I went to Halong Bay over the weekend and it was stunning. I did lots of sunbathing whilst drifting past the limestone karsts, and finished the day with a sunset kayak into a lagoon. We also visited a huge cave which was lit like a grotto and could have been a lunar landscape. Our local guide gave an informative talk on Vietnam's marriage situation, mentioning how certain hill tribes enforce women shaving their eyebrows off once they get married, and other tribes deny women the right to cut their hair so it grows to their feet. After a seafood dinner, I chatted with friends on the sundeck until the stars started to appear.
For the past week, I have been experiencing lots of tension/blocking badly on words beginning with 'd'. D was always my arch-nemesis before I joined the McGuire programme, and I studiously I avoided saying any D word. I would use every trick in the book to get out of using that sound and as such, it still frightens me quite a lot. Having said that, I have put lots of work into overkilling the fear of D, but it seemed that D wanted to rear its ugly head one last time to really test my progress.
Things came to a head in Halong Bay where I started avoiding using D words that I would normally say because I was blocking so badly, and as soon as this started to happen, I was very concerned indeed. I wasn't sure what to do, as my usual options of calling Terry (my primary coach), or Matt (the Regional Director for UK South) were not available to me as:
1. I was on a junk boat in the middle of the sea with no working telephone
2. There were only 14 other people on board so no chance for contacts to start to batter the word down.
What's a girl to do?
Luckily, I am travelling with 3 amazing girls: Ali, Adele and Danielle. I explained to them the problems I was experiencing. They very kindly agreed to make me say dreaded D words, to ensure I would not avoid using them. It turned into a game of "What is the longest sentence we can make Hannah say using D words?" and the winner was "Danielle is dearly disappointed at this dreadful, dreary, damp, depressing day". Throughout the day, they randomly came up to me and would quietly say, "Sentence time!", but thanks to them, the fear is receeding and D is going back down. Tomorrow when I get to Hoi An I will do contacts to overkill this, and this will be D's last hurrah! This dreadful D dilemma (hee hee!), made me realise that recovering from stammering doesn't have to be a serious drama- it can be fun if you include other people and ask them to help you on your way.
In more positive news, today I went on a motorcycle tour of the countryside surrounding Hue, the famed 'conical hat' city. The motorcycle tour was excellent and my driver did not mind in the slightest that I hung onto him for dear life! Everyone else just held the bar on the back of the seat, but I have only ever been on Mark's bike on paved London roads and at some points, the road was nothing more than a dirt track, a grass path through a cemetary (really!) or a hilltop road strewn with large chunks of rock. We stopped at the only tiger colosseum in South East Asia, the Minh Mang tombs and a hilltop pagoda which is famous for something but I can't really remember what as it started raining and I was cold and ready for a cup of tea.
I thought I would blog today as my last post was quite long and I think it was too long for everyone to read but this ended up being quite long too, so that plan didnt really work. Sorry everyone! I hope this was slightly interesting, at least!
