Another early morning, waking up (with sore calves) to broken english demanding attendance at the compulsory complimental breakfast. Those sound like antithetical (WRONG WORD) concepts, but I assure you with Grandma free food is a required activity. 5 courses later (or, you know, some bread, bacon, and fruit), we headed out into the cloudy morning for a long car ride... somewhere.
We arrived to an enormous parkinglot, almost entirely empty, and jumped on a shuttle to an massive ticket-hall. Really more of a ticketing-complex, surprisingly ornate, which lead us eventually to a cable-car. Cable cars are always cool, and I started to enjoy the day, sweeping over the jungle mountains while bland corporate music played. It was a surprisingly long ride, maybe 10m? and about half way through we rose into the clouds, ears popping from the elevation change. There's something magical about riding a cable car through the clouds, unable to see the ground below you, the towers above or behind, only seeing the empty carriage headed in the other direction every 15 seconds. You don't know how high you are, where you're going, when you'll get there... You could be headed anywhere.
Or you could be headed to a mountaintop souveneir hall with a 360* panorama of... clouds. Visibility was still limited to 20' or so. Doesn't matter, Lou had a plan, and lead us out a set of sliding glass doors to Golden Hands bridge! This is the famous bridge from all the travel guide photos, and apparently we had woken up early to get here before all the crowds, you know, because instagram. So I did my insta-boyfriend best and took a half dozen photos, even though it was hard to see much, given, you know, the fog so thick it was actively condensing on everything including us. We headed back to panorama hub to figure out our next move, where I was informed that all my pictures sucked, and I'm a bad photographer.
After a quick bathroom break, we headed out the huge sidewalk across the top of the mountain... to the other side of goldenhands bridge! Apparently (I USE THIS TOO MUCH FIND ALT CONSTRUCTION) the bridge just a giant prop, looping 100 feet back to the same ridge it starts on, and the side we were first on was closed for a professional photoshoot. Speaking of photoshoot, Lou handed me her phone for another round of pictures. I simply said "Nope" and walked away, too cold, exhausted, sore, and wet to care to sign up for another round of insults for a cause I never believed in to begin with. So I waited at the end of the bridge, hiding in the meager wind-shadow of a small booth, every surface too wet with condensate to sit on, and tried to conserve body warmth. 20 minutes later Lou+family emerged from the fog. Apparently she'd hired the on-site photographer to take photos that looked almost identical to the foggy pics from the first round.
The point of our visit now accomplished, we were free to enjoy the rest of the park, though enjoy is a strong word to use given my soreness, sleep deprivation, and exhaustion. I was fully in survival mode. I threw caffiene at the problem and it just made me slightly more aware of how little I was enjoying the most magical place on --earth-- VN.
We set off towards our first target, the vietnamese gardens and giant buddha statue. This was, unfortunately, all downhill. As any hiker knows, you don't trade away elevation you don't need to, since you're just going to have to recover it all anyways. Especially given that we'd been visiting Vietnamese gardens, shrines, and buddhas all of yesterday. I tried to explain this to Lou, but she just ran ahead like the 13 year old boy she is inside. So instead, I just followed along slowly with her parents, always hoping we'd gone down far enough and didn't have to make it to the end, and always being disappointed as Lou disappeared around the next bend. Finally at the bottom, I noticed the cleverness of this theme-park design! They have a gondola to take you back to the top! Or at least, they will, once it's completed in 2028 or some bullshit. So of course we turned around and retraced our steps back up the mountain. But the elderly weren't complaining, so I just mutely trailed along behind.
Once we got back to the top, we took another gondola - a short ride this time - to the next section of the park. This was where I finally realized we were essentially at Disney Vietnam. There was a french town, complete with castles and a miniature cathedral (the bible was a cast block of foam), and I could see japanese pagodas rising over those in the distance. We wandered through a lot of this, and then made our way to the steampunk area, which continained a beer-hall that was 4 floors tall. Here we got our complimentary 200ml beer in a highly-efficient assembly-line process, I supplemented that with more caffiene, and finally felt ok about the world. The best part of the beer hall was the views - the fog (clouds) was finally lifting, and we could see out into the valley, which was gargantuan construction site. The scale of the engineering project here is incredible - they're essentially building an entire city of themed skyscrapers on top of a 1500m mountain, with all the infrastructure to support it.
From here we wandered through the japanese gardens, which included a nice break while Lou took 20m of selfies or something, and then headed back down (of course there's stairs, always stairs), through some arcades / carnival game things, and then off to lunch. How do you feed thousands of people with 4 different levels of buffet offerings in a single restaurant? You stack 4 enormous cafeterias on top of each other. Again, the infrastructure and coordination behind the scenes is as impressive as any of the props, which are all world-class in their own right.
After lunch was the indoor portion, and we walked down a bunch of stairs and ramps to get to the castle where we saw a 4d film (surprisingly good plot, but the air-tickler was designed to blow on the top of asian heads and instead blasted directly in my ear every time), and rode a motion-simulator panoramic thing, which was totally fine and beats walking.
