Asia 2008

I’ve changed my mind about travelling by motorbike. I started taking xe om around Hanoi when I gave up on the taxi thieves. Two wheels - it’s the only way to travel.

Taking a xe om through the streets of a city is a nerve-wrecking and thrilling experience. Mopeds, cars, trucks and cyclists pour through the streets on independent courses. The flow is chaotic. They have to weave past pedestrians, forced on to the roads by the absence of pavements. Traffic lights – many built with money from the French government - are obeyed only at some junctions. Those who want to turn left do not wait for the opposing traffic to end; they just dive in. So the traffic flows through in four directions. To get through, drivers have to judge their own and predict others’ positions to within a couple of inches. On the whole they do, although I’m always conscious that my knees stick out at the sides of the moped more than the average passenger’s.

While the traffic is a marvel to behold, the Vietnamese drivers are not displaying wonderful skill. On the contrary: they are shit drivers. Their skills in positioning vehicles are mitigants born of the complete absence of any useful driving ability.

You see some driving that is so crazy, so apparently suicidal, that you have to laugh. Almost no-one – truck driver, biker, cyclist – looks before pulling into traffic. No-one uses the mirrors. Vehicles approaching any other vehicle from behind therefore have to hoot constantly. On a highway the average bus driver will probably give a prolonged blast once every five seconds during the day. You know when you are within 200 metres of a road in Vietnam because you hear the horns.

It is misleading to say that they drive on the right. The inner lane of a main road is, in practice, reserved for bikes and mopeds going the other way. So you have to cycle in the second lane. In order to overtake, vehicles will use any part of the road, including the part you are on. Speeding, weaving, under-age driving and drink-driving are also normal.

Most of the time they get away with it. But not always: Vietnam has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world. Nearly 13,000 deaths were recorded by the government in 2006. By way of comparison, in Great Britain, the number of people killed in road accidents in the same year was 3,172 (source: DfT). So that’s a lot of dead people who shouldn’t be.

According to the World Bank, Vietnam has an official fatality rate of 8.3 persons per 10,000 registered vehicles, an injury rate of 10.7 persons per 10,000 vehicles and an accident rate of 12 cases per 10,000 registered vehicles. Only China has a worse record. In OECD countries the average is 1 to 2 fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles. (Source: FIA Foundation press release of 2005.)

This is partly because they have more crashes, and partly because deaths per crash are higher. According to a BMJ article in 2002, the high rates in Vietnam and elsewhere are due to frequent crashes involving multi-passenger vehicles, including buses, trucks, and minibuses.

Road traffic injuries in developing countries mostly affect pedestrians, passengers, and cyclists. According to the BMJ article, in the US over 60% of road crash fatalities occur in drivers, whereas drivers make up less than 10% of the deaths due to road traffic injuries in the least motorised countries. In Vietnam, motorcycles account for 59% of injuries in traffic collisions, bikes 24%, pedestrians 11% and motor vehicles only 4%. (Source: WHO).

According to the WHO, there are several risk factors in the VN figures, such as non-use of helmets by two-wheeler users, speed, poor road conditions, traffic mix, alcohol and poor visibility of road users. Other risk and impact factors might also be suggested: seat belts, corruption and non-enforcement of traffic laws, absence of emergency facilities.

It is getting worse. In 1990 the VN rode bicycles. Then the country started getting rich fast. Within a decade, most people in Hanoi and HCMC were using mopeds that they didn’t know how to ride. Now there are 20 million motorbikes on the streets each day, and the number is rising fast. (Most people in the countryside still use bikes.)

So fatalities are rising. There were 4,907 in 1994; 11,900 in 2003; 13,000 in 2006.

Now Vietnam is on the threshold of an income level at which large numbers of road users switch to cars. Within the next decade income per head will have doubled, and Hanoi may look something like Bangkok does now: choked.

The cars might be safer for their drivers but they are more dangerous for everyone else. In developing countries, cars are a status symbol at least as much as a means of transport (mopeds are much more practical in cities.) SUVs are prevalent, and they are usually driven by idiots. I have been run off the road by several.

In 2000 only 3% of riders wore helmets (source here). Vietnamese motorcycle helmets were hot and heavy, and known as ‘rice cookers’. In this climate you need a helmet that doesn’t cover the face. Fashion concerns also limited usage (really). Head trauma was, therefore, very common. (Head trauma usually means comas, paralysis, vegetables.) According to Greig Kraft in the article just cited, every day in 2000, 25 riders were killed and over 50 others suffered brain damage or other permanent disabilities. Their injuries absorbed more than 75 per cent of urban hospital budgets.

