Three weeks in Vietnam.
Where we went:
Hanoi = Old Quarter, Ho Chi Minh’s House and Mausoleum, Temple of Literature.
Highlight: As we left there were two women fighting in the street and the Vietnamese guide said, “Look! Vietnamese folk dancing!”
Halong Bay = Huge bay with thousands of large limestone Karsts dotting the water – beautiful.
Hue = Imperial City of Nguyen Lords.
Vietnam version of China’s Forbidden City, built for the Nguyen emperors (pretty much everyone and everything in the Nam is named Nguyen…).
My Son = Cham Ruins
We took scooters for a day trip here to see the vestiges of the temples of the Cham empire. Impressive as quite different to any other types of temples we had seen but again took a toll in the war. The VC used is as a base so it got carpet bombed. A professor of Cham culture in France sent Nixon a protest letter and Nixon responded by ordering his troops to continue killing the VC without damaging the buildings – pretty difficult to do from a B-52…
Hoi An = Old riverside town with colonial buildings.
Na Trang = Nice beach
Dalat = Crazy House, Easy Riders, 1930’s Emperor Summer House.
If anyone offers you fox or weasel coffee from Vietnam – it’s coffee beans fed to, passed through and “recovered” through these animals; does something nice to the taste apparently - we declined to taste.
Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon = Cyclo Tour, Re-unification Palace.
The locals still call it Saigon. Much nicer than Hanoi; wider streets, calmer traffic, more trees, decent buildings. Looks like one place the French actually invested some money while they were here – Town Hall, Opera House, Post Office, Notre Dame Cathedral – all very nice. We took a Cyclo tour (guy cycling you around in a seat at the front of the bike) around the town and survived!
Saw the former Presidential Palace where the tanks crashed the gates to end independent South Vietnam. They still have a Huey and a Northrop F5 on the grounds. Place is a 1960’s monstrosity that was rebuilt after President Diem was so unpopular his own air force bombed him in the old colonial palace.
Cu Chi = Cu Chi Tunnels and Cau Dai Temple.
Cau Dai is the craziest religion ever – a fusion of Buddhism, Taoism and Christianity Victor Hugo as a saint! They worship four times a day at this barmy temple with dragons wrapped around the columns and the eye of Sauron overlooking everything. It has 2 million followers all hedging their bets for whatever deity meets them in the afterlife.
Cu Chi is the area with famous VC tunnels where the Ho Chi Minh trail ended, now with widened tunnels for Western tourists to crawl through! Scary as hell down there but they went underground as half a million tonnes of bombs were being dropped from above. Saw the worst propaganda film ever, made in 1967, which included lines such as, “Like crazed devils, the Americans shot everything, including the trees, the chickens and pots and pans. They shot everything in peaceful Cu Chi, very far away from Washington D.C.”.
Mekong Delta = Various Islands, Can Tho, Rach Gia
Phu Quoc Island = Long Beach
Billed as ‘The next Phuket’, not quite there yet unless staying on a construction site and watching distressing amounts of litter bob in the ocean is your idea of paradise.
General Observations: - What we call the Vietnam war, they call the American War. The war is not really an issue anymore, especially in the south. It was just another war in a long history of wars. They had the French to contend with for 80 years and the Chinese for 1000 years before that as occupiers. The population now is young and very forward looking and the only way is up.
- A Vietnamese said, “When the British left Malaysia they left a full infrastructure. When the French left Vietnam they left baguettes.” There’s not much to show for 80 years of colonial rule.
- One very disconcerting thing is how they keep touching you in markets to get your attention, one woman held on to me as I tried to walk away and wouldn’t let go!
- Customer service still an infant concept. They don’t do what suits the customer, they do what is convenient for them. No information on tours during the tour, they stop and kick you off a bus and don’t tell you what is happening next; told us the boat trip we had booked was cancelled only when we were on the replacement bus!
Overall Best places we visited were Halong Bay, Hoi An, Siagon and Cu Chi. Unfortunately after a while you feel like you’re walking around with dollar signs on your head and the only thing the locals care about is how much money they can get out of you - constantly being ripped off gets tiring after a while.
