Until the Caves – Ella | JumpEarth Around the World Adventure

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I woke up at 3 in the morning because I started to work on Dad’s Christmas present, and even though I ended up doing it wrong it was good practice. Troy got us take-out crepes and we got in a car with our guide, Luu. I never really had a good vibe about Luu, but Aba and Troy like him. Asher and I fell asleep right away, but we stopped for a satisfying lunch of chicken, rice, and sour soup which I enjoyed. On the way to the next village, we saw many curiosities such as fish on a motorcycle! They were beautiful fish!

We got to the village and, sadly, saw that there were elephants in front of our hotel. I always hate seeing this because people treat the elephants horridly.

We walked around the town and in the market I noticed cages of fuzzy yellow baby ducklings!

I saw more gasping, flopping fish and a single puppy in a cage. Aba said he was for meat. We did homework at the hotel and met a beautiful Siamese cat with vivid blue eyes! She was very sweet, and Aba said that she looked like his cat, Henry. We also met two dogs, but they were pets, not food. There was also a large cage with three ducks in it. We ate dinner and I spent the remainder of the night working on Aba’s Christmas/Hanukkah/Birthday present! We left early the next morning but not before seeing the dogs’ puppies! We also checked in the ducks and noticed that there were only two ducks… and two pythons… and one of the pythons had a large bulge in its stomach.

Thankfully, I slept a lot less on the drive and drove to a brick factory. We were able to see the machine that shapes the bricks and cuts them from long tubes of clay into fragments, and we saw workers stacking the bricks and putting them out to dry. Then, we saw how they fire the bricks using fire on all sides rather than a kiln, which was all very educational. We drove a short distance to see someone mining rocks and roughly shaping them by breaking them for foundations, and Aba even helped! This was actually really cool because of the process: drilling into the rocks and then breaking the stone in that hole. This cuts it in half!

After another drive, we hiked up a large rock called Elephant Rock, name so because it looks like an elephant’s back. It had amazing views!

The next place we went to was very insightful. It was an old church that had been bombed during the war and much of it was in ruins. However, the church was also uplifting because people had started to rebuild it. After the church, we drove to a place with two waterfalls. We walked around for a while and found one, but we couldn’t find the other. The waterfall we found was beautiful!

Asher and I slept until we got to our hotel. We went in and they gave us our rooms, and then we walked straight back out! The beds were unmade, there were clothes and socks on the floor as well as shoes, and there were two cans of Saigon Beer on the bed table! They hadn’t cleaned our rooms! Aba was therefore convinced that the hotel was unclean and made Luu drive us to another hotel. This hotel was clean, but then Aba discovered that instead of photocopying passports like most hotels, the hotel wanted to keep it. Aba adamantly refused to relinquish our passports and got in an argument with Luu. He was frustrated with us because he said that there have never been any accidents or anything involving passports and we were just making life difficult. Also, “this wasn’t his fault”. Luu was so uncooperative that we decided that we would drive back to the previous town and fly to Hanoi. As soon as we said that, Luu miraculously decided that, though it was a hindrance, he would drive to get a photocopy from somewhere else. We ended up staying at that hotel and that night we ate a dinner of sticky rice stuffed with chicken! Yum!

The next day we drove to a war memorial for unnamed soldiers in the war. Then, we drove to a drum factory. We saw how tree trunks are hollowed out to make drum barrels and how planks are lashed together to make drum barrels. We also saw the hides stretched onto the barrels and we even got to see someone painting a drum! However, I was kind of sad because there was an enormous hollowed out tree trunk about the size of a car. It must’ve been about one thousand years old and they had cut it down to make a drum and that saddened me.

On the way, Asher and I fell asleep because I had stayed up late working on Christmas presents and Asher was catching up on homework. We stopped to but some sugar cane which was cool because we just chewed on it to get the juice out. On the way to a tea farm (which Asher and I ended up sleeping through), we saw a very colorful funeral procession driving through the streets on the way to a cemetery, which was a very cultural experience. We did homework until dinner, at which time we learned a lot. There was a very loud tourist at the hotel restaurant and we heard that he “only smokes while he drinks”, and luckily for us he was drinking. Also, “English people have alcohol in their blood”, all of his friends “died on these horrible roads”, and he prefers “shy country girls to modern ones”. Following that statement, he persuaded a Vietnamese girl to join him at the table with his friends. We all lit the first Hanukkah candle (Happy Hanukkah!) and I worked on Aba’s present until we wet to sleep.

