Hong Kong and Xian

I was in HK 22 years ago (gulp) visiting my sister, Clarissa - and this time got Kerry to take a picture of me leaning on the railing on the Peak in exactly the spot (I think) where Clarissa took a picture of me in 1987. I look exactly the same, of course, but HK has a thousand new gleaming major buildings and half a dozen new transportation systems, and is even more hyperkinetic and stunning to look at than before. Astonishing to be in Kowloon or Central, which make Manhattan seem like a village, and then after a half hour ferry ride be walking up a hill on Lantau, which (apart from a bronze Buddha the size of a three-story house) could be in Scotland.

Up at 5 AM to get the plane this morning; a long first exploratory walk around Xian this afternoon; and so to bed in a friendly if noisy hostel on a narrow lane right under Xian's vast and ancient outer wall.

Nanny Sarah

On our first day in Hong Kong, we met up with our nanny from when I was in first grade and her husband Tim. It was really fun to see them again. We first took the funicular up the peak (we technically took star ferry to get there) and went for a walk. Next, we took the elevators up the mid levels and had burritos for lunch. Then we got on the ferry to Lanta (?) island. We took a bus up to the base of the giant Buddha, and climbed up to it. We saw a movie being filmed at the top. Then, we went back to the base and got ice cream. After the ice cream, we went on a cable car ride to an area near the airport, where Sarah and Tim had to go meet Sarah's dad at the airport, and we got the subway back to central Hong Kong. having them with us made Hong Kong day one an unforgettable experience.

Honkong

Today we arrived in Xian from Hong Kong. We spent 48 hours in Hong Kong to see Nanny Sarah and Tim. We spent our first day in Hong Kong with Nanny Sarah and Tim acting as our guides.


One cool sight we saw was the midlevels escalators which are the longest escalators in the world!

Hong Kong Whirlwind

We've been in Hong Kong barely 48 hours, and we're leaving for Xian in 8 hours. Wow.

We were lucky enough to be able to spend all day yesterday with "Nanny Sarah" and her husband Tim, who are teaching English in China, quite near Hong Kong. We last saw them about 4 years ago, and Sarah first nannied for us in the summer when Aidan was just finishing first grade. They were fabulous hosts, and made our first day in Hong Kong a great one.

It's now nearly midnight, and we only just got back to the hotel. We'll put up more about our HK adventures from Xian (assuming we can get internet).

Hanoi

We spent three wonderful days in Sapa, and have been back in Hanoi for three days. We're staying with Sarah, Ton and their three great kids. It's been absolutely wonderful to be in a home, not a hotel, and to experience life outside the main tourist track. We leave tomorrow for Hong Kong for a whirlwind 48 hours, then on to Xian in China.

More tomorrow.

"Up yours"

We got to Sapa on the crazily early train today (it left Ha Noi at 9:10 last night and got here at maybe 5 or 6 this morning.) Because we couldn't check into our hotel until 10, we decided to walk around. On our walk, we were pestered by a girl about up to my thigh trying to sell us stuff. When we just kept ignoring her, she said some thing that sounded alot like up yours and walked off.

Halong Bay

We just got back from Halong Bay. From a distance the landscape was amazing. But when you got down and kayaked, you could see that there wasn't much marine life and there was a huge amount of pollution. When we went into one lagoon our guide started describing how monkey brains were eaten. This was to explain why we couldn't see any monkeys on the island. Our one stop was at a floating fishing village which struck me as crowded with tourists. It seemed like a bit of a cramped life because you have an entire extended family living in a 10 by 10 hut floating on a bunch of styrofoam blocks lashed together. All the houses had dogs to protect the house and to pull the children out if they fill into the water. Around each house was a small fish farm. We also saw clam farms, which are plastic tubs of sand sunk into the shallows around the islands.

Sandcastles

This morning we were messing about on the beach before checking out of our fancy hotel and I decided to start building a sandpile. I started quite small, but with a large base and eventually, after a lot of sand digging and packing with mom's help, it got up to my waist. Then two sides of it collapsed. Then we used a collapsed sand to build a wall around the bottom. Then dad took a picture. And finally, I ran all the way down the beach and jumped on it.

At the first jump I just barely knocked off the top, but then I just climbed on top of it and jumped up and down. That collapsed it fairly effectively. This was our last beach visit of this trip. It was fun.

Asian beds

Lots of new pictures just loaded into the album.

