Vietnam (Last Day)

My last day in Vietnam was really intense.  I spent the morning at the big city market and the afternoon at the War Remnants Museum.  Both were intense in very different ways though.  The market was busy and fun and it was quite a challenge to navigate the narrow spaces in between booths with my wheelchair.  The War Museum was so tragic it was hard for me to get my head around the pictures I was seeing.

First, the market.  I went to an ATM first thing to get some money and the machine was a little dodgy.  I'm definitely going to have to keep checking my bank account to make sure all the money (all like hundred dollars of it haha) is still there.  I went off on my own in my wheelchair which was an adventure.  People at the market were really curious about me.  They would find one of their friends who spoke English and ask me questions about why I used the chair.  Once I had a whole row of people completely captivated at my silly attempts to explain a stroke using really simple english words.  I don't know if I fully got the point across, but it was still fun/uncomfortable.  :0)  I was able to get lots of birthday and Christmakkah presents for people at the market in between awkwardly squeezing through the isles.  I met a guy who was my age and we talked for a bit about TV shows and school.  It was really fun!  

 

You'd be surprised what can be accessible when you are incredibly stubborn.  haha

I was getting hungry so I decided to get some street food.  I had heard about the popular street food item that was a sandwich made from a french roll and Vietnamese recipe filling.  A little combination left over from French colonialism.  I bough the large sandwich for only $1 and couldn't wait to try it.  It was fairly good, but had a strange gritty texture.  I still continued to munch on it.  Then my guide came over and I hesitantly asked what was in the sandwich.  Turns out it was pig skin.  Ewe.  I still ate a few more bites, but I wasn't nearly as enthused after that.  

Luckily, we got to eat at a restaurant soon after that.  The food was pretty ok, but better than pig skin.  :0P  There was some interesting fruit as well.  I don't really know what any of these were called, but they all tasted good.  

Those citrus fruit slices may look just like an orange but they were about three times bigger than any orange slice I have ever seen.

The short bus ride to the War Remnants Museum was rather somber.  I think many of us were scared of what we were about to see.  It was uncomfortable because the museum was made to focus on what the Vietnamese civilians had to go through because of the war.  

The ground floor kind of eased us into the really sad stuff.  It was mostly focusing on all the different countries who opposed the war (including protestors in the U.S.  There were lots of picketing sign pictures as well as draft burning pictures and anti-war propaganda posters.  

The second and third floor had photo collections reflecting different aspects of the war.  In the interest of time because I am so far behind from the blog I'm going to quote directly from wikipedia, "Other exhibits include graphic photographs, accompanied by short copy in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliant sprays, the use of napalmand phosphorus bombs, and atrocities such as the My Lai massacre. Curiosities include a guillotine used by the French and the South Vietnamese to execute prisoners, last in 1960, and three jars of preserved human fetuses deformed by exposure to dioxin."  I know, your opinion of me just decreased by at least 30%.  But if you saw my to do list you would understand.  :0P

Before and after agent orange and bombing.  

   The pictures were incredibly graphic and horrifying.  I had a hard time comprehending that humans did this to each other.  And I was only seeing one side of the war.  There were pictures of hysterical children, bodies in several pieces, and medics futilely trying to revive fallen soldiers.  One particularly chilling photo explained in the captain that the photographer died just seconds after it was taken due to a bomb dropping right behind him.  There was a whole other group of people who also suffered greatly and a whole other side of the war not shown in the museum (for obvious reasons).  I can't imagine anyone could walk through that museum and come out being pro-war.  I won't soon forget what I saw and learned there.

   I saved one exhibit on the ground floor for last because I knew I would need to end with some hope after being thoroughly depressed.  The section was a room full of paintings done by schoolchildren showing what they thought represented peace.  :0)  

   BAck on the ship I met up with some friends and we spent our last dong on some trinkets being sold right off the ship.  

The ship put on a spectacular BBQ for us so we could enjoy the Ho Chi Minh skyline as we cruised out of the port.

