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.

Mangrove

On a tower looking over part of the northern part of the southern end of Vietnam. Cambodia is in the distance.

We saw and heard lots of birds nesting up in the trees on this silent canoe ride.

Phu Quoc Island

Big tree in the National Park on Phu Quoc Island.

Playing in the waves, John the English teacher on the left, students on the right.

Beautiful beach on the southern end of the island.

We went squid fishing at night. We didn't catch anything.

Eating sea urchin. Brown, slimy but with lemon juice and crushed peanuts it was delicious. I ate 4 of them. It was a little bit of revenge, because I think I stepped on one in the ocean and it hurts.

Trip to Saigon & Mekong Delta

While visiting the Cu Chi Tunnels, a maze of over 150 miles of intricate tunnels, some three levels deep including meeting rooms, kitchens, painful booby traps. We got the opportunity to crawl through 100 yards of tunnel. First on feet, then hands and feet then hands and knees. I can't imagine doing it with guns, helmets, etc. This tank has been here since, well, 1970. ALL of the trees in the background have grown up since 1975 thanks to the Agent Orange that was sprayed all over the area.

When given the opportunity to shoot a couple bullets from a Russian AK-47, I couldn't resist. A strange sort of tourism opportunity given the history but fun nonetheless. A little pricey at over a dollar a bullet. 3 students and one other teacher each shot two bullets.

Ted coming out of a tunnel, not too easy.

Cathedral built in 1880s in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)

A nice vintage Lambretta scooter

Donated medals from American soldier to the War Museum in Saigon.

Definitely the coolest building in Saigon. That is a helicopter landing pad sticking out. Hanoi has a long way to go to catch up with the architecture of Saigon.

There happened to be a flower festival going on when we were there in Saigon with the students.

Cathedral in Saigon.

A meal we had on the Saigon River with our students on a boat.

The Snakehead fish, this is an invasive, introduced species in the U.S. They live all over the U.S. including the Potomac River. Voracious predators that can breath air and move on land. We did get the opportunity to eat them, and we did.

On the Mekong River.

One of the two huge bridges spanning the two major branches of the lower Mekong River. One bridge was built with the help of Australia, the other with the help of Japan. The second one was finished in April, 2010! Actually, there are 9 major mouths of the Mekong River.

Yeah, not quite sure here. Herbal medicine I think with a few monkey skulls in there too.

Lisa standing next to a support post of a house showing the year and the height of the Mekong River flood. The 2010 flood was so low it is marked on the curb thing under the post. The highest flood was 2002 which is about 2 feet above Lisa's head.

We visited a Muslim community where they weave fabric with this loom.

Fish market. The fish live under peoples' houses that are built over the river. They raise them and feed them food. Most of the catfish fillets are exported, putting a dent in the Mississippi catfish market. Check the label of your next catfish fillet, might be from Vietnam.

A floating grocery store that comes up to people's boats that live on the river. They have no house, just live on their boat on the river.

Selling bananas and moving them from one boat to another, up to the big boat in this case.