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GLADIOLAS FOR TET

Viet Nam at the turn of the year 2007

We pass mile after mile of gardens woven into farms forming an agriculture unbelievably democratic and sustainable, a Jeffersonian vision of egalitarian productivity and choice, and on nearly every plot you see a patch of gladiolas planted in expectation of the Tet New Year. I suppose they are planted optimistically for market, but by my count there must be a hundred gladiolas planted for every Vietnamese. Many must end up flowering to the end in the garden they are planted, like some fragment of the flag.

Le Table du Viet Nam

Ho Chi Minh City Saigon

16 December 2007

Saigon is the Viet Nam we had promised but were never able to deliver to these people. The large banners on street corners depicting Ho and his resolute soldiers remind us of the sacrifice required to finally get foreign hands off this place, and now like some exotic bulb buried too deep in the soil, the country ultimately bursts out of ground packed over centuries by Chinese troops and French troops the Japanese and Americans. It is caught now in mid-flower, like an
amarillis unfolding that reveals what color it will be when it finally, slowly opens. Commerce and construction are white hot.

One wants to call the place a busy city but what metropolis except for Baghdad isn’t? I think that Saigon needs to be noticed for its motion because the entire populace is all aboard their own motors cooters, on a personal mission, so no one is anonymously under cover in their black-tint window Jetta, Beamer and Suburban ala SoCal. I imagine that all the young men are on their way to work on a cement crew pushing another building up. The national helmet law took effect on Friday. Everyone is in compliance.

My impression is the kindness and helpfulness of the people we have met and who serve us is genuine, engrained, cultural. That they are most famous as warriors adds to the surprise and immediate affection. Knowing that their language is a barrier to visitors they pounce on the opportunity to explain things in English. Our contract is implicit, and we must live up to our end of the bargain, because the Vietnamese seem very prepared to do their part. I could never be more charmed than when they call my wife madame, as a bit of French cultural courtesy.

Madame is a great planner. She loves everything about travel so dearly that it is a shame we are handcuffed to putting on a retail feed that serves two or three hundred lonely souls a day. But that is our contract with the universe, one that allows us to go to Yellowstone and Saigon. Olivia puts herself in places beforehand and then creates possibilities through voracious research that is forensically curious. She got us a hotel on line. The My Art Hotel which she discovered on a Lonely Planet blog, offering five floors of nice, closet like rooms without any windows, but plenty of aircon and a wall-mounted fan. After 19 hours on one of United’s 747s, picky I am not.

One of the sons met us at the airport with a cab. When we started to wander around a maze of alleys my little pet bird woke up and said “ don’t much look like the zone, friend…” and I sleepily began to unlimber Plan B, but after a few twists and turns the bitty miracle appeared. The hosts live downstairs in the lobby, which is a well-maintained family bedroom-dining room and hang, grandmother on a futon in a corner, more futons ready, a clutch of teens explaining themselves at a small table, a baby refrigerator with beer and water, some Anglos staring at computer screens along the far wall, a couple of beat motos kicked by the barred doorway.

In the morning, we walk out to observe the dancers exercising in the park. We are looking for breakast, but are an hour early for everything. We stop in recognition of a familiar name Elios Hotel, the fancy place where we could not get a reservation and costs 5 times what My Art does. We eventually eat a prix fixe breakfast there, with perhaps a bit of lunch on the side. Now I know why some people were so adamant about pho the national noodle dish and the principal reason why I should grow the Thai-type basils again. The broth and rice noodles are served with basil leaves floating on the surface, infusing the dish with a most complimentary savor.

The music piped into the rooftop café at Elios is synthetic forms of classic lovetorn tunes from the 1960s reworked somewhere in Asia. A sweetly breathless singer with perfect pronunciation is featured with lots of orchestration, so it is trying harder than Muzak. The originals are the stuff that Montoya and Thomas were listening to in I Corps when Tet blew up in 1968. Tell Laura I Love Her ( Blam), Five Hundred Miles (Wham), You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin (Boom). Such a wistful flashback, unavoidably personal because the irony of the soundtrack would probably not occur to anyone else in the café, either because they are Australian, Chinese or born after the North Vietnamese Army entered Saigon. ( I recall newscast footage of a battle
carried out in the park below us)

16 December 2007

The Reunification Express

In HCMC Saigon the city center offers Godiva, Dolce e Gabbana and Rolex ( etcetera!) in broad glass-fronted stores next to coffee houses, deep bag shops and four and five star hotels. Its all snazzed with marble and ferns and got nice uniformed security. Across the street from a string of these places a woman is selling tangerines piled impossibly high onto a basket fixed to the back of her bike, around eighty pounds of fruit. She gives me some to eat. I tell her I will come back when I have some money and make a bit of pantomime with a thumb hooking that way and a handsweep flowing back this way to further obscure my intentions. I am not so proud of my linguistic abilities now.

