The rice harvest

I am finally getting around to looking back over all my photos and making some collections.

This one is the rice harvest.

Depending on the field quality and how much rain a particular region gets, most rice fields will yield 2 or 3 harvests per year. All planting, picking and separating is done by hand. Although some towns did have thrasher machines to more easily get the rice off the grass.  

These women seemed to enjoy the distraction of photographs. They loved looking at the photos on the screen. 

I found it incredibly hot just looking at these ladies. Jeans, jackets, scarves, gloves and usually face masks all to keep the sun from making their skin darker.     

Every harvest field seems to have a spectators area

Shaking the rice from the stalks, letting it dry in the sun - often on tarps by equally often on the side of the road, and tossing it to separate the  husks as much as possible before loading into sacks 

The rice grass left to hay before being bundled up for water buffalo 

 The next morning we found another rice field to explore

the breakfast food van

next up I should have a collection of fishing photos!
let's wait and see how damn long it takes me to get them up now!

Travels

The last two week featured visits from Patrick (yey!)

 We hung out in Hanoi for a few days. Spent plenty of time walking around the streets getting accosted by fruit selling women (they have this desire to thrust their fruit baskets at me and insist that photos are taken. I declined this offer.), avoiding scams by bread selling women (I just wanted one sweet bread for each of us... she put about 15 things in a bag and demanded exorbitant amounts of money, when she continued to resist giving only two things I decided I had had enough and walked off..... she then followed and grabbed hold of me twice trying to sell the damn bread) and taking in the insanity that is Hanoi.
These photos were taken on our walk (complete with the necessary ice cream stops) around the lake. Hanoi is actually quite a beautiful city, lots of green space. This lake in the centre of the old town is just one of the garden areas that locals like to come to to relax, exercise and do some ballroom dancing.
The story goes that an emperor was boating on the lake and a magic turtle gave him a sword with which he was able to defeat his enemies. Some time later on another boat trip the turtle returned and snatched back the sword... where it waits at the bottom of the lake.

We also went to see water puppet theatre. This was awesome! I didn't really know what to expect, but the puppets are controlled via underwater rods and levers, with the puppeteers hiding in the water behind a screen. You could only really see the rods if you looked closely, and only because we were sitting above the water a bit. But the arms and heads move around with no visible strings or controllers. It was great. All the scenes also related to water type activities, like rice planting, buffalo swimming, fishing and dragons. The fire breathing / water shooting dragons with segmented bodies that moved through the water were amazing. But I failed to take any photos, partly because I was busy watching and party because the person two rows ahead of us who kept lifting her camera up high to take photos was incredibly annoying - and I didn't want to be that guy!

With our Hanoi Kids guides

I also heard about an organisation called Hanoi Kids. They offer free tours of the city by university students who are wanting to practice their English by regularly talking to native English speakers. The deal is that we as tourists pay for the transport costs and any entry fees. And in return we get a tour, explanations of places that often don't have many English signs and the chance to chat with locals about their lives and experiences (which we all enjoyed so much we ended up spending over an hour drinking one cup of coffee!).



With them we visited the Hanoi Hilton (aka prison originally built by the french to contain and torture Vietnamese revolutionaries, later used to contain captured US pilots). This is a bit of a surreal place with a heavy influence on the mistreatment of Vietnamese by the French and a couple of rooms devoted to showing how well they looked after the American prisoners. I assume that the actual treatment was probably somewhere in between what America says and what Vietnam says.... that's usually the way.

with a statue representative the height of Vietnamese people
at whatever point in time that was (I forgot)

We also visited the temple of literature. It was quite interesting to hear the history of this temple, and the modern uses from the point of view of uni students (who regularly come to pray for luck before exams)

We attempted to visit Ho Chi Minh's tomb.... but neither our hotel reception (when we asked if our clothes were conservative enough), nor the guides actually mentioned that on Friday afternoons it is closed. So we walked around the outside a bit.

