Beth and I arrived at Hanoi airport the night of the 7th and were picked up by our guide Duc who will be with us until we get the plane to Hue the day after tomorrow (I think - time is hard to keep track of partly because we are packing so much stuff into each day) - in Hanoi we went to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum (this seems to be obligatory for foreigners and was very interesting - for those readers from H&A, at the start there's a sentence from Uncle Ho with his signature, both in gold, underneath - he wrote Ho with a capital and Chi in lower case so it looked frighteningly like "Alan Hochschild"!) We also went to the Temple of Literature where students would take the exams to become PhDs starting I think in the 12th century - people still flock there to ask for good luck in school. Food has been OK (sometimes very good) but frustrating because we always get recommendations for places where foreigners are the only customers.
We're now in Sapa in the mountains and have done some trekking including this morning to a village called cat cat (tho we only saw dogs pigs and chickens) with a waterfall - thank God we were able to get a motorcycle back to town because it would have been a very hard slog back on foot. Our hotel is the Victoria Sapa - very posh and with its own railway carriages/sleepers to and from Hanoi. We'll be on one tonight and are hoping that again we'll luck out and share a 4-berth cabin to ourselves. Tomorrow morning we'll arrive very early (5:30) in Hanoi and have a few hours to kill before leaving for a 2-3 hour drive to Halong Bay. Beth is more adventurous than I am in wanting to try various phos (Vietnamese soup) we are also practicing our few words of Vietnamese - pho is the hardest so far as it is a bit like 'fur' without the 'r' - never mind having the correct tone (of the 5 possible).
How could I have forgotten in my first entry on Sapa that Beth and I were asked to SING for a class of adorable 5-year-old Hmong kids? They had entertained us with little ditties of their own, preceded and ended by hands-on-elbows bows, and we were asked to reciprocate. put on the spot I figured we could both remember the words to America the Beautiful, and it was short enough to avoid initiating international incidents. it went over OK but then the next 'act', a Frenchman, stole the show with a song including lots of air-punching and yelling - definitely appealed to the kids more than our relatively staid performance
Have to go pack and check out - will get some of the 400+ shots I've taken so far uploaded to this blog when/if we get a moment to breathe.
