Collecting Amber

It's been such a long time since I've posted a blog.  It's been a crazy couple of months with trips home to meet Bryson and see family and then vacation with 3 of the 4 kids in Thailand.  I know I need to finish up blogging about our Vietnam trip and then I want to tell you all about Thailand as well.  The trips will take me a bit of time but I hope to get to it soon.

I also want to start blogging more about life here on Sakhalin Island, so I thought I would do a quick post about our trip to the beach last Sunday.  It wasn't an actual trip to the beach to swim, but rather Max went fishing at the beach and I went along.

I'd heard about the Amber beach north of our city, Yuzhno, but this was the first time I'd been there.  It is actually the coastline about 70 kilometers north of Yuzhno near the little village of Starodubskoye.  Max's coworker, Oleg, went with us.  He and Max had also gone fishing at the same spot the day before.  Oleg told me how to find the amber along the beach.  He said you look in the line of debris among the sticks that have washed up.  I started looking and soon realized that the amber glistened in the sun and was pretty easy to find.

Below is a photo of the lines of sticks that I looked through to find the amber.  The beach is actually really pretty and goes for miles.  This was at a time when the tide was low and near an inlet so you can't really see how nice the beach actually is.  I didn't have a camera card with me so I could take only 4 pictures, three of which were of the fishermen and their catch.

Below is a photo I took of the amber after I got home.  Some of the stones are more red than yellow.  My favorite piece is the sort of large yellow stone at the top of the photo.  Oleg said he has a tiny drill bit and made his wife a necklace from one of the stones she found.  Maybe I'll do that someday.

I had so much fun finding the amber and am sure I'll do it again.

Oh, and Max caught 3 salmon on Sunday.  He also caught 10 salmon the day before at this same spot.

Love to you all,
Karen

Vietnam Trip Day 6

On Day 6, we left Hoi An for Hue, which is still in the central part of Vietnam.  On our way out of town we made a quick stop at a marble factory where they were making beautiful statues.  It was really interesting to watch them chisel and carve the stone.  Here is a photo of a very large Buddha.

We drove through Da Nang and stopped at the Cham museum, which contains the finest collection of Cham sculptures in the world.  Here is another statue of Shiva (with his head and extra arms).

Da Nang is on the coast and has some really pretty beaches.  It was a very warm and sunny morning and I asked our guide why there was no one on the beaches.  He said that the Vietnamese only go to the beach in the very early morning and in the evening as they don't want to be out in the sun very much. 

 

We then headed up into the mountains and through a pass called Pass of Ocean Clouds.  It was a very beautiful drive.  You could tell that our driver, who was sort of young, really enjoyed driving on the curvy mountain roads.  We rolled down the car windows and enjoyed the breeze.  

 At the top of the mountain, we stopped for a rest.  There we saw bunkers that were used during the Vietnam (American) war:

 

As we came down the other side of the mountain we could see the fishing village of Lang Co where we had lunch.

We had lunch with our guide and driver at a local Vietnamese restaurant.  Really awful picture of me.

 

You can see more of the restaurant here.  The people live in the house next to the restaurant.  You can sort of see it in the background.

Our drive was leisurely, so we were able to stop and take photos anytime we wanted.  I thought these round boats were so interesting.

 

Here is a city view of Hue (pronounced Hwey) from our hotel room. 

After we rested a bit from our long drive, it was time to explore this new city.  Ho Chi Minh (or Uncle Ho as he is fondly called) is everywhere.  Can't remember what this sign says, but I think it's some kind of communist propaganda.

We found a little place by the river so we sat there for a while.  A young guy at the next table, who couldn't speak any English, just came over and sat down with us.  He really liked Max's camera so he took a few photos of us and we took some of he and our waitress who he seemed to know quite well.  She eventually sat down with us, also.

After that it was off to dinner.  We had a great meal in this little restaurant.  You can barely see me on the left in the photo.

 

Love to you all!

Karen

Vietnam Trip Day 5

On Day 5, we visited My Son (pronounced Me Sun).  It was the capital and religious center of the former Champa Kingdom.  The area was under Indian influence and Hindu temples were built here between the 7th and 13th centuries.  

Of course everything is geared toward the tourists.  When we first arrived, we saw several different traditional dances.  Here is one of the dances:

 

The temples were really interesting.  They worshiped the Hindu God, Shiva.  Each ruler built their own temple.  Each temple had 3 separate buildings, the first was an entrance, the second (I think) was a waiting area and the third the actual temple for worship.  It is sad that so many of these temples were destroyed during the war.  We call it the Vietnam War, but the Vietnamese call it the American War.

 

Poor Shiva lost his head.  I think it was actually taken to a museum.

