Hiking Pinhatt Mountain

This week we went to Dalat for three nights. It's a small city originally founded as a retreat by French colonists, and it is refreshingly cool there. It's in the central highlands about 300 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, but at a much higher elevation, with dramatic valley drops and beautiful scenery. The cool temps can be deceptive, though -- it's still a tropical sun up there and wears on you.

Since the city has a reputation for being a tourist trap with few sites to keep you busy, our plan was to spend the first two days on side trips into the countryside and use the last morning before our flight home to see the city, but I had a bad case of traveler's tummy that kept me in the hotel the last 24 hours, so we didn't see much of Dalat itself. Luckily we got in our two excursions first.

We stayed at Dreams Hotel, which is recommended in the guidebooks, and that's the second time I've had good luck that way. Owners that are nice and outgoing and helpful make all the difference, and the people at Dreams were terrific. The woman who ran the place with her husband and children and grandchildren had all the flight and bus schedules memorized and seemed to know everyone in town, and she saved us a fortune on a taxi to the airport by calling in a guy she knew.

Our first trip, pictured here, was with Phat Tire, an "adventure tour" company that puts together mountain biking, kayaking and trekking (i.e. hiking) trips. For hikes, they list easy, moderate and difficult trips, and we assumed there was some grade inflation to scare away people who tend to get ahead of themselves, but thank goodness we chose the easy hike, because there was nothing easy about it. It was 14 kilometers total, with plenty of up and down before we started the ascent of Pinhatt Mountain. (No one was ever able to explain the name to us.) The next day I was suffering.

As with other trips we've taken in the past, we had our personal guide for the whole thing and a driver to drop us off and pick us up. The first picture is from the trailhead, overlooking Dalat. The second picture is of a reservoir -- Tuyen Lam Lake -- that we ascended to after a couple hours. It's known as the most beautiful lake in the area, and everywhere we walked we saw the signs of development -- roads cut through the forest for new resorts, big areas cleared for golf courses, billboards advertising the tract housing that will be going in.

The other pictures are approaching the mountain, the ascent and at the top. If you look at the picture from the summit, where we started is on the ridge between the lake the city beyond it.

After so much time in Saigon, the quiet and clean air felt a little unreal. It's the dry season now with no fog and not much in bloom and signs of grass fires everywhere. There are a lot of other pictures that tell the rest of the tale in the slide show on the right -- our guide, Minh, preparing a picnic lunch with the supplies he hauled, Ilene feeding an elephant at a park back at the lake, taking a boat across the lake to our pick up point.

Next up, our motorcycle tour around the countryside with the Easy Riders. Check back tomorrow.

-Robert

Cam Ly Airfield

This is the remains of Cam Ly Airfield, a hilltop runway a few kilometers from Dalat that was the drop point for U.S. troops operating in this area after 1968. Our motorcycle guides took us by here on our tour of the countryside.

-Robert

Ups and downs in Dalat

We returned last night from an eventful trip to Dalat. I want to tell about our hike in the mountains and the motorbike tour, but recovery is going to take awhile. In the meantime, check out the pictures here, and please check back.


-Robert

The most expensive bowl of pasta ever

The other day, I accepted a challenge from friends to make a dinner of American food in our apartment. The first problem with that was the limits of the kitchen -- no oven, a propane camp stove that I didn't know how to turn on, and no pots, pans or anything else larger than a saucer, no cutting board, no counter space, and no way to communicate at the markets. The second problem is my limited repertoire. I like making desserts -- in an oven. And it's been more than 10 years since I made any kind of chicken, beef or pork dish. When I cook fish, it's usually on the grill.

So, brainstorming what I could make on a stovetop with minimal complication with ingredients I could buy here and that might taste plausibly foreign to our Vietnamese guests, I settled on pasta, which I was able to buy at great expense at a market here that specializes in "gourmet" import food. They also had sauce in a jar, but I was pretty sure no one would be impressed with that, and I didn't have the gear for a homemade sauce. So I decided on tossing it with olive oil (again, not easy to find) and pan fried fresh Mekong River shrimp that I marinaded in cajun spice, which I found in the import market, along with cilantro and bell peppers. I found some really good looking Parmesan, but it was being sold by the gram, so I decided on a bland feta cheese. There were no greek olives, so we settled on cocktail olives with pimento. Desert was Pepperidge Farm cookies, which I think really are almost like homemade.

