Back home

The rest of the drive back from Hue was a breeze. The babies mostly kept it together, and we made a quick stop at the Marble Mountains.

Just like the name implies, Marble Mountains are a range of five steep marble cliffs jutting up from the ground outside of Da Nang. The Vietnamese name translates to Five Elements Mountains (five elements is a common theme in Vietnamese lore), and the marble was just a bonus. The mountain range has had various spiritual and military functions over the last few centuries, and only in the last few decades has served as the hub for Viet Nam's booming marble carving industry.

Both natural formations and marble extraction have led to a series of caves and archways that make for a beautiful hike.

The path is lined by recent and historic marble carvings, and several pagodas dot the mountaintop.

We barely explored the miles of trails through the mountains, since we were tired from the drive and wanted to get home before the babies lost it. So we made our way down the five flights of narrow stairs (complicated by balancing a wiggly baby on my chest), and headed back to the car.

The only problem with hiring a car is that the driver assumes that we're the type of people that would hire a car. As in the type of people that would enjoy a quick stop at a tourist trap roadside marble showroom.

We politely walked around the showroom, and explained that we didn't have space in our luggage for a $5,000 marble picnic table. The sculptures were impressive, though.

The only other event of note on the drive home was what may have been the best summary of 21st century Viet Nam. As we rolled away from Marble Mountain, our driver pointed out, "On right, airport from American war. On left, casino."

The airport he was referring to was Da Nang airbase, a critical site for US operations in the region.  In its late 1960s heyday, the airport was the busiest in the world, seeing over 2,500 takeoffs and landings daily. The only evidence that remains are a few concrete airplane hangars, as the rest of the buildings have been consumed by the insane amount of resort development happening on the sandy stretch between Da Nang and Hoi An. US Veterans know the area as China Beach. Vietnamese officials have repurposed the area as a tourism zone, allowing the type of mega resorts and casinos that (thankfully) aren't common throughout the rest of the country.

Back in Hoi An, dinner was nothing short of life changing.

Have I mentioned Anthony Bourdain in the blog yet? I don't think I have. In our infinite excitement about this trip, Aimee and I consumed all information about Viet Nam that we could get our hands on. A key portion of this was Anthony Bourdain videos. The chef/journalist considers Viet Nam his emotional and culinary home, and has filmed several episodes in the country for his various shows over the years. He really loves this place, and it's easy to see why. Amazing food is waiting for you on literally every street corner. About five years ago, one of those street corners had a banh mi cart on it, and 95 seconds on the travel channel changed the owner's life.

These days, Banh Mi Phuong (the owner's name) has grown way beyond a corner stand. It's packed from 6:30 AM to 9:30 PM with both locals and tourists grabbing what may literally be the best sandwich in the world.

If you can brave the crowd and the cacophony, you will be rewarded.

We still have a month left in this country, and I'm already growing despondent over what I'll do when I can no longer walk down the street for this.

Hai Van Pass

We had to get back to Hoi An somehow, and going by train again with the babies seemed less than ideal. So to the great disappointment of 20 year old me, we hired a car and driver to get us back.

20 year old me was really missing out. The leg room was amazing.

In between Hue and Da Nang is the Hai Van Pass, a storied overpass through mountains that separate the cities. Ecologically, the mountains are very important. They're known for blocking the "Chinese wind," and separating two of the major climate zones in the country. Which makes sense. North of the mountains (towards China), the weather was rainy and overcast. Nothing like the tropical sun we were used to in Hoi An/Da Nang. In fact, we all commented that this was the first time any of us has been cold on this trip (besides our first train ride).

After taking in so much history in Hue, I couldn't help but be a little contemplative on the way back. Especially since the car ride was relatively quiet (nobody wanted to be the person who woke the babies).

