painted. Most of the political art was on the second floor.

The top floor has ancient art, mostly of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. To be honest, that is the most interesting art. The art museum is just a short distance from the art museum is the Ben Thanh Market. This is the big market of HCM City.

It was a hot and dangerous walk. Dangerous because we have to cross some pretty crazy streets. For the last piece we just stayed next to a passerby who was crossing the same street. You have to just watch his feet. If you look at the traffic you will lose your nerve, stop, and be stuck. We got to the far side and I thanked our guardian. It took him an instant to realize why we thanked him.

I was in the door just a few seconds when I saw a good gift for a friend at home. So the trip was not a loss. But just a few minutes in the sun was enough to make us thirsty. I am hoping we will get some relief up north when we are nearer water and further, well, north.

The have a beverage called a Soda Chanh. It is essentially a do-it-yourself lime soda. It generally sells for less than a canned soda. You get a bottle of soda water into which they or you squeeze a fresh lime and add sugar and ice. Instant 7up without the 7up price. It is good, except it becomes dilute toward the end as you pour in more soda water.

As you sit down you are an easy mark for beggars and touts. They like to work the market and any place they are likely to run into tourists. Vietnam has some of the worst of India and the best of Thailand.

We then decided to walk around the market. It is quite a sight. Particularly where they have the live ducks, chickens, and pigeons in back to be slaughtered. They have live chickens, they feet tied together, thrown in stacks. Even for a chicken it is a pretty horrible way to go. They have live crabs in much the same state. Also squid. And of course they have clothing and kitchen supplies. They have what must be the best deal on restaurant food I have ever seen. A huge assortment.

Evelyn gets a Vietnamese coffee maker, a thing you put on top of the cup and it drips in, as our tchotchke.

It was now noon and admittedly I was not really hungry. I had just had the soda. But I could not pass up trying some of the food. I tried some vegetables on rice. I figured even if I was not hungry they would be healthy. They served them to me with a spoon to eat them and were quite surprised when I insisted on chopsticks instead. They must not get many Westerners here and think none of us eat with chopsticks. The veggies and rice cost 6000D or $.43. There was Tofu, a stalk that was very meat-like, and a bunch of things recognizable and not. I tried various sauces.

On the way out they were selling photovests. I frequently am needing one, though I was wearing one right then. We found one extra large with lots of pockets. 172,000D. That is about $12.30. I should have bought four. We wanted to try a famous ice cream parlor, Bach Dang. Not authentically Vietnamese, but it sounded good. We both got ice cream in coconut. Two scoops in a coconut garnished with pieces of fruit. It was touristy but nice. I felt incredibly Gringo sitting around an ice-cream parlor in Vietnam and not trying to learn anything or do anything constructive. Just keeping cool in the heat. Since the doors were open they could not air condition the place it was a little hot and noisy. They brought around little glasses of ice water with ice in it. Evelyn and I just talked and enjoyed the ice cream. What a wonderful waste of time.

Supposedly there were bookstores around and Evelyn set out to look for them. But they were not where she was looking for them. The heat was really too much for us to do much outside. It must be something like 95F or 35C. The heat is on in Saigon. (Evelyn says it is more like 102/40 and is probably right.)

When we were in India this was the kind of afternoon we would go to a movie. Here they do not seem to have many theaters. We decided to hire two cyclos and retreat to our air conditioned room. We got two drivers and haggled them from $1 each to 10,000D. Under the hot sun I decided to give them extra and apparently Evelyn made the same decision. We tipped them, well, not really well, but enough to make the trip more worth their while. They did drive us through a red light rather than stop.

Well, I just took off my shirt. I think tomorrow I may just pour the water directly on the shirt and stay some place air conditioned.

Channel 5 on the TV in the room is a double edged sword. It picks of cable movies in English. The problem is it seems to switch between cable stations without rhyme or reason. I watched half of an intriguing film called THE BEST LAID SCHEMES. Suddenly it just switched from Starz to HBO. I had seen it do that before, but this was the first time it caught me. The film the cable replaced it with I watched an hour or so and it also switched to another station. Is this any way to run a cable station?

As 6 PM approached we went out for a final dinner in HCM City. We decided that the Lotus was nearby. I ordered Spring Rolls, Barbecue Chicken, and a Mango Fruit Shake. I am not quite sure how some things are eaten here. The spring rolls came with fresh greens and lettuce. I guess you wrap the rolls in the lettuce and dip them. Sprint rolls are not like they are at home they are wrapped in a layer of fine noodles fried crispy. It is almost like eating something wrapped in shredded wheat.

