to hoi an

The coast between Da Nang and Hoi An

The night train to Hoi An is waiting in the dimly lit station. It’s a little like an old black and white movie, with people in huddled groups, hawkers on the platform and people reaching down to buy their goods or to have a last word with their relatives waiting to see them off.
I’d like to say there were furtive couples in illicit relationships, or strangers plotting their wives’ murders, or spies. But our fellow passengers seem perfectly normal – a British lady working for the WHO, a Vietnamese gentleman who moved to the south during the American War as they call it, and who is now visiting the north for the first time since.
We are shown to our compartment by the carriage attendant who will be with us for the whole trip, about 15 hours right down the coast of Viet Nam. There is something romantic about sleeping on trains and having just read the Great Railway Bazaar this train seems no different from the trains of 30 years ago. The mysterious clanks and squeals of metal on metal, the railway crossing bell approaching and dropping in tone as we pass. Almost the whole way out of Hanoi, the line is right next to a main road, and we can gauge our speed by the motorbikes alongside. Their passengers wave happily and we wave back, as we tuck into our improvised ham and cheese and baguette dinner.
It’s light soon after six and for the rest of the trip we spend most of the time right alongside the coast, cutting into the capes, bridging the rivers and sweeping round the empty bays. It’s a spectacular journey especially between Da Nang and Hoi An, although there are still major areas suffering form the effects of defoliation 30 years ago. At one point we have an extra tender hitched to the back to push up the incline of the biggest hill. Of course this enforced break turns into a major selling opportunity or the local village, and the train is surrounded by hawkers.

The river front at Hoi An

Hoi An is a pretty little town on a river near the sea, established as a trading port by the Portuguese and with a legacy of historic houses in European, Chinese and Japanese styles. Many of the original dark timber houses survive, with their street facing shops and calm inner courtyards. It’s a great place to stroll around and on the day of the full moon the street lights are turned off at night and all the buildings are lit with Chinese lanterns. On this day every shop owner sets up a table with offerings to the ancestors and the air is full of the smell of incense and burning paper money. There are also traditional games and theatre going on – the latter a little inaccessible to our western ears.
The hotel we stayed in laid on a boat rip up the river to a village that specialises in pottery making. We met a lady that had been potting for over 60 years, through two wars and many changes of ideology, and looked well on it.


Wicker work circular fishing boat on the beach near Hoi An

The beach near Hoi An is huge, very attractive and during this off season period almost entirely empty. We got bikes from the hotel and cycled (or in my case wobbled) up to the beach and back, amongst all the other cyclists and motorobike riders. The whole place is set up for two wheeled riding (unlike say London) and I got to feel what a comfortable way this is for a small city or town (obviously being flat helps!) The ride from town is delightful, through paddy fields and by the river and you seem much more in contact with the world on a bike. (If this all seems obvious to bike riders I’m new to this!)

ha long bay

' Fighting roosters' island in the bay

East of Hanoi is the magnificent scenery of Ha Long Bay, an area of limestone karsts less well known than southern China or Thailand’s Andaman coast, but every bit as spectacular. The means of touring them is spectacular too. You go out by junk – one of a fleet of 300 or so – and you can eat and sleep on many of them. We were just there for the day trip and as this is the off season ended up with a junk to ourselves – complete with crew of 5 (not to mention the guide and driver that had brought us from Hanoi – it felt like an expedition from the colonial era).
You sail out of the city port with a distant view of the islands in the mist, and head off until you are suddenly in the middle of them all. The islands loom up all around, their grey cliff faces punctured by clefts and caves, with bird life wheeling effortlessly in and out of the crevices.