The scenery was stunning. Roadside towns dropped in between miles of green jungle and rolling hills. But every now and then, I'd notice a barren stretch of land. Was it being cleared for development? Recovering from a fire? Or something a bit more distressing? One of the most infamous and controversial legacies of the War was the widespread deployment of airborne toxins. Airplanes were used to blanket the sky with chemicals that were designed to kill all plant matter. Agent Orange was the most famous, but there were several others used. The intention was to smoke out the insurgency by killing off their food sources and destroying their shelter. We all know how the war ended, so the strategy didn't work. But it did leave thousands of American and Vietnamese people with major health problems and caused decades of toxic soil that is only now finally starting to recover. It's heartbreaking to see people on the street with the characteristic leg and arm deformities that are characteristic of babies born to mothers that were exposed to the chemicals.

But everything has context. That era was filled with threats of nuclear war and collapse of civil society, so any judgement of the War needs to be looked at through that lens. It was a scary time that I have the luxury of reading about, not living through. So there's no place for my editorializing here. I'll leave that to the people who knew the circumstances best. Robert McNamera, the Secretary of Defense at the time and the chief architect of the war opened his 1995 memoir with "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." The New York Times book section included this key passage in its review.

So why speak out now? The main reason, he says, is that he has "grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt" with which so many Americans view their institutions and leaders. He knows how much Vietnam contributed to that disaffection; he would never deny the war's terrible damage. But he hopes to prove that the mistakes were "mostly honest," even if traceable to a ghastly ignorance of the Vietnamese people, culture and terrain, and the historical forces of that time.

And a 1997 book by the widely respected military leader and current National Security Advisor, H R McMaster, was even more critical.

So the people who know what they are talking about said that this was a disaster. The war ended the lives of thousands of US soldiers and well over a million Vietnamese people, and left a deep scar on our national psyche. Reminders are evident every day in our own country, and even more so here. But just like the forests are finally regrowing, the country is rebuilding. One major example of that rebuilding is the modern marvel of Hai Van Tunnel. Yep, you guessed it. Hai Van Tunnel runs under Hai Van Pass. Since the weather that day was cloudy and stormy (see the last 6 paragraphs for proof), there wasn't much point driving across a scenic overpass. So we took the three year old, four mile long tunnel that runs through the mountain range.

The tunnel was actually kind of cool in its own way. And as predicted, the mountains had blocked most of the wind. Like my mood, the weather was noticeably sunnier on the other side. There was a bit more to the drive, but I think I'm going to break that out into another post. I think I need to walk outside, listen to children laughing, and bask in the rays of this beautiful tropical sun. Even fifty years later, seeing ground zero of the War took quite a toll on me, and I can't imagine the devastation to people from both countries who actually lived through it.

We'll end on some bipartisan good news. A program started by President GW Bush and expanded by President Obama is working to clean up Agent Orange sites in the US and abroad, including many in Viet Nam. We make mistakes, but we admit them and work to make them right. There's nothing more American.

Hue

Our day in Hue started with a wonderful breakfast at our hotel. The little boutique hotel that we were staying at probably had about 8-10 rooms, and was run by an older couple and their staff of friendly 20-somethings. Breakfast was cooked by grandma, and included our choice of traditional noodle soup (essentially pho) or a fried egg and a pancake. There's a time and place to eat authentically, but we had been craving a good American diner breakfast for several days, and this was a respectable approximation. Don't judge us.

Our hotel was about a mile away from the main attraction of the city, the Hue Citadel.  The Citadel was the capital city and palace between about 1400 and and 1940 when the area we now know as Viet Nam was run by a series of Emperor Kings. It was a relatively small empire, but an empire, nonetheless.

Like most major cities in Viet Nam, Hue is built alongside a river. This allowed for a series of moats to protect the palace, but it also makes walking the city in modern times a tricky task. A small fleet of tourist boats has capitalized on that, and it didn't take long for one of them to convince us to take the easy way through the city.

It was $4.

The boat dropped us off relatively close to the Citadel, and I'm not sure if what happened next was a brilliantly orchestrated scheme to separate tourists from a few bucks, or just a coincidence. But at three different points on our walk, people on the street told us to go right when my map said to go left.

