The Japan/Hanois/Laos trip emails - you asked for it

Osaka is my favourite city in Japan. Pity you missed out on exploring.

 

I have a nephew who has been there half a dozen times. We'll time our next Japan trip for one of his visits.

 

Good evening Vietnam

We booked an airport pick-up in Hanoi for Mimi and I before we left Sydney. That sort of thing is often pretty cheap and it makes things easier. They asked for a date and flight number and description of the passengers to be collected. Lisa wrote 'older man and young girl'. I suggested that might not be an ideal description given these days of heightened awareness of sex tourists. Next thought was 'grey haired man with young daughter'. Accurate again, but still problematic. I can’t remember what we settled on, but the bloke who picked us up didn’t wink at me or anything like that.

He led us outside and we stepped into the third world - though that term is not really PC these days and places like Vietnam refer to themselves as 'developing countries'.

Our driver told us where to stand while he went to get his car. It was typical third world – there I go again - airport chaos. There were four lanes of cars in the space allocated to three lanes. Many of the cars in the first two lanes were parked while their drivers went looking for people. One had its wheels clamped presumably because the driver had strayed too far for too long. That clamped car was not helping things. But nobody was getting cranky.

The drive was lots of fun and like a ride at a carnival. I had forgotten how insane traffic in places like that can be. It was India without the cows. Motorbikes were everywhere and darting wherever they pleased. Traffic lights and signs were treated as suggestions. Lines on the road don’t mean anything - there were lots of roads with no lines, so the authorities had come to the same conclusion. Roundabouts are impediments to be negotiated in a circular motion, but the direction for bikes is optional. And it all works. But it was a shock coming from busy but ordered Japan. It really does make Japan look like the Germany of East Asia.

I asked somebody on the second day about the use of horns. He said it’s largely just to let someone know you are there. So two or three toots on a horn from someone on a bike says, 'Hey, I’m in your blind spot. With my family. And our chicken. And a small household appliance.' A long blast on a horn is a sign of anger. I didn’t hear that once.

Mimi and I are staying in the same hotel Lisa and Lulu stayed in. Same rooms, too, I think - I might have a look under the bed to see if Lisa left anything there. The hotel is in the southern part of the old town with the French quarter behind us. Another great find by Lisa.

The old part of Hanoi is impossibly crowded and crazy. It’s like a movie set and the same as the old bits of all third world cities. There are bikes and people squeezing past eachother in narrow streets and restaurants preparing food on the footpath. There are hawkers walking around and lots of groups of young men just sitting around smoking. It’s always men, never women - they are doing more useful things. The only difference in the scene now from thirty years ago would be that everyone sitting around has a smart phone and they are more engaged with it than they are with their mates.

The streets feel very safe, though. The hawkers are not aggressive and they don't employ their children - hawkers in other countries would be ashamed of them. Locals not involved in retail or food don’t pay tourists any attention at all. It's like a parallel universe.

The hotel staff were great at check-in. They sat us down and brought us fruit and a drink and gave us a briefing. They asked us whether we had been to Hanoi before and we said we hadn’t, I could see them think, 'Oh dear'. They relaxed a bit when I said I had been to India and a few other places. They told us what to do if approached by someone selling something, how to take care of possessions at the night market, and especially how to cross the road.

The advice on crossing the road, like that in similar places, is to eyeball as many of the riders/drivers as you can and walk at a constant pace and hope the traffic will scoot around you. It takes a few goes to get comfortable with it, but then you’re okay. You only risk injury if you stop or run. Mimi and I found a guide to take us on a food tour and he had another piece of advice - he said you need to smile at them because that makes them more forgiving. I found it very hard to smile when all I was thinking was, 'Don’t you hit us, you *******'.

I had a near miss on our last day. We were crossing a road and a bike I had not seen passed in front of me so closely I felt the draft on my face and his arm brushed my shirt. He would have known exactly what he was doing and assumed I did, too. If I had suddenly decided to break from a walk into a run, it would have been bad for us both - worse for me.