When I come back an hour later she has not sold that much fruit, but when I offer her a 200 Dong note she laughs and pushes it away. I am unsure if its not enough dong or she just meant to be generous. I know what its like to have a lot of fruit on your hands. It’s a terrible responsibility, and one can definitely sway better odds to your fruit selling cause by giving away today that which you will throw away tomorrow. A bit of pencil work back in the café reveals that I offered her a tenth of a penny for her product. I am pretty sure that my bid was a bit short, despite the fact that the cost of living is quite low here and the dollar to dong ratio definitely benefits the visitor.

We trust ourselves to accomplish a few tasks: changing money and getting a detailed map at a top-level stationery and book store called Fahasa. The map reveals that one may debark the northern train at a tiny burg called Muong Man and probably get a taxi down to Mui Ne on the coast. This is but part of our goal as we attempt to find and board the train. The taxi-driver has two tasks before him: take us to the rail station and help us obtain an outlet adapter for our hardware: two cameras, an ipod and two computers, all getting low on juice and the ipod issue is, like, not desperation, but would be really, really nice to figure out. A continual supply of tunes is crucial. We are squared off and Viet Nam is on the prong system. Our driver blew the adapter but got us to the railway efficiently

I am completely entertained by looking at the people and commerce as we careen through the city. I think one could have a pleasant vacation by merely tooling around town observing every mundane thing made fresh by its Vietnamese translation. The bag zone, the clothing zone, and the scooter zone are throbbing with activity and most of it is business. Motorscooter alley has the gritty character of Dodge City, Kansas, 1877. Scooter aficionados lounge around on their bikes puffing Marlboros in front of Honda and Kawasaki vendors, seat vendors, spare parts houses and joints still doing crazy business on the demand for crash helmets. Even the little babies have got to have one on. I sense that there may be a bit of a fashion rush to these items. Some of the girls have got some good sparkly pink headgear going.

We are prepared for the motor-scooter phenomena from our reading and conversations with former visitors. A few years ago the streets were filled with bicycles and taxis and delivery trucks and now HCMC Saigon and every other town are jammed with people flying on their two wheelers. We are amazed at the cooperation and the miraculous lack of mayhem. Everything is a near-miss so there are no near misses. How do they do this? Its like a beehive, I explain. There is a cellular understanding and an ultrasensory compact at work here like bees moving back and forth into the hive from an orchard of Hass avocados in full bloom. The bees do not collide and neither do all these motos and taxis. They weave back and forth, ten to fifteen abreast, a few inches between handle bars, just a little beep away from bloody sprawl as more motos and cars enter the flow from right and left, coalesce, flow on, cut right, slow down, speed up. The continual honking is not meted out in anger, meaning to cleave the way through the flow of metal and flesh, but is instead a bit of warning to those ahead that one is here or one is there, coming up or turning. I sound poetically blasé of course, however, when the federal government imposed the mandatory helmet law it was for sufficient reason. Head injuries from bike accidents from 1997 to 2006 increased three hundred percent every year.

We did not know it at the time but angels arrived with us at the train station, which was packed. After a few minutes in conversation we recognized we were in full communication break down. We had maps. We had names. We had some botched phrases and a few key words but we were getting a lot of chuckles for all our effort. Few Anglos were in the station either, which was a tip-off. We were directed to a man who told us to wait in line and we waited in line until we realized it was the line to board not the line to buy tickets and then we went to another window where we were told to go to another window where the angels awaited us with a patient and intuitive woman who derived our need and sold us three tickets and wrote out how much to pay. Dylan rode off on a scooter taxi to bag an adapter while we drank an iced coffee with cream. He came back just in time to board without an adapter but with huge tales of moto adventure in the Saigon electronica zone. He did score an ipod charger with the right prongs, which informed us that Madame’s adapter from Europe would work in Viet Nam.
The ride aboard The Reunification Express from Saigon to Muong Man was much like other train trips in that it uncovered in slow silence the lives of people in a kind of cinema verite seen from a world that exists almost entirely absent automobiles and the world that has been created because of them. Aboard the train, there are no stoplights or stop signs. There is no constant need for wariness even if you are not the driver. Generally nothing in the land of the train will affect its progress, though there are accidents and halts of course, but I said generally. Passengers may relax and within the moving room of the car personalities emerge readily, curiosities may be satisfied. I shot video of backyards and backwater bars and hangs, every once in a while interrupted by legions on motos paused at the drawn-down crossing bar. The train too is high and from the railbed one can observe distance better and make general surveys of land use, population and terrain. When you cross a big river, you are aware of every whirlpool and have time to empathize with the struggle some boatman is having while trying to keep a rangy barge in the channel. The view can be raw and unapologetic. We see stuff being made, being burned, being abandoned and abused. We see country people rambling slowly down a dirt path on bikes behind a herd of goats. Huge yards are filled with large pottery pieces drying in the sun. They must trust the season, which is dry. I wonder if they would leave a year’s worth of work out in June. We run through a rice growing region with the grain drying and cattle eating from piles of rice straw. We observe the green beans we ate for breakfast, papaya and mangos, coffee.