For the chicken they bring a little brazier to the table and a hinged grill. The chicken is already cut up into bite-sized pieces. You take the chicken, put it on the grill, close up the grill and let it cook. After a few minutes you turn the grill over so the other side of the chicken cooks. It is a formula for disaster and I had to remember to eat with the handles of the chopsticks so nothing that touched the raw chicken did I eat without cooking first. The dish came with a disk of wrappers, three inches in diameter. I it turned out to be a pile of translucent paper-like wrappers. I rolled chicken and vegetable, then I dipped it in sauce. It was difficult to eat since the wrappers were so tough in spite of being thin. At times I wondered if they were not plastic sheets that I was misinterpreting. But the meal was still tasty.

As you sit there touts from the street come around to try to sell to you. Popular items are cigarette lighters. They are supposed to be American Zippos captured from the enemy. But as Evelyn points out there are too many of them for them to really be that. Besides a cigarette lighter is useless to me. As they get more tourism they will realize that Americans do not smoke as much as they used to.

Women come around with three-foot stacks of books to sell. All bootlegs. Bootlegs are perfectly legal here, I suspect. Vietnam probably does not have that many authors that other countries are anxious to read, so they do not subscribe to copyright law. Each woman points out the Lonely Planet Vietnamese Phrasebook, probably a best seller. If they were going to bring something to the table that I would want to buy, books are certainly the item. I turned several away. Finally I bought a book from one, TRAVELLERS TALES FROM HEAVEN AND HELL. This is accounts from travelers' logs of how things went extremely well or poorly for them. People who were either treated to a rally good time by the Medellin drug cartel or nearly pulled off a cliff by a rope that had a shark at the far end. We have to get up early so we earned an under-filled day early, going to sleep about 8:30. False clues of dawn woke me up, but as I looked at my watch it was 11:30 PM. That was the first time it happened so early. About one quarter of the trip is over.

03/09/01 HCM City, Nha Trang

We have to leave early this morning. I was up for about an hour in the night. This morning I have a little stomach upset. It may be a pepper from last night's meal. When I first started traveling I would get stomach upset frequently. Trip by trip the problem gets less. I do not expect much of a problem this trip. We shall see.

There are two places to eat right outside the side door of the hotel. One we ate at yesterday, one three days ago. I liked yesterday's breakfast, Evelyn liked the other place more than I did. We each go to our own and sit diagonally opposite each other so we can still talk. My meal is a dish of rice noodles wrapping mincemeat, turkey loaf, bean sprouts, and fried onions. It looks like an odd concoction, but I like cheap dim sum foods and the meat in rice noodle is the good part. The dish cost 10,000D.

Sitting near us we talk to three ex-pats visiting from Los Angeles. One saw my Lucent cap. He used to work for AT&T. That one had been here twice before since 1975, the others were on their first return. Vietnam is changing so fast a one year old Lonely Planet is already out of date.

We pick up our stuff and are ready to head out. Going down to the lobby we check out. Twice they try to undercharge us, but we do the honest thing. Not that we would allow ourselves to be undercharged anywhere, but it would be a substantial loss to them without impoverishing us very much. Five nights is $125. That is cheap for one night in Boston and a huge fortune here. A college professor would take four months to earn that much.

With our luggage on our backs we walk to Kim Travel. The minibus is already pretty full by the time it picks us up, luckily for me. I get the front seat. Better view. Better air conditioning. Of course it is what we call the "death seat" in the US where we have seat belts and air bags.

We sit waiting to leave and beggars and touts come to the window knocking and looking for money one way or the other.

We have a young driver with a natural frown. He looks very serious. Every once in a while he whistles, the only concession he makes to pleasure.

There seem to be a lot of military monument in the city. They are tall statues of approved heroes.

we drive out of the city, but it is a big city and it will take us a while just to get out. It is just solid ramshackle shops for many miles. Not much color. They are made of the different materials but they mostly dirty concrete buildings selling things like used auto parts.

On the roads one sees how people dress. The conical hats that are so much a trademark of Vietnam are a women only phenomenon. They are warned by poorer women. I suspect that they will go the way of the Mao hats in China. Many people wear caps and the foolish wear nothing at all to ward off the oppressive sun. Richer women are into fashionable hats. Most men wear long pants and if not associated with business their shirts are untucked.

I think the rule must be here that you give up your right of way by default. To retain it you have to honk. We are driving through Ben Wa, where my father-in-law was first stationed in Vietnam. It must have created some tension that the American military had a better standard of living Vietnamese civilians.

For years Evelyn has been holding up Bangkok as a standard of chaotic traffic. Now someone in the bus who had been there recently says it really is much worse here. It was awful years ago and perhaps she has built it up in her mind. You see a lot of people using large sheets of utility polyethylene. It is always striped in three inch wide stripes. Red-white-blue-white. I wonder if it is an allusion to Americans. The stomach distress earlier appears to have been a false alarm. Must have been a pepper.

Riding in the front seat is a kick. Not only does the driver go over on the left side of the road to pass, when there are too many people there he goes further left to the shoulder to pass them. My God, what crazy drivers!