I have been meaning to write a post about my 4-month stiff neck and how its major cause is the strange Asian prediliction for beds and pillows that are like cotton-shrouded bricks. Last night we stayed for one night in a relatively luxe hotel on Cat Ba Island near Halong Bay, as part of a mini-tour... the bed was California-Emperor-sized, or something. But, just as in the most flea-bitten budget guesthouses, the mattress has all the give of a stone floor and the pillows are 5" thick and remind me of a couch my grandmother owned that was stuffed with horsehair. This morning I woke up thinking fondly of my own bed and a few weeks of physical therapy. The rest of the family is begging for massages and I'm being the bad guy and saying No, they're too expensive here.

Halong Bay in very very brief: the first day we cruised in a junk, and were stunned by how beautiful it is. The second day we kayaked, and were stunned by how polluted it is. As in all of Asia, there is plastic trash EVERYWHERE. The sad thing is that the Vietnamese just don't see it, as far as I can tell, and a conversation with our guide (who is a great guy, with excellent English, but who didn't quite seem to see what we were fussing about) suggests that the main source is not increased tourism, as you might expect, but local people who have always thrown everything into the sea but have come to rely on plastic products only in the last 20-30 years.

Apple Pie Squid

We are just finishing our stop in Halong Bay (another post, another time), and are collapsing after our dinner in the hotel. On the menu (prepaid, part of the mini-tour we booked), we had Deep Fried Squid, Hong Kong Style. It arrived looking like any other pile of breaded and deep fried squid bits, covered in a glutinous red sweet and sour sauce. But, the sauce turned out to be flavored with cinnamon and the crisp veggie sticks under the squid turned out to be apples. Very, very odd, but quite tasty too.

Walking in Hanoi

Today we took a walking tour of old Hanoi. Wow. I think I'm lucky to be alive, because I spent so much time gawking at everything that I was in definite danger of either getting run over by a motor bike or tripping into the path of a car after stubbing a toe on one of the many obstacles on the streets. Notice I say streets. Sidewalks here do exist, and in places it is even possible to walk on them. But. They are more often blocked by parked motorbikes, women selling meat or produce from baskets suspended on wooden poles, shops that overflow their storefronts, small tables and plastic stools that make up lunch spots or family dining rooms, or all of the above competing for about two square meters of space.

Imagine first deafening noise. Motor bikes revving their engines and car and truck horns honking continuously to warn smaller road users (including motor bikes, scooters, cyclos, bicycles, pedestrians, and women carrying heavy loads). On top of this is conversation and business carried out at full volume, to try to compete with the road noise. Add to this all manner of folks coming and going, with little regard for lines between street and sidewalk, and almost no regard for things like crosswalks or traffic lights. Mix in heat and humidity (though not as much as further south), dust, pollution, and random bits of garbage and loose hunks of concrete. Then, just as you should be trying to avoid stepping on the woman breast feeding her baby while serving tea at her sidewalk cafe, you are instead staring open mouthed at the square meter of gorgeous roses strapped to the back of a bicycle going by. Closely followed by the motor bike with 5 costco size packages of toilet paper perched behind two riders. And the shop which sells nothing but packing tape. A few blocks later, the shops sell nothing but metal items--tools, nuts and bolts gradually giving way to tin boxes and cooking pots. Round the corner and it's nothing but shoes. Then tourist souvenirs, then back to practical things, like fake paper money and incense for burning as offerings.

As I said, wow. We'll put some pictures up in a few days which I hope will convey some of this. In the meantime, we are off to Halong Bay for two days of exploring mother nature.

Hanoi Hilton?

We had planned to take the night train to Hanoi tonight, but we flew here this morning instead because it was almost the same price; we are now in a tiny, rather shop-worn hotel on a tiny, rather shop-worn alley in the very shop-worn Old Quarter. And they mean Old: Hanoi is planning big celebrations next year for the 1,000th anniversary of its founding.

Impressions so far: humid and hot by any temperate standards, but fresh as a daisy compared to Hue or Saigon. We walked around and gawped this afternoon, and sat on the sidewalk on the child-sized plastic chairs the Vietnamese favor while a guy hand-carved personalized ink stamps for A+D.

We will be sight-seeing tomorrow, doing back-to-back tours of Halong Bay and Sapa starting on Thursday, then back here for 4 nights on April 22.

Today marks exactly one month before we are back in Seattle...