The line runs, as one would expect, from Hanoi in the north to HCMC Saigon. There are all kinds of trains, including private-sector speedbombs that will cover the 1000 miles in one day. The line is a more narrow gauge than the US system. Ours is a twelve-car average-speed train with sleepers, soft seats and hard seats. We are in the soft seats. The cars may have been made in France in the 1940s or earlier. I deduce manufacture simply by the font used when the numbers of each seat were stamped out in metal. The rest of the evidence, style of window, flooring, and the status of the toilet room all indicate that Jackie Robinson was playing football for UCLA when these were made. The numbers on the football jerseys in those days, you remember, had that blob-serif on the numbers. These little metal plates just look French, and where else would they have come from? We were too busy destroying our own passenger rail system to have considered upgrading this one, of which, like many things, the Vietnamese are proud, both formally, in political print, as well as personally.

Mui Ne/ Phan Thiet

19 December 2007

Reading : ( Not So) Lonely Planet’s Vietnam

Not so lonely because everyone has a copy, even the taxidrivers.

A terrifying taxi ride brought us from the train station at Muong Man through Phan Thiet on the coast to Mui Ne, a resort enclave mostly peopled by Australians. It was not just the bees I was concerned about: big Chinese freight trucks bore down on us like mad crows. This taximan was not as cool as the others, probably due to whatever he had been drinking prior to our trip. I didn’t wise up to his condition until mid-way through re-entry. But the trip ended without mishap. We thankfully left the death-cab ( now we understand better the meaning behind the rock-band name) in front of one of the hotels and met our next angel, Nguyen Van Hieu. Nguyen runs a team of motos around town and apparently manages a tour company casually with the ease of his cell phone. We said we were looking for Mui Ne Cottages.

Nguyen said : “ Now you are looking for Full Moon Resort. No more Mui Ne Cottages.”

“ Ohhhh…….Kay…..?”

We took this declaration fully on trust. We went down to The Full Moon and bargained for a room. It was spiffed, clean and green and looked like the right place to stay. First the girl said no, then she said yes, then she said, well not with an extra bed, then along came the extra bed anyway and then she gave us the room we wanted all along. Perfect. It cost sixty two bucks a night, including a breakfast for three which was worth thirty bucks in the homeland. Our room at the Full Moon is on the beach. Mui Ne is where all the buff Australians and Germans are kite surfing with great expertise. They have good swagger running. I don’t mind that they are distant. There is small talk and then there is very small talk.

Their ironically tubby sunburned girls/wives accompany them at meals. There are also windsurfers plying the windy coast and looking fairly antique by comparison to the kites. Full Moon is very chill. The beach is white and there are coconut palms. We end up doing a lot of major sleeping here for two days. On the second day we lay down at 3 PM and did not start to get up until 5 the next morning. We are still submitting to jet-lag. As I write today, back at the train station in Muong Man waiting for the northbound train it is ten to 3 PM, however my computer says its ten to midnight. Which day of midnight though is not clear, but we are far enough along so that acclimatizing has taken effect, as well as forgetting and forgiving. Must be the Buddhist vibe.

We are at 11 degrees north latitude, which is comparable to Acapulco I imagine, and much south of Hawaii and Cabo San Lucas. The water here is warmer than Hawaii and its constituency does not leave you feeling as sticky. A northeast swell at about two feet is continually running. Owing to the short fetch between Viet Nam and the Philippines one would not expect the sort of wave activity here that occurs on the eastern Pacific Coast or Indonesia. The South China Sea is not broad enough to allow significant articulated wave formation. Typhoons bringing thirty-foot monsters arrive here, but that is a disaster, not sport. My impression is that over the thousand miles of Viet coast line there are a number of reasonable waves to be ridden for the burgeoning global geezer contingent as we slide slowly towards enfeeblement. I am not bent on charging anything very large these days. I rode some double overhead Pitas a few weeks before we left California, and I got some set waves that were so long I had to walk back to the takeoff, but to tell the truth anything long and head high would provide all the thrill required these days, especially if the waves were in clear warm water breaking on a sand bar south of someplace like the Long Song river mouth, and a crowd of twenty-four year old chargers was not in the water. They can make the takeoff so dreary with all their jousting, and I am too unrepentantly forgiving to compete as I probably should. I grew up with a lot of empty waves and though I did in my fully faded youth motor around places like Off the Wall or Rights and Lefts, it was the seventies and eighties, after all, and carefree is what this coast might also hold.

