Vietnam 2000

Day 8: Monday 16 Oct 2000
Danang, My Son, China Beach

This entry posted on:

18 OCT 2000 at 1900 Vietnam

18 OCT 2000 at 1200 UTC

18 OCT 2000 at 0800 EDT

18 OCT 2000 at 0500 PDT

Su Nguyen was at it again. She started at 6:30 this morning. This time she wanted us to rent motorbikes and follow her and her husband who were riding in a car up towards Hue. "You have to see Hue!" she insisted. "Is wery beautiful." I was literally ten seconds out of a deep sleep, so I hadn't the energy to argue but I somehow managed to convince her that we were going to take Thang up on his offer to drive us to My Son instead.
Thang showed up at 8am on the nose, as promised, and we had him take us to the Vietcombank so I could exchange some money. I paid a smaller commission than Mike did when he exchanged money at a hotel, but the price difference was more than made up for by having to sit and wait for the bureaucracy to move its big, fat, slow, wheels.
Go to one woman to fill out the form, she gives the form to a man who enters it into the computer, then gives it to another woman who checks and signs it, and who then finally gives it back to the first woman, who actually pays you your money.
Then, it was off to My Son. Being 60 km away, we decided to forgo the motorbikes and take a car. Thang brokered the deal, but since the car was not his, he didn't come with us, or act as our guide. Too bad, we liked Thang. But our driver Hong, was pretty cool as well.

My Son is the site of one of the most famous Cham temple ruins. The Champas were this sect of monks who left their art and ruined temples all over Vietnam from the turn of the millennium through the 12th century. My Son are the biggest and coolest.
After driving way out into the middle of nowhere on rocky dirt roads, we paid 50,000 VND to hire a van to drive us two kilometers further into the mountainous jungle. We then hiked another half kilometer or so such that by the time we found the Cham Towers, it really felt like we were in the middle of nowhere... which we pretty much were. The whole area is a Vietnam War movie location manager's dream.
The towers themselves sit at the base of Cat's Tooth Mountain and stick right up out of the middle of the jungle. Very cool. And you can climb all over them if you like... and we liked. There were great views to be had from the top of some of the brick walls.

And, in the spirit of archaeological discovery, Lars' severed head was spotted near one of the Cham Towers. The body was discovered moments later, on a sacrificial slab.

Apparently, the U.S. did a pretty good job of bombing the hell out of these towers during the war, though what we might have been aiming for, I can't imagine. I mean there is nothing out there at all. But regardless, we worked so hard at it that a respected expert on Cham art wrote a letter to Nixon telling him to "cut it out." Nixon reportedly told the Army to keep killing the VC, but to try not to hit the art. Man, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Nixon read that letter.

On the way back to Da Nang, we stopped at a restaurant on China Beach for seafood. I ordered shrimp and got an enormous plate of huge boiled shrimp. They were very good. Not being much of a shellfish guy, Mike subsisted mainly on the french fries, peanuts, and hard-boiled seabird eggs they gave us with our meal.

Mike commented on how similar this meal was to our last state-side dining experience... at Gladstone's in Malibu, for my roommate Tony's brother Steve's birthday, on the way to the airport. Two similar restaurants, both sitting on the beach on opposite sides of 8,000 miles of ocean.

And now we had a problem, in that we had about three hours before we had to leave for the airport. What to do? First we headed over to the Cham art museum to try and kill an hour. The guidebooks all say this is a must-see that you can visit again and again. Well, we speed-walked through it once, used the head, and got then hell out of there. Twenty minutes tops, and I don't think I would do it again. Although... it was a very nice bathroom.
So, without much else to do, we went back to the hotel and sat in the lobby chatting with out hotel hostess Dung Tran, whose family lives in Oakland and is taking her emigration interview next week so she can join them. She seemed a little nervous about it and, from the way she described it, she seemed to have good reason to be. It sounded to us like they were inclined not to let her go in the first place and that her interview would have to be stellar for them to say yes.
The gub-mint's gotta lighten up over here. They should head down to Pham Ngu Lau sometime and take a look at Capitalism flourishing. Cat's way outta the bag folks. Give it a rest!
The flight to Ha Noi was uneventful... except for the roach that climbed into the glass of the other guy in our row. That was kinda nasty, but whatever. When we got to Hanoi, it immediately became clear that it was raining gangbusters. Not at all dressed for inclement weather, our rain gear packed away after a bright sunny day in Da Nang, we shivered our way to the mini-bus for the 45 minute ride into town. We knew we were going to be dropped off in the middle of a dark, unfamiliar city at least a kilometer from our hotel choice and so, as much as we complain about the hovering cyclo/moped drivers, it sure was nice to get off that bus and to be met by what would be, under different circumstances, an irritating swarm of the little buggers. Later, safely ensconced in our hotel, we were struck by how readily we had handed over all our stuff, and ourselves to two guys we didn't know in a city we've never seen before for a motorcycle ride in the rainy dark. Funny thing was, we had gone to great lengths to pick a hotel from our guidebook in advance and write it down on a piece of paper to hand our drivers so we they wouldn't be tempted to divert us to the hotel that paid them a commission for referrals. But even given all our preparations, the dark, the cold, and the rain, we still had to endure a quick pit stop at their own personal hotel choice. We shook our heads insistently, and finally they relented, driving us another five minutes or so to our pre-chosen hotel.
It had been a cold, wet, freaky ride through the dark, slick streets of Ha Noi. But finally, damp and shivering, we arrived at the Violet Hotel and went upstairs to crash. I noticed when we walked in that there was some water on the floor, but figured we'd brought it in with us. It was also cold and clammy in the room, but we thought closing the window would solve that. Then Mike, lying in bed, felt a drop of water on his shoulder, but dismissed it as an isolated incident. What we didn't know was that, in the driving rainstorm, our room was leaking like a sieve. We had water rolling down one wall, pooling under our beds, and running out into the room in various streams and rivulets that hungrily sought out the perishable items in our least-waterproof bags.
But, not knowing any of this, we fell, somewhat happily, asleep, wrapped tightly in our blankets to fight the dank, chilly humidity that just wouldn't go away.
But there would be hell to pay in the morning...