Hanoi - Halong Bay - Cat Ba Island - Hanoi

We're in our last day in Hanoi, and Vietnam as well. Tomorrow heading to Bangkok, where we're going to drop off a few more fun items we've picked up along the way in SE asia and plan to head up to Chiang Mai for a week, then down to spend the rest of our rapidly-waning trip on the southern beaches....

We're both kind of ready for chilling hard on the beach and learning some new tricks in the kitchen with cooking classes up north in Thailand, to tell the truth! The last 4 days have been amazing = 2 kayaking among the 3000+ craggy, green, striking cliffed islands of Halong bay, and 2 days wandering around French colonial hanoi and eating everything in site, mostly following our noses to treats from various stalls along the streets...
Hanoi impressions, for the sake of documentation (our own, as much as for sharing with you...):
- everything is yellow, fading, french mansions abound, as do trees and paris-esque cafes and shops
- ho chi minh's mausaleum is mind-blowingly huge and set apart, iconic in its placement and setting alone. Think lincoln memorial times 3.
- estimated number of motobikes in Hanoi= .96 x local population, or 1 jillion, whichever is smaller
- estimated number of times per day we are asked if we'd like a "motobike?" taxi ride while walking: ~100 (really)
- weather in hanoi kicks every other se asian city's butt
- grilled pork on a stick at the don xuan night market, delectable (and greasy)
- estimated number of total stoplights or other traffic directing devices in all of hanoi: 10-12
- most impressive local feat of strength: very very old ladies, complete with sandals and conical hats, shuffling along with bamboo pole "yokes" dangling ginormous twin baskets of fruit, veges, and ready to heat grub
- lakes and trees slow down the pace, just a bit, here compared to Saigon
- the older the person, the kinder and less jaded they seem to be about us vulgar westerners wandering the streets and poking ourselves into all the shops and food stalls!
- vietnamese coffee, with its slow slow drip and strong strong taste (tempered by "sua", sweetened condensed milk, over ice) rocks
- go to Hoa Sua non-profit cooking and serving training school restaurant if you ever visit here, best combination of good food, good cause, beautiful restored French colonial home, and price in the city (at least that we found!)
- the 3000-dong (about 20 cents) local ice cream fave, Kem Trang Tien, and have a cone (or three) any time of day
- watching the looms grind away according to punch-card instructions for patterns at the Van Phuc silk fabric production village outside Hanoi (mom, get ready for some projects as there are many meters of colorful vietnamese silk coming back with us...)
- the vietnamese work HARD. i mean, really really hard. any given shop/restaurant is open on average 15v hours a day, and when people tell you they are going to serve or make something for you by a certain time.. they DO it. some pho (noodle soup, staple of the diet) joints are only closed a few hours each night. it feels like new york city circa 1930 or so in hanoi and saigon.
- SeaGames 2003 mania!!!

OK, enough brain dump on vietnam... Mandy's ultra-efficient gastrosystem has seemingly flushed the hateful yucko-bug that found its way into her tummy yesterday in record time, so we think (and anxious me especially hopes!) that she'll be back to normal and feeling good to jump into our Thai cooking classes in Chiang Mai this weekend. I'm going to sample a few "bia hoi"s tonight (local macro-brew beers, served in buckets at road-side stalls for a fraction of the cost of bottled beer and chock full of chain-smoking vietnamese dudes at all hours of the day) for my vietnamese swan song. Mandy is seeking out silk or Sapa-inspired blouses.

The main entries for our list of "things we want to do the next time we come back to Vietnam":
- visit to high western hills of sapa
- another dinner at Hoa Sua and more young rice flavored ice cream
- day or two at the floating markets on lower mekong river, near Can Tho
- 10 days or more in laos
- dining at La Bibliotech restaurant in Saigon, famed to be fantastic (and confirmed by pompous-but-funny chef Anthony Bourdain in "A Cook's Tour", in which he falls head over heels in love with Vietnam and its cuisine on a commando world food tour in a book we both read while here...)
- taking the leap and eating a "banh thit heo", the steamed bun filled with pork which didn't make it on to our plates this trip
- karaoke with some teens
- another kayak trip, this time longer, to Halong Bay in the China Sea
- pho, pho, and more pho
- renting our own motos and braving the utterly insane city traffic, instead of relying on our wits as street-crossing pedestrians and the fast-twitch reflexes of our moto-taxi drivers
- a custom made tuxedo and ball gown from Hoi An's tailors
- one more cup of that strong-but-smooth weasel poop java

We've loved our time in vietnam -- mandy fell hard for the geography, the food, and especially the people here, and i just laughed my way through the determination of the 80 million people stuffed into a string bean of a country ramping up a hard-working, entrepreneurial, and fairly successful capitalist economy under an archaic communist government... and chowing down noodles, home-brew, and cheap cigarettes at all hours of the day five feet from their motobikes as they do it. (Sidenote - vietnamese men, and its almost exculsively men, LOVE smoking. i mean they really really love smoking cigarettes - almost all males smoke everywhere, all day, while doing everything. it's almost like a collective national male habit.)