In hindsight, would have just gone to three places mentioned above and spent more time in China, Cambodia and Laos, where the people are nicer, haggle nicer, are interested in you beyond money (in places often much poorer than Vietnam), more polite and not just trying to rip you off all the time.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Thursday, 19 January 2012
The China Experience
Five weeks in all in China.
Too much to write about without starting an epic, so here is a summary of where we went, the main things that were there and then some general observations.
Where we went:
Beijing = Great Wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, 798 Art District, Temple of Heaven
Xi’an = Terracotta Warriors, Drum and Bell Tower
Shanghai = The Bund, Pudong
Yangtze Rive = Shennon Stream, 3 Gorges, Chongqing
Leshan = Largest Buddha in the world!
Chengdu = Panda’s!
Lijiang = China’s Bruges
Tiger Leaping Gorge = Awesome hiking
Hong Kong = The Peak, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Beaches.
General Observations:
- Can’t take a picture of the Buddha but can put a gift shop next to the Buddha…?
- No Cereal in China, milky soup and noodles for breakfast too
- The comb over is still acceptable in China, which does place them firmly in the developing nation category
- If you are mildly amused by the liberal use of the word ‘Dong’ in sentences and place names, you will enjoy travelling China.
- Success in Beijing is clearly a black Audi A6.
- Words they use that we understand: fun-gi, o-ba-ma; taxi driver said ‘Shabba’, to which we of course replied, “Mr. Lover Man.”
- No Chinese sports losses reported in the media, only wins.
- Weirdest foods seen: pea ice cream, seaweed Pringles, vacuum packed chicken feet.
- Great mobile phone reception everywhere, even in the centre of UNESCO world heritage parks.
- No fat Chinese in mainland china, plenty in Hong Kong - harbinger for Asia, with 60% of the world’s population is in Asia - we can’t all eat steak and drive saloons people! Where’s the sustainabilitaaay???
Overall
Great to see the second largest country, economy and major influencer for the next century up close. They have more in common with their American rivals than they realise: both very nationalistic and often hard to reconcile the messages coming out of the federal government with the experience of meeting the local people one-on-one - where they know the real score and are super friendly. Place is very safe and although not a smiling culture, the people are welcoming, approachable and eager to meet foreigners. They are now probably more capitalist in outlook than the West – it’s all about the money baby, without the hindrance of political correctness and health and safety gone mad.
China is a great place to visit, would recommend to anyone.
Too much to write about without starting an epic, so here is a summary of where we went, the main things that were there and then some general observations.
Where we went:
Beijing = Great Wall, Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, 798 Art District, Temple of Heaven
Xi’an = Terracotta Warriors, Drum and Bell Tower
Shanghai = The Bund, Pudong
Yangtze Rive = Shennon Stream, 3 Gorges, Chongqing
Leshan = Largest Buddha in the world!
Chengdu = Panda’s!
Lijiang = China’s Bruges
Tiger Leaping Gorge = Awesome hiking
Hong Kong = The Peak, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Beaches.
General Observations:
- Can’t take a picture of the Buddha but can put a gift shop next to the Buddha…?
- No Cereal in China, milky soup and noodles for breakfast too
- The comb over is still acceptable in China, which does place them firmly in the developing nation category
- If you are mildly amused by the liberal use of the word ‘Dong’ in sentences and place names, you will enjoy travelling China.
- Success in Beijing is clearly a black Audi A6.
- Words they use that we understand: fun-gi, o-ba-ma; taxi driver said ‘Shabba’, to which we of course replied, “Mr. Lover Man.”
- No Chinese sports losses reported in the media, only wins.
- Weirdest foods seen: pea ice cream, seaweed Pringles, vacuum packed chicken feet.
- Great mobile phone reception everywhere, even in the centre of UNESCO world heritage parks.
- No fat Chinese in mainland china, plenty in Hong Kong - harbinger for Asia, with 60% of the world’s population is in Asia - we can’t all eat steak and drive saloons people! Where’s the sustainabilitaaay???