I may have to quit all my jobs to be able to find that out though.

Nguyen took us to some basic tourist observations: the fishing fleet anchored in the lee at Mui Ne peninsula, some red sand dunes crawling with urchins begging for dong in return for sliding down the sand on a piece of plastic, followed by a surprise, curious unguided splash up Fairy Stream, a coastal creek four inches deep, twenty feet wide on soft red sand with a massive red and white sand geological anomaly rising to the south, rice paddies, mangoes and coconuts to the north on an irrigated alluvial pan. I signed a 49 year lease for fifty acres there. Sure I did. We moto’d home, weaving through a sea of Viet high school girls dressed in long mauve Ao Dai and flower-print sun hats, four and five across laughing on their bicycles.

After the dunes and the creek walk late lunch at The Full Moon was a fish done fabulously in ginger and lemon grass, with garlic and onion served with the best rice. Olivia had a bowl of the trusty pho noodles with broth and seafood. The complimentary breakfasts there have been enough to carry us through the day: omelletes, French bread, thick coffee, lots of fruit, particularly baby dessert bananas.

Today we set out early for Phan Thiet, a big town on the coast which has a large fish sauce plant and sizeable population. The fishing fleet anchored in the river channel is enormous. We spent an hour or so at the Phan Thiet marketplace, which seemed to not be visited much by foreigners, according to the surprise we created by poking around the fabulous stalls full of the exotic and unknown and the easily recognizable fruits and vegetables, mushrooms, herbs and fish. You can have your tuna whacked into slabs while you bag some purple-stemmed carrots next door. I am wondering if those purple stems are the clue to finding a carrot that will produce in hot weather, though they could be from the central highlands. We bought some tangerines, mountain apples and those bananas. We also braved a market lunch, sitting down on tiny stools with the surprised folks at lunch time. I had the impression that they celebrated Madame’s verve: not many it seemed may venture to eat the peasant egg foo young with very secret sauce and then drink tropical fruit drinks made with coconut, Ndo Ndo, mangoes and papayas.
Everyone is just adorable.

Four Hundred Miles of Nam in the Dark

20 December 2007

Reading: Thomas Cook’s South East Asian Phrasebook

She had to fax Saigon to see if we could get on the northbound to Da Nang at 4 PM out of Muong Man. With arrangements for a sleeper, or at least the soft seats. Sixteen hours at forty miles per hour awaits us on the Reunification Express. Very doubtful if passage could be accomplished. Not much time left. Vexing. She will try. Furrowed brow. Then the fax comes back: We may board. We are all so pleased with success. Then her sweet smile evaporates as some clown tries to pull a fast one with her associate train station manager. Glad I am not him! She can blow the bark off an oak tree with that attitude. Don’t cross her, friend. She is eighty pounds of panther.

If I could only speak French I would tell the French people, help them, to obtain a bit of chill amid the tropical frustrations. I have been here for a scant four days, but I lived in Montero, Bolivia. This is no big deal. The rural train stations in Viet Nam are like Santa Barbara’s by comparison. I sweated in Yapacani for a train that would not come because of a flood five hundred miles away for which there was no local notice. Who cared about trains when whole towns were gone? I waited for the runway to dry out for nearly a week in Riberalta so I could get the hell out. Muong Man is nothing. More coffee, tam biet. When I missed the last truck out of Yacuiba I ended up riding on top of a freight car for five hours battered by a billion bugs. Some left bruises on my forehead. This moment of concern is nothing, I would say, if I only knew French. But the adventure is getting to the Madame. Not my Madame, but his. My Madame is knitting a wool sweater and drinking coffee sau dau with ice from very suspect sources, no doubt, with aplomb. She will have another. So will I. I can be brave. She is not the only one.

Its too bad we leave Muong Man so late because we will pass four hundred miles of central Viet Nam in the dark. I am going to miss the Long Song River! And there is a long stretch by Son My that runs right along the sea! What a loss! No Tam Ky, No Quang Ngai! I have seen the rice and the sugar cane and the water buffalo, but I want to see more. How far north do they plant dragon fruit anyway? Eucalyptus really can’t be the answer to deforestation. Is it so bad that this miserable, toxic parasite of a tree had to get jammed everywhere, scads of feeble Eucs in groves like they were apple trees? Gimmee some diversity and some indigenity here you guys. I would like to know more.