I studied the traffic at an intersection and it’s a lot like fish around a reef. The motorbikes are small schooling fish. Cars are more solitary and split the bike schools at will. Buses are the apex predators of the intersection and everyone gets out of their way. Pedestrians are just pieces of flotsam.

Mimi and I booked a food tour through the hotel on our first night for $35 each. A young guy called Thomas showed up. I pressed him on his Vietnamese name and the pronunciation of it. It was Tien. I said, so I would pronounce my friend Kien's name the same way? He said not quite. Then he explained how intonation is so important in Vietnamese. He said the word 'dua' can mean coconut, pineapple, or something not fruit related at all depending on the tone employed. He was very kind with my attempts to pronounce his name despite the fact that I might have been calling him a banana or something all night. The word Pho is another tricky one with different meanings according to the tone. It can mean a type of Vietnamese soup with meat and noodles, or a ****. I suspect Vietnamese everywhere take some delight in westerners in restaurants ordering sluts.

Tien took us to a pho place first, then we had a Bahn mi, then a rice cake thing with chicken and pork, then dessert and then fruit. They were all in places we would not have walked into, but Tien and the hotel have a vested interest in people not getting sick, so I was comfortable with the places we went to. Tien paid for it all out of the $70 we had paid the hotel. We were probably out for about two and half hours and Tien lived near the airport - an hour away in peak hour. I asked Tien how much the hotel pay him for the gig and he said $10, so a tip was in order.

Tien was a final year engineering student. He had started learning English four years ago and he was very proficient - way beyond normal conversational stuff. And he had a sense of humour. A year and a half ago, he started learning German to broaden his career prospects. Conversation with Tien went way beyond food and strayed deep into culture, history and politics. He would make a great teacher. I asked him whether he had time the next day to take us on a history tour to see Ho chi Min's mausoleum and the war museum. He was up for that, but we needed to meet up well away from the hotel.

Tien scooted up beside us the next morning at the meeting spot and told us he had to go off and park his motorbike. We were standing on the footpath with bikes everywhere, so I needed to ask him about that when he came back. He said bikes are not allowed to park on the footpath. We both looked around at what looked like a motor bike wrecking yard on the footpath. I had watched a young bloke receiving bikes from people and squeezing them in as they walked off. Tien explained that people will stake a claim on a section of footpath and charge people to look after their bike. They then pay the local police a bribe to maintain their territory. He said taxi companies also bribe the police to be able to park outside hotels in the old quarter where we were. And restaurants would have an understanding with the police that enabled them to expand their kitchen to the footpath. I made the observation that for a communist nation, the Vietnamese had a grabbed hold of capitalism with great enthusiasm and much proficiency. And then Tien was off on a rant about the things that disappointed him about his country.

Thinking back, there would have been a reason that car at the airport causing all sorts of problems had its wheels clamped and had not been towed away. The blokes with the keys to the clamp would have been waiting for the owner to come back with sufficient cash to release the clamp.

 

I found Rome worse because the riders are less nimble. Best tactic there is to cross with a nun - lots of them in Rome.

 

Hanoi History

Our history tour with Tien started at the Ho Chi Min mausoleum. It was a misty day with a light drizzle - perfect for gawking at a dead bloke.

The mausoleum and Ho Chi Min residences were in the botanical gardens - a great oasis in the madness of Hanoi. Tien timed our arrival for just after the early rush, but there still would have been a line of 300 metres approaching the mausoleum. Tien had plenty of time for some of our Vietnamese history lesson from when the French showed up in the 1840s. Standing on either side of the line at intervals of about 50 metres were very good looking Vietnamese soldiers in white uniforms with bits of red braid and slightly tacky gold hardware. All of them would have been over six foot tall. They stood grim faced looking straight ahead as we filed past. Out of earshot, Tien explained that all Vietnamese men need to spend two years in the army before they turn 27 and those blokes would have been selected for that job because of their looks, height and the fact that they would have been strong supporters of the Party.