Off to Thailand tomorrow, for more heat and humidity, cooking classes, hiking near the Burmese border, and finally at least 8 or 10 days of serious vegetation time on the southern beaches before returning to our loved ones (whom we dearly miss, more so by the day...). Forgive the 1000 words, I know a few photos would usually suffice in place of my endless blather, but the connections are too slow here so we'll have to wait until Bangkok or we return for images -- we're anxious to see them on something other than the 1-inch screen on the back of our camera too!

Love to all, happy thanksgiving tomorrow to all celebrating turkey day, we're thankful for the presence of all of you in our lives -- never more so than when we are so far away from you all here! congrats on finishing reading another too-long blog, for those of you who made it this far... love and hugs and less than a month until we can hear your voices and share what's been going on in YOUR lives too.
xoxoxo Clay and Mandy

p.s. you may have noticed a "food" theme to our vietnam experiences. it's not an accident - we've been grubbing. as resident documentarian of our fave foods of the last 2 weeks, mandy has expressed her desire to post a blog on here at some point in the near future with her list of favorite sweet and savory local foods for the other foodies among our fam and friends who might be intrigued by such info.... don't be surprised if such a blog appears soonish. xo
- posted by Mandy and @ 3:54 AM

 
Hoi An - Danang - Hanoi

love to all - we're here in Hanoi, capital city of Vietnam, lovely as everyone says and with nice cool weather to boot. spending next week or so here and in Halong Bay kayaking and sleeping on a boat (as soon as we can sort out the details on that part...). more great food - today had lunch at oldest restaurant in vietnam, "cha ca la vong", serving one and only one dish: cha ca (mandy's favorite!). had a spontaneously large amount of clothing made from scratch - at low low prices - in hoi an, so we'll be researching shipping options tomorrow! much much love, thinking of you all and the crisp autumns and thanksgiving dinners we're sad to miss this year...
xoxo Clay and Mandy
- posted by Mandy and @ 5:18 AM

 
DaLat - Nha Trang - Danang - Hoi An

now we're in the most beautiful city we've seen yet in vietnam - anywhere else would be hard to top this... Hoi An is full of fading yellow french colonial buildings everywhere, mellow dark-wood cafes with icecream and fresh slow-drip coffee, a gigantic green vegetable market right on the river, it's muggy but not too hot. small town feel. so so great. everyone reading this should, at some point in their lives, try to come spend some time in Hoi An - just lovely here.

last night on a quick one-nighter in Nha Trang we had a meal of fresh crabs right from the China Sea -- our friendly waiter brought them out in a little catch-net he used to select them from their tank and brought them over to show their little blue-and-white pinchy selves to us. we were the only non-locals in the joint, but after much smiling, laughing, the extraction of the handy Vietnamese-English phrasebook I picked up in saigon, and some crab-size-hand-gestures, we found ourselves with an hour of extracting the crabby goodness from 3 shelled eight-legged former ocean dwellers: 2 fried in chillis and green onions, one steamed in coconut milk. some rough translation produced shrimp-and-sugarcane spring rolls, which were delectable as well. we found our tally to be the equivalent of about $9 (including 3 oranginas, what can i say we went wild.). culinary delights abound here. i'm sure you'll hear more about this from mandy upon our return, as well....

off to wander Hoi An for a few days - will write from Hanoi in afew (and will *try* to keep our food intake documenation to a minimum!). much much love to all, hope the Levenberg fam had a wonderful gathering and celebration in chicago last weekend, and mandy and I are getting more excited by the day for reunions with our fam in a month.
xoxo Clay and ML
- posted by Mandy and @ 10:50 PM

