Scenes from the Catlins and Southern Scenic Route

Sometimes the best things in life are things that are not planned. Like the picture, above. We had planned to drive further, but when we realized we could see yellow eyed penguins come ashore for free in Curio Bay, and further realized there was a pretty awesome campground wedged right between Curio Bay and Porpoise Bay, we parked our campervan and stayed put.

In fact, we almost didn’t take the Southern Scenic Route at all, which would have been a shame since, true to name, it was pretty darn scenic.  The route snakes along the southern coast of the South Island from Dunedin and cuts north to Queenstown after Invercargill.  We did the route in two days (not counting our detour to Te Anau and the Milford Sound), but you easily could spend more time meandering through.  The Southern Scenic Route follows the rugged coastline for most of the way, with sandy curved bays popping up now and again, but some of the best parts are the short detours down the often unsealed Heritage Routes.  Lighthouses, surprise sea lions on land, yellow eyed penguins waddling ashore, a high density of cows and sheep, remote gas stations which open upon request, college and pick-up rugby and cricket games, and short little hikes just how we like – it’s worth going the long way.

Sadly, the home team of Telleford were getting their butts kicked pretty bad in this rugby game.

Self-portrait at Nugget Point

We didn't spy any penguins from the hide at Roaring Bay, but did see a sea lion sunbathing on the beach.

One of the many gorgeous scenes in the heart of the Catlins.

As the sunset, we watched this little guy waddle ashore back to the young.

The Curio Bay Camp Ground

One of two sea lions we came across by surprise on shore. This one visited our campground.

Porpoise Bay in the morning

Curio Bay in the morning, where we watched the penguins the night before.

A lightkeeper and his family lived at Waipapa Point up until the 1970s.

Another beautiful stop

Back inland

Hoi An Custom Couture

Hoi An is one of those places you kind of love, kind of hate. I don’t usually like to complain that a place is too touristy. After all, I’m there, aren’t I, and why do I think I get to hog a good thing all to myself and not share with other outsiders? But Hoi An takes touristiness over the top. By all accounts, it could be a delightful little city. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site with historic old buildings and shophouses, all painted yellow, many punctuated by colorful flowers out front. The streets are lined by rivers and criss-crossed by bright lanterns. The shophouses are filled with stores selling trinkets to tourists, restaurants, and tailors. Sounds good, right? Well, the problem is that the locals took a good thing and ran out of control with it. Who’s to blame them, really, because the tourists were eating up what was on offer. Hoi An became known as the little town in Vietnam where you could get a custom wardrobe tailor made to your exact measurements for rock bottom prices. Where there was once a few tailors, there is now over 600 tailors, all asking you as you walk by to buy something, come into my shop, you want dress? You want suit? I can make you anything, very cheap! No time? No problem. The Hoi An tailors can turn around a entire men’s suit, with a shirt and tie to match, from scratch in less than 24 hours.

As you can imagine, out of the 600+ tailors, some are very good, some are very bad, and many are average. Sure, there are “couture” like deals to be had, but the reality is, whether you show them a picture or not, most of what they’re churning out is replicas of standard patterns.

Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of clothes and shopping, you’ve been wearing the same four outfits for almost a year, and you’ve got nightmares of job interviews dancing around your subconsciousness, you start thinking it would be kinda fun to get in on the action. So I did.

I had a custom suit tailored at B’Lan, modeled roughly after a JCrew picture I grabbed on the internet the night before. I debated about going to Yaly Couture, the shop in town with the best reputation for suits and with the highest prices, but I fell in love with a grey pinstripe Super 110 wool at B’Lan. The first take was not good. The pants, despite being measured rather extensively, could not even be zipped. And the jacket? Well, let’s just say whoever sewed the jacket must have been watching Star Trek the night before. After I got them to majorly tone down the shoulders and majorly widen the pants, the second take was better. All in all, I probably had seven fittings to get it right.