Overall
Great to see the second largest country, economy and major influencer for the next century up close. They have more in common with their American rivals than they realise: both very nationalistic and often hard to reconcile the messages coming out of the federal government with the experience of meeting the local people one-on-one - where they know the real score and are super friendly. Place is very safe and although not a smiling culture, the people are welcoming, approachable and eager to meet foreigners. They are now probably more capitalist in outlook than the West – it’s all about the money baby, without the hindrance of political correctness and health and safety gone mad.
China is a great place to visit, would recommend to anyone.
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Monday, 2 January 2012
Beijing!
Nihao!
Arrived in Beijing after a 12 hour flight that should have been ten hours, they needed to replace a “battery” on the 747 on the tarmac and made everyone sit in their seats for an hour on the hottest day in summer, cabin temp being raised incrementally to the point I started to think it was the slow boiling frog experiment with humans or that the plane was fitted with a thousand CCTV cameras and we were now the unwitting stars of a new condensed Lord of the Flies type reality show. Anyway, joys of long haul travel aside, we finally arrived in Beijing! Or as the Chinese call it…Beijing! To describe Beijing in the words of “One word weather with Nelson Mandela”: SMOGGY!
i.e. “Lot of fog around today…oh, that ain’t fog.”
You can tell from the airport and the drive in that parts of the city are like London if the British still had money and less planning regulations: the airport terminal is the size of a couple of Heathrow Terminal 5’s, they have six ring roads around the city…six! In England we’ve been struggling to repaint the hard shoulder of the M25 since 1987.
The city itself is like a giant grid radiating outward from the forbidden city. All the buildings are ordered in design, this pleases my wife, who likes ordered things, this consequently pleases me; happy wife = happy life and all that.
The Forbidden City is second clue to Chinese culture, when they put their minds to it - they don’t mess around. The place has 8,000 rooms and a building for every function, e.g. This is the building the emperor puts his robe on, then he goes to the next building to have a rest after putting his robe on - the robe resting building. I thought Topkapi Palace was impressive, and I’m sorry Istanbul, you know I love you dearly, but Topkapi is a model train set in one of the buildings of this place, then there is the summer palace…
It was while we were here that I first noticed how people were staring at us. Two tall caucasians stick out a mile here. They particularly stare at my wife - a five foot eight blond beauty floating serenely amongst a seaweed of four foot nothing clone hairstyles is a sight to see. It’s like travelling with a celebrity as kids take pictures of her. The kids also occasionally run up to yell practice the solitary word of English they know which is of course “Hello”. Initially we were covering our pockets against the swarm but soon realised it’s not like Europe where it is some co-ordinated pocket pilfering by itinerant caravan dwellers - here it is just enthusiasm for for some tall foreign devils. Even at that young age, they probably also realise there is a plain clothes policeman about waiting to violate their human rights if they damage brand China. This is most noticeable on Tienanmen square - pretty much more cops than tourists. Wouldn’t give anyone five seconds to strip down to a “Free Tibet” T-Shirt before finding themselves at the bottom of a collapsed scrum. The positive side of all this of course is the place is very safe! Walking around at night even, never felt in danger and Ass Peril alarm not gone off once.
The city has some nice parks and shiny new shopping malls…which play Kenny G as muzak…all the time…like its the new shizzle…urgh…even the Eastern Europeans have graduated to playing Phil Collins in such places.
The locals are friendly though the language is tough; totally tonal language. You’re stuffed trying to read it off the page, so you get them to say it and you say it back, what they just said and they say it’s wrong. How can that be wrong? I’ve just repeated what you’ve just said! Nope, slightly out = wrong. The word “ma” means four different things depending on the tone - got to be bang on. Cue hand gesticulating frenzy. We are surviving on the vegetarian front too, despite their penchant for putting pork in even their tea. We have had some interesting culinary adventures, which we knew we would - we will upload a picture of the “Condom of cheese” when we can - a picture still speaks a thousand words. Also saw some live scorpions and big ass bugs on skewers at the market, and I mean like still clawing the air live - we moved on swiftly before the inverse of the aforementioned Happy Wife Universal Constant was invoked.
We are meeting some friends of friends who are locals today, they have been most welcoming and hospitable, so will be great to pick uplocal insight from them.