 
DaLat, Vietnam

here we are in dalat, which is almost the only place in this whole region where it is cool and breezy since its up in the western hills and its cool at night and so delightful during the day. aside from the nice break from the hot hot weather, it's also quite hilarious/.cheesy around here b/c its the preeminent destination for honeymooning vietnamese couples -==- flowers, stuffed animals of every color imaginable, numerous man-made lakes, and candy-colored hotels abound... as well as a 1/4 scale (or so) replica of the Eiffel Tower, to drive the point home that Dalat is "le petit paris" of vietnam to all who visit (though i'm not sure that the genuine tour Eiffel is covered in quite so many cell phone dishes as the one here!). Amorous couples walk around, or more frequently put-put around on their Honda Hero Econo-power II 100cc motorbikes two-to-a-seat. Everyone has got something to sell here, but we're mainly saying yes to the dried strawberry candy vendors but denying ourselves the luxury of motodop rides around, choosing instead to walk everywhere as a proxy for the cardio exercise we are sorely missing on oru travels (and to try to work off a few of the suger-coated strawberries). This area of vietnam produces a lot of the fruits and veges of southern part of the country, and we haev been marvelling at all the tasty vittles available in the central marker here day and night. Mandy's new fave fruit is the custard apple, a SE asian native that looks like a little artichoke but has white sugary yum inside.

Have we mentioned before in an earlier blog that the most highly refined type of coffee sold in vietnam, among the many excellent and tasty (and STRONG) coffees here, si the Ca Phe Chon -- locally referred to on the english menus as "weasel coffee"? It is produced - and i am not making this up - by feeding high-quality coffee beans to a certain species of vietnamese weasel, collecting said beans from the weasel's excrement, then roasting grinding and serving to you. Mandy and I enjoyed a piping cup each - mine hot, hers in the vietnamese cafe style over ice - and we can attest to the truly magical effect that a weasel's digestive system must have on the coffee bean curing process. (How they figured out this method of coffee bean production, and then scaled it to availability in the cafes here, is beyond me... but they've done it. I'm going to pick up a kilo or so of Ca Phe Chon beans in Hanoi and bring them back for my fellow Seattle coffee lovers to experience first-hand....). Cafe culture is huge here -- although the vietnamese twist, as we've learned (and mandy loves!) is that fresh ice cream in a variety of local fruit flavors gets equal billing in the ubiquitous cafes as does Ca Phe and tea. I suspect we'll be sampling the local "kem" (i.e. ice cream) cafes in several of the towns we visit here!.... So far, Mandy's fave flavor by far is the young rice from Fanny's on Pasteur in Saigon.

Other than that, things are great - we're headed up the coast to Nha Trang, danang, Hoi An, and Hue, then on to Hanoi and Halong Bay before we figure out how to get ourselves over to Lao. Sad to be in our last month of travels, but happy to be starting to entertain the thought of seeing all our fam and friends we miss so much from back home. Highlight of our evening tonight is that we're staying at a funky/wacky joint tonight that the locals call the "crazy house" - a hotel of 10 or so rooms all fashioned inside two big banyan trees (or replica banyan trees, which seem to be handmade out of painted concrete)_ with big carved animals with red light-bulb eyes inside each one. The place was conceived, sculpted, and now run by a daughter of a former president of vietnam named Hang Nga... We're in the "honeymoon room", which is just like all the others in that it is small, totally Alice-in-Wonderland, and features tree trunk-esque individual steps climbing up to the loft bed, round walls, fake bamboo and vines carved all inside it, and a whole ceiling of handmade fake stalactites dripping down (luckily neither of us is over 6 feet tall or else we'd have some issues).

Getting in lots and lots of walking, (mandy tells me, according to her trusty pedometer which she brought with her on the trip and uses religiously, that today is a 8.5 mile day so far... just an fyi). Meeting lots and lots of vietnamese who are excited to share their country, and potentially their services/products, with us. So far, we aer really really liking it here.

love to all, and most of all CONGRATULATIONS to julie and howard on their nuptials, which we are sadly missing today!
xoxoxox Clay and Mandy
- posted by Mandy and @ 1:36 AM

 
HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS AND MAZEL TOV TO JULIE LEVENBERG AND HOWARD ZEMEL!

We're so sorry to miss your big wedding day this weekend but know that though our bodies are in Vietnam our hearts are in Chicago with you both! On Sunday evening, wherever we are, we'll toast to you and your life together filled with joy and happiness.

xoxoxo
- posted by Mandy and @ 6:35 PM

 
Saigon (ho chi minh city), vietnam

Hi and love to all,
We are safe andsound in Saigon, after it took us 15 hours and 2 minibuses, 2 boats, 1 moto, and 1 taxi to get here from Phnom Penh. As a bonus, though, we got to thoroughly see and appreciate the slow slow mekong delta life as we put-putted down the rivers to get inside vietnam and eventually here, to the city of 6 million (and everyone's on a scooter, as elsewhere!).

mandy's freaking out with the delicious food everywhere, and i'm really being reminded of the zip and hip of new york here. it's great.

