Tomb Raiders

Yesterday Alex and I started our day on a dragon boat down the Perfume River, where we saw hundreds of pontoon boats that poor families live on year-round, which is incredible in itself. The boats are probably less than 5 feet wide, 20 feet long, and have a small area that is covered by a wicker canopy (often also covered with colorful tarps to keep out the rain) ... definitely made me feel appreciative for a whole covered apartment with bathrooms, heat and room to stand up. The river, on which our hotel also sits, is very beautiful and once you get about a mile away from our hotel, it opens up into a large stretch of undeveloped land that is really idyllic.

After getting off the boat, we stopped at a Buddhist temple which has a large pagoda you can see for miles down the river, and then went on to see three mausoleums for most of the day. Each of the mausoleums was quite different from an architectural perspective, but two of the three we saw were on stunning grounds (the other on a small piece of land but with incredible ornamentation inside the main temple) ... many acres large, with man-made lakes, boathouses and temples, and beautifully manicured. The idea was that this is where the king would live in his afterlife, but since they took 10 - 30 years to build, the king often used the mausoleum site as a vacation spot during his life, so there were plenty of buildings there for him to enjoy in life too. Apparently, in some Asian countries when the king dies, his concubines and wives are killed too, but in Vietnam they are permitted to live, but move to the mausoleum site to take care of the grounds until they die, never permitted to re-enter society. One of the kings had 500 concubines (142 children), so that was a lot of women taken out of circulation upon his death.

The king is "officially" buried in a tunnel underneath the main temple where his spirit is worshiped, but because many kings were buried Tut-style with a lot of valuables, the actual location of his burial would be kept secret. The last king's mausoleum we saw took 30 years to build, and the 100+ soldiers and workers who knew where he was actually buried were all killed at his son's command to preserve the secret when he died. A lot of the sites we have seen in Vietnam have been looted over the years, and many more destroyed by the French or the Americans, so most of what he have seen has been reconstructed since the war. Luckily there is a lot of foreign money here used toward the reconstruction so the Vietnamese don't have to bear that expense in addition to everthing else (one of the sites we visited yesterday had a large American Express banner as they are paying for the current reconstruction of that site).

Our mausoleum tour took about 5 hours as the sites were relatively spread out, so we drove through villages and countryside on our way to each, which was amazing. The rain has continued, but yesterday it made our tour even more beautiful, as seeing the country in the rain gave it all a romantic feel, and reminded me of so many Asian poems I read while in college which all seem to have been written in the rain, or dreaming of the rain, so for once I would say the rain actually enhanced the trip.

We leave for Hanoi at noon today, our last stop in Vietnam before heading home via Tokyo (where we will celebrate New Year's Eve). I am looking forward to Hanoi but already feeling a little sad that my amazing journey is almost over ...

On the bright side, it is not yet over, so look forward to sharing Hanoi with you.