IT'S ALIVE!!!

     About 33 years ago, Paula said, "That's it. We have an incredibly ugly back yard.  Do something!" 

 

 Luckily, while staying up one night with one of my patients in labor, I met her husband, an NC State-trained landscape architect, who said, "Lemme take a look."

     The neighbors kindly allowed a backhoe to come up their driveway into the back yard and dig a narrow winding pond.  A liner, a couple tons of big rocks later and - voila!  A pond!  

    All of the kids except one fell (or were pushed) in at one time or another.  

 

One of Paula's friends was visiting one day and they caught her five-year-old tossing things in, including Legos and our oldest daughter's high school diploma.  The grandkids discovered that a whitewater kayak could fit in the pond and how many kids it could actually carry.  

     Ponds attract lots of things, other than the items mentioned above, such as leaves, pine needles, more Legos, and live stuff!  We plunked in some cheap goldfish who called it home and they started having babies.  Frogs somehow found it and did likewise.  Water skimmers, dragonflies and others found it posted on some bulletin board and joined the party.  

     The hospital was rotating out an older microscope that they felt could no longer be cleaned to standards and gave it to me.  I bought some glass slides and cover slips and we looked at some pond slime.

    WOW!  If you though that the macro joint was jumping, the microscopic world was going nuts!  There were rotifers and amoebas, paramecia and water bears, daphnia and volvox, vorticella and spirogyra!  All flitting about eating each other!  How did they get in there?!

    Oh, mistakes were made, wildlife-wise.  Someone kindly offered some tadpoles, which unfortunately turned out to be future bullfrogs.  Unfortunately?  Yeah, the adults are voracious omnivores, meaning that they will eat anything they can fit their gaping mouths around.  Fish, other frogs, baby birds, small children, foreign cars, you name it.  I emailed several herpetologists (people who study such creatures) at big universities and I got back varied answers:  "Learn to love the bullfrogs."  "Get a rifle."  "Drain the pond for three years and you might get rid of them."  It took me three years, a scuba dive light, a long-poled net and moonless nights to finally flip the last huge, wily female out of the pond, chase her across the yard and deposit her in a lake far enough away that she probably couldn't hitch hike back.  

    Our little ecosystem attracted other wildlife.  Bats would silently flutter in to take a drink on the wing. 

 

 Great blue herons put us on their map - what's not to like?  Shallow water?  Color-coded fish that can't go deep? and they'd stock up in winter when the smarter fish in the local lakes went to the bottom.  

 

I saw several hawks carrying away my beloved Southern Green Frogs (Lithobates clamitans) 

 

and the occasional raccoon would drop by to see what was on the menu.  It probably didn't help that the (not very smart) goldfish learned that things they saw moving above the water might be going to feed them, and Hey, let's go see!  

      A family of garter snakes has moved in, and are occasionally spotted catching some sun. 

  

Chipmunks have burrowed homes among the rocks and go skittering around nervously (see "hawks" above). 

    So, being such a wild habitat, it takes care of itself, right?  I wish.  The surrounding plant life figures out that there is free water and sends roots.  Stuff falls in from the trees and accumulates.  Soggy high school diplomas and Legos have to be fished out.  An occasional tree branch punches a hole in the liner, blah, blah, blah.  

    Paula can't stand disorder, and she weeds and cleans around the edges periodically.  However, she has had some close calls leaning over.  She announced one November that she wanted waders for Christmas, so I did my research and found her some good ones. 

    However, I knew that it wouldn't sound good telling people that I had bought my wife fishing waders for Christmas, so I had to get her a cashmere sweater also.  And some other stuff.  Anyway, she delights in her waders and periodically gets in and fixes things up.

    I also get to help muck it out from time to time, and like I mentioned, you find all sorts of stuff.

 

     As above, it's a real ecosystem, attracting all sorts of crazy animals.

     Would we go to the trouble again?  Absolutely!  It has been a magnet for our kids, then grandkids and other creatures, and I love reading by it on quiet summer mornings and evenings, listening to the trickling water.  

    Just don't bring me any unapproved tadpoles, and leave my Lithobates clamitans alone.   

Dave & Paula

OK, never thought this would happen

    I grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs, and being 72 now, my teenage years were witness to the thickest parts and the wind-up of the war in Viet Nam, a great tragedy for all involved on both sides of the conflict.

    So, it was more than a little weird on a quiet evening in December when Paula looked up from her iPad and announced, "Hey, here's a bicycle trip from Saigon to Hanoi that sounds like fun!"  Excuse me?!  "And there are two open slots remaining!"

    And so during the last week in February we found ourselves on the 30-hour flight to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, where we met up with the rest of the folks on trip.  That included Son Nguyen, the 46-year-old very-experienced and fun local guide  

and fourteen other people, two of whom were from the US, along with three other Vietnamese guides and drivers.  

 

      If you check, this timing coincided with the onset of the Iran war/"excursion"/"mistake"/whatever, and two other people never made it to Viet Nam because of the resulting difficulties with air travel.  The rest of the party included people from the UK, France and Canada.

     And it was a truly great experience.   

