Travel Tuesday: Halong Bay

As part of our trip to Vietnam last summer, Tutt and I went on an overnight cruise around Halong Bay. I hadn't really heard of it before but Tutt, a fan of Top Gear, had seen the special where they turn their cars into watercraft and was keen to see it in person, so we included it in our itinerary.

It was a very swish boat.

We boarded around lunchtime and were swiftly whisked off into the other-worldly landscape. It is truly odd: huge limestone chunks jutting up out of emerald green water, usually with a bunch of birds sitting on them and staring. All different shapes and sizes, and seemingly at complete random. While I remember enough geology to know why they look like this, I've never really been satisfied with why it happens so randomly. Why did these chunks survive the weathering, I wonder.

Anyway.

We sat on this balcony after our multi-course fish banquet and Tutt taught me cribbage. I am a bad loser and she kept remembering rules she hadn't told me which only made me a worse loser, but we had fun and I didn't throw her overboard. The next morning, we woke up to this.

We were hustled onto little boats and taken around a floating village, wearing these hats to protect from the extremely strong sun. It was a bit like going on a camel ride in a Bedouin village - awkwardly touristy - but I loved floating around the village. What an interesting place it must be to live. Terrible wifi though, I'm sure.

Afterwards we had some beach time. Deliciously welcome after all the heat and humidity.

I can recommend going: it is something to behold. The cruise was quite touristy but my attitude to that is always - well, I am a tourist.

Travel Tuesday: Cu Chi Tunnels

During last year's visit to Vietnam, I went on a day trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, from Ho Chi Minh City. These are a three-layered maze of tunnels where the Vietcong hid during the Vietnam war.

I was interested to find out that the tunnels led to the nearby river for ease of escape. The network was extremely substantial, and included schools, hospitals, entertainments - all kinds. They were very ingenious about it. 

The whole thing did make me feel slightly sick, it must be said. I have a creeping dread about being stuck in a cave somewhere, which I attribute mainly to my size, so peering down these tunnels made me feel decidedly strange.

Vietnamese people are considerably smaller than fat English history teachers.

I'm not convinced my foot would fit down this one, let alone the rest of me.

We were taken down a set of tunnels, which had been specially widened by 40% to accommodate tourists who like their cake. I decided I would press on and experienced what must be my closest ever brush with a panic attack at the opening to the tunnel. I really, for a moment, thought I would not be able to go in, but there were three people behind me, including a faintly racist NZ tourist who kept whinging about how difficult it all was (there were other things that marked her out as a racist, not this whinging) and my pig headedness would not allow me to go back, so I managed to force myself forwards. At one point my hips were briefly wedged in the tunnel, so I crawled on my hands and knees, seeing stars and sweating, until we were out. I wouldn't repeat. How they all lived down there for months on end, in tunnels even narrower, is beyond me.

They were pretty ingenious with the panji stakes, too.

When I teach about the Vietnam war I always point out that Vietnamese people with sticks beat Americans with state-of-the-art weapons, partly because they were fighting for their home. They set a lot of booby traps like this one, filled with sharpened bamboo stakes. Apparently villages used to make them together in some kind of bonding exercise. This beats any team building event I've ever been to. They indicated to each other where these traps were using leaves with sticks stuck in them. The mind boggles.

They were up against some big old weapons.

But they had AK-47s, which could be stored under water until needed (!) and thus trumped the M16. We were invited to shoot AK-47s for a small fee. I declined. I was pleased to see that it was no longer possible to pay a bit extra and shoot a cow, as it apparently was when my friends visited 10 years ago.

Interesting place. It felt a bit dark and sinister, but I'm not really surprised about that.

Today I wish I was...

Take me back to Vietnam.

When I woke up this morning, I thought it was Saturday. When I realised that the alarm going off indicated this could not be the case, I decided it was at least Friday. Brutal.

I urgently require:
a) a long lie-in in a big fluffy bed
b) to feel sand between my toes (without getting stabbed by a dead fish)
c) an afternoon nap with a trashy magazine
d) to hang out with Tutt for a time when we don't just talk about work

I'm just under-snoozed, really. Work isn't too bad. That could go on for ages, if I could just get myself into bed before 11pm 3-4 nights a week.

Saturday Night Treever

During the summer tour this year Tutt and I went to Gardens by the Bay, a very large park complex built on reclaimed land in Singapore. We went for the night music show by these "trees"

They are actually massive exhausts for the biofuel generators that power the domes. Amazingingly cool. Singapore is just something else.

They also danced (or rather, their extensive lighting systems danced) to a 70s medley for 20 minutes.

It was completely surreal to watch in the tropical heat of a Friday night, but we had a great time. The place was crawling with people and it was a really fun atmosphere. Afterwards our taxi driver took us to an amazing hawker centre for dinner, which is also a very Singaporean thing to do. Want to see a picture of my dinner? Of course I took one.

Every type of food you can imagine. I think I might have got a bit stiffed on the price as I paid about $12 for this and Tutt's Chinese choice was much cheaper, but it was still the cheapest meal I ate in Singapore and it was absolutely delicious. No regrets.