An NGO called the Asia Injury Prevention Foundations, run by Kraft, stepped in to manufacture cheap, ventilated helmets called Protec and to sponsor the provision of free helmets for children, TV adverts and billboards promoting helmets.

Even so, fatalities have continued to rise as more people switch to motorised transport.

The government belatedly passed a law on 15 December 2007, and most riders now wear helmets. The fine is 150,000 dong, about $10 – enough to deter. Serious traffic injuries fell by 50% within weeks. A similar helmet law was tried in 2001, requiring helmets on highways outside cities, but protests killed it. The fine for violation was very low, and it was not enforced.

The next stated priority for the WHO is drink driving. They must also be considering a campaign for cycle helmets, not least since perhaps half of cyclists are children.

One day, perhaps, the government will set and enforce high standards for driving tests. And a couple of decades after that, the Vietnamese will be able to drive.

I haven't been able to access the travellerspoint website since arriving in Huế because it is too slow. Until now. So a quick update. On St George’s Day it poured down. I stayed in my room, catching the wifi from a hotel next door, finding out traffic accidents statistics and bird populations (more of which later). The day before yesterday it merely rained. I took a bike and visited the Citadel.

While I was there, my camera reset its numbering to 0001. I had taken my 10,000th photo with it. More to the point, I have taken 8,200 since the end of June 2007, and 4,000 in the last seven weeks. It is accelerating like a drug habit.

Yesterday I took an organised tour north to see the Demilitarised Zone, DMZ. There were perhaps 35 of us on the bus so it wasn’t a very individual experience. We set off at 6 and returned at 6, and we spent nearly all day on the bus. With the exception of two sites, we only stopped for 10 or 15 minutes and the sites we visited.

The first exception was Khe Sanh, which did its best to present a story of heroes and martyrs against cowards. There was little there other than the museum; the Americans blew the place up when they abandoned it, and the locals stripped the remaining concrete after the war.

The second was the tunnels at Vịnh Mốc, north of the Ben Hai river. Unlike the tunnels 1,000 km south of here at Cu Chi, these tunnels were not used for fighting in. They were used for several years for living in. The villagers had to go underground because the Americans were bombing the area so much. They built a set of tunnels at three depths. Branching off the tunnels were little niches; this is where families lived. There was a maternity room. 17 babies were born in the tunnels. It was the only site really worth travelling to unless you have some emotional link with the war.

Yesterday I was monstrously hung over after drinking with some people from the tour: Magnus and Sara from Scotland, Kate from England and Robert from Amsterdam. We had half a bottle of vodka each and several beers. I think the vodka had formaldehyde in it because I felt poisoned all day.

At 7 pm I went back to the Citadel for the third time. They have a 'Royal Palace by Night’ programme that runs about twenty days a year. I wasn’t sure what it involved, but the ticket cost only 55,000 dong.

Passing through the main gate, Ngo Mon, I walked over the emperor’s bridge, passing between two goldfish ponds. Smiling, silk-clad women holding lanterns lined the bridge. I joined some people sitting in front of the Thai Hoa palace. We watched a show of music and dancing. It was fun, although not the sort of thing I would want to see more than once.

Then I wandered along paths within the Imperial Enclosure, illuminated by paper lanterns. The atmosphere was enchanting. I had tea at the Pleasure Pavilion in the Queen Mother’s complex. I took off my sandals and sat on a seat about six inches from the ground. Vietnamese tea, blessedly weaker than usual, was served from china cups decorated with chư nôm writing. I ate candied ginger and nougat. Tea was served formally by a young woman with a beatific smile. Her name is Dung – pronounced Zoong in Hanoi but Jung here -, she is twenty, a student in Huế, cute as a chocolate button. I had eight cups.

Then I had dinner at the Lạc Thiện restaurant. Lewis Moody and Ben Kay had eaten there too; their photos were on the walls. The food was excellent and cheap, and the meal was fun. The proprietor, who is mute and, I think, deaf, communicated more easily with me than those Vietnamese who can speak. He gave me a bottle opener: a small plank with a nail embedded. He showed me an album of photos sent by previous customers, all taken of them with a Lạc Thiện bottle opener, in places all over the world. One couple were standing in front of King’s College, Cambridge - my old college.

