It has been a great time. I stayed a few more days in Hanoi after writing my last post, and headed out towards an old (but very touristy) French hill station called Sapa, and hmingled with the Hmong people for a little bit, and visited some pretty isolated towns, and saw some amazing landscapes.
It is probably true that all mountain ranges have a distinctive appearance; my dad could certainly identify the mountains of Hawaii from a single photograph, and I could identify the Appalachians. Similarly, the Tonkinese Alps, as Westerners call the mountains of Northern Vietnam, have a very distinctive appearance: larger than the Appalachians, but still rounded: just as covered-in-green as the Appalachians, but green with a deeper hue. The subtropical vegetation is broken by areas of (green) grass and rice-paddies, so that it is rare to see a mountain completely covered in forest, as the Appalachians are. This brokenness should not, however, be described as 'spotty'. If the different classes of green areas could be described as a checkerboard in three shades of green, there would be at most four squares per mountain. Though the vegetation of these mountains is shorter than the forests of the Appalachians, it is generally more dense. I think that the deer, with no predators left, eat all of the underbrush of the Appalachians, causing the relative sparseness of vegetation on the forest floor.
A distinctive feature of the mountains of the older islands of Hawaii is how clear it is that water has been the main force shaping them over the millions of years. The shape of the Tonkinese Alps is notably less fluvial.
The agricultural practices of this area of Vietnam are also very interesting. Along the sides of the mountains there are terraced rice paddies, just like you've seen in pictures. Cultivating these paddies looks like incredibly difficult work. Building them in the first place requires basically amounts to changing the landscape of a whole entire mountainside. When that task is complete, cultivating the rice can involve walking waist-deep in the mud, directing your ox has he plows, or does some kind of other kind of work, something I saw several times. I like the fact that, if one were to make a topographical map of these areas, the map would be 100% accurate in the places where the rice paddies are. Another amazing sight was when, travelling along a ridge, there would be a small or medium sized hill in the valley that was completely covered in rice, so that the top of the hill was a single paddy. It looked like Legos.
They grow corn in these mountains as well, and the way they plant it is also interesting. When being driven, in the Eastern US, I like to look out the window, and look down the spaces between the long rows of corn as I go by. Here, the corn was planted densely, but haphazardly, which was a bit unsettling. It was also planted on some very steep areas of the mountains, without terracing. "How do they do that?", I thought.
I stayed a night in a Hmong village. They are very kind, but also very poor. The food that they served me (I was paying them) was actually not very much (it was enough, though, and I was satisfied), and it is possible that the shortness of the Hmong is caused by their diet as well as their genes. That is just a guess though, I would not take it too seriously. The Hmong have probably learned English better than the ethnic Vietnamese, and it serves as a common language between the ethnic minorities that live in the mountains. I was even surprised when I was able to exchange greetings with with a Hmong girl who was my age... in Spanish!
As I mentioned, here are many other ethnic minorities in these mountains besides the Hmong (such as the Dzao and Thai), all of who have their own clans, identified by a color. Each ethnic group has their own language (with dialects for each clan), clothing, and customs. The Hmong have colorful clothing, and the women wear combs in their hair. The Dzao women have headdresses made of red cloth. I saw many other styles of clothing, but I regrettably did not learn what ethnicities belong to which style of clothing. Particularly striking was one ethnic group where the old women wore majestic black headdresses, but many of these people seriously did not like having their picture taken.
I bought a few Hmong handicrafts, and their weaving reminds me of that of the people of Guatemala, examples of which can be seen at my house in Arlington.
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After doing all of that, I came back to Hanoi for a day before a one-day, two night trip to Halong Bay, from which I returned today. The highlight of this day was the water puppet theater, located across the street from the lake that I mentioned in an earlier post (the lake where I bought the plums). I would have to say that the water puppets were the most amusing thing that I have seen in my life. I use the word 'amusing' in a very literal sense, and I acknowledge that the word 'amusing' is not taken very seriously these days. We have all seen a movie or a TV show where, right before the villain is about to vanquish the hero, the villain goes into a prolonged speech about how 'amusing' the efforts of the hero efforts of the hero and his friends are, which in turn, gives the hero a chance to make a miraculous escape, and ultimately prevail. In contrast, the water puppets were actually entertaining, and caused me to grin and lightly chuckle throughout the show.
