Promoting Peace by Studying War

On the second day of our stay in Saigon, one of our residents, Barbara, arranged for several events to honor International Day of Peace - September 21. The first part was to gather at the War Remnants Museum and hear a talk by Madam Ton Nu Thi Ninh - a high ranking diplomat with a long history - she spoke of conversations with Henry Kissinger where he warned the world, " Don't stand between Vietnam and their sense of direction" She also told us about Vietnam's Bamboo Diplomacy (bend but don't break) and the 4 No's foreign policy:

1. No military alliances
2. No siding with one country against another
3. No foreign military bases
4. No use or threat of force

I felt so privileged to hear about Vietnamese policy from such an experience insider. She also told us about how resilient the Vietnamese were after the Vietnam/American war. Once peace was restored they worked hard to establish relations with former adversaries. They now see themselves as agents of peace. They send grain to Cuba, they set up field hospitals in Sudan.
See this article in a Vietnamese newspaper: The Bell of Peace Rings Out from the War Remnants Museum

Our group gathered in front of the museum

After the talk we had a musical performance by Orange Happiness - a group of musicians with physical disabilities resulting from agent orange. Then we had a tour of the museum. It was a very depressing tour. All wars are horrible, but this one was closer to home. It brought me to tears to see the images and hear the stories. One thing that I didn't know is that so many of the correspondents that took those photos and wrote the stories, died in the process.

 

60 PhotoJournalists who died while covering the Vietnam/American war.

A Food Tour on One Table

After the museum, we had a group reservation at a Michelin rated restaurant called Man Moi. They served the food family style, 8 dishes: 3 appetizers and 5 entrees. Every one was delicious.

The menu for our luncheon

 

Ringing the Ship's Bell for Peace

Once back on the ship and getting ready for sail away, we had another event. The captain rang the bell 5 times as prescribed in Barbara's talk, each ringing represented something:

• First Bell – World Peace: Dedicated to peace across the globe, particularly for those living through war, violence, and conflict, and for those working toward reconciliation.
• Second Bell – Community Peace: Dedicated to peace within the host communities, cities, and countries that welcome the ship throughout its global travels.
• Third Bell – Peace Within the Odyssey Community: Dedicated to harmony, respect, understanding, and kindness among the residents and crew living aboard the ship.
• Fourth Bell – Inner Peace: Dedicated to personal peace within oneself, acknowledging that lasting peace begins as an individual daily choice.
• Fifth Bell – The Future of the Odyssey: Dedicated to the future of the ship and its community, seeking wisdom, patience, and stability for management, crew, and residents through upcoming changes and challenges.

Finally, we sailed away with a happy hour and some singing in the observatory.
Good Bye Vietnam!

Ho Chi Minh City

Is Ho Chi Minh City on your travel bucket list? It certainly was never on mine. I didn't even know where it was. I didn't even know that Ho Chi Minh City is actually the new name for Saigon. Saigon evokes those years in my past where we heard about death counts every day. Not something I care to revisit.
So, imagine my surprise that the Odyssey's visit to Ho Chi Minh City earned a place on my list of top experiences on this journey!

A hotel stay for line dancing

It started with the fact that we got off the ship and stayed in a local hotel. Some people do this at most every port. We do not. This port was different because our line dancing group was getting together with a local line dancing group early in the morning (the dancing will be outside and it's hot!) It's nearly an hour from the ship to downtown, so we went in the night before and stayed 2 nights for $65 😮

I think I've already written in here about how special the line dancing had become for me, and when we meet with local dancing groups, it ups the ante even higher, and the Saigon (yes, they call it that) group was the best yet. The leader of the group, a man named Tam Van, met us at a brewery the night before. Using Google translate, we got to chat with him a bit. We learned that his name, Tam, is Vietnamese for 8, and he is the 8th child in his family. I didn't ask if his siblings were named 1-7 😂

Line Dancing in Ho Chi Minh City  

On the morning of dancing, we walked from our hotel to the Nguyen Hue Walking street. This is not a street that gets blocked off from traffic occasionally, it is a permanent park-like median. The view in the background included a fountain, a statue of Ho Chi Minh, and the People's Committee building (City Hall.) 

