I’ve crossed this bridge just about everyday for the last 6 months, which in some tiny way has led to its rather dilapidated condition, that and the fact that it is over 100 years old, has been bombed over the course of several wars, doubles as a market place, wedding photo venue and has to withstand litres of urine a day as people often feel the need to relieve themselves over this 2.5km stretch.

I am once again uprooting for possibly the last time in Hanoi  and moving back to civilisation as some might call it. This side of Long Bien bridge, i.e the east is considered by “true” Hanoians as not really Hanoi, it’s the wrong side of the tracks, if the tracks happened to be running in a north-south direction which is not true in this case, so perhaps a more appropriate phrase would be the wrong side of the river. The mention that i live out here is usually met with gasps and occasional fainting at how far away from everything it is, but in reality it’s only a short often potty-mouthed motorbike ride over an iconic bridge from Hanoi’s old quarter.

The city end of Long Bien Bridge is actually one of the poorest areas of Hanoi, with many practically homeless and lotsa heroin use. For slightly more real life around Long Bien bridge pics, this is a good album.

So I’ve had by far my biggest holiday adventure in Vietnam so far over Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) where we get a week off work. The only problem is the whole city shuts down as everyone goes back to their quê (home town). If I was a good Vietnamese boy, I’d head down to Ca Mau in the very deep south of Vietnam or at least visit my remaining direct relatives down in Saigon. But I’m not a very good Vietnamese boy (and my Saigon uncle was off gallivanting on his first trip to Oz, where the rest of his family has abandoned him to), so instead I left Hanoi on a 6 day motorbike trip with a couple of friends.

Our total planning would have taken up all of about 10 minutes discussion, actually telling eachother we should meet up and talk about it took longer. Guided by an ancient war map with outdated names and missing major geographical features from the last decade or so, we ended up going from Hanoi – Son Tay – Mai Chau – Tan Xuan – Moc Chau – Phu Yen – Yen Bai – Phu Tho – Hanoi.

Highlights included:

- Breathing clean air and driving on near empty roads.
- Driving into Mai Chau Valley (amazing scenery)

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- Hanging out with local White Thai students who fed and watered us and forced us to merrily sing to/with them.

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- Being stuck overnight in the forest near the Laos border and being interrogated (for hours) by the local authorities after straying and taking directions and suggestions from various strangers. The authorities even borrowed my torch to assist them in interrogating us as their village was blacked out. They seemed uninterested in a watermelon we had brought along as a potential offering. It was a fine watermelon. A good account of it written by Ben is here.

- Driving through towns with local villagers waving and cheering at us, my closest experience to participating in a Tour de France I suspect.

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- Reaching a massive lake (not on our map) with colourful hills on the way to Phu Yen. The drive into and around this lake was unexpectedly spectacular, no one talks about this place as far as I know and we didn’t see any other westerners all trip. The sun was even in rare winter shining form that day.

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I could talk about it in more detail but I’m lazy and my fellow biker Ben has written a good account of it, complete with a video montage, here, here, here and here.

So i was chatting with a work colleague today when i started to notice a rather putrid smell exuding from his general vicinity. We’re at the point now where i can be fairly direct and insulting towards him, he’s kind of like my understudy, so i mentioned that he was exuding a putrid odour, which in my Vietnamese 4 year old tongue would have translated to “you smell notta gooda”. To which he replied “I’ve been sick, and haven’t showered since Saturday”. His theory was that when you are sick (he just had a head cold as far as i could tell) you shouldn’t shower, which perhaps makes sense historically when water was less clean and without heat. But Saturday was 5 days ago! and his smell consumed most of the available oxygen in our office, luckily he decided that he was well enough today to take a bath, perhaps tomorrow will be odour free.

Nothing says happy new new year more than a watermelon on your balcony with a “happy new year” sticker on it.

It finally happened. A plastic stool succumbed under the weight of my weightiness. Luckily I had prepared for this moment, with a nightly routine of squats, pulling chairs away from myself, graceful backward rolls, observing others in similar incidents, and practising my “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face, it’s a very specific look.

