The whole point of this particular journal was originally to serve as a list of “stuff I like”.  It’s not a page for restaurant criticism or ratings, since (a) critics are lame and add no value to society, and (b) if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say it — my usual snarky comments notwithstanding.

Since Karin and I are fortunate enough to be able to eat out and travel a fair amount, we tend to run across a great number of amazing places.  As a result, people sometimes ask me for recommendations, so rather than racking my addled memory for ideas, I just give them this link.

In that vein, this is a short attempt to create a list of things to check out if you’re visiting / moving to Paris.  It’s not a definitive or complete list by far, nor do I make any claim to describe secret, hip, “in” things.  It is a work in progress, and I’ll add/edit things as I think of them — suggestions are welcome.

Most importantly, you’ll want a good guide, and a bunch of time.

Restaurants & Bars

I’ve made an effort to list all my favorites already.  There are numerous search options.

• By map:  go here and check the map in the sidebar.  Zoom in on Paris.
• By tag:  I’ve tried to do a reasonable job of categorizing places by what I think best describes them.  Click on the category in the tag cloud on the right hand side.  Unfortunately, the map search by tag doesn’t seem to work.
• By location in the title
• By search (top right field) — does not search by category
• By category search (widget at right side)

Most of the places on my list are not that cheap, although there are exceptions.  There are neat wine bars around the city, such as Le Rubis, which charge a song for a glass of wine and a nice heaping place of good meat and cheese.  I haven’t bothered writing about it, as a good friend was chased out by the screaming, vaguely psychotic proprietress after accidentally breaking a cheap Ikea glass – but if you don’t mind the possibility of a bit of local color, go for it.

Another great budget option is to picnic in any of the many parks or on the quays bordering the river — one favorite is this area just NW of the Pont Neuf.  Great on a sunny day, and I really don’t know why you’d bother visiting on a budget when it’s not nice out.  I did an experiment once with some friends, called the €5 wine challenge.  Every week, I’d buy a couple of bottles of red (usually Bordeaux) at a supermarket, ubiquitous in the city, with a limit of 5 bucks per bottle.  We never got a bad one, and some of the plonk was actually more than decent.

Avoid the crappy fast food places like Quick or McDonalds, the city has a wealth of cafés and brasseries that often serve decent food, as well as boulangeries (bakeries) with occasionally pretty decent sandwiches.   Paul is a chain of bakeries that I’m a fan of.  There are also vergers (green grocers) and markets with a wealth of fresh, diverse produce.

If you’re just visiting, go have hot chocolate and macarons at Ladurée (preferably the one on Rue Royale).  The line out the door is probably for the shop, so make sure you’re not waiting for nothing.  The downstairs room is much nicer than upstairs.

Remember that Thursday night is when a lot of people go out.  Lunch tends to be late, starting around 13:00 — most restaurants won’t serve food before 12:30.

Not all the food is good, by far.  But it’s generally a pretty safe bet if a place is reasonably crowded (or, it may just be a tourist trap.  That said, I’ve eaten extremely well even in places with menus in 30 languages outside).  Do try things you haven’t had before.

Hotels & Lodging, Living-Here-Logistics

No clue about hotels.  As far as I can tell, you should be able to find a reasonably central 2-star place for around €100-€150 a night pretty easily.  If you’re on the cheap, check out couchsurfing.  With hotels, as with everything else in this city, sky’s the limit price-wise.

If you’re staying for longer, there are any number of managed apartment sites.  An email acquaintance pointed out Paris Attitude, which seemed to have some decent flats.  Otherwise, have a look at Se Loger, that’s where we found ours.  French laws and contractual issues concerning rentals are too vast to go into, so ensure that you find a good expat site to explain them to you.  Suffice it to say that it appears furnished and unfurnished apartments fall into different categories of tenants’ rights.  As always, inform yourself thoroughly before moving anywhere.

The same goes for taxes, pensions, whatnot.  There are plenty of expat resources out there that can do a vastly better job at explaining how things work than I could.

Transportation

If you’re moving here, you can order a Navigo pass for free (just the card).  Often, employers pay up to half the subscriptions to various transportation offers, involving various zones in Paris’ RATP – bus, Métro, funiculars, and RER (suburban trains) — system.  Paris By Train has schedules.  The national rail system is the SNCF, for anything outside of Paris.   I prefer the RER to buses for getting to/from Charles de Gaulle airport — they get badly stuck in traffic sometimes.  Orly has a connection via RER, from which you have to switch to the Orlyval tram service.

You can also buy a “carnet” of 10 tickets for €12 at any ticket machine in Métro stations (they take credit cards with chips, some accept cash) or from the ticket desks.

The Navigo card can also be used for a monthly or annual Vélib subscription (borrow-bikes that let you take a bicycle from any of a ton of stations around the city) — usage is free for half an hour, then you are charged.  You can also buy 24h or weekly passes at the Vélib stations (you  may need a credit card with a chip, many American cards do not work.)  Biking in Paris is great, just pay attention.  Bike lanes are usually indicated on major roads — in some neighborhoods, you’re allowed to go against the flow of one-way streets.

Taxis are fairly common, but you may have trouble finding one at peak times (rush hour, Saturday nights).  Minimum charge is €5.60, with extras for a fourth passenger and additional suitcases.

Museums

I love the Musée Rodin and the Musée d’Orsay, the former especially in summer when you can explore the sculpture garden.  The Orsay does Thursday night dinners for €55/person in the beautiful old waiting salon of the former railway station (you must reserve) that include a visit to the museum after it closes.  You can get a “passport” to visit both of these at a reduced price.

The Louvre is just huge and amazing, too much to take in.  You will wait in line.  Avoid the crowds of Japanese tourists vying for a picture of the Mona Lisa, it’s not that great a picture.

With all three of the above, I recommend booking in advance.  Check the websites for details.

A smaller favorite museum of mine is the Carnavalet, in the Marais, dealing with Parisian history.

If you’re into militaria, visit Les Invalides.  The entrance to Napoleon’s tomb is around the back — it’s pretty impressive.

The Grand Palais sometimes does exhibitions — some of these tend to be booked out long in advance, some are free.  It’s a very nice example of glass and steel architecture.

Check the hoardings in the Métro — special exhibitions are usually advertised.

Sightseeing & Culture

All the big Parisian sights have been described to death.  Do all the touristy stuff if it’s your first time — Eiffel Tower (get there really early if you want to climb it), the Arc de Triomphe (lots of steps), Montmartre / Sacre-Coeur (watch for scam artists and pickpockets), Notre Dame, Saint-Sulpice, and the Paris river boat tour (bateaux mouches — there are several private companies), they’re all fun.  Don’t listen to anyone who snottily tells you to avoid the “usual” tourist crap.  Hey, you’re in Paris.  Be stupid.

