In the morning we marvelled yet again at the majesty of this place, and it became apparent from the car parked nearby that our driver had also stayed over.  We had carefully arranged for him to pick us up at noon as he had agreed to take us to Kenh Ga Floating Village.  The floating village stretched along the watercourse for some distance, and I would not have given it that name.  True, there were many small boats with families living in them, but there were also many permanent buildings on the shore.  The colourful name was probably given to promote tourist visitation.  Ruth took some pictures of an extremely beautiful young woman and her small children who were at the window of their boat.  Later we duly mailed them to her, hoping they would arrive, as before.  While waiting for our guide we stood on a bridge and looked upstream, watching an endless parade of floating islands of vegetation pass beneath us.  It was edible it  seemed, since some people were harvesting it. The islands were of varying sizes but their density on the surface remained constant, as though someone were releasing them at a steady rate.  How was this happening, I wondered?  When will it end?  I watched enthralled, as if contemplating a perpetual-motion machine. At last we were on our motor launch, a boat made of concrete with a noisy diesel engine, and were taken through and beyond the village to a spot several kilometers upstream.  The banks of the channel were wide and had high-water marks on them, about 1.5 metres above our level, the same marks we had noticed at Tam Coc.  This was still the dry season though there seemed to be plenty of water around, and it gave us a sense of the volume of the monsoon rains that were to come.

Previous articles on Vietnam: A Ramble in South East Asia - Ron Hannah, a Canadian who 'came of age' in the 1960s, the 'Vietnam War' era, takes a ramble around 21st century Vietnam.  This is the first of six 'musings'.....more to follow in the coming months..... The motorcycles of Hanoi - ah, who would have thought, in the let's-bomb-them-back to-the-stone-age sixties, that Hanoi would ever again have streets, let alone vehicles?  But vehicles it has "by the glory" (Ruth's favourite phrase), and the two-wheeled motorized variety predominates by far. A Ramble in South East Asia - Continuing Ron Hannah's observational and perceptive ramble...."We were interested in the villages around Sapa and I wanted to see Dien Bien Phu where the French were defeated in 1954.  We heard from returning travellers that it was below freezing up there, and that travel was difficult.  The spectre of a very large Australian tourist at a streetside shop trying to buy a sweater that would fit him in this land of small people, was what finally scrubbed those plans, I think." A Ramble in South East Asia: Part 3 - Part 3:More than once on my I travels was painfully aware, and more than a little embarrassed, by my wealth and soft life compared to these people.  I had been reduced to bankruptcy in Canada, yet I was still far better off and had many more opportunities than these labourers.  They were cutting irregular chunks of red clay from the ground with their shovels and stacking them piece by piece, bucket by bucket, onto the circle.  What they put inside to fire the clay was not clear.  They noticed us and waved, making jokes that may or may not have been polite.  Running Through Battlefields On the outdoor veranda of our hotel, a 9 year-old Vietnamese girl wanted desperately to unload her supply of Tiger Balm into our hands. She was playful and cute, calling us diarrhea and then laughing girlishly into her balled up fists. The slang she had picked up on the balconies of these hotels added flare to her sales routine, but in the last week we had seen a hundred other charming children trying to pawn their commodities. On this hot summer evening near the Gulf of Tonkin, our beers provided all the entertainment we needed. Eating Bali, Secret Bali,Scared to Death Everything you ever wanted to know about Bali, and more.

Once again it struck me how much easier these peoples' lives would be if they had access to a few simple pieces of technology, and how niggardly Business is in not providing them.  My outrage was growing and was to increase as we visited even poorer countries.

Our guide asked us to follow him and we walked along levees between paddies for a long distance toward a low and crumbling hill.  The hill contained an impressive cave, with its inevitable Buddha, and on the way up to the entrance we noticed several piles of large and empty snail shells, the work of rats and other predators, we were told.  At the mention of predators Ruth immediately was on the lookout for snakes, her pet fear.  The view from the top out over the green geometry of the rice paddies was well worth the sweaty walk, as was the mother with the smiling child that we encountered, and I happily tossed my plastic water bottle to a thirsty worker on the way back, wishing there were more in it for him and sensing the envy of his fellows further out in the field.