Heat 1, Family 0

Today has been unbearably hot, and we gave up the sightseeing long before we saw what we should have seen. We are in Hue, the ancient capitol of Vietnam, and we attempted to tour the citadel and royal enclosure today. We saw some, perhaps half, and then collapsed into two cyclos to be pedaled back to our aircon hotel rooms. I looked up the temp, and it was a mere 90, with 66 percent humidity. But the "real feel" was 97 degrees.

Cooking School in Hoi An

A few days ago we went to a cooking class. It started with a drink at the cafe that operates the class. I drank a bottle of water because my stomach wasn't feeling all that well (but it felt much better later). Then we got a tour of the local market. On the tour Mom bought a new vegetable peeler. The point of the market tour was to learn what we were cooking and what various vegetables, herbs, meat and fish are used for. There was flying fish for sale. There was corn silk for sale. The guide said it's used to make soup for weddings, because it symbolizes the tying together of the couple.

After the market tour, we got on a boat going to the cooking school. Once at the school we got a brief intro and then the head chef demonstrated how to make seafood salad in a pineapple boat. The head chef was very funny, occasionally using lines like "You must treat it gently, like a lover. Me, I'm single, but I watch movies."

After the seafood salad, the chef demonstrated how to make fresh rice paper and then roll it into spring rolls. You make a rice batter by soaking a cup of white rice in two cups of water for seven hours, and then draining the water off and and adding fresh water. Then you put it in the blender for 5 to 7 minutes, until it is really smooth. To cook it, you pour the batter onto a cheesecloth stretched over a pot of boiling water and steam it for about 1 minute. To remove it you use a skewer of some form and then you put it on a plate and add your filling. The filling normally consists of some sort of meat and vegetables. Then you roll it up, and cut it into pieces, and eat.

Next, he demonstrated how to make Vietnamese pancakes. The pancake batter is the same as the rice paper batter, just with a pinch of tumeric added, and whatever meat you want. You stir it up, and pour it into a pan with oil in it, then shift the pan around until it looks somewhat cooked. Then you sprinkle chopped up spring onion and bean sprouts on top. Then you keep frying it until the bean sprouts and spring onions have sunk in a bit and are cooked in. And then you flip it over to cook it on the other side. Then you flip it a few more times, and then pour off the oil and slide it onto a plate. You take it and put it on a napkin and press the napkin on it so it removes some of the oil. Then put a piece of dry rice paper on the plate, put the pancake on that with some lettuce and herbs on top of it, then roll it up and eat.

Each time the chef showed us how to do something, we then went over to our cooking stations and tried them ourselves. We then got to eat what we made.

The last thing we learned how to cook was eggplant in clay pot. Surprisingly enough, I ate most of my eggplant, probably because it was cooked by me and I knew exactly what went into it. I tweaked the recipe a little by not putting so much chili into it or tomato.

Then we learned some food decoration, including how to make roses out of tomato peels and Vietnamese hand fans out of cucumber. My rose looked like a tulip, and my cucumber failed, but it was still fun.

The train to Hue

After a very pleasant three days in Hoi An, during which we even permitted ourselves that ultimate tourist indulgence, a cooking class, and leaned how to make our own fresh rice paper for spring rolls (yum, yum, yum), we took the train today up the coast to Hue.

Actually, we took a taxi to the Cham ruins at My Son ("mee sun"), followed by Danang train station, followed by the train to Hue. Coincidentally, I am reading Andrew Pham's return-to-Vietnam book "Catfish and Mandala," in which a German tourist describes these very ruins (a World Heritage Site) as "a pile of bricks surrounded by extortionists." This is not QUITE fair, though there is an aspect of Vietnamese culture, prominent though not universal, that seems to treats Western tourists as fair game for every scam in every way. (A taxi driver will look you in the eye and demand ten times the proper fare up front. When you say 'no meter, no taxi,' he will either shrug and walk away or shrug and turn on the meter. Then he will take you a long way round after trying to take you to his brother's hotel first. Of course, Vietnam is a very poor country - but it's interesting that in Cambodia and Lao, which are even poorer, this just doesn't happen.)

Anyway, My Son was a steam bath, and not MUCH more than a very large and very old brick pile, but atmospheric and beautiful in its way. The Cham culture was heavily Indian-influenced and flourished for a thousand years before being absorbed by the Vietnamese in the 15th century. 40 years ago there was a lot here, but the Viet Cong used the ruins as a base and the USAF then bombed the *%$@ out of them. The butterflies (dozens of species, mostly huge) were in a way more interesting than the ruins.

