Heading North

On Thursday, Oct. 1, we had the first leg of our journey up North, which included a six-hour bus ride throughout the countryside as we moved away from the city and towards the central highland territory. I have never seen a country with such an extensively changing and versatile landscape. I have also never seen anything like the precarious infrastructure that we have been plodding through as we headed up to Da Lat.

As soon as we headed away from the city and outside its suburbs, the landscape changed dramatically from congested buildings and motorbikes to jutting peaks and vast farmland. As we made our way through the mountain passes, even the air and temperature began to shift from the humid and polluted to the clean and cool. The roads became windy and bumpier, and the true rural Vietnam sprung to life.

When we finally arrived in Da Lat, I could not believe how this small city was nestled within the hills and mountains of the central highlands. After climbing a mountain for what seemed like hours, the city of Da Lat appeared out of nowhere in the landscape, hidden in the rural foothills and vegetation. When we had eaten dinner and experienced a live Mid-Autumn Festival dance in the restaurant, we headed back to the hotel through the market-filled streets to the beds of our first home on the ten-day trip.

Friday, we woke up bright and early in the city of Da Lat to head to a Buddhist monastery on top of the mountain that had brought us through to the city the day before. The weather today was absolutely beautiful, and we couldn’t have been at a prettier setting than the monastery. The monastery itself boasted typical Buddhist architecture, with a few small shrines and a large temple with a statue of the Buddha and a place for burning incense and worship. The monastery also looked over one of the most beautiful lakes I have ever seen, nestled in between two mountains at the bottom of a steep set of stairs built by the monastic community.

After walking through the temple and taking photographs, we headed down to the Da Lat markets where the Mid-Autumn festival was once again in full swing. All throughout the market, young boys participated in the dragon dance and drummed as they cavorted throughout the masses of people buying and selling. Vietnamese folklore says that the dragon dance performed in a marketplace is a prayer for the prosperity of the sellers in the market as they begin the day. This market was a host of color, crowds, and activity, as purveyors with products from live chickens and frogs to t-shirts and fur coats sold their wares. I came away with a kilo of mulberries and a pair of two beautiful flowers. Pretty successful if I do say so myself.

After the Da Lat market, we boarded the bus again to head over to a local, prosperous farmer’s house. As a coffee farmer, he utilized the rich soil in the central highland region to grow his coffee, where we also dispelled the myth about a certain coffee coming from the digestive movements of the weasel… It was extremely kind of him to open his home to us, and we had a great lunch of foods that had all come from his farm prepared by his wife and daughters.

The final stop on our long bus ride was at a silkworm factory about halfway between Da Lat and Buon Me Thot, where are final destination was for the evening. The women in the silk-factory hatched the silkworm cocoons, spun them for silk, and sold many beautiful silk pieces. The factory had a very mechanical feel, while also maintaining a meticulous and almost painstaking care for the product. It was a very interesting dichotomy of production.

The bus ride to Buon Me Thuot was definitely our longest and perhaps one of our most painful so far, but a few bus games, naps, snacks, and laughs later we are checking in to the hotel, eating dinner, and heading to sleep, eagerly awaiting the elephant ride tomorrow!! Although the bus rides are tough sometimes, it is definitely the best way to see the country. I can take a 30-minute nap, look out the window, and see a completely different Vietnam than I did when I first closed my eyes. The landscape is one of the most telling things about the different characteristics, almost levels, of this country, and experiencing it firsthand through travel across the country is definitely the best way to do it.

Saturday, our group went to the small, ethnic village of Buon Me Thuot for our elephant ride and tour of the village. One of the interesting things about this village is that although it attracts tourists and visitors through many attractions and goods, these same “hokey” tourist attractions are what pay for the continuation and the sustainability of an indigenous ethnic group and their lifestyle. Forgetting the tourist atmosphere that the village boasts, they are a people who are very proud of their heritage and are good at sharing that heritage with outsiders.