It's not hard to tell where people are going in Hue. There's one major attraction, and we were clearly tourists (see above). At first, I was skeptical, but when the third person (a woman running a mango stand) pointed us to the right, I figured that they all couldn't be wrong. We were on a well trafficked major street, and it's not like they were pointing us down a dark alley.

In all fairness, the Citadel is huge, and there are several entrances. The strangers may have been pointing us to the closest one, or maybe they were getting a cut from the bike taxis that descended on us, promising to get us to the Citadel much faster. But today wasn't our day to find out. We politely declined, and turned back in the direction that the map suggested we go. The bike taxis dispersed.

Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I wondered if they turned away because they knew we were going the right direction again. But even if it was a racket, it was a charmingly harmless one. That said, the thought of a 60 minute tour of the city in the front basket of a tricycle with a squirming baby on my lap wasn't particularly appealing.

After just another few minutes' walk, we reached the main entrance to the Citadel.

The outer wall reveals the military function of the complex, but the inner walls are much more decorative.

But Hue's history isn't just ancient. The central gate was intended to be used only by the emperors. Even now, it is only opened twice a year for major holidays.

But if you look closely, you can see bullet holes from what we know at the Vietnam War and what they know as the American War.

Hue was one of the hardest hit cities during the war. Not only did its location in central Viet Nam cause it to get caught in a lot of the crossfire, but it was also one of the primary locations of the Tet offensive. The Tet offensive in 1968 was a major surge by the North Vietnamese army against South Vietnamese and American battalions throughout the country. Most insurgencies (including the one in Hue) were eventually fought back, but at a major cost. War historians universally point to the Tet offensive as the turning point in the war that eventually led to the withdrawal of American troops in 1973 and the fall of Saigon in 1975. Cinema fans might also remember the Battle of Hue as a major plot point in Full Metal Jacket.

Military historians and journalists have compared the Battle of Hue to the more recent Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. Both involved high-intensity urban battles, often requiring US forces to go door-to-door in search of enemy combatants. Likely in the case of both, but certainly in the case of Hue, the drawn out battle was widely publicized and caused popular opinion in America to shift. Many people at home began to conclude that regardless of which side was more justified in its actions, this was going to be a long, messy war, and a lot of people were going to die. And that's exactly what happened in Hue. Intense fighting lasted for over four weeks, and about 5,000 civilians died, as did a similar number of North Vietnamese fighters. About 700 US troops died, and many more were injured. It was nothing short of a tragedy all around.

One report I read said that US bombers were initially instructed to avoid bombing the Citadel during the battle because of its historical value. But as fighting intensified, those restrictions were gradually lifted. The resulting attacks leveled 80 out of 100 buildings in the imperial city, and caused an incalculable loss to our shared world heritage.

But the area is currently undergoing internationally-supported restoration (below), which I see as a sign of humanity's resilience and general tendency to do what is right. Sometimes it just takes us a little longer to get there.

The rest of the walking tour was both beautiful and bittersweet. It's impossible to separate the ancient from the modern history at the Citadel, and it was like walking back in time during two different eras simultaneously.

American tanks recovered from the area serve as a striking reminder of the more recent history of Hue.

This is getting heavy. A little help, Mimi?

Phew. Thanks.

That moment of reconciliation happened at our next stop, the Thien Mu Pagoda. It's a 200+ year old working Buddhist monastery on a hill overlooking the city. It's about 2-3 miles away, and before I would say, "let's walk," a familiar voice in my head said, "Nope. Take the Goddamn taxi." I listened this time.

But equally important to the smaller members of our travel party, the monastery had a lovely grass field. We've spent most of this trip in busy cities, so a little bit of countryside crawling went over very well.

Many of the visitors passing through the pagoda were Vietnamese, and their tour guides didn't stand a chance.

Dinner was at a neighborhood restaurant serving a Hue delicacy, Banh Beo. Banh Beo are small rice pancakes topped with a variety of delicate toppings, usually shrimp or fish. The legend goes that one of the Hue emperors was a very picky eater, and demanded dozens of different courses at each meal. So Hue specialties tend to be small, flavorful bites.