If you’re an architecture geek, La Défense has some cool modern buildings.

A fellow reddit reader posted an interesting resource — Flickr map of photos taken in the city — red dots for pictures taken by tourists, blue dots for those taken by locals.  Draw your own conclusions.

The catacombs are a great visit — I’ve been told by friends who’ve visited some of the many many miles of off-limits underground tunnels that the bits open for tourists are actually the nicest parts.  You will probably wait in line for a while.  Try to get near a big tourist group, as they tend to stick together, leaving you a lot of peace and quiet.  It’s pretty tranquil.  I have some photos online.

Visit Versailles — both the gardens and the castle.  If you’re lucky, you can catch a show in the gardens.  Here is the link to the program and tickets page.  Trains run very frequently from Paris.

One of my absolute favorite things to do is to listen to the organ concerts at Notre Dame.  They’re every Sunday at 16:30, admission is free.  There are also amazing concerts in the evenings — check the previous link for an updated schedule.  You can buy tickets for usually less than €10 at the church entrance.  Make sure you arrive about an hour before the concert starts for a good seat.

Opéra Garnier does sightseeing tours.  If you can swing opera tickets, the box seats are extremely expensive (€150 upwards) but entirely worth it.  Make sure you get the Palais Garnier and not the Bastille opera.  You will have to book months in advance, and be very lucky.  Bring a tux, so you can look like a suave badass while having intermission champagne on the balcony overlooking the square.

Paris has a load of arcades (“passages couvertes“) — indoor shopping arcades from the late 19th century.  They’re as interesting for their architecture as for the weird shops you may find (for example, the area around Bourse is full of stamp and coin collectors’ shops, and the passage just North of it has about 10-15 of them.  A beautiful one is just West of Place des Victoires, on Rue des Petits Champs, just between Rue de Richelieu and the Rue de la Banque.

Arriving by TGV or Eurostar is pretty nifty, if you get here via one of the many Parisian train stations (Gare de l’Est, Gare du Nord, and Gare du Lyon, maybe others) with spectacular vaulted steel arrival halls.  Try to arrive at night, the stations have tinny-sounding loudspeakers that make you feel like you’re in a 1930s movie.  Try not to arrive during big French travel dates.  In fact, try not to get near Paris on big French travel dates.  Just don’t.

Areas and Neighborhoods

These are generally pretty touristy, but also contain beautiful areas that are not too overrun.   You have to find them.

Le Marais is the old Jewish and gay (!) quarter in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements.  Tons of shops, restaurants, narrow alleys, and museums — it’s one of the few areas in Paris open on Sundays, when much of it shuts down for most motorized traffic, but it is also jam-packed with tourists.  A great time to see it is early in the morning, before people start going to work.

Rive Gauche / Quartier Latin — area in the 5th and 6th (the Quartier Latin much more so).  Best to just explore for yourself.

Montmartre, including up from Métro stations Abbesses (go North for some cool twisty streets and areas full of cafés) and Anvers (for Sacre Coeur)

There is a rough quadrilateral described by the Rue Saint-Honoré on the South, Les Halles (which is pretty scummy) on the East, the Blvd. des Capucines / 4 Septembre on the North, and Rue Royal on the West that is full of small shops, restaurants, and bars.  It tends to be a bit cuter and less up-scale.

Nearby, just to the East of Bastille, there’s an area in the 11e full of bars and restaurants.  I can recommend the bit along the 8 line to about Ledru-Rollin.  Wander.

Definitely check out the Canal Saint Martin if it’s a reasonably warm night – that’s where the kids hang out.  Especially the section just South of the Hotel du Nord has a great atmosphere.

Parks & Cemeteries

Père Lachaise is worth a visit.  Entry is free, and if you’re lucky, you’ll meet one of the friendly old coots who give tours for tips.

There are tons of parks around, the most notable and significant ones being the Tuileries, the Jardin de Luxembourg, and the Jardin des Plantes.  If you’re in a hurry, the former two are more worthwhile.  The Place des Vosges is small, but beautiful and old and impressive and all that jazz, but it’s usually full of kids hanging out and smoking in summer.

When it’s warm, it’s also great to hang out along the Seine and in the little park on the Ile Saint-Louis I mentioned in the Restaurants and Bars section above.

There are tons of smaller parks that are hidden away, like the gardens of the Palais-Royal or innumerable small parks in the Marais, as well as larger areas like Buttes Chaumont, Bois de Vincennes, and the Bois de Boulogne, if you’re looking for some greenery.

Safety

Paris is very safe compared to a lot of large cities.  People are used to tourists.  Nonetheless, don’t be an idiot.  Don’t flash jewelry, put your camera away (and if you have a nice DSLR, buy something like a good anti-theft travel strap (this is the one I use — a side benefit is that you don’t have a huge ugly Nikon/Canon logo on your shoulder), be mindful of bad areas (i.e. if you’re walking around Rue Saint Denis or somewhere around the outer 18th/19th at 2 in the morning, something bad may happen).  Don’t leave bags under your table or unattended, etc. etc. etc. — but being the seasoned traveler you are, you know all this.  Right?

Tips for Getting On

Disregard anyone who recommends avoiding Paris in August / early September.  It is not nearly as empty as people make it out to be, you can find parking (and it’s free), the weather tends to be nice, there are not nearly as many people, and it’s generally my favorite time of year in the city.

I humbly implore you, don’t be obnoxious.  Parisians have a sometimes deserved, sometimes unfair reputation as being snotty and arrogant, but I’ve generally just found them to be very high-strung and stressed.  This city moves fast, and people don’t get enough sleep.  Just keep that in mind.  Stay polite, smile (they may think that you are a retard, but that’s okay, they’ll just feel sorry for you and be nice), and don’t take them seriously when they get snippy.  If you run into trouble, throw yourself on the mercy of people, that goes over very well, in general.

Try to speak the language.  Don’t shout.  Don’t whine.  Don’t call waiters “garçon” — in fact, use monsieur/madame a lot.  I’ve mostly encountered Parisians as fairly correct and polite, but as with anywhere, your mileage may vary.  I used to think that New Yorkers ate their young, until I visited.

