Tam Coc & Hoa Lu

After returning to Hanoi we took a one day trip to Tam Coc and Hua Lu where we visited a Buddhist temple and had a rowing boat and bicycle trip. This was a typical Vietnamese tour in terms of being largely unpredictable even though the hotel staff had described it to us. Not least we originally thought we were visiting a national park but that turned out to be a separate tour that is only combined with ours by adding a second day. There were more surprises...

There was quite a long journey by bus to get there with the usual unsolicited shopping stop. This shopping stop was run for the benefit of victims of the American 'Agent Orange' bombing in the Vietnam war. Many children had since been born with deformities and some of them, now grown up, were working in this centre to create tapestry work for sale to tourists. It was a sobering sight to see them working with such disabilities. Although it was clear that they were being looked after we were hoping also that some of the obviously large profits from the shop were reaching them too. It was obvious that much of the craft work on sale there were also not made by those people.

The temple visit was quite brief but picturesque and I confess I cant remember much of the history and could not easily understand the local people's explanations because of accent and translation barriers, but it was on the site of what seem to be numerous ancient capitals.

The boat trip was unusual. The local people row traditional boats for various purposes and they row facing forwards using their feet! The oars were cunningly fixed to the sides of the boat with short ropes that automatically twisted the oar to the right position during each rowing stroke. Many more of these boats have been built in the same style to take a couple of tourists on a one and a half hour trip down the river and back, through the karst hills jutting straight out of the water and every now and then passing under them!

The cycling was through the same area as the river with views over the rice fields and smallholdings. We saw what looked like a large flowering tree that, in the binoculars, turned out to be a tree full of roosting squawking Egrets.

It was interesting to see the building style alongside the highway to and from Hua Lu. We saw very tall thin houses just like in the built up streets in Hanoi, except most of these had no neighbours. Presumably the plots available to most people are quite small like city plots, so they build as much as they can in their small space and eventually all the gaps get filled in.