Thursday, December 04, 2008

Transit to Dalat

We spent most of the day on the bus to Dalat and all I can really report today are some snatches and glimpses of what drifted by the window during the 8 1/2 hour 300 km voyage...

A hand sprayed painted sign reading "Sim Card." Cell phones are in abundance and there are plenty of people shouting into them as they scoot by. A great leap in communications considered the infrastructure investment it spares the country. Another sight would be a household TV antenna propped on the end of a 10 metre bamboo mast.

This country is being built by hand. Sidewalks, storm sewers, you name it. Towering buildings being torn down with hammers and kicks. (Not sledgehammers, hammers.)

The roadside patina was a blur of coffee beans, corn husks and cobs, beans, grains and rice drying on tarpaulins in the sun.