Hi there,
O and I have just returned from a wonderful trip to Mai Chau, one of the earliest sights of modern Vietnamese tourism. During the height of the war, a guy starting hosting people in his home from all over the world. We met him today, 83 years old, with pictures of Ho Chi Minh and others on the walls of his home.
We slept well under mosquito netting on thin pads over bamboo caning as the floor of a guesthouse on stilts. Waking this morning, it was quite foggy as we peeked out a window right above our head onto a pond where the evening before we’d watched kids playing on bamboo rafts; today we saw only a white/gray vision punctuated by a two new blossoms from the water lilies.
Unbelievable landscape. If I painted you a picture, you’d think I was making it all up.
This evening we took a cab into central Hanoi. We went to a bookstore to get a guidebook—sadly my advance planning of buying a guidebook in Chicago worked well, but broke down when I left the guidebook in Chicago. We got a great book with history of Hanoi and I got a book on the 20-year new economic plan of Vietnam—a mixture of socialism and market economy. Seems to be working pretty well.
J and O
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