Our sunny weather is getting gray and cloudy. Perhaps there will be relief from the heat. We eventually get to small towns and rural area. There are small houses as usual, some close together. There is nothing much that seems to be more than a five minute walk from the road. There are few motorbikes and a new addition is oxcarts. The oxen are given huge loads to carry. I am not sure if they are oxen or something similar. I think they are oxen because they are golden brown. Certainly water buffalo would be darker. Nice looking animals.

Houses are mostly single story with maybe two rooms. The landscape starts to look tropical like Manila or the Bahamas. As we drive we pass a school just letting out. 10:30 seems a peculiar time. Student crossing guards haul ropes across the road. One kid takes a stance with is legs apart. Very dramatic like a Chinese revolutionary poster. I guess at this age children soak up that government party line and want to be good little communists. Teenagers seem to have a different attitude. One of the locals made the odd comment that the teens hate their parents for giving them such a restrictive system. They see prosperity and the freedom to use it in other parts of the world and want it for themselves. The person who told me this is one of the few people who said things change too slowly in Vietnam. He might be right.

One sees a lot of odd religious symbols at various temples. There is the all-seeing eye I mentioned already. Another is the swastika. Another seems to be two of what look like elephant tusks set to the outer boundary forms a circle. I saw a small pair in the reformation palace and larger ones on churches.

The driver takes out a tube from his pocket and pulls out an orange tablet. He drops it into his bottle of water. A while later he drinks from the bottle and it is all yellow. Must be a way to flavor the water. When I was a kid we had a candy called Fizzies. You dropped a Fizzie into a glass of water and if9 it was fresh, which it rarely was, it turned a perfectly good glass of water into a bad imitation of soda pop.

We seem to be driving through a resort area. Nha Trang is also a resort area, but that is still a way ahead. This town is Mui Ne.

We stop to eat at the Hanh Cafe in the resort town. I order something off the menus called a Green Dragon. Of course they don't have it. I order a Pineapple Fruit Shake and grilled squid. A big sign says "There's no strangers here at Hanh Cafe, only friend you haven't met yet." Not too original. The table has the usual toilet paper dispenser used here as a napkin dispenser. They bring a brazier for me to grill my own but they do not bring me a plate or silverware. The shake never comes either. The squid, however, they could not do a whole lot to ruin and right off the grill it is worth all the other problems. Other people told me they were given bread with ants. And could not get much to eat there. I just hope that I don't get sick from the squid. I tried to keep as little contact as possible between the cooked and the uncooked but I was given only one set of tongs.

We got back on the bus at 12:20 and hit the road. We dropped off some people in this town and the driver told me to take a seat in back. I got to know some of the other passengers a little. There is a man, Dutch I think, very erudite traveling with a Vietnamese woman. She has been carsick the whole way.

We pass farmland. Lots of fields with oxen grazing. I try to take pictures when I see something, but generally I am just not fast enough.

We stop for a rest break at a beautiful seaside point. It is right on a beach. Evelyn and I go down to look at the beach. The Swiss man is there. As he looks out he says "The cruel sea..." Immediately I tall him "Nicholas Monserrat." That is the author. "I am going to tell you a story. It is a true story because that is the only kind worth telling." That is the opening of the book. One of the most memorable book openings I know of. It tells you so much about this no-nonsense, no fiction man. The main character tells us so much about himself in two sentences.

Well we have only a ten-minute stop so I go to the restroom. The metal part is ripped off the door and the wind keeps blowing it open. I have to keep the door pushed shut while I use the room, not an easy feat.

Getting back on the bus the Vietnamese woman buys a bag of fruit and gives it to the bus. In return I give some tamarind candy. Evelyn is at first positive on the fruit but finds hers has bugs and a worm. The relationship between the Dutchman and the Vietnamese woman is unclear. Perhaps they are just traveling partners. The woman is so likable and friendly, so happy to see her own country, we can see why the Dutchman would want her around. So many of the Vietnamese seem so serious. Her natural expression is a smile. If she was not smiling so much she would have only average looks. She makes herself attractive by the way she acts.

Some of the rice paddies are such a rich green. They look like green velvet. Finally it does cloud up and we get some rain. We also get a couple of nice rainbows. It rains only for a few minutes.

Finally we get to Nha Trang. It feels very strange to be here. Suddenly I know what it is. This is a town that does not start with an "H". Ho Chi Minh City, Hoi An, Hue, and Hanoi are our other stops.

We have been traveling nine and a half hours. As we are finally pulling up to the town we get a flat tire. The driver pulls into some place to get it patched. We on the bus make goo-goo eyes at two little girls who were watching the whole process.

We finally arrive At the travel agency. But the driver says don't worry about finding a hotel part of the service is taking the passengers around so they can see hotels. They will take you to any hotel you choose, including ones recommended in the Lonely Planet. Of course the reason is that the get a commission for bringing customers to hotels and apparently they get it from virtually every hotel, so they are happy to bring people around to see hotels.