We ordered 4 or 5 different types to try, and then couldn't help but reorder every one of them again. They were amazing. And of course, the meal included free babysitting.

Hue was a delight. Enigmatic, historic, and extremely tasty. We headed back to the hotel to rest up. One way or another, we had to get two toddlers back to Hoi An the next day.

Aimee hits the docks, and we all adventure northward

Hoi An is a fascinating city, so there are all types of specialized tours to explore beyond the usual tourist trail. Food tours (we'll get to that in a few days) and photo tours seemed particularly appealing to us. Today, Aimee was going a sunrise tour of the fishing docks. She got picked up around 4:45 am, and I was on baby duty for the morning.

The tour was led by a professional photographer who tours around Southeast Asia for various freelance photo jobs, and makes Hoi An his home (well played, my friend). It's easy to see why a photographer would base himself here.

The people on Aimee's tour included everyone from other professional photographers on their ninth trip to the docks to tourists snapping memories with their iPhone. They all received a mini photo lesson on the way out there, and were let free to roam the docks. The photographer has a good relationship with the dock workers (read: probably buys them all lunch after every tour), and they love the attention.

Without further ado...

My wife, ladies and gentlemen.

And as wonderful as these photos are, Aimee downplayed them. She said that there was little time to adjust settings or get into position when she was literally dodging thrown fish the entire time.

But today was more than just nice photos. It was the start of a major federal holiday celebrating the reunification of Viet Nam. Saigon fell (or was liberated, depending on which half of the country you were born in) on April 30th, 1975. Over the last 42 years, there has been an emotional transition around this weekend, going from triumphant to somber to memorializing. Now it's a day off from work that means many things to many different people. Not unlike our Fourth of July.

As Americans in Viet Nam during the Reunification celebration, we treaded very lightly. That said, not once has the war been brought up by our Vietnamese friends, and it seems like most people in Viet Nam are playing the long game. The war was 50 years ago, and was the unfortunate and likely inevitable conclusion of centuries of foreign intervention. For the past 20 years, the official position of the Vietnamese government has been been that normalized international relations and continued economic growth were more important than reopening old wounds. I have no doubt that memories of the war still linger in people old enough to have lived through it, but everyone we have met seems to approach the war history in the same way as the government: focusing on healing their country and being proud of both their history and their future.

So in that spirit, we thought we'd take this weekend to discover more of their history up close. The old imperial capital city of Hue (pronounced "hway") is about 3 hours north of us, and we thought we'd pack up the diapers and sippy cups and make the journey to see it.

Since Nona and Grael hadn't experienced the train yet, it was an easy choice for how we'd get to Hue. But now there were two babies locked up in an 8x8 cell, so we figured that we'd just book a one way ticket and see how things went before committing to a second train journey home.

Viet Nam remains charmingly analog when it comes to domestic travel. So the morning of the trip, we walked down to one of the neighborhood booking offices, reserved a cabin on the train, and left with paper tickets. I love it.

Since we were planning this trip in real time, we had a relatively tight connection. We had to pack up the babies in less than an hour and catch a car to Da Nang. No small task, but we made it to the station and didn't forget a single baby.

Of course there was a three hour delay before the train pulled out of the station, so we bonded with several Vietnamese families over all of our kids losing their minds. Some truths are universal.

Once the train started boarding, we walked down the tracks to where our car (car #12) should have been. But the train stopped at car #11.  Hmm.

As I began to question the legitimacy of our tickets, we saw another car getting pushed up the tracks. It slowly knocked into the rest of the train, and a train engineer crawled under the tracks to presumably make the final connections. Huh. Seems legit.

Even still, all of us had visions of getting stranded as the rest of our train went up a hill.

But the train ride itself was painless. It was only two hours long, and passed through the green, mountainous highlands that you've seen in postcards and history books. Absolutely stunning. It was lost on the babies, but they kept it together reasonably well. The non-smoking train (presumably enforced by the conductors smoking in the back of the car) even served a decent fried chicken dinner. Granted, the timing was unfortunate, since I had just told Nona and Grael about what happened after eating questionable fried chicken on a previous trip (spoiler alert: 36 hours of porcelain hopping), but the experience was much better this time around.