     Why see any place on a bicycle?  In our opinion, it's the premier way to learn about that place.  By definition, you're going slowly (and slower every trip, it seems), on back roads, pedaling through small towns and villages, seeing and smelling things (and I do mean both) up close.

 

    Of course we saw the big stuff.  Paula and I took the somber tour of the "Hanoi Hilton," and crawled through tunnels used by guerrillas, and visited Da Nang and Hue and other places whose names you've heard.  

  

 

     But we also stopped for lunch at people's homes along the way whom Son had come to know, and tiny cafes in little towns whose names I couldn't pronounce and you'll never hear of.    

 

 

    We cycled through bright green rice paddies and past small and large Buddhist shrines.

     We answered back "Hello!" at least a thousand times to kids who came running out when we passed.  I gave "low fives" more times than I can count, slapping little boys' hands to their great delight as we rode past.  

  

    We had the cultural experience of covering some of the miles between Saigon and Hanoi on a non-tourist overnight train.  This meant bunking up with two other folks for the night in a small cabin.  

     I might not have slept that well, but it was a lot of laughs, especially from down the passageway where the three 50-something English ladies and the others were having a great time playing cards.

 

     We arrived at Han Ong, Van Phong Bay (aka Whale Island) late one night by boat,

 

and in the morning found ourselves in a nature preserve for a day and another night.  OK, it was nice to not be on a bike seat for a day, but it was also beautiful.  We later learned that the floating structures in nearby bays were oyster and lobster farms, whose products may have later ended up at Wegman's back in Raleigh.  

 

    If you look at your shirt or dress tag, you may discover that it was made in Viet Nam, along with a lot of other things.  Walking around a historic town one day, Paula saw a shoe shop and found a pair of sandals she liked, but to her disappointment they were too narrow.  The young lady proprietor said, "No problem!  I make you a pair today!" and so she did, delivering them to the nearby hotel where we were staying for the night.  Paula says they are the best-fitting and highest quality sandals she's ever owned.

     We attended several branches of the Church on Sundays, (don't worry, not in those great-looking bike clothes) and learned that there are 50-some LDS missionaries serving in Viet Nam, with headquarters in Hanoi.  Luckily, there was good translation.

    Having done a number of bike trips in the past, we have found that folks self-select who sign up, and this was no exception.  They were, to a person, good-natured and adventurous and didn't whine about the sometimes-basic bathroom facilities along the way.  Usually.  

 

 

      Look, I have no idea why karaoke is huge in Viet Nam, or why it seemed so hilarious in the middle of the night on a boat in Halong Bay (see below), but it did.

     The war is, of course, a giant occurrence in the remembered past of the country.  

 

    Over three million Vietnamese perished and much of the country was destroyed and/or contaminated.  However, we were treated kindly by everyone, and as honored guests in their homes.  

    Anything bad?  OK, when we hit an ATM and walked away with bills worth THREE MILLION Vietnames "dong," we were really only putting about $114 in our pocket.  Luckily, that went a long way, but maybe they could drop a bunch of zeroes.

 

    Anything else?  Some heat?  Some wind?  A few hills?  C'mon, you're on a bicycle.  Anyway, when conditions were tough, we'd stop, the small bus would magically appear and the crew would present a tray of slices of dragon fruit or watermelon and glasses of some lemon drink that might have contained cocaine, as I couldn't seem to get enough of it.  That and coconut-containing crackers that I need to get the license to import to the US.

 

   Food?  We took a cooking class in a small city one night, so I take personal blame for that evening, but the rest was great.  

    Vietnamese are slender by inheritance, but they also walk a lot and have an generally healthy diet with lots of vegetables and fish, not unexpected for a country with over 2,100 miles of coastline.

 

    Yeah, but isn't it a Communist country?  OK, sort of.  That may represent the official structure, and people did mention frustration with how it's run in many ways, but meanwhile, capitalism rules.  New infrastructure and buildings were everywhere, and an entrepreneurial spirit was very evident.  VinFast, maker of many of the electric cars in that country is building a multi-billion factory in North Carolina.  North Carolina?!

    Our next-to-the-last night on the tour was spent on a very-nice-but-not-overly-fancy boat with just our gang, in Halong Bay near the Chinese border.  Famous for its 2,000+ 'karst' limestone islands, it was simply breathtaking.

  

     That last picture looks peaceful, no?  I had to step out on the deck for a minute because of the karaoke going on inside.  However, I think most of the other boats were enjoying the same thing.  Sheesh. 

 

The icing on the cake (and by the way, I got one on my 72nd birthday on another day on the road, thanks to Son), 

 

was spending our final evening as a group at Son's house in Hanoi, where his wife and mother-in-law cooked us the best meal of the entire trip.

     Because of our travel schedule, we spent a couple of days exploring Hanoi before getting on the looonnnngggg plane ride home.  I'll bet you didn't know that water puppets are a millenia-old traditional art form in Viet Nam, did you?  Now you do.

    Ooof!  That was a long entry, and for that I apologize.  I hope you can feel our enthusiasm and respect for what turned out to be a kind, bustling country with good people, which we hope can continue upward. 

Dave & Paula