*****

Bird species

The UK is a bird-friendly place. We don’t eat a lot of game. Shooting birds – a very common activity in Italy, Spain and France – is reserved for relatively few places and few people. The UK is also a very popular destination for migratory birds. And it hosts a quarter (writing from memory) of Europe’s sea birds. So you would expect to see a lot of species in the UK. The British Ornithologists’ Union’s British List for 2006 recorded 572 species.

307 species of birds are listed in Cúc Phương National Park alone. 840 or so are listed in Vietnam, and 1,000-odd in Thailand.

*****

A recipe

In Ninh Bình I ate stir-fried squid. Chop squid into small pieces. Add chopped spring onion, onion and dill. Stir-fry. That’s it. Delicious.

Except it probably had MSG in it. Monosodium glutamate has had a bad press in the last ten or twenty years. It gives some people headaches. For example, at cookery class in Luang Prabang, Izzy and Marla understandably demurred for that reason. We used chicken stock instead.

MSG is described in English ingredients lists as ‘flavour enhancer’. But that is misleading. It is a flavour: umami. It is the fifth taste, the others are sweet, sour, bitter and salt. Specialised umami receptors on the tongue are stimulated by glutamates. Miso soup tastes like umami. Umami tastes succulent and savoury; indeed, umami means ‘savouriness’ in Japanese. Anchovies and marmite also have plenty of it. I adore it.

Umami was identified by Professor Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. He also identified and isolated MSG. A genius. Since MSG doesn’t do me any harm, I’ve decided to cook with it sometimes when I get back

I travelled to Huế overnight by bus. The journey was absolutely vile and I am a wreck. So I am just cruising the town drinking coffees. I’ve got into the habit of drinking cà phê sưa – coffee with milk. Made with condensed milk, it is strong and sweet. A filter is set over the glass, and the dark coffee drips on to the milk. The two layers don’t mix, so it looks like a Guinness upside down. I don’t like it much, but it imparts the necessary drug dose. It’s better iced.

They have power shortages here. There is no power in the mornings, but there is in the evenings. Or maybe it alternates. I didn't understand my instructions.

*****

Anyone who might be European, American or Japanese goes through Hanoi besieged by taxi-thieves, touts, hucksters, hustlers, hawkers, pushers, pimps and parasites. Actually, not the penultimate as far as I know, but I needed a list. So when anyone talks to you, you instantly think “What does s/he want from me?” And you immediately say “No thanks.” It's difficult to be open when 99% of people just want a piece of you.

I have to admit that I'm finding it hard to like the majority of Vietnamese. There have been many exceptions, notably tourists guides like Tinh at Hạ Long Bay, and all the guys at the hotel in Ninh Bình. But there has been too much naked grasping. It's really tedious going through life as a walking wallet.

Sometimes – but not often, sadly – cynicism lets you down. First was when I used a facility on Lake Hoàn Kiếm. As soon as I walked out, a woman spoke to me. “No, thank you,” I said. But she persisted and I lost patience: “I do not want!” I said, voice raised, in Vietnamese. Turned out, of course, that she was the attendant simply trying to levy the standard fee.

Second was when two young women approached me, at roughly the same spot. “Do you have five minutes?” Well, I have a year. They said they were students. But I assumed the five minutes would involve me listening to some story and then parting with my money, so I walked on. But they persisted, and it turned out they simply wanted me to look over an English assignment – they are training to be interpreters and had a rather difficult piece to listen to and translate - and to practise their English. (How did they know I wasn’t French? They didn’t.)

In fact several people have now approached me wanting to practise their English. That’s fine by me, so long as they only want to practise their English; half the time they want a gift as well. Really the only Vietnamese that tourists are likely to talk to other than touts of one sort or another are people wanting to practise their English, and tourist guides, and other tourists.

All of my tourist guides so far in Vietnam have had degrees in English. Here, the skill with the greatest economic value added seems to be languages: English and Chinese. So, many of the smart people are likely to be studying languages.

The Huế hassle has already started. Not only do moto-taxi and cyclo drivers assail you at every corner, but here the human mosquitoes have a different tactic from in Hanoi: they engage you in conversation. Maybe because we are south of the DMZ here, so more English is spoken. “Where you from?” first. Then “How long are you here?” Etc. One cyclo driver followed me for ten blocks. But it’s not really possible to ignore someone who smiles and asks you where you’re from, even if you know it’s only a preliminary to a sell. I just tell them at an early stage that I do not want a xe om or cyclo. And if that doesn't work, I'm within my rights to tell them to eff off.