In the end, there are things I don’t love about the suit. You need to be very precise in what you want, right down to every little pintuck and button. For example, I paid more to have the suit lined. What I ended up with was a lined jacket and unlined pants. The response of the sales representative at B’Lan was that suit pants are always unlined. Since I have lined suit pants at home, I know that’s not true. Maybe in Asia, but not as a general rule. Plus when they offered me the lining option, they never specified it was for the pants. Then again, I never specified it was for both the pants and jacket. So there you go. They begrudgingly offered to remake the pants for a reduced fee, but in the end, I didn’t want to sink any more money into the suit. The pants are also a little straighter than I envisioned, but I realized I probably didn’t communicate what I wanted in a clear enough fashion. The sample suits I saw at Yaly look a little more finished, but overall, the fabric is nice and the suit is cheaper than what I’d pay at JCrew. The real test will be whether it holds up over time. We’ll see – right now it is still enroute from Vietnam to Pittsburgh. Hopefully it will get home in time for job interviews. Oh God I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I also had a casual dress made at a little shop I wandered by. The name of the shop is something like Hieu Vai Gia Dinh Family Cloth Shop. Many of the dresses on display in town are similar and rather flimsy, but I liked the fabric in the window. From a catalog of dress patterns, the tailor and I designed the dress based upon parts of patterns I liked. She whipped it up, with a lining, in something like 12 hours’ time. One set of tweaks, and it was good to go. I really love the dress and it was fun to design something from scratch without making a major investment.

Despite the tailors’ best efforts, Sean never gave into having a suit made, although he wavered once or twice. They were trying to sell to the wrong man; he already has a suit, and he wears the same suit to wedding, funerals, job interviews, and my old firm’s holiday parties. But he did end up having a suit made, albeit of a much different variety. I may have mentioned before Sean is obsessed with keeping our packs light, even to the point of recording our bags’ weights on his Ipod at the airlines’ weigh ins. He is so obsessed, he insisted upon using a pair of his shorts as his swim trunks. This worked fine when we were only visiting beaches now and again, but with a month of straight beach time coming up, he finally caved into wanting separate swim trunks. (But only if he could ditch the shorts, of course).

We saw a pair of swim trunks in the window of a tailor shop in Hoi An, and wouldn’t it be fun to have custom swim trunks made turned into actually having said swim trunks made. There was only three problems. (1) The trunks turned out to be REALLY ugly. I guess we’re bad designers. (2) At $15, the trunks were three times what he could have spent buying one of the thousands of pairs of board shorts sold on the streets. (3) The lining was rather, um, small. So the swim trunks never saw the light of day, and some hotel employee is now the proud owner.

In the end, getting custom clothes made in Hoi An wasn’t all it cracked up to be. It was fun getting something you designed made to your exact measurements, but I don’t think it is worth any major investments. Spreading out your purchases from different tailors definitely helps in case the tailor turns out to be a dud, but it also means you’ll be running all over town to fitting appointments. If I had to do it over again, I would have a fun casual dress made and maybe a going out shirt made from Vietnam’s beautiful silks, but that’s it. I wouldn’t have gotten the suit made. We’ll see how it fares, but I have the sneaking suspicion I’ll wear it a few times and then ditch it for a JCrew suit bought on sale. We’ll see; maybe I’ll be surprised. Or, ideally, I’ll have a job where I won’t have to wear a suit.

Total price: $190 (premium wool pants and jacket + silk/poly blend lining for jacket) + $15 (swim trunks) + $26 (casual cotton dress, lined) + $37 (3-4 month shipping to United States for suit, sandals I sent home, and four Vietnamese lanterns direct from B’Lan).