The whole affair was a reminder that travel is the art of compromise. Can you see from the picture that I'm using an aluminum teapot to cook the pasta in?

The one thing that wasn't a compromise was the bread. I found a bakery here that is the real deal. (Schneider's on Pasteur across from the palace, if you're in the neighborhood.)

The whole thing took me about five different shopping trips over a few days, and the least expensive ingredient was the kilo of shrimp.

This was actually an "iron chef" kind of party, and after the pasta (which our guests picked at very politely), Tuan prepared fried spring rolls and all the fixings.

Which was familiar territory, but he did introduce us to one new item -- a kind of soft drink prepared on the spot with a syrup from tamarind juices, mixed with hot water, then poured over ice and the chewy pits of tamarind and sprinkled with peanuts. It was very sweet and tasty. I wish I had gotten the name of it.

This wasn't even the most exciting part of the evening. Don't ask about the plumbing disaster that unfolded in the middle of it all. I'll just say that washing the dishes was also a reminder that travel is the art of compromise.

-Robert

Every little bit helps

When it comes to understanding how money works here, my meter seems to be off. At home, I've spent a lot of time helping to communicate the message that when it comes to philanthropy, every little bit helps, but sometimes I can't understand how so little a little bit here can mean much. I'm assured that it does.

Yesterday, we joined a day-long "charity trip" organized by the English conversation club that we've been involved with. This kind of thing happens a fair amount before Tet in the way Americans might contribute to toy drives or food drives before the holidays. This trip was to a hamlet in the province of Ben Tre, which is in the Mekong River delta about three hours drive from here. (Ben Tre is famous for two things -- the sweetness of the coconuts and all coconut products and for a battle in 1959 between Vietcong guerrillas and the South Vietnamese Army that is generally considered the first battle of the civil war. The heroine of that battle is memorialized with a street named after her a block over from us in HCMC.)

When our friend Tuan invited us on this trip a few weeks ago, he said they were hoping to raise 3 million dong -- about $170 -- to buy school supplies for the children at an elementary school we were visiting and that there were about 120 pupils. They have been passing the hat at the weekly English club gatherings. I assumed that, as often happens here, I had misunderstood in some way, but I heard right. Four busloads of us went six hours round trip to distribute what by my reckoning were pretty modest gifts.

This was on a Sunday, and all the kids turned out in their school uniforms along with teachers and the principal and a lot of their parents and grandparents. When we arrived, they were all lined up in the school yard to yell "Hello!" The kids mostly eyed us suspiciously, and then the college kids organizing things started the games and loosened everyone up. There was singing and poetry recitations and bags of salty snack foods and balloon inflating contests. Parents stood in the ditch outside the school yard wall peeking over the edge and laughing. Most heartbreaking was girl about 12 years old standing outside watching. She was too old for this school and, I suspect, any other.

Finally all the "dignitaries" lined up (that's me and Ilene, a couple other foreigners on the trip and all the senior citizens) and the children were marched by us one rank at a time for us to hand over the goods -- a plastic bag for each child with two notebooks, a box of crayons, a few pencils, a pencil case and a plastic toy. If you went to Big Lots and bought what all this in bulk, it would have cost you about $1.50 per child to do this. It cost more to keep my hydrated for the day.

Like me, the college kids were taking a lot of pictures, and even from the position of my comparative wealth, I could see how enormous a gap there was between those city kids and the children we were visiting. With their cameras and cell phones and fashionable jeans, they looked almost foreign in that setting themselves. And these are people who I feel embarrassed to let know that I sometimes treat myself to a $4 cheese sandwich when I get homesick.

I was talking afterward to an older woman who had joined the trip. She is a school administrator who is really smart and accomplished, but I think in her whole life she will never be able to buy the trans-Pacific plane tickets that we buy routinely. From her perspective, it was wonderful to be able to make these gifts. How, I asked her. How poor could you possibly be that so little could be meaningful?

Those notebooks and pencils are a lot, she insisted. Their parents just can't afford it. The school tuition is free. The school clothes were donated by someone else. The plastic bag of school supplies are make-or-break. As it happens, that represents about a half day's income for a household in rural Vietnam. She was inspired herself to get more involved with this school. She wants to see if she can get them some books. (You can see in the slideshow on the right that there aren't any books in the classrooms.) Or some training for the teachers who she guesses are following the model of whatever meager education they got themselves in similar circumstances.