Most activities that involve sitting in Vietnam will likely be facilitated by a plastic stool if anything at all. Plastic stools range from the tiny plastic stool which is really just the lazy man’s squat to a full adult sized chair with a backrest. The one I had was a tall variety without a backrest, similar to the top most picture. They also tend to come in red, yellow and green but i don’t think i’ve ever seen black.

It was kind of a lucky break I had though. I was coming to the end of a meeting and was just chatting casually with colleagues when the *crack* sound came which you wouldn’t hear in a crowded Little Italy restaurant or Dinh Liet Bia Hoi for instance. This triggered my training instincts to tense up my quad muscles and go into a kind of tall squat formation. As the crumbling of the chair leg occurred I was able to remain reasonably upright, I thought about preforming a backward roll, but figured it would just be showing off and rather unusual for my colleagues to see, then came the reflex to in a flash replace the broken stool with a fresh one and lay on the “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face. My colleagues didn’t know what hit ‘em as the conversation flowed naturally onto why I wasn’t married and how that made me ugly and pitiable.

With two days of continual downpour at a rapid rate, the streets of hanoi were swimmable, parts of the city were under various levels of flooding. This left movement by motorbike or car almost impossible with scenes of people pushing their vehicles along and major queues at motor repair shops. My movements however were largely unaffected seeing as i didn’t move much, deciding that the streets would be too flooded to get around. I was happily enjoying the pounding of the rain which was a nice change from honking traffic horns, until my neighbourhood also decided to blackout. With almost no food in the house, no power, a suggestion of dinner and an otherwise early friday evening on hand, i set out with my housemate to see if we could get across town for dinner. Riding my honda wave, we made it 500m before hitting the intersection shown above. I turned back rather than risk joining the throngs of dead motorbikes. Sure we could have just eaten around the corner from my house, but that wouldn’t have been an adventure. It was time to bring pretty lady back out. Our bicycles were thriving in the rain and flood leaving in our wake hesitant and or broken down cars and motorcycles. We picked up a friend who was stuck in town as the road back to his town was chest deep in water (unfortunately he was already half way to his town before finding this out, which resulted in a lonely delirious several hours walk back to hanoi!). Taking advantage of his delirium we convinced him that spending the rest of the evening cycling would be in his best interest. We managed to travel across town quite easily in the end with only a few stretches of flood to deal with. My 85000 dong three course meal was well earned that night. With this new found sense of pedal powered freedom, Saturday was spent in the company of pretty lady and now less delirious friend, cycling up to and around West Lake. The above pic is of Hoan Kiem lake in the centre of Hanoi which overflowed. People are standing on what is normally a few metres wide footpath around the lake. As the rain started weakening, there was almost a sense of disappointment that the flooding was subsiding (this sentiment was probably not shared by many, especially for those who where knee deep in water standing in their kitchen). Being overtaken by motorbikes and cars was once again the norm. At the top of westlake we came across graffiti street (everything in Hanoi has a street, e.g Chicken Street, Shoe Street, Creme Caramel Street, female motorbike taxi?? street), not the usual gritty inner city graffiti you might get around a major city, it was more the etching person a loves person b into a tree kind of graffiti. Along graffiti street on a 10 metre stretch of lake a whole bunch of fishermen were gathered. They all stood body to body as opposed to spread out across the lake, for warmth? probably not, perhaps it was the best fishing spot and not unlike shops in Hanoi, when someone is onto a good idea, then you’ll get a whole bunch of copy cats, or perhaps they were just being sociable. The fishermen don’t use any bait but have this spider like hook, not really sure how it encouraged fish to hook themselves, but it seemed to work. And thus ends the flooded weekend. More flood and fishing pics from the vietnamese press here. Apparently fishing and floods go hand in hand, in some cases the overflowed (or overflown?) lakes mean fish end up getting washed down drains, so waiting with nets outside a drain is a good idea. There did seem to be an unusually large amount of people fishing around west lake matched by the amount of people spectating too.