Brazil! (Day 2)

My second say in Brazil started just as early as the first.  I scrambled to get ready and arrived at the meeting spot just in time to sign in before we left the MV Explorer.  Similar to yesterday, we all boarded onto a large boat that would take us up the river.  Along the way, the guide explained some of the things we were seeing.  

I learned how important the rivers (the Amazon and Rio Negra) were to the people who lived here.  The river was a source of transportation similar to a highway complete with floating gas station

as well as a repair shop

and was also a major source of food.  

Most of the fruit I have been eating is actually imported because edible vegetation is rather rare.  Fish is the main staple food of the region.  It's a good thing there are 100s of different species of edible fish so there can still be lots of variety in the diet.  

The boat meandered along the meeting of the waters which is where the Amazon River and the Rio Negra meet.  Due to their differences in pH and sediments, the two rivers actually flow side by side for quite a while before they truly mix.  The guide told us a lot of interesting things about the rivers including where they got their color.  The Rio Negra looks black, but is actually a deep red from the same acid that causes an apple to brown once cut.  The Amazon on the other hand looks more like the brown of chocolate milk due to the high concentration of sediments that the snow melt in the Andes brings into it.  Some species of animals can live in both rivers, but for the most part, they are adapted to one or the other.  The river dolphins that we visited yesterday swim in between the two rivers to eat a wider variety of fish.  

After a leisurely cruse around Manaus, the boat pulled up to where we would be eating lunch.  My stomach was rumbling at that point, but I found out we would be going on another nature walk before it was time to eat.  I once again almost opted out of the walk due to the heat and humidity, but found the energy to do it anyway.  I was rewarded right away with a curios monkey climbing down from the treetops to get a better view of us strange creatures.  A walk along a rather dodgy bridge brought me to a second fantastic sight.  There was an offshoot of the Amazon that had gathered into a large, still pond where giant water lilies made their home.  I couldn't get over the size of these things!  They were bigger than the largest pizza I had ever seen.

On the way back, I stopped for a brief photo-op with one of the larger trees in the area.  

At this point in the day the heat was miserable and I saw it take it's tole on the people I passed by on the trail.  Oddly, I fully felt the intense heat, but seemed to be largely unaffected by it.  I was certainly no more uncomfortable than anyone else.  Another surprise I found out about what I am able to do.

Instead of going directly to lunch, I shopped a bit in the nearby indoor market.  I was expecting outrageous prices based on what the people from the embassy told us, but things were actually really good prices.  I bought some jewelry and magnets of some of the creatures I had seen on the trip including the pink river dolphin, the large fish I saw yesterday, and a piraña.  

Lunch was fantastic and I got to try many new foods.  By the time I was done, I was more than happy to board the canoe that would take us out on the Amazon.  The breeze from the moving boat was very welcome after a couple of hours in stagnant air.  The tour through the offshoots of the Amazon was everything one would expect it to be.  We saw tons of birds and a few of those huge blue butterflies I had only seen in a museum previously.  We got a treat part way through when an 84 year old indigenous man paddled up to us to chat with our guide.  He was selling some excellent candy that his wife had made from chocolate and Brazil nuts.  The guide taught me how to say a few things in Portuguese so I could properly purchase some candy and then tell him how good it was.  

We concluded the boat trip with some fishing for pirañas.    Even though the other boats were pulling them in like nobody's business, our boat had no such luck.  I am pretty sure it was because I bright us bad luck.  At home, my dad and I go fishing all of the time but we haven't caught anything in at least six years.  It was still fun watching the pirañas nibble at the bait.  

On the way back to our ship, it started pouring quite torrentially which was very welcome and refreshing.  I gladly spent the rest of the day resting up for another early day tomorrow.  I did some reflecting on how lucky I am to be able to do all of this.  I am having a hard time reconciling all I can do now with the memory how sick I have been.  Not that I'm complaining one bit!  :0)