The view from our bungalow

Mai Chau was stunning! It took four hours in a van to get there, but definitely worth it! I was a little worried that it would be a bit of a tinsly tourist town (like my experience of visiting that "traditional village" near Buon Ma Thout). It was actually really empty and relaxing, we were even there on a weekend (apparently a lot of locals visit on weekends) but even then it wasn't too busy. The air was clean and the lack of traffic was welcome after a few days in Hanoi! Bike riding and hanging out in the rice fields was fun.
Climbing up to the 1000 steps caves was less fun and more hot, especially as I am told it is in fact 1200 steps! But the satisfaction of beating the steps was worth it... I guess. We also found a mysterious path at the back of the cave which was obviously designed to be explored - it had hand rails.... but then the guide yelled at us to come back and appear to be quite agitated. Maybe there were ghosts back there. I find lots of times that people here do thing I can't explain it all comes down to ghost actions.

Yey, bikes!

 
 Staying in Mai Chau also means you get obligatory after dinner entertainment in the form of "traditional dances".

This is a kind of awkward affair, the first dance featured eight people standing in a line holding hands, then swinging their arms back and forth. A bit like a grade 1 Christmas show dance. But with adults. After this first dance the men dancers all sat down and enjoyed the bucket bong in the corner while the ladies danced. As the grand finale everyone returned for a bamboo dance. Hard to explain without seeing it yourself. but two people hold two pieces of bamboo on the ground and hit them down twice, then smash them together. Meanwhile dancers jump in and put pf the bamboo, avoid getting their ankles smashed. Everyone was brought up to join in the dance. Which got more and more hilarious as we discovered how bad at timing the group of Vietnamese girls on the tour were..... especially when they wanted to hold the bamboo and do that bit! a couple of people got bruised ankles in that portion of the dancing!

Halong bay

Next stop, Halong bay!
Boating around, drinking expensive cocktails (I have been in Vietnam too long and every seems expensive now. These were $4-6 cocktails.... I will not cope with Australia prices) and relaxing on the beach. Pretty awesome!

Halong bay is made up of limestone cliff islands. The landscape is pretty stunning and once you get out and away from the ridiculous amounts of diesel smoke it is amazing. As a bonus, because it is limestone cliffs it has lots of caves, like this one. I have found that Vietnam in general has a bit of an obsession with caves, and they have many caves. This one featured bonus lights-of-every-colour and rocks that looked vaguely like stuff if you squinted really hard and pretended!

Fishing boats in a sheltered bay

We also kayaked around some of the cliffs and through caves.

Swimming wasn't totally the nicest, because even moored in the "clean water swimming spot" there were patches of oil in the water. I really hope that boat owners (at least the tourist boats) see that people are not into the smokey polluting boats and they need to do some vaguely regular maintenance to actually keep the bay nice!

But swimming did involve water entry from the very top of the boat. So I was into the jumping-off-the-sun-deck thing :)

I had heard from various people that Halong Bay was disappointing, or dirty and polluted. I found it beautiful! Yes, there was pollution from all the boats, but some places seem to be striving to reduce that. Our hotel on Monkey island was collecting all the flotsam that came near the beach and burning it. I am sure it's probably as much about keeping their private beach nice as it i about reducing pollution. But they didn't wait for the tide to wash stuff away.

Hopefully everyone (tourists and locals alike) will try to keep it nice. but we had a great time!

That's pretty much our first week wrapped up. Will add more about the second week later!

sunset drinks on the balcony. life is good

Tam Ky - Dioxin centre

Tam ky is about 1.5 hours drive away - it is a bit far to go on motorbikes regularly, but while the physio students have been here we have been going down in the van every Wednesday.

Kids dancing

The Dioxin and unfortunate children centre is a fairly new school and vocational training centre for kid with agent orange based disabilities (dioxin), and any other disabilities as well. The school is a bit bare at the moment, with one teacher, a nurse and the director. But it is a really nice place, they are all really happy to have any help at all and work with suggestions or ideas we provided. The kids get lunch there, and it is actually a nice looking lunch! (as opposed to the gruel that is served everywhere else!) meat, rice, vege. Good looking food!

