To Mai Châu, Hòa Bình for a swift break

Needing to decompress after an intense weekend coaching my team at a football tournament, I decamped on Sunday afternoon to Mai Châu. I just left straight from the pitches with hundreds of young footballers, the crazed coaches, the hoarse parents and a medal ceremony on to the dusty roads of industrial Hanoi to get out to the beautiful province of Hòa Bình. As ever, I spent the first hour of the trip questioning my own sanity, “this road is depressing, maybe I should turn back, I would have been at home by now…” and then you get out to the green bits with views, hardly any lorries and my mental state lifts. The open road, cruising at literally tens of kilometres per hour, trying not to obsess about what just happened on the football pitch. I would need to keep going solidly to get to the destination before dark. All going well under a grey sky and then after the Hòa Bình town bypass the road leads you up into the heavens, or thick cloud, as it is known. Visibility was perhaps two motorbike lengths. There wasn’t much traffic but I joined a sort of convoy of cars for a while before they shook me off. On the other side of the road, lorries squealed and wobbled past on their way down the mountain and you are struck by the dark thought that it is only convention keeping them on that side of the road and also, darker still, that if they hit you, you would end in a ravine. It was thrilling and forlornly smearing my glasses with a wet finger helped me stop thinking about the football for a few moments here and there. After this Ganzfeld for about half an hour, the merely miserable mist on the other side was like a summer holiday. OK, there were slippery, mud-strewn roads plus the odd pothole but at least you could see where you were going: Visibility really is under-rated. I made it to Mai Châu just as it was getting dark and rolled up to a well-kept house offering rooms. This was the view:

And here it is again, a beer, a shower and 15 minutes later

The next morning I rejected the Western breakfast offered to me (bread and banana pancakes) and insisted on beef noodles. A bird strutted about my breakfast table, apparently unaware that I fancied chicken noodles for dinner.

Then I went to find the back of beyond, 30 km up a mountain from Mai Châu. What do people do out here? Well, of course I still don’t really know but I took some pictures that give a little insight.

: 

It is a very calm place, not bustling, so it is easy to think that nothing is going on. Yes, nothing, apart from making clothes, practicing dance, collecting some sort of insect for drinking in alcohol, making trinkets, and the slow, muddy, never-ending, bent-back work in the rice fields. And they obviously send a lot of letters… three pint-sized post offices off the beaten track

and they play football, or at least have pitches and goalposts that make you stop complaining about the ones we use.

The trip back was in constant drizzle, so a lot better than the way there then because you could actually see your life flash in front of your eyes. And I got back in time for football training.

 

 

The Far North: Ha Giang

I didn’t spend much time planning this trip. By now I am quite comfortable just setting off with a target town in mind. The first 200 km I’d done before, then I turned left into the countryside, winding for over 100 km between two main roads. It was spectacular and there was only occasionally a signal for my phone. Wisely, I already had some screenshots of Google Maps so I would have a chance of finding the way.

All was going well until…

TL255 has a gate across it and is not for foreigners, it turns out. The boy-guard was not about to offer me an explanation. I would have liked to have argued that I would not have been trespassing, just driving through, but he didn’t look like he enjoyed a discussion about legalistic semantics as much as I do. This was a navigational disaster. It cost me more kilometres than I care to remember. I stopped waving at children and slowing down for chickens. No more Mister Nice Tourist. I stayed at a roadside hovel but had a nice bowl of noodles and an extra beer to soothe the pain. The next day I gritted my teeth and stuck to main roads. I was no longer a groundbreaking rebel; I was lorry fodder. After three hours, the landscape opened up, the sun was baking and it felt like an adventure again. A half day later than hoped for I reached the city of Ha Giang, Vietnam’s equivalent of Tromsø, it being the gateway to the far north. The main road ended there and it felt like the end of the world.

There was a shop offering motorbike tours, and I decided that on current form I needed to be chaperoned around the countryside. The following morning we set off and it quickly became impossibly beautiful. I hastily taught myself to use the panorama function on my phone.