The closer we got, the quieter Tien talked. We turned a corner and were about the mount the steps to the enter the mausoleum when one of the guards reached out and poked me in the arm. Tien had stopped talking by then, but told me out of the side of his mouth to take my hands out of my pockets. The guards at that point had bayonets in the rifles, so I clasped my hands behind my back pretty quickly. At the door to the room where Ho Chi Min lies in state, another guard tapped me on the arm and I unclasped my hands and put them to my side.

The coffin was enclosed in glass and in a pit. It sat slightly below eye level. The floor around it was sunken. Four of those soldiers stood in the pit at each corner of the coffin, but were below our line of sight. As we filed around three sides of that coffin, I could see how moved many of the Vietnamese (including Tien) were. He said there are many locals who come every year as a sort of pilgrimage. Vietnamese down south tend to not revere Ho Chi Min as much.

Hi Chi Min makes his own pilgrimage every couple of years to Russia. Because of the inclination of Russians to embalm and put their past leaders on display, they are very good at touching up corpses. So Ho Chi Min is sent back there occasionally for a bit of work.

Out the other side of the mausoleum, Tien relaxed a bit, I looked around and gingerly put my hands back in my pockets, and we strolled past the old presidential palace. It had been built by the French, so when they were ousted, it was expected that Ho Chi Min would take up residence there. He had the whole place washed from top to bottom because he said it smelt. Then he thought it would send the wrong message to people if he lived there, so he instead moved into a three room building in the grounds formerly occupied by the palace electrician. The blokes who spent months washing the palace probably wished Ho Chi Min had had that noble notion before they started with the suds and rags.

That small and sparse house in the grounds is still there and we walked past it and looked in the windows. After a few years, Ho Chi Min commissioned an even more modest two room raised timber house nearby. Adjacent to it on the ground was a third room with access to a bomb shelter that he used during the war.



Also in the grounds is a building housing three cars given to Ho Chi Min - none of which he used. The first two were from Russia, the third was from the Vietnamese people living in Noumea, I think.







Tien knew a lot about Ho Chi Min and was clearly a fan. He had the backstory down pat - humble upbringing, left Vietnam to travel the world working on ships as a kitchen hand to learn about the world, came back to sort out the French etc etc. I suspect the backstory is taught in schools in the north and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has made its way into a song or two.

Next stop was the war museum. The first thing you pass walking through the front gate is a Russian made (and loaned) Mig21 that is regarded as a national treasure. On its nose, it has 14 stars representing the 14 US planes it shot down.



There is a captured Iroquois helicopter and a chinook, and there are a couple of dozen other planes and tanks. They’re all out in the open and dirty and bashed around which adds to the authenticity.

The centrepiece is the tail of a plane speared into the ground with a collection of other wreckage around it, including bits of a B52 - a much prized score. The signage and labels on all the exhibits are not kind to the US.





If I ever decide to become a history buff to bore people, I will pick as my subject the history of Vietnam from the arrival of the French in the 1840s till now. It really is an amazing story.

We left Tien after the museum. He was keen to get home because he had heard his pregnant sister had just learnt she was expecting triplets. It was not welcome news. She and her husband work at the airport in the cargo area, but money is tight. The wage for those sort of jobs and ones like front of house in hotels and junior policemen is around $1,000 AUD per month for long hours. Police and hospitality workers find it easy to supplement their wages, but not so much workers who don’t deal with the public. Tien's dad also works in the cargo area of the airport and has done for 29 years. For Tien's sister to get a job there, his dad had to pay someone $10,000 USD. It costs around the same to become a policeman after five years of university, but unless your dad is also a policeman, you will stay junior forever.

There were a fair few Aussies in Hanoi, and not classy ones like me. It’s always disappointing to spend a lot of time and money getting somewhere and finding Aussies there. The youngsters were pretty well behaved, though. The Americans were a bit more low key in Hanoi given it was a place where they didn’t have a win. It was the Chinese who were the loud and pushy ones. The Vietnamese don’t like them at all.