As is probably clear, I'm fed up with it.

*****

On a much better note, congratulations to Vicki and Hasan, who now have a son, Kamran.

*****

Are you married?

One of the first questions asked of all people in Southeast Asia.

The only proper state for an adult, especially one of my seniority, is to be married. So in Vietnamese, you do not say ‘I am single’. You say, ‘I am not yet married’.

*****

To anyone going to Hanoi I offer the following:

1. Don’t take taxis, unless you telephone for them first. The meters are usually fixed.

2. Take the motorcycle taxis, xe om. 10,000 dong for a journey of a few blocks; more if going more than, say, 2 km.

3. Consider staying outside the Old Quarter. West Lake and its neighbour lake Truc Bach are nice spots. The government quarter east of the station isn’t bad. Just go to the Old Quarter if you want to shop or arrange tours.

4. Go to the Ethnology Museum.

5. Minimise your time in Hanoi.

On Saturday morning a week ago I headed east to Hạ Long Bay in a minibus with three women in their early thirties: Antje, Inga, and Jule. I had booked a trip on a tour operated by a Hanoi travel agent.

They are from Frankfurt, and speak good but not perfect English, so it is easier for them to talk in German. So I have learnt some German by the passive smoking method. Listening to their soft Frankfurt accents made me feel really ignorant, forcing them to talk English, so I’d better learn some upon return (I have more chance of actually learning some German than bloody Vietnamese). The best thing I learnt was “ear worm” – a good phrase for that tune in your head that won’t go away. In return I taught them “brown trousers moment”.

Our guide is Tinh. He is 27 and has a degree, of course, in English. He is a good chap, and extremely enthusiastic, and proud of his country.

Hạ Long means descending dragon. The old name for Hanoi, dating from 1010, is Thanh Long, ascending dragon. The islands of the bay were created when the dragon landed, carving out valleys. And why would you want to argue with such a poetic explanation?

Hạ Long city seems a bit of a hole. The port is chaos: tens of junks, hundreds of tourists. But after a minor delay to sort out ticketing errors (the difference amounting to 10,000 dong) the four of us have lunch on a large junk capable of accommodating 16. They are nearly vegetarian, at least while in Vietnam, so I get most of the junk food.

After lunch we set engine, and motor past lumps of limestone, looking like teeth (or, occasionally, cakes) dropped on to a plate of custard. The magnificent scenery is the point of the trip.

Like the landscape at Sapa, and at the Perfume Pagoda, and around Ninh Bình, it is karst. The whole country seems to be karst.

As far as I know, karst is a landscape of half-dissoved soluble rock, usually limestone. The surface and fractures are dissolved by mildly acidic rainwater. There are lots of caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers.

The original Karst – with a definite article and a capital letter – is above Trieste. People there speak Slovenian, and in Slovenian, it is Kars. In Italian it is Carso. The Austrians – temporary possessors of that part of the world where Teuton meets Slav and Latin – called it Karst. But the karst in Vietnam is like nothing I have seen in Europe.

The main island, Cát Bà, is surrounded by floating fishing villages. People row between house and fish farm.

We stopped late afternoon for a spot of kayaking – actually canoeing, in pairs. C2, in the code. Although it was quite fun, it was pretty pointless. It would be a good way to paddle around the many caves around Cát Bà (woman island), but we just paddled around a bit. I would have liked to have done it on my own, and for longer.

After canoeing we switched to another boat, the second of four or five during the trip. Each had a special function: the first was our lunch boat, the second the post-kayaking boat. The boat took us to our private island, Cát Ông (man island), staffed by four or five young guys and a young woman, for us four. This ratio is normal in Vietnam, where underemployment is rife and labour cheap.

There is a central pavilion, with sofas and a bar, and half a dozen bamboo beach huts equipped with electricity – perfect. This is mine. At high tide the balcony got wet.

On this holiday I have been drinking cocktails, which I seldom enjoy, simply because the prices are absurdly low. More of the same here.

There are lots of Alsatians around the place. In German they are not named after a former province; they are ‘sheepdogs'. One of the dogs is obsessed with rocks. It thinks of rocks and nothing else; wakes up and thinks of rocks; sleeps and dreams of rocks. And on this rock I will build my life. Every person it meets, you can see it thinking “will this two-leg dog play rocks with me?” And if you do, oh bliss. Canine nirvana.

Dinner is merely adequate, save for one of the best shrimps, beach-barbequed, that I have ever tasted. After a day on the water we are tired and hit the hay immediately, and fall asleep to the sound of the waves. I sleep under a mosquito net for the first time I can remember.

