Thanks Mark. She's feeling much better this morning.

Hope she's feeling better again soon. Never nice to be poorly in a strange place... 😞

On the map, the closer you got to the screen, the smaller the text got! I did a Google search for "Ca River" (no diacritics) to see what would come up, that was much easier to see.

When we were bringing books to Laos I taught myself to read and write Lao, which wasn't all that difficult, actually. From there I learned Thai, or at least enough to read slowly, like a six-year-old. That has really helped us in rural areas where all the menus and signs and bus schedules are only in Thai. Can I speak and understand Thai? Nope. Bruce sort of can. Between us we have a sliver of comprehension, just enough to be dangerous, really.

Thanks for the clarification. My close up vision goes to pot after exercise due to fluctuations in blood pressure so I must have read the accent incorrectly. As you say, at least we can read Vietnamese. The easiest non-Roman character set to learn is Korean Hangul because it is so logical. Leigh spent a lot of time learning the two easier Japanese scripts but it just became too tiresome in the end. I didn't last as long with Arabic although much of that had to do eith not being able to read the subtle differences on my phone screen.

I'm pretty sure Bruce has a huge stash of those little round wrapped soaps somewhere!

This is the Cả River, Cả translates to "chief". The rising accent marked word cá means "fish". Fish, tomato, chief, you're whizzing by a bike and trying to make sense of Vietnamese diacritics even though it's actually readable as opposed to Thai/Lao/Khmer/Burmese.

We've seen this in Cambodia and similarly in Mozambique as well but I suspect in those cases the wood is heading to China.

You can put some sort of soft, hazy filter on your camera, oh wait! It's hot and humid so no need, it's already there!

It's when we're hot and sweaty that the photographer needs to step back a bit :-).

You two are too young to stop taking close up pictures of each other, but one can always just focus on the soup.

Horrible. We saw that in Laos in 2014, huge teak logs on boats covered with tarps to escape detection.

Lotsa worse places to hole up than Ninh Binh, right? Enjoy.

Ha ha!

...in the restaurant I suddenly saw Clint Eastwood and asked if I can take a photo...

That's a good description of what it feels like.