Day 8 -- More Ninh Binh
We prevailed on Linh to push back our start time for the day so we could soak up a little more Tam Coc Gardens delightfulness but mid-morning we piled in the van for the drive to Bai Dinh Temple. It was a fairly wet day and Nam continued vying for the title of world’s slowest driver: we were regularly passed by scooters. Scooters ridden by old ladies. Old ladies carrying full sized refrigerators. Nevertheless, we did eventually arrive at Bai Dinh and it was worth the trip.
A NOTE ON THINGS WE SAW CARRIED ON SCOOTERS: Westerners who go to Southeast Asia tend to talk a lot about things they saw being transported on scooters. This is because UNBELIEVABLE what people manage to transport on scooters. Here’s a partial list of just the things I saw with my own eyes:
The aforementioned family of five
Two guys with a huge Churchillian bulldog laying crossways between them
A six-foot orange tree covered in oranges (possibly artifociial, but that’s not really the point)
Approximately 1 dozen full-sized styrofoam coolers (at one time)
5 cases of wine (again, at one time)
A welding cylinder Dave estimated at about 200 pounds
A queen-sized mattress
A complete roof’s worth of 8 foot lengths of corrugated metal
The Lonely Planet calls Bai Dinh a “bombastic Buddhist complex” and there’s no way I’m coming up with a better description than that. It’s huge -- in fact, the entire point seems to be its hugeness. 500 larger than life stone Buddhas -- each one unique -- line a long series of steps up to three increasingly gold-filled temples, culminating in a final 90-step climb to the largest bronze Buddha in Vietnam. The place is brand new (though located at the site of an ancient temple) and appears to have been built very candidly as a Buddhist tourist attraction. We were there on what we understood was a slow day so the crowd was modest, but three million people a year apparently trudge up all those steps.
My favorite moment at Bai Dinh was when a young girl asked if she could take a picture with me. I thought she was asking me to use her camera to take her picture, but no -- she wanted to take a selfie with me in it. Linh explained that this wasn’t uncommon -- and then told me he’d like to see a picture of me when I was in my 20’s because he “thought I was very beautiful then.” So … thanks?
Linh took us to a very pretty local restaurant for lunch. Birds in white cages hung from the deep overhang and the dining room was bright and airy even on a dreary day. They were expecting us and very quickly had a colorful meal on the table -- stir fried goat, crunchy rice cakes to eat it with, fried chicken, shrimp in a sweet tomato sauce, spring rolls, sauteed morning glory, and some adorable little bananas for dessert. Dave had been asking about rice whiskey and Linh brought some to the table and offered shots -- a few of us had one (and enticed Linh to have one as well) and then Dave asked whether he could buy the rest to take with us. This resulted in a bit of flutter as it turned out they were willing to sell us the whiskey, but not the bottle. The two or three energetic ladies who’d gotten involved in this negotiation neatly solved the problem by pouring the liquor into an empty Aquafina bottle and popping it in a plastic bag for Dave to take away.
After lunch we visited a fairly lackluster historical site -- a thousand-year-old citadel that had been the capital of Vietnam very briefly before the king who built it pulled up stakes and moved the whole rodeo to Hanoi. It was actively raining at this point and we were a bit worried that our final activity for the day -- paddling up the river into the amazing limestone caves around Ninh Binh -- was going to be washed out. But the rain let up and we found willing rowers at the riverside.
Mary and I clambered into a little rowboat with an extremely jolly lady who immediately began working the oars -- with her feet. She spoke not a word of English (a couple of words of French), but her huge smile and occasional enthusiastic hooting and pointing ensured that we spotted the highlights of this really lovely stretch of river. The vegetation looked impenetrably thick on the banks in some places, creating an eerie sense of just how nerve-jangling it must have been during the war to move along that water with the constant possibility of lurking snipers.
We saw lots of livestock -- water buffalo, cows, goats, black and pink pigs, chickens, ducks. Bamboo thickets and stands of sculpted Buddha trees drifted past. We quickly realized that our overcast sky was in fact a bit of good luck -- it would have been a long trip in the blazing sun. We rowed into three different caves -- really just places where the river cut through the base of a hill rather than flowing around. Our exuberant rower snapped on a headlight (literally -- a light she wore on her head) and passed us a flashlight. The caverns were cool, glittering in some places where sparkling crystals had accreted, and ranged from barely missing our heads to vaulted high above. We saw a little family of bats hanging in one corner, and a lump of glistening limestone that our rower managed to convey was supposed to resemble Buddha. (Of course, saying a particular rounded lump of stone looks like Buddha is sort of like saying a particular fat baby looks like Winston Churchill.)
Back to Tam Coc Garden for slightly damp cocktails by the pool before another excellent dinner -- sweet and sour shrimp soup, banana flower salad, a delicious rice casserole with fresh bamboo shoots, more excellent fish. We were really sad to be leaving this wonderful place and told Linh not to pick us up until noon the next day to prolong our stay. (There’s a running story to tell regarding the bad behavior of German tourists that includes a chapter from Tam Coc Garden, but I have decided to take the high road with this narrative and skip the many anecdotes about people impeccably enacting their worst stereotypes.)
