Family Island Regatta Vietnamese Style

 Location: Hoi An, Vietnam

While living on Rachel, we really enjoyed attending a few Family Island Regattas in Georgetown, Exuma, Bahamas. Today we had almost as much fun (albeit only for a couple of hours rather than five days) watching the Hoi An Tet celebration boat races.

Two races, about 8 boats from local neighborhoods and mostly local spectators cheering them on from the shore and in boats. One can't watch an event like this without getting caught up in all the excitement.

This is an annual event that takes place just after the Tet holiday. The boats are double ended rowing boats. Like most boats here in Vietnam, there is an eye painted on either side of the bow. We've read that they are supposed to be the eyes of ospreys, which strike fear into sea monsters, keeping the boat and it's crew safe on the water.

At any rate, there's a crew of 8 men, six constantly paddling, one on the bow paddling most of the time and helping pull the boat around the turns, and 1 man in the stern to steer, paddling like crazy when he can, too. In the fastest boats the forward paddler on the inside joins the bow man in pulling the bow around. With two of them pulling, the boat makes it's turn faster and can regain speed more quickly.

 The race is three laps around a course that we guess to be about 500 yards long with a turning buoy at each end. We watched the first race from about ½ way between the turning buoys. As the boats passed, the spectators used bailers, paddles, whatever was at hand to throw and splash water on their favorite crews to cool them down.

 The second race found us right near one of the turning buoys. Definitely now our preferred place to see the best action.

We saw one boat overturn after being pushed by another, and the following boats simply blasted right on through, just missing the crew in the water, with one actually riding right over the capsized boat. Very exciting – thank goodness no one was hurt.

One of the strategies if you are slightly behind another boat is to wait for them to start to make the turn around the mark, then take the inside and jam your boat between them and the buoy, forcing them further outside. Once the mark has been passed, you then paddle like crazy to turn your boat first and get into the lead.

Touching the mark is apparently not penalized in these races – in fact, most of the time the boat approaches slightly inside the mark, leaving the lead paddler to whack the mark with his paddle to force it to the inside of the boat at just the right time, thereby shortening the course temporarily by a foot or so.

In the video above, you can see the boat that won (yellow shirts with white shirts fore and aft) on the left actually stop paddling for a bit to allow their opponents to pass them on the inside during the first turn of the race. Once the other boat starts the turn, the yellow guys start paddling like crazy and two of them turn sideways and pull the bow around. By taking control of the inside they are able to come about more quickly and take the lead. Very dramatic.

The next video shows how NOT to make the turn. The inside boat is forced to the inside of the buoy by another boat. We think “They'll have to back up to go around it”. In true Family Island Regatta spirit, however, they say “The heck with that!”. The guys on the buoy side of the boat just pass the buoy forward, dragging it's anchor until the bow guy can shove it under the bow, allowing the boat to round it on the outside and take off again. Then they run into the side of the outside boat and use the other boat's momentum to help them turn faster! Only problem with this strategy is that it can be difficult to paddle and steer when two boats are tight against each other. After all this, one of the committee boats had to come out and re-anchor the mark. 

The last video shows the battle for second place.  The woman at the bottom of the screen is obviously rooting for the red shirt teem who came in second in both races.

The winning boat “Thanh Ha” (pronounced “tine-hahhh” - ish) won both races. And, happily enough for us, it turns out they're from the pottery village (Go team! Yay!!).

In reviewing all the videos we took, it's pretty easy to see why Thanh Ha won. From the start to the finish these guys gave 100%. Paddles flashing they took an early lead in both races and after the first lap rounded the buoys uncontested – seemingly the only sure way to make sure no-one else messes with you in the turns. Three laps at full tilt can't have been easy. And a second race less than an hour later, also three laps at full tilt, must have been really exhausting. These guys were so dominant they lapped the last place boat in the first race and won by an even larger margin in the second race. They really had their strategy and teamwork down, and seemed to stay totally focused throughout both races.

Congratulations, Thanh Ha!!

Tet

 Happy New Year! Or, perhaps more appropriately, Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!

Vietnam uses the lunar calendar, so the Tet holiday changes every year.  The first event of the Tet holiday is New Years Eve, which this year is on January 27.  This will be the year of the rooster so there are lots of big mylar rooster balloons for sale.

The excitement in our neighborhood has been building for days. We've had rain for the past several days until yesterday, when the sun came out. There is an increasing number of kids playing in our street, and everyone seems to be looking forward to the new year. Our street has become more active and much more interesting!

The sidewalks are filled with drying laundry and scrubbed furniture – it seems everyone is working up a storm, getting in their last minute cleaning before Tet. It's bad luck to sweep during Tet (you could sweep the good luck out of the house and have bad luck for the entire next year), so after tonight, that's it for at least the next three days. The people who live here are very industrious and very clean – the women always seem to be out sweeping, cooking, and doing laundry.