The Danang - Hue stretch of the train line lived up to its reputation as the most scenic in the country, clinging improbably to cliffs along the coast. Alas the train and its windows were so dirty that we experienced the vista as through a light fog. We were in "Foreigner" class (yes, really) - though 2/3 of the people were Vietnamese. Foreigner class here means that only some of the seats are broken - it was pretty seedy.

Sure enough, on arrival we had to pick the semi-honest from the total bandits among the taxi guys ("Bad hotel. I have much better. Special price.") But we made it into town and have just had good Shrimp Pho and other goodies at a hole-in-the-wall across the street from our hotel. K+R started with the induldence of an iced gin; A+D finished with the indulgence of an ice cream.

And so, to quote Samuel Pepys, to bed.

"And then my stomach said 'too much information'"

Declan, describing our dinner: "I tried a few bites of the soup, which tasted ok at first, but then tasted gross. So I ate a beef roll, and then my stomach said 'too much information' and I had to stop and wait until I decided what was making me queasy."

Earlier today we ran into a New Zealand couple we've bumped into a few times in Vietnam (we're on basically the same tourist path from Dalat to Na Trang to Hoi An), and they said they'd had a fabulous meal ("the best curry we've ever eaten") at a restaurant called The Secret Garden. A little pricey, they said, but only by local standards, and a truly amazing meal in a gorgeous setting.

How could we resist?

And it's true, the setting was gorgeous. Getting to it was part of the fun, as it involved walking down a very narrow alley way between two rows of houses, into a part of the block we would never have guessed existed. Inside the gate to the restaurant was an elegant garden, with fish pond, white cloth covered tables, and lanterns. The menu featured vietnamese food, with an upmarket flair.

But...the Star Fruit Soup (the "really gross" one) had none of the promised star fruit (nor any of the promised pineapple), just a bland broth with an aftertaste of latrine. When we complained (after several of the other dishes proved to be equally disappointing), they took the bowl back to the kitchen, stuck some pineapple into it, fluffed up the chunkies, and brought it back to the table with the admonition that "star fruit not in season".

The grilled eggplant tasted good, but Richard and I realized upon simultaneous mouthfuls that the shrimp on top were not cooked. The seafood curry was also bland, and included precisely two shrimps and one small piece of squid. There were more tomato chunks than seafood. Lest one think that shrimp are expensive ingredients to be served sparingly, yesterday we had delicious ban xeo (crepe-like savory pancakes) with half a dozen shrimp each for only $2. The beef rolls were ok, but very chewy and rather gamey. The spring rolls, which Richard ordered in his pursuit of the best, had a delicate exterior, described as "fresh rice pasta", but a gritty, dry internal texture reminiscent of hard boiled egg yolk. I'm still not sure how you can get that texture from tofu, carrots, tree ear, lettuce and herbs.

All in all, the meal was pretty bad. But, in good news, earlier in the day we had discovered a great bakery. So we got the check (quibbled over being charged for water that had never been served), and headed off to sweet paradise. Two scoops of ice cream for Declan (cinnamon and chocolate chip), passion fruit sorbet for Richard, lemon tart for me, and chocolate truffle cake for Aidan ("wow, that was just like eating a softball size truffle. I might be sick later but what a way to go").

Food in Vietnam

After falling in love with Khmer food in Cambodia, and feeling at best very ambivalent about Lao food, and being hugely disappointed with much of the food we found in Thailand, I'm just delighted to be here, eating among other things Pho (noodle soup), crispy wontons, endless varieties of noodle salad, and Bahn Mi (literally 'bread with...', a mini-baguette filled with anything from butter and jam to slices of roast pork and fresh cucumber). I am also on a mission to find the best fresh (not fried, which aren't bad either) shrimp spring rolls in Vietnam: I order them whenever they are on the menu. Always with peanut sauce, but each peanut sauce tastes different.

The Vietnamese food tastes so fresh, and does a brilliant job of what I think Thai food is best at in theory - taking bland, simple bases and studding them with little explosions of bright flavor - ginger, mint, chili, shrimp, onion, galangal.

Oh, and the beer is really cheap, but if you want to get seriously incompetent in a hurry there's Hanoi Vodka. Which, unfortunately, is pretty good.