Try not to dress like a tourist.  Baggy, ill-fitting jeans, tennis shoes, fanny packs, college sweat shirts and windbreakers, backpacks, and baseball caps don’t really work.  The well-dressed Parisian is a stereotype, but with a grain of truth.  If you dress reasonably elegantly (although a lot of kids run around in jeans and t-shirts in summer, you see a fair proportion of slovenly dressers) you’ll be taken a bit more seriously.

Mind the dog shit, there is a lot of it.  Always scan 30m ahead on the sidewalks.  Gaps between cars are especially treacherous.

Please don’t give money to beggars.

Try to find a small map; all kiosks sell very handy small blue books with maps by arrondissement, as well as public transit maps, for a few Euros.  They may not necessarily include all tiny side streets, but you’ll find them far more comfortable than having to unfold a massive map every time you’re lost (which will happen).

Most importantly, don’t over think things too much, and have fun.

Our base in the West of the country is in Bentota — formerly home to beautiful, nearly empty, unspoiled beaches.  Now home to beautiful nearly empty, unspoiled beaches and a lot of fat, very unattractive German and Russian package tourists sullenly sitting around their hotel restaurants.  Nonetheless, it has an attractive back country, with dense forest harboring temples and small villages along the river.

Bentota apparently means “where the pesky blood-sucking insects live” — Sri Lankan mosquitoes are something else. The little vampires eat you alive at certain times of day, and it doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone to just cover entire houses in mosquito netting. I recall reading in school about how American engineers managed to do a decent job clearing the Panama canal zone of anopheles, thus cutting down on malaria enough for them to build the canal. Why not here? Absolutely mad, soon I will be out of blood.  At least the monitor lizard that occasionally ambles across the hotel lawn seems peaceful.

Cricket is everywhere, and around 6 pm, half the country’s adolescent population seems to pop out of the woodwork for random games — ranging from spontaneous dirt field pickup played with sticks and and rocks, to full-on uniformed league practice with recruits from the local navy station.  Taking pictures of school kids playing at one of the school yards near our place resulted in at least one adolescent clown coming at me with a big grin on his place demanding “bonbon” and making “pay-me-money!” finger gestures.  He was still laughing when I told him smilingly to piss off.  You can get away with pretty much anything in this country if you give a big enough grin — my face started hurting from smiling so much after about day 3.

I want a Bajaj three-wheeler.  Desperately.  These things are ubiquitous, and surprisingly versatile.  I would have expected them to tip over much more readily, especially when tear-assing along potholed jungle roads.

I want one, and nothing you can say or do will stop me — but the RE 4-stroke, rather than the RE 2-stroke, not that I can tell much of a difference, they both sound like anorexic sewing machines. For some reason, most of the ones in Colombo have Piaggio badges, while down here they’re all Indian-made. Enormously versatile vehicles, and we’ve seen some very funny customization jobs, ranging from chrome shovels solidly mounted on the back where nobody is going to be doing much trench digging, to a vast variety of stickers proclaiming about as wide a variety of sentiments as you can get without going into politics. Probably a good thing, given how badly the press here is supposedly locked down. I can believe it — the current president clapped his election oponent in jail after winning, and held himself a grand old coronation despite accusations of embezzlement, and our morning English-language papers could not possibly have been more fawning and adulatory.

What happens when a tuk tuk breaks down? Do they call a tow tuk?

One of our drivers calls himself Tuk Tuk Charlie — said he’s famous in England, and almost begged for a good review on Tripadvisor.  Good for him, he was a funny guy, and I got to ride home with his 3 year old kid on my lap after he nearly kicked out his mother to make room.  In the end, there were five of us in a single Bajaj three-wheeler.

There are several antique shops at the side of the coastal Galle Road.  They’re mainly full of corroded stuff you think was scavenged from Tsunami-ravaged houses.  Some amazing items, but lots of it looks like it sat in water for days.  Don’t blame them for trying to make a buck or two, but it seems a bit macabre, with 50k dead, over a thousand of them in a single train.  I can’t imagine what it must have been like, sitting in one of the rickety cars that barrel along the tracks (sometimes right between houses and the beach) with that murderous wave  coming right at you and no place to run.

I generally want to see more handicrafts, not just the masks and soulless rows of carved elephants at the vaguely bizarre glassed-in and air conditioned tourist tat pavilion near our hotel.  We visited a local “market”, if you can call it that — two or three stalls of very dodgy looking fish and some anaemic vegetables, but you gotta hand it to them — they were very proud of the fish, though. Note to squeamish tourists — always visit fish markets in the early morning.

As for the rest of the shops — lots of plastic tat and our daytime travel companions managed to score a bright pink plastic toy tuk-tuk.

They really are everywhere — each day in the morning and evening, we hear the bakery tuk tuk playing a melody weirdly reminiscent of “It’s a Small World”.  Like an ice cream truck on three wheels, and with house wives instead of children chasing after him.

It’s difficult to get a grasp of the value of money here – tourists are sometimes charged obscene amounts of money for things like meals, when you can pick up a delicious roti for less than rs. 150.  Also, our house maid claims that she’s paid the equivalent of less than $2/day while hotels rake it in.  Bizarre.  Makes me reluctant to give more to a beggar at a temple who watched our bicycles (well, kept an eye on them, but I don’t give to beggars as a rule, while someone who actually works for their money, no matter how pro forma the “work” actually is, is a different story…)

We’ve taken a trip into the highlands, to Deniyaya, about 3/4 of the way to Eliya national park.  The highlands are beautiful, tea pickers in the fields all seem somehow happy the moment they see a camera.  I’m still figuring out why they’re all dressed distinctly, Karin claims that she saw one of them use her turban to store tea leaves.  I would have liked to see Kandy and Adams’ Peak, but Karin’s bum knee ensured that we had a comparatively relaxing holiday (much needed, no complaints), and two mad English types who’d rented a motorcycle for a 400km tour through the hills turned up soaked at our hotel after 4 days away, with tales of incessant rains and mudslides along the route.  Judging from the torrent that inundated the coast for the last half day of our presence, I don’t think we missed much.

Visited a tea factory in the mountains.  The scenery was absolutely spectacular, the tour actually fairly interesting, and the manager was terribly proud of the place.  Rightfully so, they did a pretty professional job, but if any tea company is reading this — you really want to advertise your place, and offer some snacks with afternoon tea, you’d have tourists beating down your doors.  Instead, we’d arranged for a driver with our hotel — the poor sod barely spoke any English, and despite having protested that he knew his way around the area, he took about 45 minutes to find a plantation we could visit.  All the while, Karin fumed in the back seat at the seeming lack of organization, but we did make out like bandits.  We probably bought more tea that afternoon than they’d sold in weeks — easy, given that silver tip is about a fourth of the price it is in Paris.