When travelling with limited time in a new land, since all places are unknown and therefore more or less equal, it is difficult to decide on a destination until something sets a place apart.  We knew we had 30 days to traverse the length of this country, and we knew when and where we wished to cross into Cambodia.  We also knew of a few places we definitely wanted to see on the way, but between Ninh Binh and Hue, our next major stop, was nearly 1/3 of Vietnam:  we couldn't just ignore it, but where to go?  The beaches around Vinh beckoned, but they also tended to be developed, full of day trippers from Hanoi and, we surmised, expensive.  We were trying to keep to a budget of 30 US dollars per day - difficult, and we rarely achieved it, but that was our goal.  Also available to us was the spectacular ride to the Laos border at Cao Treo, and the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh.  We finally settled on the Phong Nha cave near Dong Hoi, the largest cave in Vietnam, a World Heritage site, probably developed but maybe having enough room that the MTD (Mean Tourist Density - my term) would remain comfortable.

As was our custom, we travelled on a local bus after purchasing tickets at the bus station.  That sentence seems mundane, but it has more significance than the novice traveller might suppose.  One can flag down a bus on the road and negotiate a price with the conductor, but it is truly best to deal with a proper agent.  One can even board a bus and negotiate a price with the driver or conductor while the bus is still in the station.  We in the West tend to trust our public service workers, but that is not the best policy here.  Once I did this; got on board, asked the price and gave the man the correct money.  Then on a hunch I followed him as he went to purchase our tickets.  After he got them he turned, and seeing me standing there, sheepishly handed me my tickets - and my change.  The bus was crowded of course, they always are, and we found seats near the front, fortunately, since Ruth sometimes gets motion sickness if she has to sit at the back.  It was uncomfortable and I had dropped my glasses and stepped on them while entering, so I was not in the best of humours.  When the conductor came by and asked me to give up my seat - more of a bench really, or a tool box I complied, agreeable as always, and moved to the back.  Later Ruth told me she felt abandoned, and I had certainly not anticipated that I would be spending the next several sweaty hours sitting on a filthy blanket atop some lumber while ragged and barefoot Vietnamese labourers stared at me.  I tried to make things less stressful by passing around one of my remaining packages of cigarettes and later by playing some tunes on my recorder.  They were fascinated by this instrument and took turns blowing into it while I wondered if I would ever get it back.  I did, and they turned out to be a very friendly lot.  On a different standing-room-only bus ride, I forget where, somebody had anonymously stroked the hair on my arm.  The people are fascinated by Westerners and very curious.

The bus stopped at Dong Hoi, after the driver having paid the mandatory bribe to the policemen in their handsome tan uniforms to let us pass their checkpoint even though we were far overcrowded, and we got out in front of a row of hotels, rectangular buildings as I have described, several side by side.  We enquired about prices and finally settled on one a little up the street.  It turned out to be noisy, facing the busy Reunification Highway, and the next day we moved.  The joy of backpacking is complete mobility.  You are not tied down to a place and the feeling of freedom is palpable.  The staff seemed indifferent to our presence.  Had they been more friendly or even spoken to us, we might have stayed.  They have much to learn about basic service.  The guidebook suggested several other guesthouses and we chose one nearby.  Public transport in Dong Hoi is mostly by motorcycle and we duly placed our bulky packs before our drivers and took our places behind them.  We had given them the name of the guesthouse and even shown them on the map where it was, but it quickly became obvious that this was not where we were going.  We raced through the streets, closer and closer to the sea, and finally arrived somewhere.  Ruth has fond memories of her Harley friends from the past and she enjoyed the ride, but this was not our destination and our suspicion and anger grew when we were told that the price we had been quoted was not the total, but per person.  We had in fact been taken to a hotel at which the drivers would get a kickback.   We paid them their inflated fee but denied them their kickback by walking down the street to another hotel.  An inquiring look from the hotel keeper and our negation caused the drivers, eagerly following us up the stairs, to be summarily dismissed to our satisfaction.

