Travel commentary from Nov. 9 to 21 was sporadic and brief, thanks to our intense schedule of changing hotels on a daily basis.
Posted Nov. 12
Train from Tuy Hoa to Da Nang... 1 hour late, and a 7 hour ride. Walked into our spacious cabin for 6, enough room in the aisle for one person to walk in and do an about-face, as long as the other 5 are safely tucked away in their bunks. Beds long enough for a person as tall as 6’-2” gave me a luxurious 1 inch to spare for wiggle room. Beds guaranteed to straighten your back or give you bruises to remember. As for the restroom, 1 per car, BYOP (p for paper).
Arrived in da nang at midnight. New guide, new driver. We’ll miss our former guide and driver more each day.
From Nov. 14:
A few words about hotels... last year in Italy we couldn’t wait for the hotel breakfast to see what they had, or to find what we liked so well from the previous day. Here, we have trouble picking through the offerings to find a few morsels to carry us until lunch. Shower enclosures are another problem. It wasn’t until we arrived at our hotel in Hue that I finally found an effective shower enclosure. One hotel had a setup such that if one person was showering the other person could not sit on the toilet without getting soaked. Another hotel had an intentional gap at floor level that let water flood the bathroom floor. Another had nowhere but the floor to put soap and shampoo. And the list goes on.
From Nov. 15:
Photos from Hue, La Vang, etc. Today the surprises started early and ended late. I awoke around 3:30 am and decided to post a few photos. Within seconds my friend [name removed] commented on one of the photos. For those who don’t know, she and i were high school classmates, and we haven’t seen each other in 40 years, but by chance we are in Vietnam at the same time, traveling about the country on our own independent schedules. Obviously, she was awake at this same early hour, hundreds of miles away, and we both suffer from early morning wakefulness. I eventually went back to sleep, but woke again not much later to begin (resume, actually) my busy day. My wife and I toured the burial sites of a few kings of Vietnam’s last dynasty, then went on to the royal citadel and a well-known pagoda. Most of these places my wife had visited many years ago at age 14, so she had a few more stories about what is different now from then.
Finally (almost) we took off for Dong Hoi, our base for visiting Phong Nha caves. Then our guide gave us a surprise detour to La Vang, the site of a reported apparition of the Virgin Mary in the late 1700’s. My wife never dared to put this place on her bucket list because she never imagined it would be possible to visit. Suddenly we were there!
After a brief stay we continued north, passing over the former DMZ, the dividing line between north and south Vietnam for many years. Being in Vietnam is one thing, but crossing the former dividing line, about which I heard and read so much during the early 1970’s, was an eerie and unsettling experience.
There were still more surprises before we slept, but the biggest surprise will wait for tomorrow for explanation... |