couple of quick things for our doctor friends and those otherwise inclined... One, the cello concert and talk in siem reap, cambodia, was amazing. It was given by the head of one of three hospitals under the name Kantha Bopha for children in cambodia, a guy named Beat Richter. He's an incredible inspiration --- the guy has put his efforts where his beliefs are for the past 11 years (and some before that, pre Khmer Rouge) in Cambodia and the difference it has made is striking. THe medical situation there is veryvery bad, and especially so for children. His efforts, almost single-handedly, have greatly improved things in siem reap and phnom penh. A swiss pediatrician, he has channeled his energy into what he calls "justice" - righting the wrongs of the Western conflicts negative down-stream impacts on Cambodia's politics and economy - hence people - for the past 20 years. Anyway, docs and others should check out what he's done'/doing at: http://www.beatocello.com (perhaps MD's want to think about volunteering at one of the Kantha Bopha hospitals in the future?!). Ok, so that's the plug for that - we were really impressed and we learned so much about the huge gaps that Cambodia has to work on closing in its medical system to properly care for their people.. and they need help, if they can get it.
Two, we were impressed in Nepal by the work done by the Himalayan Rescue Association -- the ngo founded years and years ago by a Canadian doc from Victoria (just up the coast from us!) that uses trekker doc visit fees to fund free health care for the local villagers in Manang and Solu Khumbu districts. Again, super cool potential future volunteer oppty's for those with the med skills and inclination. OK< while it was on our minds (and while I'm recovering from my mystery "flu-bug" as my sis calls these things), I thought I'd get it down..

OK, we are going to run and enjoy the Saigon nightlife and more food -- specifically some Fanny's ice cream, supposedly the best in a country known for it's ice cream delights (incongruously ?!) -- after having devoured a big meal of two fresh pho's and two tasty Saigon beers for $2 total. This place has zip and tons of people moto'ing from cafe to cafe and neon and just really feels like an alive, funky fun city., So we're staying a few days in the "baby Paramount" hotel we found here (modern, funky, white-and-black, but cheeeeeap!) and eating and checking out where all these folks are zipping about at night here...

Much love, xoxoxoxo
Clay andMandy

- posted by Mandy and @ 7:46 AM

 
Siem Reap, Cambodia

Hi all - a warm and humid typical evening in cambodia, where mandy and i are almost completely healthy, happy, and amazed once again by new cultural experiences. We''ve kicked, we believe, whatever the weird stomach ailment was that we both picked up towards the end of our time in Nepal. It was not debilitating for either of us, but also not exactly perfect for our arrival in se asia and the land of (finally!) tasty, exciting food and drink. so we say THANKS to our doctor friends overseas who provided their valuable consultation from abroad, and we're keeping our fingers crossed that things keep getting better and are all cleared up before we head to vietnam for even tastier vittles...

So Cambodia is amazing. People are so super friendly, i'd say the heat factor is down to about an 8 on a 1-10 scale (with bangkok never changing from having the needle pegged right at 10 at all times, including midnight). It's richly tropical, so wet that even the traditional homes are all on stilts. Yesterday we explored the better part of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, including the awesome Bayon towers and smiling stone faces, and tomorrow we're going back to spend a second day taking in the details of the temple carvings by bicycle (first day we went with a moto-tuktuk, riding in style - we felt indulgent but then remembered the bargain it actually is here to do everything except enjoy a morning muffin, a luxury that we've been able to continue at the relatively astronomical price of $1 a day because we're treating it as a personal multi-continental experiment to test the bakeries everywhere we go :). The scale and durability, as well as stone carving artistry, of Angkor Wat is awe-inspiring --- it certainly lives up the billing that chris and em, wrenn, jack, cathy and mike, and others who have been here gave it when we started pestering you all with questions about where to go and what to do so many months ago.

Today, we rode with our tuk tuk friend out to some temples further afield, including Banteay Srei, set 30km out of siem riep in the midst of wet rice paddies, palm trees, and simple stilted a-frame homes as far as the eye could see. Bas-relief carving artistry that was astounding, unlike anything to be found covering base to peak of any architecture today. Everyone everywhere is selling something, many of them literally running out of shops, restaurants, or just alongside you as you walk to hawk... and everyone is doing it with enthusiasm and a smile and interspersing their pitch with questions about where you are from and what your name is... and no one takes it hard when you must say No to them in the end. Pure capitalism mixed with sweet, sweet dispositions and an easygoing attitude about everything. Abotu 95% of the population rides 100cc motorcycle/scooters everywhere and/or bicycles, with the average riders per bike/cycle probably at about 2.5. (i.e. there are lots and lots of people, men women and children of all ages right down to a great many naked babies, bumming rides to and fro on the backs of the motorcycles in particular). The most we've seen riding together on one 100cc cycle so far is 5 -- 3 adults, 2 kids, all wedged front to back on one standard motorcycle seat -- so that's the record so far, but we're going to keep our eyes peeled for a 6-top tomorrow! Amazing to see completely rule-less roads working so trouble-free with such a density of well-packed motos and bikes all sharing 2 lanes -- and hardly any horns at all, even out of the few cars negotiating space with all the two-wheelers, and DEEE lightful change from honk-happy nepal!). Tomorrow's bike trip out and back to Angkor Wat will lower the average siem reap people-per-bike ratio given that mandy and i will each have our own.... as mandy says, "sharing is caring" when it comes to the side of the road here! So, all in all mandy and i are finding cambodia and everyone we meet here very endearing...