This place turned out to be one of the best, and cheapest, guesthouses of our entire trip:  a lovely room, clean and fresh, with a balcony overlooking the river/sea on the other side of gently blowing white curtains.  Again the staff was silent, though at least they smiled, and the place was so gorgeous that we stayed an extra day.  I say river/sea because we were practically on the beach at the mouth of the Nhat Le River.  At low tide it was a flowing river, at high tide salt waves lapped on the sand.  There were hot sun and palm trees, colourful boats and seafood.  This was the Tropics at last!

We wandered about town, trying to get to a spit or island that we could see out there, and on the way found a fragrant market where we tried to spread our business around, buying bananas from this lady, mangoes from that.  We never found the bridge or ferry that would take us across, but who cared?  Fragments of a Gothic Christian church by the shore put me in mind of Glastonbury, in England, a butterfly landed and stayed still nearby, allowing Ruth to get the first of a glorious set of butterfly shots, and the whole place seemed calculated to seduce an innocent Canadian into staying forever.  Some odd contraptions sat close by the shore  huts on stilts which apparently controlled a large net.  At the release of a lever the four posts holding the net would collapse and the net be spread across the seabed.  After a time the operator would work a foot-winch, raising the net, then inspect what had been caught by paddling out in a bowl-shaped boat.  We had speculated for some time over what these things were until we finally saw one in operation.

Restaurant choices, as always, were plentiful, and we stopped dubiously at an expensive-looking place whose menu in fact proved reasonable.  We asked for something typically Vietnamese and had our first taste of the fish soup I have mentioned.  A young man with good English came and spoke to us, explaining that he was a chef in DaNang who had been seconded to this restaurant because United Nations delegates, here to officially declare the Phong Nha Cave a World Heritage Site, took their meals here and stayed in the affiliated hotel.  This was Friday and the ceremony was to take place on Sunday.  That settled it.  The debate we had been having over which day to visit the cave was ended.  Not for us the silly pomp and speeches of rich bureaucrats to a fawning and poverty-stricken populace that for some reason tolerates them.  We went on Saturday.

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Down at the water, our slender motor launch was built to hold twenty or more, but it set out with only us on board, along with a driver and our pretty guide.  This sort of thing happens often to foreigners.  Perhaps they think we don't like to mingle with locals, or perhaps we unknowingly paid extra for this luxury.  After 20 minutes or so, through lush greenery, we arrived at the cave entrance, dominated by a massive flat slab of rock sticking smoothly and vertically out of the water, but instead of entering, our boat tied up at a dock beside several others.  We hadn't realized it, but the cave is really a series of caves, and after a few moments of puzzlement we first went to a dry upper one - a demanding climb - and then floated into a flooded lower one.  Above, stalactites, stalagmites, graceful curtains and mazes of water-deposited limestone, enhanced by colourful lighting, were laid out before us, and a cooling breeze came from somewhere.  Can one speak of ordinary, everyday awe?  We have both seen marvelous caves, on various continents, and they never fail to inspire, to impress, to make one aware yet again of one's mortality.  Below, the silent glide (the boats were required to turn off their motors and had to be propelled by poles) took us past features both massive and delicate, beneath building-sized clusters of stalactites so thick they looked like boulders hanging from the ceiling, some of which we could reach up and touch with our hands, and finally to a beach a kilometre or more inside upon whose gravelly surface we walked a good distance further to another Buddhist shrine.  This place had been used as an ammunition dump during the American war, and the smooth entrance still bears the marks of attacks by aircraft, an exercise in futility if ever there was one, but then "military intelligence" has long been the world's most telling oxymoron.

The following day we did little.  I sat and wrote a few phrases of the Symphonic score I had brought with me while Ruth read on the grass.  On our daily walk we watched the huge parade as hundreds of vehicles set out carrying delegates and dignitaries to the cave site.  Sedans with blacked-out windows rolled by escorted by armed policemen on motorcycles.  No doubt, I speculated, some of the cars were empty of passengers to thwart assassination attempts, for there seemed to be a lot more cars than there were chairs out at the site.  "We are here to declare this place one of earth's wonders, but we certainly don't want to have anything to do with the poor people who live here", they seemed to be saying.  It seems the price of riches and power, when coupled with injustice, is fear.