Don’t bother going to the night markets in Hanoi. They get talked up but are pretty disappointing. All the vendors are retailers and many buy from the same wholesalers, so there is stall after stall of the same rubbish - most of it probably from China.

But do seek out an egg coffee. Apparently it’s a Hanoi thing. The people at our hotel told us the best place to buy an egg coffee in the old quarter. There is a street known for coffee and it's number 39 in that street - I’ll find the name of it, Steve. You walk down a dark hallway into a sort of grim atrium and get ushered upstairs - that’s where they send tourists. Upstairs, there is a shabby space for perhaps 30 people to sit on stools calf height at dirty little tables and have coffee. The story is that in the 1940s there was a shortage of milk and a bloke working in a hotel experimented with making coffee using beaten egg yolk. He left the hotel and started a cafe and apparently that cafe is now run by his daughter and his grandson works there, too. Lots of places in Hanoi do egg coffee and I had a few elsewhere, but that one really was the best. The egg sits on top like a sort of very dense yellow meringue. The coffee stays below it. You scoop up and eat some of the egg and then mix the coffee through it.

Being savvy capitalists, I saw on a menu stickytaped to the wall that the cafe had introduced a few line extensions to the humble egg coffee. The was egg coffee with rum, which sounded okay. There was egg coffee with matcha for the Japanese, and with Coke for the Americans. I had a pretty good idea who the egg coffee with beer was aimed at.












On our second last day in Hanoi, Mimi and I went on a day trip out of town to Vietnam’s biggest pagoda and a place called Ninh Binh, which they market as an inland version of Ha Long Bay.

The hotel organised the trip - $55 each including lunch at a local restaurant. A mini bus collected us at 8.30am. It was great being the apex predator going through the traffic in Hanoi. The driver was tooting the horn constantly, but less for his sake, it was mainly to let motor bike riders know that he was coming through and they and their family and chicken needed to get out of the way.

When we got on the bus, the tour guide did a bit of a rehearsed intro to himself and the driver with a few lame gags. He told us their Vietnamese names, and their adopted western ones. The driver's name was Minh, but the guide said he was the company's best driver and had once raced cars so they called him Michael, as in Michael Schumacher. I meant to have a quiet word with the guide afterwards and suggest that naming the driver after a racing car driver who had been in a coma for some years after an accident, albeit a skiing accident, might not make passengers as confident as they hoped in his driving.

There were a couple of Chinese and Korean family on the bus. Then there was Mimi and I, an American retiree couple, and a very annoying English woman who would have been in her 60s and I think trying to recapture her hippy youth.

We stopped after an hour and half at rest stop that consisted of a big clean dunny with a huge souvenir store attached. The bus let us out on the dunny side of the building and picked us up on the other side - exit via the gift shop. I don’t think anybody bought anything – it was the same stuff as sold in the Hanoi night market.

First proper stop was Vietnam's biggest pagoda - Bai Dinh Pagoda. It was hard to get a handle on the place because it was so big. And the Vietnamese love very much that it is so big. There is a thing called the Vietnam Book of Records and that pagoda apparently has plenty of entries. It has a 36 ton bell. The biggest bronze (coated in gold) Buddha - 10 metres high. There are the most Arahant statues. The biggest doors. And a couple of corridors that go for a kilometre linking the major buildings.





I think what liked best about it was the fact that although Bai Dinh pagoda looks like it’s hundreds of years old, it’s only about 10. And it was built by a private company. I forgot to ask our guide what business the company was in. In the main hall where a huge gold Shiva sits (biggest in Vietnam, no doubt) all around the walls, are hundreds of niches that hold gold painted statues about 18 inches high. Anybody who donated $500 USD to the building project got a statue with their name on it.



The English tourist started to get annoying there. I thought she might have been a recent adherent to Buddhism making a bit of pilgrimage, but she was just loud and making a goose of herself posing for silly selfies and laughing at her own jokes. Mimi and I formed a pact with the American couple that we would stick together lest one of us end up in a boat or at lunch with the annoying woman. Very schoolyard stuff. Andy the American summed it up and said she seems like somebody who just liked drama in her life.