Scenes from Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula

Dunedin is a little big city on the South Island’s east coast. Home to New Zealand’s largest university, it has a definite college town feel. Maybe because of the couches plunked on the front porches next to empty beer cans? Or maybe because it is full of young people and energy and architecture befitting a university next to stately trees. Whatever it is, Dunedin seems like a cool place to go to school. The town radiates out from the center octagon, filled with trendy shops and a Cadbury chocolate plant. There’s parks and hiking trails right within city limits, and if you go to the outskirts, you find a coastal road snaking out on the Otago Peninsula that is beautiful whether you take the high or low road. My favorite part of Dunedin was its happening little Saturday farmer’s market, located in the parking lot next to its stately train station. Fall (which apparently is an American word, I’m told) in April means you get apples next to hot cross buns. We filled our campervan’s tiny cupboards and fridge to the brim with sweet Pacific Beauty apples, juicy pears, crisp cucumbers, fresh sourdough bread, free range eggs, organic garlic, berry farm jam, crisp lettuce greens, and many more tasty treats (including a real honest to goodness chocolately brownie, a fair trade organic long black espresso drink, and savory pies that may have gotten stuffed into our pieholes before we even hit the road).

The mean streets of Dunedin.

The Octagon (well, one side of it anyway)

Not the same meaning in New Zealand as in the United States!

Dunedin has an independent music store, a dying breed. And it has cassette tapes! You know, those things contained music before CDs? Oh wait, you don't know what a CD is, either? Sheesh!

The lower coastal road on the Otago Peninsula.

Told you the sheep are fluffy!

View from the upper coastal road on the Otago Peninsula

Cute little houses in Dunedin (the ones that haven't been turned into frat houses)

A stop at the Whitestone Cheese factory in Omarau before heading south means wine and cheese party in the campervan!

A glimpse of the train station

A fall Saturday at the market

The Vietnam War from a Different Perspective.

The Vietnam War, as we Americans call it, looms large in American history. Thousands and thousands died in the war on all sides. Many thought the United States’ involvement in Vietnam’s affairs was a mistake, and the opposition to the war defined a generation. Most people our parent’s age grew up watching footage of a far away land on the news; younger generations grew up watching movies dramatizing the Vietnam War.

While we were in Vietnam, we took the opportunity to try to learn more about the Vietnam War. Just being where the war actually took place opens your mind to a different perspective. War becomes a lot more real when you met the “other” face to face and see the places with your own eyes. It also allows you to learn things that American history classes at home leave out. For example, before traveling through Southeast Asia, I never knew that the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asian affairs extended far behind Vietnam and included extensive side bombings of Cambodia and Laos, as well as implicit support for the evil Khmer Rouge government.

As part of our education, we visited a number of museums and exhibits. We toured the Reunification Palace, which is a time capsule of the way it was on the day the North Vietnamese army tanks rolled through the front gates in 1975 when the NVA finally captured Saigon; the War Remnants Museum, which tells the story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the victors, i.e. the current socialist government; the Demilitarized Zone, the dividing line between North and South Vietnam; the Chu Choc tunnels, where a North Vietnamese village hid and lived underground for two years while bombs raged overhead; and the so-called Hanoi Hilton, where John McCain and other American prisoners of war were kept (and tortured) by the North Vietnamese.

As you can imagine, the current ruling Vietnamese government, as the victors of the war, have quite the different perspective on things. For starters, they don’t call it the Vietnam War; they call it the American War, or more bluntly, the American War of Imperialism. The War Remnants museum is peppered with references to the American aggressors and the South Vietnamese puppet government. It also shows many of the horrible effects of the war – but only those effects of acts committed by the Americans. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of acts to show.

All of the war related museums in Vietnam seemed to start out the same: with exhibits after exhibit showing the world’s opposition to the war. While there is no doubt there are many people worldwide that were opposed to the United States fighting in Vietnam, the captions on the pictures had their own spin, such as the one stating “American people demonstrated to support the Vietnamese struggle for independence and unification of the country.” Hmm, I could be wrong, but I don’t think that is quite what the Americans were protesting about.

The museums are full of references like these, to independence. At first, I was confused whose independence they were talking about. Whether the United States should or should not have gotten involved is a different matter, but I’ve always understood the war as being about the Americans and their allies fighting on behalf of the South Vietnamese to stop the North Vietnamese from spreading communism south. My wiser husband had to explain to me the obvious; from the current government’s perspective, they were liberating the South Vietnamese from the United States’ imperial ways and reuniting the country they never thought should have been divided.

