Vietnam
So, playing catch-up again. Computer time is scarce these days, so these entries are going to be breezy. Flew Paris-Singapore, Singpaore-Saigon. Didn’t sleep on the plane, arrived delirious, overwhelmed by Saigon. Walking through this city is like being stuck in a beehive. Rickshaws, bicycles, cars, trucks and impossible numbers of motorbikes swarm the streets. The reek of exhaust fumes, the soundtrack of bike horns are ubiquitous. Often, you can’t see the street for the density of the bikes. You see three people on a bike, four people on a bike, five people on a bike. Two parents, two kids squeezed between them, a grandfather clinging onto the back. No helmets. These are not large bikes. 110-120 ccs. In addition to human cargo, you will find bikes carrying four trees’ worth of bananas, a pig in a cage, a significant number of shoes, or chickens, or a mattress, or any number of watermelons, or sacks of rice. They do not drive slowly. The traffic at a roundabout is most remarkable. People cut each other off, blare horns, recklessly enter and exit this vehicular cyclone. You see one school of motorbikes – think fishes – approach another school of motorbikes and you brace yourself for imminent carnage, a t-boned bike, heads split open like canteloupe on the streets. But, miraculously, in a chorus of honks and beeps, the bikes slow down, and one school incorporates the other. The traffic is organic, like eddies a river current. Sometimes you will see a bike actually turned around, facing the wrong way with another throng of bikes bearing down on it, but the current slowly rights the bike and everyone ends up safe. It is a like watching a tightrope walking act at the circus. The tightrope walker wobbles on his wire, and in this moment of suspense, the audience 100 feet below, gasps and covers its eyes, waiting for the sound of internal organs splatting against the ground, but the tightrope walker regains his balance and the audience sighs with relief. This chaos is reflected the power lines above the street. Hundreds of wires strung from in one telephone pole. Thick and tangled as eagles’ nests. But there is incongruity. The traffic flows around massive green spaces with shrubberies molded in communist propoganda. The hub of a chaotic roundabout will be a 10-by-10-meter-square star of yellow flowers laid a bed of red flowers. Or a bush trimmed in the shape of a fifteen meter long hammer and sickle. Never a leaf out of place – as painstaking and pristine as the traffic is frenzied and orderless. Saigon has more to offer, I’m sure, but I spent most of my time taking pictures of the traffic. See Flickr Set.
I started by taking a few trips outside of Saigon. First out to Tay Ninh, 80 km NW of the city. First glimpses of the South Vietnamese landscape that would become familiar over the next few weeks. Busy, dusty, oppressively hot main road lined with small, brightly colored concrete hovels, roughly the size and shape of suburban garages. Canopied storefronts where people sit on small plastic chairs eating the country’s staple dish: pho bo (beef soup). Motorbikes parked orderlessly in front of these cafés. Hammocks tied to trees in rare places of shade. Palm trees with haggard fronds rising up behind this strip of storefronts. Occasionally opening up into far-reaching bright green rice fields. Fields are sectioned off in squares of a perfect sort of geometry that seems to compliment the fieldworkers’ conical hats. Groves of bamboo and rubber trees. Attached to every streetlamp lining the road are symbols of communism, red flags emblazoned with stars or hammer-and-sickle in yellow. We pass Chang Thang, the road which served as backdrop to the famous photograph of the woman screaming, naked, running from a napalm explosion.
In Tay Ninh I wanted to see the Cao Dai temple that Graham Greene describes in The Quiet American. Caodaism is one of the minority religions in Vietnam. (Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism are the main ones). Caodaism is a synthesis of teachings from Buddha, Jesus Christ, Confucius, Lao-Tse. An interesting enough cocktail in itself. But, it gets better: Victor Hugo has his own temple. They also worship William Shakespeare and Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc and Winston Churchill. Seeing the roster of philosophies incorporated in the Cao Dai doctrines, you imagine a six-year-old in an ice cream parlor choosing ingredients for a sundae. The hub of this religion is the Holy See temple in Tay Ninh. Greene’s curmudgeony narrator makes fun of the temple, calling it a “Disney fantasia of the East.” I wanted to behold the absurdity for myself. It didn’t disappoint. The Holy See temple is a colossal structure. As many as six cake-like layers high, a long corridor branching off into various wings. The architecture is as motley as the religion’s dogma. Part pagoda, part european gothic, with a hint of mosque. The only constant is kitsch. Everything painted in garish pastel technicolor. Enamel dragons carved into flying balustrades, radiating around the singular symbol of an eye. The eye of God, the caodaists call it. Inside, the ceiling is painted like a starry sky. More gold-leaf and day-glo color schemes. Centerpiece is a massive glowing brass globe. Tinkling music should have been emanating from this place, powered by a little crank on a music box. But, for all of the plasticness of the temple, the unsettling part was the interaction between tourists and Caodaists. Flocks of tourists – myself included – snapping photographs from an upper balcony, whispering to each other with constipated looks on their faces as though trying to absorb the spirituality of this moment. Meanwhile the Caodaists are kneeling in their columns, noses pressed to the floor, then up again, raising their hands, singing their chants. It felt like some bad burlesque show. The performers draw an audience because they are freaks, the audience are freaks for being there. And neither party seems to be aware of their freakishness. Religion and tourism make a messy marriage.