I want to figure out what the hell they are drying on those racks. What is that little stick-tree that has been planted everywhere in the dry season? Is it cassava? Looks like cassava but I have seen no cassava in the market! But they have not harvested it yet. Just because there is corn in the field do you expect to see corn in the farmers market? Wise up! Now I feel better. But what is that little stick shrub?

I enjoy the antiquated inconvenience of the peasants, their giant five foot long blocks of ice melting on the back of a bicycle, their timeless hand tools that remind me of my own, two wheeled pull-cart struggles and strange round woven boats the little trawler pulls into a circle as the sun rises. They cast nets all morning in a big hurry, throw, gather, throw, knowing there are fish, then crank those paddles like mad to get back into formation as the current pulls them. They can really truck. I know they can keep up with a conventional double-oared skiff, probably beat it in a race. The broad paddle is tied to the gunwhale, and they churn out with a figure-eight motion. The boats have no keel, no bow, no stern, just a bowl of cereal on the windless sea. The weave on the boats is tight and hard and I surmise some kind of gum rubber mixture seals the voids. What are they made of?

Stability would have seemed the guiding principal in their invention because these bowlts are steady little platforms you can work from any side because there is only one side while a craft fashioned from trees long and narrow like a pirogue-styled boat would be inherently tippy. One is never in the bow or stern, one is always somewhat in the same place, only disrupted by the modest wooden stanchion fixed to the guwhale for the paddle. And that is today’s lesson in metaphysics: port equals starboard.

I am in the middle of a history. The past and future exist in the same seamless present. I am offered the image of where this all ends up and hope that some of it survives. These centuries-old woven boats are still here after all this time, so they may survive the 100 dollar a barrel oil fiascos. The revolution enfranchised the peasants on the land where all their ancestors are buried and they grow rice for sale and a few introduced specialty crops like dragon fruit and winged beans with the pink and aqua grave markers in constant view.. There are forty million farmers in Viet Nam. America has fewer than 700,000. The Viet farmers manage the ground with water buffalo and a Brahma type of brown cattle. They operate big handled hoes smooshing the grey paddy mud around. Lord knows how they determine when they have accomplished what they set out to do. The muck is nearly up to their knees but behind them everything is all formed. They keep their big boots out on the banks of the paddies. No need to bring those things home, for sure. Even with all the concrete being poured everywhere you get the sense that the water buffalo and the cereal bowl boats are going to coexist in the big family future of Viet Nam.

You Handsome, My Friend

21 December 2007

When we got off the train in Da Nang nearly every taximan asked if we wanted to go to Hoi An and I thought it was amazing how intuitive they all were. I had barely heard of the place; imagined modest tourist destination on the beach, not a pulsing heart of creation, blueprint for egalitarian trade ecstacy, direct-marketing ground-zero. Now that I have seen the vast numbers of westerners roaming these streets, the drivers, in retrospect, don’t seem to have been so clairvoyant. Of course we were going to Hoi An.

Hoi An was remade for us and now we will go out and remake the world in the image of Hoi An, one joyous, ever optimistic, unflagging, brightly lit, Museum Gift Shop, all 200-200 billion whistle-bell blocks of it on every continent and archipelago, with plenty of fine tailorshops so you can wear good, flash-made custom duds while you continue to shop. Drop your pretentious aversion to consumerism! Embrace your desire to acquire! Disneyland is just a sterile bad dream compared to our silver-plated, pearl encrusted, spun from the sun boundless phantasmagoria. No corporate logo is safe here! This ain’t no flea market, this ain’t no swap, this is where all the gold is flowing, just dip your little thimble cup in and have a nugget. Hoi An for everyone! Break out your lanterns and start selling sandals, paintings, Bok Choy and hose clamps. We need more jewelry around here for Heaven’s sake, so get fine. Cook up some rice and pork ribs and invite every person you see inside for a beer. Fill the streets with chairs and barbeques and don’t let any cars in. When people are in cars they are moving too fast to spend money, and worse, they are sitting on their wallets. Besides there is no place to park and we don’t have room to make some. Get them out of their cars and show them what you have in your shop, have them eat some fried spring rolls and wash it down with more of that beer you made in the tub out back. Get some happy going, my handsome friend. Get some trousers and Smile! Smile because you are beautiful, smile because it feels better than not smiling. Smile even if you are tired of smiling. Please, look at my beautiful silk and 400 thread cotton, you look like you need a custom shirt habit. Please, you need some shirts!

