Back in February, Grace came to visit. This is why I came back from Hoi An. We stopped at one of the temples and walked around with the crowds. We got some ice cream. Grace was impressed by my ability to order since Vietnamese people don't use lines well. (You just kind of push to the front and yell at the worker . . .not the best system but it's what you gotta do) We drove through Old Quarter for a bit and stopped for Tra Chanh (lemon tea) in front of the cathedral. Afterwards, we tried meeting up with Justin and crew at the Ethnology museum (turns out it was closed ... Google lied). So we walked around a park, watched a fight (looked like some younger guy had tried to steal something or hit the lady at the parking area ... dunno but the security guards were just wailing on him), tried to go to chicken street (also closed) and then not sure ... we "tried" to do a lot. It was hit or miss on whether something was open or not. Anyways, Grace and I go to Cat Ba for a couple of days (island in Lan Ha Bay ... less touristy than Ha Long Bay). We did some rock climbing and kayaking with a tour group. We took a boat out into the bay and a smaller boat out to rock climb. There were tons of little floating villages out in Lan Ha bay. They're mostly fish and pearl farmers. The villagers live on the water full time. They go to the mainland only really to go to market. The children who live in the villages close to the island might go to one of the island schools but the ones further out in the bay usually do not go to school. They just learn at home about the family business. After our excursion, we head back to our hostel. One of the guys in our room asked if we wanted to join him and his friend for pizza. His name was Ben ... turns out his friend's name was Ben too. That was fun. Next day .... we rented a motorbike and explored the island. We went to the national park in the center of the island and took 2 hour (ish) hike. There were SO MANY ANTS. Everywhere. And they flew. Along the trail, it was fine, they just crawled around. But at the top it literally sounded like it was raining ... but it was just the ants walking around on the bush leaves. Needless to say, we did not spend a whole lot of time at the top. We did spend a few minutes about 50 meters down from the top picking off the ants who decided to land on us. We ran into Ben on the way out. Our park ticket also got us into one of the caves down the road, Trung Trang Cave. Further down the road was Hospital Cave. We never did figure out how they got patients into the hospital. Both ends of it had a massive set of stairs. Seems a bit inconvenient when you're carrying someone who's bleeding out ... helicopters didn't seem logical either as the whole goal was hiding the hospital (and not getting blown up) ... Oh, in case it wasn't clear from context, this was a hospital built into a cave during one of the Vietnam wars (might have been including the French stuff in the 50s). The place selling tickets for the cave also did lunch so we stayed for a bite to eat. We ran into Ben again and had lunch with him (we saw a lot of the same people everywhere, the island is only so big). That afternoon, we went up to Cannon Fort since we heard it was a great place to see the sunset over the bay. While the views were magnificent ... the extreme amount of clouds completely blocked any sunset that we would have seen. Mildly disappointing. Groot loves Grace!! We did some shopping in Cat Ba
0 Comments
|
ShannonMath Teacher living and working in Hanoi, Vietnam Archives
February 2022
Categories |