So when I start to get homesick, which I inevitably do when I travel, I dream about the horses. I dream I am riding them. These are vivid scenes. I can feel the horse. I can feel the rhythm of the trot and the three beats of the canter. The dreams are often very long. In the most recent dream, I rode all three of my horses, even unbroke Belle. That's the sign to me that it's time to get the bags packed and get back on the airplane.

Usually when I travel I try to do at least one horse-oriented thing. Last year, when we went to the Czech Republic and to Prague, I took a day trip out to see the national stud, in a village called Kladruby (which also happens to be the name of the national Czech horse--a cross between the Iberian breeds and European warmbloods). The search for the horse (where ever I may be) often turns into an adventure. In the Czech Republic, it took me two tries to find the Kladruby. Little did I know that there are multiple villages in the Czech Republic with the same name. So the first time I ended up in a small village with nary a horse in sight. The second time, I got off the train and walked about a kilometer and saw the horses---hundreds of them in the fields and a grand "national stud" looking place. I had arrived.

It was a satisfying day--a beautiful building, lovely horses, and a real insider's tour. In Vietnam, however, finding horses has been next to impossible.First, there is very little English spoken outside of the tourist centers. Horses are still used for work here--we saw some pulling carts and carrying loads of rice as we passed by on the train. From what I can tell, from a distance, the horses are more ponies--small, stout, usually well-fed, with bushy forelocks. We saw some light colored horses, dun-colored but without the dorsal stripe, a few greys, some chestnuts and a couple of almost-whites. Obviously being a dark bay in a place where it is routinely hot and humid would be an evolutionary mistake. I also imagine that the horses are close to Mongolian ponies since there was a long period of Mongolian colonization of Vietnam in the 15th-18th centuries (all this information gleaned from the Hanoi history museum). So this trip, that was about as close as I came to visiting horses. We never made to the Hmong country, since the journey was fairly difficult and there was plenty to keep us busy. In Hanoi 20, or even 15 years ago, I imagine you'd still see the occasional horse. But nowadays, it's all about the Honda motorbike.

Maybe on the next trip to this fascinating, crazy, dirty, wild, place. There will definitely be a second trip here. And maybe next time I'll study Vietnamese before I come. Or at least learn the word for horse.