Since the war-related museums were so extremely one sided, my antennae was up the whole time, and it was hard to trust what I was reading because I felt like much of the story was being left out or distorted. But, on the other hand, I felt there was an important lesson. How much of what we have learned in the past is incomplete or distorted? Learning about the war from the perspective of the Vietnamese government is a good reminder that there’s always more than one side to story: his side, her side, and the truth.

[Above: The Central Highlands hillside My told us the Americans bombed during the war.]

The Reunification Palace in Saigon

Inside the Reunification Palace, it is as if it is still 1975.

One of the first things that greets you at the War Remnants Musuem in Saigon.

The awful Agent Orange exhibit, showing the effects of the chemical used by the Americans during the war. One of the more thought provoking things in the exhibit was a recent letter written to President Obama by a young Vietnamese girl affected by Agent Orange. The letter asks the United States for reparations for the effects of Agent Orange, which still affect the Vietnamese to this day. The United States has provided assistance to the soldiers afflicted with Agent Orange, but has not offered assistance to the Vietnamese, including the children fathered by American soldiers. Should they? Or is it just an unfortunate casualty of war? Food for thought.

All of these children were born underground in the Vinh Moc Tunnels.

Sean telling me to hurry up before the French tour group disappeared. The most cost effective way to see the Vinh Moc Tunnels is to see them on a tour of the DMZ from Hue. We were signed up for one, but Sean felt really sick right when we were supposed to leave at 6:30 in the morning. When he felt better later that morning, we decided to go just to the tunnels and do it on our own, since it was the one thing Sean really wanted to see in Vietnam. There is no public transport to the tunnels and they are some distance from Hue, so we ended up paying for the unused tour AND a pricey private car to the tunnels. The tunnels are clearly set up for tour groups, and the mainly Vietnamese speakers at the tunnels gave us conflicting instructions on whether we needed a guide or not to see them on our own. When the English speaking guide they promised never materialized, we ended up following a French speaking tour group into the very dark and very narrow tunnels.

Me in the Vinh Moc tunnels. As you can see, they are extremely squat and narrow - and dark. (Sidenote - our thighs hurt from squatting for days - how in the world did a whole village live down there for years?!?!?!) At first, the French group didn't notice us since we stayed well at the end. But then the tour guide started giving us weird looks, and he'd halfheartedly shine a light on us as he noticed us in the rear in the dark, trying to make our way down the pitch black stairs. Then, the whole group noticed us when they abruptly turned around. They declared something in French, presumably "turn around and go the other way." Or at least we hope it was that, and not, "who are these idiot Americans following us in the dark?"

Outside the Hanoi Hilton.

Infamous picture of John McCain inside the Hanoi Hilton. This museum is full of references to the fun life the POWs lived while imprisoned. They learned more about the ways of the Vietnamese! They celebrated Christmas! They played sports! They got tortured! Oh yeah, the last one was conveniently left out.

Scenes from the South Island’s East Coast

So, do you want to get a look at all of this awesomeness we speak of, or what? The locals on the east coast kept telling us the real beauty is out west, but we think they’re just being modest. We found the east coast to be pretty fantastic, ourselves. Lots of coastline, lots of sheep, with a rainbow at the end? Yep, the east coast whetted our appetite, big time. (Above: The jaw dropping Banks Peninsula that first let us know what we were in for.  Totally worth the detour from Christchurch.)

Months of chasing sunsets in the Southeast Asian islands with hit or miss results, and we get a stunner on night three in New Zealand without trying. Shot from the side of the road on the Banks Peninsula.

Akaroa - a little belle of a French town in the middle of former Brit-land.

Another day, another highway sunset.

Omarau, if only you didn't chill us to the bone, we'd love you and your historic buildings.

A windy stop by the Moeraki boulders.

Our first indication that there may just be a lot of sheep in this country.

Good thing we took the scenic route marked with the tiny sign on the way to Dunedin, because we got to see this...

...and this!

Apparently the autumn weather turned for the worse the day we arrived. Fantastic. It was so cold, even the horses needed coats.