The First 1000 km, Part 1--Hanoi and Sam Son

Written from Hue (Central Viet Nam) November 20, 2018
I've come, again, to Hue and will be here three days more or less, that being the time it takes to make a new pair of glasses here.  Actually, two pair, since I can count on wrecking one pair every year or so and this is a new, slightly stronger prescription (did I mention old age creeping up??)  I suppose if you're not in Viet Nam the information that Hue has the best optometrists and least expensive eye glasses anywhere I know. . .probably isn't that important to you, but if you're passing through. . .oh well, you understand.
But there have been two factors at work that have limited my writing to you, first, I have been on the road a lot of each day lately, and perhaps more importantly, I've been very slow to get my body and my time zone together this year.  I did bring a bit of a cold with me and that can't have helped, but I've been sub par a long while now, so if not on the road, I tend to be sleeping.  So I've accumulated a fair stack of photos since last I wrote, I think I'll just throw them up for you with enough caption to make sense of them. . .sort of!

My breakfast egg in Hanoi has been fried in this self same pan (or so it looks) for at least the past twelve years.  She makes a fine sandwich, but her husband fries the eggs even better  

Rolling flower shop. . .makes it easy to take a bouquet home.  This is right across the street at the moment.

Cute kids everywhere and they always catch me with the camera.

Ordinary evening traffic on my street.

Amazing what people will buy at a night market.  There's so much for sale I suppose it wears down your resistance.  

Hanoi, especially my neighborhood, is full of art galleries, some lovely, some interesting and others. . .well, somebody must like them. . .

Sometimes the best is not on top

Okay, so it's not realistic, but really pretty, yes?

Oops.  This is just before I got shooed out. ,. .I'd missed the sign that said "no photos!"

You've been to this bakery before, but it's always worth another look to see what they've done now. . .

This is just some of the every day stuff, prices run from 25 cents up to gee, 75 cents for something outrageous (pineapple upside down cake. . . yes)

These next few photos are sort of documents, not great art, but marking the further development of the longshore fishing from Sam Son beach.  Sam Son is about the closest nice beach resort to Hanoi and has become vastly popular in the years I've been passing through, so much so that I have to hunt around for a place to stay and eat that I can afford.  At one end of the beach (it's a couple of miles long) they've built a monstrous "golf and beach resort" with multiple hotels and hundreds of villas and. . .you can barely imagine.  I rode through several years ago before construction was complete.  Now they don't let wanderers like me past the gate.  I suppose if i had a reservation?? But I don't golf!
More importantly for my work, the evolution of the inshore fishery, which has been very vigorous at least since the 1980's, has finally broken almost entirely with the past. . .bamboo and tar used to make their surf boats for example, but the year I broke my leg (2010 was it??) was also the last year bamboo boats have been woven here. . .now they are all fiberglass.  For a while they were just fiberglass copies cast on old woven bamboo hulls, but now even that has passed and they are almost all laid up over other plugs. . .and the design is freed up from the constraints of woven slats of bamboo.  Most noticeably, the chines of the boats are hardening. . .sharp corners between the sides and bottom. . .giving more initial stability, but with some interesting possible problems in bigger waves.  The first generation of the glass boats are now beginning to be worn out and they're being scrapped high up on the beach. . .so they have a life not much different from the old bamboo and tar boats.  They simply break when banged hard enough.  H'mm. Bamboo was famous for bending instead. . .but then the tar leaked.  Oh well.
Another big change in the lifestyle. . .many little diesel powered capstans have been built on the beach, making it easy to simply drag the boats up out of the water. . .one or two men instead of a gang of a dozen pushing the boat up across the sand on old car tires.  The tires still help going downhill though!  There's no winch offshore!!

An old hand cranked diesel single cylinder engine does so many things in Viet Nam, here, with a gear reduction, it winds up the line that pulls the boats up the beach.  Turning fairleads here and there allow the one winch to bring up boats on several different tracks and people can steer the boat as it skids up the sand.  Way easier than pushing up through the sand with a bunch of your friends and neighbors.