Speaking of better than walking, there was a funicular/trolley thing to take us back up this hill! We'd essentially completed the entire park, except for the alpinecoaster and the squiggly road. After dragging us to the aplinecoaster lou then started asking "do you want to do it? should we do it? I don't know if it's too expensive ($3). Do you want to do it?" Despite my answers of don't care, if you want to, $3 aint shit, really don't care the questions persisted, and I eventually agreed to do it with her because she clearly wanted to. It was... ok. Roller carts on a downhill track. I think it could have been fun if they let you take the entire thing balls-out, but they had these clever inductive brakes to slow you down. Mounted beneath the cart were two powerful magnets, and the track had - where they wanted you slower - thick aluminum sheet that would stick up into the gaps between these magnets, harnessing eddy currents to slow you down. I mean, they turned it into a kiddy ride, but it was technically neat.
The entire park complete except for the "lava road", Lou dragged us back across the park again. Running ahead, as always, while we politely and exhaustedly followed. However, we did not follow her down the lava road, a zig-zagging pathway that lead down the mountain to a fenced off gate, and let her do that one on her own, communicating with gestures that there were perfectly good benches up here and she'd be forced to come back this way eventualy.
Now, we were done. You know, except for another round of instagram on golden-hands bridge. Lou was evidentally still too stung by my refusal this morning, so instead she begged passers-by to take her photo, while I took photos for other passers-by, in a crude fascimilie of an economy. But these strangers actually thanked me, and none insulted my skills as a human tripod, so I guess it worked out.
The cable-car down the mountain was less cloudy (though we still vanished for a while), offering better views of the virgin rainforest below. I still can't believe we thought we should fight a war here.
The last of the caffiene wore off as our driver picked us off, and I was already making plans for how I would politely excuse myself once we got back to the hotel, and head out to find a beer and a pizza, or something easy like that, alone for once. However, there was then a phone call (which are always loud, you have to yell into the phone since they're so far away. Vietnamese can be a beautiful language, or it can be barked out as a stacatto assualt). The phone was passed around the cab, and apparently we were looking for a scooter on the side of the road, since we then followed that scooter down an alleyway and then exited the car to head down a smaller side road, ending up at a house.
This home was a "middle class" home. Still a giant cement box, but this one had doors and windows, and was broken into rooms inside. On the interior balcony, a small shrine to buddha sat, ceiling stained directly above from decades of incense.
One of grandma's friends lived here. They hadn't seen each other in 40 years, it was admittedly heart-warming to see them reconnect. As a guest, I was on my best behaviour, smiling, sipping tea, and pantomiming following conversations I couldn't understand - reading inflection and facial expressions to gauge reactions. It's definitely not as relaxing as a normal conversation, but once you get the knack of it it's pretty easy. I'm sure the beer helped. Dinner was egg-pancake things, which you would roll into a rice-paper wrapper along with some cucumber or lettuce, and then dip in fish sauce. Quite delicious.
We finally got back to the hotel at 8:40pm. Just in time to pee and speedwalk to the dragon for the 9pm show. Tired as I was, I wasn't going to say no to a giant flamethrower that is the pride of an entire city, and the food/break had rejuvenated me enough. The bridge was packed. Hundreds of people on each side, and some brave souls in the median directly infront and ahead of the beast. 8:58 rolled around, and everyone whipped out cell-phone cameras. It was definitely a cooler experience on the bridge than from the boats. You could feel the heat of the flames, and the crowd atomsphere was a fun touch.
After the second set of blasts... the pilot light didn't extinguish. In fact, we could hear crackling from the flame, and the occasional drip of fire fell from the dragons mouth. The third and final set of fireblasts was just a single blast, instead of the typical quartet. The crowd was worried, but mostly wanted to see what would happen next. The smoke blasts - a super high-pressure high-flow water mister - came next, drenching those foolhardy souls brave enough to watch from the median. The pilot flame still wasn't out though, and the dragon began to smoke with actual smoke, coiling and rising out of the mouth. Traffic on the bridge resumed, a man emerged from a control-box in the neck of the dragon to look up at the mouth, shouting into his radio. A minute later another water-jet issued forth, drenching the dozens of scooters unfortunate enough to be crossing the bridge at just the wrong moment. And still it smoked.
It appeared the show was over, so we made our way down to the night-market, and out the bridge-of-love or some bullshit like that. Basically, a pier with heart-shaped lanterns on it, where couples can engrave their name in a lock, latch it to a railing, and toss the key into the river, sealing their togetherness forever. I don't know why Lou takes me to these romantic places, but I did appreciate the view from the pier. Firetrucks had shown up on the bridge, blasting the dragon in the face with foam.
From there, a quick pass through the nightmarket where I had to refuse dozens of offers for lobsters. Great price, but I've already eaten too much. I did pick up a cool lighter though, and Lou talked to a local woodcarver about making a nameplate. He's going to deliver it to the hotel later, and won't let her pay for it until shes sees it incase she doesn't like it. VN is a high-trust society, and it's SOMENICEWORD laudable? interesting? to see that as the default between strangers.
On our way back, we stopped for cocktails at some fancy bar. Lou had to photograph them for instagram, of course, but had to do them one-at-a-time so it didn't look like a date. Whatever. I thought we might finally talk since it was just the two of us and the converstaion wasn't dominated by vietnamese (her mother basically never stops talking), but mostly it was time to check facebook and instagram. But I wasn't walking, and I had a fancy gin+tonic aspertif something to keep me company, so still a successful stop.
At long last back to the hotel, and I'm too exhausted to blog before going to bed. (I'm finally getting to this 5? days later). But we saw cool shit, walked another 11 miles, and I survived the day. Some days (definitely some portions of the day) that's the only goal.
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