The scenery was so breathtaking that even my camera skills sufficed. Any list of “100 places to see before you get bored” that doesn’t have Ha Giang on it, should be torn up. The views, the smallness of you, the life of the Hmong. Many places on Earth have a view or two. This place had them for valley after valley, rice field after rice field, for hundreds of kilometres. Pointy, green mountains, hairpin bends, ethnic minority people transporting corn and sticks on their backs, goats butting each other, water buffalo crossing the road.

We stayed in a town near China and the hotel guy sorted a permit to enter the border area. They don’t want foreigners hanging around near China. It’s touchy. I spent an evening being forced to demonstrate to the guide and hotel owner that the extra 30 kilos I had on them gives me an advantage when it comes to drinking the local corn wine. They didn’t look like they were going to give up but abruptly (and wisely for them) they did.

The next day we went on three trips. Firstly to a tower, just on the Vietnamese side. The guide stayed at the permit-checking office at the foot of the hill, and as I went to scale it, he casually mentioned that there were 1000 steps to get there. Ouch. The guide was a bossy cool-guy who delivered lectures on what a great rider he was but also left his indicator flashing for kilometres at a time. I would have preferred him not to constantly be on the phone and I don’t need cigarette breaks, but he did the job and I didn’t have to worry about which way to go. As you can imagine though, I really appreciated the charming texts he sent to herd me around.

Anyway, back to the tower. As promised, there were steps and steps.

After 10 minutes of climbing I got to the base of the tower

and was pleased to see that one couldn’t actually go to the very top, when…

I made it up, feeling spritely and pleased to be alive. I am lucky that my superb physical form meant that the climb was merely a warm-up to me.

More amazing views and it felt meaningful to see China.

 

Then we went off-road, which was spectacular in itself, to get to a 1000 year-old tree. We parked a short walk away and the guide gave me 10 minutes to see the tree for myself. It was atmospheric and at the base there was a group of men having a picnic. I approached and one got up and marched me to a spot in their circle. He welcomed me in Vietnamese and a spirits glass of corn wine was poured for me. They were going to try the same trick that I had seen off the night before but this time I was vastly outnumbered, and, worse still, their biomass was larger than mine! I decided on a maximum of two glasses. Ten seconds later I revised that to four. They started approaching me individually for their own private down-in-one-with-the-new-boy. I thought of screaming for the guide to come and get me. I tried to delay them and to talk about something, anything. Then I saw the rice and pork, and asked for some. It won me a few minutes’ thinking time. I chewed slowly and thoroughly and smiled fixedly at them. Right, two more then I’m off, I promised myself. I raised my glass to all of them, thanked them and downed mine. They downed theirs and my glass was refilled. One for the road: I rushed it down and stood up. My attempt at waving goodbye was stopped by a chubby arm that pulled me back down. I understood that I was going to have to reach deep down into the sack of despair to find a way out of this one. I stood up again and addressed the group in parliamentary English: “It is a great pleasure to have stumbled across your fine flock and to have partaken of the ethanol of the maize persuasion with you. But now I shall leave you with this”. And I sang Mr Moon to them, loudly and pompously. It had the desired disorienting effect and they watched and listened agog. In all modesty I would estimate that they enjoyed it about twice as much as I enjoyed singing it and I had won my permit to leave the circle. One took me to the shrine and showed me how many incense sticks to light in each pot, and I then waved goodbye to a scene the likes of which I bet that tree had never before witnessed.

And finally we went near a river that the border runs down the middle of. By now, blasé about the mountain views, I found a cloud that looked like a dog. And is that a little bunny I can see loitering beneath it? OK, it must have been the corn wine kicking in.

 

Thoughtfully, motorbike-sized gaps had been left between the safety blocks

That evening I played ping-pong with the hotel owner and his friends. I looked forward to teaching them a thing or two: Alas! I could barely get the ball back. I think they play a lot up in those parts.

At this point we were over 500 km from home. For the way back I managed to find all but 155 km along roads different to the ones taken to get there. I met some memorable people, like the one-armed French-speaking guy serving in a noodle shop, and two Swiss guys I had a meal with. The overwhelming impression left is of the scenery. Go and see it. The Hmong people are dignified, hard-working. There is also poverty. People living in wooden shacks, ancient technology, families showering in the runoff from the mountain.

It is a magnificent part of the world, stunning, just stunning.