The "snail trail" where she was dragged up by the winch.  This is a second generation fiberglass boat, not quite like the old woven baskets, square corners between topsides and bottom instead of the easy round shape of the old ones,

These diesel powered fishing rafts aren't much bamboo anymore.  Three heavy timbers sawn and bolted to the shape, some bamboos bent with heat to make the curve of the bulwarks and split bamboo to cover the styrofoam top and bottom. . .all held together now by heavy monofilament line and a very few bolts.  They're really good boats for landing on the gently sloping beach.  Many are still rigged to sail as well, though only downwind. . .when the breeze suits they'll power upwind then sail downwind dragging their nets.  This is a completed hull, but still needs her mast, cabin, motor and fishing gear. . .about half done.  

This one is not so pretty, but it's working today. . .a very rudimentary cabin, but any shade is very welcome under the hot sun.  They've landed two big baskets of tiny shrimp and now will spin the boat around in the shallows and launch out again for more.

The beginning of the end of today's work for a beach seine team.  There are perhaps 30 people involved and a monstrously long net.  Here they've completed a set and are beginning to pick up the net off the beach and load it onto the raft for the next set.  This raft is an innovation in the past few years, built much like the offshore rafts, including with a diesel engine, but with the engine set way forward and working through a slot down through the hull so that the set can be made in a wide arc offshore from the beach and back in again, enclosing quite an acreage of water.  Then the whole crew works together to haul the net ashore, crowding everything along before it until the catch is all in one small spot and can be transferred to baskets and sold (and carried home too).  The older rafts were not motorized, just poled out to a depth determined by the length of poles the men could swing to push with.  I suspect this is a more productive method, though at much greater cost.  Another nearby team still uses the plain style raft.  H'mm.

If that's it, it was a small haul.  I've seen much more in the past.

Not machine tracks. . .these are the tracks of the crew hauling on the long lines to bring the last of the net ashore.

Tiny shrimp, there are vast quantities coming ashore at fishing ports all along the northern coast just now.

