February 24, 2015 – Hoi An #2
Our hotel is about a kilometer north of downtown, which is a pleasant walk in the morning if you manage to avoid being run over by the completely silent electric bicycles that are extremely popular right now. Small enough to avoid regulation, you don’t need a licence, registration, or a helmet. Needless to say, they’re a hit!
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Speaking of bicycles, here’s what you do when your frame rusts out!
We try to take a different walking route every time, and one day we came across a beautiful stream that someone had made by placing small pieces of slate on end. It’s very unique. I took a pic of Deb, and then she decided to take one of me. As she was setting up, a Mynah Bird swooped down, landed on her head, and tried to pull her hair out for nesting material! Deb’s grey/white hair is very unusual here, apparently even to the Mynah Birds. The bird went home empty-taloned, and we all survived with yet another weird story.
The stream. No Mynah Bird in sight.
A fish pond in front of a local-government building.
We’re in the thick of Tet-madness now, and many sidewalk vendors are selling potted Kumquat trees. They have bright orange fruit, like little oranges, but I don’t know if they’re edible. It’s a big deal, like Christmas trees, except you don’t kill them. You can buy them and keep them all year, or you can pay someone to maintain your tree at a storage place until next year, or you can just rent one and return it at the end of Tet. But you gotta have one.
There’s a little restaurant two doors down from our hotel, run by a lovely young couple whose parents own the business. They’re running it until they have enough money to get married and then buy the business. I would be blissfully unaware of any of this, but people talk to Debbie wherever she goes. Long story short, the young lady has offered to give Deb a half-day session on Vietnamese cooking. They went to the market together, bought everything, then took it back to the restaurant and prepared it. Very exciting! Once it was finished, I got to help eat it. Everyone has a role.
Debbie with her four dishes. The food was excellent!
Success!
There’s a lady who sits near the entrance to our hotel gate and sells cigarettes. After watching her for a while, we realized that she also dispatches several motorcycle taxis from there, and she and the motorcycle drivers play poker, along with the security guards for our hotel, when they’re not busy. Of course, Deb invited herself into the game and won some money! So, new friends. We wanted a tour of the countryside, so Deb wangled a half-day tour on the back of a couple of bikes, and they took us for a very interesting morning.
Our tour guides are standing on a typical country road, which is two metres of concrete.
A footpath through the fields, which often delineates the properties.
Water buffalo yield to no motorcycle.
In a part of the world where governments have come and gone numerous times, an ancestor’s grave is the ultimate proof of ownership. It is customary for farmers to be buried on their property.
We stopped at a farm belonging to the family of one of our guides. His father was busy watering all of the plants on the property – by hand. And the water tank that he was dipping from was being used to raise fish at the same time.
Intensive agriculture on very productive land.
Raising fish in the water trough.
After touring the countryside and driving down to the ocean to see where the locals used the beach, the boys took us to a pottery shop. We both made cups and wrote our names on them, which I’m sure they squished back into primordial goo the minute we left, but it was fun.
This lady makes lovely pieces with a foot-driven wheel and a pair of hands.
We were home by early afternoon, and it was a very good day.
By now, it’s getting very close to Tet, which is February 19 this year. One of Steve’s molars has gone south; it’s a tooth that’s given him grief for three years back in Canada, and which dentists have failed to fix. It turns out that there is exactly one dentist in the entire city – and his office is closed for Tet. So, we wait.
In the meantime, there’s the Lizardboat Races! That’s Steve’s name for them, because they are the same as our Dragonboats, but only about half the size. This is officially a Big Deal here. There are at least a dozen boats entered, each one from a different town, and competition is fierce. This is one of the very few times we saw police in our three months here. It is not unknown for cheering to turn into beer-bottle throwing, leading to nose-punching amongst drunk farmers, so the government has sent two policemen, who are asleep in their truck.
Representatives from each team tour the course along with the officials. That’s a 16th-century covered bridge in the background.
The official race recorder.
The crowd filled the banks on both sides of the river for 500 meters.
There must be rules, but I couldn’t figure them out. Only saw one boat get swamped. Learned some new Viet swearwords.
So that was fun. We’re getting ready to head north now, next stop the old Imperial City of Hue. But first, I need to get to that dentist. I headed down the next morning, and he was open! He has almost no equipment, but he looked at my tooth and decided he needed an X-ray. He went to a cabinet and pulled out something that looked like a cordless hairdryer, took a shot, and then put the roll of film into a portable developer and developed it right there! After a few minutes, he advised that my tooth was cracked, and probably has been for a long time. There’s an infection in the roots. He can’t fix the tooth, but he gave me prescriptions to get rid of the infection, and he gave me copies of the X-ray. Forty bucks with the three prescriptions.
We’re going to miss Hoi An. It’s been a slice.