The younger people on the tour like the first hotel at $6/night. That leaves just the Dutchman and his friend and us. The Dutchman has a hotel he likes and is holding out for it but is willing to look at others. We take one with a view of the beach, though a little run down. It is the Thanh Thanh, $15/night. I have a feeling that the Dutchman will want his hotel.

We get our stuff in the room and book a tour for tomorrow. Evelyn asks if the weather is supposed to be good tomorrow and the man at the desk says it is supposed to clear up and be nice. What this may mean is that he gets a commission from ticket sales.

Then I offer to take Evelyn out for dinner, like I have a choice. We go out walking. I pass by a couple of people playing Chinese Chess. An on-looker offers to show me how to play, but I say no thank you. I have a board and rules somewhere at home.

Things are changing very fast in this town, due to its nice beach. This will be a resort town. Between our street and the water is a strip of land that really is the beach front and they are building a small amusement park there and new hotels. Some things will change if they get more Americans coming. One thing that will change is the name of the My Dung Restaurant.

We walked looking for a nice place to have dinner. Night was falling and we did not want to search side streets for long. On place had a menu that offered abalone. It has been years since I had abalone. Back when I first was learning to like good Chinese food, abalone was no more expensive than beef. I got a taste for it then, but the price went way up. But food prices are cheap in Vietnam.

We go in and we order an abalone dish and a wild pork dish. After about ten minutes the waiter comes back and says that they are actually out of both. We order an eel dish and a quail dish. There is no eel. We order a quail dish and a shrimp dish. They have shrimp. Their quail turns out to be two very scrawny birds. The total meat is less than one small chicken drumstick. The shrimp dish is interesting. They cut open a coconut, take out a little of the milk, put in a bunch of whole shrimp and steam them that way. Both dishes are very messy to eat. Two dishes, a Pepsi, and two soda chanhs come to $5.57.

On the way back we take the walk next to the beach. Tomorrow the moon will be full. Today it is nearly overcast with a big patch lit by moonlight a way out like something out of the movie COCOON. The water is lapping up on the beach and the palm trees complete the image.

Evelyn suggested the walk and I was enjoying it immensely. Evelyn was for once terrified. When motorbikes come along the path I am not jumping out of their way but letting them just ride around me like the locals do. Teenagers standing around on the beach might be muggers. After a short walk we go back to walk on the main street where she feels much safer. Of the two of us, I am the romantic.

On the way back we buy water and cookies. Then back to the room.

There is a Chinese music concert on and I watch a little. I am gooey from the heat of the day and take a shower.

The bathroom is functional but not like the ones we are used to. It is more like the bathrooms we had in China. There is no curtain on the bathtub and if you hang up the showerhead, which is on a hose, The water goes onto the floor. That is not as bad as it would be at home because the entire bathroom is intended to get we and there is a drain in the floor. There is an electric water heater with a switch right above the tub. There is also an outlet right there where it is all too easy to hit it with the shower spray. I wonder what would happen. There is not a hard wood door to the bathroom but a folding curtain. This makes the whole bathroom like a soundbox of a guitar, an amplifier which sends bathroom noises into the room. The underside of the sink faucet looks like it was dredged from some kind of fungus cave.

03/10/01 Nha Trang: Island Boat Trip

I must have been very tired. I slept from 9 PM to 5 AM.

I am caught up in my log so I have a chance to do some reading. The first restaurant that looks reasonable is My Dung. In spite of the unpromising name we go in. I get rice porridge with seafood. Evelyn orders it with just shrimp.

It is difficult to walk down the street without having a bunch of people asking where we are going. The woman making my orange juice coughs without covering her mouth. People are less worried about such things here. And I do keep a bunch of antibodies on the payroll just to counter such things. Also I will take something else to protect me. Fresh squeezed orange juice.

Speaking of ills, Evelyn has had a scratchy throat two mornings in a row. It is not yet a cold. I hope it does not become one. More reason for me to get Vitamin C.

Today's tour is a very touristy thing. We are going to visit four tropical islands, swimming at two of them. It will be nice to try some of these beautiful beaches.

Evelyn's dish is hard to eat. They did not peel the shrimp. Chicken has bones, shrimp has the shell. Mine was pretty good. Seafood meant squid and shrimp with the accent on squid. As you may have noticed I seem to get squid frequently. It is a lot easier to get here than at home and I like it. My friends claim I want a restaurant called Tentacles R Us. Frankly I am not put off by tentacles. Octopus used to be fine by me. Now I know a little more about octopus and I try to avoid it because they are intelligent and interesting animals. I avoid it like I avoid red meat which is doing something but probably not enough. Any animal smart enough to exhibit curiosity I hate to eat.

On the way back Evelyn picks up cold lozenges. Back at the hotel for pickup I run up to the room and take a large dose of Vitamin C.

It is an overcast day verifying my interpretation of the desk clerk's statement that it would be sunny and nice today.