Ian on board the junk

We popped into a floating village where each boat/house has a ‘basement’ nursery for fish, that are grown on for market. Or you can buy direct. There is even a local shop that tours in a rowing boat.
We were presented with an enormous lunch on board the junk, with every kind of seafood available locally as well as meat and vegetable dishes. All the time we continued on the journey, with fresh vistas of islands receding to the horizon.
We also visited a cave discovered only 13 years ago, which was one of the most impressive I have seen. These islands are honeycombed with caverns and hidden streams slowly eating away the limestone.

hanoi

Now it’s time for the long march, a trip down the coast of Viet Nam from north to south.
I’ve caught up with Ian again and we are making this trip, flying into Hanoi, which is unexpectedly cold, requiring extra layers, and misty and grey for the first few days at least. On the final day when the sun shines it’s vastly improved and you get a much better feel for this city of boulevards, tree-lined and motorbike filled, with its lakes and quiet cafes.
Hoan Kiem Lake stands between the old quarter and the newer colonial city, and is a nice size to walk around, very popular with the locals who sit and chat, have a little glass of yellow Vietnamese tea, play draughts or stroll arm in arm. (Apparently around 6am they also do exercises there but needless to say I didn’t witness this myself.)
From here you can wander into the old quarter. This really is an intense experience. The huge area is filled with shop houses, each narrow street specialising in a particular trade, from rice to leather to silk to bamboo screens to fruit and veg. Shoe Street has more footwear than you’ve seen in your life. Glass Street is packed with glaziers, cutting to order, and mirrors for sale. There is an Ironmongery Street full of angle grinders and welding torches arcing away ; and a Tin-bashers Street, where you can cacophonously experience the making of A/C ducts and tin boxes, laboriously, by hand, right there on the street. Another street is full of paper lanterns and fake money to be burned in ceremonies for the dead.

The whole place is filled with noise and colour; the streets crammed with push carts, trolleys, overloaded motorbikes and ladies in conical hats with those panniers suspended in a yoke across their backs (still a surprising number of these). We saw a motorbike forcing its way through the market with two whole pigs loaded across the back; another was loaded with crates of rather shell shocked live hens.
Every other corner seems to have a small temple, some of them very old, and you can also visit a merchant’s house, set up much as it must have been in the past, with a trading area at the front and calmer living quarters at the back around a tiny internal garden.
At night Hanoi gets quiet early. By 10.00 the streets are almost empty and by 11.00 most bars are pushing you out and putting the chairs on tables. Hanoi generally feels like the administrative centre as opposed to Saigon’s commercial hub: Washington to New York.
Apart from the must-see Ho Chi Minh mausoleum – a socialist realist tour de force where you can just imagine the PLA thundering past on May Day under the unblinking gaze of the Politburo – the best cultural sites in Hanoi are the Temple of Literature and the Ethnology Museum.
The temple was founded as Viet Nam’s first university and has a series of cloistered gardens with some fine examples of local temple architecture dating back almost a thousand years (though like most temples here repeatedly re-built). The Confucian ideals of sound ethical administration were taught here and the graduates – just a few every few years – are commemorated in carved stone plaques confirming their achievements.The new Ethnology museum is well arranged and describes the history of Viet Nam’s minority peoples – there are over 50 ethnic groups with a total population of 5 million. While the Vietnamese kept to rice farming and fishing along the coastal strip and in the deltas, distrusting the mountains, the other groups have spread across the hills that make up most of the country, with many diverse cultural approaches to survival. The museum has a number of full size replicas of tribal houses. The spare use of material and the understanding of lightweight structure is very impressive.

koh chang

room with a view

‘Down to the end of the beach, it’s the last but one bungalow.’
My little wooden hut (with A/C) is I suppose what I’ve always thought of as the ultimate in tropical holidays. Right on the coral white sand, I can gaze out of the window or sit on the verandah and watch the big copper coloured sun drop gently into a sparkling blue ocean, with only the sounds of the gentle waves and the wind in the palm trees.
Koh Chang is one of Thailand’s biggest islands, and most of it is a national park, with its rainforest still well preserved in the mountainous interior. I arrived by car ferry from the mainland after a breakneck minibus ride, and you could immediately feel this was something different from the overdeveloped, more famous Thai islands (but for how long?).
I hopped aboard a dangerously overloaded song thraew. There is one road that goes almost all the way around the island, and this passes all the little resorts and beaches and settlements. Arriving at Hat Sai Khao (White Sand Beach) I am unceremoniously dumped at the little settlement and pointed in the right direction. I walk back right along the beach to its far end, where the White Sand Resort has its bungalows stretched along the last 500m or so of the beach, past a rocky outcrop to which some rather more informal establishments cling, limpet like. It’s high tide and I have to make my way through the bars and shops of these places to get to my hotel. Eventually I make it and am sent to the very far end of the beach.
Last but one bungalow; and beyond that is a tiny shack where they do freshly squeezed juices and a menu with 2 items – chicken and sticky rice, or noodles – both delicious, so you don’t even have to get back to the resort café, you can just laze around and swim and eat and drink.
Resort is probably too grand a term. Just a big open wooden hut for the café and reception, and the bungalows, and the beach and the waves and the sun and the stars at night…
I swim under the stars the first night. Millions of them. And stars below too: those little phosphorescent dots of night creatures that glow as you thrash about and seem to cling to you. They are the only light here, except far out from below the horizon, the dim glow of the fishing boats working through the night. I fall asleep to the lulling sound of the waves, rushing ashore. I wake to the same sound and the brilliant early morning sunshine.
In the evenings you can wander right down to the other end of the beach to the brasher, livelier bars and restaurants. It’s still all fairly low key, mostly single storey wooden huts with their toes in the water at high tide. But while I am there at night the tide is low, leaving a big shallow foreshore, still gleaming wet to reflect the neon and the fairy lights.