As far as food goes — I wish they’d bring out their own stuff more.  We’ve had a lot of delicious eats, but as with many places we’ve visited, there seems to be some strange reluctance except on the part of a few entrepreneurs to really show off local cooking.  People seemed almost embarrassed when talking about seafood and curry, but when we finally managed to talk someone into serving us local specialties, we found that the stuff was incredible.

Overall, the country’s great, but undeveloped.  Potential is there, people are amazingly nice, and the landscape is gorgeous, coupled with a rich cultural history.  Not just that, but despite the worst godawful stewardesses we’ve ever seen on their national airline, and some bureaucratic inefficiency on arrival and departure, the airport security guys are sensible enough to look at me funny when I ask them where I should dump my water bottle — before waving me through.  The culture and other attractions need some bringing out in the open, albeit preferably without falling more victim to large mobs of fat German tourists.

The bits we drove through on our short stay were a weird mixture of impoverished third world country, with its legions of pedestrians walking who-knows-where on dirt berms in the middle of nowhere, and developed economy with its malls and hotels. The taxi hawkers at the crowded, antiquated Jomo Kenyatta airport (apparently some of them will dump you at a random spot, rob you blind, or demand more money) and haggling over transportation make me tend toward the former, though. Interestingly enough, the touts vanished the moment we latched onto a slightly more expensive, reputable-looking taxi broker.

Thankfully, we ended up in neither, with a (short) night at Macushla House B&B, after deciding to avoid the exorbitantly expensive downtown business hotels. I’ve rarely seen such polite, welcoming service, made especially memorable by great food in a colonially decorated mansion’s private dining room, just for us, whee! Everything in the place, although it is relatively newly built, tastefully reminisced about colonial days. While probably not so great for the natives, if you were a wealthy white resident, the Empire must have been a grand old time to hang out in Africa.

Beyond the superb decorations at the guesthouse, everywhere you look, something is named after Karen this, Blixen that…sort of ironic given that Out of Africa was as much a sad look back at a colonial past that had already vanished by the time Isak Dinesen wrote the book.  There’s not much reminiscent of her description of the Ngong hills in the smog and barbed-wire-topped walls enclosing the gated communities around Nairobi national park.  I’d be curious to see the park on a clear day, but the ads for real estate investments in planned golf communities in the area I read in Kenya Airways’ inflight magazine (in between advertisements for all kinds of random marine maintenance and paper bag manufacturing companies, whose PR agencies should mainly be taken outside and fed to wild animals) didn’t give me much confidence.  I just somehow can’t imagine it would live up to the romance.

If I hadn’t come to this conclusion before, our one night in Kenya finally convinced me that organized religion can bite me — muezzins can be charming, when they’re not belting out their call to prayer at 4 a.m., and the legions of pentecostal congregations scattered around the area broadcasting repetitive hymns over external loudspeakers during most of the night didn’t help our sleep quota much. Especially considering that Karin dreamed we’d had a wakeup call at 3 a.m., jumped up, and headed for the shower.

The thing that really shocked me, though, was when our driver, upon returning us to the airport, switched off the dome light and asked us to pay him in the dark, gesturing at the policeman wandering about the cars dropping off passengers. “Please give me money in the dark, don’t let him see it or he will want some.”  Wow.

This sounds really negative.  Sorry.  Macushla is amazing, even if the tiny bit of Nairobi and surroundings that we saw on our very short stay didn’t make much of an impression.

Macushla House
Nairobi, KE
+254 (0) 20 891 987
www.maclusha.biz

The idea was to shrug off the cares of the world for a few days, loafing on beaches, snorkeling on one of East Africa’s best coral reefs (I would have killed for some scuba kit, but it was not allowed there, and the price I was quoted for a day trip to Mnemba atoll would have broken the bank more than decisively).

To get to Chumbe, it didn’t seem to matter whether the tide was high or low, in both directions we ended up having to take off our shoes and carry our crap (with some help) across a stretch of shallow ocean before getting to the ferry boat.  The only difference was that our afternoon trip out was right into the afternoon winds, resulting in a mad rollercoaster ride that made us fear being swamped by the waves more than once.

Some of the cooler aquatic fish-type critters we saw included (non-fish) hawkbill turtles that let us swim with them, crocodile fish, coronet/trumpet fish, loads of (also non-fish) hermit crabs, moray eels, beautiful peacock groupers, spotted sting rays, swarms of barracuda, and loads upon loads of ridiculously colorful reef life.  Our guides, two marine biology postdoc-type “ramadan volunteers” hired for the month, were great about pointing out and explaining fun lifeforms.

Ramadan, alas — most of the staff stayed out of sight during a large part of the days, it was only near the end that I discovered the lot of them sitting around in the shade.  I’d loaf about too, if I couldn’t eat all day — but then again, with all due respect, even if I did go for organized religion, I wouldn’t pick one that forbade me from eating lunch for a whole month — or from boozing at all.  Bleah on that.

Zanzibar, despite generally being comparatively laid-back about the whole religious thing, is strongly muslim and occasionally very traditional about it, something we were reminded of when some of the male staffers at Chumbe didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with Karin, or to even acknowledge her existence.  We were also very politely reminded, on arriving, that while we were welcome to come pray at the 100-year-old mosque if we were muslim, we maybe should stay the hell out otherwise, historical building or not.

Funny thing, though, most of the time they were friendly, and some were intensely engaging, to both of us.  And considering nobody was eating all day, the boys were surprisingly un-cranky.

From everywhere on the shore, we watched the fishing Dhows go by, and in the evenings, saw the lights of Dar-es-Salaam in the distance when not watching the crisply clear starry sky or hunting giant coconuts crabs in the mangrove forest.  It’s a beautiful, beautiful peaceful place, but you’ll get sand in your shorts no matter how hard you try.

Chumbe Island
P.O.Box 3203
Zanzibar/Tanzania
+255 (0) 24 223 1040
www.chumbeisland.com

Already flying into Tarangire national park in Tanzania, with a redheaded English aviatrix at the stick, we got an idea of what would await us. She insisted that, occasionally, the guides waiting to pick up tourists at the rough-hewn airstrip didn’t do much of a job in the way of clearing out elephants loafing about, and that she’d had to power through more than once to escape angry bulls pissed off at the small plane. I got to ride in the cockpit, which was a particularly neat experience. Whee, vroom!

