Another early morning, waking up (with sore calves) to broken English demanding prompt attendance to the compulsory complemental breakfast. Those sound like antithetical concepts, but I assure you with Grandma free food is a required activity. Five courses later (or, you know, forcing down a croissant and some fruit), we headed out into the cloudy morning for a long car ride... somewhere.
Or you could be headed to a mountaintop souvenir hall with a 360° panorama of... clouds! Visibility was still limited to 20' or so. Doesn't matter, Lou had a plan, and dragged us out a set of sliding glass doors to Golden Hands bridge! This is the famous bridge from all the travel guide photos, and evidently 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 despite 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 again 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 Golden Hands bridge! The bridge doesn't go anywhere, it's just a just a giant photo trap that arches back to the same ridge it starts on. Back on the bridge, Lou attempted to hand me her phone for another round of pictures. I simply said "Nope" and walked away, too cold, exhausted, sore, and wet to sign up for another round of insults. 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 and family finally emerged from the fog, having hired the on-site photographer to take photos that look identical to the foggy pics from the first round.
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 didn't feel any real need to tackle this hike. I tried to explain this to Lou, but she just ran ahead like the 13 year old boy she is inside. So instead, I followed along slowly with her parents, always hoping we'd gone down far enough and she wouldn't take the next staircase down, and always being disappointed as Lou disappeared around the next bend beyond those. 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. Waiting that long, though tempting, wasn't an option, so we retraced our steps back up the mountain.
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, to a beer-hall spilling 4 floors off the side of the mountain. Here we got our complimentary 200ml beer in a highly-efficient assembly-line process, I supplemented that with more caffeine, and between the two finally felt ok about the world. The best part of the beer hall was the views - the clouds were finally lifting, and they revealed a gargantuan construction site surrounding us. The scale of the engineering project here is incredible - they're building an entire city of themed skyscrapers - with all the infrastructure a city needs - all on top of a 1500m mountain.
After lunch we headed (down more ramps and stairs) to the indoor portion of the park, a oversized castle where we saw a 4d film (surprisingly good plot) and rode a motion-simulator imax ride, 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 back across the park 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 at speed, but they had 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 pass between these magnets, harnessing eddy currents for smooth deceleration. A clever (though disappointing) physics trick.
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, the rest of us communicating with gestures that there were perfectly good benches up here and she'd eventually come get us.
Now, we were done. You know, except for another round of instagram on golden-hands bridge. Lou was still smarting over 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 facsimile of an economy.
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 could win a war hear.
...
The last of the caffeine wore off as our driver picked us off, and I started planning out how to politely excuse myself once we got back to the hotel, so I could head out to find a beer and a pizza, and be alone for once. My musing was interrupted by 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 in a staccato assault). The phone was passed around the cab until we (loudly) found a scooter waiting on the side of the road, who we followed down shrinking lanes first by car and then on foot, until we arrived in someone's yard.
This home is considered 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, staining the ceiling above with 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 behavior, smiling, sipping tea, and following conversations I couldn't understand - reading inflection and faces to choose appropriate expressions. It's definitely not as relaxing as actual conversation, but once you find the rhythm it becomes automatic. 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. It was 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 stood on each side, and some brave souls sat in the median directly in front 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 atmosphere of the crowd was infectious.
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 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 around and rising out of the mouth. Traffic on the bridge resumed, a man emerged onto the bridge from the neck of the dragon to look up at the mouth, shouting into his radio. A minute later another water-jet issued forth, drenching dozens of scooters unfortunate enough to be crossing the bridge at just the wrong moment. And still it smoked.
The show concluded, we made our way down to the night-market, and walked 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'm not sure why Lou takes me to these romantic places, but I did appreciate the view from the pier. A view of firetrucks up on the bridge, blasting foam into the dragon's face.
From there, a quick pass through the nightmarket where I had to refuse dozens 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 she approves of the finished product. Unlike Baltimore, Vietnam is a high-trust society, and it's strange but inspiring to see trust as the default between total strangers.
On our way back, we stopped for cocktails at some fancy bar. Lou had to photograph our drinks of course, but made sure 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 conversation 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 aperitif 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. (This writeup is actually 5 days later). But we saw cool shit, walked another 11 miles, and I survived the day. Some days that's the only goal.
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