Advertisement for a Guest House. . .and some other stuff

Written from Hanoi, November 15, 2018
I've never written an advertisement for a hotel before, so this will be a first.  H'mm, where to begin?  I was just the past two days out toward Halong Bay, with a stop over night in Uong Bi, a visit to the boatyard out beyond Quang Yen town, and then on to Halong City for a second night away from Hanoi.  Or, to put it another way, I made my standard shake-down ride, from here to Halong and back again, with very little on the agenda but to exercise the little horse (and find out she has crud in her gas tank and that got stuck in her low speed carburetor jet and her battery just wouldn't come back from the long sleep). . .so we exercised the horse and found out those things, which weren't too bad, compared to a ruined clutch last trip.  But I suppose I'd best tell the story more or less as it happened, and get to the hotel in due course.
It was raining in Hanoi three mornings back.  I got out of bed, halfway wanting to be on the road, but the water running in the street and the dark sky somehow failed to get me moving.  Mind you, I did buy the new rain cape and have last trip's new rain suit complete with the camouflage colored plastic boots (that actually fit!!) and I really have very little to fear from warm rain other than that the road might be a little slippery in places and if there's mud on the pavement we might get pretty dirty. But to leave a comfortable room surrounded by friends and excellent noodle shops and the finest bakery I've found on this continent. . .to leave all that to go riding in the rain just didn't suit, so I ate a nice breakfast (egg sandwich, with cucumber and mixed herbs and a little too much salt, but I like salt after all). , ,and drank tea and coffee and wandered back to read a little then dozed off. . .living very lightly you might say.
Then I woke up to dry streets and a thinning overcast at 2:00 in the afternoon.  Yikes.  By 2:20 we were packed and loaded and rolling toward Halong Bay.  That was a late start for what is generally a  three and a half hour ride if everything goes right.  But better late than letting the dry spell go to waste.  At the turn off from the Hai Phong road onto QL-1, which would have lead to QL-18 and the most direct route to Halong, we carried on straight ahead on old QL-5, the Hai Phong road, also the oldest 4-lane freeway in the country.  Why, you ask, would I do that?  Er. . .well, the last time I traveled QL-18 out to the Bay it was gosh awful, over crowded, under maintained and generally a mess.  It used to be a sweet little road when I first met it, the sort of 2-lane road you'd take a friend to ride on just for pleasure.  Then the Koreans and Japanese as well as the locals, built factory after factory alongside it, and bit by bit it became awful, with far more traffic than road way too often.  The Hai Phong road, by contrast, has grown into its industry pretty nicely.  The truckers that run up and down it are professionals and do well enough without scaring the rest of us too badly.  So I held the little horse straight ahead for Hai Phong, intending to turn aside on QL-10 just on the outskirts of the city and thence across country to Eastern QL-18, which we should find at Uong Bi.
We did, but sunset and then late dusk caught us on the outskirts and we stopped the night in Uong Bi.  If you were along for the ride last year you'll already know about UB. . .I'd never spent the night before and liked it perfectly well last trip, even with the monstrous coal burning generating plant just down the street from the hotel I ended up in.  This trip UB has a problem.  It's getting a new water main  on one side of Main Street, and all new underground electricity on the other side of Main Street, and they're trying to get it done all at once, so. . .there are two ditches, one on one side of Main Street and one on the other.  It gets worse.  The street trees used to grow in a lovely long row on each side of the street, spaced neatly, about 30 feet apart.  They'd been doing really well, some of them too big to get your arms around (though mostly a little smaller than that). . .and they're all gone.  Where the ditches are dug clear out they are gone entirely, nothing left but the mud and crushed rock of the backfill.  Further along the project they've just been cut down and hauled away and their stumps stand, still above the right of way, but only a few inches above.  Crews of men with pry bars and shovels are digging out the roots that will be in the way of the new pipes and the orange plastic conduits.   Yes, it's a mess, though every shop and house has a temporary wood-plank bridge to get across the mud or the gaping hole.  It makes for an interesting approach to the hotel steps with the motorbike but she's good at narrow bridges even if she scares me sometimes.
So that was our first night on the road this year.  The rice restaurant just down the block still served a large and tasty dinner and after that, a short walk to see the neighborhood again by night lights, and then to bed and sleep.  It was a start.  The bike ran, the rain held off, we got to a good hotel and had a good dinner.  Nothing particularly wonderful, but a start.  There was a good football game on the big screen TV down in reception. . .the Asia Cup playoffs, I think that was Laos and Cambodia in Red and White.  They play well and the crowds love them.  You can stand and watch quite a while before you remember you were headed upstairs to bed.
The morning came in with rain running hard in the street, but with the gutters gone along with the street trees just adding to the mess. . .but we'd already begun a trip and so dodged quickly down the street to an egg sandwich lady working under a big umbrella on what was left of the sidewalk and the front steps of a shop that was closed. She did things a little differently than I'm used to, but her blend of herbs was fine and the eggs were well-fried without being crisped. . .then she squeezed the whole sandwich between a pair of hinged wire grates, the sort of thing you might use to keep hamburger patties from falling into a barbecue grill, and put the whole thing over a hot little charcoal fire to toast.  It came out squished together and crispy on the outside.. . .and somehow quite all right.  I took it down the street a few doors to a fancy but empty coffee shop and ate it with an expensive iced coffee chased with a strong flavored ice tea.  Really quite fine, though the straw and the curly plastic stirring stick seemed unnecessary in the normal course of breakfast coffee.  While I munched and sipped and wrote up yesterday's diary (my almost invariable morning), a small gaggle of the real patrons came in, young and lovely business women very nicely dressed to start their day in a properly chic coffee shop.  I felt a bit out of place, but they still smiled at me in my jeans and plaid shirt (with the monstrous gap in front of my smile) and one of them went through the whole standard introductory question list.  So, once the horse had stopped for breakfast just down the road, we were both ready for the day.  I had on the whole outfit, rain pants, coat and plastic boots, but it wasn't stormy really, just a mizzling rain and we didn't have far to go to Quang Yen town., so I didn't rig the rain cape.
From Uong Bi on to Quang Yen is just 10 kilometers more and it's easy riding on a dead level, dead straight little road with almost no traffic.. .what riding a bike in VN is supposed to be!  That leads you right into town and out again and over the bridge you have to cross to get to Mr. Chan's boatyard.  As soon as you come down off the bridge you turn off, hard to the left, to take the dike road downstream along the river.  About a block further on the road (which I knew to be a nicely paved little thing) turned to mud.  Oh goodness. , ,more sewer work? The electrical lines are still overhead.  Perhaps it's just to be repaved.  One way or another, it's slow and messy going for quite a ways.  And then it's all fine again and the two of us went running downstream on the nice little road I remembered.
And that leads to the boatyard on the Chanh River where the gorgeous "old" fishing/sailing junk was built, what almost two years ago now, where Mr. Le Duc Chan, master boat builder and the umpteenth generation of boatbuilders in his family sends fleets of new fishing boats to sea every year.  I'd planned to look in, admire the boat again, have a quick tour of the old boatyard and see what's building now, drink tea with Chan perhaps, and then move quietly along before lunch.  H'mm.  Well, to begin with, the boatyard is going strong, four wooden boats building, and if I counted them all, five new steel boats in various stages. . .and some other boats pulled out for repairs, a very busy boat yard indeed.  But the pretty sailing junk is moored at the extreme offshore end of the yard, moldering away,   She's been given an engine and her graceful sailing rudder has been taken off and an improvised motorboat's rudder sort of stuck on to a bracket willy nilly. . .no doubt it works for motoring, but it wouldn't do for sailing. . .,which I suppose is fine, her sails lie hanging in shreds from her spars.  Clearly, she's fallen on hard times.  Chan and I don't have enough language in common to explain complicated things like contractual payments and foreclosure and dispute resolution, heck, we don't get too far past "Hi, good to see you again" between my Vietnamese and his English.  His grandboy with the laptop helped a lot, transcribing his grandpa's comments into google translate in more or less real time, but that's a tenuous route for communication!  So, I can't tell you how the sailing junk came to be as she is, but I'd wager that if you have a small handful of money you could take her away and make her shine again.  I'd love to, she's a fine sailing vessel and could be again.  She won't go in my carry-on though, and I couldn't afford to keep her at home anyway.  Anyone else interested?
Well, besides the awful news about the sailing junk, the real news from the boat yard is that, as he said last trip he might, Mr. Chan has gone into steel boat building.  The government prefers it, the customers are asking for it and the wood supply is really shrinking.  He had to build in steel or stop building very much at all.  As the 11th generation of master boat builders in the family, he just took up the challenge, built a new crane way to handle the heavier steel plate and shapes and went to work building.  In the first year (assuming I got this right) the yard put out 20 steel vessels.  Right this moment there are five a building, two on the ways and three in the water.  That's not to say the wooden boats are finished, he has four woodies building as well and a couple up for repairs too.
What with one thing and another I ended staying for lunch and finally got away to Halong City a little after two.