 

Down South

In our first year the spring was terrible: The grey skies, day after day, the inescapable damp, the wet socks, the soggy motorbike cape. Last year it was much sunnier, but this year we are back to 2012… It’s dank and dripping and has been for three months. Typical, low-lying cloud

So I decided to escape down south, and flew to Nha Trang for a couple of days. First night, in the warm, out at a bia hoi, eating fried frog: Don’t knock it, it’s delicious.

Then I rented a motorbike, and when I complained about the rubbish helmet was told that “we think if helmet not so good maybe you drive slowly”. It reminded me of the Bulgarian hotel who said “No, no fire alarm. We think sound of fire will wake up guests”.

Off I went into the countryside. Gorgeous scenery, suncream, wayward navigation, but how can you get lost when you don’t know where you are going?

Zooming along I doubled back to re-read this sign.

I had heard of Dr Yersin, mainly because his name has been taken by the football-playing French school in Hanoi, and here was his tomb. Off the road, up a grassy track, there is an atmospheric shrine to him. He was a Swiss-born scientist and humanitarian who isolated bacteria and developed serums, turned French and spent much time in Vietnam, and visiting his grave was utterly unexpected and touching.

Later on I stopped for lunch and chatted with the 60 year old men running the restaurant. They spoke a bit of English (generally the level is better down south than in Hanoi) and we were getting on so well. Then I ventured “So…, you were involved in the war?”. The retired teacher peered over his glasses at me and said “I understand what you say” and turned to talk quietly to his brother. We did shake hands warmly when I left, but I had crossed some sort of line. I think it was a complicated business. The complexity of a civil war with massive external forces necessarily split the Vietnamese on to different sides. I have no idea what the specific problem in this case was, but the sudden clamming-up was definitive.

Drifting around, I saw a mudbath spa. It was unbelievable. I had only had one once before, in Napa Valley. That one had real thick mud slopping about. In this one, muddy water was pumped into an outdoor stone bath. This is how spoilt I was at that moment: I was feeling a touch upset that the Beethoven symphony that was playing was not one of my favourites. There was a sequence of horizontal showers, mineral swimming pools in which one floated and a cup of tea to finish off with. I was the only customer and there were at least 20 staff. I wouldn’t want to know what a Geiger counter would have made of the muddy water, but it was a fantastic, soothing experience.

Otherwise the non-touristy town I went to had not seen many foreigners before, it had some very empty buildings and deserted squares, as well as nice homely roadside restaurants and a hotel room which was VIP because it had an electric organ in the corner.

The flights up and down were substantially delayed, giving me time to compose some Anglo-Vietnamese poetry:

VietJetAir, number 1?
Don’t think so
Luôn luôn muộn

 

The Law bites the dust

Aarrgh, driving along the other day, what do I see but a black swan. Having established over a two-year period that legs always go left on the back of a motorbike and declared it a Law, I then spot the scene below. I forget all safety precautions, race over raised manhole covers and cut corners to catch up, hoping it was a trick of the light, all while getting my phone out, entering the code, opening the camera and taking the disconfirmatory snap, as giddy as if I had spotted Elvis.

In defence of the Law, the woman is clearly a foreigner, who may simply not know any better. So, blonde lady, if you are reading, stop causing unrest and please get your legs on the other side. I now withdraw to the following revision:

Vietnamese women place their legs on the left hand side when travelling on the back of a bike. Foreigners do what they like.

 

‘Cos Ba Bể I love you

Aldous Huxley praised Lago Atitlan in Guatemala by saying that “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches the limit of the permissibly picturesque, but Atitlan is Como with the additional embellishment of several immense volcanoes. It is really too much of a good thing.” I drove up to Ba Be lake in northern Vietnam last week and it is an unexploited, unspoiled Lago Atitlan.

The first few hours were on an uncharming and dangerous road, where mere motorbikes are targets for huge trucks overtaking towards you. Although not quite rivalling journeys in Guatemala in creaking, retired Greyhound buses with a broken rear axle or spinning 180 degrees on a mountain road between Sarajevo and Tuzla, it was at times unnecessarily thrilling. The 22-wheelers seem to take aim at you and force you on to the gravel or grass or into the pothole at the side of the road.