Showing me how to use the incense making machine

At the moment they are not able to accept kids who need wheelchairs as they don't have enough staff to support those children, which is unfortunate.

The young adults also work together to make incense sticks. Which these gentlemen told us they love doing, I get the feeling they didn't have a role in their lives outside of the centre. Now they are in charge of the incense production line, teach the kids (and random foreigners who come sticky beaking like me) how to use the machines and get to sell their products to help support the centre and pay for lunch etc.

The fellow in the photo above has athetoid CP. So his left arm is constantly writhing and moving and throws him off balance if it is free. It is hard to see in the photo - but he has a piece of plastic twine tying it down. Which does work to stop his arm moving too much, but also bit into his skin!

The students got some leather in Hoi An one weekend, and we got out cook here to sew us a belt with a little loop for his hand to slip into. This is nice and stiff and stops his hand from moving around too much. Plus it is a lot thicker and softer than his twine, so now more cutting into his string! Sometimes, the littlest seeming things - like getting some leather and making a belt - can make the biggest difference. Now, if our belt eventually breaks at least he can take it somewhere and get a new one made to the same design!

We are pretty sure that the fellow in the background of the photo on the left is now also acting as a teacher. He seems to boss around the kids often, and sometimes the other teacher. If he is, what an amazing role model for these kids. Showing that just because he is missing a foot doesn't mean he can't do anything he wants! He also drives around on a cool three wheeler motorbike and was really keen to come to another centre (a place we were thinking about buying incense machines for) and teaching the young people there how to use the machines.

He also sold me 80 000 dong ($4) worth of incense..... which is actually 10 giant packets that fills up a shopping bag!! but it smells nice!

The very beautiful and photogenic kids of the Dioxin centre!

 The kids always get excited when they see a camera get whipped out and start posing, smiling, giving peace signs and generally doing entertaining things. If the camera is being held and not used..... constant tapping on shoulders and pointing at the camera to ask you to take their photos!

 It is hard to know exactly what the kids usually do during the day. It seems they get lessons and have books to write in. But there isn't a chalkboard in the classroom. So I guess everything is taught orally. One of the teacher's main concerns for physio was that the kids all have messy writing. I was amazed that half the kids could write at all! But Vietnam does have a big emphasis on neat writing. The kids we teach English too have such neat writing it makes me ashamed of mine!

 They also have a karaoke machine in the classroom. Because every kid should get to karaoke machine..... instead of a chalkboard! They do love it though. On our first visit we were hoping to get to see what the kids usually do.... but instead we got sung to by various children.





Including one (on the right) who apparently can't actually speak - but loves to sing and just make noise. It was actually quite tuneful singing too.
While playing with some beading I had her copying the colour names (in Vietnamese). Seems if you spend some time giving her the language she can copy and pick it up! But the only teacher doesn't have time to sit and do it all day, I guess her family is probably too busy working to spend the time. But it is so sad to see someone with so much potential who just doesn't have people with time to teach her.

dancing fun

 We decided to try to get some physical activity into the kids day. A few of the kids are on the bigger side, and tend to sit around all day not really running around and playing. So we started with the macarena - you can see in the photos that they are having a great time dancing!

teaching the kids the macarena

We had a great time teaching them. We also went through the chicken dance, and then a simple version of Gangnam style..... as soon as the music for gangnam style started playing the kids were laughing and getting more and more excited!

The only problems were the heat - which was getting intense towards the end of the 5 weeks! the weather here is really heating up!

Hopefully the school will keep going with the dancing, and hopefully they can do so early in the morning when it is slightly cool. The kids absolutely had a ball dancing, in the last week they were even singing along to the songs.

We also taught the kids how to play tunnel ball and bought them some balls to keep so that they can play soccer, tunnel ball, generally throwing or kicking the balls around.

over the top tunnel ball

intense tunnel ball action