Next morning we hailed a bus on the highway and asked the price to Hue.  The man held up five fingers and we weren't sure what that meant.  I stepped up and a lady inside the bus made the palm-down-waggling-fingers gesture which I instantly took to mean "the bus is full, go away", and I stepped back down.  Ruth interpreted it correctly however, and soon we were on board and seated.  After setting out, the conductor, an unpleasant young man who had already made several comments that had other passengers snickering, came to us and showed us three 100,000 Dong notes - our fare.  How five fingers could be rendered into that amount I don't know.  He had apparently reconsidered.  I knew this amount was ridiculous, but not being an experienced bargainer I only got the price down to two hundred.  He took the cash and said something that made the crowd roar with laughter, obviously at our expense.  We should have stood up, hefted our packs and demanded our money back.  Doing so would have made him lose a lot of face and it would have served him right, but we didn't.  It was the most uncomfortable time on our trip and not because of the antiquated seats.

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Hue is an ancient imperial capital and it boasts a Citadel that rivals the Forbidden City in Beijing, or did until recent horrors overtook it.  The inner sanctum is even called the "Forbidden Purple City".  In my Social Studies classes in school many years ago, I can recall precisely nothing ever being mentioned of the grand and varied South-East Asian empires.  People came and traded in Cathay and Japan, oh, and there were spices in the Dutch East Indies, but the Canadian education system must surely stand to be roundly castigated for its appalling lapse.  The history that was presented was that of white traders only:  notice "Dutch" East Indies and "French" Indochina.  The disgusting behaviour of the first Portuguese traders and priests, which caused the Chinese to set up strictly segregated trading ports, of course was never mentioned.  If those U.N. delegates were cheated as I was, then perhaps they can be forgiven for not understanding that those simple people in the fields were the descendants of poets and lawgivers, soldiers and emperors.

We lumbered along beside the Perfume River seeking a section of town that was thick with guesthouses, along the way passing a floating restaurant, several boat rental places with aggressive touts handing out business cards and trying to get you to commit to returning for a tour, and a grassy park containing a number of pieces of modern sculpture - some quite strange and out-of-place.  A young man on a bicycle approached, asking if we had a place to stay.  We have been held up by annoying touts many times on our travels, and had just passed through the boat rental group, so we were in no mood for any more of this.  He was mildly persistent, however, and spoke of a quiet place and the friendly old couple that ran it - plus it was very close by and our packs were heavy.  We relented this time, and once again were shown to an extremely pleasant upstairs room with a shaded balcony full of potted tropical plants.  I had visions of a colonial gentleman in a white suit taking his coffee in the morning and looking serenely out along the street.  The couple who ran the place were silent, but among the friendliest and most radiant people I have met.  I was glad of the young man's persistence the day before.

The next day, a taxi took us into an alleyway near the wall that surrounds the Citadel.  He could go no farther and on foot the area is daunting.  The royal residences are within a second wall, surrounded by a moat, and between the two walls there are now businesses, ordinary houses, museums, and such oddments as the Nine Holy Canons.  These are impressive symbolic weapons made of brass that protect the palace even though they were not meant to be fired.  They were beneath a canopy and the shade was welcome as we looked toward the Flag Tower and the imposing gate leading into the Imperial Enclosure.  Even the burnished gold of these guns had a comforting and cooling effect, I thought, as I stood under them.

Inside the enclosure were fields of vegetables, terraced in large rectangles and oddly unexpected.  Here used to be Imperial halls and residences until they were leveled by the unimaginable weapons of the American War.  Munitions had been stored here, perhaps in the belief that such a beautiful and historic milieu would not be attacked.  Maybe the American education system is as lax as the Canadian in failing to instill knowledge of and respect for this place, because it didn't work.  The buildings that remain, like the Imperial Reading Room are truly lovely though, and its peaceful garden invited a visit with a good book.