We woke up in the morning and tried to go to a coffee factory, but they weren’t open for visitors. We then went to a Catholic orphanage not visited by many people because it is on the outskirts of the town. When we arrived, we were greeted by a mob of little children wearing red uniforms. They were a bit shy, but they would smile and wave and then dart away. There was one little boy in particular with a contagious smile that would laugh loudly with a glint in his eye. We taught him how to high-five. We toured the complex; bedrooms, school, dining hall, chapel, pigsty, etc; and saw a couple of older girls who I guess were about eight or nine years old. The matron told us they were thirteen.

However, everyone was smiling and at the end of the tour the little children we hugging me and wouldn’t let go of my hands! We took a group picture with some of them and one girl tried to drag me away with her to eat brunch.

We had to leave after that, and although my writing might not show it, this place profoundly affected me. I don’t know how or why, but those children touched my heart.

The rest of the day was dedicated to homework and making presents, and after dinner, we lit Hanukkah candles and watched a movie about the Vietnam American War. At dinner, Troy was horrified to see Luu touch all of our food with his hands after smoking and I was appalled, a little repulsed, to see him first devour a chicken FOOT and then the entire HEAD, eyes and all. When he took it out of his mouth, all that remained was the beak. The next day we woke up and drove to the tall communal house that we saw the day before. This time, we saw a couple of novice Buddhist monks on vacation and they took pictures with us! There was one monk who was always smiling (even though he got all serious when we took his picture) and held a brown fan, and, though I had previously suspected it, Aba and Troy confirmed that he was gay.

The communal house was very tall and made of dried grass, which I thought was very cool. We passed by a graveyard which we at first thought was a village! Every grave had is own pagoda or hut model on top of it! We kept driving until Luu let us out and showed us a family of wood carvers.

We watched them work, to the soundtrack of a barking territorial dog, and then went next door to see a man testing the quality of liquid rubber. Troy explained the process to us, so you’ll have to ask him about it, but he basically took a sample of rubber, evaporated the water, and compared the weight with the weight he took before the water was evaporated. We drove to a rubber forest where trees were being tapped and I got to touch some of the rubber sap. This was really weird because it actually felt like rubber, but it was just sap, straight from the tree! It didn’t seem natural!

The next stop was a rickety old bridge nicknamed the “San Francisco Bridge” (or as Luu says, the “San Fransico Bridge”). This bridge was the most unstable and dangerous looking with the most rotted boards and holes in the planks that I had ever seen, but we crossed the bridge. On our way back, we felt the bridge shaking. Some adorable little boys were tipping the bridge over! We hurried to the other side and passed the laughing boys. Troy looked petrified!

We drove to lunch where I tried Bok choy sauteed and steamed in broth and garlic. It was AMAZING. I even ate my whole meal with chopsticks! However, the chicken was as hard as a rock so none of us ate it. We drove to the hotel and did homework, ate dinner, watched an episode from a Netflix TV show about Vietnam, lit Hanukkah candles, worked on presents, and finally went to sleep. We got in the car the next morning and drove nonstop on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. One interesting area of conversation was when Asher and I tried to convince Troy to say “The white whale wailed where he wanted in the water in Wales” because he has a peculiar quirk of saying ‘hw’ instead of ‘wh’ when saying ‘wh’ words. We drove nonstop, or that was the plan, for the car broke down in the middle of a town. We stayed at Luu’s uncle’s house for a couple of hours and met a little cute rat that lived there! When I had to go to the bathroom, I saw a sight I thought I had left behind in Nepal: squat toilets. I worked on homework and made presents until we finally got on the road again. Luu had had to order parts from another town and fix the car. It was dark by the time we got to Hamburger Hill, so we ate dinner. I ran to the hotel room in order to call my French teacher, Martha, when I realized that Asher had the key. I ran back and got to my room again when I realized that for some reason, Troy had taken my computer! He ended up coming so I didn’t have to get it, but phew! After my lesson, Asher had a Spanish lesson and I made presents, then we all lit Hanukkah candles and fell asleep. The next morning’s drive was uneventful until we stopped to eat a lunch of rice and vegetables. Our entire time in Vietnam we haven’t seen beggars, but this town was full of them! However, there were only very old women and young children. We arrived at the hotel and, while we waited for Aba to check us in, a boy roughly my age on a bike started talking to us and smiling. As we turned to leave for our rooms, I noticed he wore hearing aids. We did homework and I worked on presents again and talked to Savta until dinner. On our way, we saw a sweet little orange kitten. It wasn’t next to any other cat and it was minuscule and tiny. I petted it for a while, but I was sad to leave it. It purred and brushed against me, and I think it was lonely.

