Vietnam and Cyclone Preparation
Trip Start
Jul 10, 2008
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13
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Trip End
Jul 10, 2011
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Darwin,
Northern Territory,
Australia
Saturday, December 13, 2008
We had put together a rough itinerary four our trip and had booked the first two night into Hotel 127 in HCMC (Ho Chi Mihn City) or Saigon as it is still sometimes called and was know prior to reunification in 1975. They had arranged for us to be picked up at the airport. It's always nice not to have to left to the mercy of the taxi drivers when you're arriving in a new city of 6M people where you don't know the language and get confused when you think, now is that 10,000 dong worth $1 or $10? We had booked a flight to the island of Phu Quoc, at $50 a one-way the flight was cheaper that a nights accommodation. We had wanted to stay at the eco friendly Mangos, at $50 a night for a beach front cabin it was going to be our big splurge, unfortunately it was full as it seemed were a lot of places at this time of year. We had our heart set on a beach front cabin though, always a mistake, and we ended up booking a place for $75 US a night - Ah you only live once, but for a developing country this certainly blew away the most I'd ever paid for a room on any previous trips!
First things first though, we had both recently attended the CDU cyclone awareness program. Very interesting it was, it did of course have the obligatory video footage of some guys out in a cyclone as big pieces of debris flew past them and saying don't do this at home folks! There were all the scare tactics and some interesting details on the eye of the storm.
Dad and Erica by Catherdral Termite Mound
If you're lucky to have the eye of the cyclone pass directly over you there will be a big lull in the winds and apparently sometimes even a glimpse at sunshine! The wall of wind will eventually hit again and it is at it's most intense when it's closer to the centre so one big no no was going outside if you got a sudden drop in the winds, because guess what was coming next! And because the winds move in a circular motion the winds will be going in the totally opposite direction once they start up again! Well this is what causes the most damage - all the pressure coming from one side, weakening the structure and then the winds come from the total opposite direction to destroy what was not previously downed! They say buildings in Darwin have to be build to withstand a category 4 cyclone as the chance of being hit by a category 5 were too negligible and the additional cost was too great. The one thought that keeps returning to me though is what if!Just to make sure our fears weren't dulled too much I had recently spent a day at the Museum and Art Gallery of the NT with my dad who was visiting. This was my first trip to this great free museum! They have some great aboriginal artwork but more importantly a fantastic display on Cyclone Tracy that hit Darwin on Christmas Day in 1974. This had been a category 4 direct hit on Darwin. They have some great before and after shots from the air. We even found out our local supermarket used to be a drive-in movie theatre. This cyclone had killed 71 people, 22 of those were at sea, and destroy about 80 percent of houses according to the wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy
Back then the buildings were not up to code and didn't contain cyclone proof rooms.
Dad and Jon by Catherdral Termite Mound
One of the helpers at the museum, who had been here during the cyclone, reckoned 20 percent of the homes had been truly destroyed and most had been just damaged still the pictures shows a trail of destruction and we certainly didn't want to be taking any chances!As we were going to be gone we took the advice from this program to cyclone proof our house before we left! We brought in outdoor furniture or anything else from the yard that could act as a missile; unfortunately the new truck would not fit through the patio doors, shame as we'd cleared a nice space on our living room floor specially! We took picture frames off the walls and that was about it! One of our frames was covered in what was a pretty colourful and nasty looking mould! It was pretty well ruined and went straight to the bin! The houses have tin roofs here and we'd had to call out the roof repair people a couple of time to fix leaks! It seems the bolts that hold the sheeting down eventually rusts and in comes the water, in our case, running right down behind the picture frames. One of the perils of living in the tropics!
The other thing we did was take a bunch of our electrical gear to Erica's nice air conditioned, cyclone proof office! Laptops, unused lenses, external hard drives and Ipods. No point letting a cylone get to them if in managed to rip our rusting roof off or worse the ant deciding our external hard drives looked like a nice place to set up home!
My dad was leaving the same day and we took him to the airport at 12pm, giving us time to prepare.
Dad by Catherdral Termite Mound
We took a taxi at 3:30pm but even though we were at the airport 2 hours before out flight we nearly missed it! We were sat in the departure lounge drinking coffee and beers only to find there was another security checkpoint we had to go through for international flights! We ended up running for out gate as the display flashed up gate closing!Our flight was with Jetstar, these guys certainly know how to make a quick buck with their captive audience on the 4 hours 30 minute trip! The plane has no TVs in the ceiling or seatbacks, but you're more than welcome to purchase a portable entertainment system with movies for $15! They seemed popular though and they ended up running out! Get a seat near the front of the plane if you like to watch TV with Jetstar! Dinner for 2 and a glass of wine for me also set us back $36
The flight itself was great, we got views of our house, Nightcliff jetty and the coastline all the way up to the northern suburbs! We flew over the Tiwi Island. There were these great windy river systems. They looked estuarine and looked like they would be great places to go up in sea kayaks following the tides! We also crossed over Timor, Borneo and Brunei before starting our decent into HCMC.
Moving countries is a complicated task and we both were looking forward to the three week break!