The Americans were fun. A childless couple who were very well travelled and had worked all over the world. He was an engineer and had worked for Dow. They had been on the road as retirees for over a year and were not able to return home. Their last residence in the US was in Texas, and when Trump became President, things got increasingly uncomfortable for them. Andy had retired, so Rhonda chucked in her job and they sold their house and they’re going to try and stay out of the country till the Trump era is over. All of the Americans we meet travelling are the enlightened ones. It doesn’t take them long to apologise for Trump - it's almost their opening line in a conversation.

After the pagoda, we were taken to the 'local restaurant' for lunch. There were half a dozen buses in the car park and the restaurant was like a huge cafeteria with long tables and a cold buffet that would been warm an hour previously. The food was pretty ordinary, but that was okay for everyone except the annoying woman. She insisted they heat some food up for her and was then ****** that we had to leave before she finished eating it.

The main attraction of Ninh Binh, like Ha Long Bay, is the water. Ninh Binh is an inland and scaled down version, so appropriately the boats are much smaller. They are flat bottom skiffs that carry four passengers with a local in the back rowing. All the boats followed the same path around a lake with limestone peaks that jut out of the water. We went through three caves, one that ran for 300 metres. The ceilings were very low, so suggesting Mimi take a video was pretty dopey of me. She got sconed by a stalactite, but kept hold of her phone. Luckily, we were going pretty slowly and that she kept hold of her phone. Boy, I would have been in strife if it had gone into the drink.






Toward the end of the ride, we were put ashore on a small island where they filmed some of the recent King Kong film. It must have had a tiny part because the Americans who had seen the movie didn’t recognise anything. We came upon half a dozen grass huts that must have been in the movie and there were five or six local people hanging around awkwardly in maroon robes with their faces painted. I imagine in the movie there was a lost tribe or something on that island and these locals were supposed to recreate the experience for us tourists of a walk through their village. They hadn’t really been told what to do, so they just sort of stood there. The locals really hadn’t worked out how to monetise that experience. They sure monetised the boat ride, though. We had heard there had been recently a bit of pushiness from the people rowing the boats when seeking a tip for their services. They would have been told to pull their heads in by whoever was running the operation and we were advised beforehand on the appropriate tip.






The annoying English woman didn’t really enjoy the boat ride - she was with the Chinese couple who didn’t speak English and had nobody to complain to for two hours. She made up for that when she got onto dry land. Everything was a problem and she complained to anybody in earshot about the arrangements for the tour, the guide, the boat ride and especially the lunch. I eventually asked her whether all her days were so fraught, or whether it was this particular day that we were sharing with her. I had to eventually tell her to let it go because she was being really annoying. She sulked the whole way home in the bus.

On our last day in Hanoi, Mimi and I had nothing special planned, so we went for a walk in the French quarter. I thought we might as well have a look at the old prison - the one called the Hanoi Hilton by the American pilots imprisoned there during the war. The French had built the prison in the mid nineteenth century to lock up recalcitrant locals. They even had a guillotine there - such an efficient and theatrical way to kill people. Then when the French were pushed out, the communists used the prison to lock up people who weren’t sympathetic to their cause. And then it was used during the Vietnam War to hold captured US airmen.

There were the usual grim cells and displays of manacles and a few hokey dioramas, but the best things were the propaganda films showing in two of the rooms. They were made in 2008, but seemed much older. The footage was from the 60s and 70s. One film talked about the indiscriminate bombing of Hanoi and elsewhere by the American aggressors and all of that. It’s hard to imagine why they still need to do that - I've never met anyone from America, or Australia for that matter, who thinks sending troops to Vietnam was a good idea. The second film focussed on conditions inside the prison for US airmen. It showed how well they had been looked after - good medical care, plenty of food, lots of activities, friendly locals hanging around and doing crafty stuff with them. At the end of the war when it was time for them to go, the Americans were given souvenirs and hugs and some apparently wanted to stay. Maybe the name Hanoi Hilton was not ironic after all?