On another sojourn down to Ninh Binh for a countryside wedding, involving characters from a previous adventure, I came across a book. “The Mystery of Chimney Rock”, number 5 of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, a mere 121 pages and yet 36 different endings, truly amazing. It brought me back to my primary school days when all i could read were these books. When I had supposedly grown out of them by the age of 11, I simply stopped reading rather than being subjected to the linear constraints of traditional novels. I at least wanted to pretend I had some say in what was going to happen.

In the hotel lobby we stayed at in Ninh Binh, there was a small mediciney cabinet on the wall stuffed with books, literally. Opening the sliding cabinet door meant shredding some of the books that were squeezed inside. It looked as though it was filled with books from travellers that had left them behind, “The Mystery of Chimney Rock” stood out, possibly because of the gaze of the cat’s eyes on the cover. The staff were genuinely taken aback that we could be at all interested in this cabinet of decaying books. For some nostalgic reason I guess I built up some sort of resolve that meant this book must come into my possession (“my precious” like). The staff must have read into this and made sure that I could only bargain it down to 30000vnd from 40000vnd, in full knowing that surely nobody in their right mind would perhaps even notice this cabinet let alone want to own an item from it. I felt slightly cheated seeing as I had never paid for a CYOA book, but it was a small price to pay for something that had to be.

It was an entertaining light afternoon’s reading in any case, even if I did manage to die several times. However, the “other” mystery of chimney rock is that it obviously had a previous owner, whose details were on the inside cover. I wonder if this person has the full set of CYOA books, but is now only missing number 5, and their only reason to live is to recover this book. If this did happen to be the case, and if anybody happens to know a person called Emma, who lived in a Mount Waverley, Melbourne probably as a 10 year old in the late 80’s and travelled to Vietnam and left behind a book that they are now continually searching for because they have no other reason to live, or perhaps would just think it neat to have it returned to them, then let me know.

(p.s above photo taken from my new house, I’m in a loft with a little balcony that overlooks what you see in the picture, I like it, it makes me feel like I’m living in a hub. Directly below the balcony I’m standing on is a little alleyway rice stand. It means I have to enter and exit my house outside of lunch hours as otherwise I can’t get my motorbike out, it also means I get to sample homemade, if somewhat oily, Vietnamese dishes right on my doorstep.)

In order to explain the lack of content on this site, i thought i’d divulge a little about what i’m doing over here. Not everything though, it’s top secret, i’ll have to knee cap you kind of stuff, so secret that i’d have to knee cap myself if i knew the secret stuff i was doing.

Above is a little screen grab from the software i’ve been programming away at. “Working on Software!?”, “Doing Programming!?” you say, “I thought you were an accountant, you studied economics right!?”. Well it’s a “Yes” to the first two, and a “half yes” to the last one. For some reason people have assumed that having studied in the economics/finance faculty, my only career path could have been accounting. “Ha” to them i say, i’m much cooler than that, my hunched back and fading eyesight can attest to the fact that i am now a quasi programmer. Quasi, because well, this is my first piece of real work, i had done something for bluejuice once, which may have resulted in emailing the same person continuously for hours, until the bluejuice site got shut down, that was intentional of course.

So back to work, my initial project was to help Binhminh obtain some kind of information system to manage their operations. Easy enough, choose some software, buy some hardware, do some training, eat some noodles, drink some rice wine and i’d be outta here. Turns out that there wasn’t much microfinance software really suited to us and available in Vietnam. There is definitely a lot out there, but when you are a predominantly Vietnamese speaking organisation with little IT resources and cashola, then your choices are limited. Limited to the extent whereby you may get the likes of me suggesting it could be a good idea for the likes of me to put something together.

To my delight, things seem to have come together, it’s likely not the greatest piece of code ever written (using PHP, a little javascript and MySQL by the way), but in its initial incarnation should be able to do the job. The job being to replace the hours and hours of manual calculations and pen and paper record keeping that takes up half of the credit officer’s time, when instead they could be engaging with our clients a little more. And engaging they shall be required to do, as one of our partners is an organisation called Kiva.