Hoi An

We have done so much in the last few days, it's hard to know where to start. In short, we took a long bus ride from Dalat down to Na Trang. It's only 130 or so kilometers, and took nearly 6 hours. Snoozing wasn't really even possible, since the driver seemed to particularly enjoy hitting potholes. He also blasted his horn at every possible opportunity. (But that's just par for the course here, everyone blasts their horns constantly.) Na Trang was nothing special, though we had an excellent visit to a museum dedicated to the life and work of Alexander Yersin, a French man who lived in Vietnam and discovered the microbe that causes bubonic plague. One of the items on display in the museum was a letter to his mother in which he says, among other things, that he "encloses some bottles containing samples from the buboes of plague sufferers, wash your hands after reading this letter."

We spent a little time getting pummeled by the waves on the beach, and then took a night train to Hoi An. We arrived just before 5 this morning, sat outside a hotel until it opened at 6, left our luggage until we could check in at 11, and wandered the city. It's very picturesque, but we're headed for naps now. More later.

Guacamole--and Artichoke Tea

So after a little dinking around on the web, I found a blog post in which someone raved about the cold beer and chips at the Pro Shop at the Dalat Golf Club. So...after a fun touristy ride on a small train and back, and a long walk (made longer by getting slightly lost) through some very nice residential areas, we found the pro shop. And yes, they had guacamole. It wasn't the best I've ever had, and the fried flour tortilla chips were a little greasy, but I really enjoyed it. The portions were too small, but hey, I can't have everything!

Today, before renting paddle boats, we stopped for a brief refreshment break. I decided I had to finally try artichoke tea. It tasted vaguely grassy, with a slight sweet note. Nothing special, nothing revolting either. A squeeze of lime and a bit of sugar (both recommended by the waiter) resulted in a glass of sweetned lime tea.

The boys, meanwhile, ordered ice cream. Declan ordered the 4 color ice cream, but Aidan then asked the waiter what flavors it included. The list started with bean sprout and avocado. Aidan ordered chocolate, and Declan quickly changed his order.

Breakfast at the Dreams Hotel

Throughout the trip I have had a tough time going local for breakfast. I even like rice porridge, but somehow I need comfort and familiarity before 9.00 AM. Unfortunately the "free breakfast" at most budget hotels is green tea plus either rice porridge with salted shrimp-bits or a piece of toasted Wonderbread and a crispy deep-fried fried egg. So it has been a special delight in Dalat to be enjoying every morning what has to be the best budget-hotel free breakfast in Asia. Eggs however you want, bacon, endless crispy mini-baguettes with peanut butter (or Marmite; yay), platefuls of sliced mango, pineapple, papaya, avocado, tea and coffee... There's even a plate of fresh passionfruit every morning. (For the uninitiated: the inside of a ripe passionfruit looks like luminous snot, and is about the same consistency, and tastes divine.)

This hotel is also spotlessly clean and run by the friendliest, most helpful family in Vietnam. We don't want to leave! Buut the calendar calls and tomorrow (Monday) we will be taking the bus down to the coast at Na Trang before starting to head north by train for Dalat / Hoi An, then Hue, then Hanoi and Halong Bay. Having thought 3 1/2 weeks in Vietnam was almost too much, we are already making decisions about not doing X or Y so that there's time for Z, and greedily wishing we had another couple of weeks here.

Probability

If Mom is doing the homeschooling, and Declan is working on calculating probabilities, what is the probability that after 2 hours Declan retreats to his bed and pulls the covers over his head? Is it higher or lower than the probability that Mom orders a gin before dinner? Does interrupting the work on probability to determine whether Aidan correctly calculated whether Maggie, walking at 70 meters per minute, will pass Ming, walking at4o meters per minute, on their way to school in the morning, increase the likelihood that Mom will order two gins before dinner?

Hiking in Dalat

We set out today to find a mountain to hike. With the help of the woman at the front desk, we planned a route that had a taxi dropping us at the trailhead so we could hike to the top. Then back down, walk up the road to a restaurant where we could hire a boat to take us across the lake, where we could pick up the cable car that would return us to within a few kilometers of the city.

Other than not managing to find the trail up the mountain, and there being no boats, everything worked great.