The rackets are kind. Inflation happens. What’s a few thousand more dong between friends? Overcharging is what transpires in dollars, back home. Here, why bicker over nickels? Where else are you going to get a custom made shirt for ten dollars with the patterns lined up? Bartering is passé. This circus is run by experts. Your argumentation is useless, but if it pleases you to squeeze some dong out of this transaction, please, we have learned to be patient with amateurs. If you stay long enough you will learn to be wary, like a fish suddenly thrust upon a shallow reef ringed by spear fishers. They know what you big slow fellows have in your belly and if they can just get you to pause long enough in the shallows they will soon have you opened up and out will come all your dong. This is our mutuality, our friendly compact with visitors. If you stay long enough to learn, you will not be so easily induced to crash your vacation on the sharp Charybidis of Tien Nuoc Street ( Money River ). But do not let your wariness consume your opportunity for joy. Have a beer, smell the lemon grass being added to the soup, look at the fabric, watch the boats on the river. Smile, you are handsome, my friend.

The custom shirt deal is as bad as heroin. So watch out. Once they start putting the measuring tape across your back you are finished. Then a few hours later when you return to fetch your new threads you are so smitten with your custom chrysalis your eyes turn longingly to the stacks of cloth piled to the ceiling, and you imagine yourself in this pattern or that as you reach for your thinning wallet to pay. I need to get out of here while I still have money for the fare to Hue.

They so warned us in Lonely Planet Vietnam that one thing else you will probably buy in Hoi An that you did not intend to is another suitcase. We got ours last night. It should do the trick if we can escape soon, but last night Dylan met some ( was steered towards ) some charming girls from Australia and now we are thinking of merely moving further away from the World’s Happiest Farmers Market while allowing for the youth to socialize.

Except that, the place down on Le Loi Street where they were so nice to us had that great gold and blue fabric that would make a really nice shirt…..

Buddha Bakery Bags

22 December 2007

Olivia found a good cooking school-the original cooking school that everyone else in Hoi An has since imitated-and took off for a course on pho and lemon grass shrimp for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Dylan and I were entrusted with finding a hotel with internet access and a better restaurant than the Huang Hoy. We went to the Thanh Tien Blue Sky Hotel as suggested by Loony Planet Vietnam and we were so smitten by the inexpensive opulence of the place, especially our proposed room with chrysanthemums scattered on the bedspread, a nice view of town, and especially the lovely concierge, that we neglected to recognize that our windows faced a busy street that would beep and blare all evening. There is also this thing about street lights that you don’t always think about at midday. We were all so bushed that evening we passed out anyway. Dylan and I got tuckered circling the riverside tourist area looking for Olivia after her cooking class, who we never found. Shopkeepers and mototaximen became familiar with us after observing us circling the same neighborhood for a few hours, and we pretended to shop which is an extremely good training technique.

We drank some manly beer and then some Viet coffee but still no Madame Oh. Earlier we had devised a system in case we got separated. We had no cellphones but if lost we could talk to each other via the internet. We could be within two blocks of one another and not know it, but we could at least notify one another of our location by email and eventually meet again. Olivia eventually showed up-she has a wild streak that takes her off to adventures such as this occasionally- and we did not have to resort to email, but we were just about to try it out when she popped up. Nonetheless we think we are immensely brilliant for the email idea and I am sure no more than 123,008,987 other people have dreamed up this measure.

Around four this morning I awoke to the sound of continual rhythmic slapping. As my consciousness flickered open I realized that in my dream I had thought it was water. What the…Salappo! Some kind of whacko construction? Slap-slap-slap, sallappo. Slap-slap-slap, saaaallappo! Couldn’t be that, could it? Too methodical and kind of slow, nothing urgent like busy bed springs….slap-slap-slap…….salappo.

“ They’re making bread across the street.”

She should know, she’s a baker.

I got up to take a look. Three guys were slapping out baguettes on a big table across from our second story room A wood-fired oven roared with red flames and a done pile of bread was on a low cart. They had maybe fifty loaves out already.

“ Oh, so its those buns…”

“Ha-HAH! I knew you were going to say that.”

“I’m just saying…. “

“ Yeah, I know. You were just thinking.”

I started videotaping the bakery. It was kind of verite and authentic, red flames darting out of the oven, an agile lady loading and unloading bread. A rat even sped across the floor, captured on film, and I mentally cursed that fucking Ratatouille again. Fucking rats. Nobody in the restaurant business thought that rat movie was any good, you may bet your non-existent ratirement fund on that.

They got serious rats down here. Its scurry time after sundown.

I went downstairs and opened the front door of the hotel, which was probably not allowed or at least plain not normal at four twenty AM. The sleeping watchman mumbled something to me from underneath his mosquito net but I was already on the street by the time he got his shoes on.

The bakers were all glad to see me. The head kneader waved me on in. Great opportunity to practice their English. “Hello, friend!”