Kiva allows individuals to lend money directly to a microfinance borrower (no interest returns for the lender though, just warm fuzziness), acting as a conduit/marketplace where microfinance orgs can post their clients on the Kiva website, and individuals can invest in them, instead of losing money through the current credit crisis (if only!). However, as part of our partnership with Kiva, we have to do certain things like giving updates to investors about how our client is going, taking pretty pictures, not steal all their money and be accountable which is also why my project has taken place.

You can have a peek at what i’ve done here. Username: testmanager, Password: test. It’s not our real test site, just one especially designed for the wonderful few people who come across this blog. We are just starting to pilot the software in one of our branches at the moment, so it’s a kinda exciting rubbing my palms together kinda time.

I have given away too much, i shall track you down and knee cap you, although having knee capped myself (which i’m going to have to do now) you may just get away.

Also, if anyone out there feels as if they would like to work in improving/takeover what i have done (given my impending lack of knee caps) feel free to contact me.

Last weekend was spent in the province of Ninh Binh, visiting the home of an Akubra wearing Vietnamese man. It was rice harvesting time (which conincides with kite flying), which happens twice a year. Having consumed rice almost every day for my entire life to sustain my “fine” physique, it was probably about time i found out where it came from (not a rice cooker on your kitchen bench it turns out).

Families are designated plots of land around their commune based on the number of family members registered, i.e more family more land i believe. For Mr Akubra wearer’s family, one harvest should cover enough for 8 months of rice, so two harvests should result in a surplus, given decent weather and no attack from crop circle loving aliens or creatively inclined people attached to ride on mowers looking to kill time.

When the rice crop turns yellowish and when people who know what they are talking about say it’s time to harvest, it’s time to harvest. This involves using a little scythe, it probably has a real name but to me it was a little scythe, in vietnamese it could possibly be called a liểm (i am no authority on this subject it seems). I had never understood the point of such a curved blade until harvesting. Having the curved blade allows one to simply pull through the crop in a single stroke inflicting pressure upon the stem without having to use a sawing motion, amazing.

So a cutting we went, barefoot in the mud, wearing shorts and t-shirt was probably not the best attire for such a venture. Lucky the straw hat made up for it somewhat. To my disappointment there were no harvesting songs sung, i’m sure it happens in the movies, but spending most of your time bent over and twisting probably isn’t conducive to singing i guess. So after the rice is cut about three quarters of the way down and left in piles, the men then get to work.

Traditionally it’s the women that cut the rice while the men bale it, poke the bales with a stick of bamboo sharpened at both ends (is there anything bamboo can not do?) and carry it off. We managed to partake in both activities, breaking down the traditional gender boundaries allowing men and women to bale and wield hand held scythes as they please, a momentous day indeed.

After a couple of hours of work from us, and several more hours work from the others one field was cut and baled and a well earned drink from the kettle was had. Some other beverages may also have been consumed resulting in a very relaxed state.

All the bales are then taken to the local village machine which separates the grains of rice from the grass, which is then left to dry in the family courtyard. When it rains, which it did, you have to rake it all up and move it indoors, or just cover it in plastic as we did.


After posing proudly with the harvest (which is not a mandatory step), the now sufficiently dried grains get husked at the local husking machine, and then you simply add water, heat and you have the backbone of an entire diet, hooray for rice.

(why does rice get thrown at weddings? it seems a waste, and this practice should be stopped given food shortage crises, i say.)

an old partially complete (probably never to be completed) site resurrected, my trip o’europe that took place in 2001. I happened to lose 15 kilos in 9 months, mainly through shovelling various forms of manure and the occasional herding of agile animals.

Not exactly sure why i’m compelled to post it at this hour (it’s nearly 4 am!), well i kind of do, the me of 2001 didn’t really know how to write html, hence several hours spent fixing links tonight. why won’t sleep takeover?