The bus comes. It is a minibus packed with people. I think they are mostly English. They say our next stretch is one large pothole.

The tour company is Ma Ma Linh. Apparently many different companies offer the identical tour. Right down to the floating bar.

We get to the dock and crowd onto a thirty-foot tourist boat. A balding man with what hair he has pulled back in a ratty ponytail hands out ads for a hairdresser.

It is a lot cooler when we get out into the South China Sea. Wow. The South China Sea was where adventure films were set when I was a kid. Usually they starred someone like Myron Healy. Now I am in a 30 foot wooden boat somewhere on the South China Sea. Sorry, I know I should be more reserved. Maybe I will be when I get back to land. Right now I am on a 30 foot wooden boat somewhere on the South China Sea.

We see at a distance a hotel built to look like a large sailing ship. Kitsch is the word. It towers over the nearby ferries.

The guide gets up with a microphone and rattles off ten minutes of Vietnamese. I ask one of the Swedes, "You getting all this?" A second guide gets up and translates into French. Finally the first guide translates the brochure in a C- accent.

They had an option with the trip. They were going to send divers down for sea urchin. 50,000D for fresh sea urchin in either soup or raw. I have had it at home in sushi. It was very expensive. Throwing caution to the winds I wanted to try it raw. About five people got it as soup and I think I was the only person to order it raw.

We stopped at Mun Island. There was no beach and the water was about 10 feet. The adventuresome went snorkeling. After my Australian adventure I was a little leery and stayed on the boat. Steve and Hanh are Vietnamese ex-pats living in Massachusetts. Steve works for UPS. Hanh is a pharmacist for CVS. He escaped Vietnam in 84 in a boat. Now he is back with his new wife as of last Sunday. They have come back to the old country for their honeymoon. I follow them up a ladder to the top of the boat and we take turns taking each other's pictures and admiring the view.

After a while we just sat and talked. Steve's escape from Vietnam was by himself at the age of 13. He came to the US and somehow was given foster parents. The word Dung we saw this morning is Vietnamese for "hero." That is really Steve's first name and leaving your country on your own at 13 certainly represents heroic qualities. But Steve is thinking he would want to come back to Vietnam when he retires.

When I mentioned my belief that the Communists would lose some of their power when the younger generation started to take power, Steve steered the conversation away from politics. I interpreted that as telling me what I wanted to know. I suspect people are a little afraid to speak freely even if they are not Vietnamese citizens.

I gave him my email address and homepage. Maybe we will continue a friendship.

Sidenote: Steve was not able to give me a derogatory Vietnamese name for foreigners. I like to collect names like gringo and gwai lo. Steve did not know a term Vietnamese called Americans when we were not around.

A little while later and back in the main part of the boat they brought out a bowl of soup to Steve. It was sea urchin soup. They brought me some raw and it was quite good. It was much like sushi uni but it had less of a bitter taste.

The backs of the bench seats were folded down to form a big dining table. They rolled a large sheet of linoleum over the top to form a top surface. They served a lunch of baguettes, spring rolls, rice, fish steak, squid, whole shrimp, and beef strips.

One of the Australians made a dessert of a banana and baguette sandwich. I tried it and it was not bad, but it would have been better with peanut butter. Bananas are as big around as ours, but only about three inches long. They are cheap and plentiful. They are about four cents a piece if you don't get a local's discount.

After lunch the guides brought out guitars and started singing songs. I would have told them not to quit their day jobs, but this was their day job. Initially they said this was going to be very funny. If they had let it go with three songs I would have thought it was a put-on. Their voices were not terrible, but frequently they got the melody wrong. Somehow nearly right on melody is not as good as way off. If you know the melody it is frustrating seem like it is going to do the right thing only to veer off and do something else at the last instant. I could accept three songs on those terms. After three songs you need talent or an audience who loves you, not just nerve. They did a lot more than three songs.

After about an hour of singing people go in swimming again. One of the guides floats out with bottles of wine and glasses. This is the floating bar. People who swim out get a glass of wine.

Our next island was Tam Island. At last this was an island you could walk on. There was a 4000D entrance fee. About ten boats were lined up and the pier. To get to the pier you had to climb through nine boats. We paid our entrance fee and what do we see. You can rent chairs for 10,000D and hour. The beach looks like one would get like if it were abandoned. There is trash and garbage everywhere. The island looks good only from a distance. Everything on the island is pay per usage. As far as an unspoiled paradise, this is not it. We find an abandoned cabana foundation and sit down. Steve and Hanh wander by and we talk to them about the pollution problem. They say people are just not taught in schools to protect the environment. I think I am glad I didn't go in swimming before.

We start walking back to the boat. As we walk by the para-sailing section one of the Australians tell us of an accident before. Two Japanese were in the para-sails. They did not get enough lift and were dragged over the rocks into the water. Both looked like they were hurt. The boat goes over to them and pulls out the parachute. The two Japanese had to swim to shore themselves. Consumer protection is not very far advanced in Vietnam.