While we ate, we saw the owner of the restaurant cuddling a large dog wearing a bright red collar. She made Troy smile. We also saw the chefs watching a cooking show… I don’t think they learned very much…

On our way back, we saw people lighting fires from boxes and texts; newspapers and books etc. Luu said it was for good luck.

We watched another episode about Vietnam on Netflix and learned about Hamburger Hill, where we were at the time. Many American soldiers died for a position with no strategic value. In fact, its value was so little that they abandoned the hill soon after capturing it. After lighting Hanukkah candles, I worked on presents until we went to sleep. We got in the car the next morning and drove for a while until we got to the next village. In the car, I weaved a little but then mostly slept. When we arrived, we went to the ticket center in order to go into some caves. It was very expensive and the caves were about to close, so we decided to put it off until the next day. I worked on presents until dinner, but by the time we left, it had started pouring rain. We ate at the first modern-looking restaurant we had seen for a while and ate food other than rice and vegetables. Asher even had a hamburger! There were a few beautiful dogs around the restaurant, but there was a particularly beautiful chocolate brown one next to our table. After lighting Hanukkah candles and watching another episode about Vietnam, we decided to watch Netflix’s new Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. It was so bad that we didn’t even finish it. It was horrible! I don’t recommend it. I worked until we went to sleep. Yesterday morning, we woke up early and I checked my email. My dad, Greg, had finally sent me the link to his new company! He founded a t-shirt company called Untitled EMPIRE and designed the art himself! I’m even wearing a shirt of his as I type (Every Drop of Us, if anyone cares to know)! Check out his awesome website, he’s spent a really long time working on this, and the designs really are amazing (I know he’s my dad so you may think I’m biased, but I’m actually very hard to impress). Anyway, we woke up and drove to Paradise Cave (Thiên Đường Cave). I’ve been to several underground caves in the United States and New Zealand, but the stalagmites and stalactites in this one were enormous! Gigantic labyrinths of connected pillars of calcium littered the floor, sometimes embedded in the ground through time. Asher seemed amazed, he is always fascinated by natural structures like this. I, too, thought the cave was wonderful, and we were all left with much to think about as we walked in a slight drizzle back to the car.

As we had been walking to the cave we had to climb a steep uphill path. There was an old woman, perhaps seventy years old, laboring up the path, and Asher just skipped on by her. She laughed out loud! Well, we got to the car and Luu drove us to the next cave of the day: Dark Cave (Hang Toi). We watched a video about the caves and cracked up at the dramatic music playing in the background. We put on our swimsuits and ziplined across the longest zip line in Vietnam, though I don’t think it was actually that long. However, I got stuck in the middle. I was the second person to go, and I was frustrated because the last time I got stuck on a zip line was in Thailand and Asher and I got stuck TOGETHER in the middle. I had to put my hands on the cable and pull myself to the end. After Asher, Troy, and Aba made it across, we talked to a man from New Zealand, and by the time everyone else from the group ziplined I was feeling better about myself. FOUR other people had gotten stuck, too (granted, none of them were as far out as I had been)! By this time, it was raining heavily, and we all ducked into the cold water separating us from the cave and swam to it. The rocks on the cave floor were sharp, but as we passed the formations we saw many spiders and bats. Finally, we arrived at our destination: the mud baths. There was a natural deposit of mineral mud in the water and everyone was just squelching around in it and rubbing it on themselves. It was a whole lot of fun and we even got to talking with some of the millennials! I was also happy to play tic-tac-toe on Troy’s stomach! We went back to the small lagoon and slid down a literal mudslide. It was a lot of fun, but it hurt! My upper thighs burned from the friction! I could see all the girls in bikinis rubbing their upper thighs, too, and we all laughed. After swimming in the lagoon, we kayaked to an area with activities. There were two water ziplines, meaning that you jump from the zip line into the water, and an obstacle course bridge. After completing these activities, we drove back to the hotel and took freezing showers. We ate lunch and watched another Vietnam episode on Netflix, then worked on presents. For dessert at dinner, we ordered a banana with ice cream and mousse, we got this:

After dinner, we returned to the hotel to light Hanukkah candles. Yesterday was the seventh day of Hanukkah, which is also Aba’s Hebrew birthday, so after lighting candles, Troy, Asher, and I gave him a small birthday card we had made him.