Sunday Ride to Song Cau

I rode my motorcycle up to Song Cau today to visit Salem's family, check out the progress on the house, and just enjoy riding. Song Cau is about 40 miles up the coast on Route 1A, the coastal highway. "Coastal" highway is a bit of a misnomer since the road is seldom in sight of the ocean during the entire 1000 miles from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. One reason for this is that for major stretches, especially in Phu Yen province, there are large bays separated from the ocean by mountainous islands and peninsulas. These bays provide beautiful vistas as the road emerges from the several passes along the highway.
I stuck with the highway going to Song Cau because I was anxious to get there. Work on the house proceeds a little more slowly now as it rains part of each day, but it's looking great as it gets it coat of stucco and paint.




Soon after arrival, we sat down for lunch (at 11 AM). Vietnamese eat lunch early because most of them get up at 430 AM or thereabouts.

There was a salad (meat is pretty common on Vietnamese salads, normally beef or seafood), some grilled fish, rice (not shown), and question cake. The word "cake" here applies to noodles and the "question" apparently refers to the curves which resemble question marks.

On the way back to Tuy Hoa, I opted to get off the main road and try to find my way home on the back roads. These skirted the west side of some of the bays and consisted of dirt paths for a lot of the way. The bays are fished by fisherman with nets in very shallow canoes. Along the edges are many shrimp pens, a lot of which are abandonned at this time because the industry was overbuilt a few years ago.





In the fields along the way were, as usual, many tombs. These are often decorated with swastikas, which were used as symbols in Eastern religions for more than 2000 years before being used by Nazis in the 20th century. Nevertheless, I am still taken aback when I first see them. A piece on Buddist use of the symbol follows below.

Buddhism originated in India in the 5th century BC and inherited the manji or swastika. Also known as a "yung drung"^[16] in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity^[17]. Today the symbol is used in Buddhist art and scripture and represents dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites. One can see swastika on the Pillars of Ashoka where the swastika is a symbol of the cosmic dance around a fixed center and guards against evil.

The paired swastika symbols are included, at least since the Liao Dynasty, as part of the Chinese language, the symbolic sign for the character 萬 or 万 (wàn in Mandarin, man in Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, vạn in Vietnamese) meaning "all" or "eternality" (lit. myriad) and as 卐, which is seldom used. Swastika marks the beginning of many Buddhist scriptures. The swastika (in either orientation) appears on the chest of some statues of Gautama Buddha and is often incised on the soles of the feet of the Buddha in statuary. Because of the association of the right-facing swastika with Nazism, Buddhist swastika (outside India only) after the mid-20th century are almost universally left-facing: 卍. This form of the swastika is often found on Chinese food packaging to signify that the product is vegetarian and can be consumed by strict Buddhists. It is often sewn into the collars of Chinese children's clothing to protect them from evil spirits.

In 1922, the Chinese Syncretist movement Daoyuan founded the philanthropic association Red Swastika Society in imitation of the Red Cross. The association was very active in China during the 1920s and the 1930s.