fire dancing on the beach

You can select your dinner from today’s catch and have it barbecued right in front of you. There are laid back little bars with tropical cocktails and jazz, and some more organised ones where the waiters strip off their shirts a couple of times a night and perform a fire dance, skilfully chucking flaming sticks up in the air and whirling them around in time to the music.
The ultimate in relaxation.

bali

The four of us decamped to Bali to celebrate Ian’s 50th birthday. He had organised an amazing villa with its own pool and private garden not far from the beach the perfect place to relax after a frenetic new year’s partying. The beach itself was pleasant with some days some huge waves, and we watched some fantastic sunsets. The weather all the time we were there was just about perfect.
One day we got a guide to take us round the hot spots of the island, the temples, the palace, the huge lake filled caldera at the centre of the island. The constant sun, frequent rain and volcanic soil make this a very fertile land, and some areas produce 3 crops of rice a year. Almost every square foot of the land is terraced into rice paddies, now just planted and full of regular rows of bright green shoots.
The religious culture is nominally Hindu (elsewhere in Indonesia overtaken by Islam) but the earlier pagan ancestor worship still shines through. Every house has its group of thatched shrines for the ancestors, often more elaborate and bigger than the houses themselves. Outside every house and shop little leaf-bowls of offerings are left every day.
The island is heavily populated and every road is lined with houses and shops and temples, with the land behind all rice-fields. Most of the s hops and now some of the temples are now devoted to the tourist trade and it feels a little bit over developed because of this.

new year in bangkok

One night in Bangkok – and then a few more. New Year is probably the busiest time of all as far as the tourist circuit goes – day and night. Four of us are here to celebrate and it’s as good a place as any for ‘Happy New Year’ as they call it (as in ‘What you doing for happy new year?’).
The Thais use any excuse for a party, and celebrate three New Years – their own in April (Song Khran), Chinese new year (and almost half Bangkok’s population is of Chinese descent) and the western one now.
So we find ourselves in trendy Soi 4 for a celebration. All the bars in this little lane are garish with neon and fairy lights and Christmas decorations (snowmen and blow up reindeer in this heat!), and all are blaring pop music at top volume (all different so it’s a complete cacophony). And everyone is having a good time.
It’s Yasser’s first time in Bangkok and so it’s been good to show him my favourite places – Wat Pho, with the huge reclining Buddha image; Wat Arun, the huge stupa style temple on the opposite bank that pre-dates Bangkok; the royal palace; and of course a trip on a water-bus along the great river.
All are busy in high season, with visitors but also with locals. At Wat Arun something I have never seen before. Everyone is lining up to give gifts to the tempe and its monks. Plastic buckets full of useful things – food, candles, incense sticks, umbrellas – are popular, and they are also stringing money up like prayer flags on long strings from the top of the stupa to the ground. And they also are gathering round a tree that blossoms at this time. They all clap to encourage the blossoms to open. I can’t say that this is working but you never know. Anyway, they are all having fun and that’s what matters.Of course we ate and drank very well. It’s very difficult to eat badly in Thailand, and we had many good meals. From humble street restaurants to the best royal cuisine, Thai food is one of the great cuisines of the world and a big favourite of mine.