The weather was great, although still quite hot even at 7am. The Vietnamese dancers wore those wonderful side-slit dresses with pants underneath, the ship dancers wore our street clothes but added a multicolored flowered lei to identify us. We danced for a bit over an hour - and they were all dances we knew! As opposed to the 4 hours of dancing and list of 50 dances in our last place - Singapore. Jim went live on YouTube during the dancing.

It was wonderful fun and we took breaks for lots of photos and lots of hugs. We gave them gifts of earrings in the Vietnamese colors of orange and yellow, they gave us the very practical gifts of fans! You can learn more about the Vietnamese group on their facebook page.

Learning about Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh city

In the afternoon, Jim and I took the Hop On Hop Off bus for an overview of the city. I loved learning that:

If China is the factory of the world and India is the office of the world, then Vietnam is the kitchen of the world.

We also learned that HCMC has the highest concentration of motorbikes in the world with a count of 8.5 million. We experienced this first hand whenever we had to cross a street! Very few intersections have traffic lights, the instructions for crossing streets is to just walk - but walk 'confidently' and the scooters and cars will drive around you. Juuusst a bit scary, but it does work. I almost got confident with it until we wanted to cross a 6 lane road that was jam-packed with cars and scooters. We watched for a while, then looked at each other and said, "nah" and turned around.

Electric Motor Scooter charging stations. 😊

 

Saigon Zoo and Botanical Gardens

Left: Bitexco Financial Tower, Right: Trần Hưng Đạo (1228–1300) was a revered Vietnamese military commander and prince who led the armies that defeated major Mongol invasions in the 13th century.

With their thriving capitalistic economy, it's hard to remember that this is a communist country. Billboard translation: Commemorating the 96th Anniversary of the Traditional Day of the Party's Propaganda Department (August 1, 1930 – August 1, 2026)

Rotary Clubs around the World

Another opportunity for cultural exchange was with our Rotary Club on board. As club secretary, Jim had contacted the Saigon Rotary Club and arranged to meet up. The only member of their club that was available was Grace who is the secretary.

Jim is secretary of our Odyssey Rotary Club. Here he's chatting with Grace who is secretary of the Saigon Rotary Club. Don't let her youthful appearance fool you, Grace is a Corporate Attorney here.

The traditional exchange of flags between clubs. Our Rotary president, Paul Montoya. 

Using Google Maps

I don't know how people traveled before Google Maps! I took the opportunity of a real-life use of walking directions to make #1008 of our Tutorial Videos - GeeksOnTour.com/1008:

Sea Days - Sail Away

When you live on a cruise ship, life is divided into Port days and Sea days. On port days, many people get off the ship. They've arranged for tours, or maybe even a hotel for a night or two. On Sea days, you're looking for activities on board. Anyone who wants to organize an activity or a club, knows that it needs to be scheduled on a Sea day because that is when everyone is on board. Many people think that Sea days are dull and boring with nothing to do. We find it to be just the opposite.


When you've been at port for a while, leaving is called a Sail Away, and it is an event. We've had 'sailaways' on the bow, in our cabin, and in the observatory, but the most special 'sailaway' is when we're invited to our friend's balcony. Nuran has the best balcony on the ship - up on the 8th deck.

Then, I just had to try Google Photos AI feauture to 'Remix' photos as a Art Deco Painting ...

To see exactly how I made this, see our GeeksOnTour.com tutorial #1007 1007.GP-Remix a Photo to an Oil Painting



When we left Ha Long, we knew we had 5 sea days before our next port at Ho Chi Minh City. We have an active line dancing group on board with a very accomplished teacher/leader. So I planned to go to class every day. Jim was voluntold to dress up at Colonel Mustard for a 'clue' themed party and I also attended some choir practice sessions.



We also took care of some GeeksOnTour business and had a zoom meeting with our members.

Lastly, we had a book club meeting - the author of the book is one of our group! An Uncommon Red Guard.

Yen Tu Mountain

Due to difficulty in getting fuel, and upcoming itinerary changes, we ended up having 10 whole days docked in Ha Long. What a treat! There are fireworks almost every night that were visible from our cabin's window.

