Tyhoons from China and Tornado's from Nottingham

Fiona in her finest on xe om heading for a night out

I’m writing this three full weeks after Fiona went home. It doesn’t seem that long but that’s another example of just how time seems to fly by. Christmas has gone and tomorrow night is New Year’s Eve, then its 2007 – can you remember celebrating New Year’s Eve 1999?

Her visit was just like our trip in 2005– a blur of activity with little breathing space, lots of new places, tastes and smells (most of them pleasant) and plenty of exercise (you can see the photo’s on Flickr) and yes, she's the tornado.

She arrived on Saturday 25th of November and I took the bus to the Airport to meet her. This is a two bus journey and the number 7 which does the airport leg is a more expensive bus so the total journey costs a staggering 26 pence. It can take a long time – I was advised to allow one and three-quarter hours – but on this day everything went very smoothly. I walked through the village to the bus stop turned round and there was a bus. The first journey took exactly the time I was told it would and when I changed buses the number 7 was waiting behind the bus I got off. It was good advice to change before Kim Ma bus station for as the bus pulled in and the doors opened a flood of people ran on, pushing and shoving to get the remaining seats before the long journey out to NoiBai. As it left Kim Ma the bus was packed. Once again the journey was smooth and I found myself in the arrivals lounge just over an hour after leaving the house, and well before Fiona’s plane was due.

I sat in the coffee bar having a snack, watching everyone sitting smoking under the no smoking signs (and using the ashtrays provided) and glued to the tv where an Eddie Murphy movie was showing. The movie was in English but the voice soundtrack was faded almost to nothing. A single woman’s voice dubbed all the different actor’s lines into Vietnamese.

The plane was late I sat longer. The Bangkok flight arrived and people started to trickle out from the baggage hall. The Singapore flight was in and Fiona was one of the first off. The doors opened and the familiar vision complete with rucksack and enormous pink kit bag came striding out. It didn’t feel like we hadn’t seen each other for six months. A long kiss, a few words and a taxi back to the house pointing out the sights of Hanoi on the way.

I’d booked us into Hoa Sua, the street kids training restaurant on the special private balcony table for her first Vietnamese evening meal (the one in Bangkok doesn’t count) I got extra brownie points for the string quartet which I didn’t actually know were performing until we got there.

Sunday we wandered Hanoi and caught up with gossip. The temperature had climbed back to the high 20’s – thankfully – so it felt like a holiday. We tried the motorbike taxis which she took to immediately, looked for the turtle in the lake (we only saw the stuffed one) then did the two people on one bicycle thing from West Lake back to Van Ho stopping off at the Goethe Institute for a Germanic late lunch. In the evening we had a pizza!!

Monday the fun started. The itinerary looked like this;

Monday – Ha Long bay for two nights
Tuesday – Full day of Kayaking on the bay
Wednesday – Visit some caves on the bay then back to Hanoi to catch the night train to Sapa
Thursday – Three nights at the Eco-lodge 45 minutes drive from Sapa
Friday – Morning around the lodge. Afternoon a half day walk through local villages
Saturday – Do a day walk in half a day then get motorbike taxis back up the mountain
Sunday – Do a two day trek in one walking right back to Sapa for the night train to Hanoi
Monday – Arrive in Hanoi 4.30am, walk back to the house, change and catch the afternoon flight to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), have an evening in the city
Tuesday – Three day two night cycling trip in the Mekong, starting during Typhoon Durian.
Wednesday – cycling down to Can Tho where we saw the floating markets
Thursday – early start to cycle around Can Tho before we go back to HCMC for a tour of the War Remnants museum and the evening flight back to Hanoi
Friday – Visit my offices, bit of shopping, eat in with the other house guests
Saturday – Meet a Shaman, do another cycling trip with some Australians I know and then eat out with a load of people at an event put on by Catherine
Sunday – Pack and take her to the Airport

I went to bed early that Sunday night!

The most memorable part of the trip for me was the cycling. The first morning involved a two hour drive to our start point. We ate breakfast to the sound of torrential rain beating down on the restaurant roof and when we got outside the palms and bananas were bending in the wind. As we drove out of HCMC the weather was showing no signs of abating and our guide’s mobile was ringing every few minutes with changes to the itinerary brought on by the impact of the passing typhoon.

