The challenge is on
VIETNAM | Saturday, 25 August 2007 | Views [264]
I
have moved into my house, so now have a permanent address.
Unfortunately, I can’t actually send it to you, as the stupid English
keyboards can’t make the right symbols. Let me know if you want it and
I’ll send as a picture, or better yet, you can get yourself on facebook
and grab it off there. It’s a really dodgy postal system though. I am
living with 3 lovely girls, Jess, Yvonne and Tammy, all AYADs like me.
I think I may have said before that I was staying with them for a
couple weeks, but we decided that I should stay there permanently. I
also am now the proud renter of a motorbike. It’s shiny and blue and Mr
Quan assures me it goes fast (not that I am likely to find out in this
traffic!). Yep, all of you who have listened to me over the years say I
wanted to learn to ride – I am going to do it in the craziest motorbike
city ever. But hey, I figure I am a safer rider than most of the xe om
(pronounced say ohm, is a motorbike taxi) drivers who first try to
charge you too much and then try to kill you.
I
have started my new job. I am working with the VN Dept of Environment,
and my job at the moment (apart from long lunches, siestas, the
occasional English grammar checking, and grant application writing) is
to comment on how to improve the draft Law on Biodiversity Conservation
for VN. Which is quite cool that I can have input into something so
huge. They wouldn’t let me near something like that in Aust with a ten
foot pole. Possibly because I am not a lawyer… A bit boring in the
whole reading law, day in, day out, but still, if I think about the
bigger picture, it’s fantastic.
Besides,
I get to do fun stuff like getting sent on my first ever work junket,
to a 5-star resort in Da Lat in the Central Highlands of VN. The kind
of place where the bath mats and bed sheets are emblazoned with the
hotel name, there are two different types of showers in the bathroom,
and there are bell-boys, complete with little square red caps tilted at
a jaunty angle, to attend to your every need. WHEEEEE! Bring on more
work junkets, I say. And, we do it VN style, which means 2 hour lunches
(so everyone has time to have their nap), and everything paid for,
because, hey, we are government workers here baby. We deserve the best.
Plus the conference was on a Tuesday and Wednesday, so I took Monday
off work and went down early on Sunday morning. Da Lat itself is ok,
nice enough, but outside the city in the forests it is absolutely
beautiful. Monday I went on a 5 1/2 hr trek through pine tree forests,
over waterfalls and rivers with swinging bridges, through coffee
plantations scattered throughout the forest, up and down and up
mountains to a tiny village inhabited by hilltribe minority people…
Would highly recommend, and my guide Duan was absolutely lovely. My
photos are on facebook. Da Lat is a big university town, based on the
fact it is actually cold there (cos it’s in the mountains. Cold being
about 22 degrees, I guess I am becoming acclimatised to Ha Noi!), so in
the days before aircon, it was the only place anybody could actually
get any work done (though that being said, just because there is aircon
is no guarantee of any work actually being done). The irony is, after 5
weeks in VN, I got sunburnt for the first time in Da Lat. But at least
my sunburn kept me warm.
Other
than my junket, I have been taking a few day trips out of Ha Noi to try
to escape the craziness. Survived 8 years in Sydney without ever
feeling the need to get out of the city, 3 weeks in Ha Noi and I was
about to kill someone if they beeped their horn one more time.
Unfortunately I think that would entail killing all 6 million residents
of Ha Noi, as I swear every man, woman and child spends about a third
of their life with their hand on the motorbike horn. Anyway, so I first
headed to Ba Vi National Park, with stops at Tay and Thay Phuong
Pagodas on the way there. Pagodas were very cool, but Ba Vi NP was
better. We drove most of the way up the mountain, then climbed 1226
steps to the top, to get views over Ha Noi and the Red River delta, and
to see a temple dedicated to Uncle Ho. People were praying and burning
incense and money. I like what I have heard about Ho Chi Minh, but
really, praying to a politician? A shrine to Little Johnny? I don’t
think so.
The
weekend after that we went to the Perfume Pagoda, which was a great
trip. We caught a bus to a little village, then jumped into tiny tin
boats rowed by little old ladies in cone hats (and giant plastic
raincoats as it had conveniently decided to start raining just as we
got off the bus), up the river for an hour to the base of a mountain.
Khang, our guide, asked if we wanted to go the “adventure way or the
easy way”. In what turned out to be a rather a big mistake, our instant
answer was “adventure way”. The ‘adventure way’ consisted of about a
billion steps, while the ‘easy way’ was the convenient new cable car.
But we stuck with it, got ripped off by the water vendors who took one
look at our red sweaty faces and decided to charge us double, and
eventually made it to the top… only to walk back down hundreds of steps
into this cool cave about the size and shape of Sydney Opera house.
Took the easy way down the mountain, cable carring it over the top of
the forest.
It’s
a long weekend coming up soon – 2nd of September is National Day, so we
are planning a trip to Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island and National Park.
Ha Long Bay is supposed to be spectacular, so I am looking forward to
it. Besides, I was set a challenge on Wednesday by the man who
discovered the saola – a saola is a cool deer thingie with one horn,
looks a bit like a unicorn, only discovered in 1995 – and who nearly
died of malaria tracking down the 8 remaining Javanese Rhinoceros left
in VN (so I was rather impressed with him already). I told Mr Xuan I
liked National Parks, and he said “There are 30 in Viet Nam, by the end
of your trip, I want to hear you have been to a third of those”.
Challenge accepted! 1 down, 9 to go.
Thanks to everyone who has emailed or texted, it’s great hearing from you. I miss you guys, so COME VISIT!