After our elephant ride, we boarded the bus for Nha Trang, where we would stop by an elementary S.O.S. school and be guests at their Mid-Autumn Festival celebration. After another grueling bus ride, we arrived at the school in time to hang out with the kids and watch their proud performance. S.O.S. (an international organization for Save Our Souls,) institutes school programs for children who are either orphaned by their families or whose families cannot afford to take care of them. These schools give the children a place to live, and provide them with familial structure from the “mothers” (groups of teachers designated as family heads.) The children were really excited to have a group of foreigners attending their celebration, and a game of basketball and playing on the playground before the show let our group unwind from the long bus ride and enjoy hanging out with the kids.

That night, we stayed at a hotel across from the beach in Nha Trang. This town was definitely more tourist-oriented, but none of us were complaining when we were able to order pizza at the restaurant that night. Although we came in at night, the vast beaches were obviously beautiful, and this notion was affirmed when we ventured out to the ocean early the next morning. Small islands to the east surrounded the beaches, while large mountains and peaks still cut along the shore from the west. It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

After packing up at the beach, we boarded the bus again and headed to a Cham temple. The Cham practitioners built these original temples out of bricks of sandstone, and they were an incredible sight to be seen. The Cham people are responsible for creating the Kingdom of Champa, which controlled the central part of Vietnam for about 1,000 years. Through trading and interaction with other Asian cultures, including Java, the Cham people adopted facets of Hinduism in their religious structure. The fact that these temples are still standing attest to the strength of their creation and the attention that the Cham people paid to creating them.

Sunday, after a night in Hoang Yen, (another less-touristy beachside city,) Brittany, Cathy, Evan and I woke up at 5:30 am to take a swim in the East Sea. Around here, the sun rises at about 5:45, so we snuck out of our hotel room quietly at around 5:20 and sat on the beach to watch the sun rise. Professor Jones explained to us that the time of sunrise is one of the “magic hours” of photography, creating a light that brings a different feel to a photograph. Although I didn’t take many pictures this morning, I have to say that I agree with how magic that time is. It was really special to wake up that early, swim as the sun rose over the ocean, and see the early morning fishing boats and coastal mountain ranges come to life as the sunlight began to hit them.

After getting on the bus, we drove to Quang Ngai province to visit the memorial of the My Lai massacre. I felt that memorial did great justice to the atrocities that happened there. The memorial itself was nothing more than a few house foundations saved from American destruction, a sculpture created by the Artist’s Foundation of Vietnam to represent three main photographs attributed to the massacre, and a museum of photos; however, each part of this memorial came together to give a rounded depiction of what happened there. One of the hardest things to see was a coconut tree left standing after the massacre, still riddled with hundreds of bullet holes.

There is no question that what happened in My Lai was horrible, but even as people swear to remember this massacre and take the lessons of war in to the future, there is currently a war going on in which horrible things like this are happening again. And even as there were heroes of the My Lai massacre who stood up against their fellow soldiers to try and save innocent civilians, their were also soldiers who raped and killed and burned and shot without blinking. Although we are told countless times over that the Vietnamese people are looking to the future and counting on positive relations with American people in order to prosper, I continue to wonder (especially in places like this,) how there are such current, positive relationships when we have taken and broken a piece of Vietnam’s past in a way that I feel cannot be healed. Sometimes I wish that there were anger or some sort of discrimination against Americans here. Anything that I could have a reason to feel sorry for. But the forgiveness in the hearts of the Vietnamese people in recognizing the future as a chance to make amends is something that I both respect and covet.

Which leads me to where our crew is currently stopped. Hoi An. A small has-been port/market town which was actually hit quite hard by the recent typhoon. Lucky for us we missed it.. Just got back from a 10 mile bike ride to the beach. We traveled via rice paddy. Pretty cool!! Will write more about Hoi An when I get the chance!! Much love to everyone.