There she sits,anchored and end tied to the mud bank, her sails rotted off her spars, her cabin top filthy and her oars weathering badly.  That's fresh water she's lying in, so nobody is eating her below the water line, but without sailing and keeping her topsides salted down she can't last forever.  The stainless steel rudder will no doubt handle her as a motor boat, but she'll not balance to sail. . .needs the old wooden rudder extending forward under the hull.  Oh sigh.

Mr. Chan among the new steel hulls abuilding upland.  The yard has no rolls, but the plating gets jacked and pulled into fair curves.  He's still building pretty boats!

The concave stem profile, ample flair and springy shear line (the curve of her topsides), will make her dry in a head sea.  The cabin shows traces of wood inside, but I did NOT go up that gangway to have a closer look

An older wooden vessel, in for repairs, with a new steel boat tied off on either side.  This smaller steel boat still has no wood in her cabin. . .and I suppose she may not.  That's a lovely fair hull though, even if it's not wood.

She's getting quite close to launch day, sitting blocked up on the launchway.  Note the wooden hull coming along in the background!

Bottom planking complete and some frames going in, Chan builds a hull like this in about a month.  He has 40 men working on the steel boats but still has 20 men building in wood.  The new building shed will make for dry welding on rainy days.

She's an old "Halong Bay Squarehead" (that's just my name, nobody else calls them that), she's up for major refurbishing. . .note the holes drilled into her hold. . .she'll keep her fish alive on board rather than worrying with ice.

And there hou have three wooden hulls coming along nicely

Chan is a constant model builder, making models in various scales and sizes, of all the different sorts of Halong Bay junks.

This is one of his larger models,. too big for the table top but too small to take sailing.  H'mm.

