The 2 hour train ride to Ninh Binh was very close to torture. A loudspeaker that was broken, of course, mumbled on and on very loudly. Then “Rail TV” came on and it was a comedy act and they ended up screaming and yelling. It was hot in there and not exactly comfortable. Then we got to our “hotel” Chezbeo Home Stay. I laid in bed for a couple of hours and slept and just listened to the absolute quiet. We are the farthest bungalow out and it is so amazingly quiet. It takes 8 and a half minutes to walk and is over 6/10 of a mile. You have to cross 4 bamboo bridges and quite a long bamboo “board walk”, not my favorite part of the walk.

(Mute your sound for the video as the wind in the microphone is fairly obnoxious.)

Our view of the mountains is spectacular.

Originally we were going to make this trip a slow travel trip and it hasn’t really turned out that way. So this may be the test: 3 days here with basically nothing to do…can we deal with it??

Well, it turns out that this “rest” stop was just what we needed. Buzz came down with some chest congestion and he was in bed resting a fair bit on the second day here. I had brought my sketch book and watercolors with me and have only opened them once, in India, in the first 2 weeks. So I hauled out my watercolors and spent the afternoon playing. It is not ready for the Louvre but I had fun. This is the view from our back porch.

The water lillies are fantastic. They open at night and are closed by about 1:00 in the afternoon. Open or closed, they soothe the soul.

We are a little bit of a captive audience here. A taxi into town costs about $5, which is a lot here. So we ate most of our meals at the restaurant here. Not great food but it served the purpose. And it was always comedic watching these young men who work at the home stay, trying to keep up with orders and people checking in and out, with a limited knowledge of English and no guests speaking Vietnamese. One morning Buzz ordered a chocolate pancake and I got my banana pancake delivered and I had eaten it and he still did not get his. So we finally asked about it, the “waiter” looked at the chocolate pancake he had delivered to the table next to ours 10 minutes ago; they had not touched it so he reached like he was going to serve us that pancake. We both said, “no, fresh” and he just shrugged and walked back to the kitchen. Another time, he put an order in front of Buzz, so he started eating it and about half way through, the waiter set something else in front of Buzz and we realized that the first dish was mine…now half eaten!

Vietnamese coffee…by the time it drips down, it is ice cold but strong enough to wake the dead!

Our shower is right out in nature so we have only taken one shower since being here because it has been chilly and very windy; we would freeze our little toucas’ off!!

We ventured into town on the third day here to buy our train tickets for the next leg and to visit a restaurant I read about that serves…….HAMBURGERS!!!! In India, the meat is so weird, I was basically a vegetarian the whole month and Buzz ate less meat than in his life! Vietnam’s meat is not butchered as weird as India, but is usually tough. Chookies serves actual western burgers with lettuce and tomato and mayo and bacon and a fried egg. Their steak fries were fabulous (side note: we have had a lot of fries, everyone seems to serve them) and the hamburger was very passable. The beef is still nothing like our beef but it was a very good substitute! We skipped dinner because the hamburger was quite large and held us over. (another side note: I am dying for a latte right now with the fallish weather  this morning sitting on our porch soaking in all the mountain views)  

We finally got around to watching the movie Ghandi last night. We tried in India but we were either too busy, too tired, or had crappy or expensive wifi. Great movie and it really helped us to understand India a little better.

Our train ride to Dong Hoi was one for the books. When we booked the seats, we asked for soft sleeper, AC, lower bunks. The ticket lady assured us they were the lower bunks. Well…you guessed it…upper bunks with one little foothold to step on and up. No way, Jose. So we found the conductor and got the situation through to him and he talked to the people in the car and they moved for us; how sweet. So one of the travelers was a retired doctor and he loved to talk (as we have discovered most Indians and Vietnamese do!). A couple of hours into the trip when the two other passengers whose ears he had talked off left, he started in on Buzz. He showed him his doctor’s credentials, medicines, photos of his grandson, videos of his grandson, vacation photos, and finished off the show with a video of Obama. Mind you, the doctor spoke hardly a word of English. It was hysterical.

So he got off and a young man got on. His English was also limited but when he discovered that we were American, he was very happy. “I love America.” So he asked if we wanted a beer and he said he would buy and Buzz said no, he would buy. So finally the Vietnamese guy gets up and walks out of the car and comes back a few minutes later with 4 beers and 4 cups of ice. The beer is not cold on the train…and actually many other places. So we accepted the gift of beers and he started to toast us, quite loudly. My radar started clicking about now. Then the snack cart came buy and he asked us if we wanted corn on the cob. Well, I had traveled to the dining car an hour before and all they had was snacks and corn on the cob so that was our lunch and we had our fill of that. We thanked him and politely refused. He kept insisting and we kept saying no. He ended up buying the corn and peeling it for us and we just put it aside. So he is drinking his beer and the toasts are getting louder. He offered for me to lie down on the sleeper by patting the mattress next to him but he never indicated that he would then move. He did this several times. Then the weird hit the fan. The conductors came around and asked if we wanted to order dinner. This was a 9 hour train ride so we said yes and he jumped up and pulled out his wallet to pay for our dinner. So we started the  “thank you, that is very kind of you but you are not paying for our dinner” routine. He was very insistent. He paid the porter and the porter moved on. So I got up (Buzz was kind of trapped in behind the table) and headed toward the corridor to go catch the porter. The Vietnamese man grabbed my arm with both hands to stop me. I gave him the “look of death” and told him in no uncertain terms, language barrier or not, to get his hands off of me. Buzz grabbed his arm and tried to pull him off and I finally jerked free. I went to get the porter who had been very nice to us and spoke a little English to tell him that this man was grabbing me and we wanted out of his car. The porter calmed the man down and said he would move the man because he was going a shorter distance than us. The man kind of put his hands up in resignation and laid down to go to sleep. He slept until it was time for him to get off the train. Really freaky!