Playing touch-the-westerner (Trip Day 2)
Trip Start
Sep 19, 2002
1
97
129
Trip End
Sep 22, 2003
Central Highlands,
Vietnam
Sunday, June 1, 2003
The first event was driving through thick mud at road works on a high hillside pass. Binh and I got a puncture here while we were skidding around but they soon fixed it and off we went again. We passed areas still trying to recover from the effects of being sprayed with Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the American war to try and prevent the Viet Cong hiding in the thick forest. Basically it just strips the vegetation from the trees so you are left with lots of dead trunks. They have taken most of this wood to use in housing and are trying to grow things in the soil and it is beginning to recover although there are still many babies born with severe deformities due to the mother eating contaminated veg from these areas. The good news (and there is some) is that they told us there is really very little risk of land mines in Vietnam now (unlike Cambodia and Laos which are still heavily affected). The second event of the day was seeing a stick in the road that wriggled away as we got close - my first cobra sighting!
We stopped briefly at a smallish farm where Chung fed us leaves and tree bark (which turned out to be cinnamon) and flowers (which were some sort of veg). We wondered what else they would feed us after the fox of the day before! On one of our stops we saw cashew nuts growing. If you've ever wondered why something so small can cost so much we can now tell you - each fruit on the tree is about the size of a small apple and at the bottom of this fruit grows the pod for the nut. One single cashew nut for each fruit. This is the only time we have seen true wastage, as the Vietnamese cannot use anything else on the tree. The fruit itself has a lovely strawberry / mango smell which Anita Roddick should bottle as bubble bath but the fruit cannot be eaten as it is far too sour. The tree grows like apple trees so they cannot use the wood when the crop has finished either, unlike the coffee trees that have to start again. We also saw some bees and unlike honey farms in England, we wandered close to the hives with Chung pulling the wax slides out with no concern for being stung at all (well we were concerned but no-one else was). At another stop we saw a chopstick-making factory (the disposable sort for export to Japan and Korea etc) except everyone appeared to be asleep in various hammocks about the place. Along the way, as yesterday, we saw a myriad of old battlefields, including quite a few that now have war memorials built there, some quite lavish. In one area we were struck by the beauty of a church that had been the sight of a ferocious battle and the steeple was still standing in quite good condition but the whole of the rest of the church was missing and was now a graveyard for a few of the victims.
We headed to the town of Boun Ma Tout where there is a big American tank in the centre of a roundabout acting as yet another war memorial. Of course this, as with most of the others, is dedicated to the people of the North who fought for their country and no mention is made of the people fighting for the south. We continued on to a little 'resort' near the river and on the way in a bird swooped low and hit Binh in the face. As startled as he was he managed to control the bike and I never felt in danger at all. Of course afterwards we laughed about it as I picked feathers out of his helmet. After checking in to our bungalow we headed out to a few large waterfalls. We were the only people there and were able to wander around in peace and see the 3 waterfalls within sight of each other. They were all beautiful but one (Derasap) was absolutely awesome - the biggest either of us has ever seen. It wasn't Niagra but it was close enough for us and even though we were a fair distance away, it was hard to take pictures because of the spray. We stopped at a local brickworks where the children all rushed out shouting "hello candy!" which we had unfortunately forgotten to bring. They then began to play touch-the-westerner and rushed up to me pinching my bottom and running away. The bricks themselves are made by digging clay by hand and pushing it into a machine like a mincer then squirts out a long sausage at the end that they cut into bricks.
Back at the resort we walked ourselves down to the river and the alleged waterfall there but it was more like a raging rapid. The only people in the resort, aside from ourselves, was the locals who lived by the river and they kept swimming up to where we were sat with our bottles of beer and they giggled and chatted to us in Vietnamese. We watched young Chung fishing from a little boat and when we passed him later he showed us his 3 inch catch. He must have caught another after we had gone as we had his fish for dinner and it was very nice. Tonight's entertainment was again provided by Chung, this time some amazing card tricks. They also introduced us to salt, pepper and lime juice which the Vietnamese have with their chicken and their French fries. We said good night to the 2 huge pythons in front of our bungalow (luckily in a cage) and looked forward to what sights we would see one our last full day with our new friends.