 Many along our street burn paper, fake money, and other things throughout the day, sending “gifts” to their ancestors. From what we have been able to learn, most people don't believe in this as much as they used to in the old days, but it's still a traditional sign of respect – similar to us placing flowers on a relative's grave. We have to monitor the burn rate to decide when to open or close our front doors to keep the ash and smoke out of the house.

Every house along our street seems to have guests. This evening before the festivities, a guest of one of our across-the-street neighbors killed, scalded, plucked, and butchered a chicken on the sidewalk in front of their house. 

The kumquat trees, chrysanthemums, and other flowering plants are in full bloom, and tonight and for the next three days we expect to see everyone in their finest.

 New, brightly colored clothes seem to be the order of the day. Tradition dictates that everyone has new clothes for Tet so everyone looks really spiffy (except us!). Dark clothes, especially black and white, symbolize bad luck. Don't feed anyone duck or squid – the duck is a stupid animal and has dark (unlucky) meat. The squid emits ink, also dark, and therefore, unlucky. We are on our best behaviour, trying to make sure we don't offend anyone as we participate in this, the biggest holiday of the Vietnamese year.


 --- Two days later

It's strange to look out onto our street and not see at least someone sweeping. Before Tet, it was a pretty much constant activity – we could walk down our street any time of day and see several people sweeping. Now, during Tet, there's not a broom to be seen.

One of many Tet traditions is that of giving small children lucky money (“Li Xi”) in a red envelope on the first day of Lunar New Year. Our landlady, who lives next door to us, has had several grandchildren visiting. They seem very interested in us, and, when they first arrived, reached out over the fence between the houses for us to give them lucky money. Unfortunately, we weren't very well prepared, and their parents stopped them and apologized for their forwardness before we could give them any.

Another tradition is making and eating “Bánh tét”, or as we call it “green log”. Our neighbor across the street turned her sidewalk into a bánh tét factory for a few days before Tet. Big tubs of rice and soybeans, lots of soaking, lots of rinsing, lots of pork slicing, and lots of wrapping and tying in banana leaves, resulted in a dining room table that was stacked full

of green logs. There was a pretty much constant stream of people coming to buy them, so Julie & Marg went over and bought one for us. We boiled it for several hours, sliced it, added soy sauce and chili sauce, and found it to be delicious. Here's a link with more information.

The ubiquitous food cart.

Walking around the neighbourhoods we've seen families sitting together playing card games, everyone seems to participate and they all seem to be having lots of fun.

Almost every marketplace and shop, and many restaurants are closed. As a result, we've had to eat out for the last 2 days as we were nearly out of food. Not such a hardship, however, as meals usually cost between $1 and $5. Mr. Hi (pronounced “hee”) and his wife Tao (pronounced like Taos, New Mexico without the “s”)” at “Hi's Restaurant” have kept us well fed with inexpensive and really delicious meals. And the best part is that they're only about half a block from our house!

These rockets were set off about 100 feet from where we were standing!   We were under a palm tree so luckily none of the falling debris hit us.

We didn't get to see these folks perform on New Years Eve, but we did get to see them practice a few days before.  We especially enjoyed their choice of music.

Today we walked over to Cam Nam, the next island down river from us. Two little boys all dressed up for Tet, did a little “Hello” dance for us. Unfortunately, we only caught he last few seconds of it on camera so we can't share most of it with you, but you get the idea - it involved a lot of jumping and yelling "Hello!"

Note: Check out our friends Steve & Marg's blog at:
http://www.sailblogs.com/member/lionspaw315/

Hoi An Pottery Village

20 January, 2017

We are wondering why our host named his homestay the Riverside Pottery Village Homestay. We ask, and he gives us directions to our hotel's namesake and sends us off on 4 of his bikes.

Just a short ride back toward old town we turn right at the fish market. We haven't made it to the fish market yet because it's only open from 3am to 7am – a bit early for our jet lagged selves to contemplate at this point.

After the fishing village we come to the pottery village where terra cotta pottery is still made in kilns made of clay and wooden strips. A museum has been built here and we happily pay the 30,000 dong (about $1.50) entrance fee.

Inside we find ourselves delighted. We are surrounded by incredible terra cotta art installations, a 3D visual gourmet meal.

Rather than try to describe them, we've decided to take the easy way out and just post a bunch of pictures. Hopefully they will give you a sense of what we found in this little gem of a museum. What a delicious ocular feast.

Leaving the museum, we take the back route through the fishing village along the river and stumble across dessert – a fleet of brightly colored fishing boats.

Still having a wonderful time,

Julie & Mark

Julie's new friend.

Interesting restroom signs