Three flights to get from Torremolinos, Spain to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Stops in Madrid and Dubai.

We spent a few days in Saigon before heading to visit friends along the Mekong River. This is the plaza in a shopping center near our hotel.

The biggest celebration of the year is Tet. The Vietnamese New Year. The celebration goes on for nearly two weeks. This year it is the year of the snake. This is a large snake display in the front beach park in Vung Tau.

Here we are in My Tau along the Mekong River where Tu (on the left) grew up. Her sister and her sisters daughter are with her.

HEALTH UPDATES

Charlotte. In Spain, Charlotte developed a pain in her right knee that prevented her from enjoying walking. We took her to a specialty clinic there where they determined her meniscus – that cartilage device that keeps the two major bones in the leg from scraping against each other – was worn and torn. Rather than a metal knee replacement, we opted for the placement of a synthetic gel to support the meniscus. It was injected into her knee and has allowed her to walk normally. It will need to be replaced about once a year.

Luke. After arriving in Vietnam, Luke developed a severe case of bronchitis. It involved difficulty breathing, an almost constant hacking cough, inability to lie down or sleep and it lasted 4 days. In My Tau Charlotte, Tim and Tu took Luke to the regional hospital and there, in treating the bronchitis, heart regurgitation was discovered. Luke had been getting unusually tired after exercise for a few months. The bronchitis gradually got better and Luke was able to get some sleep. After another four or five days, after we reasearched heart hospitals on-line, Luke was taken to a specialty heart hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. There, a full checkup including a CT scan, found that the heart regurgitation was not the most serious issue. There was myocardial arrythmia. Eight drugs were assigned and now nearly two weeks later, Luke has regained much of his former strength for exercise and is going for a follow up checkup in two days.

Here we are with our friends Tim and Tu at our hotel in My Tho along the Mekong River. We met Tim and Tu while in Panama as they had the duplex below us in Alto Boquete.

From our back window we can see the large Buddha statue on a nearby mountain. There is a monastery there. Vung Tau is where Thich Nhat Hanh grew up and started his training as a monk.

Looking the other direction there is another mountain with a large statue of Christ.

This is a scene from Back Beach, the newer, more touristy beach along the South China Sea. That line of people in the distance are pigrims heading out to a small island with a temple on it. You can only make this trek during low tide. A large container ship is moving in the background.

There is a fair amount of trash that floats up on the beach. Part of the millions of tons of plastic in the worlds oceans. We decided to do our part to clean it up.

In all I think we got 16 bags of trash off the beach. The worst part is when we accidentally try to put an oily tar ball into our bag. It makes an oily black mess of everything.

A lot of small fishing boats parked near Front Beach. This is close to where our apartment is and this is the older part of town facing the Saigon River bay.

Fresh fish being sold on the front beach.

Part of the decorations in Vung Tau for the Tet holidays.

More Tet decorations in the park at front beach.

Near Front Beach we often see groups of meditators.

This is what we have in front of us when we meditate 1 – 4 hours every day.

We read a book recently, called Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth, in it we learned it was advisable to regularly get our bare feet on the ground and reestablish our vibrational connection with the earth.

Grounding with salt water.

Grounding extremists.

When she wears shades, she is the embodiment of cool.

The owner of our apartment building Ms. Ming, as a gift for Tet, gave us a night stay in a very high end hotel. She also owns an interest in this beautiful hotel. It has swimming pools on each of the top ten floors or so. Ms. Ming came to our rescue when we booked a flight that would have caused us to overstay our visa by a day. She handled all the paperwork (which is immense) for getting our visa extended.

This is Ms. Cuc. She manages the apartment building we stay in. She is so nice. She has brought us fruit every week, bouquets of flowers and helps us in so many other ways

The local Catholic church has some nice trees on their urban property and they decorated them nicely for the Tet holidays.

I thought this was funny. There is a huge Hilton hotel being built on the coast here. The currency here is Vietnamese dongs. A lot of dongs involved in this project.

HEALTH UPDATE (Luke)

After being diagnosed with heart failure and atrial fibrillation about six weeks ago, I’ve been taking several drugs prescribed by my cardiologist. Last week (near the end of March), they asked me to come into the hospital in Saigon for three days of testing, procedures and monitoring. They wanted to use electric shocks to get my heart back to a regular rhythm. After passing a test for no blood clots, (called an transencephloechocardiogram where they numb my throat and cram a think black tube of sensors down to even with my heart and look for thrombosis (blood clots)). they did an EKG before the cardioversion procedure (electric shocks). A short while later, the cardiologist came into the room and showed us the readout of the EKG. My heart had reverted back to a regular rhythm on it’s own. They cancelled the procedure and released me from the hospital.

We’re not much for riding on motorcycles. Charlotte rode with Ms. Cuc to see another apartment and is not interested in doing that again any time soon.

Some of the plastic floating in the oceans has been there a long time. This bottle got barnacled.

This woman really appreciated our work cleaning up the beach. She even offered her apartment for us to stay in next time we come to Vung Tau.

Friends that we met in Colombia arrive on the ferry for about a ten day stay in Vung Tau.

These are our friends, Rob and Darci from Arizona. We are conspiring together, working toward non-lucartive residency visas for Spain.

One of the wonderful features of Vung Tau are the beautiful large trees lining many of the older streets, particularly in our neighborhood. Some of them are enlightening.

With the world in turmoil, we are not isolated from that. We do take time to think. What to do? What to do?

On our last Sunday we went up to the Buddhist Monastery on the mountain that we see from our back window. We meditated at an alter there while a large group of monks were having a service in the room behind us.