We have a habit of riding our guides pretty hard whenever we hire one, but Dominic was a trooper. For three days straight, he drove us up and down Tarangire, starting at the amazing Swala tented camp. “Tented” in this case being a pretty liberal use of the word, as each of the individual accommodations had all the luxuries of a permanent high-end hotel room, with the exception of the black-faced monkeys goofing off on the roof, and the elephants ambling by in the morning on their way to the watering hole in our back yard.

The service was outstanding, from the professional waiters and not-particularly-talkative Maasai Askaris (in traditional blanket garb and assegais, in addition to tennis shoes and flashlights) whom we were obliged to call upon for an escort to and from our room anytime after dark, to the trio of managers who’d meet us with hot towels and smiles after a dusty day in Dominic’s battered open Land Cruiser. The latter was a really small effort for them, and yet made the lodge feel much more welcoming, like every arrival was that of an appreciated guest.

Only the request to not submit ladies’ undergarments for (free!) laundry (“due to cultural considerations” / “our all-male staff”) was a bit out of character, and even then, more amusing than anything else.

The restriction on walking around after dark seemed like a fairly sensible one, given that we spent half of a night being kept awake by a particularly annoying leopard skulking around behind our outdoor shower. Or, the sixteen lions one of the guards spotted walking through the camp the night before that.

We’d picked Tarangire as a wildlife safari destination as it didn’t look as obnoxiously crowded as Ngorongoro/Serengeti or any of the Kenyan locations, offered a particularly good selection of animals to see (partial list below, please excuse spelling), and let us stay at a hotel that, while still providing the kind of luxurious digs that are a pleasure to return to after a day of annoying the hell out of elephant herds, don’t require the sale of a kidney for mere mortals to be able to afford a few nights there.

The only times when we did run into larger groups of other tourists during our stay there (for most of the time we even had the jeep and guide to ourselves, and when we had fellow passengers, they were a pleasant and appreciative German couple who spent most of the time oohing and aahing at the insane number and diversity of animals running around) was at a picnic spot, watching leopards being lazy in trees, and at a river crossing where a pair of lions were mating every few minutes.

The picnic grounds were mostly tidy, if populated by particularly aggressive and grabby monkeys, but offered a magnificent view of a river crossing where colossal herds of wildebeest, elephants, zebras, and warthogs would collect to water.

Watching the lions do the nasty (over and over and over again — apparently they go at it for 4 days straight) was one of the more spectacular highlights of an already highlight-filled trip. When one of the drivers jamming up the river crossing next to the cats burned out his clutch and quickly exited his car to attach a tow rope, he confirmed what our guide had mentioned about the animals and cars — they don’t see jeeps as anything of particular interest, which is what lets people get so close to them, but the moment some pink blobby thing on two legs exits, boom, the hackles go up and the pink blobby thing is no longer a mildly annoying-but-tolerated pest, but dinner delivered to the beasties’ doorstep.

And then, the moment the driver jumped back in the car (after a cacophony of Kiswahili warnings from the other guides), the couple went right back to coupling, prodded on by two jeeploads of Italians shouting VAI VAI SEXY SEXY! You can’t possibly claim that lions are endangered if they can reproduce under such conditions.

The leopards were something really special in an already amazing experience. Apparently, people visit several parks for days without seeing any — we saw two, including one perched on a branch (like a lazy house cat — the inter-species resemblance is uncanny) with its prey, a duly savaged impala, occasionally flicking its tail and slinking over to another part of the tree. They’re beautiful animals, and I can understand the hordes of people trying to get a good picture of them whenever they see one. To Tarangire’s credit, all traffic is tightly restricted to the limited dirt tracks, which I imagine restricts the impact of large crowds on the animals (who generally ignore you anyway.) One man we encountered, clumsily wielding an enormous 800mm prime lens out of the roof of his jeep, had the right idea — no problem with picture shake or pixelation for him, although according to him, “it’s a great lens but you can’t carry it anywhere.”

One of our mornings consisted of an early (we generally couldn’t believe how insanely early we both got up and ate dinner compared to our usual decadent Parisian schedule) walk with an “old fart” (his words) originally from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. He chain-smoked, treated his likable young Tanzanian park ranger colleague with more than a bit of condescension, and was generally pretty kooky, but did a masterful job of getting us to two watering holes from downwind where the animals couldn’t get a whiff of us. The experience underscored the animals’ distrust of anything on two legs — to quote our tracker guide (who spent a disconcerting amount of time poking around in animal poo), “we’ve been eating them for thousands of years”. He had some great tips, though — animals are alert to motion and contrast, rather than shape, and if you approach them in a group and only leave the upper half of your body visible, they won’t really know what to make of you.

During our hike, we came across what appeared to be poacher tracks, which was moderately exciting — our guide made the point that this was the sort of experience that makes walkabouts, no matter the expense to willingly paying tourists (supposedly to cover park fees and the cost of the ranger accompanying us — again, a great guy), worthwhile, since from jeeps it’s not possible to pick up the footprints of illegally encroaching hunters. That made me feel a little warm and fuzzy, let no self-righteous environmentalist claim that I’m not doing my part to preserve nature, and yes, I’m feeling particularly smug right now.

Our last evening was particularly memorable, insofar as we already risked returning back to camp late. Since a lot of animals are nocturnal, apparently driving with lights or at night is not kosher due to the distress it causes them. Dominic’s Formula One impression to get us back in time put paid to that notion, though. Despite a promise to myself to not take too obscenely many photos (since I already had about 80,000 giraffe/zebra/wildebeest/buffalo/warthog/elephant/you/name/it shots), I nonetheless found myself frantically seeking boring zebra pictures to delete. In the space of no more than half an hour, our guide managed to take us through a steadily building crescendo of amazing animal sightings, of which the family of cheetas snacking on something dead were only the start. Several dozen cape buffalo really close to the road, a massive troop of baboons running ahead of us, a large male waterbuck leaping across the road right before the car, and a bat-eared fox sitting right by the roadside, probably too startled to figure out that our speeding jeep might even conceivably constitute a threat, were only part of the scenery. Bumbling into the midst of a, by the sound of it, extremely pissed off elephant herd the next day, nicely wound down the fun.

I can’t imagine doing this trip on a budget tour in a large jeep full of backpackers (although a snorkeling guide we encountered off Zanzibar later insisted that she’d had a bully time on hers), sleeping on rudimentary campsites — the countryside is dusty as all hell, and I’m still cleaning the fine red dirt out of my camera equipment. Likewise, I don’t think I could muster the endurance required for some of the multi-camp, multi-park safari trips some of the tourists make; it’s just too damn much work. Rather, stick by my original plan of coming back to a civilized base every evening, setting up my telephoto lens with a tripod and remote control, and lazing around on the porch while having a drink and getting in the rest of a day’s photo hunt.