Lunch was a fish stew in Thai Nguyen city.

When I stopped for the night after 6 hours driving my hotel charm detector failed me as I ended up in a place reminiscent of Eastern Europe pre-Glasnost, with the associated attention to customer comfort, the poor drainage, the dodgy electrics, etc. You can feel the warm welcome the lobby bar afforded.

My revenge is to chuckle at the poor English in the room instructions. I know it’s trivial, patronising and very possibly wrong, but I just can’t help it.

Note that the staff will be “quite good” at putting out fires. Sleep tight!

The next day it took about three hours through the mountains, with landslide-strewn roads to Ba Be. Some pictures from the way: See the long arm of Cool Britannia.

Then you get to the park. It is magnificent and the views are stupendous.

   

In one village many houses offer homestay accommodation: I chose one away from “downtown” and instantly became a family member. They made tasty food, the shower worked and I basically lived above a rice field in the lake.

Tourist information was at a premium but I managed to find a waterfall and drive and walk around some soothing scenery. The locals are friendly, except to the semi-wild pig in the picture who kept on stealing the corn left out to dry.

A fantastic experience.

 

Motorbiking in Hanoi: Rain, repairs and Tim’s First Law

I have yet to work out when the rainy season actually is in Hanoi because it rains all year round, and the rain here is wet, wet, wet. Not cute, neat droplets that can be brushed off, but big gloopy splats that soak into your clothes. As pointed out last time, Vietnamese bike drivers, particularly women, cover up when it is sunny. They also cover up when it rains so as each downpour starts everyone pulls over to the side of the road and puts on a plastic cape.

Bike repairs
I took my bike for a service the other day. Even at a garage owned by a multinational, I knew the communication was going to be swimming-in-treacle difficult. I tried to tell them that the oil had been changed recently but that I wanted the brakes looking at. They said come back in two hours, and it will cost you 180 000 Dong (50 kroner, £5.50, $8.50). “Yeah, yeah”, I thought, “Until you discover that the exhaust vent needs replacing or the hydraulic valve is leaking or the cylinder head is a bit rusty and then you will sting me for several million”. They phoned two hours later to say it was ready, I turned up and was handed a bill with 180 scribbled out and 30 written underneath. That’s 9 kroner, $1.42 or £0.91. The bike was shiny but there were no other visible changes, the brakes felt the same and any conversation aimed at finding out what they had actually done would have been as doomed as Captain Oates. So off I went, scratching my head through my helmet. I would like to think that perhaps I have stumbled across an honest garage, unique in world history, one that doesn’t make up a list of things that need replacing. However, for my own peace of mind, I think I will keep on taking my bike to garages until one says “Oooh, I don’t like the look of that… tut, tut” and charges me big money.

Tim’s First Law
When a lady motorbike passenger is wearing a dress or skirt she doesn’t want to ride with her legs astride the seat. So she swings her legs over to one side. Now, modern psychologists have by and large given up the quest to uncover laws of behaviour. The thinking is that there is just too much variability in the human condition to capture even circumscribed aspects of it in deterministic formulae. However researchers have been looking in the wrong place. Here, just for you, in a world premiere, I am today publishing a law of human behaviour.

A woman passenger with unbetrousered legs places her legs on the LEFT side of the bike.

I have seen hundreds of pairs of legs on the left and none on the right. I have no idea why this is so.

 

Motorbiking in Hoi An

On the recommendation of Saskia’s maths teacher no less, we got in touch with a Mr Thong who organises motorbike tours from Hoi An. He picked us up from the hotel at 8 and drove us in a minibus to his house, where there were various motorbikes and an extra driver. I was given a quick course in how to change gears on a bike (I have a cushy ex-pat automatic in Hanoi, you see) and then we set off, spread over 3 bikes.Straight out into the countryside, to see artisans at work. I took loads of pictures and yet still didn’t get any of lots of the stops we made: There was the family crushing peanuts for oil, the rice cracker machine run by two old aunts, the people living in shacks by the river, the delicious food at the local place we stopped at, getting barked at by narrow-eyed dogs from the carpentry workshop (we bravely scarpered from that one) and everywhere we went we were met by open mouths and waves. We drove for 120 km over 10 hours and were really out in the sticks. I wouldn’t mind betting that some of the people we drove past had never seen a white girl before. It was a long day with a high wow factor and some of the bridges were straight out of Indiana Jones.

