Saigon

IN SAIGON, I STAYED AT THE HOTEL REX, an old Soviet-style block of concrete with a nice bar on the roof and a restaurant in which the only thing I could order was too-salty spaghetti and canned tomato sauce. I asked them how much it would cost to hire a car and driver for a day, and they told me it would be $100. So I went across the street to the central tourist office, where I sat in front of a pretty woman who told me they charge $70 for a car and driver for a day trip. As we were going through the details of the transaction, I noticed she was quite formal and stiff and not really enjoying her job that much. I tried to be entertaining and playful, but she was all business. This went on for ten minutes as we worked out all the details. Then she asked me where I was staying and what my room number was. I asked why she might need to know my room number, turning my wedding band on my finger and trying to get her to smile. She explained that it is a government requirement that they get the room numbers of all tourists (the tourist agency, like most everything else in Vietnam, is government-run), and she kept her stern face the whole time as I protested lightly but eventually gave in. I said I was staying in room 444. Her face lit up. She looked right into my eyes, smiling, saying that was a VERY good number. I said thanks. She kept smiling and said it was a VERY good number. I accepted her congratulations. She became much more relaxed, smiling brightly, and enjoying our conversation. She said her name was Jessica and she would love to help make my trip as enjoyable as possible. It was as if I had told her I owned a Ducati and it was parked outside. Jessica asked where else I was going in Vietnam, and she insisted that she help me make reservations for Hanoi (I wasn't going to Hanoi). She gave me her card, wrote her personal mobile number on it and email address and said I should be sure to contact her and she looked forward to seeing me again soon. She waved enthusiastically as I walked back to the Rex Hotel, making sure I hadn't accidentally left my room key with Jessica.

 

That night I had a very pleasant dinner with a guy who runs an offshore programming operation. I told him about Jesscia and the number 444. He said people in Vietnam really are superstitious about numbers and he had already found a few that worked with the single women. He said he would try 444 and see how far it got him.

Can Tho

THE DRIVER TOOK ME to Can-Tho, stopping on the way to have a tour of a floating market, which I found interesting (it turns out that EVERY town has a floating market, so they try to get you early and often). In Can-Tho, I found a restaurant where I couldn't eat a thing but where the menu was hysterically funny to read. I tried to buy a menu but no matter how I tried to explain it, I could not get them to understand what I was trying to "order." I really wanted it, but I was too hungry to stick around and I didn't want to steal it. I had to leave it behind, but here are a few of the items I remember:

 

   Fried stomach pork with cabbage

   Snake tripe with chicken skiing

   Fried ball with bitter melon

   Fried salty fish paste with pork

   Raw mixed shell meat with mangs

 

All around the world, people take live animals to market. It is better to kill the animals at the last second, to make the meat as fresh as possible for the consumer, than slaughter first and transport second. This means live animals are transported under all kinds of brutal conditions, with no care for their comfort as they have less than a few days to live. In Vietnam and Cambodia, people strap two dozen flapping chickens to a single motorbike, tying their legs together and hanging them upside down for a six-hour ride at wheel level in the blazing hot sun. They tie huge pigs upside down on a board and then strap the board across the back of the motorbike. Strangely, the pigs somehow become unconscious when upside down, so they ride as if asleep, while getting a very painful sunburn on their belly. They also use a long round basket to transport about a dozen small piglets at a time, each one piled on the other with no room to move. You can see photos of upside-down pigs at Flickr.

 

I happen to enjoy fresh sugar cane, so whenever I am in the tropics I look for it. Sugar cane is a stick of wood you chew and suck and the juice runs down your throat, but there are hazards. First, you need to get a stalk of the stuff, which is often problematic. It needs to be fresh and juicy, and often it is dry and hard. Then you need to convice someone to sell it to you, because they tend to be in the business of selling it by the hectare. Once you have a stalk, you need to cut a small enough piece to work on. You can use a pocket knife for this, but a machete is a much better tool for the job. Then you need to slice the skin off without getting all sticky and making it dirty. Finally, you need to get small chunks of cane into your mouth, where you can chew on them. I have learned the hard way that too big a piece makes your jaw muscles ache. Once you have chewed the piece of wood, you need to spit it out, so chewing on a bus or a train is not practical. By far the best way, if you can find it, is if someone has prepared small pieces of juicy cane and put about a dozen of these pieces in a plastic bag. More than a dozen and you will start to feel sick. I was able to purchase a bag of about 30 pieces like this in Phnom Penh for about a dollar (I overpaid), ate about half of them, then gave the rest to some small children.

