Highlights of Vietnam and Cambodia

Day Seven – 23 January 2015

Weather – Sunny, 23, delightful.

It’s another jam packed day. Breakfast is in the restaurant which faces the street and has a patio so that you can eat outside. Another omelet chef and a great setting in comfy temperatures.

I heard some say they had to move rooms because of flies but I hadn’t noticed them. I would see a couple later on in my room and they were fruit flies. Then I noticed the plate of fruit in the room.

Not hard to add two and two. I mentioned to Thom that they should reconsider leaving fruit open in the room like that as it only encourages the flies. They could always offer it at checkin and that way the fruit doesn’t sit there all the time.

Before I head out to the bus, my feet tell me to try the spa again and sure enough, the girl is there and I get my foot massage. Ten minutes. She did both feet but I think I would have been happy if she spent the whole ten minutes on just the one bad heel.

My feet said ahhhhhhh.

We get on the bus and Thom says we’ll need our Whispers. But he doesn’t call them that. He calls them “listening devices” which we all find kinda humourous in a Communist country. He head off to our Be My Guest lunch at the Tra Que Organic Farming community. One of the others had mentioned that he met a group who were doing a farm tour of Southeast Asia and that they had visited this farm.

It’s in a gorgeous setting and is like you would imagine a community farm. A huge field of small plots.

They grow everything here from mustard to peanuts to herbal medicines and papaya. We get a welcome drink that has mint, sugar, ginger and lemon basil seeds in the bottom. Quite tasty. Then we are all fitted out in our shirts and hats.

The farmer proudly shows us what is in many of the plots, picking some to let us smell or taste them. He picks some mustard seeds and tells us that it’s a cure for an ailing tummy. You just grind them up into a paste and put them on the belly button and no more nausea.

We ask for a pound each. Just in case.

They use various organic techniques like composting for fertilizer and doing a system of rotation. They’re not far from the ocean so there is apparently a bit of a salty taste to some crops and they use a plant from the sea for fertilizer that often contains little fish.

As we are walking, a loudspeaker starts up and is quite loud. I miss some of what he has said until we move away. When someone asks what it was, he says it’s just government messages. Then he turns to us, smiles and says “just noise.”

They get their water from underground and each family has a well and pump located throughout the field. The water is not sprayed but rather picked up in cans and poured on each plot.

He gave everyone a chance to help one of the other farmers plant a section. We started by using their hoe to dig a trench. The hoe is bigger with a longer pole and works best if you use it side on like one of the pics above. He asked if anyone knew how to use a hoe and it got a lot of chuckles. Later Thom told us that we shouldn’t say “yum” when we see food either. It’s the same as a word that rhymes with Lornie.

Then the farmer dumped in some fertilizer and went to another bed to pull some plants. Can’t remember what it was, but the seeds are planted en masse and then pulled to be planted with spacing in another bed.

When we finished planting the bed we went back to the house for a foot massage! My second of the day. My feet said yaaaaaaaaaaah!

Then we sat down for our cooking demonstration and lunch. They showed us how to cook Vietnamese pancakes. When one of the cook stoves wouldn’t light, he looked up at us and said “made in China.”

It was another platter after platter affair with various meats and stuff. Something for everything. The spring rolls and pancakes are delicious.

After a while, we start looking at our watches. My Son is over an hour away and it’s getting on to 2 pm with the sun going down at 5:30. As we head out, we pass by the dishwashing section.

From here, we went back to the hotel and set a time to leave for My Son (pronounced Me Son). I wasn’t sure about this one since my foot was acting up (pouting, I think) but I’m glad I did. The late arrival also meant we got sunset shots and a deserted site.

The drive wasn’t an hour and a half as had been suggested. It was just over an hour.

The temples were built between the 4^th and 14^th Century by the ruling dynasties of the Champa people. They are Hindu temples dedicated to Shiva.

They were built with brick and the walls of many of the structures got progressively thicker the higher it went. This kept them sturdy and many survive to this day.

Unfortunately, during the war, the US believed the site was harbouring Viet Cong and destroyed much of the site in a week of carpet bombing. The craters are still there.

They believe the site was built here because of the mountain in the background which looks like the tooth of a cat.

I think it looks more like Abe Vigoda.

We walked the site until it started to get dark and checked out more temples that are undergoing restoration.

Apparently, the old brick is superior to the ones used to restore the missing areas. The Champa were able to create a brick that held very little water and didn’t need to use any mortar. It’s believed they held them together with a sap.