Scooter tour, Thien Mu Pagoda, Emperor’s tomb, Boat trip on Perfume river, night train to Hanoi

I wake up feeling rubbish from last night’s King’s dinner and am tempted to pass today’s optional programme, a scooter trip through the countryside. But once again, everyone else is chirpy and ready to go, so I gather my strength and hop on a scooter.

It is another hot and sunny morning in Vietnam. I am already sweating at nine o’clock, when we make a stop in the rice fields. The farmers have already been working for quite a while, by their looks of it. They are covered from head to toe, you can see hardly any skin from under the layers of clothing… and the temperature is nearing +30c.

Working in rice fields.

This specific area of Vietnam gets two rice crops a year. It is the time of the harvest; the water has already been pumped out of the fields, the rice has been cut and it is now being piled and taken out from the fields to dry.

Rice closeup

Both rice and hay are dried the same way, left to dry on the side of the roads. We ride our scooters over countless piles of drying layers of hay. I assume people spread the hay on the road in the morning and in the evening it is all dry and ready to be swept away to the storage rooms. Sometimes I see car tracks that have messed a pile of rice, but I assume the roadside is generally good and safe place for drying rice.

It is the last school day before the summer holidays and a local school is giving prizes to every child before they are free to vanish for couple of months. The kids are all dressed in their best clothing and look very beautiful. We stop to watch the ceremony and the children all get distracted and yell ‘Hello’ to us.

Last school day before summer holidays.

The kids still have a long day ahead, so we jump back on the scooters and head to a local market. The weather is too hot for me, so instead of walking around I go look for a shadow and find a spot under a decorated bridge. An old fragile lady possibly in her seventies is sitting next to me. She weights probably 40 kilos, she is dressed in beautiful pink silk costume and unlike most women in Vietnam she is wearing makeup. She must have been a real beauty once. She opens a conversation telling me the bridge is 230 years old. I nod. Then she asks if I want my future told to me for a dollar. Great deal.

My future:

“In a year you will find a man. He is 36 years old when you meet, educated, most likely a doctor. In two years you are married and you will be in together and in love for the next 35 years. You will have two children; a girl and a boy. (There will be another man involved tho, which I don’t quite know how that will work). You will have good income of money and you will die happily in your sleep as an old woman.”

Fortunes under the bridge.

Vietnamese dreams? I hope I will be older than 100 when I die, because I have great plans for my 100^th birthday.

We ride along the narrow roads between the rice fields made of 2×2 meter concrete blocks. I remember East Germany used the same method to build roads. On both sides of the road people are busy working on the rice fields. Our next stop is a conical hat workshop. They are seen everywhere in Vietnam and one size fits all. They are waxed so they last in rain, they can be used as fans, they can be sat on – a least if you are light and Vietnamese and don’t sit on them the cone side up J

A layer of palm leaves being placed on the bamboo frame.

The conical hats are handmade using dried palm leaves, bamboo frame and fishing thread. First the dried leaves are ironed on a heated bomb fragment, “it’s the cheapest way, because there are so many bomb fragments left in Vietnam” explains our guide. It takes four hours to make one hat from scratch and one hat usually lasts less than three months in use.

Every area in Vietnam has its own unique fashion style; in The Hue area only two layers of leaves are used instead of three, which makes the hats lighter. Between the two layers, there is a layer of dyed newspaper with cut out figures, unique only to this area.

The cutouts between the layers show beautifully when the hat is placed against light.

When the conical hat is put against the light, the little paper figurines show darker against the hat. The cut out figures epresent a local poem. Unfortunately I can’t get me a conical hat, because I still got six weeks of travelling ahead of me. No hat can last that long on the road.

When the palm leaves have been attached to the model, the hats are sown together using fishing thread. This is by far the longest part of the process.

We continue on the scooters to an incense stick stall on the Hue roadside where we get to try how the incense sticks are made. The process looks straight forward – a big lump of soft raw incense, tool to flatten it, few bamboo sticks and a table. The girl who is making them is probably just over ten years old, but she can make 3000 incense sticks a day.

Making 3000 sticks a day…

vs. making one long incense stick a day.

When the tour members get try to make incense sticks themselves, I find out that it looks much easier than what it really is.

When we stop to a Tu Duc tomb. It is midday and sun is high. The scooters bring a temporary relief, but immediately when we stop, I start sweating like I have never sweated before. The scooter drivers dose in the shade when we go walking. I am forced to hold an umbrella to block the sun. I feel like Professor Calculus from Tintin, but the heat is unbearable without it. The tomb of Emperor Tu Duc was constructed 1864-67 and served as a second imperial city, where the emperor, who reigned from 1848-1883 came for relief from his duties. He was tiny so all the statues in the tomb were made tiny. Kings and their big egoes. To our surprise the emperor was never buried to the tomb. The reason he was not buried in this location is that he was afraid of grave robbers, and looks like he had a point; the French colonists dug open the floor to search for his treasures, and that is why the floor tiling around the grave is mismatching.

An empty tomb of king Tu Duc. No one knows where he got buried in the end.

We have our lunch in a nearby nunnery. The food is all vegetarian and it is the best lunch I have had during the trip. The nunnery is quiet and the air is cool on the contrast for the weather outside. The swallows are the only creatures making noise, it is peaceful and quiet. We see few young female nun trainees and their haircuts look more punk than nun to me. When I ask why they are only partly shaven, I hear that their heads will be fully shaven only when they are no longer apprentices. We leave them to have a nap and move on.

A delicious vegetarian lunch in a local nunnery.

The last stop before returning to Hue city stands a pagoda called Thien Mu, where the famous monk The most venerable Thich Quang Duc used to study. He is remembered for the famous photo of him burning himself alive as a protest of the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem administration. Photos of his self-immolation were circulated cross the world and brought attention to the policies of the Diem regime and the iconic photo of the monk’s death won the Pulitzer Prize.

The famous photograph of the burning monk on the wall behind the car.

The sign states: “In this car The Most Venerable Thich Quang Duc went from An Quang Pagoda to the intersection of Phan dinh Phung street and Le van Duyel street on June 11, 1963 in Saigon. As soon as he got out of the car, The Most Venerable sat down in the lots position and burnt himself to death to protest against the Ngo Dinh Diem regime’s policies of discriminating against Buddhists and violating religious freedom.” Curiously, his heart remained unburned and is held in a museum.

We return to the city by boat, grab our rucksacks from the hotel and take a SE4 train from Hue railway station. It takes 12 ½ hours traveling through the DMZ to Hanoi. I love sleeping in the trains. We are staying in the first class, four people per room. We leave before a dinner and our evening meal consists of white bread, jam and beer. See the ‘happy’ faces below.

A beer, jam and bread dinner on the night train.

I fall asleep dreaming of being inside a dragon, listening to Ipod and the rhytm of a train. It is great being on the road again.