Island life

All is forgiven. It didn't take much more than a few minutes on the beach to fall head over heels for the Cham Islands. We spent the afternoon watching the day-trip boats come and go, and we were really glad that we weren't on them. The last boat sailed off around 4pm, and suddenly we were three of maybe eight people on a deserted tropical beach. It was both eerie and idyllic. Mostly idyllic.

The walk home was lovely, and we watched the fishermen set off on their nighttime cruises. Dinner was at our homestay, and we spent the meal chatting with our host "mom". Just like the name implies, a homestay in Viet Nam is a room rental in someone's home. Tourism has grown so much in Viet Nam over the past twenty years that the hotels couldn't keep up. Enterprising home owners found a solution, and the idea stuck. A homestay generally includes a few home cooked meals, and it's a charming way to see the country.

There are a wide range of homestays, ranging from hostel-like accommodations for 20-year old backpackers to quaint Bed and Breakfasts for former 20-year old backpackers and their ten month old daughter. And since Sue set up the homestay for us, this one was perfect. We were staying with a relatively young family that had both a five year old daughter and a six week old son. We were a little shocked to find out that our very energetic host had given birth during the time that we'd been in Vietnam, but it's actually not a bad job for someone with young kids. Our host was at home as much as she wanted to be, and this being Viet Nam, her inlaws also lived in the house and could watch the baby while she worked.

But back to dinner. Barracuda. We ate barracuda. That's a thing.

It's hard to question the ethics of eating an exotic fish after it has been placed in front you (and looks so incredibly tasty), but I looked it up after the meal. It's apparently such a rare meal in the US that Seafood Watch doesn't even list it. But looking at a few other sources, the fish doesn't seem particularly threatened. But it does seem to be slightly threatening. Apparently barracuda can be linked to a type of food poisoning that causes gastrointestinal discomfort, limb weakness, and an inability to differentiate hot from cold effectively. No joke. Surprisingly, that never came up in medical school. Please wait a moment while I go stick my hand in the freezer.

Ok, we're good.

We slept. We ate breakfast. We went back to the beach. The Cham Islands almost certainly contain plenty of cultural and religious landmarks. We saw none of them.

Instead, we saw this.

And this.

And best of all, this.

That's right, we managed to put our baby down for a beach nap two days in a row. Winning.

But Mimi wasn't sleeping the entire time.

By the way, the contagious happiness you feel when looking at a beaming ten month old in a wetsuit was also experienced by a pack of Chinese women. They absolutely lost their minds over her.

I have no doubt that our baby is currently trending on Sina Weibo.

For lunch, we ate prawns that make you think twice about ever going in the water again.

But they sure were tasty.

Mid-afternoon, a Scottish dad with a couple of pre-teens struck up a conversation with us. He told us how much respect he had for people who travel with small children, and said he struggles enough even with kids who can carry their own luggage. As I looked down on our baby taking her second nap of the day on one of the world's most beautiful beaches, I thought, "This ain't that hard."

We again watched the last of the day boats sail away, and walked back home before sunset. As few tourists as the Cham Islands see during the day, they see even fewer during the evening. Most of the visitors are on day trips from Hoi An, and only a handful spend the night. So when we walked the docks before dinner, we became the island's evening entertainment. Well, actually Mimi did.

People literally ran out of their houses and stopped their motorbikes dead in their tracks to see the rarest of sights, a tourist baby on the island. Cham Islanders have just as much baby fever as the rest of the country, but as yesterday proved, they get far less exposure to visiting ones.

By the way, you can see that the women in front and I were in mid-conversation. But the discussion was far less engaging than it looks. We literally said the Vietnamese word for 'girl' back and forth for five minutes. They were convinced that Mimi was a boy, and (not unreasonably) assumed that I meant boy, but was saying it incorrectly in Vietnamese.

Mimi has short, curly hair and didn't get her ears pierced at three days old, so it is generally an uphill battle to convince people that she's a girl. The pattern is so predicable that Aimee and I know which conversational pauses to reply to with em gai (girl), and muoi tan (ten months) to fake a pretty convincing case for understanding Vietnamese much better than we actually do.

After we broke free from the crowd (and avoided several others), we made our way back to the homestay for dinner. It was unclear who was there to eat whom.

There were a lot of firsts that day. Snail, sea urchin, and half-shell clams were among them. It's probably best that Mimi was already asleep for that.

[Parenting tip: There are cell phone apps that allow two cell phones to act as baby monitors when connected to the same wifi network. It is almost embarrassingly easy to travel with a small child these days.]

The next day (our last on the island) was as blissful as the first. We packed our bags early and headed back to the beach. We didn't bring much with us, but we did bring our rolling suitcase with my laptop and a few other essentials. Since we would be getting picked up at the beach (and didn't want to make the thirty minute walk with luggage), we made arrangements to have our bag brought to the beach by a motorbike taxi later in the day.

Walking down the road, we saw the day's incoming tourist boats far off on the horizon. I was strangely protective of "our" island, and savored the quiet that we had experienced between 4pm and 9am each day. But without those boats, we wouldn't be there either, and I was begrudgingly happy for the Cham Islands' success in developing a relatively low-impact tourism industry.

By mid-morning, even Mimi was scheming about ways to miss our boat home.

But as the day progressed, it started looking like that problem might solve itself. We didn't see our boat driver, and I had begun to question if I'd even recognize him after 48 hours of not thinking about going home. And to make matters worse, our bag was nowhere to be found. I chided myself about intentionally separating myself from our luggage, something I usually make a pretty strong effort to avoid. But I wasn't really all that worried. Aside from being clearly well-intentioned, our host was obsessed about her homestay's online ratings. I knew that she wouldn't do anything to jeopardize them on purpose.

I was running all sort of scenarios through my head. The best of which involved us missing our boat but finding our luggage. But a few minutes after our planned meeting time, our boat driver found me and waved us to the boat. I hesitated for multiple reasons, but told him that it was because our luggage still hadn't arrived. "Bag on boat. Bag on boat." I had never been so disappointed to not have lost a suitcase.

The boat ride back to Hoi An was just as harrowing, but we knew what to expect this time. So we hunkered down mid-stern and willed Mimi to stay napping. We made it home without incident, and reminded ourselves that we were still in paradise, just a slightly less idyllic section. 

Sigh.