Hue - The Former Capital of Vietnam

Nov 27-29, 2013: In 1802 Emperor Gia Long founded the Nguyen dynasty, moved the capital from Hanoi to Hue, trying to unite northern and southern Vietnam, and started building the Citadel.

One of the beautiful gates into the Citadel.

The Citadel was closing when we got there, and the following day it was pouring down rain, so we never got a chance to see it.

We visited the War Museum to learn more about how the Vietnamese portrayed the war, and it was interesting.

As we already knew, the Vietnamese people are very resourceful: They used parts of a plane to make this operating table.

It was a happy time when families were re-united when the war ended in 1975.

Time for a coffee and to rest the brain and the legs - all patio chairs and tables were children-size for us...

We met a British couple and two Danish girls, all of whom we spent time with in Kopan Monastery in Nepal - it is a small world after all!

The Vinh Moc Tunnels

On the way to Hue with the Phong Nha Farmstay bus, we stopped in Vinh Moc village to see the Tunnels, which during the Vietnam War was strategically located on the border of North and South Vietnam. Vinh Moc is the remains of a costal North Vietnamese village that literally went underground due to heavy American bombings (9,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped).

The villagers didn't want to lose their land or leave the area, and the Viet Cong found it useful to have a base here, so they encouraged the villagers to stay. After 18 months of tunnelling, an enormous complex was established, creating new homes on three levels from 12m to 23m below ground. More than 90 families disappeared into the tunnels, and 17 children were born there during the six years the villagers lived in the tunnels.

They also dug 21km of trenches, so they could get to and from their rice and vegetable fields to get food as well as transport war materials.

Their longest sojourn lasted 10 days and 10 nights.

The tunnels were a success and no villagers lost their lives. The only direct hit was from a bomb that failed to explode; the resulting hole was utilized as a ventilation shaft. The Vietnamese are resourceful people.

The Things You Do For A Cold Beer

Ben, our host at the Phong Nha Farmstay is very entrepreneurial, so he has joined forces with the only place in the area which sells cold beer, and freshly slaughtered chicken for lunch. It just wasn't easy to get to!

We jumped on the back of the motorbikes, and went up a muddy track to the river.

We then had to cross the river, waist deep in water, brrrhhhh....

pick the chicken we wanted for lunch...

and have cold beer(s) while we waited for the chicken to be cooked!

It was an enjoyable afternoon, then across the river again!

The Ho Chi Minh Trail Challenge

From war zone to a tourist destination. Phong Nha is lying just 100km away from the former Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and was once one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the country. In 1972 life was counted by hours! 

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was used by the North Vietnamese as a route for its troops to get into the South. They also used the trail as a supply route – for weapons, food and equipment. The Ho Chin Minh Trail ran along the Laos/Cambodia and Vietnam borders and was dominated by jungle. In total the ‘trail’ was about 1,000 kilometres in length and consisted of many parts.

 

The ‘trail’ consisted of dummy routes that served the only purpose of confusing the Americans, but was, in places, 80 kilometres (50 miles) wide. It is thought that up to 40,000 people were used to keep the route open. The natural environment gave the trail excellent cover as the jungle could provide as much as three canopies of tree cover, which disguised what was going on at ground level. 

The American response to this was to use defoliants – the most famous being Agent Orange – to kill off the greenery that gave cover to those using the trail. However, while large areas of jungle were effectively killed off, the task was too great and the Ho Chi Minh Trail was used for the duration of the war against the Americans in South Vietnam.

 

One way for the Americans to counter the Ho Chi Minh Trail was to build large bases near to it. From these large bases, patrols were sent out in an effort to intercept anyone using the route. Regardless of this, it does seem that the task was simply too great for the Americans. Whereas the trail was based on deception and fluidity, the military bases built by the US were static. Therefore, once patrols left these bases, they were by themselves. While they could be supported by air, there would always be a time delay between combat on the ground and the arrival of air support. By the very nature of guerrilla warfare, this gave the North Vietnamese the advantage as they had the ability to disappear into the jungle.  

We walked, or rather climbed and crawled, 11km (return) of this very challenging trail.

It was raining all day and the trail was very muddy, so it certainly was a challenge.

We swam 200m into a cave in our hiking clothes and shoes.  It was really cool to watch with our headlamps on, the bats inside the cave, swooping down to catch the bugs, hovering just above the water surface. We were very wet for the rest of the hike back to the road. We could not bring our backpacks with dry clothes, because we were required to wear our life jackets.  To add insult to injury it also rained a bit on the way back. This also made the hike very challenging, especially crawling thought dormer shelters, as the life jacket got caught - another interesting experience!

We tried to dry out a little while we had lunch, but it was still raining, and there was no shelter.

We were very wet and tired when we finally hit a warm shower, and we now fully understand how difficult this most have been during the war. Respect!

The Final Flight...

... the flight home, has been booked! And it made me sad. When I pushed the 'Confirm payment' button, I realized I had held my breath, and the world froze for a few seconds. Oh, no!

Of course, I knew the day would come soon, it just came sooner than expected! We could not get our boarding passes to the flight from Sydney to Auckland without having a confirmed flight out of New Zealand within the next three months, so it had to be done. Andy was on the computer next to me, so we could coordinate the bookings.

March 4th it is, but you can only whisper it, as I don't want it to know! Until then, we are going to have a blast here in New Zealand.

Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park

The flight from Hanoi to Dong Hoi took just over an hour. Even though the distance is just over 500km, it would have taken us 10-12 hours by bus or train.  We were told that in Vietnam, the average speed by bus or train is about 40km per hour. The train trip would have cost almost the same as the flight, and the bus would have been much cheaper, but we just didnt feel like going on a sleeper bus, and wasting all that time.

The driver from Phong Nha Farmstay (PNF) met us at the airport, and took us the 35km to Cu Nam village. The Farmstay overlooks an ocean of rice paddies, run by a very nice Australian-Vietnamese couple, and a great base for activities in the park.

We walked around the village, and thoroughly enjoyed not being asked to buy anything; a very welcome change. A couple of children came running and showed us some crabs they had caught, and people shouted 'Hello' as we walked by. Rural Vietnam is great.

THE PARK

The park was designated a Unesco World Heritage site in 2003, and contains the oldest karst mountains in Asia, formed around 400 million years ago. There are 300 caves and grottos with a total length of about 70 km, of which only 20 have been surveyed by Vietnamese and British speleologists. In 2009, a team redisovered the largest cave in the world, Son Doong. It had been originally discovered in 1990 by a Vietnamese man named Ho Khanh, who stumbled on the cave , while looking in the jungle, for the rare and valuable wood of the Aloe tree. By law, the cave allows only 84 tourists a year. The price for a 6 day trip into the cave is a whopping $3,000, so totally out of our league! It is huge, it is over a kilometre from one side to the other, and can easily fit in several NFL size stadiums.

PARADISE CAVE

But the Paradise Cave was in our league! We were the only people going on the trip (luxury), and we agreed to do the 40km to and from the cave on the back of motorbikes. It was a fun experience. 

It was a bit Jurassic Park (without the dinosaurs), to go on the golf cart to the cave entrance at the base of the mountain.

This cave only opened to the public in 2011, and it extends for 31.4km. It is said to be the longest dry cave in the world. The cave is really breathtaking,with its cathedral-like space full of colossal stalagmites.

And glimmering stalactites of white crystal resembling ice sickles. 

When we reached the end of official part of the cave, our two guides gave us headlamps, and we went through the gate into the darkness leaving all the tourists behind. A couple of them wanted to join us, but they had not paid for this part of the trip! It was amazing walking another 3km into the cave being shown all sorts of amazing formations. 

Cave man......?

We then sat down for lunch, carried into the cave by one of the guides. The chicken, spinach, and rice were still warm. At some point, we were told to turn off our headlamps and keep walking; the darkness was claustrophobic, and we totally lost sense of direction, but what an experience. Due to heavy rain the river in the cave was too high, so we could unfortunately not do the boat ride another 3km into the cave on the river, so we headed out again.

It was the most amazing cave we have ever seen. We also realized that we had the inner portion of the cave totally to ourselves. This is very rare according to our farmstay hosts, as usually there are many tour groups, with lots of flashlights, in the inner portion of the cave. Lucky us!

Change Of Plans

Originally, after Vietnam we had planned to travel to Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau and Hawaii before heading home at the end of January. But at the end of our time in Nepal, Andy said

'I think we should go to New Zealand'.

Dorte argued that our 8 nights in the Amalfi coast had exceed our budget (820 Euros for the apartment alone), as had the month in Jordan due to lack of public transportation, and the flight tickets would be expensive. We hadn't booked any part of the remainder of our trip, and the more we discussed it, the more we got excited about the possibility. On the sleeper train from Sa Pa to Hanoi we shared a berth with a couple from New Zealand, and that was too much of a coincidence for us to ignore (that good karma we learned about in Nepal)!

When researching flight tickets to Auckland, we found that it wasn't as expensive after all - around $700 per person, and when we also discovered we had reward points enough to fly from Auckland to Vancouver, the excitement reached new hights!

But the living costs would still be higher than the average of $50-60 dollars/person (or less) a day we were living on in Asia...... We could do some more volunteering to cut down on accommodation and food costs for a week or two, but most of the opportunities were farming, and our experiences at the hazel nut farm in Italy taught us our bodies ( and backs) are not young enough for that type of work!

As it is summer in New Zealand in December, and Christmas, many people go on vacation, and Dorte suggested that maybe we could try to house babysit. That would probably entail looking after a cat, dog or other pet,  but we

- would stay put for a while

- be able to cook our own food

- drink tap water (you can't believe how you feel about bottled water after 5 months)

- spend Christmas in a house and not another hotel room

- would stay for free

Sounded like a good plan... We researched many housesitting websites, and decided to sign up with HouseCarers.com for a fee of $50 for one year. We put up our profile, and read the list of available jobs over Christmas. and there were quite many. We applied for three positions: one without pets (our priority #1), one looking after a rabbit ( a cutie named Stanley), and one looking after a cat. 

So, as you might guess, we were successful, and will be housesitting in a three bedroom house in Auckland from December 16 to January 24. There are no pets to have responsibility for - just the house and the garden, which gives us much more freedom to explore during the day! The funny thing is, and maybe that is why we got the job among 14 other applicants, the owners are going to Vancouver to visit their son, and he lives in Burnaby, where Andy teaches!

Once done with the housesitting, we will rent a car or a camper-van, and travel around the rest of the country before heading h... (don't say that bad 4 letter word!) at the end of February!