Parts of Vietnam were beautiful, but the country frustrated me. There are seven or eight destinations that people come to Vietnam to see. Tourists travel between these attractions in air conditioned tourist buses that whisk you from a travel office in one city to the company’s corresponding travel office in the next. It’s a tourist conveyor belt. While it’s convenient not to have to think about bus stations or haggling with moto-taxi drivers or getting lost, this system makes for unrewarding travel. You know in gangster movies when a guy from one gang is brought to the other gang’s headquarters and they throw a hood over his head before putting him in the car so he can’t see the route? This is what traveling by tourist bus in Vietnam feels like. You are isolated from any part of the country that isn’t on the tourist path. And those places where the buses do stop have become diluted tourist circuses. Even more frustrating: those times when I did travel outside of the tourist infrastructure, I was ripped off by mototaxis and bus drivers, given misinformation, delivered to places I didn’t want to go. It felt sometimes like Vietnamese people had been ordered by the government to shepherd any stray travelers back to the tourist path, where they will spend more money. Many of the tunnel systems I wanted to see weren’t served by public transportation, or people told me they weren’t, so I would have to pay to get on a tour. You expect to be overcharged when traveling in less developed parts of the world. This is the nature of things – Westerners are the cash cow, moto-taximen are trying to make a living. There is a difference between shrewd business and insult. Everywhere I went in Vietnam, I met travelers sick of being swindled by the vietnamese. Guides collecting money for a full day tour, then dropping people at a bus station after two hours. I didn’t realize until too late that the only way to properly travel through Vietnam is to buy a motorbike and do everything yourself. Oh well..
All of that said, I did have a few wonderful experiences.
Mekong Delta. The Mekong starts in Tibet, flows through China, Mynamar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and ends in the Delta in the south of Vietnam, flowing into the ocean through nine tributaries which give the river its name: River of Nine Dragons. I spent two days and a night drifting down this river. Narrow backwater jungle rivers lined with thatched huts on stilts. Sleepy little tributaries which feel like neighborhood streets. A few floating markets. Remarkable how every aspect of life takes place on this river; it is the lifeforce of the Delta people. Infrastructure is laid out according to the river. Electrical wires strung between branches on either side of a small tributary. Women in silk pajamas and conical hats pole their way across the river in slender flatboats. Larger longboats with eyes on the front that were painted in ancient times to scare crocodiles. Seventeen thousand offshoots in the delta, according to legend made under the feet of elephants. One of my more surreal tourism experiences occurred in a cage filled with water, labeled with a sign: “Crocodile Fishing, 5000 VND.” Pay 5000 Dong and you get a fishing pole with a piece of meat attached to it. Dangle this over the pool, crocodiles rise to the surface, and snap their jaws. When a crocodile clamps down on the meat, the bamboo pole bends, then snaps and everyone screams.
In Long Hai, a small beach village to the southwest of Saigon. I stumble upon a Tet party (Tet is Vietnamese New Year). This place is far from the tourist conveyor belt; I’m the only Westerner in town. So when I happen across this little party – a long table of food, lights strung up, karaoke machine blaring – they sit me at the head of the table, feed shrimp and pork. They open beer after beer for me. ‘Yo’ – ‘cheers’ – everyone barks, then drinks. No one speaks English, so the village English teacher is brought in and she interviews me over the karaoke microphones and a sound system so everyone can hear. What is your name? Do you like President Obama? Are you married? Every time I open my mouth everyone cheers. There are people watching this from second story windows. I’m positive that for the rest of my life, I will never feel so good about myself. That was the peak right there. They asked me to sing a karaoke song. I have always been ideologically opposed to karaoke. But, as I said, all this cheering and chanting my name had me feeling pretty good. Given the choice between ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas,’ the audience chooses the holiday theme. ‘Good tidings we bring, to your and your kin, good tidings we bring…’ you know the one. My rendition was an act of carnage, but no one understood a word, and I received much applause.
Woke up at dawn in a little beach village called Mui Ne to go see the fishing market. Hundreds of idientical tourquise-black-yellow painted fishing boats, festooned with flags, tires and rolled-up nets hanging on the sides, bobbing in unison in the harbor. Fisherman rowing ashore from the fishing boats in large circular baskets. A pungent mixture of trash and fish. People haggling in twangy, rubbery Vietnamese, pointing to piles of shrimp or crabs laid out on tarps on the beach. Some standing waistdeep, others squatting back on their heels. Chickens running under legs of marketgoers and venders. Strange to see a chicken on a beach. Beautiful reflection: clusters of fishboats bobbing in the bay aligned with clusters of venders milling about on the beach. All moving with the same unhurried, languid grace. The sky and water an identical gray, rendering the horizon invisible.
Ha Long Bay. Sheer limestone karst formations rising abruptly out of calm blue-green waters. In small lagoons are floating platforms with nets full of squids and crabs and fish for sale by the kilo. A relaxing boat ride through this bay made more interesting by the mix of nationalities in the tour group: two Iranian couples, an Israeli girl, an American-Palestinian. On the bus ride back, we figured out all of the problems and called it the Ha Long Bay Peace Convention.
