VNAH retreat part 2

Not much posting recently due to me being surprisingly busy with volunteer work and HGSE research, as well as my laptop's hard drive failing, which was unfortunate. It's currently somewhere with a computer technician named Quy who can hopefully install a new hard drive, transfer at least some of my files over, and have it up and running again. Sort of a hassle, but at least everything is backed up.

I did finally put up a Picasa album with photos from the retreat the other week, so check those out if you're interested in pictures of the beach, caves, and extremely cute Vietnamese kids. The highlight of the trip (besides the food) was Phong Nha Ke Bang national park. Here's us just inside the park entrance:

The park is sort of in the mountains, a little ways inland from the town of Dong Hoi and has an amazing system of caves that we got to explore. We took one of those boats (well, actually two since we were a huge group) behind us in the picture up a river to the side of a mountain, where we got out and climbed pretty high up some extremely steep steps to the entrance to the first set of caves, where we could wander around for a little while and check out the rock formations, which were really impressive. This is the view from about halfway up to the caves:

After the trek back down we all sat around for a while eating ice cream (at 10:30am) and relaxing. I sort of thought this might be it, but then we got back in the boat and headed further up the river, until we saw that the river actually went underneath the mountains through an opening that was only a few feet high and that the boat barely squeezed into. A little ways in, the passageway opened up into giant underground caverns that must have been over 100 feet high and absolutely stunning. The woman paddling the boat continued on down the river until we stopped at a sandy bank and climbed out again, spending some more time wandering the caves, which made the first set seem like little baby caves in comparison. The pictures don't capture the scale of it very well, but if you take a look at the album you can at least get an idea of what the rocks looked like.

Other recent highlights from Hanoi include starting Vietnamese lessons with our tutor Duong (prounced "zuhng"), playing some intense ultimate Frisbee with about 20 expats and Vietnamese on Saturday, and eating silkworms for lunch at work last week. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the silkworms.