Overall, having a great time, there is so much to see in Bejing, still need to get to the Olympic park, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, kung-fu, acrobatics show etc etc. then at some point think about moving on south…
Until the next exciting episode…remember, “Be safe. And if you can’t be safe - be legal.”
www.GarethFlood.com
Arrived in Beijing after a 12 hour flight that should have been ten hours, they needed to replace a “battery” on the 747 on the tarmac and made everyone sit in their seats for an hour on the hottest day in summer, cabin temp being raised incrementally to the point I started to think it was the slow boiling frog experiment with humans or that the plane was fitted with a thousand CCTV cameras and we were now the unwitting stars of a new condensed Lord of the Flies type reality show. Anyway, joys of long haul travel aside, we finally arrived in Beijing! Or as the Chinese call it…Beijing! To describe Beijing in the words of “One word weather with Nelson Mandela”: SMOGGY!
i.e. “Lot of fog around today…oh, that ain’t fog.”
You can tell from the airport and the drive in that parts of the city are like London if the British still had money and less planning regulations: the airport terminal is the size of a couple of Heathrow Terminal 5’s, they have six ring roads around the city…six! In England we’ve been struggling to repaint the hard shoulder of the M25 since 1987.
The city itself is like a giant grid radiating outward from the forbidden city. All the buildings are ordered in design, this pleases my wife, who likes ordered things, this consequently pleases me; happy wife = happy life and all that.
The Forbidden City is second clue to Chinese culture, when they put their minds to it - they don’t mess around. The place has 8,000 rooms and a building for every function, e.g. This is the building the emperor puts his robe on, then he goes to the next building to have a rest after putting his robe on - the robe resting building. I thought Topkapi Palace was impressive, and I’m sorry Istanbul, you know I love you dearly, but Topkapi is a model train set in one of the buildings of this place, then there is the summer palace…
It was while we were here that I first noticed how people were staring at us. Two tall caucasians stick out a mile here. They particularly stare at my wife - a five foot eight blond beauty floating serenely amongst a seaweed of four foot nothing clone hairstyles is a sight to see. It’s like travelling with a celebrity as kids take pictures of her. The kids also occasionally run up to yell practice the solitary word of English they know which is of course “Hello”. Initially we were covering our pockets against the swarm but soon realised it’s not like Europe where it is some co-ordinated pocket pilfering by itinerant caravan dwellers - here it is just enthusiasm for for some tall foreign devils. Even at that young age, they probably also realise there is a plain clothes policeman about waiting to violate their human rights if they damage brand China. This is most noticeable on Tienanmen square - pretty much more cops than tourists. Wouldn’t give anyone five seconds to strip down to a “Free Tibet” T-Shirt before finding themselves at the bottom of a collapsed scrum. The positive side of all this of course is the place is very safe! Walking around at night even, never felt in danger and Ass Peril alarm not gone off once.
The city has some nice parks and shiny new shopping malls…which play Kenny G as muzak…all the time…like its the new shizzle…urgh…even the Eastern Europeans have graduated to playing Phil Collins in such places.
The locals are friendly though the language is tough; totally tonal language. You’re stuffed trying to read it off the page, so you get them to say it and you say it back, what they just said and they say it’s wrong. How can that be wrong? I’ve just repeated what you’ve just said! Nope, slightly out = wrong. The word “ma” means four different things depending on the tone - got to be bang on. Cue hand gesticulating frenzy. We are surviving on the vegetarian front too, despite their penchant for putting pork in even their tea. We have had some interesting culinary adventures, which we knew we would - we will upload a picture of the “Condom of cheese” when we can - a picture still speaks a thousand words. Also saw some live scorpions and big ass bugs on skewers at the market, and I mean like still clawing the air live - we moved on swiftly before the inverse of the aforementioned Happy Wife Universal Constant was invoked.
We are meeting some friends of friends who are locals today, they have been most welcoming and hospitable, so will be great to pick uplocal insight from them.
Overall, having a great time, there is so much to see in Bejing, still need to get to the Olympic park, Great Wall, Temple of Heaven, kung-fu, acrobatics show etc etc. then at some point think about moving on south…
Until the next exciting episode…remember, “Be safe. And if you can’t be safe - be legal.”
www.GarethFlood.com
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