Hong Gai, Vietnam 4-19-09 Night Market

Just a 10 minute shuttle ride from the ship, was a treasure chest of pearls! Gals chasing you down the street with pearls draped over their arms as if they were getting a running start and they had wings of pearls to fly! SO many pearls! Our friend Katie felt the need to rub them all over her teeth, as this is what her mother told her to do to test them to see if pearls were real or not. Haven't we all heard that? Well, I bet her mother never thought she'd be rubbing them on her teeth straight off a gals arm in the middle of the road in Hong Gai, Vietnam! However, Katie did it anyway. She might as well have kicked the curbs too! We had fun watching. I just let the gals use their Bic lighters to show me that the pearls were not plastic, as real pearls do not burn! I liked that plan better. Needless to say, we bougth many a strand of pearls and had a great time bargaining with the gals on the streets and the vendors in the night market. Once you cross the threshold into a real store or into the market area, the motor scooter pearl ladies can't "hound" you! We learned that trick and it got a lot more pleasant!
There were people setting up tables with plastic baskets that we assumed held "catch of the day" in them. You see what you think. Can you name any of the items in the baskets? We did not buy any of it, only because we had no way to refrigerate it. Charles really wanted to try one of everything!!

Chan May (Hue) , Vietnam 4-18-09

This was a stop we had in 2007. We had seen the countryside here and been down the famous Perfume River, so we opted for a short day in this small village of Chan May. Pretty much all that is there is one hotel and a few store fronts. Lots of rice fields and that wraps it up! We managed to do a little shopping on the pier for some of those wonderful pearls! You will see "seas" of pearls in photos to come! The gals in one of the photos are all coveed up. They do this for 2 reasons. To avoid sun exposure. For this reason they wear face masks, long sleeves,hats and gloves! It was boiling hot every day we were in Vietnam. I do not know how they could stand being so covered up. The temperatures swelled up and over 100 while we were there. The second reason for the masks is to filter some of the polution from the oh so many motor scooters, bus fumes, etc... Just walking though town you could feel the back of your throat start to itch and make you cough from the heavy, dirty air.

Ho Chi Minh City/ Cu Chi Tunnels 4-16-09

The flag for Vietnam.



This long hut-like structure was built to show tourists some of the entrances of the tunnels. One you can see Nicky is squatting next to. Kathleen is trying to make sense of what the video is saying about the Americans in the war. Unfortunately for us sitting there, the video of what happened here was VERY one sided. It actually called Americans "devils" at one point! There were Vietnamese government workers/soldiers all around and it seems this is the Communist view of what happened. It would anger any American, whether you fought in the war, had freinds in the war, sons in the war, brothers in the war or even if you were against the war! Our guide DID tell us that the video could offen, and he was right.
After the video, we were off to the tunnels. The jungle was full of large centipedes. To imagine soldiers walking through these think jungles at night with snakes, spiders, booby traps, the sounds in the jungle whether it be gunfire or creatures of the night or sounds of fellow Americans being tortured and Vietnamese soldiers and sometimes Vietnamese civilians waiting behind any given bush or tree.....









Can't you hear our guide saying "You are here"?? That is exactly what he was saying. Plus the fact that the winding tunnels ended up being 120 miles in length. Just like Birmingham to Atlanta!! However, it was not a straight line. These tunnels meandered through jungles and at one point even went UNDERNEATH an American base!
The guide told us the Americans won the war during the day, but at night it was a whole different war. The Vietnamese would come out of the tunnels and raid camps wearing nothing but black. While we were in these jungles, when the sky opened and flooded us, the thought of what it would have been like to be 18 years old, in this jungle with all the sounds we were hearing plus the sounds of the night creatures, the intense heat...too hard to imagine really. They now have a firing range that "tourists" can go to and shoot rounds from an automatic weapon, some sort of bazooka thing and more. The rounds were $1.20 US to shoot them. We did not participate. However, the sounds of other people shooting them was eerie at best.
The vertical tunnels. Those tunnels were about the size of the a/c vents on the floor at your house and adding about 6 inches around! Really small. Getting into them and getting down them must have been much easier for the Vietnamese people! The American soldiers that were trained to find these and go into them were called tunnels rats. That must have been the worst job in the entire war.
As if the tunnels were not enough, the booby traps. They were sneaky. They had grass patches that were in hinges and would give way when you stepped on them and the person would plunge to their death on a bed of 3 foot long steel spikes. Or there were foot booby traps that would catch your leg and harness it like you would a small animal and you'd have to cut your foot off to get out of it. The torture that the American soldiers endured here makes every soldier that served here a hero.











Crawling through the tunnels is like duck walking for three short blocks in New York City and the heat and humidity of Vietnam combined. Just lovely!! By the time you emerge, you are soaked from sweat and feeling like you need to run through an open field to get air in your lungs again! I duck walked into a Vietnamese government soldier. He offered me a flashlight. Do you think that would have been the case in the 1960'sand 70's??
When we finally made it through the abbreviated version of the tunnels, the sky opened and we were in a lightning storm and rain coming down so hard that rivers formed on the dirt paths we were on in the jungle!! It was a scary feeling for sure. We managed to RUN through the jungle back to the entrance where we purchased Vietnam flag t-shirts! Not my favorite thing but they were dry. If anyone would like these as souvenirs, let me know. First come first serve! The picture of Kathleen with the towel. This was especially made for our sweet friend Sondra. Bring a towel!! You never know when you will need it!!