Swala Sanctuary Lodge
www.sanctuaryretreats.com

And of course, the chest-thumping list of what-we-saw, look-at-me:

The Beasties:

Here is a partial list of some animals we saw, in no particular order, and probably repeating, and definitely occasionally misspelled (Dominic-the-guide had a bit of an accent, plus it’s not so easy to understand exotic animal names when tearing along in a bouncing jeep, not to mention Karin’s writing in said bouncing jeep, which is a whole lot more legible than mine would be under similar circumstances). Quite a few of them we probably don’t bother even mentioning more than once, like the black-faced monkeys or Impalas, since there were so many of them to make them more a part of the scenery than anything else…

Day 1:

Ground hornbill
Leopard (male)
Red buck
Saddle-billed stork (female)
White-headed buffalo weaver (one of the “smallest 5″)
Warthog
Kudu
Giraffe
Buff-crested bustard
Bush chicken (guinea fowl)
Zebra
Elephant, with babies, whee!
Impala
Dik-dik
Waterbuck
White shrike
Antelope
Long-tail shrike
Spark stallion
Termite

Day 2:

Elephant
Batla eagle
Black-faced monkey
Brown-snake eagle
White-browed concal
Van der Decken’s hornbill
Magpie shrike
Crested Francolin
Bush baby (just me, ha ha, thank you Melembuki the heroic Maasai with the flashlight)
Ostrich
White-bay bustard
Yellow-colored lovebird
Marabu
Vulture
Bat-eared fox
Cape buffalo
Ox pecker (on buffalo)
More elephants with babies, between 1-7 days old
Warthog (small and big)
Black-backed jackal
Grant’s gazelle
Cheetah
Egyptian goose
Lion (male and female, mating, VAI VAI SEXY SEXY)
Ibis
Oliver baboon
Lilac breasted Rala
Wild dog (super duper uber-rare, lucky us! Woof!)
Still-bock
Ostrich
Coke’s Hardebeest (Cogoni)
Giraffe
Zebra (loads and loads)
Hamerkopbird (huge nest, small bird, size isn’t everything)
Red-beaked hornbill
Wildebeest (hanging around with zebras)
White-backed vulture

Day 3:

Iland
Dwarf mongoose
Giraffe
Zebras (even more loads)
Martial eagle
Coke’s hardebeest (with young)
Brown-snake eagle
Namapua dove (the smallest dove there is, apparently)
Bush baby (the other kind, looks like a squirrel, without the huge cute eyes)
African fish eagle
Antlion

Day 4:

Kudu
Juvenile tawny eagle
Bat-eared fox
Banded mongoose
Leopard, with kill
Lion (female)
Striped wildebeest
Waterbuck
Giraffe with babies
Elephant (doing a downhill marathon, with babies)
Silver-beaked hornbill
Secretary bird
Jackal
Bushed mongoose
Gnus, gnus, gnus in the “small Serengeti” area
Warthog (just a baby one)
Vulture with nest and young chick
Cheetah (3 of them, eating, mmh)
More buffalo

Day 5:

Elephant (nearly attacking us, the angry little shits)
Buffalo (more than you can shake a stick at)
Ostrich (we’ve stopped counting)
Giraffe (ditto)
Impala (not even worth the mention anymore)
Warthogs (fighting!)
Goliath heron
Fish eagle (juvenile and adult)
Black-shouldered kite
Grey heron
Adada Ibis
Core bustard
Spur-winged goose

As it turned out, this is a routine event, judging by the three other furious tourists at Zanzibar airport, the researcher at the Kenya Airways office in Stone Town, and the Canadian couple on our flight to Arusha who had all seen their luggage vanish at some point during their trip (twice in a row, in the case of the livid Irish couple stomping about outside the lost luggage office.) Dozens of phone calls and a trip back to the airstrip finally yielded results after three days of effort, along with the discovery that bags are regularly shoved aside somewhere when one of the handlers is slightly confused about their tags.

While I wish we hadn’t wasted the hours trying to track down the damn thing, we eventually got it, and still had a chance to do a reasonable amount of exploring around Stone Town in the three short days we spent there. The city is an in-your-face explosion of culture and color, mixing (mainly) Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, between black Africans, Arabs, and Indians, as well as the usual complement of confused-looking tourists, unwashed backpackers, and the occasional expat causing wide-eyed surprise among the locals with the fact that yes, mzungu knows Swahili.

Photography in the city was a little bit intimidating, as we had been enjoined by numerous people to always ask permission before taking anyone’s picture — something I try to do anyway. I gather that the usual developed-country tenets of particularly elbowy, assertive photographers that “it’s a public space, so you’re fair game” wouldn’t apply here anyway. I was told “no” a number of times, so hooray for telephoto lenses and long distance snapshots. Discretion is the better part of valor, after all. And no point in being torn to bits by an irate indigenous crowd, not that I could really imagine the locals ever putting together much of a credible lynch mob. I would have loved a shot of some of the muslim men at prayer, and could possibly have pulled it off with a bit of nice-like wheedling, but in any case, I’m too chickenshit to bother.

From our beautiful top floor room at the old Emerson & Green hotel (now 236 Hurumzi), with a view of the city and harbor, we regularly heard the muezzin calling to prayer (at least 4 times a day), church bells, the enthusiastic clanging of Hindu prayer bells — the stout, sari-clad women who ring these make an enthusiastic racket vastly out of proportion to their small numbers, and miscellaneous shouts, crows, drums, cats, Vespa horns, and other noise. Not to forget, of course, the gay Dutch couple with the tower room across from ours, professing loudly to each other that “you look as sexy from the inside as from the outside.” It probably wasn’t very nice of me to yell “TOT ZIENS, DOEI” out the window before we left the first evening, but it did at least remove that mildly disturbing mental image for the rest of our stay.

Next to the rooftop dinner at our hotel, with its spectacular 360 degree view (interesting during breakfast, when the wind blew away chunks of my omelette — never seen that before) and the Monsoon by the harbor, food was pretty rich at the Forodhani market night food court. A hard-core Rastafarian barker piled a towering mix of brochettes, chickpea balls, bready thingies and other “stuff” on a paper plate, performing some quick mental random number theory to calculate the bill. A contact of mine had recommended we “enjoy the market, but avoid the fish”, so no matter how much the giant grilled octopus tentacles tempted us, we couldn’t help but combine his caution with the heaps of the day’s catch we’d seen glistening in the sun at the Darajani market that afternoon and stick with something a bit less potentially harmless.