 

As I mentioned earlier, much of this area was destroyed/damaged by bombing during the war.  There was a lot of fighting in this area.  Here is a bomb crater.  We saw several of these.

After we finished our My Son tour, we had a leisurely drive back to Hoi An.  Along the way we stopped to take pictures.   The houses were so interesting.  Here they are drying corn in the front yard.

 

Here's a guy hanging tobacco leaves.  First time I think I've ever seen tobacco like this.

Here is rice paper drying.

 

 There are tons and tons of these rice fields everywhere.  The white cloths you see are actually scarecrows used to keep the birds away.

Once back in Hoi An, our guide took us on a walking tour of the old town.  We stopped to have a drink of fresh coconut water.

 

We walked around the local market:

 

We had lunch at a local sidewalk stall.

 

We walked around the market some more.

We went back to our hotel and had a leisurely afternoon relaxing and reading.  The weather was really nice.  We kept hearing this music with drums and traditional Vietnamese instruments.  It would play for a while and then it would stop.  We walked over to the side of the hotel, peered over the fence and saw people wearing white robes with a white tie around there head.  We realized that it was a funeral and that the music we heard was coming from this house next door to the hotel.  Kind of eerie, but we really liked the music and could even hear it from our room.  After relaxing for a while, we went back to the old town for dinner and to walk around.  Another nice day.

Love to you all!

Karen

Vietnam Trip Day 3 & Day 4

On our third day in Vietnam, we got up early and drove about 3.5 hours to Halong Bay.  At the halfway point, we stopped for a rest at a conveniently placed huge souvenir shop where I think they take all the tourists.  They were even making some of the crafts there.  We really liked these embroidered pictures that you can see being made in this photo.  Each one is hand stitched.

Here is one of two pictures we bought with the girl who made it:

We then arrived at our boat for an overnight cruise on Halong Bay.  Here's a photo from our boat of the area that we left from.  We drove over that bridge to get there.  It was a pretty cloudy day, so the photos are hazy.

We had a really nice cabin with a balcony.  I posted pictures of the cabin on facebook.  Here is a photo of the dining room:

The scenery was beautiful. It reminded me of the scenery from the previous day, but on a larger scale.  The cloudy, haziness just added to the whole surreal experience of it all.  Halong Bay has 1969 small limestone islands.

Later that afternoon we visited one of four floating fishing villages in this bay.  About 300 people live in this village.  There is even a school for the young children.  Older children must go to the mainland for school, but many do not as they go into the fishing industry.  We were taken by rowboat on a tour of the village.  The men of the village fish and the women work in the tourism industry.

Here are some photos of the houses in the village.

There were quite a few kids.  We saw them go from house to house using the boats that were in between the houses.  Every one has a generator and all the houses had TV antennas.

 

After the village tour, it was back to our ship for dinner, which was fabulous.  After dinner, you could go to the back of the ship and try to fish for squid.  Max tried, but didn't catch anything.

The next morning we had a quick breakfast and then went to the Hang Sun Sot Cave on one of the bigger islands.  Here's a photo of where we were heading to.  We walked up about 200 stairs.  They told us in case some folks couldn't do it. 

This next photo is a view of the harbor from the ledge in the previous photo:

It was really hard to get any photos inside the cave but here's a couple.  This first photo shows a walkway inside the cave which is much bigger than it looks.

After we finished the cave tour and were walking back to the smaller boat that would take us to our "junk" boat, we saw six monkeys on the side of the limestone wall.  So cool.

 

Here's a photo of our "junk" boat "Victory Star" on our way back to it:

 

Once we got back to the boat, we had a really nice brunch and then packed up our stuff and returned to the mainland.  Once there, we were met by our guide and driver who took us to the Hanoi airport (a four hour drive).  At that point, we had to say goodbye to our favorite guide and to the north part of Vietnam and we were off to the central part.  After a one hour flight we arrived in Danang.  We were met by our new tour guide and driver who drove us to our hotel in Hoi An.  We arrived at the hotel just in time to catch the last shuttle bus to the old town.  We had a really nice dinner, walked around the old town for just a bit and then caught the bus back to the hotel.  Really nice evening in Hoi An. 

Love to you all!

Karen

Slushy Yuzhno

I'm still working on blogging about our Vietnam trip and will have Days 3 & 4 completed today.  I just wanted to insert one about slushy Yuzhno.

A little over a week ago just about all of the snow had melted and I was convinced spring/summer was just around the corner.  Then last weekend it snowed for almost the entire weekend.  It then warmed right back up so of course the snow started melting pretty quickly.

In our housing complex, Zima, it's hilly so the snow melts and drains away nicely.  Plus, the complex is very well maintained.  Not quite the same in town.  I needed to go shopping in town last Tuesday and because it wasn't really that cold and the snow was melting, it was a slushy, mushy mess.