It’s not often typhoons hit the south of Vietnam. They normally strike the middle of the country. This is given as the reason the area was ill prepared and so much damage occurred. Over 100 people were killed, 34,000 houses destroyed and a further 200,000 damaged and over 800 fishing boats were lost in the space of 24 hours.

We cycled in the wind and the rain as the storm moved away passing power lines which were laid in flooded rice fields which should have been dry at this time of year. We saw houses which had lost all the walls and roof. Bamboo or concrete platforms with furniture and other belongings scattered about were the only evidence they had ever been houses. My saddle developed a mind of its own and was soon pointing at the sky, that’s a bit painful! I fixed it once myself but it moved again so we stopped at a village workshop and raised an oily mechanic from his hammock. He fixed the offending item with a few twists of an alan key and we were underway again. We could choose from 22km or 50km, no prizes for guessing which route we did.

Our afternoon trip on the river and overnight stay on an island was cancelled – the police had closed the river so we had to overnight at the place we had lunch, an old Japanese style house with restaurant, large orchard garden and a big veranda where we could sit, eat, drink and watch the rain in the evening. From here in the late afternoon we took a small boat along the canals stopping to talk to people stripping fruit to make candy – if you work fast you can earn £1.30 a day – and a woman who makes palm leaf tiles for the roof and walls of bamboo huts. She sells her tiles for a tenth of a penny each and makes enough to earn 60pence a day. Her business was booming in the aftermath of the storm. We also visited rice paper production and coconut candy makers, but they were not working as everyone had gone home to deal with the typhoon. As a concession the rice paper producer made a few sheets for her family’s tea, just so we could watch.

Our revised route that day had taken us through narrow muddy tracks for most of the journey so bikes and clothes needed cleaning, we washed and hung our stuff up to dry before yet another cookery lesson in the art of making Nem. These were made in a rice flour lattice rather than the usual thick rice paper. They looked different but tasted the same. The wife of the house owner took to Fiona and we received special attention for the whole of our stay. We ate our own cooking, had a couple more drinks and retired.

Breakfast was not one of my favourite meals. Everything was sweet, apart from the dry bread. Sticky rice is a triumph of design over common sense and I also take my hat off to the marketing department at Laughing Cow – their version of Dairy Lea cream cheese wedges is served everywhere in Vietnam by hotel owners who think that is what westerners eat for breakfast, but it’s not my idea of how to start the day. The awful instant coffee completed the picture. Oh for a bowl of Vietnamese rice porridge or Pho. They just can’t do a western breakfast, but they can’t believe we would eat a Vietnamese breakfast either. We cycled to meet the van and be transported to the day’s start point.

That day we tried Durian fruit, visited a brick works and a tile and ornament factory, drank Mia Dah – the sugar cane drink and gorged on all sorts of other fruits along our route. Durian has a peculiar smell which means it is actually banned from aeroplanes and many westerners can’t get past the smell to eat the fruit. The smell didn’t bother either of us and the fruit was delicious. As we ate the woman whose shop we had bought the fruit at asked all sorts of personal questions through the guide. He answered without asking us so now we’re married and left the kids at home for our holidays. I was surprised to find the brick kilns using rice husk as fuel. The stuff arriving in barge loads to be carried in baskets to the ovens. It must take a massive amount of the stuff to generate enough heat to keep the kilns to temperature.

That’s just one example of many interdependencies in the economy of this region. Another was the source of clay used in making the tiles, bricks and ornaments at these factories. It comes from rice paddies. Every so often the rice farmers have to lower the level of the rice fields to make sure the water levels stay right. To do this they move the top soil and dig out the clay below. The clay is then bought by the factories, compressed back into large blocks and cut with cheese wires to make anything from a brick to a Buddha.

Unusually Fiona was finding all this industry interesting. She was also finding the cycling hard as the temperatures started to climb in the wake of the typhoon. There were no requests for more demanding mileage. Hammering along the long straight roads in the strengthening sun was enough and even when the guide shortened the last leg of the day – concerned that we would not make it to Can Tho before rush hour congestion blocked the ferry – she did not complain. We arrived in the city and the hotel looked fine, it was only later we discovered our room was beneath the disco and it started to look like a long night.