In fact, we had a gorgeous 2 hour ramble through the countryside, skirting the edges of several smaller hills and admiring the farms carved out of the hillside. The foliage is mostly pine trees, with grass and rhodies underneath. Large butterflies flitted around the wetter areas. After this lovely meandering walk, we returned to the road, and headed to where the boats were supposed to be. Unfortunately, they can't be hired there. But we were able to eat our sandwiches while watching the lake, and then the nice folks at the restaurant called a taxi for us. 15 minutes later, a driver showed up, and drove us around the lake to the top of the cable car. The 2.6km long ride was stunning. It was amazing to be over the tops of the pine trees and see the hills all spread out around us. (The cable car was built in the mid-1990s, and felt clean, modern, and most important of all, safe and well maintained.) From the other end, it was a quick taxi back to our hotel. I'm now sipping tea and the boys are doing homework.

As an aside, we are reveling in the weather here. It is between 75 and 80, with very low humidity (except during the late afternoon downpours). We are wearing long pants and fleece jackets, and loving the strange sensation of walking inside to be warm, rather than to find air con.

Artichoke frustration

Dalat has the most amazing produce we've seen in any markets. All the Asian vegs, familiar and unfamiliar, but also beautiful red cabbages, zucchinis, avocados, and artichokes. The artichokes are huge, and look fabulous. But can I find them in any of the restaurants? No. I have asked several times, and have been told they could make artichoke tea, or artichoke milk shakes, but that they won't/don't cook them any other way. Arrgh. I'm fantasizing about steamed artichokes with butter and garlic.

And the avocados. You'd think some enterprising person would have figured out that western tourists would pay big money for avocados on their salads, or for guacamole. Nope. Avocado is an option at breakfast, and I've been mashing it into my baguette, but the only place we've seen it on menus is as a milk shake.

From my Notebook: Traditional Theater in SE Asia

Last night (ok, this was in Bangkok about a week ago) we went to a traditional Thai puppet show. The theater was running a section of the Thai Ramayana, the Ramakian. The Ramayana is originally from India, and contains some 6,000 verses. The Ramakian is based on the Ramayana.

The theater [called "Traditional Thai Puppet Theater(Joe Louis)"] was performing the story of the birth of Ganesha, the elephant headed god. The story runs like this: Before the beginning of the play, Satee, the consort of the Chief of the Gods, Isuan, dies. In grief, Isuan becomes a recluse and ascetic. The play opens with the Chief Demon, Taraka, petitioning Brahma, a senior god, to make him invincible, so that he might replace Isuan as master of heaven. Brahma eventually consents on the condition that the son of Isuan be able to kill Taraka. Taraka, seeing that Isuan is a childless ascetic, agrees to the condition.l

Upon obtaining his powers, Taraka invades heaven with an army of demons. The defense fails, and Indra, anothe senior god, flees to warn Isuan. First, he tells Brahma.

The scene changes. Uma, Satee's reincarnation, approaches Isuan and gives him a garland of flowers. Karmathep, god of love, shoots his arrow and Isuan and Uma fall in love. They go back to the kingdom together. Taraka, by an unexplained plot twist, has abandoned his attack on the kingdom of heaven, for the moment.

In the next scene, Isuan is preparing to go on a retreat and gives Uma a 5 pointed spear with which to defend heaven. During Isuan's absence, the demons invade again. Uma's lady in waiting sees the gods losing, and advises Uma to retreat to her bedroom and bar the doors. Uma does so. Next, she creates a child from her sweat, as she bathes in the waters of Konkka, the goddess of water. She names the child Kumarn, and instructs him to guard the doors with the 5 pointed spear.

Scene changes. Isuan and Visukam, another god, return from their retreat to find their way blocked by Kumarn. Visukam attempts to chase him away, and nearly gets killed, which enrages Isuan. He throws his trident, and severs his son's head. It is at this point that Uma appears, and she is not happy. Her grief turns to anger, causing her to turn into Kali, who is a four armed, seriously ugly, scary, angry woman. Isuan is horrified by the transformation, and promises to return the boy to life. He instructs Visukam to go north, and to bring him the head of the first living thing he finds lying down with its head pointed west.

In the next scene Visukam returns with an elephant head, Isuan reattaches it to his son, and renames him Ganesha. Indra and Ganesha leave to fight the demons. The scene changes and Indra enters with Ganesha. They destroy the demon army, and Taraka appears. He refuses to believe Ganesha is Isuan's son, as last he knew Isuan was living by himself in the mountains in a cave. Ganesha summons a naga (a many headed snake) to hold Taraka while they fight, and kills him with the five pointed spear. In the final scene Ganesha is venerated as a god of success and a patron of learning.

