One ‘flu over the cuckoo’s nest

I have been avoiding poultry. I read that one man in Vietnam got sick from just eating a chicken. So instead I’m eating snake. In Nam Bo, an overpriced restaurant in Chau Doc, I had the set menu of snake nem (spring rolls) and snake curry. It was satisfyingly neanderthal - “meet ‘em, beat ‘em and eat ‘em” - and very good. To my disappointment, it didn’t taste “just like chicken” but rather, just like lamb, although identifiably serpentine in appearance. I didn’t manage all of mine and suggested that the waitress might like to finish it off. She was, however, “tellified of snakes, but thank you.”

In the past two days I have visited two Buddhist pagodas, a snake farm, a floating market, a rice-husking mill, a rice-noodle factory, a Cham minority village, a joss-stick factory, a fish farm, Ho Chi Minh City Fine Art Museum, the Museum of Vietnamese History and the War Remnants in Vietnam Museum. Consequently the photos attached to this post contain no amusingly inebriated twats, but scenes of bucolic idyll and buildings and rivers and shit.

On the way into Saigon, I saw my first road accident. Actually, what I saw was a pool of blood, a compound fracture and a head wound, accompanied by a traffic-jam of rubber-neckers and dubious first-aid. There are more than 1000 deaths a month on the roads in Vietnam, almost exclusively motorbike riders. That’s more than 30 a day. Builders’ hard hats are favoured as helmets, but what’s favoured most of all is not wearing a helmet. In Cambodia I’m sure the statistics are pretty bad, but everybody drives so slowly you could often out-run them. This place is worse than Malta for road-awareness.

For a Communist country the locals I have met today have an awesome knack for the key concepts of Capitalism. I paid more than 15 times the local price for a coconut (my maths gets wobbly when we have to multiply by anything-thousand). My cyclo-driver, who pedalled me around all day for the agreed ten dollars, suggested, as he threatened to drop me off in the middle of nowhere, that I might like to pay him 20 dollars plus 100 000 dong (about 6$.) It’s a shitty job and I would have tipped handsomely, perhaps feeling more inclined if it had been my initiative. When he reiterated how poor he was by almost showing me his scrotum through the holes in his trousers I caved in …

He was, however, great company. One of the first things he said to me was “Very small Vietnam girl very pretty.” I instantly got a cold chill and contemplated leaping into the oncoming tsunami of motorbikes. Then he explained himself: “Most girl Vietnam very small - maybe 45 kilo. I have seen the English girls - maybe 80 kilo!” and laughing long and loud. For what seemed like forever.

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Incidentally, stopped for a drink at the Continental Hotel, which figures prominently in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I suspect I would have adored Saigon thirty years ago, with nary a belching motor to be seen. The hotel now is no longer on a tropical town square but a sweaty, toxic roundabout. It didn’t inspire me to literary heights. In fact, had I spent much longer there, I might have been inspired to redesign my facial features with a blunt instrument.

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76 pretty photos here