“Hello! Bon bang mee!...Bon. Bon Bang mee! Xin!”

I offered courageously, with a terrible accent void of proper inflections: Four bread…four…four bread, please! They all laughed, and it was serious laughter, like I had said I had a toilet seat for a face. I laughed too. I stood in front of the oven with four fingers up, big old I am a funny as hell California man who wants hot bread grin on my sleepy face. They laughed again, and one guy grabbed a bag and put four breakfast style half-baguettes in a plastic bag and they were so hot they could have melted it. The smell was fantastic. They cost thirty cents. I love Vietnamese wholesale! Cam on! Cam on! ( thank you!)

We had green tea and baguettes and watched the sun come up while those guys slapped dough for another two straight hours. Motley business came to pick up at the bakery: big orders taken away on scooters in double side baskets with two more big bags on the handlebars, quick stepping sole operators breading up for the café day. A cab took a big load away to deliver, an up and coming son in law, I surmised, helping his mother in law before he started running stunned Germans back to the airport in Da Nang.

Then I went down to buy another travel bag and go to my own cooking class. Olivia said I should go to this one, an all day tutorial, because they were going to an organic farm. This time I did the bagging at the bag shop. My sights were set. I would not pay more than seven dollars for the bag because I had paid 12 dollars for a bag twice that size the previous evening at another shop. I knew my bags and I was not going to pay too much. Besides there was another bag shop a hundred feet away. I made as if to pivot.

“ But you are my first customer.”

“ You need good luck then!”

“ Nine dollars! “( I had started her out on five, then moved to seven, but she had hung on nine.)

“Kong! Madame! You take seven. You will have good luck all day.”

“ You think?”

“ Positive. Its in the bag.”

She did not understand my joke of course, upon which I had counted because I don’t know what happens when you get caught making fun of people around here. But she took the seven with a little fake frown, then pretended she did not have change for fifty thousand which was preposterous; then when she saw I was prepared to complicate things with one dollar bills she brought back tattered dong for change. Both happy! Cam on!

I stuck my stuff in my brand new North Face knockoff. The original is probably worth around 60 at some Big Five in Woodland Hills. No corporate logo is safe in the global trade village. Nike swooshes are smeared over all sorts of products in a messy fashion that indicates we are all in need of another international consumerist symbol.

Sometimes symbols or nomenclature from competing brands are on the same piece of luggage. The blasé innocence is precious. Imagine the consumerist schizophrenia if we stuck the big fat Chevrolet cross on Fords in America. There would be a national mental health crisis. It would be as if the Catholics showed up for mass and Buddha was sitting in the church instead of the Virgin Mary.

( The lights just went out in the city, but in a few select spots the backup generators have just fired up. Our ( new) hotel, the An Phu is one. Such a nice hotel! The Kung Fu school on the other side of the wall went nuts when the power quit. About 40 eight year olds were all practicing sword play at the time. Their’s was controlled berserk though, but sounded super.)

I went down to Hai Scout Restaurant and took a bus to the Red Bridge cooking school. We went across the Hoi An River to a state-sponsored farm enclave, around fifty houses surrounding a twenty acre field planted to intensive bok choy, basil, mint, chives, edible chrysanthemums, Gladiolas set to bloom during Tet, lettuce and leaf-celery. The beds are two feet wide and all hand dug. Everything seems so historically laid out nobody needs to put out string lines because these farmers have been doing two by fifty foot beds for the eons. They hollow them all out ¬in true bastard trenching style and backfill them with marsh weed. Grannies are hauling double buckets of marshweed on poles over their shoulders. Then the farmer covers it all up and after a designated amount of time they neatly rake it flat and plant into the sand intending to have the decomposed muck grass feed the crop. The flooding which arrives every year is a boon and a beast. It replenishes the ground with “silt” from the river valley above and also makes a mess of every low-lying thing man needs like roads, houses, the electrical system, roads and bridges. It happens every year with various degrees of mayhem. The populace in low lying areas still has not recovered from the flooding two months ago.

In Phan Thiet I had been overwhelmed to obtain vital though illegal souvenirs of my trip and had purchased three bags of vegetable seeds which I now, having realized that I did not want to smuggle chrysanthemum seeds into America after all, distributed to the farmers we encountered.

I observed some neat Global South techniques that I have channeled over the years: branches and other useful foliage used as mulch for moisture and to keep the sparrows off the seedlings. (I also have used it to keep the sun from scorching tomatoes) Brazen bareooting ‘neath the tropical sun. Art to entertain and recognize the deity. The place was sacred and some pious action was afoot. Three generations went out to a temple with food offerings for Buddha and they gonged a metal gong and beat on a big long tree trunk all the time we were there. All they lacked was a Miles Davis solo. It filled the farm with sounds of power.