Making rice paper

Several bumpy kilometres away along narrow lanes, pottery

And we had a go too

We stopped at a Hindu temple

And this is what we looked like

Paprika was baking by the roadside

The cows were playing volleyball

We visited a UNESCO heritage site, the My Son temples

Ragnhild asking an impossible question of the guide

and Saskia cooling down by the river

Amazing greenery and scenery

The first rickety bridge

But this was nothing compared to the second

We stopped and played with some children. Below, the initial stand-off.

And then we caught the ferry back to town. Sort of roll-on roll-off, but not as you know it.

Then finished with some keepy-uppy with some boys,

drove home exhausted after a blur of a day facilitated by the charming Mr Thong (http://easyrider-hoian.com/, mrthongtours@gmail.com), collapsed in pool, went to bed, before the alarm went off for Euro 2012… It was a whole holiday packed into a single day.

 

Picture story

Life in Hanoi is a touch cramped. We’re like sparrows packed in a cage.

Sometimes, one has to go against the flow…

…and sometimes you just want to soak up the rays,…

or ponder vanishing points.

This man’s job gives as much perspective as being in an ivory tower, I would think

A picture I didn’t buy…

and one that I did…

The air-conditioner guy just stood and stared, and concluded I was a lunatic.

 

Visit to a University

I must be having withdrawal symptoms due to lack of time on a University campus, so when a friend of a friend was prepared to show me around theirs I accepted. This is the Hanoi University of Engineering. My guide said that it was only a small university, with only 2000 engineering students… OK…

It was busy on a Friday afternoon, though I didn’t want to take pictures of packed auditoria, in case the lecturer reacted in the way I might have if someone snapped me in full flow. Anyway, below you can see what the student density is like…

… and how engineering isn’t easier in Vietnamese than it is in English.

In Oslo I tried, and mainly succeeded, in scheduling my teaching between 1015 and 1500. Here are the timeslots at this institution.

My guide had a 6.45 a.m. the next day: SATURDAY! And I assure you that the salary did not sweeten the pill. (But bear in mind that, because of the time difference, Tiêt 15 wouldn’t interfere with Champions League kickoff like it would in Europe, so maybe that accounts for it)

The buildings were airy and pleasant.

 

A major hydroelectric project, I suppose.

No browsing at the bookshop.

And how do you think the students get to and from campus? By motorbike, of course. Here as elsewhere, you pay a couple of thousand Dong to the attendant (really, don’t worry, that’s less than a krone or 10p) and then park as scruffily as you like, whereupon said attendant neatens your parking so that you end up with snugly tessellating Hondas.

This banner marks the 82nd anniversary of the Communist Party in Vietnam.

It reminds me of when I first moved to Oslo. I was taken aback to find that a political party had such large prominence in the Social Sciences Faculty. It took me longer than I care to admit to realise that SV-info was in fact a help desk for social science students rather than a mouthpiece of leftwing proposals.

(Quoique…maybe I was right the first time :p )

 

An interview with Jemima

Jemima has spent a few days at home feeling rotten, with the aforementioned skin infection. She is now back at school for a half day, to see how it goes. While she was weak and floppy, I took the opportunity of bombarding her with some questions (upon reflection it might have been this that led her to drag herself back to school). Anyway, happy reading.

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What was your first impression of Hanoi?

Hot!

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Are you enjoying your new life?

Yeah, so far so good

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What are you missing about Norway?

The fresh air and my friends

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What is the best bit about Hanoi?

The scooter rides

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Favourite new food?

Phở maybe

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Best moment?

Scoring the only goal of the final in the preseason football tournament.

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Funniest thing that has happened?

When we were in Nha Trang and we drove the small karts, and while I was driving I waved to another kart and the driver (a guy on my team) drove into a tree.

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Best subject at school?

Spanish is fun

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Looking forward to snow and ice at Christmas? (There won’t be air conditioning…)

I hate snow so much, but Christmas isn’t Christmas without snow.

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Isn’t it great having Dad at home?

Yeah, and Jerry Seinfeld is a great actor.