Blue Monday

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the blue tiled bench from the park in Hanoi. Here's the end of it: something that would be great to recreate in my back garden, albeit in a much miniaturised form.

Tuesday Ten

Ten Swims of the Summer

1. Italy: Villa Scapone Pool

When Tutt and I stayed here two years ago, I don't think we went into the pool. What a mistake! It was very refreshing and had great views over the bay.

2. Italy: the Adriatic

I had a little swim off the dock while we waited for the kayak man to come back from his afternoon nap. Then Mr Z and I paddled over to the practically private beach for some more wading and general enjoying of the sea.

3. Vietnam: Halong Bay

I didn't jump off the boat, as I had intended. I didn't fancy it. But we did stop at a small beach as part of the trip around the floating village and I was able to have a good splash around.


4. Vietnam: Hoi An Hotel

We didn't know this place had a pool until we arrived and found that our room overlooked it. The only problem was that it warmed up a lot during the day, so it was not as refreshing by the afternoon as it might have been. 'Oh no, my pool is too warm' - this could be the original first world problem.

5, 6, 7 and 8. Vietnam: Fusion Maia Resort, Danang

This place was RIDICULOUS. Tutt found it via a luxury holiday website and, although the travel agent pulled a "How?!" face when we said we'd like it included, she managed to get us two nights there within our budget. How, I will never know.

There were four swim opportunities at the Fusion. First, the sea:

I had a good wade in the sea but didn't really go in. I was a bit put off. When I first approached it, I saw a dead fish had been washed up and was being eaten by birds. As I got closer, I realised they were not birds, but large, spidery crabs, which melted back into the surf as I approached. I decided to kick the fish back into the sea, to prevent any nasty surprises from anything else feeling peckish while I was nearby. This turned out to be a mistake: on my second kick, that dead fish bit me* really hard on the little toe. I was bleeding quite profusely for some time, it hurt a lot and my hypochondriac brain kicked in with fears of poison and so on (Tutt was as sympathetic as you might imagine). As a result, I was not tempted to swim in the South China Sea again; but as you'll see, I didn't need it anyway.

* clearly not actually a bite, but I don't really want to think about what else on a dead fish's face was able to puncture my toe so effectively.

Option two was the infinity pool that led down to the beach.

A trick of the light makes it look short. It was not. This pool was lush - the shallow end was shallow enough that you could loll about on your elbows and soak up the sun - but busy.

Option three was the private pool in our room (I told you this place was ridiculous).

I did spend a lot of time in the private pool.

Loving my GoPro a bit too much at this stage. 600 pictures and videos of pools later...

However, I think my favourite must have been secret option number four, which was in the spa. It had its own waterfall. Under-12s were not allowed. And it was entirely deserted. Result.

9. Singapore: Raffles Hotel

Another place our magician of a travel agent managed to squeeze in under our budget. A rooftop pool, here.

Slightly marred by the unsupervised children who arrived and started spitting water at each other; but I could only smile, remembering 10 minutes earlier when I had watched a dishevelled pigeon bathing in the shallow end.

10. France: campsite

Last but not least, the campsite we stayed at in Normandy had its own outdoor heated pool. This one was nice because it had a sort of ledge all the way around the edge, so even the deep end was not that deep at the edges. It was less nice because the water level was way down (end of season problems) and there was quite a lot of leaf matter in there. And children. But that's always going to be a public pool problem.

Blue Monday

On our first full day in Hanoi, I went for a wander by myself after it became clear that Tutt had little motivation to move from the hotel room. I was looking for the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum; it's probably lucky I didn't find it as I was not dressed conservatively enough to file past his body*

Instead I wandered towards a nearby body of water in desperate search of a cooling breeze (there was none to be had). I came across these rather fetching mosaic park benches on the way, in various hues:

There was a dark blue one as well, but someone was kipping on it and I was already attracting enough attention by being a sweating, gigantic westerner, wearing clothes made in Vietnam but shipped halfway around the world for me to buy and carry back there.

I sat by the lake for a while, avoiding several men who were trying to sell me motorbikes, until a young man dressed all in black (wtf) came over and asked me to fill in a survey about tourism. The survey was all about Saigon, which made me suspicious, but I didn't want to be rude so I did what I could. He then told me he worked for the Red Cross and was selling toothpicks for a blind man. It was a real mish-mash of charitable opportunity for me, but I was not in the mood. Eventually I managed to make him believe that I didn't have any cash of any currency on me - he had stated that he would happily take British pounds - and he went away in a huff.

If he'd told me he was desperate to buy some clothes that weren't black, I might have been in a more giving mood.



* not actually his body, if popular gossip is to be believed. And what is with ignoring the wishes of communist dictators when they die? Ho Chi Minh wanted to be burned. Lenin wanted to be buried next to his mother. Both (ostensibly) ended up embalmed in glass cases, being goggled at by ignorant tourists. It's like the ultimate revenge of capitalism.