 

I'm enjoying digging out these emails and rereading them - quiet season at work. Only a couple more to go.


Luang Prabang - Laos

We got out of Nam on a steamy moonless night on board an ageing twin prop transporter.

We were four again after meeting up with Lisa and Lulu in the airport at Hanoi. It was our second successful family meet-up at Hanoi airport.

It took a bit over an hour to reach Laos. The airport in Luang Prabang was like a small relaxed regional airport. Foreigners queued up to get a visa, which meant handing over our passports, spare passport photos we brought with us, and $124 US dollars for the four of us. Customs had packed up shop for the night, so there were no other checks.

There were only a couple of dozen people on the plane to Laos and we milled around the taxi desk. The taxi guys had a great system. We were charged $11 USD for a trip to our hotel and bundled into a van with a confused Chinese couple. It was only a ten minute drive through very quiet, dark streets.

Then we lobbed into the middle of madness. The night markets were on (they’re on every night) and our hotel was in them, though only 30 metres or so. Blinking in the bright lights, we got out of the van and wheeled our bags through throngs of market shoppers and stalls to the hotel entrance. They were expecting us and sat us down and gave us a drink.

It was a bit disorientating and I mentally promoted Vietnam to being a second world country.

Our hotel in Luang Prabang is small with a dozen rooms that have names - our ones are 'serenity' and 'nature'. They are large rooms with old timber parquetry floors. At the entrance to each room is a timber barrier that needs to be stepped over. This is a Buddhist thing – having to step over something forces you to look downwards as a sign of respect upon entry to a room. The building would be 80 or so years old. The best bit is that it has a roof deck on the third floor with a bar. We sit there every night and the girls write in their diaries (quaintly old school) while Lulu the 16 year old downs gin and tonics. At least they are cheaper than in Japan. No electric toilets here, but I like the way they flush. Water comes in from the side and creates a whirlpool in the bowl that eventually sucks everything down. It’s hypnotic and reminds me of that scene from Lost in Space where the Robinsons are in the chariot and get caught in a whirlpool. (That reference is for you, James, but I’ll spare you a photo.)









It’s another amazing hotel find by Lisa, assisted this time by Mimi - who recalled walking past the hotel when she was here with the school in year 11. The accomodation in Luang Prabang ranges from very fancy, to backpacker. Our place would sit in the middle. The fancy places are where the wealthy Germans, French, Chinese and Japanese would stay. An ex Sydneysider who has a shop here - friend of an acquaintance of Lisa's - told us that the older French who come here act like arrogant colonialists. The Chinese also act very proprietorial given they are throwing around a bit of money in these parts and promising the government lots of contributions to infrastructure.

In the little lanes behind the hotels live the locals who would work mostly to support the tourism industry. Their accommodation definitely isn’t too flash.

It seems to be a very chaste and humble town. Tourists drink, but I’m not sure locals do. We are in the tourist zone, though, and most of locals here are working. I don’t know where the local idle youth hang around. Perhaps on the other side of the hill where the backpacker accomodation is. There is a notice in our room about behaviour that is prohibited by the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. We are not allowed to get drunk, and we can’t bring into our room opium, heroin or ‘people who are not our spouse’.

Luang Prabang is not at all what I expected. Although the fifth largest city in Laos, it's small - maybe 60,000 people. But it's growing because it is becoming a tourist spot. I reckon it would have the feel of Bali 40 years ago. If it had beaches instead of the muddy Mekong and allowed people other than spouses into hotel rooms, it would be buggered by now as Bali is.

The nicest part of Luang Prabang is on a peninsula between the Mekong and a tributary. On the Mekong side of the peninsula are two long streets - maybe 2 kilometres long. These are where most of the decent guest houses are and the markets. There are hundreds of beautiful old French buildings that are now small guest houses. When the French were pushed out of here as well, they left some fabulous buildings and the skills to make baguettes and croissants. And then when the Americans decided to drop 200 million tons of bombs on Laos in the 60s and 70s, they didn’t target this area, so it’s mostly intact.