Chan and his Lady Wfe, in the run up to what turned out to be a very nice lunch.  This is a very pleasant outdoor room, under a tin roof with the tin panels insulated. . .very nice in almost any local weather.

My only real mission in the City was to meet with Ms. Cuc, the amazing innovator at Indochina Junk cruise line (and all sorts of new and more interesting tourism developments).  Ms. Cuc has been a huge help and become a dear friend in the past few years, arranging for me to meet people and go places I'd never have managed alone, some of which were really important to my understanding of the local boat building (and monster basket boat weaving) business.  This year I wasn't looking for more help, the book after all has gone to the publishers, but a visit to Viet Nam without a visit to Ms. Cuc was unthinkable. . .and there was the matter of seeing her new house, a topic of much conversation last trip. 

Ms. Cuc's new house, two full stories and a penthouse room and rooftop patio, soon to be a roof top garden no doubt.  The bricks are the universal in-fill between the concrete columns here, they almost never show, plastered inside and out and often with ornamental facing as well.

It's a thoroughly modern house for a thoroughly modern lady.  The steel ramp for bringing the motorbikes inside picks up and gets put out of the way when it's not needed.  

A hair dryer for the bike?? That's a new one.  She (the bike) was crusty after the ride in the rain and a year and a half of storage.

Just another Halong Bay rock.

Er. . .just another Halong Bay conference center??

Un. . .a couple of bridge pylons and a monstrous ferris wheel. . .that you can ride to on a cable car that carries 200 people and only costs $10 for a ticket.  Holy cow.

Harvest is still going on, but these fields have all been cut. 

We've kept track of this church out in the country since it was only half built.  About halfway home from Halong Bay on Highway 18

We managed, in the event, a running visit of several hours over the rest of that day and half of the next, and that at last leads to the hotel in question
I've stayed in hotels here that were dreadful and others that were lovely beyond expectations, and this one is an interesting combination.  From the outside it looks pretty grim, an old rough wood painted double door and the normal collapsible steel grillage to secure the place at night.  I'd been turned away from four hotels in a row and was becoming a bit worried as the afternoon wore on but still, I nearly skipped this one just to avoid its ugly facade.  Good luck prevailed though, and I went in, found they had a room (and only up 3 flights of stairs. . .about 60 stairs to be clear. . .and the room was gorgeous, with new lovely pine furniture, really nice, new tile on floors and walls, a sparkling bathroom and sweet smelling linens on a very firm mattress. . .all with a view out over the street and the lake beyond and the pretty hills beyond the lake.  But that still wouldn't rate a solid recommendation, many hotels are that good, more or less. . .but the people were lovely and the three-year old daughter absolutely charming (though she's currently down to just one front tooth. . .I can sympathize).  So here it is, if you're looking for a surprisingly lovely place to roost in Bai Chai, I'd strongly suggest "Nha Nghi Viet Dung", at 1058 duong Ha Long.  That is "Viet Dung Guesthouse, at 1058 Halong Street, Bai Chai.  There, I've done it.

This may be my ugliest photo of the year, but it's also some of the nicest use of pine in furniture I've ever seen.  It's all clear lumber and beautifully put together. . .with a flawless lacquer finish you could fall into and drown.  And the whole hotel room was like this, spotless, new and very nice.

Ah, but here's the best part.  She walked straight up to me, climbed in my lap and proceeded to talk my ear off, whether I understood a word or not.

We played with Barbies, Spiderman, an old adding machine (as a phone) and a nice empty box.  And then her Mom (or maybe grandma) made me pho and sweet coffee for breakfast.  Five stars I tell you, it just didn't look that good from outside!

And now, though there's a lot else been going on (a new tooth, a fuel filter, a new camera case, a visit to a huge "Sport" trade show and some pleasant people met . . .all of which might make a good story if I worked at it, it's time to be on the road.  The streets are dry and there's time to get to Sam Son at least before dark, and if the going is good, maybe all the way to Cua Lo for the night.  Southbound at last.

