Bac Giang - Beijing - Bohemia
Bac Giang - Quang Ninh - Ha Long Bay - Cat Ba Island
Taking advantage of a three-day weekend, my friend AC and I set out on a motorbike trip that was planned with no other authority than a map book and a bottle of wine. With the simple goals of getting out of town to see green rice fields, mountain forests, craft villages, and the sea, the first day--up through neighboring Bac Ninh and due east into a region littered with brick kilns in every field. We spent an hour or so rolling through (oddly empty) streets of Phu Lang, a pottery village specializing in funeral urns, and rode between piles of kiln wood and cast-offs used to build garden walls. The rest of the afternoon we sped along deeper into the hills of Bac Giang along the Luc Nam river on mostly good roads, the towns getting less frequent, and only had to backtrack once before we reached An Chau. Saturday started with the best bowl of bun cha (noodle soup with fried rolls of ground beef and pork) that I've ever tasted, on a side street of a town that seemed to have plenty of soup shops but almost no accommodations. We then spent a cloudy cool morning winding slowly through the forests of Yen Tu, where old ladies still make their grandsons shake hands with foreigners and school kids ride bicycles as if there are no cars. There were plenty of signs of progress, too--coal mining paths carved into the hills, bare hillsides from logging, and a hill that was dynamited for the rock. At the coast, we found our way to the ferry that would take motorbikes across Ha Long Bay to Cat Ba Island (the cheaper, non-tourist ferries, without cocktails), and we had enough daylight left to drive through the large egg-shaped hills covered in jungle and find a hotel. Too cold for the beach, we took the long way to the pier (okay, really just a hut on a canal), with another ferry (also for motorbikes) back through the container port areas of Hai Phong, to catch the train back to Hanoi. - Click here for 34 pictures from the motorbike trip.
Beijing
Being from the the Great Plains, I grew up appreciating what was around me--wide-open spaces, clean air and water, not being crowded or in a rush. This also meant having a healthy suspicion of places without these things--like sprawling traffic-choked cities in California. But when I finally visited California--during college, at a conference--it had much more to recommend it. My first-ever trip to Beijing, also this past month, was similar. I like to think I'm open-minded, but all I could think of when booking the trip was either canned tourist topics--Forbidden City, Great Wall, Pandas--or the touchstones of modern Beijing: urban development on overdrive, smog, and a city with the audacity to try and control the weather for a sporting event. But a city with that many people certainly has a lot of stories folded into all that change and migration and new-found prosperity. With a lot of help from a Chennai colleague now working in China, AC and I explored the city by bicycle, stayed in the low-rise hutong neighborhood, sampled the local cuisine of dumplings, stir-fry, and Peking Duck (not all together). And between catching sight of the sights that make China iconic--Forbidden City, Mao's tomb, pandas, and temples--we sampled shopping options for clothes, art, and calligraphy, dropped by the Olympic grounds to check out the architecture. The highlight was certainly the 10-km hike along sections of the Great Wall, which was hot, steep, and breathtaking. - Click here for 45 photos of Beijing.
La Boheme - Verdi Requiem
Among these trips (and some of the busiest days I've had at work since starting in Hanoi), I also volunteered my way into performing in two separate pieces staged at Vietnam's national theater, the Hanoi Opera House. One was a two-night revival of Puccini's La Boheme by the Vietnam National Opera and Ballet, in which I was supposed to be a background chorus singer, and ended up being an extra, a streetsweeper, and a cafe-goer. Then last week, a coalition of music groups formed a 100-member-strong choir and orchestra to perform Verdi's Requiem for two nights. It was very satisfying practicing and presenting music in a large group again, after many years of ad hoc small groups, and meeting a group of people I would rarely otherwise cross paths with. - Click here for 12 photos of the Opera House.
Taking advantage of a three-day weekend, my friend AC and I set out on a motorbike trip that was planned with no other authority than a map book and a bottle of wine. With the simple goals of getting out of town to see green rice fields, mountain forests, craft villages, and the sea, the first day--up through neighboring Bac Ninh and due east into a region littered with brick kilns in every field. We spent an hour or so rolling through (oddly empty) streets of Phu Lang, a pottery village specializing in funeral urns, and rode between piles of kiln wood and cast-offs used to build garden walls. The rest of the afternoon we sped along deeper into the hills of Bac Giang along the Luc Nam river on mostly good roads, the towns getting less frequent, and only had to backtrack once before we reached An Chau. Saturday started with the best bowl of bun cha (noodle soup with fried rolls of ground beef and pork) that I've ever tasted, on a side street of a town that seemed to have plenty of soup shops but almost no accommodations. We then spent a cloudy cool morning winding slowly through the forests of Yen Tu, where old ladies still make their grandsons shake hands with foreigners and school kids ride bicycles as if there are no cars. There were plenty of signs of progress, too--coal mining paths carved into the hills, bare hillsides from logging, and a hill that was dynamited for the rock. At the coast, we found our way to the ferry that would take motorbikes across Ha Long Bay to Cat Ba Island (the cheaper, non-tourist ferries, without cocktails), and we had enough daylight left to drive through the large egg-shaped hills covered in jungle and find a hotel. Too cold for the beach, we took the long way to the pier (okay, really just a hut on a canal), with another ferry (also for motorbikes) back through the container port areas of Hai Phong, to catch the train back to Hanoi. - Click here for 34 pictures from the motorbike trip.
Beijing
Being from the the Great Plains, I grew up appreciating what was around me--wide-open spaces, clean air and water, not being crowded or in a rush. This also meant having a healthy suspicion of places without these things--like sprawling traffic-choked cities in California. But when I finally visited California--during college, at a conference--it had much more to recommend it. My first-ever trip to Beijing, also this past month, was similar. I like to think I'm open-minded, but all I could think of when booking the trip was either canned tourist topics--Forbidden City, Great Wall, Pandas--or the touchstones of modern Beijing: urban development on overdrive, smog, and a city with the audacity to try and control the weather for a sporting event. But a city with that many people certainly has a lot of stories folded into all that change and migration and new-found prosperity. With a lot of help from a Chennai colleague now working in China, AC and I explored the city by bicycle, stayed in the low-rise hutong neighborhood, sampled the local cuisine of dumplings, stir-fry, and Peking Duck (not all together). And between catching sight of the sights that make China iconic--Forbidden City, Mao's tomb, pandas, and temples--we sampled shopping options for clothes, art, and calligraphy, dropped by the Olympic grounds to check out the architecture. The highlight was certainly the 10-km hike along sections of the Great Wall, which was hot, steep, and breathtaking. - Click here for 45 photos of Beijing.
La Boheme - Verdi Requiem
Among these trips (and some of the busiest days I've had at work since starting in Hanoi), I also volunteered my way into performing in two separate pieces staged at Vietnam's national theater, the Hanoi Opera House. One was a two-night revival of Puccini's La Boheme by the Vietnam National Opera and Ballet, in which I was supposed to be a background chorus singer, and ended up being an extra, a streetsweeper, and a cafe-goer. Then last week, a coalition of music groups formed a 100-member-strong choir and orchestra to perform Verdi's Requiem for two nights. It was very satisfying practicing and presenting music in a large group again, after many years of ad hoc small groups, and meeting a group of people I would rarely otherwise cross paths with. - Click here for 12 photos of the Opera House.
posted by John at 11:06
2 Comments:
Sound like motorcycle diaries :-) pics of you on the motorcycle requiered!
...also missing a pic of you singing!
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