Nature

We got to Hanoi about a week ago. We made it to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, at least the outside, the Ho Chi Minh museum, and the “Hanoi Hilton,” the prison built by the French and later used to hold the American pilots shot down during the 1972 bombings. But it also rained for 48 hours straight so I’ll hold off writing anything about Hanoi until I’ve seen it dry.
Mostly, we’ve been doing nature stuff. Since I’ve never had much to say about nature—it’s pretty, it’s very pretty, it’s too cold, there are too many bugs—I’ll go light on the comments and just say what we’ve been up to.
After two days in Hanoi, we took the night train to Sapa, a nine hour ride north of Hanoi to Lao Cai, then another hour by van deeper into the mountains. We arrived about 7, had breakfast, looked around the market filled with Black Hmong and Green Hmong and Red Dao, and started off on the five hour “trek” we had arranged months earlier. I had figured “trek” meant a walk or maybe a hike, the way a “safari” means riding around in a jeep or “teaching” means standing in front of a class talking. As it turned out, in this case, the trek was at least a traipse and maybe even the real deal. As it turns out, Sapa is famous for its winter mist. There was no rain but everything was wet. Our guide led us down a dirt path that turned into a narrower dirt path that turned into the edge of a terrace in a rice paddy that turned into a stream. The paths, when there were paths, were all mud and, when there weren’t paths, they were also all mud. It was pretty. It was even very pretty. It was also fascinating to traipse through the Hmong villages. It wasn’t even cold but it was very wet. We did see a couple of 25 year olds, with a different guide, skipping along the same route we took. But we aren’t 25 year olds and, so far as I can remember, may never have been 25 years old. We finished the trek exhausted, covered in mud, soaking wet. My position, at least since we’ve both been employed, is that we have too much money to have real travel adventures. I may have to revise that position.
Topas Ecolodge, where we stayed, another 20 miles past Sapa, may have the most beautiful view in all of Viet Nam. That’s what the guidebooks say. I wouldn’t know. We could not see more than fifteen feet. We had an “easy trek”-how’s that for an oxymoron?—scheduled for the next day but cancelled it and spent the day in Sapa town getting laundry done. Sapa was also covered in mist—except for about five minutes when the mist suddenly disappeared to reveal a town, a lake, and a valley (just like in Lost Horizons, about the same ratio as the one day a century that Shangri-la appears). We took the overnight train back to Hanoi, arriving at 4:30 in the morning, hung out in a hotel lobby, ate breakfast and at eight were fitted with glass slippers and whisked off to Halong Bay.
Halong Bay is three hours east of Hanoi by van, in the general vicinity of Haiphong, the area most heavily bombed by the US from 1965 to 68 and again in 1972. The bay is filled with “karsts,” odd limestone formations, extending for miles, forming little coves (some with floating villages of fishers), sometimes housing caves, other times surrounding little lakes that we could reach through cave-like passages in the limestone. We had reserved a two day cruise with a company called Indochina Sails that runs four boats in the bay, three luxury boats with fifteen cabins, another ultra luxury boat with only five cabins. (The picture of our cabin is from their website.) We had reserved on one of the larger boats. A couple of days before we were set to leave, I got an e-mail from Indochina Sails, saying that a “government official” had requested the room we had reserved and offering, as compensation, a bump up to the “suite” on the small boat (plus a free bottle of wine). Now, “suite” may be another word like “safari” and “teach” but the cabin was 300 square feet, about 50% bigger than any other cabin in the Indochina Sails fleet, possibly the biggest cabin in any of the several hundred boats that float around the bay. It wasn’t quite so epic an upgrade as getting booted to first class for a flight from NYC to South Africa but it was very nice: good food, lots of hands reaching out to help us as we got in and out of the boat, the first decent bottle of wine we’ve had in South East Asia, and the pleasure of lying in bed floating past one of the world’s spectacular sights. It was pretty. It was very pretty. It wasn’t even cold and it didn’t rain and there were no bugs.

We have had a couple of bad meals in Vietnam but not many. The interesting thing, I think, is that unlike French and, even more, Italian food and, in a different way, good American food, all of which rely much more on the quality of ingredients than the quality of seasoning, Vietnamese food, probably like Chinese food, is driven much more by the combinations of seasonings than by the quality of ingredients. (For what it’s worth, the two French guys who were on the boat with us and own a traditional French restaurant in Auvergne not only agreed but seemed to think it was incredibly obvious.) I’ve known for a while that you can make anything taste good if you just use enough butter or sweetened condensed milk. I’m now adding lemongrass to the liat.

..............

One of the amazing things about this trip is that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts continues to deposit checks in our bank accounts every other Friday even as we float through Halong Bay. I have not done a great deal to earn that check but Naomi has been busy. If you're interested, check out Nancy Folbre's blog in the New York Times.