Part 2: Other Stuff from Our Trip to Vietnam

As two postings for one trip may seem a bit much, I’ll try to keep this second posting short.

Our first stop in Vietnam was Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), a city with wide boulevards filled curb-to-curb with motorbikes. To cross the street, you step out slowly into traffic and the drivers weave around you. I was afraid to do this at first, and then realized I could place Aaron between me and the oncoming vehicles and block my view of them, which dulled my fear – and would have dulled the impact should one have occurred.

To my surprise, I was only hit once, lightly, in the nine days we were there – and it doesn’t really count because the woman who hit me apologized.

Over the last 15 years, motorbikes basically replaced bicycles in Vietnam. (Hanoi has the largest number per capita in the world). Unfortunately, as a result, the country is struggling to address terrible air pollution and very high traffic fatality rates.

For now, at least, motorbikes seem essential to life there. We saw them used like minivans, carrying families of 5 (often mom and dad were in helmets, but kids were without)...

(apologies for the semi-blurry motorbike photos -- most were taken from a bus)

And we saw them used to transport all kinds of things:

Including caged chickens:

Mattresses:

and even 6-foot mirrors:

Actually, they gave up on this idea. I don't know why.

As I should have predicted, what Aaron took away from all of this is that he needs to have a motorbike (or “scooter” as he calls them now, in a form of propaganda). I’ve argued against this idea. Those with opinions should express them (in my favor) in the poll to the right.


Also filling the streets of Vietnam are lots of markets.









Looks delicious, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t all like that. For those of you with especially weak stomachs, now its time to sort of squint up your eyes so that things get dark and then scroll down the page so that you miss the next couple photos.

------

------

(Ok - body part section over).

Where there isn’t a full-blown market, there is still food for sale, carried around in baskets by women.

The sidewalks are also pretty packed – mostly with motorbike parking, but also with outdoor dining establishments which tend to feature tiny, tiny stools.

And, of course, there are food stands:




And on some street corners in Hanoi they serve “bia hoi,” the very popular local draught beer (which is not bad, especially for 17 cents a glass).



Aaron thought the Hanoi bia hoi tasted a lot better than the snake wine he tried in southern Vietnam. But he may have been biased against the snake wine as it made his eyes hurt for a few days. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a pic of the wine Aaron drank, but here are some other items from the same shop).



In addition to our trip to Mai Chau (see previous post), we did lots of other fun stuff in Vietnam.

We took a boat ride on the Mekong River:

Went to a huge end-of-Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) celebration in Saigon, where they presented an enormous Tet cake (made of ground beans and pork, wrapped in banana leaves) to some rather bored but distinguished looking gentlemen. (That’s the Tet cake behind the waving lady in the first pic, and then again on the big screen below).

And we slept overnight on a junk in Halong Bay, a beautiful coastal area with almost 2,000 limestone rock formations jutting out of the water.





Halong Bay also must have about 2,000 of these floating bodegas – the women paddle around unbelievable loads of food and liquor to sell to tourists.



We also went kayaking in Halong Bay, and met some very friendly kids who were helping out with the boats, and we all had a great time taking pictures of each other and then checking them out (yay for digital cameras!).
--------



Ok, so much for brief. Bye for now.