Next on the agenda was a fruit party. Basically they set up the table like it was for lunch and laid out a very large assortment of fruit. It went from fruits we knew like watermelon and pineapple to ones we did not like... Gee I never found out what those were. Some was only slightly sweet, some quite sweet and juicy. The best was the pineapple.

Our last stop was Mieu Island. The point here was to see fish farming and to have an option to take a basket boat ride. What they did not say was that seeing fish farming meant you were exposed to an area where fish farming was done and that was about the extent of it. The real point of the stop was to sell basket boat rides. The boats were woven like baskets and are about seven feet in diameter. Each has two old women to row.

After everybody was back on board they headed back to the port we left from. Not a word about the fish farming. I am not sure why it is listed except that other tours listed it. The crew felt more comfortable with the throwing a party aspects of their jobs. They figure visitors are not anxious to learn. I would think that is a mistake. Vietnam is pretty remote. Who wants to come all this way for a floating bar?

The description of visiting four islands for swimming and snorkeling was at best misleading. We actually visited only one island though we got close to three others. Our vision of beaches turned out to be one trash-laden beach that there was an extra fee to get to. On the other had, we did get a decent meal and a decent snack of fruit and we did get to meet some other travelers.

We also met a nice French couple. I did not get names but the wife, like me, does not like tobacco, alcohol, or coffee. I might have been curious to know why not. In my case it was just never worth my effort to overcome the original aversion. They are all acquired tastes that I never did acquire.

We got back to the room and found it warm. In our absence they were having power failures. That turned off the air conditioner. The power failures continued until well after dark. We were both feeling kind of weak and collapsed on the bed. It was not the exertion but the beating of the sun.

I keep remembering Robin Williams's weather forecast in GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM. "Now here's the weather. Today: HOT! Tonight: HOT! Tomorrow: HOT!"

Evelyn and I decided that it might be good to move on to the next town. That involved going to the Hanh Cafe office in town and making reservations. (The travel agencies all seem to be called cafes. I guess they started as cafes and branched out.) I was not looking forward to the hot walk, but by now it was dark and cooler, though still muggy.

Now you would think that the sidewalks were hard enough to navigate. Where the sidewalk is not already appropriated they plant a tree in the middle of the sidewalk. It was OK as a newly planted tree, but it spread its branches at about four feet above the sidewalk. One more obstacle in the dark.

On store we passed sold Lipovitan. It sounds like a health preparation. That was the only product. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of cans of Lipovitan.

As we walked down the street there was a horrible noise ahead of us. Two men were carrying what was probably a CD player on a pole. The music was pretty terrible. The boy saw us and came over to us with his palm out. I motioned no. Angrily he gesticulated we should pay hem. We pushed past. At home we may have to listen to Ghetto Blasters, but at least we don't have to pay for the privilege.

So as we are walking to the Hanh Cafe in town we pass an office of Hanh Cafe. So we go in to make our reservations. The guy gets on the phone and then pulls out a map. He shows us the way into town. They can make the reservations there. Yeah, thanks.

We passed another couple on the sidewalk going in the other direction. In a nearly perfect double-double-take we passed each other by about eight feet and we both looked around. It was our Dutchman and his Vietnamese friend from the bus yesterday. He had found his hotel at $16/night. He had had the name wrong, but he found it anyway. We should have stuck with him.

We continued on to town. We found the Hanh Cafe and made our arrangements. On the wall they had pictures of their version of the same tour we took. They had photos of each event. They really did take people to a fish farm. Ours was a low-grade tour. As the boat was going back they said we should recommend Mama Linh to our friends. Not likely.

As we left the agency there was a cyclo-driver there just where and when we wanted him. We took a cyclo back. In theory it was cooler in the night. I could tell it was cooler since I came back only partially sweaty and only sort of thirsty.

We checked out what do Vietnamese watch on TV on Saturday night. It was a German police show with the hero being a German Shepherd with the intelligence of Rin-Tin-Tin. The bad guy is escaping in a pickup truck so the dog jumps in the back. When the truck stops the dog jumps to the ground, around the side, and in through the window, tagging the bad guy. What a dog! The shows are dubbed into Vietnamese. The original soundtrack is played low and one person, usually female, interprets all the roles.

I think when Vietnamese needs a new word they like to take an old word and just change the tonality or the diacritical marks. There are a whole lot of words that transliterate to "Pho".

One thing in the room we never used is the electric waterfall. That is what looks like a picture of a waterfall when you turn it on. It looks like the water is actually moving and rollers inside make a sound almost unlike the sound of a waterfall.

03/11/01 Nha Trang to Hoi An

We both had alarms set for 5 am and they went off seconds apart. The bus is supposed to pick us up at 6:30.