The Rastafarian above, by way of note, was frequently about town on his mountain bike, sporting a little backpack and wraparound shades, with a chubby, tanned, Northern European blonde college girl type clinging to him. While he was friendly enough at the food market, his sneering treatment of his girl-toy brought to mind the most stereotypical pimps-and-hos c’mere-bitch 1970s blaxploitation films imaginable. Good times. Whatever floats your holiday boat, I suppose.

The market itself is a good sight, and had there been a bit more sun, the photos I took there might not rely so much on adding some color saturation in post processing to make them look as bright and happy as what you see in picture books of Zanzibar. Then again, the smell from the seafood and meat sections would probably have been really overpowering. The fruits and spices here are outstanding, though, something that was confirmed to us during a tour of a cooperative spice plantation our first morning in Zanzibar. We paid extra, on the assurance from online reviews that our agency actually supported some worthwhile causes with the cash as opposed to the numerous touts who advertise such tours, and our guide was a good type anyway, so money well spent. From what our hotel’s portly Canadian manager, a longtime resident of the island, told me, everything having to do with government and official infrastructure is so rotten and corrupt anyway, that a few dollars extra to support good service and entrepreneurship are just fine.

Apparently the corruption is one of the main factors preventing greater investment in Stown Town’s crumbling architectural legacy; since a lot of the old Indian and Omani merchant houses are built from coral, failure to maintain the roofs leads to the walls becoming sodden with rain, resulting in the unfortunate collapse of these beautiful houses. More than one open space in the otherwise densely packed old quarter was obviously the sad outcome of such neglect. Since many of the large buildings were expropriated from their wealthy Omani and Indian owners, who were often sent packing in the 1960s, lucky to get out with their lives.

I had the privilege of watching a Hindu religious service at the temple (whose entrance, while well concealed, nonetheless sported several large “WELCOME, COME IN” signs) on Hurumzi Street; a highly welcoming elderly Indian gentleman explained that only about 400 Hindus remained on Zanzibar, active in two temples, after the persecutions and expulsions in the 1960s and 70s. All this despite the oft-proclaimed citation of the presence of Hindus as an example of the island’s religious and cultural diversity. Our hotel was once actually the residence of one of the more prosperous Indians in Zanzibar — before it was rebuilt by its founders, after expropriation and application of a few years of revolutionary economic planning, I assume. Likewise, many buildings were confiscated and turned into tenements for large numbers of poor peasants under misguided social equality programs.

According to the Hurumzi manager, restoring them is a major pain in the ass, since, in addition to innumerable palms that demand greasing, every single tenant has to be individually bought out, and inordinately, unrealistically severe historical restrictions apply to what can be done to old houses. Assuming, that is, that thats not something that can be solved through a bit of baksheesh in the proper quarters. With a lot of tourism development potential, mixed in with the corruption, I can easily imagine that hotel operators will opt for the “easy” way out of just bribing a few officials to build sprawling resorts on the coast rather than investing in navigating the tricky process of really turning the city into the jewel it should be.

236 Hurumzi Hotel
236 Hurumzi St.
P.O. Box 3417
Stone Town, Zanzibar, TZ
+255 (0) 77 742 3266
www.zanzibar.org/236hurumzi_hotel

Monsoon Restaurant
Opposite Forodhani Gardens
Stone Town, Zanzibar, TZ

Eco & Culture Tours
Hurumzi St.
P.O. Box 1390
Stonetown, Zanzibar, TZ
+255 (0) 242 233 731
www.ecoculture-zanzibar.org

These guys are traders, like Lebanese on steroids.  They’re also builders and makers, who’ll sit on a sidewalk and bang together industrial-quality metal goods with little more than a hammer and a pile of sheet metal.  But every shopkeeper in touristy areas has the same goods and welcome lines, my tailor could have saved an insane amount of time and effort by just using their past experience to make some active suggestions before I ordered my clothes, and nearly ever road and building construction site seems to be making the same mistakes in terms of leaving things half-done — their overall productivity, happiness, efficiency and attractiveness of urban areas could be increased so much with a few basic steps.

It’s the most can-do culture I’ve ever come across, while at the same time crippling itself somehow.  If they ever figure out a way to take a step back, look at what they’re doing, and logically think about ways in which they could do it better, they’ll be unstoppable.

Before we left, we decided that, for form’s sake, we really had to dive into the mob of eager Red Dao women trying to aggressively sell trinkets and fabrics out front of the lodge.  So, the moment we’d loaded our bags into the car, we faced them, and said, “ok, now I buy from you” before plunging into the chaos.

No matter what we picked up to look at from the dozens of outstretched hands (“YOU BUY FROM ME YOU BUY FROM ME YOU FRIEND”, I cannot begin to describe the chaos), ten more hands would immediately vanish into backpacks and shoulder bags, re-emerging with ten more variations on exactly the same item.  We bought a cap for a friend’s baby, ten more baby caps would come out.  Scarves, placemats, etc.

A short note — an Australian gentleman and his Peruvian anthropologist wife I’d met at the lodge described how they had gone about dealing with the Red Dao (tremendously cool name, I think); they’d just started walking energetically toward their village, and as one after another of their followers dropped back, they were finally left with one or two of the more hard-core, English speaking ones.  With these robust ladies (they see you coming, they start running toward you, backpacks full of souvenirs and all) they’d started to talk and bargain, and talk some more, until they got an invitation to their homes and actually ended up buying a full authentic outfit.

Bargaining feels a bit odd, because on the one hand, I really don’t feel like paying the asking price up front — that kind of implies that I’m made of money and could set a bad precedent for others, plus I don’t like the feeling that I’m being taken for a ride.  However, the stuff you buy here is so cheap, and a few bucks either way doesn’t make much of a difference, that you really have to walk a thin line.  Bargain for form’s sake, but don’t be obnoxious about it.  And always keep smiling.  It’s amazing how much far that seems to get you here.

Funny enough, Karin tried to buy some of the amazing silver ear rings that a few of the older women wore, not settling for the cheaply made imitations they offered alongside the otherwise very beautiful handmade scarves and cloths (apparently the dyes aren’t properly set, so don’t wear them with anything light, as attested by skin discolorations of many people we saw in nearby Sapa), but that was not happening — no way they were selling these.  I think those are the holiest of heirlooms or something.

Sapa was an interesting place, really resembling Aguas Calientes in Peru for pure wild West disorder.  We bought a few nifty souvenirs, including a thoroughly intimidating H’mong hatchet from a tiny woman (who turned out to be heavily pregnant, rather than the 12 or 13 I’d initially guessed), and some beautiful wood carvings that should have a nice place in our living room.