I found a small bomb in a store on the first day. I’m not sure whether it was for sale. I picked it up and in hindsight put it down a bit too casually. A thought went through my head that it was only about 10 kilos and would fit in my suitcase. Close behind that thought a scene played out in my head where I got to Sydney and was asked whether I had anything to declare. I imagined saying, 'Well, there is some coffee, and a bamboo thing. Oh, and that bomb I picked up in Laos...'




The night market, which starts at the hotel runs for about 500 metres toward the end of the peninsula. It’s so much better than the market in Hanoi. It’s all for tourists - locals have their own food market in a narrow street behind our hotel. And there are no makers in the market - the vendors are still just resellers buying stuff from often the same wholesaler. But it’s much better stuff. There are none of the really trashy trinkets that I saw in Hanoi, and the stall holders are more laid back - some a little too laid back. They sit on the ground and a few sneak a bit of a snooze. Nearly all of them have a smartphone and many sit there glued to it like teenagers. One girl was selling trinkets supposedly made from melted down bits of bombs and she was completely engrossed in a shoot 'em up game on her phone. The markets are a nice place for a wander, unlike those in Hanoi. And because our hotel was on them, we passed through the markets a few times every night and bought some little coconut pancakes every time.

Right beside our hotel is an alley way where food is sold at nights. We have eaten there twice. It’s crowded and possibly not too hygienic, but it’s great. The grilled whole fish they sell looks and tastes very good. Lisa asked what species it was and they said, 'Mekong'. They looked like perch. There were lots of fish traps in the river out front, so I liked to think those fish came out of there and were not bred in the traps they have further down the Mekong where the family that owns the fish trap live above it and the fish eats everything the family deposit from above. Yes, everything. Putting aside the provenance of the fish, it was great to have a family meal for $10 - a fifth the price of some nuts at the Peak Bar in Tokyo.

 

It's all over

I just got bitten by a mossie.

In Marrickville.

We're all home and the first mossie I have encountered in a month has been in Marrickville. I’ll still keep taking those malaria tablets for the requisite five days, though.

Hard to imagine that 30 hours ago we were sitting on the rooftop of that hotel having a gin and tonic with the night markets busy below us.

We knocked a few things over on our last days in Laos.

A trip to the waterfalls was mandatory. Everyone does that. The cheap way is in a tuk tuk, but it turned out to be a 45 minute drive, which would have been a long time to be sitting sideways on a wooden seat in the back of an open vehicle. I'm glad we went with the people mover option. The falls were good. All tourists, of course. A village with lots of food and souvenirs has sprung up around the entry to the falls. There is a bear sanctuary there, too, where they rehabilitate bears that have been kept in captivity as pets. A few Australian companies are involved in that. I liked the lifesize plaster models they had of bears from small ones right up to a polar bear.

There was no koala at the low end of the scale, though. Is the koala a bear? Perhaps not because they are a marsupial. Not sure why a marsupial also can’t be a bear, though a diet of leaves admittedly makes them seem a bit unbearlike.

Lisa and the girls had a swim in the water that was a curious blue and we headed back to town.





Lisa’s friend of an acquaintance arranged a tour of a pottery village for us. It was across the river and not a place where many tourists go. We were picked up by a young bloke who runs the only switched-on business in the village. His name was Thieng. Pronounced very similarly to Tien in Hanoi - same same, but different (that is of course the line on a popular t-shirt in the markets).

Thieng had arranged transport across the river on an open boat owned by a local guy who makes his money ferrying locals across the river. It was great to get onto that river in one of those long, skinny boats





Once onshore, Thieng walked us up the steps on the river bank and into the very quiet village. I think it was quiet because the military were doing a parachute jump display in Luang Prabang and that’s a bit of a novelty so lots of people went over the river to see it.

The village is home to 91 families and is known as the 'pottery village'. There would also be textile villages around Luang Prabang and others that specialise in other stuff, but it will all be dying out with China flooding all of south east Asia with goods even cheaper than they can produce themselves.