If only I knew then what I know now.

Since this train's intercom was no better than the last, I was only 80% sure that we got off at the right stop. But the medium-sized station felt right for a city like Hue.

A taxi driver approached us as soon as we got off the train. Generally speaking, I have a loosely enforced rule to never use the first cabbie that approaches me in a foreign city. That tends to be a recipe for getting scammed. But the kids were breaking down, and I was in no mood to hike around the city looking for a ride.

As we were loading our luggage into his trunk, I asked him how much our half-mile journey would cost. He told me a price that wasn't too far from what I pay for the 45 minute trip to Da Nang. Woah, woah, woah! I told him that we live here (that phrase changes everything around here), and negotiated the price down quite a bit. We were still over-paying, but the extra dollar or two was a small price to pay to get to the hotel before Mimi completely turned into an over-tired gremlin.

No luck. About 10 seconds into the cab ride, Mimi absolutely lost it. Thankfully, this was really only the second or third time on the trip that she was inconsolable. But when it happens, she makes it count.

Maybe I was projecting, but as soon as Mimi started crying, the cab driver warmed up, and looked as though he almost felt guilty for overcharging us. Again, some truths are universal. We were tired after a long day of travel, and had a baby that was breaking down. Every family worldwide has been there. I wished we had bonded instead over something less ear piercing, but it was a nice moment of humanity.

But my wistful daydreaming was snapped back to reality as cars honked, Mimi wailed, and motorbikes flew by. It only took a few minutes to get to our little boutique hotel, and the charming desk clerk (and chef/maid/maintenance woman) read our faces and kept the introduction brief.

We put our baby to sleep, and for probably the second time in my life, actually opened up the hotel minibar. Ultralight rice beer had never tasted so good.

All in all, the hassles were trivial, and were more than worth the chance to explore another city. But first, some well deserved rest.

Just take the cab

I had a some morning meetings scheduled in Da Nang, so after a nice coffee at our waterfront cafe, I set off for the city. I usually take a cab both ways, which costs $10-15, depending on how hard I feel like negotiating. Either way, it's a pretty amazing deal for an intercity car ride. But it's a tough pill to swallow when the bus costs a little over a dollar. And since I only had things scheduled for the morning, I figured that it would be a good day to investigate the bus route home.

Being that this is Viet Nam in April, it was hot. I didn't feel like the half-mile walk to where the internet told me the bus station was. So I took a quick cab. The driver let me out exactly where I asked him to, but there were absolutely no busses to be found. That wasn't a huge surprise, since reliable public transportation doesn't seem to be a concept that the Vietnamese are super committed to. At least their food is amazing.

Bus station? Anybody know where I can find a bus station?

After walking around for 20 minutes under the midday sun (in work clothes, with no cell phone reception), I realized that this plan was not ideal. Dumb, even. So I kept walking around for another 20 minutes. And then, in my infinite wisdom, I thought that walking another 20 minutes to the airport might not be a bad idea. I figured that plenty of travelers would be going to Hoi An, and I could probably find a shared-ride van. But the 20 minute walk was just to the airport. I then had to walk through another 20 minutes of broken pavement and heavy machinery, since everything in Da Nang (including the airport) is under construction.

Every time a cab drove by, an increasingly loud voice in my head said, "Maybe you should just take a cab?" Vroom.  "Yep, you should probably take a cab." Vroom. "Take a cab." Vroom. "JUST TAKE THE GODDAMN CAB." But despite the hour long walk and my blossoming sunburn, I couldn't give up now. I was so close.

Actually, I wasn't. The Da Nang airport only receives flights every hour or two, and I happened to be there during a dry spell. No busses, no hotel shuttles. Just cabs. So I had plenty of time to reflent on my impromptu walking  tour of Da Nang as I sat in the back of an overpriced taxi back to Hoi An (I was in no condition to negotiate). Next time we just take the goddamn cab.