I've also spent a lot of time with nonprofits at home communicating to donors that you get back more than you receive, and that's always the case here. It's good for the spirit of course, but this time we got paid back immediately with a fantastic spread of food at a neighboring church. They set up a dining room in the driveway, hung up some tarps for shade, fired up the kitchen in back and stuffed us with shrimp and chicken and coconut and rice all raised in the delta. You wouldn't believe how good this food tasted.

-Robert

Little to report

Please do keep checking back. The initial set-up weeks are on the boring side, but we expect some adventures to report on soon. Ilene is off on one now, and we've got a trip to the Mekong Delta this Sunday.

We've been establishing work routines and getting to know our neighborhood better. I'm getting used to the noise (or going deaf) and can usually sleep through the morning rush. This week, we had a couple days of uncharacteristic gloomy rainy days when the laundry wouldn't dry. That's over now -- the afternoon heat is killer.

The whole city seems to be holding its breath for or preparing for Tet. The park outside our building is the site of one of the many "flower festivals" in the week of Tet, and a little bit of progress is made each day stringing lights and building the decorations.

Ilene taught her first class on Monday and felt it was a good start. She's in Vung Tau now, a resort town on the coast a few hours southwest of here. It's a conference of all the Fulbright scholars currently in Vietnam. She returns tomorrow, and I'll try to get her to write a little about that. She's super busy. (In addition to everything else, she conducted an interview earlier this week via webcam with the committee at SCSU that will hopefully recommend her for promotion to full professor.)

A big chunk of our time is taken up with just holding together body, soul and home, like pioneers. Laundry and dishes and shopping and every other kind of housework needs to be done in small batches without letting anything build up. We only have 2 of any utensil. (Well, four chopsticks.) Slowly we acquire the the necessities and comforts there wasn't room for in the luggage allowance. Everything takes a little longer to accomplish because we don't know the routines here, then a little longer because we don't have the language skills to ask, then a little longer because everything takes a little longer here. The hunt for bottled water alone is something I have to concentrate on daily. Also chocolate.

A particular example of friendliness

It's pretty common for us to end up in conversation with strangers over a certain age -- war veterans or older. Usually it's when one of us is eating alone in a little shop where a tourist wouldn't typically be and end up seated next to one of these men alone. If I make eye contact and nod hello, they say hello in English and ask where I'm from. Ilene reports that the same thing happens to her.

These guys end up being enthusiastic conversationalists, interested to hear our perspective and to practice English that has been rusty for thirty-five years. Occasionally they are Viet Kieu -- that is, Vietnamese who have moved abroad -- and who came home for retirement or on a work assignment for the American or Canadian companies they now work for. Typically they worked with Americans in some way during the war, which usually means they had a hard time of it in the decade after. If they aren't themselves refugees who have returned, they almost always have children or other family living in the U.S. ("You know Louisiana? You know Maryland? Cali?") They often have complementary things to say about Americans. (The stereotypes here are often that we are "sincere" and that certain other nationalities I won't name are "not sincere" or "shallow.")

They're always curious why we're here. They're impressed that we're teachers. They're amazed with Ilene's Vietnamese. They're surprised to find us eating at a street stall and wonder if we always eat Vietnamese food. They run through the list of American celebrities that they like and don't like. (I'm sorry to say that the votes against Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Oprah and Tiger are so consistent that it looks like racial prejudice. Everyone likes Obama, though.)

They always try to pay my bill. That happened on the day we moved into the apartment when I went downstairs to find lunch. Yesterday, something like this was unfolding, and as soon as we got into conversation with the guy, I started waving for our bill so I could pay it before we had a chance to become friends and he offered to pay for us.

Ilene and I were together this time, and the guy was much older than usual -- maybe late 70's. He greeted us at first, somewhat hopefully, in French. His French is much better than his English, he explained, and whenever he had trouble thinking of or pronouncing a word in English, he tried it in French to see if we could understand him that way. He grew up in French colonial schools and spoke with a certain amount of regret for the educational system that has been lost. He's a retired educator himself and doesn't think much of kids these days or the schooling that they're getting.

He lives in the neighborhood, and before we left we exchanged phone numbers and agreed to get together soon.