August 28 to 29—Tailor Day, My Son Ruins, and Leaving Hoi An, VietNam

Dear Family and Friends,

Tuesday, August 28, through Wednesday, August 29, were a blur of tailor shop fitting visits and posting our purchases to go home (almost 10 kilograms for less than 50 USD), with a mixture of exploration and time with the Dutch ladies! Dani awoke suddenly at 8:10 AM on Tuesday after Martha forgot to turn on the alarm clock the night before so that we could easily have a fruit shake before our 8:00 AM scheduled pick-up to tour the ancient My Son ruins! DOH! Thankfully, the bus was late, so we were able to throw together clothes, shoes, contact lenses, and hats in 10 minutes and still make the bus! Whew! The bus drove around to the other guesthouses around town, and finally headed north into the countryside for approximately 40 minutes to reach the tourist site.

Our tour guide, Spider, named the forty of us ‘Spider Group’ for easy collection. We crossed a bridge and were tunneled up the hill by minibus or by Marine Corp-issue “For Official Use Only” green jeeps. Hey, it’s been thirty years and our equipment still works on a daily basis! Up about 2 KM, we learned some about the history of the My Son ruins, including how they used to look before the Viet Cong took up residence in the former-Champa temple and the American bombers made a mess of things, leaving behind a large bomb blast hole that is marked on the site’s maps. Martha spoke with Spider along the path up to the ruins, admitting that it is saddening to learn that bombs from our country had damaged their heritage site. He calmed Martha's fears about the Vietnamese harboring resentment towards Americans, commenting that the place would never have been bombed if the Viet Cong had not housed up in there. VietNam, according to Spider (and seemingly more-so in the Southern parts of the country), is a present and future-only sort of mindset, putting the past behind them. It seemed true, too, because we felt no animosity from the people here when they learned of our American heritage—we had been planning on telling people we were Canadian if necessary.

The sites open to the public had been restored at places and left untouched in others. The American bomb had made quite a crater, left overgrown, a spot that nature will eventually fill with time. The structures of the My Son ruins were actually the third manifestation of most of the buildings. The first and second manifestations (of wood and another short-term building block) had been replaced with brick. The Champa people were known as the brick artisans, creating images of their Hindu gods across layers of bricks mounted in rows. The bases of the structures were actually the parts restored, bricks piled and held together by cement instead of the tree-sap glue used successfully by previous generations. These buildings were used as ‘gates’ for different stages and types of ceremonies, from Hindu fertility rituals calling for the gods Vishnu and Shiva to purification rites fueled by the waters of the clear river running nearby.

Walking the grounds by ourselves to take photos, we talked with others on the tour, discussing Angkor’s grandeur in comparison with the small scale and less-distinguished workmanship of these ruins, and likely talking one couple into making a trip to Siem Reap in the coming weeks. Back towards the bus, we decided to hike down the hill for more walking in our day, eventually hopping into the minivan about 200 meters from our end-point with the last of our group to avoid delaying their departure. We struck up a conversation with a couple from Australia, originally from England. She was a university teacher who traveled to SaiGon to work with students in a distance-learning English master’s program—not an easy task. Her retired husband met here there and they were enjoying their jaunt into VietNam for a couple of weeks. We ran into them again the next day at the post office and they admitted to deciding to stay in quaint Hoi An for the rest of their time in the country.

We had signed up for the bus-to and boat-from tour group, which cost us 2 USD more than the 3 USD option to go to and from by bus only. So we waited with a small group along the riverside for our boat to arrive. In the meantime, we marveled at the sand-laden boats floating swiftly down the high river, barely afloat for their burden, but afloat nonetheless! A Spanish girl sat down to take some time to write in her journal, and one of the local men squatted before her to watch as she wrote in her native tongue. We Westerners have a much greater sense of personal space than folks in SE Asia, we have found, and it was proved as this girl got up and stopped her writing time as soon as the gentleman was distracted from his place stooped at her feet.

On the boat, we slowly headed up stream as we ate plates of tofu with vegetable fried rice. We split an ice tea, which we paid extra for, and watched the boats either working to bring goods or to transport folks along this river community. Our one stop along the way was at a revered woodworkers’ village, which Martha’s parents would have loved because they collect word carvings. We got to witness the carvers at work on the floor, tools displayed in personal formation to their immediate left or right hand, digging into the wood to make happy Buddha to lighten moods around the world. At different stages of the process, one worker would make deep trenches in the wood to get down to be able to add detail. Others would make small chips in the wood to smooth out a Buddha belly or cheek. Expert carpenters were everywhere, working by hand or guiding power tools to make large window decorations or elephant- or dragon-adorned hangers for the women's tapestries. (Dani and Martha loved being in the workshop, with the smells of different types of wood being worked, and we are particularly fond of carpenters as we live between two of them at home.)