Tonight a cello concert (free, with a donation request i'm sure but we're happy to listen and contribute!) given by one of the doctors at the local children's hospital, a weekly gig aimed at converting one guy's talents into donations for the much-needed medical services here --- soundsgood to us, true social entrepreneurship at its best (he promises Bach selections, we're anxious to hear the sounds of a cello on a muggy se asian night).

OK, enough - more 1000 year old architecture ahead, then a boat trip down the Tonle sap River on Monday to see the remains of the annual Water Festival boat races there this weekend and arrival midday, we expct, into Phnom Penh for a quick visit. Probably on to saigon from there but not sure, yet, more LP reading and discussions over dinner tonight.
Love to all, happy birthday to my dad's father Pompaw, and thanks as always for letting us know how you are doing with your emails... we are missing home more and more everyday, and starting to get excited about connecting more closely with you very soon.
XO
Clay (mandy sends boisterous, enthusiastic love as always too)...



- posted by Mandy and @ 3:02 AM

 
Quickly:
Engagement congratulations to:
Greg and Lisa!! (hooray!)
Brad and Claudia (felicitaciones!!!)

- posted by Mandy and @ 10:19 PM

 
Kathmandu - Bangkok - Cambodia (soon...)

Hello to friends and fam from Bangkok, Thailand. We arrived here safely two days ago after a typically delayed Royal Nepal Airlines flight from the bustling chaos that is Kathmandu... We were happy to be in a new place -- indeed a completely new place for both of us, aside from the quick 1 day stay we had before leaving for Nepal -- after one month or so in Nepal.

We were even happier to have been warmly welcomed once again by Jack Kneeland (thanks Jack!!!) at his tropical pad near downtown for a couple of nights of recovery and rest and good tasty thai food. It's a pure delight to taste the many flavors, sweet savory spicy and everything in between, of se asia after 3 months of fairly bland cuisine. We quicklybought the requisite Lonely Planet books for the rest of se asia on the legendary Khoa San Road, hunkered down over Phud Thai for a few hours to plot out our next steps, and then treated ourselves to a visit to the incredible Wat Po temple for the local specialty: Thai deep-tissue massage. We've discovered a required treat of any stay in Bangkok, andone that's not even so much of a "luxury" given the low-low price and ready availability of the rub-down treatment almost anywhere around town. More massages are likely to be in our future (as well as some serious cooking classes, at some point upon our return!)...

Tomorrow morning bright and early we leave on a quick plane flight over to Cambodia to Siem Riep, about 5 km from the Angkor Wat temple complex. From there, the rough plan is 4 days there, a one-day boat ride down the river to Phnom Penh, quick spin through town and then heading overland or by air or something to southern Vietnam. It seems like probably 10 days or so there, perhaps a bitmore, is needed to get the feel of both the Mekong Delta area to the south as well as Hanoi and the coastal villages of the north. We're not sure yet. Whatever we do, we'll stay safe and travel with our heads up and we're planningto be in either Lao or back in Thailand by about November 20th or so. We'll see if that plan holds as we make our way around! {and for fam: not sure about internet access, but we suspect that vietnam has plenty of opportunities so we'll do our best to check in as we can... :) }

OK, time to go view some of the ornate temples and gilded Buddhas of the nearby Wat Po and other Bangkok Wat's as we prepare ourselves for Angkor. Mandy and I are a little run-down from lingering bugs that seem to have followed us in our bellies from our time in Nepal, but we both feel a little better by the day and so we're resting and drinking (water) and generally interested to see what the rest of this big peninsula of se asia holds in terms of people, religion, architecture, heat, flora, fauna, and culture.

Thinking about you all, sending our love, happy birthday to the fam members with big days coming up this week, and more to come....
xoxo Clay and Mandy

- posted by Mandy and @ 10:06 PM