I know when last we spoke I was in Hoi An and you might reasonably have expected I'd head on south down the coast as I've done so often in the past. . .or perhaps that I'd have made the transition up into the mountains just west of there. But instead, we rode through the rain (a lot of rain at times) back to Hue. We didn't do anything dramatic like perhaps riding through Thanh My and A Luoi up on the mountain road, a loop I haven't done in several years. . .I'd have liked to, but not in that much rain (the dark sky looked even darker out to the West). Or we might have crossed over onto the island and ridden back into Hue through Thuan An town. . .and in fact that's what I had in mind, unwinding down that almost 50 km run through farms and fields and sand dunes and the long narrow little towns, but when i looked up and realized I was past the old turnoff and it hadn't been there or at least not as I remembered it, it was too late to safely turn back, so we rode on into Hue on the main highway all morning. Good grief. But I was happy enough to get out of the saddle and into the dry, so perhaps that's all just fine.
 |
| The sea was surprisingly calm off Lang Co (on the north side of Hai Van Pass, but there was a biggish swell rolling in from the last few days of wind. I'd thought the wind on the road was pretty ragged, but the sea. . .not as bad as it has been. |
 |
| I'd gotten out the waterproof camera and put away the delicate (but optically superior) machine. However, whether it's waterproof or not, a raindrop on the lens still makes it blurry! |
 |
| Looking back south from the bluff above Lang Co |
 |
| I couldn't have done that with my raindrop if I'd tried.. . .especially since I didn't know I had a raindrop. She was a pretty girl but he got the only photos of her. |
So I'm back in Hue with other things to attend to but with some time on my hands too, so what do you do with odd bits of time on a not terribly rainy day?? For one thing I thought I'd go out in search of good rain cape photos for you. . .try to get a good notion of what a rain cape looks like and how it (doesn't always) work. It turns out to be harder than you'd think and I have a lot of discards in this stack, but here are a few rain cape photos,
 |
| These electric bikes are a little slower and thus a little easier to catch |
 |
| A cyclo of course is really easy to catch. . . |
 |
| My cape is like this one, but a nicer, lighter blue |
 |
| Oops, she caught me, and no smile. That's a cape with two heads and a window for the headlight, top of the line. |
 |
| your passenger gets some benefit even if she doesn't climb clear under. Wives and kids tend to get under cover and up tight! |
 |
| All the step-through bikes work well with a cape, but these flat-floored scooters work very well indeed, the cape integrating with the scooter's front fairing. . .much better protection for the lower body than you get on a "motorcycle" style bike like mine. In most rain the scooter gets by without rain pants at all. Not me! |
 |
| Awful photos, but kind of artistic. . . |
 |
| It wasn't really downhill. . .just camera angle. Kind of artistic though maybe? |
And then I kept walking to the Citadel, the old imperial moated wall around what was once Vietnam's imperial city. It figured heavily in the 1968 fighting, which I was fortunate to avoid entirely, just graduating from college then! Now there's a small park and museum to house some war trophies, captured American hardware as well as some Vietnamese armaments from the same battles. The asymmetry is striking still. The American iron is dirty and broken to one degree or another, but the "Liberation Army" equipment is kept reasonably clean, people like to climb up into the gunner's seat.
 |
| Carrier based bird. . .big and ugly and simply left behind, not shot down |
 |
| Dear me. This is a tank retriever, either an M88 or it's immediate predecessor. 1000 horsepower, air cooled gasoline engine, would burn the paint all off the front of anything it towed. The wishboom (on top) self-erected over the bow (the blade is on the bow) and the operator controlled both the winch wire and the machine's steering to make heavy picks. I had a small fleet of them in the maintenance platoon. . .in Kansas and Germany, not here! |
 |
| She looks sad, with her main gun depressed about as far as it would go. This is an M48 tank, very similar to the M60's I worked with, most notably repairing and towing them back and forth across Germany after they broke down on exercises! It's hard to imagine fighting a tank on Vietnamese terrain. . .they can do close to 50 mph on the highway, climb out of a basement if they fall in. . .but they don't like deep mud much. |
 |
| A liberation army (Russian made?) 133 mm long range artillery piece, towed behind a truck which would have carried the ammunition. There's no protection for the crew, they expected the infantry to keep the enemy away. Doesn't help much against air superiority. |
 |
| I suppose this little anti-aircraft gun might have helped though. This sort of gun shot down a lot of airplanes in WWII. I don't have any idea how effective it would have been against faster jet fighters in close support. . .Helicopters though might have been easy. Again, no protection for the crew. |
But really, I haven't come here ever looking for ghosts from the war. If I have any ghosts they'd be farther south anyway, somewhere around Bien Hoa. But this is the sort of thing that happens when you're essentially killing time on a rainy sort of day.
Much better, though was a fish shop on the way back to the hotel!
 |
| Let's go in! |
 |
| Angel fish. . .my favorite when I was a kid. . .I never had an all-white one though. |
 |
| I don't have a name for these. . . |
 |
| Or these, but I had some very much like them, actually, almost exactly like the black ones. The speckledy ones are really nice though! A very lively crowd! |
 |
| About big enough to eat, but they'd make really expensive fish and chips! |
 |
| Oh wow. . .what colors, what a presence. . .bigger than my hand too. . .and dignified! |
 |
| And some artsy angel fish How is it that a lousy photo often looks quite pretty?? |
 |
| Oh dear. This is hard. Is there anything short of a grandkid that is as appealing as a puppy trying to get a job at your house? Four of these competed eagerly for a place in my luggage. Sigh. Maybe when I retire? |
