Our Day Trip to the Perfume Pagoda

Went to the Perfume Pagoda. We hired a van and driver for the day. It was a mostly bumpy 2 hour drive from Hanoi through village after village, all streets lined with the ubiquitous open stalls and people selling. Very tall and skinny concrete structures with decorated facades topped many of these stalls. It seems like every family has a business selling something, but I’m sure that can’t be the case.

We also passed miles and miles of farmland with people out tilling the soil or planting or harvesting. The crops are numerous. These farms seemed much larger than what could feed single families, but I don’t know what their arrangement is with the land and how much is sold and by whom.

When we arrived at the river to get on a boat to take us to the Pagoda mountain, we were approached by 2 very young women, Minh and Hua (pronouned Way). They asked us if we wanted guides and we told them no. They rowed alongside anyway and chatted with us the whole way. Their English was very good, in fact Minh taught me some Vietnamese, which passed the time on the 60 minute trip. We were being rowed in a long, low metal boat by an oarswoman – most, like 99%, of the rowers are women.

We got to the Pagoda mountain, got out of our boat, our uninvited guides got out of their boat and they proceeded to walk us up the very steep, about 2 hour climb to the top. Minh had me, Hua had Kathie. Minh and I were moving up a lot faster, or I should say Minh was pulling me up a lot faster than Kathie and Hua. We stopped and rested at many covered stalls on the way up and drank water. Oh, I forgot to mention that Minh took pictures of us every now and then with a very nice Canon 35mm camera. We asked early on how much would they cost if we wanted to buy one and she said $1. We thought that was reasonable.

The cave itself was a thing of beauty. The opening was at the bottom of a long set of stairs, the opening cavity opened to probably 80 stories high with massive limestone stalagtites hanging from the roof and stalagmites protruding from the floor. As we entered we saw a large Buddhist shrine in the center with smaller shrines to each side. The center shrine was a many armed woman beneath the Buddha figure. The story of who the woman is was told to me by Hua as follows.

A king had three daughters, but he needed a successor, so one of the daughters needed to marry a suitable heir to the throne. The first two daughters did not marry suitable candidates and the third daughter wanted to become a monk and serve Buddha. Later, the kind needed medical attention, so the devoted third daughter cut off both of her arms and cut out both of her eyes and gave them to her father. As a reward, the Buddha gave her back many arms and sight because she was such a good daughter. Thousands of Buddhists climb to this temple every year at Tet to worship the Buddha and the many armed daughter. Many people pray for marriage, a union for themselves or loved ones.
The two facing Buddha shrines to the right of the main shrine are where people pray for sons or daughters.

Unfortunately, on the way down from the cave, Kathie and I got the hard sell about how we must pay them money for being their guides. We were separated at the time, something that I’ll never allow to happen again in a situation like that. I finally capitulated to paying Minh 300,000 dong which is 20 USD. By that time Kathie had caught up with me and she was pretty much obligated to pay the same amount to Hua. They both continued to demand more money all the way down. We refused to buy any pictures from them at that point and got told that they had to pay the government for the film. We said, pay it out of the money we gave you. Oh, no, that’s to pay for school. They wanted 50 USD from each of us!! Needless to say, it was an unpleasant finish to an interesting day and the earlier friendly relationship with these two young women.