I had to walk down this sidewalk to a crossing area to get to the other side of this busy road.  Quite tricky.  Good thing I wore my snow boots that day.  They do plow the roads, but they just pile the snow up along the side and cars have to park in it.

 In this next picture you can see that the road looks almost like a river.  Most of the roads aren't this bad, but there are a lot of pot holes and puddles everywhere and your car gets splashed with muddy water constantly.  My windshield was splashed a number of times with dirty water from the cars speeding past me.  Also in this picture you can see a turn off onto a side street.  That's where I had to park.  I was getting into my car and a car sped by and splashed muddy water all over me.  Such is life in the spring in Yuzhno.

The good news is that now the snow has just about melted away, and once again, I'm hoping that spring/summer is really on the way.

Love to you all!
Karen

Vietnam Trip Day 2

On Day 2 we took a 2-hour drive to Hoa Lu which was Vietnam's first capital. Since everything was still new for us, it was so interesting to drive through the rural areas and see the people and the homes.  There were rice fields everywhere.

One thing we kept seeing along the road were these little cemeteries - just a few headstones grouped together here and there.  They were family burial grounds.  Our guide told us about the interesting tradition for the funeral and burial of the deceased.  One thing you should know is that the Vietnamese (80% Buddhist - and this may be a Buddhist tradition) worship their ancestors.  When someone dies, the family keeps the body at their home for a day and a night while friends and relatives come to pay their respects.  The family members wear white robes and headbands.  The deceased family member is then buried in a coffin.  After 3 years the family member is dug up.  Prior to the digging up, a fortune teller is consulted who tells them exactly when to dig the family member up, based on the birth date of the deceased.  The family has about an hour to wash and dry the bones and put them in a ceramic urn and rebury them.  Three or four people usually help the son with this process.  If there is not a son, then the family member is not dug up.  A ceremony then takes place in the family home, where multiple generations live together.  Our guide told us that he did that with his dad.  Very interesting.

The scenery around Hoa Lu was really beautiful but the day was so overcast and it was rainy.  We would have had some beautiful pictures had it been more clear.  In this first photo taken at Hoa Lu, you can see fishing nets in the middle of this little lake.

We visited the temples dedicated to Emperor Dinh Tien Hoang of the Dinh Dynasty (968-80) and Emperor Le Dai Hanh of the Le Dynasty (980 - 1009).  Two separate temples.

At the entrance there are usually two posts with one of their traditional symbols, the unicorn, on top.

In every temple there are one or more Buddhist statues where they worship and make sacrifices.  In the one below, you can see fruit (a very typical sacrifice) and if you look closely in the bottom left corner, you can see money.  It's not actually real money.  They buy this fake money to sacrifice and then it is burned.  Several times, while walking down the street, we saw people burning something in their yard.  Our guide told us it was the fake money that they were burning as a sacrifice.

Here is a copy of the traditional shoes that these emperors wore.  We saw actual photos of some of the more modern emperors in their traditional dress wearing shoes like these:

At the same location, there was the ancient Hoa Lu Citadel (Palace) which was mostly destroyed.  At one time it covered 3 square kilometers (or 1.89 miles).  Huge.  This was all that was left....we looked down into this deep hole (excavation area) to see basically just a few stones remaining.  There were some original dishes and bowls in a glass case around the big excavation area.

After viewing the temples we went to Tam Coc Town, had lunch, and then had a boat ride in this waterway surrounded by large limestone karsts that jutted out from green rice fields.  The boats were called sampans, but they were basically rowboats.  Here we are at the starting point waiting to board our sampan.

We could see these little statues along the way:

Really pretty and so calm and quiet even though there were a number of boats on the water.

We went into about 3 of these caves.  It was really dark.

We would see a few homes along the waterway.  We could also see people working in the rice fields.  We even saw some mountain goats on top of some of the karsts.

Of course, at the end of the waterway when we turned around, there were the ladies in boats selling souvenirs.

 

Here we are in the boat.  I didn't get a good photo of us.

After the sampan ride, we went to a local market.  So interesting.  The red fruit in this photo is called Dragon Fruit.  We saw it everywhere.  The inside fruit that you eat is white with black dots.  Very interesting texture.

Meat is just laid out there on tables:

And they really do eat dog:

Our guide told us that the market is really busy in the morning and the afternoon.  People go to their gardens and fields very early, pick their produce and then bring it to the market.

Or they catch what they sell.  I think these eels were still alive:

After the market, we had about a 2 hour drive back to our hotel in Hanoi.  Again, a really nice day.

Love to you all!
Karen