Weekend in Bach Ma

We had a special connection from WWF who organised for us to go on a trip up the hill to Bach Ma National Park. The park is currently closed to visitors because they are 'fixing the road'. What we had imagined was a short section of roadworks, but no. The entire ten kilometres of road up to the top of the hill is currently being worked on simultaneously by multiple workgroups. Our ride up the hill was the park fire truck, and the driver some sort of ex army guy who made light work of driving over huge piles of sand and being-mixed cement. This pic is the one time we actually had to stop to remove a couple of piles of rocks from our way. When we got to the top, we found we didn't have the place to ourselves. A large party from the US Air Force were taking advantage of the closure to look for persons missing in action. They told us they could not divulge much at this stage.


Testing the water at a stream

A handsome lady frog

Bernard was pretty tired after all the travelling. Here he relaxes against the pane of a cabinet selling kewpie dolls (is that what those are called?) at Danang Airport.

hue

I took the train down with Bernard.  Travelling alone on a night train with a baby is a bit of a challenge, but the guard was very nice and held the baby while I went to the toilet.  Next door was a tiny 3month old who was just returning from a trip to Hanoi for a heart surgery operation - she seemed very well indeed.

We went to the beach in a taxi.  The place was windy and deserted.  No birds.  A few hawkers plied the few tourists:  I bought a rather sandy plate of banh loc, water dumplings.  The sand was squeaky.

In the mornings we tried this litlle group of food stalls.  The first day I was really hungry and had egg sandwich followed by this one.  You can't see it but the noodles are square.

Spot the product placement on the table!  This was at Che Hem, where we had sweet soup.  Bernard liked Hue and tried to eat everything, including the above table.