At breakfast the next day a large buzzard, or some such, was circling the beach. 49 falconiforms are listed for Vietnam, so I am none the wiser.

We took a third boat to the harbour near Viet Hai village (Viet sea) on Cát Bà, past lots of fish farms and people rowing in their front to front way. To get to the boat we were each ferried by canoe. Tinh took me.

We walked five km along a road to Viet Hai village.

The cicadas were very loud, and I heard birdsong for the first time in ages.

Then we climbed a rocky and slippery path to Navy Peak, maybe 270m high. The climb was not so difficult, but the humidity is high in Vietnam, and higher still in forests, so we were dripping at the top. I’m sure the view from the summit was delightful, but we were attacked by mosquitoes and did not linger. This is Inga flicking her towel at the mosquitoes. One might as well order the waves to retreat.

After a huge lunch at Viet Hai we took the boat back to Cát Ông. The wind had got up and I got seasick.

On land I played fetch with the lithophilic dog. In its transports of delight, its teeth came into contact with my hand. I don’t think its teeth marked, let alone pierced the skin, but it made me stop nevertheless. A single bite would mean a trip back to Hanoi and several injections. My rabies injections would just give me more time to be treated. Even a scratch or a lick can transmit rabies if you have a cut. But I think the dog was merely deeply stupid and obsessive-compulsive rather than mad, so I chanced it. No symptoms so far, beyond my usual aversion to unadulterated water.

The wind got up on the final day. The girls’ boat trip was cancelled, and then my bike ride was cancelled too because of the storms. Lightning struck about 150 metres away while we were on the boat. So we just minibused, very slowly, to take the daily hydrofoil from the port in the afternoon.

We stopped along the way to throw stones from a cliff. The tide was a quarter of a mile out. This was my attempt to recreate a famous painting of his wife and of Anna Ancher by P S Krøyer, which hangs in the Skagensmuseum at the northernmost tip of Jutland. It should be retrievable somewhere around here.

Actually the light was nothing like that in Skagen, so I am not sure why that came to mind.

Then we visited a cave that had been turned into a military hospital by the VC during the American War. There was a small concrete swimming pool. The largest cave was turned into a cinema.

We ate a few yards from the war memorial near the port. We shared some clams, with a sweet chilli sauce, with the various Vietnamese men around the place – our driver, tour guide, guys from the resort and from the restaurant. I’ve never eaten better.

We helped it down with Hanoi Vodka, steeped in the leaves of a local plant that Tinh said cures headaches (salicylic acid – aspirin – came from willows. It’s much more plausible than tiger penis or bear gall bladder). This was a bit like a flavoured Russian vodka, and we drank it à la russe – very quickly. Our driver not excluded. You say “tram van tram” [ie, 100%] or “mot, hai, ba, cho!” before drinking. I had half a dozen shots.

Then we had lunch: prawns, potatoes, greens with garlic, fish balls with lemongrass, chicken with lemongrass. All simple and delectable; the cook (female, invisible, indoors) was an unheralded genius.

Ninh Bình itself is, as far as I can see, just a provincial town stretching for a couple of miles down a large dual carriageway. But there is plenty to see around it, which has reminded me why I am travelling. I’m staying at the Xuân Hoa Hotel, where the room is not bad ($12) and the owners are very friendly. The hotel is named after the owner and his wife, but Xuân Hoa also means spring flower. I think.

Ninh Bình is famous for its goat meat. I have had it here twice and it wasn’t very good – nothing like a Caribbean curry. There is snake on the menu but you have to order it. I tried doing so, but the cost makes no sense for a single portion: 800,000 dong, which is 16x the price of my usual dinner here.

On Thursday I took a taxi motorbike 45km to Cúc Phương National Park. There I saw the Primate Rescue Centre before heading 20km inside the park to check in. I stayed the night and walked on both days before heading back, exhausted, to Ninh Bình. The park was wonderful, even though I was eaten alive by mosquitoes. I was going to say countless infinities of mosquitoes, which is of course not true. But say there are 10 mosquitoes per square metre in the park (and I can tell you that there are a hell of a lot). That makes 100,000 mosquitoes per hectare. The national park is 22,000 hectares. So that means 2.2 billion mosquitoes, I think.

A mosquito weighs, on average, 1 milligram. That is before eating. They can eat three times their own weight in blood. They manage this partly by immediately urinating all but the plasma. So the mosquito biomass of Cúc Phương national park is, according to my estimate, 2,200 tonnes.