I dry-brush my teeth. That is a lot easier to do than trying to use mineral water. I suspect we could have drunk Vietnamese tap water. The locals drink it. It is not like Chinese tap water that nobody drinks. Supposedly it is just the different mineral content that bothers Westerners and we have gotten used to a lot of weird water. We have cast iron systems.

We hastily finished packing and went out in search of breakfast about 5:30. People rise early in Vietnam, but there was not much happening at that hour. There were a couple of street venders, but we would have had to eat in the dark.

We found a small restaurant open. We sat down and you could tell from the owner's expression it would be a problem communicating. Unasked she brought us both a pot of tea and two cups of coffee. I gave my coffee to Evelyn.

I had thought I saw pho on their sign so I went to the sign to point it out. No the sign did not say pho. I pointed instead to op la, not knowing what I was pointing to. I thought it might be Vietnamese for omelet. A lot of words they picked up from English or French. Evelyn pointed to something with bahn. She thought it might be something with rice paper wrappers. What I got was two fried eggs and a baguette. Evelyn got a baguette with a wheel of Laughing Cow cheese.

I had thought I had heard the baguettes were very good here, but I also saw bunches of them lines up in stands all over. I doubted that when you got one it would really be fresh. The one I had was excellent. The one I got was very fresh. Soft on the inside, crisp on the outside. Nice breakfast for 25,000D.

Back to the hotel to wait for the bus. The clerk is interested in our HP 200LX palmtop computers. Can we receive email? No. But we could if we wanted to set them up that way. How much do they cost? About $600.

A minibus picks us up and heads out... to a bus station. We get onto a big bus after checking they have our luggage.

We are the last on a full bus. At first it looks like we cannot sit together, but a husband and wife consolidate and a man who looks a lot like the actor Armin Mueller-Stahl moves his bag. Now there is room for us to sit together, albeit over a wheel.

There is something odd going on on the road. At first it looks like a demonstration but there is a hearse and coffin. There are some Buddhist monks. I suspect it is a very fancy Buddhist funeral.

What makes a lot of the houses seem depressing is not that they are made of cheap materials. I have been in several countries with poorer housing. But the houses are not well maintained. Many are just sooty-dirty on the outside. Many look just ugly but with a cleaning and a coat of paint would look nice. Trash is a major problem here. Litter is all-pervasive. You see a lot of piles of burnt trash by the side of the road. Keeping the place neat is just not part of the ethic. Where the houses are better maintained they look like they could be pleasant.

We pass by a tall religious statue. You can tell from a distance it is religious because it is yellow-beige. Yellow-beige is color of religious buildings. It seems like a convention that crosses religious lines.

There are a distressing number of road accidents. Whenever you travel you see one maybe every two hours or so. They have these motorbikes but travel with little protection. Lots of people are getting hurt. The government should be doing something about it but has other things on its mind.

As we go along the coast road toward Hoi An we get some nice views of the beaches. There seem to be no end of nice beaches here, we just have not been taken to one yet. We stop for 15 minutes about 9am to stretch our legs. As we are leaving we see that they ran out of luggage space and put our luggage in the aisle of the bus where everybody has to step over it.

It is a nice little cafe on a beach. There is a beach and an eight foot channel and a sandbar. I follow Evelyn over the bridge to the sandbar. Hawkers came out to sell us bananas. I bought from one and got a sour look from the other.

Evelyn figured she should get more cold lozenges while she could. They were selling for 5000D. Evelyn held out here lozenges to show what she wanted and the money. They took her money and went on with what they were doing. Evelyn had to use sign language to say these lozenges were hers and already open. Finally they gave her some more. I am surprised they did not try to take back the open package. Leeper's Fifth Principle: Simplifying things only makes them more complicated.

The countryside looks a lot like pictures from the war. Low rice paddies ending in this walls of palm trees and ferns. You can almost see helicopters flitting overhead.

My knees are just not up to spending three consecutive hours bent and unable to change position. At a little after noon I trade places with Evelyn.

We stop for lunch at 12:15 at a roadside restaurant. The guy ahead of me trips over my suitcase. I can just imagine the state of the breakables inside. Vietnam is a country without much consumer protection.

We sit at lunch with a Vietnamese from Denmark. He left legally about 1992. I had the Grilled Cuttlefish and Evelyn had soup. The cuttlefish was quite nice but the fork, which was punched from sheet metal, kept bending.

After lunch I wanted to use the facilities. The facilities turn out to be bucket with a water tap, a plastic basin, and a lipless three inch hole in the wooden floor. I am not sure what to do with these. So what did I do? This problem is left as an exercise for the reader to work out. The man who looks like Armin Mueller-Stahl comments that it is a short cycle. The waste feeds the crabs below, then people feed on the crabs who fed on the waste.

We know we are in Vietnam looking at a rice paddy because you can see something this big, this flat, and this green and nobody is playing golf on it. It wouldn't be too good for golf, the green is also a water trap.

