Tam Coc: Hey, More Karsts!

From Hanoi I grabbed a minivan down to Ninh Binh, a little town a few hours south of Hanoi with a lot of guesthouses and no restaurants. (The people are lovely, though- people said hello and practiced their English at me, I got a wordless high-five from a gardener, and an old man thrust his one-year-old granddaughter into my arms when I applauded her toddling.) It's not really set up for tourists, but it should be, because it's the closest town to Tam Coc, which is very, very worth seeing.

Tam Coc means "three caves", and is a site full of rice fields and karst towers along the Ngo Dong River. There have been a lot of karsts on this blog, but I liked these the best. When you're touring them you pass right under and through them, and even though I did the very same thing in Halong Bay in a kayak, they seem so much more striking when they're jutting out of the green high grasses of the rice fields. 

The only way to see Tam Coc is by renting a boat, rowed by local women who do so with their feet. 

They row you through a path carved through the rice. 

I don't know what to say about this place, except that it seems otherworldly and mystical. The karsts of Halong Bay or Southern Thailand rose from the water, which, although dramatic, isn't unfamiliar. My brain, I think, interpreted them along the same lines as sudden-rising islands or maybe icebergs. But here you have two seemingly incongruous landscapes occupying the same space.

Pagoda on top of a karst. How did they get that up there? 

When we went into this cave I kept waiting for the ride to kick in.

It reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean roller coaster at Disney World. But the speed stayed constant and nothing jumped out at me.

More superb photography. 

It was dark and spooky and all kinds of awesome. 

And then back out into the overcast day and the fortress of the karsts to see blue-grey cranes dancing in the rice and a lost white goat picking his way along a sheer rock face, a hundred feet up. 

After we finished paddling around and the locals tried to sell me everything from Oreos to handicrafts, I climbed back onto my rented motorbike and went to find Bich Dong, a pagoda built into Ngu Nhac Mountain dating back to 1428. 

There are three structures layered up the mountain, so I climbed up to the first...

And then to the second...

And through a cave with shrines inside...

 to exit here...

And find this view. 

But then I scrambled up a little farther to the highest structure:

and higher on a rocky trail just to do it and to look out on this:  

...which was pretty sweet. 

I scrambled down and made my way out, and climbed back on my motorbike to tool around the countryside for a bit, where houses were backed up right against the rock.

The road exiting Tam Coc had long rice fields and houses with the karsts hunched behind it all on one side.

And on the other, some kind of industrial something, which added a sort of dystopian effect.  

And a beautiful young girl was washing clothing in a drainage ditch. 

Jeez, I have real problems with achieving level horizons. 

When I got back to the highway that runs between Ninh Binh and Tam Coc, I almost immediately hit some very intense traffic of both vehicles and pedestrians. 

When I reached the bottleneck I found that there hadn't been an accident; the traffic was caused people crowding in the road, in the median, and on the train tracks next to the road to get a glimpse of a Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage, who was getting to wherever he was going using full prostrations. 

This is another photo of traffic. I couldn't get close enough to see the monk, who was a rockstar. 

That means he was doing this:

Over and over and over again. But each time he got back up he brought his feet to where his hands had been, and made his way forward that way, rather than taking any actual steps. Some pilgrims doing full prostrations end up with thick callouses on their noses and foreheads (and, one would imagine, knees and hands) from touching them to the ground countless times along their way.  It's extremely hard core. 

He was preceded by women from the town sweeping the pavement ahead of him, a nun overseeing that, and two nuns following him, singing. When I lingered at the head of that procession to try unsuccessfully for a decent photo, the nun at the head of the line grabbed me and asked (through a bystander) where I was from. I said the U.S. (I was the only Westerner in the crowd), and she rummaged about in her bag and handed me a data CD with Vietnamese on it. I thanked her for it, and she patted me on the shoulder. Then I sped off, because the police were starting to get pushy.

I'm still carrying that CD, because I'm not carrying any technology to see what's on it. I'm sure it's in Vietnamese and that I won't understand a bit of it, but how could I throw something like that away?