 

In Southeast Asia, it's easy to find someone with a small hand-cranked press, through which they pass the cane several times and collect the juice as it runs out. The first time I tried a glass of cane juice, it tasted buttery and I wasn't too impressed. But finally one day on the road, after we had taken photos with live tarantulas on our arms, I decided that rather than eat a fried tarantula (our photo teacher, Nathan, ate one), I would try the cane juice again. This time it was delicious, sweet, clear, refreshing. It needs to be cold, and the ice they have is not for tourists, so I drank it quickly before the ice could melt. Later, I learned to put ice in a bag and then add the cup of cane juice on top of the ice, and when it got cold enough I would drink it - delicious. A glass of cold cane juice on a hot day is a real treat. Two glasses of cold cane juice is one glass too many.

 

Chau Doc

THEN I TOOK THE LOCAL BUS TO CAN-THO, on the Mekong near the Cambodian border. They said it was the express bus, but once I got on it was clear this was the local bus. We stopped and picked up several hundred pounds of sheet metal, which they put on the roof. People got on and off every few kilometers. Finally, everyone in the bus told me to get ready, and the bus stopped just long enough in Can Tho to let me get out the door before it zoomed away. Chau Doc is great. Very friendly people. Everyone in Vietnam seems to want a photo taken, even the women, even the old women! Strange, but fun for photographers. I must have taken about 700 photos today. I started at a pagoda this morning, then in the market, then I hired a boat guy to row me by hand through what is essentially a floating trailer park. Each floating house has a TV, lots of space, and a pen with thousands and thousands of fish below. One fascinating thing about Vietnam is that i have seen almost no dogs, except every floating house has at least one. And people here must have figured out sex about 5 years ago because everyone has a small child. They are everywhere.

The mekong delta is an amazing mix of old people and old ways on the river, and new people and new consumerism on the roads. They meet in the towns, which explode with life, mostly on scooters and mobile phones. I just spent an hour standing by the road taking panning shots of people passing by on scooters. According to my guide book, Vietnam is the world's third largest motorcycle/scooter market, and that's NOT per-capita! Before coming to chau doc, i had seen exactly three motorcycles carrying 4 people in my entire life - I watch for them wherever i am. Here i saw about one a minute during high-traffic hours. I saw 3 of them in two minutes! I lost count at about 20.

There is no comparison between Southeast Asia and Africa. In Asia, you see motors in use everywhere and glass windows. Glass windows are one of the best indicators of middle class. In Asia, they are everywhere. All the floating houses have TV antennas, electric motors to do the work, and glass windows. I'm sure they have corruption, but they can't have that much if the average family is doing so well.

I called Beatrice today and woke her up at 4am and we talked for half an hour, but the internet phone connection died 4 times in the process. She is doing great and studying hard in Bern. Too bad she can't put the Pepi on the phone to talk to me! We miss each other and will soon be traveling around Europe together, looking for good deals on hotels and stopping to eat whatever the Pepi orders.

No one speaks English here, and English-speakers I met who have lived here don't speak any Vietnamese. Even the waiters and waitresses don't speak English - the menus have English and Vietnamese side by side, so when i point to the English they read the corresponding Vietnamese. Everything else is sign language. for example, to explain "no ice", they don't understand what no means, so i have to go back into the kitchen, find the ice chest, grab a glass, and mime putting ice in the glass, then make a scared face and draw a big X in the air. Another difference with Africa - there is ice everywhere. They seem to go through tons of it and don't treat it like anything special. I discovered a fresh fruit juice and smoothie place today and filled up there twice. Amazing fresh fruit juices of all kinds!

Vietnam and the War

WHILE TRAVELING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, I read a fascinating book called "The March of Folly," by Barbara Tuchman, showing how almost all wars are fought for insane reasons and the personal gain of just a few. The Vietnam War was essentially made up by the United States after refusing to help Ho Chi Minh get rid of the French. The French were brutal occupiers and extremely unpopular. After WWI, Ho Chi Minh went to Versailles to ask for his country back, but the Western powers wouldn't listen to him and the US had to show support to the French (after all, the French had helped us get free of our former colonial rulers - why should we help their colonial subjects kick them out of South East Asia?). After asking the US for help FIVE MORE TIMES, Ho Chi Minhgot an invitation toMoscow, and he reluctantly took it. The Chinese were all too eager to pitch in, giving Ho a pair of powers to play off each other in getting what he wanted - the wherewithal to kick the French out.

By 1962, the US had already poured more than $2 BILLION of military advisors and materiel into the region to support the French, and it hadn't gone well at all. After Kruschev beat up Kennedy in Vienna, Kennedy needed to show that the US was a strong ally of democracy and that it was imperative to prevent the spread of Communism in South East Asia. Only problem was that this Communist ambition was a fiction made up bythose in the administration who personally benefitted from Joe McCarthy's fear-mongering, thinking that the Communists were going to take over the world. In the fall of 1963, all the reports came back so negative that Kennedy approved a coup that ended up killing Ngo Dinh Diem, the US puppet installed by the US in the early fifties. Kennedy was unconvinced that any number of troops could accomplish anything positive, and he confided to several people that withdrawal would be the best of a number of bad options. But he wanted to be re-elected, so instead he added troops, planning to get out as soon as elections were over. That chance never came.