It is amazing to see miles of stripes by the side of the road of drying rice.

At about 3:45 the bus pulls to the side of the road. Something is wrong. There is a shop there but it is closed up. Why have a rest stop where we cannot do anything but stand. Soon out come tools and the driver starts fooling around under the front left wheel. Ah, a breakdown. We stand around at take pictures of people raking the drying rice. A few examine the houses surrounding. I comment to Evelyn that the beggars and touts don't have a GPS system to find stranded tourists and beg. Shortly thereafter an ice cream cart pulls up. Amazing. After standing for 20 minutes in the hot sun, ice cream sounds good. He makes a little cone bout four inches high with the ice cream and then takes out a can of chocolate syrup and decorates the top. How much? 1000D. Seven cents. This is not ice cream as we know it. It tastes more like vanilla sorbet. Well worth the price.

Before we are done the bus is again ready. This is our longest ride inside the country. We started about 6:40 AM and it will go past 7 PM. It is much harder than flying from Newark to California.

We have been throwing the peels in the same bag with the bananas. Evelyn thinks this has had a negative effect on the bananas since the ones we are getting now are all bruised and mushy. Maybe throwing the peels in with them has shown them their fate and has demoralized them. Anyway we finished them off during the stop.

The roads on this stretch are pretty bad and we get a lot of jouncing. This is when it is good to have a palmtop. I couldn't handwrite notes and probably could not even dictate them. Bouncing buses are very little worse than buses on smooth highway with a palmtop. The palmtop just jounces with my hands.

At about 4 PM we stop for the afternoon rest stop. There are about six little girls selling from trays they hold. Cookies, crackers and candy. I buy Evelyn a Coke, me a Pepsi and I buy a bag of fruit candy. The candy is like fruit chews in the US, but it includes coconut, soursop, and a number of local fruits. Word goes around that we will not get in until 9 PM. That will make looking for a hotel difficult.

The scenery is picturesque, but it does not change a lot. A lot of bright green rice paddies and peasants with conical straw hats working in them, perhaps with oxen or in rare cases water buffalo. Houses are small by American standards, made of concrete or brick. The rare house is made of wood with a thatched roof. The latter are more often than not in need of repair. The houses do have electricity. For a small country there is a lot of rice grown. It is second largest exporter of rice after Thailand and this year Vietnam hope to pass them. With so much rice, it is amazing that the price does not drop and hurt the farmers.

Night falls and it is dark on the bus. Little we can see outside but shapes in the distance and a few lights. I wish the driver would turn on the lights in the bus.

(People without palmtops can skip this paragraph) I have after years licked the problem that my palmtop has no backlight. For a dollar I bought a keychain flashlight. The lightbulb part rotates in a complete circle. When it is pointing toward the base and the batteries it is turned off, when it is rotated away it is turned on. If I hang the keychain part from a button on my shirt, the flashlight is directable toward the screen of the palmtop which it illuminates. The problem is that the head tended to rotate in my pocket and the flashlight turns itself on. To prevent this I open it up and reverse one of the batteries when not in use.

By the way the bus driver did turn on the reading lights, but they do not reach to the aisle seat.

Dinner was leftover baguette from this morning and cookie, washed down with a liberal chug of water.

From what I can see the town we just went through must be the watermelon capitol of the Eastern World. Every shop had a huge pile of watermelons. They are the size and shape of basketballs here. This town was unloading more and they really didn't need them.

This road is what Harry Truman called a piecrust road. It must have been soft like a pie crust. The whole bus is just vibrating itself to pieces as it tries to drive the road. To fix the road would require labor, management, and materials. Labor is cheap here. Materials are probably not that expensive. What they need is the government to manage it. Even with cheap labor and materials they don't do it. The government may be doing something for the people, but it is not obvious what that might be. They are putting up a lot of nice colorful billboards about how good communism is. They are putting up billboards about AIDS. I suppose the latter is useful but it is not very substantial. They aren't maintaining roads or worrying about public safety. They are not even taking advantage of the cheap labor they have to make life better. We finally stopped someplace at 9:15 PM. Was this then end of our journey? No this was a hotel that had two rooms. Nobody wanted them so they took us to another drop off. This time they said the bus was illegally parked, please exit the bus as quickly as possible. We picked up our luggage. It looked like it had been thoroughly trampled. They said that two waiting vans were for an expensive hotel that would cost $25/night. We figured it was in our price range. OK we took the van. When we got to the hotel we found it was Vinh Hung, an old Chinese trading house. They said they had two rooms, one for $30 and one for $50. We saw the $30 room and it would have been small by Japanese standards. Just enough room for the bed and luggage. But the furniture was interesting. It looked antique. They wanted to show us the $50 room. Like there was a chance we would take such an over-priced room. We had to climb a half story on a stairway that was more a ladder. I have seen stairways this steep only on ships. We got to the room at the top and we