Hello everyone! It was so good to see you at Artfest! Thank for coming out! I have one more art market before I take a break in July-The Manito Art Festival at the Duncan Gardens! It’s always a great show, so I hope to see you there! I’m booth 14 on a corner!
Now back to my trip! We finally made it to Vietnam and our first stop was Ho Chi Minh City or as it is also know, Saigon. We went on a food and walking tour where we got to try many delicious things-a noodle soup that is Southern Vietnam’s answer to Pho, a banh mi (A big favorite of mine at home!), Vietnamese coffee (too strong for me in this interaction) and the big favorite-a huge rice crepe tinted yellow from tumeric stuffed with shrimp, pork and bean sprouts which you would wrap in lettuce with herbs and eat dipped in fish sauce.
Here you can se the crepes being made!
I loved the Vietnamese tendency toward open air dining-big multi-pavilion spaces festooned with lights and plants (and if you are lucky, koi ponds!). It is a smart solution to the heat and humidity because if you don’t have the air conditioning cranking, it gets suffocating in enclosed spaces FAST.
We had a very entertaining guide who made the argument that while the Vietnamese government was Communist that the Vietnamese themselves are very capitalist in how they operate and that was a theme for the rest of our time in Vietnam, along with awareness of how the government tries to control the people. On a bus excursion another guide was asked whether there was freedom of speech in Vietnam and he replied, “On this bus there is!” and our guide said that there would be spies listening to tour guides in the squares to make sure that the guides didn’t say anything too controversial. HCMC (as the city is often known) had a very cosmopolitan feel. We saw lots of other tourists, many clearly traveling as individuals rather than in tour groups and the streets were full of modern, high end shops. It felt like a place that was open to the rest of the world and with aspirations.
We returned to our ship and set sail for Da Naang!
I usually prefer to paint on location as well as draw, but this trip kept us on the move so much that I usually had to add paint once we got back to the ship.
Viking Cruises are well-known for their focus on music and every night there were multiple options to take in live music. This is the atrium where they would project beautiful paintings and photographs and we could listen to piano music or string instruments.
On one of our sea days, we took part in afternoon tea on the ship with friends as a violinist serenaded us.
Da Naang is a city that was clearly attempting to rapidly modernize and is in a bit of an awkward in between state. We took a boat tour passing under multiple bridges (including one with a decorative dragon that spits fire at night) passing by new skyscrapers as well as old temples and shanty-type houses plus quite a few abandoned Chinese investment construction properties (Another regular sight all across SE Asia). For me, the highlight was not the city itself, but visiting “Marble Mountain”, a mountain riddled with caves that were filled with statues, and pavilions to various gods, decorated with huge potted plants and elaborate tiling. The mountain was a hide out for the Vietnamese during the war and was bombed multiple times by the nearby US helicopter base.
Buddhist statue on Marble Mountain. I desperately wanted to carry off those footed flower pots. Aren’t they incredible? Shipping them home would cost a fortune though. SIGH.
On our bus ride back to the ship, we passed this incredible view of location aquaculture- I think it is mussel farming, but it could be shrimp!
The bus paused for 15 minutes for a break, I got to cracking on the drawing!
As we sailed toward Ha Long Bay, EVERYONE was out on deck to watch as we passed these incredible limestone karst islands that are a UNESCO World Heritage Site three times over. It was unworldly and contrasted strangely with the many freighters and commercial ships in the area. Only one part of this area is actually UNESCO protected and the rest is still used commercially. The humidity and fog meant that visibility dropped off quickly with distance and added to the unrealness of the scene. It reminded me of ancient ink paintings I have seen of islands rising directly out of the sea, surrounded by mist. The ancient myth is these islands are the remains of a dragon that crashed to earth thousands of years ago and honestly, that seems like a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw when you’re face to face with them. There’s something magical about it.
The next day we took a smaller ship out among the islands, where we got to experience both wonder and the horror. The first island we stopped at was literally heaving with people, incredible hot and humid and unfortunately quite dirty. There were no formal docks and all of the boats just jammed in the landing area, jostling for position and they were unafraid to ram each other which horrified me as I kept expecting a fiberglass crunch from my years of boating in my youth, but they had metal hulls, padded with tires-well prepared for the scrum! We leapt from the landing onto the boat and zoomed away, helped by nudges from other boats eager to take our boat’s position. In my head, I named that little excursion “Escape from Tourist Island.” It was madness!
The second island was much more pleasant, not only because the crowd situation was a little calmer, but also because it was much cooler. The limestone karst islands that populate the Ha Long Bay Area are extremely porous/hollow and many of them have caves in them. This island had a huge, atmospheric cave with paths and lights that was fascinating, especially when it opened up into an enormous high ceiling-ed cavern. It was like visiting another world.
After some more aggressive “docking” maneuvers, we re-boarded our boat and motored back through the islands with visibility dropping as the mists rose while I thought on what we had seen today. The ancient landscape, the overly touristy madness, the preponderance of “party boats” in the water full of people who were clearly there just to drink and dance to their very loud sound systems, lights shows flashing wildly-obvious to the mystique of the landscape, and our crew, working hard to ferry us visitors out and back in order to make a living. These contrasts between those with money and those with subsistence lifestyles, modern skyscrapers and ancient temples, beautiful nature, and trash piled on and around it were constant themes everywhere we went in SE Asia.
Next up Hanoi and Hongkong!