Our guide had booked us a table on the upstairs terrace of the best restaurant in Can Tho, with views of the Statue of Uncle Ho and the fish market. The latter is not such a great view now that it’s enclosed. Fiona had had her fill of Vietnamese food by now so she ate pizza and I had a steak, the first for months. After dinner we wandered the streets and along the river front. Despite the fact that Fiona was tanning quite quickly her skin was still fair enough to attract admiring stares from local women who aspire to have white skin. If you have wealth, high status and don’t have to work in the fields then your skin will be pale, so even if you do work in the fields cover up and try to be as pale as possible so people will think you have wealth and high status. Fiona’s skin colour is highly desirable here.

Thursday morning we started the day with a boat trip to the floating markets. These are not tourist markets, they are places where villages bring their produce to sell to market traders who then sell it in the city. Whatever a particular boat has to sell is strapped to the mast so buyers can see which boats to head for. Some boats were the size of river barges and had many different fruits and vegetables strapped on the bamboo pole. If you see one of the palm leaf roof tiles strapped to the pole then it’s the boat itself which is for sale. Mobile bakeries, tea trolleys and snack stalls float amongst the bigger boats providing sustenance for vendors and buyers alike.

We passed yet more damaged houses and weaved through a network of canals to rendezvous with the van and start the day’s cycling. Once again Fiona was not fidgeting, she had enjoyed the markets and now we undertook a leisurely cycle ride through the countryside to the East of the city, but this was a short day. The ferry had to be negotiated again. There seemed to be fewer boats running and our river crossing took over half an hour. We made a quick stop at one of the many roadside restaurants, all personally approved by the tour company’s owner and arrived back in HCMC in time to spend an hour in the War Remnants Museum.

Previously called the Museum of American and Chinese war crimes, the re-badgeing coincided with the increase in American and Chinese tourists. But once inside the original name holds true as exhibit after exhibit shows the painful truth about war and what it does to people. Graphic colour photos and eye witness descriptions of massacres, the devastation of napalm and the long term effects of Agent Orange. Anyone seeing this would be moved. There were many Vietnamese students wandering round making notes and sketching some of the exhibits. In the yard we appreciated the size of some of the weapons used in the war. The last part of the museum showed how the French had suppressed nationalism during the late 1940s including one of the guillotines used to execute convicted “terrorists”. I do admire the way the Vietnamese appear to have put all these things behind them and focus on the future.

Fiona laughed at my antics attempting to say “airport” to the taxi driver but then became a bit more sympathetic when he eventually got what I was saying and repeated it back to me. To both of us his rendition sounded just like what I had been saying to him. If I can’t hear the difference, how can I ever get it right?? The day before our guide had apologetically taken me on one side and explained that I was not saying “hello” to the nice children along the road side who all know one English word (hello) and use it frequently. My attempts to respond in Vietnamese were failing miserably as usual. My pronunciation of hello was coming out as a request for rice porridge.

The rest of our trip was full of new experiences too, like being asked by one of the young staff at the Eco-lodge to help him learn to pronounce “Cathedral” I don’t know why he wanted to know but teaching the pronunciation was hard work! Or sitting in the house of a group of Red Dao, on a bare earth floor with everything – even the mosquito nets on the beds – blackened by soot from the pit fires throughout the house which had no chimneys, everything except the tv that is, which was kept covered when not in use. We walked the hills of Sapa with a female guide who had resigned herself to remaining a spinster after splitting with her boyfriend and so was heading for university in Hanoi intending to start her own business in a few years time. On Ha Long Bay Fiona became the only woman on board to jump off the top of the boat. We held hands, which was a big mistake since I travelled down faster than she did and we both hit the water at an angle making a loud noise and raising a few bruises. We also lead the way on the kayaking, since I’d been to the area before the guide allowed us to make a few detours and we had the enjoyment of being alone in one of the secret lagoons before the rest caught up – a few minutes of silent magic.

At the airport as Fiona checked in we saw a fellow traveller from the Ha Long Bay trip and three acquaintances from the previous night, all on their way to Singapore and on the same flight as Fiona. The first leg of her return journey turned into a party.

It felt very quiet after she left. On Saturday we were cycling along the dyke roads outside Hanoi with every smiling child we passed shouting “Hello” and by the following Tuesday we were both back at work in offices five thousand miles apart. Still, now we have the pleasure of planning the next one and the added connection which comes from Fiona having seen the people and places we talk about on Skype.