When Johnson took over, he couldn't stand the thought of "defeat" in the region, even though he had to be seen as a pacivist to win the '64 election. Once firmly in office, a Cold War mentality gripped the people running the war from the White House, even though the Vietnamese people didn't want the Americans in their country any more than they wanted the French,a ground war was unwinnable, and the Domino Theory was more fullydeveloped in Washington than it was in Beijing or Moscow. Johnson sought and got congressional approval to add more troops via the Tonkin GulfResolution. He sent in hundreds of thousands of American kids,until an inscription on a soldier's Zippo lighter in Denang summed it up best:

The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.

Once Nixon got involved, things got worse. By that time, even deGaule said there was nothing to be accomplished militarily in Vietnam. All told, between 1959 and 1975,at least3 and probably closer to 4 million Vietnamese lost their lives, along with 1.5-2 million Cambodians and 750,000 Laotians. In addition, we lost 58,000 Americans. After the war essentially ended, the US bombed Cambodia heavily, killing at least 500,000 Cambodians (mostly farmers and villagers), supporting Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who killed another 2 million Cambodians in the seventies (largely Henry Kissinger's work, among many of his other projects). The US and China gave money and arms to Pol Pot, supporting thegenocide until 1990.

War is a sign of failed negotiations. Whenpoliticians saytheymust go to war to "prevent another Nazi Germany" or to avoid "the false comfort of appeasement" - they are drinking their own Kool-aid and asking us to follow. As Tuchman has spent her life trying to show, almost all war is foolish, folly, a political fog into which small-minded men are drawn, usually to improve their own personal position in the world. The "enemy" is always the problem, and war is always the solution. When George Bush declared that the "War on Terror will be a war of ideas," why did he show up so lightly armed? Why have both his Secretaries of State been yes-men/women? Where are the ideas? Who are the real terrorists?

Ashley Wilkes, Margaret Mitchell's sage character in Gone With the Wind, summed it up:

ASHLEY:

Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about.

All throughout Vietnam and Cambodia, Ilooked for traces of past misery in the faces of people over 50: They looked into my blue eyes and smiled. Did something flash in their minds? It could have. They could have seen the worst, the thing that took their sons and daughters from them so many years ago. The blood and the smoke, the smiling blue eyes of death. Now repairing a nylon net on a shaky boat in the middle of the Mekong, trying to get a few more fish to market, the old man could have looked at me and wondered if I had any idea how connected I was to the darkest part of his life. The woman selling me a cup of cold coconut jelly on a hot day could have seen the faces of her children who would never have her grandchildren. Yet they didn't. They just looked and smiled, one person to another, as if to say "Hey, it's a new world. We are doing okay. Want to share some fish with us? How do you like that jelly stuff? Can I offer you a deep-fried grasshopper? They're delicious." People in this part of the world live simple lives, but they are happy. Those who live on the river live life essentially pre-industrially (with the exception of the gas-powered engines that seem to power most of the boats and belch out the blue smoke that causes almost everyone to wear a fabric mask over his or her face most of the day). They raise fish beneath their houses that float on the water, farm and bring their fruit to market by boat, a dog on every boat keeping watch over the children. They sleepin a hammock during the hot hours of the afternoon. They swim in, shit in, and drink from the greenish-brown river, just as their grandparents did, and their naked kids love to jump in and splash each other. Then there is the new world that lives near the road, with shopping malls, electronic gadgets, the latest scooters, mobile phones, universities, and Internet cafes. These two worlds meet in the towns, like Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, where enormous bridges are being built to make the trip to Saigon a matter of a few hours on a bus. Tens of thousands of people are moving into the region to build homes, open hotels, run gas stations, and mix with the people of the river when they drive their scooters into town to pick up fresh fruit. Kids are everywhere and old people are few. And almost everyone enjoys a garlic-fried grasshopper now and then. In Vietnam, people have more money, middle-class jobs,and economic hope. In Cambodia, most people now have good jobs making North Face backpacks orTommy Hilfigershirts, and better times are ahead. In Laos, time is stuck, as it was in East Germany, without the bullet holes. There isn't that much to do but watch and wait for a political change. More on that next time. As I visit more countries and think about the state of world affairs, I keep thinking something I heard once and you can find in many different contexts around the Web: "It's the occupation, stupid." It's not about the surge or the peace process or which superpowers have a right to re-emptive war or nuclear weapons. Look for the occupations and you'll see the folly - Barbara Tuchman would be running a cottage industry writing about it if she were alive today. Here's a short video by two documentary filmmakers on the New York Times web site talking about the folly of occupying Iraq and where the "Insurgency" comes from.

Technorati Profile