The theater was a about two thirds of the size of a typical American movie theater, and the stage consisted of a shallow pool of water, about the width of the singles court in tennis, and about third as long. On the side of the stage opposite the audience there was a screen with it's bottom edge barely submerged in water, behind which stood the puppeteers. They operated the puppets using long poles which extended towards the audience from below the screen, so the that the puppets would move and dance on the surface of the water. These poles must have been rigged with wires that controlled the finer movements of the puppets. This form of puppetry extends back in history for about 1000 years, and was originally performed on the rice paddies surrounding Hanoi.
To the left of the stage, from the audience's perspective, was a platform upon which sat an ensemble of musicians who played traditional Vietnamese music which included an introductory piece, and accompaniment for each act of the puppet show.
The ensemble was dressed in traditional Vietnamese clothing, and was led by two female singers who also played small percussion instruments, and included a flautist (who played a traditional wooden flute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1o), a traditional Vietnamese zither or dulcimer, a violin-like instrument that consists of a single string, and a sound box at the base (perhaps one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Vietnamese_musical_instruments#Bowed), and a drummer/percussionist who had a drumset consiting of many traditional Vietnamese drums and percussion instruments. Perhaps there was a banjo-like instrument as well. In any case, all of the instruments are certainly contained on the main traditional Vietnamese instruments Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Vietnamese_musical_instruments#Bowed.
The music, especially the flute, part, was rhythmically complex, and all of the musicians were well-trained. I would not be surprised if the music was based on a scale similar to the Western pentatonic scale (with added semi-tones). The singing had the particular harsh twangy harshness that can be found in east-Asian music (like Chinese opera), but it is a harshness which I actually tend to enjoy.
The show was divided into fifteen separate, unrelated acts. The program said that hundreds of traditional water puppet acts exist.
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Spoilers contained below.
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The one called 'Buffalo Boy Playing the Flute' was my favorite. It just consisted of a boy... on a buffalo... playing the flute... but the way that they made the buffalo bounce in and out of the water, and turn it's head was incredibly realistic.
Another good one was called 'Catching Fish', in which two fishermen frustratedly tried to catch fish which jumped in and out of the water. They got angry at each other, and started trying to catch each other, and in the end one fisherman caught the other in his trap at the exact moment that the other fisherman actually caught a fish.
In the Dance of the Phoenixes, two different colored phoenixes swam around, breathing fire from their mouth. Then they sort of went underwater for a little bit, and there was smoke caused by dry ice under the water, and when they popped up, one of them had laid an egg! It then hatched, and a little phoenix swam around with the two big phoenixes.
Also striking was the "Tale of the Returned Sword". It has to do with the legend concerning the lake across from the theater. Back in the day, when the Chinese or someone was invading, the gods gave the emperor of Vietnam a majestic sword, which allowed the Vietnamese armies to drive out the invaders. When it was over, a GREAT TORTOISE arose from the lake, and asked for the sword back. This is the reason that the lake is called (translated from the Vietnamese) the Lake of the Restored Sword. The tortoise puppet was painted golden, and had a deep, impressive voice.
No one can deny that the Vietnamese have shown incredible fortitude in the face of foreign invaders.
The final act was a dance of four sacred animals, and included a dragon, a phoenix, the tortoise mentioned earlier, and a mythical creature that is translated into English as unicorn, but was probably one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qilin.
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End spoilers.
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For 60,000 Dong, or 3USD, it was good entertainment.
So, anyway, I just got back from Halong bay, and I am going to catch the night bust to Hue, another ancient capital, from which I will go to Hoi An, a place that is reportedly worth seeing, after which I will fly out from Da Nang. This will take place in the space in about four or five days.