I was intrigued that the god of love carried a bow and shot arrows to make people fall in love. This might be 200 years of western influence showing itself, or it might be merely a coincidence. It didn't seem that the other gods bore any relation to their western counterparts, since they didn't really even appear to have western counterparts. Zeus and Jupiter throw lightening bolts, and Isuan hides in a cave in the mountains. Alternately, Hera throws a lot of lightening bolts and Uma retreats into her bedroom and bars the doors.

When Uma turned into Kali, there was a puff of smoke and a flash of light elsewhere on the stage to draw your eyes away from the puppet. This allowed for the puppeteers to change puppets, so that they could have the much bigger, and four armed, Kali, instead of the smaller two armed Uma.

I was interested by the fact that the puppeteers were clearly meant to be part of the show, but they were in uniform, not constume. Each puppet had three puppeteers, one controlling the feet, another controlling the head and body, and the third controlling the arms. The three puppeteers carried the puppet around the stage, and moved with it, stepping as the puppet stepped. The puppeteers wore traditional Thai outfits made from black cloth. There was one occurrence of an actual costume, which was when Taraka appeared after the vanquishing of the demon army. At that point, he was represented by a dancer in costume, as showing his death would have been too difficult to portray with a puppet.

In Cambodia, we saw a traditional dance. In truth, we saw a collection of dances in Cambodia: a palace dance, a fishing village dance, and a section of the Cambodian Ramayana. It was interesting how pronounced the differences were between the different dance styles in Cambodia, so it surprised me that the Thai puppets looked like miniature Cambodian dancers. Indeed the one dancer in the puppet show could have stepped right out of the Cambodian Ramayana. An aspect of Cambodian dance which is very important is the hand position; long fingers arched backwards and hands and wrists moved gracefully and deliberately. The Thai puppets had the same hand form. The feet of the puppeteers moved very deliberately too, much like the feet of the palace dancers. Indeed these similarities were pronounced enough, that I was surprised when we saw the water puppets in Vietnam, and they bore no resemblance to the Thai puppets or Cambodian dancers. If I stop to think about it, it's probably not that surprising, since back in the old days (1000 plus years ago), the Khmer ruled both Thailand and Cambodia, but I don't think they controlled Vietnam. Also, the Vietnamese puppets were not part of a Ramayana, so the stories, gods and people were not the same. I'll write more about the Vietnamese puppets later.

Breakfast

Breakfast in our hotel in Dalat is so good! It consists of all you can eat fruit, bacon, ham, baguette, tomato, avocado, vegemite, marmite, peanut butter, yogurt, cheese, butter, and jam and tea or coffee. Also you can get two eggs, any style, and passionfruit juice.

My favorite fruit is passion fruit, which when it is ripe is basically liquid. And the seeds go down as easily as liquid. The watermelon and pineapple are battling for second place on the favorite fruit list. I like the mangoes too, but not the dragonfruit. Personally, vegemite, marmite and peanut butter are disgusting. Something that makes me so happy is that the eggs don't have brown crispy bits that most Asian eggs have. Almost all the fried eggs I've gotten in Asia have brown, metalic tasting crispy bits on the bottoms, and lots of the scrambled eggs are cooked so they have brown bits too. These eggs were soft and eggy tasting. I ate passion fruit, some watermelon, some pineapple, some bacon, a baguette, two scrambled eggs, and drank a glass of passionfruit juice and a cup of tea.

In Dalat

Thanks for the comments on commenting, which we are indeed receiving. We have exactly no idea why this is set up to be so difficult. It should be straightforward and we are trying to make it so but no luck so far. Choosing an anonymous profile apparently helps. Blogger, like all Google products, is easy to use when it works but impossible to work out how to fix when it doesn't.

Anyway, we arrived yesterday in Dalat, in Vietnam's Central Highlands, after a 7-hour bus ride from Saigon. After two days spent drenched in sweat from the mere effort of breathing, it's like landing on another planet: low humidity and temps around 25 C / 75 F, with PINE trees and rather northwest-looking flowerbeds. Also the town is very hilly and had a lot of slanted roofs and spired Catholic churches - squint and you could be in the foothills of the Austrian alps.

I just posted a couple of very cool photos from a smoky Chinese Buddhist temple which we visited in Saigon. In the dim depths, with no light but a few shafts on sunlight through holes in the roof, the temperature plunged to only about 32 C/ 90 F.