I'm sorry it's been so long since the last post. We were pretty busy during the last few days in Hue, and it took a while to track down an internet cafe here in Da Nang. I'm covering several days here, so I apologize for the very long stream-of-consciousness post below.
My title refers to an adventure Matt and I had on Sunday. We rented a couple of motorbikes and went looking for footage of city and country life. This is what's called B-roll, illustrative shots that may or may not be used in the film but which are nice to have if you find you need them. Since the OGCDC is in Hue, we needed some footage of life around the city. We also wanted some more farming footage, despite my little run-in with that cow.
So, we rented bikes from the hotel at $1 USD/hour, threw the camera in Matt's bag and the tripod in mine and set off. Now, the motorbikes in question are more like amped up mopeds. Matt kept jokingly referring to his as a hog, but these things don't exactly scream "Easy Rider." They're pretty much the same thing you see all over the place in Europe. Also, virtually no one here wears a helmet, so renting one of those was out of the question. In other words, I'm riding a motorbike with a heavy backpack on, with no helmet, on streets with almost no traffic control, in a country with a sub-par hospital system. Sorry, Amara.
It was worth it, though. We got some great stuff around the city, including at an open-air market that was definitely of the locals-only flavor. Then, we got on the highway leading south out of the city toward Da Nang. After a few km's we turned off the main road, drove through a thin facade of stores and houses, and were almost instantly out in the rice fields. We rode the bikes along this 4'-wide dike between the paddies. (If you've ever been out in midwest or southwest farm country, these dikes are a little like the dirt road grids out there, except they're much smaller and made for two-wheel/two-foot transport only.) We decided to ride all the way to the other side, where we saw a farm village in the distance, and then double back to pick up the scenes in the fields that looked the most promising. But when we got to the village, we realized it was like one of those I described in my last post, a farm village that has no full-size roads in, and is therefore entirely absent of westerners. The village had a river running down the center and a concrete bridge across the river. There were people fishing and bathing in the river, and we got some great shots of this little hideaway. The sight of two tall white men with cameras, as you can imagine, created a bit of a spectacle, but no one seemed to mind, and the kids were hilarious. Everyone seemed to find it amusing to have the camera pointed at them, although several of the shots are way too posey to actually use.
After leaving the village we went back across the dike (which was a little over a km long) and stopped twice to get some shots. Alas, no one was working with a water buffalo, so that shot still eludes us. However, we got lots of other good "rice work" footage and a few shots of something pretty odd. These paddies have lots of little canals between them to use to flood the paddies or pump water out of them. The farmers also use the canals to farm small fish as well (smart, right?). There were two people in a small boat who, at first, looked like they were netting fish in a small net on the end of a pole and then dumping them in the boat. But there were three or four car batteries in the boat hooked up in series. We couldn't figure out why until we saw a wire leading from the batteries down the pole to the "net," which was really a wire mesh basket. In case you haven't figured it out by now, the man was electrocuting the fish. And there was a creepy buzz every time he stuck it in the water. Sure makes it easier to catch the fish!
When we finally returned to the hotel, I realized that I had a problem. I had put on sunscreen, but when I did so I hadn't considered that my shorts would ride up when seated, and I hadn't put any on my lower thighs. So my lower thighs and knees had been in direct sunlight for several hours. Although the area of the burn is relatively small, this is definitely the worst I've been burned in a VERY long time. I'm writing this about 48 hours later, and they're still bright pink. I'm surprised they haven't blistered. Sort of puts a downer on going to the beach here in Da Nang.
Another interesting little tidbit of VN information comes from a trip Matt took a few days earlier. It's too complicated to try to explain why, but on Friday he took a car to Da Nang from Hue and back again. The driver spoke very good English, and Matt had an interesting converstation with him. At one point, Matt told him how some people back home were a little worried about us coming here because they assumed that the people here would hate Americans. The driver, in what has to be one of the best lines heard on this trip, replied, "We don't hate Americans. We look to the future, not the past. We hate the Chinese."
Yesterday (Monday, the 4th) we took the three hour bus ride from Hue to Da Nang. Most of the people on the bus were westerners, but, as on the DMZ Tour bus, there were few Americans. Most of them were Aussies, English, or Irish. There was one woman in her mid-twenties who just wouldn't shut up the whole trip. She was speaking very loudly and ceaselessly to everyone within 10 feet of her in a thick Manchester working-class accent. I don't care how much you like My Fair Lady, that much cockney, for that long and that loud, is just damn annoying!
Half way through the ride, we stopped for toilet (that is, "toilet") and drinks. The people getting off the bus were instantly acosted by people selling tchotchkes. And one local lady had a ripped $20 bill she was trying to exchange for VND. At first this seemed pretty reasonable. We've noted on a few occassions that if a US bill has even a relatively small tear in it, vendors and even banks won't take it. I don't know why, but a ripped US bill is basically useless here. So it's not, on the face of it, so suspicious that this woman would want to try to trade this bill to some westerners. Matt, always the capitalist, was going to offer her 200,000 VND for it, which is about $12.50, but when he took a look at it, he realized it was couterfeit. When he told her he thought it was counterfeit, she got very upset at him. It was pretty funny, because her reaction was of the methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much type; she was definitely running a scam.
As we were getting back on the bus, I asked for a cold Huda beer. Huda is one of two beers brewed in Hue, and it's pretty good, not to mention criminally cheap. I paid my money and waited, but they didn't have a cold one, so they offered me a 333, which is a Hanoi beer. They wanted 3000 more for it, but I didn't have any more small bills (it takes some getting used to to think of 2000 or 5000 notes as "small bills"), so I just asked for my money back. At that point they just let me take the 333 for no extra charge. But here's the thing, according to all the travel guides, 333 has formaldahyde it in. If you get drunk on it, you'll get very sick. Thanks goodness I only had one. (Sorry again, Amara.)
When we arrived in Da Nang, we found a hotel on the beach, which cost, per night, only a little more than the hotel in Hue..."really cheap" as opposed to "dirt cheap." It's right across from the beach, and all our rooms look out over the ocean. In fact, it's a lot like the beachfront strip in Virginia Beach, only a little shabbier. We're here until tomorrow, when we set off for Hoi An.
Da Nang is a tourist town, but most of the tourists are domestic. This is where the Vietnamese come for their beach holidays. So the tourism trade here caters much less to westerners than in Hanoi or Hue. For example, right next to our hotel is a big restaurant that clearly gets its business from the nearby hotels. But whereas most of the other restaurants we've been frequenting were catering almost entirely to western tourists, this one had only one other table with westerners at it and no English on the menu. This made ordering a little bit of a challenge, but, as always, Lan was happy to rescue us. I went back to the hotel and made a short night of it, but some of the ladies went later on to another restaurant just to hang out. This one made a stab at an English menu, but as we find so often here, the translations and misspellings can be unintentionally humorous. At this place, they tell me, an item that was clearly supposed to be steamed crab was listed on the menu as "steaming crap." A few others that stand out in my mind:
1. At the Ho Chi Minh museum in Hanoi, there's a locker area to stow your things with a sign that reads, "Take luggage of foreigners, no charge."
2. At one of the restaurants in Hue, a sign for a tourism company bragged about their roomy busses that would, "comfort many-legged foreigners."
3. A cute little boy seen on the street in Hue wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a puppy and the words, "I like dog." I wanted to ask him if he prefered grilled or fried, but I just don't have the Vietnamese for something that complicated.
That's about as good a place to end it as I can think of. I'll try to make another post soon, or, as a sign in Vietnam might say, "Will effort to make blogpose very qwik."
Stu
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