The H’mong children are particularly persistent in their selling, following you for ages with “you buy from me you buy from me ok” ringing in your ears wherever you go.  A polite no, with a wave of the hand and a smile usually sends them off, but the moment you give them even the slightest opening, you’ve had it.  I now own two probably Chinese-made embroidered purses (whatever, they’re pretty, they’ll make nice gifts), and in return the kids who’d been following us, to the point of waiting for us outside the first restaurant we made the mistake of trying to have lunch in (it was revolting to the point that we had to just settle up and walk out — not something I’ve done often, but taking a quick swipe of the tabletop and having your finger come away black was a bit too much.  Plus, I don’t think spicy papaya salad is made with tomato ketchup.)  In return, the kids ended up with a lesson in aggressive bargaining.  And I made them promise to work hard in school.  Hah.

A few of the urchins followed us to the travel office, where we were to catch our bus to Lao Cai.  Instead of buying from them, I grabbed some waste paper from the office staff, and Karin and I regaled the growing crowd of little girls for a while with paper airplanes, little cutout accordion people, and whatever primitive bits of origami we could think of.  Particular hits were the little paper dragons we made for them, which we named after the girls we gave them to.They stopped even trying to sell to us, aside from some perfunctory requests to buy more purses (purely for form’s sake, I suppose), and even came running after us when our car was about to leave to give us some woven bracelets as thanks, waving their dragons and shouting “remember Mu the dragon ok?”

Karin suspected that between school (there seem to be fairly well-developed and equipped schools in all the villages and towns here, so I assume they have the chance to go) and working as souvenir sellers, they probably don’t have much opportunity to be kids, so seeing them light up when we gave them silly paper toys was a great experience.  Note to anyone visiting these parts:  bring lots of small things, pens, paper, whatever, to give as kids, and a good sense of humor (some magic tricks help too.)  The kids love it.

Topas Ecolodge
Sa Pa, VN
www.topasecolodge.com

Why not, alas…as it turns out, the Americans not only destroyed all North Vietnamese rolling stock during their many air raids in the war, but also bombed every single centimeter of railway in the country.  As a result, I think our train consisted of bolted-together Soviet shipping containers, dragged across naked railroad ties by a particularly loud bulldozers.  I don’t believe the car had wheels.

At least, that’s what it felt like.  The cabin was nice enough, as was the friendly service, with an attendant who brought us tea, rubber slippers, and plentiful advice to always always keep the damn door locked (notwithstanding the fact that, had I bothered to bring my Leatherman, I could have opened it in about 3 seconds from the outside.)  All good, aside from the porter desperately trying to extract more tips from us, thought we’d paid for that in advance?  Lesson learned, alas — but trying to sleep on the sheet-clad plyboard slabs used as mattresses, while someone did their best impression of a bunch of military tanks smashing into each other (and us) all night, was a challenge at best.  The experience was reminiscent of the obnoxious freight cars in Thomas the Tank Engine books; bumpy, jerky, and like riding an enormous children’s see-saw (at high speeds, at that).  I never imagined that a train car could whip about like this, it has to be experienced to be believed.

Arrive, however, we did, and that’s what counts.  At 05:00, though, running the gamut of surprisingly un-pesky transportation touts for Sapa and surroundings, was taxing, waiting for our driver while the last passengers of our bus arrived on a separate train (and a warm bed beckoned somewhere in the mountains beyond Lao Cai) even more so.  But we made it, after an hour and a half of increasingly bumpy, curvy drive among the usual armada of insane motorcyclists (except here, half of them wear traditional Hmong/Red Dao/whatever garb), plus women carrying babies, water buffalo, pigs, mountain waterfalls that washed away half the road, Laos-sized potholes, and absolutely spectacular vistas.  For the first time since we set foot in the country, the sun came out, giving us views of beautiful hill scenery, with valleys still shrouded in mist.

Our trip back was uneventful, as soon as the driver (two of them this time) actually showed up.  Affable enough fellows, although stopping at one of the very touristy souvenir and marble carving shops along the way for them to have a quick lunch got us grimacing and pointing at our watches a bit.  Turns out the place is actually some sort of workshop for the disabled, although the cynic in me wonders whether the various drivers get a free lunch for depositing tourists on the way back from Ha Long.  Hey, no objection to charities being profitable.

Unfortunately, tickets for the water puppet show haven’t worked out, as it’s apparently booked out for many days in advance, but the staff of the Hanoi Elegance 4 have been magnificently helpful in all other regards, offering various transfers, assisting with luggage without asking, and generally providing an exceptional level of service.  Missing the puppet show wasn’t that much of a loss, as it has allowed us to do a bit of shopping for warm clothes.  We are by no means the only group of travelers who utterly failed to do their research and realize that the winter monsoon actually brings cold weather to Northern Vietnam.  Tropical country, right?  Warm, right?  Sunshine, right?  Even given that the locals don’t seem accustomed to anything below 20 degrees and swaddle themselves in fake Chinese down jackets, it can still get chilly.  Wonder what Sapa holds — we’ve been hearing enough horror stories about how freezing it is up there.

Unfortunately, the Vietnamese we’ve encountered in shops and street stalls thus far don’t seem to really have gotten the gist of the whole negotiation and bargaining thing.  A lot of descriptions about the country that we’ve seen underscore the point that Northerners appear to see themselves as guardians of culture and philosophical thought, while Southerners are the stylish, cosmopolitan merchants.  The Northerners don’t like the Southerners for being decadent and shallow, and the Southerners dislike the Northerners for being a bunch of commie bumpkins.  The folks from the center feel that the capital is still in Hue, and that they are thus superior to the rest of the place, while being roundly detested by both North and South.  And thus it goes.

However, as for commerce, the modus operandi seems to be to name a hair-raising initial price (look!  Foreigners!  Made of money!) and walk away shrugging at any attempts to bargain — at least, that’s Hanoi.  I’ve heard similar stories from people we’ve encounter; a shopkeeper trying to gouge Karin for a pair of Chinese stockings costing more than she’d pay for a decent pair in Paris, $480 for a $10 1970s vintage propaganda poster, stated without any smirking or irony whatsoever.  Good luck with that, folks.  What’s sad is, we’d really genuinely like to buy some stuff.

Thankfully, with our extra free time, we’ve been able to hit the Quan an Ngong for dinner again; the food was as delicious as last time, and the service fun and friendly (including a group of waiters snickering at our sad attempts to figure out what to do with the ingredients of a bowl of soup.  Solution:  dump it all in and get on with it.)