On the Ground, in Hanoi. . .again?? Indeed

Actually, there aren't too many other places I'm likely to start from these days, the little horse lives here, twenty five km out of Hanoi, getting dusty under a lean to against Mr. Dung's country home, which is also his lady wife's dry goods store and general merchandise shop and home to four, count 'em four kids.  When I met Dung (you say that "Zoong" in the northern pronunciation) there was only the one child, but that's been years ago now.  For a while it seemed as though they added as child every time I came back, but for some time  now, when I ask (the first thing after "how've you been?") is "How many kids now?" and it's hung tight at "Just Four" with a big grin.  Dung and I got off to sort of a rough start. . .I had a brand new bike to sell but with no title and he could only offer me "parts" value for it. . .a perfectly reasonable business position, but it left me quite short on the deal.  The scoundrel in Sapa who sold it to me (and that's a long story including a very tired old but beautiful Suzuki that barely got me up the mountain to Sapa before it died on his doorstep). . .,that scoundrel, as I was saying, sent me merrily on my way with a piece of official looking scrap paper that was not a title at all. . .,and kept the title himself.  I've no idea how he thought that would work well, given that I didn't bring the bike back north at all after my ride to the south but no matter, I had a bike with a piece of pretty paper and Dung gave me $100 for it when I needed $150 to get out of town whole.  H'mm.  In the end, he talked the original dealer out of the title and ended up with a usable bike to rent after all, but that was good luck.  And I survived after all.  The present little horse is, what, the third or fourth since I paid full new price for a brand new, top of the line (cheap, Chinese knock off of a line, but still, the top of that line) bike and convinced Dung to keep it for me between trips.  The deal was he could rent it out when I was gone as long as it was ready to ride when I got back. . .and it was never the front line of rentals, just a spare at the back of the lean to.  I think that brand new bike got wrecked. . .Dung never said. . .but one way or another, there was a fresh replacement waiting for me the following year.  That bike lasted a couple of rides and something went wrong with it, which brings us to yet another brand new blue bike (I like blue!!) that he snatched back from me after what would have been just the break in ride and presented me with the present Little Horse, with about the same mileage (kilometrage??) as the missing bike would have had, but with the cheaper head light (I really liked the big round headlight we started all this with) but also with a great set of racks for my saddle bags.  After a clutch replacement last year she's been superb, 120 cc's of raw power (yes, these little things are loud), smooth and fine to handle on the road.   I'm prejudiced, but she's a great bike for long adventures.  She carries 185 pounds of me and another 40 pounds or so of my luggage and in a pinch she'll lug along a passenger for a little ways too.  I've had her on roads that were just big chunks or rock sort of smoothed out by a bulldozer on the side of the mountain, along winter roads of pure slippery red clay and pushed her along through 400 km days on the highway and she just keeps going.  She'll cruise at the legal limit of 60 kmh all day on level ground, and grind up any hill that has pavement on it at least in second gear, all while delivering very close to 100 miles per gallon of Vietnamese gas.  If you buy one like  her, be prepared to scrap out most of the electrical thingy's, replace them with the Vietnamese spares you can get in any town, and you'll be fine.  The frame, motor and tires are great. . .some of the rubber is a bit shoddy, and the electrical boxes. , ,yes. , ,well, 'nuff said.

This year's first important chore, once the bike had been retrieved, was to meet with the publishers and specifically the book designer who is putting the English edition together now.  I don't write a lot of books (er, just this one really) and it seems I put an enormous amount of text with each photo, rather more like a chapter than a caption, and since she wanted a photograph on every page, the problem became getting all that verbiage in too.  So we talked about layouts and formats and looked at square samples and rectangular ones, hunted through and picked out the cover photos (front and back) and I dug out a shot of me with a canoe looking mysteriously younger to go with the "author's bio" on an inside flap of the cover.  So a final draft will be ready by the time I get back from the road this year and actual publication in. . .er. . .early 2019?  Sometime?  Clearly, stuff is happening!

Now that I've gotten the bike out of storage and met with the publishers, I've had to take care of a few minor details to get ready for long stretches of the high road.  This year those minor details have rather gotten out of hand.  To begin with, my 72 year old teeth have been begging for attention. . .which I can afford here in Hanoi. . .so there was the matter of setting up an appointment to rearrange my facial expressions a bit, new front tooth, to be clear, and a new crown and. . ,wait, you don't need all that information.  Just take it that the Preston dental work has slowed down this year's departure from the city, and I'm not smiling a whole lot in public just now.