Thieng's adopted village (he married a local) has been there for 400 years, but only six families currently do pottery and the young people in those families are being discouraged from pottery by their parents because it's so hard to make money from it, as every ceramicist knows. They do things the way they would have for hundreds of years. For their wheels, a hole is dug in the ground perhaps 600mm across and the same in depth. A greased (buffalo fat) hardwood spike rises from the bottom of the hole and sitting on this is a solid bowl shaped piece of rosewood with a flat top for the work surface. The maker sits on the ground in front of the wheel. Across from him sits his wife. It's her job to turn the wheel for him while he fashions the pots. If the wife or husband dies, that’s the end of the family business. It’s staggering that in 400 years, nobody has said, 'Hey, what if we could sit higher and operate this thing with our feet?'





Thieng said over the years several well meaning people with knowledge of ceramics have come to the village to try and introduce new ways of doing stuff, but the locals aren’t interested. They are sceptical of him with his walking tours and lunches and stuff that looks a bit different.

He is on a mission, though. He wants pottery in his village to grow. He has a small shop and six wheels in an undercover area for his team and visitors to use. A morning with Thieng starts with a ride across the river, then a walk around the village to see what the other five families are up to – either sleeping or making big urns and pots mostly. Then a visit to the underground kiln and the place where people make bricks and floor tiles, and a session in Thien's workshop where we each made a pot - I finished first and I think mine was the best, though I had help.





We finished up with lunch made by his wife and mother-in-law. Boy, that was a good lunch. We sat on the floor and ate with our hands using sticky rice formed into a spoon shape. My favourite was the dried river seaweed with sesame seeds and the mushrooms picked in the forest that morning by Thieng's wife. They didn’t seem to be hallucinogenic, but I was a bit surprised to see the Loch Ness Monster in the Mekong on the way back across the river.





Thieng told us that the government had just graded the road through the village and were going to pave it. The road leads to a building yet to be finished by the government where the families who make stuff will have a retail space. They are going to need to lift their game, though. The things they are producing range from the utilitarian - big pots and urns with little variety - to the naff - little turtles and elephants. If that’s all they have to sell to tourists, it’s not going to fly. Then they will feel vindicated and pottery will die in the village. I’m not convinced Thien can pull off his vision.

On our second last night we had a sunset cruise on the Mekong. It’s a bit of thing. It was just the four of us on another one of those very long boats. This one was a bit more flash. Gee, it was a nice thing to do. There were only a couple of boats out and we all headed up river for a while. Then we drifted downstream as the sun set in front of us.





We had a last dinner outside at a flash hotel and then walked around to their garden and watched on an outdoor screen with a dozen people an old restored silent movie made by the film maker who did the original King Kong movie. The movie was about a tribe in Laos and their travails with elephants. It was a nice way to spend the last night and it’s good that the poor American woman who took ill and vomited expansively into a garden bed waited till after the film to do so.





So that's it. The girls were great and good fun and nothing went wrong. Lisa's diligent research was gold. I just found the salmon jerky I bought in Tokyo at the fish markets. It made it through customs at Hanoi, Laos and Sydney - possibly because it’s not very good. And the girls are now as proficient as me with chopsticks, though the collective Asian determination to eschew forks and spoons after all these years still perplexes me.

This morning I was at the newsagent down the road near home talking to Nathan who left Hanoi in 1980 as a 17 year-old on a fishing boat. Living in the midst of Sydney’s second largest Vietnamese community, I have always felt a bit remiss in not visiting Vietnam, so I was pleased to tell him I had just been there.

Natham came to Australia via China and has been back a few times. His wife, Na, was his neighbour in Hanoi and on one of those visits he must have convinced her to come over. It turned out that Nathan’s family home (and Na’s) was around the corner from where Mimi and I stayed and that as a kid he used to fish in the small lake near the old part of Hanoi. We talked about the craziness of modern Hanoi and I told him how much I liked egg coffee and what a great Hanoi thing that was. He said, ‘Egg coffee? Coffee with egg? I never heard of that.’