Day 10-- The !00% Club

Day 10...The 100% Club
On the move early for day 10. This will be our longest drive of the trip. It is 300 KM from Da Nang to Quy Nhon. It will take us nearly 6 hours to go roughly 200 miles. The road is lined with many little villages and the area is verdant and lush with vegetation. Rice paddies abound and through the course of the day we drove through paddies that represent the entire planting,growing, harvesting and drying cycle for the rice crop. The planting as well as everything else is done by hand. As we drove further south the rice grew green and tall and you could begin to see the rice buds at the top of the plants. More to the south the crop was maturing and turning a golden brown. A little further on they were cutting the mature rice by hand and and tying it into small tee pee like bundles. The next step was the thrashing to separate the rice from the chafe and then mile upon miles of rice spread along the side of the road to dry. It didn't seem to matter if cars or bicycles drove over the rice. It is a hearty little seed. The rice was in its natural brown color before being processed and bleached to white..
Water buffalo are everywhere as well as people fishing or picking greens from any and all sorts of locations.
We passed lots of farmers on motor bikes taking their pigs and produce to the local market places. We stopped for a short rest break and I noticed a small market place across the street. I grabbed my camera and headed in.I'm not particularly tall but I had to stoop down to walk through the market place. Fruits were at the front...vegetables in the middle and the meat and fish toward the rear. No one was shy about being photographed. I'm glad I made the little side trip.
We picked up a little snack of dried coconut to snack on.
I have to hand it to our driver. Handling these roads with all the foot, bicycle, motor bike, truck and bus traffic is a nightmare. The horns are going off constantly and near misses are pretty damn frequent. However, I wouldn't trade these drives for anything. I just can't take my eyes off the people and the landscape.
Quy Nhon is a coastal city and there are many fishing boats in the harbor. Each is very brightly painted and quite colorful. We are taken to our hotel that is built into a cliff dropping down to a beautiful beach.
Words can't describe how beautiful this place is. I'll post some pictures to help out.
The hotel is called the Life Wellness Resort Quy Nhon. I highly recommend checking it out on their web site. www.life-resorts .com. This is as exotic and good a resort hotel as any place I have ever been...and I have been to a few. Our rooms were a whopping $136 a night. It is a shame that we will only spend one night at the Life Wellness resort. I guess that means we must come back. When we do I'll bring five cows to give to selected poor families. I'll tell you why later. Our hosts in Quy Nhon said that aside from the wheel chairs that on on cow was one of the mosat meabingful gift that you could goive to the poor people in the provence.
We checked into our rooms and then headed into Quy Nhon for the distribution. The wheel chair recipients had been waiting patiently for any hour so I was relieved to finally get to the location. We met with the organizers who were a combination of the local Red Cross and Giving It Back to Kids. I am continually impressed with the work that the Red Cross does. These were all Vietnamese but they wore their red Red Cross vests and white hats with pride. Giving It Back to Kids is also well respected in this area. Each of the coordinators and I gave short speeches and then we were invited to go in and amongst the 107 recipients to talk to them and touch them. It is so pleasing to receive their smiles and honest sense of gratitude. One old man reached over to me and grabbed my hand and gave it a very firm and long shake. There were lots of frail elderly here as well as some severely handicapped children. The local newspaper kept asking to get pictures of us touching or talking to the disabled people. I think this will do a lot for US good will in the region.
I gave Tommy two bags of reading glasses to hand out and he was literally mobbed by a group of seniors. I thought that the glasses idea would be a good one but not this good. We promised to send another case so that those that missed out could get the benefit of reading once again. I want to thank the SCE Vietnamese Affinity Group for giving us the glasses. I know the Affinity Group will be pleased when they see they pictures and video of their fine country that we bring back.
Again a favorite time for me is to film the loading up and departures of the wheel chair recipients. I would say that 90% leave with the chairs strapped onto a motor bike or Tuk Tuk. I love to see their smiles as they motor off to their homes.
Of course after the distribution we are invited to dinner with the local government officials. It is a tradition to honor guests with a dinner and also to enter the Vietnamese world of the 100% club. Pat and I are generally seated in the middle of the table with the boys at one end and the girls at the other. The rebel rousers are always seated across from the young bulls, Danny and Tommy, and any eligible Vietnamese bachelor seated next to Laura since she is unattached. The boys are under constant siege during dinner to go 100% down the hatch with with every glass of beer. I lost count after about 20 rounds but I think the boys were well up to 40 by the time we called it a night. Although the language barrier was great,we once again bonded closely with the Vietnamese people as we ate their food and celebrated their traditions. We moved a little deeper into the Vietnamese culture today and it was a very pleasant experience. I think we are working on a PHD in life experiences...
No finer education and the only way to live is 100%