I also managed to pack a cold along in my baggage, just taking hold on the flight over the Pacific (did I mention it was a new record for me, all of ten minutes short of twelve hours in the air!!  Goodness, just how long can these new airplanes stay up there?)  Anyway, it was 12 hours to all intents from Seattle to Seoul, an hour changing buses in Seoul, and another 4:35 on to Hanoi by 10:30 at night, and on top of all of that there was a cold settling in for a serious discussion.  Sigh.  That's slowed me down just a bit, what with naps in the middle of the day and such like.

There are the every-trip requirements, a new sim card for the cell phone for example. . .er. . .and this year, a new cell phone to go with the sim card.  My scrawny little ATT iPhone won't work on the Vietnamese networks, no matter how many sim cards you buy it.  Darn.  I like the new Nokia fine though, and maybe it'll plug in to the network at home.  So much for Apple for now!  (full disclosure, there are millions of happy iPhones in Viet Nam. . .just not from the ATT network.  Sigh.)

What else??  There was money to change and a new rain cape to buy (they don't last from one year to the next, and they're very nice to have when you're plugging through a rainy day on the bike). And I had to replace the keyboard on this poor little computer, not once but twice. . .The original built in keyboard decided to do without e's, t's 7's and a few other minor keys, so I found a young fellow with a tiny screwdriver who replaced the entire keyboard for $20. . .and that didn't do the trick.  Yikes!  Some sort of a software glitch I guess, it can't be the new hardware making the same exact errors.  So now I'm typing on a really lovely little bluetooth keyboard with the screen and "tablet" portion of the poor little laptop sitting in a blue rubber groove at the top of the keyboard. . .very cool. . .and a very nice keyboard to work on,   We won't discuss the un-budgeted expenditure, but I'll economize somewhere down the road.  Honest.

So, there's been a good bit of walking around on these errands and just seeing the neighborhood (gosh how it changes from one year to the next!!) and so there are some photos. . .nothing fabulous for now, that might come later.  In any event, tomorrow should be the first day on the road. . .out toward Hai Phong, then cutting cross country to Uong Bi and from there to Quang Yen and the wonderful sailing junk.  After that, Halong City and dinner with friends and we shall see.  Something good always happens around there.  Pack your rain gear, it looks like a damp trip this year. . .

A block from home and Traffic at a complete standstill on all four sides of the intersection, but more cars, bikes and cyclos closing in on the place moment by moment.  Much better to be walking just now.

Oh dear, he's dropped the last bite from the skewer.   .and he's going for it,  Sis looks very doubtful.

This is the secret to really quick and really good wonton soup. . .you pre load everything in separate bowls, have the noodles in reserve and an enormous kettle of lovely broth bubbling on the fire.  An order comes in, chop off a handful of noodles, throw the meat and wontons on top, add broth and a big crispy fried wonton sort of thing, a small handful of greenery and put it on the table.  ,elapsed time about 30 seconds, and a lovely supper.

About halfway through I realized this would make a fine photograph. . .plain yogurt, jackfruit, and who knows what the other stuff is. . .delicious I guess.  it's called "sua chua mit" yogurt and jackfruit.  You have to walk half a mile to get a bowl full, which maybe helps with the waist line

A fine view down one of the display cases in the best bakery anywhere around here, oh dear, it's on my block too,  The chocolate tart on the bottom shelf is to die for.

A street duck?  Later I met his person and found out he's seven years old and shares the room with a chicken and four cats.  No kidding.  He pecks your toes if you stand still.  

And this pair of street chickens seem just to hang out next to a busy noodle shop and roost right out in the open on the sidewalk.  Actually, street chickens aren't all that uncommon.  Ducks, on the other hand. . .maybe there's only one?

Here's a surprise set up in the middle of one of the busiest streets in Hanoi, the circle drive around Hoan Kiem Lake!  It's a huge and elaborate stage, all sorts of lights and mirrors and several thousand festival goers right where you would usually vie for space to ride your motorbike.  

I didn't have to wake him up to buy my supper, as soon as I paused in front of the steamer he was ready to go,  Steamed buns filled with meat, egg, noodles and that sort of thing are a ready staple in the city.  Out in the countryside though you'll rarely see them, and they won't likely be as tidy looking.  Home made ones tend to be lumpy, but very good.