I am reacting badly to the bites I got in the park, perhaps because there are so many of them. There is no malaria around here, but there is always dengue.

Yesterday I was still tired after the national park, so I got up late and took a public bus to Phát Diẹm, otherwise known as Kim Sơn. It cost 12,000 dong to go 30km or so. There is a cathedral there, built in 1890 or so. I think I remember reading that 20% of the population of VN is Catholic, but they are concentrated in pockets. Most of the Catholic population fled south in 1954, but many have returned. To judge by the cemetery outside Kim Sơn, two thirds of the population around here are Catholic.

Graham Greene wrote about the cathedral at Phát Diẹm in The Quiet American. I don’t remember it, though, which makes me think I haven’t read the book as I had believed [a wrong subsequently rectified].

The cathedral is known as the stone church, which sounds banal; but most temples around here are wooden, so it is noteworthy.

There are four chapels around it, all closed except for mass, like all churches in Vietnam. Plus three grottoes. One of them, according to Greene, is devoted to Our Lady of Fatima. Might it be this? No idea.

There are familiar European gothic elements, particularly inside, but the exterior is largely indigenous religious architecture. The free-standing campanile holds an absolutely enormous bell (two tons in weight), with a gongy breathy sound. At 12 it struck 30 or so.

I wandered around Kim Sơn and saw a nineteenth-century covered wooden bridge.

Then I whiled away the time waiting for a bus by watching the cyclists. A guy on the bus back told me they were celebrating Buddha’s birthday in Ninh Bình, but I saw no evidence of it.

A lot of the signs around here advertise Rươu Kim Sơn. That just means spirits or wine from Kim Sơn. I bought some. The proprietress filled a small water bottle with a clear spirit from a large water cooler. It cost 8,000 dong, about 25p. Everything around here is made of rice, bamboo, teak or rattan, so it’s a fair bet that this is a rice distillate. It smells slightly of obstler. It tastes a little fruity and then a little nutty. Very nice indeed, and a bit of a bargain. I’ll stock up before I go to Huê.

Today I hired a bike and pedalled through back roads, lanes and paths to Hoa Lư. There were no signs and I didn’t know where I was so I stopped and asked directions three times and watched where people pointed. Actually it is probably difficult to get completely lost, because it’s a cartesian world here. The roads and lanes run in rectangles, no doubt because the irrigation systems require it.

About half of the people I passed shouted 'hello!'. I am an object of fascination here. If a Martian landed in London and took the Tube, we would ignore it, as long as it didn't make too much noise. Not here.

Hoa Lư, a ruined citadel now, was the capital of the Ðinh and early Lê dynasties between 968 and 1009. In 1010 Lý Thái Tổ moved it to Hanoi, which celebrates its millennium in 2010. The citadel, three square kilometres in area, is ruined, but two old temples still stand, the Ðền Thơ Vua Ðinh, celebrating Ðinh Tiên Hoàng and his family, and the Ðền Thơ Vua Lê, celebrating Lê Ðai Hành and his family.

This is inside the temple of Ðinh Tiên Hoàng. I haven't featured many pictures taken inside temples. This is partly because Buddhist architects don't share the Christian compulsion to use scale as one means of inducing a sense of the ineffable. And it is also because it's not always I can pluck up the gall to photograph worshippers, and certainly a flash is out of the question. So you end up with dark photos of fruit and fag packets.

I’m not getting much out of the temples in VN, probably because I have never had a guide and haven’t the faintest idea what I am seeing. The Ðền Thơ Vua Ðinh seemed a lot like the Temple of Literature in Hanoi to me. So, again, the best part of it was the getting there.

Here was a postcard vendor resting on the threshold as I left.

This is the garden in front of the tomb of Lê Ðai Hành.

I also climbed up to the 207 steps to the Ðinh tomb, where again lots of people stood next to me to have their photos taken. Like Zelig, I am heading into the photo albums of hundreds of Vietnamese families.

207 steps is not so many, but the heat was oppressive at 2pm. On the way down I realised I was seriously dehydrated, which is my excuse for shouting at a woman who tried to charge me a dollar for a small bottle of water. A glass of cane sugar juice solved that problem.

Tomorrow I hope to cycle again, this time to Tam Coc. This is wonderful cycling country: utterly flat, and the only wind comes from the air resistance and the beer.

[Slightly edited, and photographs added, 1 June.]