But do you know how we fix that? Beach time. We had been in Hoi An for almost two weeks, and had barely explored the beach. Today was a good day to start. The advice that I got from all of our new local friends was to go to the beach late in the afternoon. The tourists have gone home, the sun is shaded by the jungle behind us (the beach faces east here), and the water is calm. So even though I didn't get home until 3, there was still plenty of time to hit the water.

Mimi, protecting the coast.

We live here.

An Bang beach is universally considered one of the prettiest in the world, and for good reason.

Aimee is a pretty good photographer, eh? She actually went for a sunrise photo tour the next day to practice with a group of professionals. But I'll break that out into a separate post. So for now, we'll cap this at a bad walk and good beach. Net win.

Well suited

Look at the tag on your clothing. There's a very decent chance that it was made in Viet Nam. The country is a major garment producer, and Hoi An is the fine tailoring capital. We haven't talked much about the history of the city (we will), but it was essentially the primary trading port of Southeast Asia from the 900s to the 1800s. During that time period, textiles were a major commodity. So over time, with the world's textiles passing through Hoi An--and with traders from all over the world needing clothes during their time here--a major tailoring industry developed that persists to this day.

There are tailors all over Asia, some of them good, some of them less good. And of course, there are the sweatshops and poor labor practices that frequently come to light. So getting a cheap suit in Asia is not always a harmless decision. But thankfully, the Hoi An tailoring industry developed three hundred years ago for the express purpose of making me a suit. Seriously. The tailors here are not being pulled out of existing garment factories or away from other critical industries. They exist to make nice clothing for visitors using the textiles that pass through the town. Kind of amazing.

I guess I could have saved two paragraphs and just said we got some clothing made today. But we know too much. Sometimes these too-good-to-be-true deals really are, and can have a harmful effect on local economies. That doesn't seem to be the case here. In fact, just the opposite. Nearly every block in the city has a tailor on it, and most have far more. The tailoring industry here is booming, and it's not entirely just for visitors. We noticed that the owner of our house is always wearing a nice sun dress, and it's because she doesn't ever have to buy clothing off the rack. Many people here have a few pieces of very well fitting clothing, instead of a closet full of crap. That's something I can definitely get behind.

I guess I could have saved three paragraphs now and just said we got some clothing made today. But we'll get there, I promise.

You all know me, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I'm not a huge fan of shopping for clothes. But I had been looking forward to getting a custom suit since we first heard that it was an option. And when I say custom, I don't mean pick a suit off the rack and get it altered to fit your inseam. I mean pick a fabric roll off the shelf and tell them how many buttons you want, how many flaps you want in the back, and what color you want the lining to be. It's a pretty amazing process.

And since there are dozens of tailors in the city, they jump at each opportunity for a sale. When we walked into the a tailoring shop that our landlord recommended to us, a small army of tailoring assistants swarmed. Like actually swarmed. One asked us what material we wanted, the other one showed us color samples, one got out the notebook to just down our measurements. Then the queen bee walked out and a hush went over the room. She looked me over, said nothing, took out her measuring tape, and made what must have been a hundred different measurements. "Two slits in the back," she said, making me self-conscious of my bum for the first time in my life.

The master at work

Our landlord, Ha (background) was a much needed tour guide through this process.

Meanwhile, we have two babies hunting down pin cushions while Aimee was trying to snap at least a couple of photos before one of the babies runs out onto the street. One of the assistants asked Aimee if she wanted something made for her, and with a baby in her right arm, and her day bag in the other, she muttered something along the lines of, "Good God, no." Which was a step up from curling into the fetal position like any reasonable person might in that situation.

But it actually was a pretty amazing experience, and we were looking forward to seeing how the suits turned out in, amazingly, less than 24 hours.

We wandered along the waterfront in a bit of a daze from the experience. A cold beer went a long way towards helping us recover.

Exhausted from the tailoring experience, and with Nona, Grael, and Conrad still recovering from jet lag, we had another early night. Which was fine by me, because even in paradise, I still needed to get up for work the next day. But being in paradise definitely makes it easier.