Entries from November 2005 ↓

The bus journey to Dalat was a bit of an ordeal. Eight hours, two speeding fines, one puncture and a series of seat-hugging hairpin bends. The views, however, were spectacular. Dalat is delightful. I arrived late last night and found Saigon Nite, a bar with a glowing visitor book and pool-shark of an owner. He also trounced me comprehensibly at Connect 4. I left happily with low self-esteem.

Today I walked 1400 kilometres, my “Diesel” runners now broken in and my feet broken up. I learnt that “karaoke” is a euphemism for going to the toilet. I drank poo-coffee, cà phê chồn, the beans ingested and evacuated from the insides of a weasel. Every other house on the road up had large drying mats layered with coffee beans in the driveway. Life could be worse than living, drinking and working coffee. I am conducting an illicit, one-sided and highly satisfying love-affair with Vietnamese coffee.

My hike today reminded of a Sussex summer (e.g. it was fucking freezing) and verdant beyond belief. There’s a big lake (circumference: 450 km) that I trekked around, which was gratifying despite the water being the colour of mud. There’s a golf course. They make strawberry jam and sell it by the road. There are lots of domestic tourists (although unlike Sussex they’re keen to have their photos taken with the foreigners. In Eastbourne the closest the locals come to interacting with the foreign tourists is when they’re nicking their handbags.)

On my last day in Saigon I toured the Cu Chi tunnels and Holy See of Cao Daism. Cao Daism is a religion based on Taoism, Catholicism and Buddhism. They also recognise other prophets such as Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. I have tried long and hard to come up with a Caodaistic version of the Lord’s Prayer in French iambic pentameter, set to music. You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve given up.

We spent about an hour and a half out of the bus, five and a half hours on it. When our guide wasn’t trying to get in the pants of a Danish girl three times his size, he was talking incessantly. A typical interjection might go something like this:

“Good morning ladies and gentlemen, good morning Vietnam. (Snigger) If you look out the window, you know window? Window? Yes? You know window? You see the traffic is very busy. The traffic is very busy. Out of the window(?) the traffic is busy. You know? This because many Vietnamese people, you know(?) going places. Maybe they’re going to shops, or work, or to a party, a wedding party perhaps, you know? You know wedding? Wedding, yes? So maybe a wedding party, or shops, or just going to meet friends. Maybe they have boyfriends and girlfriends, you know? Maybe just meet friends, normal friends. Not boyfriends or girlfriends. Or maybe they go to a wedding(?) party. The roads are very busy. In your countries, you know, you have roads. Roads, yes? In Vietmanmycountry we have roads but not like your country, yes? In Vietnammycountry the roads very … busy … with people going places. Maybe a wedding(?) or shops or visit boyfriend … etc”

This went on all day. Everybody was too polite to ignore him. He invited us to join him on a three-day tour of the Mekong Delta but didn’t have many takers.

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Just read Self by Yann Martel and it blew me away. Seriously, the best piece of fiction I’ve read in ages (and I’ve read more than 25 books since arriving in Asia.) The following is lifted straight from the pages of the book. I’m sure it’s legally dubious to quote it here, but if somebody buys it and reads it I’ll feel atoned …

“Travelling alone is like an extended daydream. You catch all the sights, you watch the people, you admire the scenery, all the while inventing your own company and your own scenarios, on your own time and at your own pace. It’s the only way to travel, if you can stand the regular loneliness, which often I couldn’t. But thank God there were the easy friendships of fellow travellers, friendships that lasted an hour or three days, a meal or a train ride, that were a gold-mine of travel lore and useful information, that always started with “Where are you from?’ and ended, when you felt like turning left, not right, with a simple, honest “Bye.” ”

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Bye.

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

24 hours in Vietnam now. Friendliest people in the world live in the Mekong Delta. Apparently a bit different in the cities. Within two minutes of getting my passport stamped various ladies were enquiring as to the state of my dong. Luckily the chap on the boat had sorted my dong out for me …

I have walked around Can Tho twice, found a bank, had a coffee and chatted to an old lady in French for 20 minutes whilst standing in the middle of the road.

I am a dong millionaire, which explains the armed guard by the ATM. I could have used one in Phnom Penh on my last day when I was chased, quite comically, down the street by a dog. First I heard the yells from the house. Probably “Rover, no! You ate three days ago!” Then the patter of doggy hooves. Then the snarl, then the chase. I stopped dead. We had a standoff. I responded to his growls with equally aggressive sphincter shudders. Then I walked slowly backwards, which was the cue for the dog to follow. I looked around expecting to see amused faces on the locals who had gathered to watch. Instead they all looked slightly concerned. So I ran into the middle of the road. The dog had more sense than to follow me. It took me five minutes to get back to the pavement.

Safely in Vietnam, earlier today, I ordered a coffee perched on a foot-high plastic stool (me, not the coffee.)

Me: “Caa-fay”
Her: “[something in Vietnamese]”
Me: “Yes”
Her: “[something in Vietnamese]”
Me: “Yes”
Her: “[something in Vietnamese]”
Me: “Yes” … ad infinitum …

When the coffee arrives, it is sugared, black and poured over ice. Accompanying the coffee is a large pot of green tea, to be poured over the ice once you’ve finished your coffee. Tea follows coffee over here.

Which is, and was, wonderful.