We began our education in Vietnamese culture on the road to My Chau, a rural area about 3 hours from Hanoi.  Rice fields, villages with houses on stilts, (now cement at the bottom instead of all wood and square so snakes cannot coil up them),farming that included vegetables and fruit.  The first thing we learned was that even at roadside rest stops, the kind where you buy cold drinks and snacks in the US, the markets include knives for sale, really big sharp knives and cleavers set on a stand among straw hats, luggage tags etc.  The guide said that when meat and chicken is cut, the knives need to go right through the bone and that most people need to do this at one time or another.  We also learned that sticky rice is cooked in bamboo stalks in the countryside.  We stopped to sample some and it was delicious.

I really didn’t want to do the bike ride in Mai Chau — I was still tired but I let the guide convince me –big mistake.  Yes – we saw villages and rice fields and grazing animals but the cement path was often not in the best condition and the bikes a bit hard to maneuver.  Worse yet, they were crowded with other bikers, pedestrians, and scooters.  At a particularly tight left hand turn I tried to maneuver around a wheelbarrow standing in the intersection and the bike went down a ravine for about 8 feet with me on it.  The face bruises healed in a couple of days but the knee continued to bother me for about 10 days, until I found a good brace.

The next day was a ride in a traditional bamboo raft, which as the name suggests, is a number of large bamboo stalks lashed together to form a raft, a traditional means of water transportation, particularly a way of getting goods up and downstream.  The driver consented to a photo.  The banks of the streams were completely littered with plastic — I like to think that there had not been an opportunity to clean up from the typhoon last month that hit North Vietnam which did a good bit of damage