So much to share. Too tired to keep posting...Here's a "peek"

Ho Chi Minh City (Formerly Saigon) 4-15-09

This should be the city symbol for Ho Chi Minh City! Which line goes where? Which road goes where? Which way is up? Which way is out? Is it old or is it new? Should the man cross the road with his cart of chickens or wait until "all clear"? Big hint, "all clear" never happens!

Ho Chi Minh City is the heart and soul of Vietnam. It is alive with people, millins and millions of them. It is the largest city in Vietnam but not the capital, that goes to Hanoi, in the northern part of the country. It seems to be the cultural trendsetter for Vietnam. The streets are where everything happens here. People live in the street, work in the street, sell things in the street, drag carts through the streets, traffic is everywhere going nowhere. Jackhammers pound the pavement tearing out the old and trying to build new. The sea of motorcycles and scooters...as far as the eye could see in any direction at every intersection. Some on the road, some on the sidewalks, some scooting down alleys trying to "sneak" through the snarled up mess of traffic.
Our tour started at the former presidential palace. If you have ever been to White Sulphur Springs, WV, you probably toured the bunker that is under the hospital there on the grounds of The Greenbrier resort. This place had much the same look in it's basement. All areas were closed off pretty much except for us to see how the Vietnamese were able to have this secret "headquarters" deep underground. The bed shown in a phot is where the president would have slept if there had been a nuclear bomb dropped. See the rotary phones? The huge brains to their computers? Very 1950's decor for sure.
The tank outside was the tank that busted through the gates that led to the surrender of the South Vietnam to the North and to become Communist. The flag flying is that of the current Vietnam.

















What is a visit to a lacquer workshop without a t-shirt? Charles and our trivia partner, Steve made sure they did not leave without one (or two). Two for $5.00!!
The man working on the lacquer tables was using his paint to make beautiful landscapes of Vietnam.
The gal with the eggshells. I thought what was in her bowl was trash left over from a boiled egg lunch! Seems this was what she was using to create her art that would become part of a painting in lacquer. She crushed the shells and used a pinpoint accuracy tool to push the shells into place.
The lady perched on the blue plastic stool had a smile on her face like she had the best job in town. She may have just been laughing at us but either way, it made for a great photo for us! How many folks do you know that could sit like this 8 hours a day 6 days a week? Actually, we never saw her stand up. She might be what we call in Alabama "stove up" and have to stay like that!! YIKES!!
The close up small vase. This man moved his hands over this vase hundreds of times just while we stood there to watch him. He made a very dull piece of wood turn into a piece of art. It was really amazing to see.
We had a wonderful tour that included a water puppet show, which Vietnam is famous. We saw a great show and then the sky opened! All the ponchos, umbrellas, nerd hats...were on the ship!! We were in a pickle. Of course next on our agenda was riding the "rik-shaws" that are powered by little old Vietnamese men on bicyles and you are in a wooden perch out in front. A bit scary considering there are no real traffic laws in Vietnam, its every bike, scooter, taxi, bus, for themselves! Nicky and Charles opted out as the rain was a steady drenching. Kathleen and I wanted the experience and got it. Not only did we get it. We risked life and limb. Cars swerving around our slow rides, buses backing up into me!!! You can see the tail-lights. motorcycles dodging us by inches, nobdy realizing that their country had purchased traffic lights and hooked them up and they were working....YIKES!! Every once in a while I would scream out to Kathleen and see if she was okay, but inbetween the noise of the vehicles, the thunder and lightning...I did not even know if she was near me!! My little old man kept hollering at me in Vietnamese and I finally realized he was pointing at another bike. It was Kathleen and I got a shot of her riding in the rain. It really wasn't rain, it was a flood!! When we got to our destination, I thought they were both giving me a "peace sign", turns out, $2.00 was the cost for risking our lives!! I was happy to pay them and say adios!













The extremely large lacquer vases will not fit in any of our luggage. If you want one of these, you will have to find it on ebay I guess! They were beautiful but not practical for us. If you worked for the local telephone company or power company or cable company, you would probably spend a lot of your calls untangling wires! This looks like one of those octopus nightmares that as children cause fires in your home! What a mess!!
If you need shoes, they are available at this local in town market in Ho Chi Minh. Every style slipper imaginable, in every color anyone could want. The food choices were not anything like you'd find in the local food courts of any mall you might be familiar with but fun to look at and play the game, "what do you think this is"? The big green thorny fruit is called Durian. Many people love it. Many people hate it. Some places like Singapore, won't let you bring it through customs. It seems that the smell this fruit gives off once it is cut open is much like an open sewer smell. We tried really hard to get someone to cut us one open so Nicky could sample it but had a hard time finding someone with a knife and had a hard time finding Nicky to try it!
Great day. Tour very interesting.