We returned to town early around 1:30 PM, even with all of the waiting for boats and such. We returned to the shower and to the tailor shop for 3:00 PM fitting. Dani worked hard on her clothes, pointing out what looked good and what needed adjusting—this is poofy, during the fitting I had asked for the sleeve length to be shorter, and maybe the skirt lining needs to be longer. “Oh, no, that’s the way it should be” was Dani’s girl’s response to all of her requests. “No, it’s not, please make it right,” was a too-commonly-needed phrase from Dani. Martha’s shirts needed to be taken in at the middle, but otherwise didn’t know any better to ask for adjustments along the lines of a suit, so Dani stepped in to help. Martha’s lady just calmly told her that they would take care of whatever she needed. We agreed to return at 7:00 PM after another walk through town. They would then hook us up with buttons and we would return at 8:30 PM that night to pick up the final products.

We went for a quick snack of another of Hoi An’s local dishes of fried wontons covered with fresh parsley and tomato salsa, where we chatted with a businessman named Peter from Munich, Germany, who was vacationing with his currently-absent wife and teenaged son. He kindly gave us his office phone number, just in case we needed a friend during our Oktoberfest adventure at the end of September. Such nice people, those Germans!

At 7:00 PM, we returned to the tailor’s shop and tried on our clothes once again, very happy with the adjustments that had been made and thankful for their hard work. At 8:30 PM, we made our final stop to the shop to get our new duds, quite happy. We asked for some of their business cards to pass on along the way and headed back to the room to drop off all of our new clothes. We finished the day walking the town some more, including another run through the locals’ market and through more of the small streets, able to now tell the seamstresses along the way that we were sorry, but we had already purchased our choices for this trip. Martha packed, and we watched some of From Dusk Til Dawn on HBO before heading to bed before our last morning in Hoi An.

Wednesday, August 29, we were up, packed, and out of the room after final e-mail checks before our 11:00 AM departure time. The front desk lady informed Dani that the post office would come to our hotel, package everything for us, and take it to be shipped for the same price! What service in this town! We decided, however, due to Dani’s paranoia, to take the box to the post office ourselves. We shipped the almost-10 kilogram box by Sea Freight and were sullenly informed it would take three to four months to be delivered to the states! PERFECT! SO WILL WE!

Dani quickly found us somewhere to get her fix and satiate her fruit shake shakes. AWe sat on the little plastic chairs at the little plastic table, enjoying another day's fruity refreshment. And we walked around town some more with our little time left in town, finding the Japanese bridge during daylight and enjoying a lunch of Malaysian fried rice (which had an egg on top and a chicken wing on the side) for Dani and some spicy lemongrass and chili fried rice for Martha at a local hole-in-the-wall.

We made it in plenty of time to catch our bus at 2:00 PM, headed North for Hue. We joyously arrived at 4:40 PM (much earlier than the five hours predicted on the schedule), so decided to just continue through that same night to HaNoi, the capital of VietNam, instead of exploring any of Hue. Hue’s cultural tours were said not to be very good during Martha’s research that morning, and the countryside was mostly littered with tombs of the dead from wars past and reminders of the heat of the fighting that took place here during the American War. You could also get tours to the DMZ (the ‘demilitarized zone’), but there was no guarantee it would be worth the money. More fun was certainly to be had in the capital city than here. So, we got on the next bus starting a bit after 5:30 PM, on the bus for 14 more hours.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not depending on what you think of such things), we saw the three Dutch Ladies walking the streets of Hue as our bus—and consider that we had been in town less than an hour—passed by their rain-soaked, obviously weary bodies. We banged on the window and waved our arms, trying to get their attention as the bus teased us, moving forward a bit so they might catch a view … if only they would look up. Finally, Saskia ‘Lady 38’ did look up from beneath her blue parka, only to wave a hand slightly. Well, maybe she would realize in a bit who our faces belonged to, anyway!

On the bus, we couldn’t even read as the lights went out and the overheads did not function. So, we enjoyed our typical pastime of staring out the window (of course, our new stress-less lives and personal histories of long car rides since youth have helped us develop a great contentment and joy from hours of landscape). Eventually, the rhythmic tones and beeping of the bus horn lulled us to a surprisingly comfortable sleep.

In love and light,

Martha and Dani