The first 1000 km, Part 3--and on to Hue

Written from Hue, on the 21st of November, 2018
Too often I move on from a neighborhood I really like before I even have time to tell you I've been there.  Hue, for a variety of reasons, is different.  Hue is a grand tourist location, with a vibrant hotel district that can cater to a cheapskate in rumpled blue jeans riding an old Chinese knock off of a 1980's Honda motorbike, or a luxury bus full of elegant people in fine clothes and proper luggage. . .with equal aplomb, putting each into his or her own comfort zone.  It's a place whose people have touched my heart over the years, a place I met friends of long standing, a place whose boat builders and fishermen have given me some of my loveliest  surprises, my best insights and most satisfying photographs.  It's also the place I buy new spectacles every trip.  There it is.  I need bifocals to get by these days and they take longer to make, so nowadays I schedule a 3-day visit in Hue as perhaps the only absolute certainty of my travels from Hanoi back to Hanoi a month later.  I will get to Hue and having gotten there, will stay until my spectacles are ready.

You can tell you're in Hue.  Nowhere else do the river dragons carry dance floors on their backs.  On the other hand, would you really want to ride on a boat that could toast you, split you and share you for dinner?  I guess they're really pretty tame dragons at that.

Street with many dentists!  You can see three smiles from right here!

A busy place across from the main market. . .the optometrists are just beyond the rise.

Quickly now, we'll skip the gold shops and household goods and clothes and such inside and just walk along the fresh market on the street behind. . .

What pretty blue crabs. . .

Why does it look so uncrowded?  Riding on this bridge can be easy like this, but sometimes it might be better to swim across.  Still, everyone is careful and polite in the crowd.

The little horse loves Hue.  After the run to Halong City and the ride south to Hue she's added 1000 km to her life story and gets an oil change, her chain lubed and tightened, her tires checked and a very good bath.  This gentleman has washed my bikes for years and years now. . .a splendid workman!

Outside the nicest tea and coffee shop in Viet Nam. . .

The city itself, notwithstanding its comfortable hotel zone and tombs and pagodas and ancient artifacts, or even the life on and around its river, is not what draws me so strongly though.  Rather it's the 38 km long sand dune barrier island that is the divider of the inland sea to the west and the deep ocean on the east 13 km east of the city.  The inland sea is shallow everywhere, sheltered from the ocean for something like 50 km by a long almost-island peninsula to the north and my island proper to the south.  It shades from water to dry land only very gradually on the island.  The ocean side of the island, on the other hand is steep-to sand hills and bluffs, covered with scrubby casaurina trees and the houses of the ancestors, mixed in generally with the houses of the current occupants, though in places the neighborhoods are quite separate.  A highway (a very narrow highway, almost a full 2 lanes here and there, but usually more like one and a half) a highway, as I was saying, runs the full length of the island, always on the inland side.  I started a guide book to the island once, listing out the distances to and the details of everything along the way.  Then I realized that was not a good thing to do to a place I loved for what it was, but wouldn't if it suffered an invasion of adventurers on motorbikes.  So now I just tell my friends about the place and if they come I can trust they'll do no harm.

In the countryside on the island, a lane and a half, and it's generally enough.  Here the inland sea is to the right, and the villages, gardens, sand dunes and ocean to the left

In the towns on the island the highway widens out to two full lanes, except where stacks of brick or sand or whatever block a bit of it.  It's a densely populated sand bar really.

Side streets on the ocean side climb steeply to the crest of the dune and then slope down again to the sea.  It takes a brave man to drive a truck up a lane like this.  No turning back!

And this is the pot of gold on the island, many hundreds of these bamboo boats, almost all of them diesel powered now, but of a design built for many decades and superbly fit for their use.  They make typically trips of half a day more or less, night or day, depending on the season and the tides, then return to their home beaches to discharge the catch and prepare to go again.  The smaller ones carry a crew of two, the largest no more than four men.  To land through the surf and move up the beach takes a lot of help from neighbors though.

Such a pretty thing!

The bamboo basketry of the bottom can be re-coated with tar a number of times before it's worn out, and then it can be replaced at no great cost by its owner.  Taking off the sponsons and striping out the interior framing and engine in order to re-coat the inside of the basket seems to be an annual event

Recoating the exterior is easy enough, though handling the hot tar is a fraught operation.  The burns from a mis-step would be awful.

With the boat rolled over and stripped out, a bucket of hot tar is cut with (??) a jug of gasoline and the much thinner mix painted carefully all over the inside.

Rudder raised almost clear out of its slot in the sternpost, steering oar rigged to port (always), newly painted and just back from the sea.  A lovely thing!

Is there anything tougher than a wad of old nylon netting?? The steering oar on its stanchion. . .

And then, when its time has passed, the basketry is cut loose from the wooden topsides and replaced in a matter of just days.  I've heard numbers from four years to ten for the life of the basket, but the wooden frames, with bits replaced each year as needed, can go on a very long time with new basket bottoms.

Not a large catch, but worth the effort.

One of the smaller boats, two men only.  She's just touched bottom and one man has bailed out to steady her in the backwash, while the skipper hoists the rudder clear.  If it struck bottom it would either break itself, not a small matter, or split the stern post, a very large matter.  

Only three men take her to sea, but by the time she's free of the water there will be a dozen helping rotate her back and forth up above the reach of the tide.  Pick up the downhill end, walk it uphill, gain five or six feet, go back and pick up the other end and do it again.  Twelve or fifteen times and she'll be good for the night.  With a lot more effort you can move her clear off the beach and into the back yards.  Kids start to help early on.