Earthquake

Two days ago, there was a 7.0 earthquake on the border of northern Thailand, Laos and Burma. That part of the world there are few people, so I have read that only one person was killed. We were watching TV in our apartment at night when it happened and we both felt the building swaying back and forth. Really scary being 16 floors up in a concrete building! So we grabbed our passports, cash and the laptop and we ran down 16 flights of stairs and outside. Luckily our fears were validated as there were hundreds of people outside standing in the street looking up at their respective apartment buildings. We waited out there for 20 minutes or so and then went back in and upstairs. We hope that was it for a while.

Mai Cho Village

Ancient and modern technology in one picture. The man in the back is plowing his rice field with a water buffalo, TV via satellite.

The drive to the village was up and over the mountains.

Lush and green with clean air, the opposite of Hanoi.

Our beds inside the stilt houses.

We slept in these houses and ate our meals under them.

Lisa, rain and rice.

This is an elementary school we visited. They have a nice courtyard and awesome view!

Cuc Phuong National Park!

At our visit to Cuc Phuong National Park, the first national park inn Vietnam-1962. We visited the Endangered Primate Rescue Center where they help rehabilitate primates that have been caught from poachers or in the illegal animal trade. Many of these primates go to China for "medicine" or meat. We saw langurs and gibbons. The langurs have long tails they use for balance as they walk along branches and the gibbons have no tails but long arms which they use to swing between branches. The sound of the gibbons in the morning is incredibly strange and hard to believe it comes from mammals. One starts and then others join in. Hopefully the video below will show this.


A Langur

A different type of langur

Our group in front of a huge tree. I am realizing how hard it is to take photos in a rain forest. It is dark and photos just don't capture the scale of things, or the sounds.

This was one of our favorite trees we saw in the park. Well over 200 feet tall sticking up above the rest. The video below of Lisa's sunglasses falling off gives you a look at it.

One of the highlights of our visit and possibly of our whole time in Vietnam was a 10 mile hike through primary tropical rain forest. This is the type of forest that has never been cut down so it has been here really since the beginning. Several thousand years for sure. Some of the trees are just enormously wide and tall! During our hike, it rained for most of it, several people got land leeches and we were all pretty muddy by the end of it. The park sits on limestone and so in the forest there are beautiful, jagged rocks and the occassional sinkhole. One right next to the trail with an opening about 10 feet across and dropping down over 80 feet we estimated. Really cool!

Hard to tell in this picture, but the base of this tree is about 25 feet wide.

A view towards the end of the hike.

Almost finished. Just a slide down this muddy slope to the village below where we spent the night in a stilt house under mosquito nets with think blankets. It was proabably in the 40s at night.

Gibbons swinging.




Gibbons calling.