There was a carnival area with lots of eateries and gift shops right at the end of the dock. And it was all next to a beach with gently lapping waves. Great for walking and just sitting having a 'Bia.' Bia may seem like a strange word, but if you pronounce it - you'll see that it's really quite familiar ... beer.😊

Build it and they will come?

One odd thing abut the carnival area is that it was bordered by dozens of what looked like apartment buildings, but they were all empty?! In fact they did not even look completed. A little research uncovers the term "Ha Long Ghost Towns"

From Google:

Locals will openly tell you that the properties are a mismatch for the community. The units were priced for multi-millionaire foreign buyers or high-end retail brands. When those international buyers didn't show up, the developers refused to drop prices to what local families could afford. [1, 2, 3]

The result is a bizarre modern ruins scenario: immaculate, freshly paved Italian-style boulevards spanning kilometres, completely abandoned to the elements without a single soul ever having signed a lease. [1, 2]

Time on our Hands

We thoroughly enjoy having so much time at one port. We always have plenty of computer work to do which usually means we miss out on some of the sights. But, with all this time, we were very amenable when we heard Charley talking about his plans to go to Yen Tu mountain the next day. Can we go too? Sure!
Charley arranged for a small van and 12 of us piled in for the hour drive to the mountain.
First we walked thru the grounds of a monastery. Then we took a gondola up the mountain to where there was a path with lots of stairs, eventually leading to yet another gondola where we hiked another set of stairs to a golden buddha. All totaled we logged over 15,000 steps that day - almost all were either up or down!

  
After the mountain our guide took us to a local restaurant that served traditional food. Uh, sorry, but I don't know how they eat some of this stuff 😮 The chicken was a bowl of parts. A conversation with the restaurant staff revealed that they think it's odd how westerners separate the meat from the bone. They just chop it up, bones and all, and put the results in a bowl. These were pretty scrawny chickens to start with. You really had to hunt to find any meat. I just couldn't do it. Another dish was deep fried greens and sardines. Whole sardines. I tried a bite and nearly burned my mouth on the hot oil still dripping from it. I did eat the rice and tofu.

The last stop was a magnificent monastery and garden. I was immediately put into a trance by the multiple chimes strewn about the place. Please play the video so you can hear them and see if you agree.
We returned to the ship in time for dinner ... I was hungry!
And, we stlll had one more day in Ha Long. So relaxing!

 

Ha Long Bay

 We stopped in Ha Long both coming and going. And, I'm so glad we did. Our first stop - on our way north - it rained the whole time. Well, we got off the ship on the morning of the first day and went for a walk, but it started raining that afternoon and didn't stop for 4 solid days. We just stayed home and did our computer stuff. 

The ship continued north to Hong Kong, them came back to Ha Long and it was GORGEOUS weather. We were so lucky since this is one of the most scenic spots on the entire planet! Sailing in thru those rock islands takes a couple hours. We were scheduled to dock at 8am, so we had to get up early for the view - it was worth it!

Sunrise in Ha Long Bay

Sometime during breakfast, I overheard Eddie talking to Matt and saying that he was going to just get out on the dock and find a private boat and driver to go on a tour of the bay. I butted in and asked if we could tag along. He said Yes! Oh Boy. 

We got there and gathered our stuff to get off the ship. Eddie started bargaining with a tour guide and 2 other people from the ship were nearby and got included in our group as well - Ben and Basia. Amazingly, the boat went on the 5 hour tour with just the 6 of us on board. It could easily hold 40. What a delightful day.

Our tour boat for the day

The big tour boat took us to this lagoon where we got on a little row boat that took us thru a cave.

The monkeys came out to greet us.

Next stop was a climb up to a cave entrance. And, what a cave it was!!

Our group, Matt, Eddie, Basia, Ben, Chris, Jim

The last stop was a beach and we actually went swimming!

The bay includes countless of these limestone karst islands and islets. I've seen counts as high as 1,969 islands although other references put the count at 1,600. According to Google there are 980 islands with formal names.

Google Photos has a fun new AI feature that will turn your photos into rich oil paintings or Art Deco images. I thought Ha Long gave me the perfect images to play with ...

Here is what it looks like to come home to our ship after dark.

I thought it was so beautiful, it deserves to be a work of art .. in oil painting style.

And, let's see what these islands look like as an art deco work of art ...