I asked what kind of holy goings-on was in the center of the garden, with large painted gate entries, statuary/sculptures and stonework. There was a large wheel-like emblem. The little shrine was an ornate treasure but overgrown.

“ That is where the original farmers for this land are all buried.”

The Red Bridge

Hoi An

22 December 2007

No chef anywhere will probably know more about local agriculture than Ngoc, the lead teacher at Hai Scout Café’s Red Bridge Cooking School. He is probably close to thirty years old, grew up on the edge of Saigon amid the checkerboard of farms, gardens and habitations, and trained in the culinary arts in Australia, where he picked up his Commonweath Accent . It was Ngoc who lead us to Tra Que to discover the herb gardens grown in the commons there.

My impression was that curiosity had empowered his farm connection to the food he prepares at Red Bridge and Hai Scout and their position is legitimate, compared to some of the other probably unintentionally exaggerated blarney about “ all organic ingredients” that we observed in menus elsewhere.

Farming is still performed everywhere in Viet Nam amidst all the commerce, reconfiguration and brick-laying, and while growing up Ngoc was never far from some form of food production. Half the front yards seems to have eight rows of productive roses or tangerine trees in short pots lined up from the gate to the wall of the house or little raised beds of coriander and basil, chickens or ducks nibbling in shady corners. The universality of food production in Viet Nam is only one generation removed. Specialization within cubicles is yet exotic. Ngoc described the Tra Que farmers’ growing practices, answering every question I had with detail that was not rote but instead vital and heart-felt. When asked if the farmers also sold their produce in the open-air markets he replied:

“ Farmers are too busy farming to sell at the markets. They need to farm. That’s what they do. Sellers sell, farmers farm.”

A German couple from Cologne and a woman from Australia with her three teen-aged daughters were also in the class. Red Bridge suggests optimum class size would be seven to eight and it seemed a perfect number for all our activities.

Ngoc was expert in every aspect of the agricultural system, from the water supply to the fertility program to the crop rotations to pest control, of which he said they had little need ( probably because of the rotations and the diversity) and observation seemed to prove that out. Small brown frogs living on the farm seemed to attest to no chemicals used. At Tra Que commons farm we observed leaf coriander, celery grown as a leaf-herb, anise basil and lemon basil, mint, a light-colored open-crown lettuce that they harvested without allowing to come to term, a bok choy with an open habit (as opposed to the hybrid Mei Quing variety) with the former observed running to seed rapidly, chives, spring onions, edible chrysanthemums, and gladiolas planted to bloom at the Tet New Year’s celebrations.

The seed density in the beds was tremendous, like 100 plants per square foot for coriander, basil and chrysanthemum. As the plants grow they are thinned continually. The younger herbs have an agreeable taste that wanes with age, which we observe in our production, but we are not selling basil plants two inches tall. Our break-point is after two months and-two to three feet-or so, when basil begins to become woody and the taste more soapy that sweet.

I have not seen sunflowers grown or sold here but expect that they will be a new introduction soon. I have observed taro growing but not in the market and corn three weeks old though it could be growing year-round-according to the climate this year-but in previous years in the northern part of the country they claim it is normally much colder than we have experienced. We discussed climate and implied agricultural alterations for Viet Nam and the world.

The Australians, having seen eight years of severe drought, said the inevitable questions were being asked there too. I am not perfectly convinced about the traditional cold or at least cool season here at Latitude 15 north because coconut palms are everywhere and if basil is being sown I thought we would have seen more abundant fruiting vegetables here in the tropics like eggplant, cucumbers and tomatoes. The latter two we have seen, but sparingly, both in the markets and in the field. The notion of “cold” is relative to how hot it gets by comparison during the summer, and probably does not indicate that it comes anywhere near freezing, its just a little chilly.

I recall from when I lived in Hawaii of seeing school children lined up by the side of the road waiting for their bus wearing parkas and caps on the record-tying coldest morning on the north shore of Oahu: 58 degrees. How they suffered.

After our farm tour, Ngoc then lead us to the Tiger Market across the river from the farm where we bought other ingredients from individual vendors for the cooking class: garlic, shallots, lemon grass, bean sprouts, limes, carrots for color, yellow onions, small red chiles, purple banana flower, green papaya, water spinach (related apparently to morning glory), beef bones for the pho broth, chicken for the salad, little shrimps and mackerel. We then took the van through a neighborhood full of rice fields, sweet potato fields and groves of ornate palm trees planted tightly on six by six foot spacings to the Red Bridge, which for now is a cooking school and a four star restaurant with an international wine list of some note, but evidence of more grandiose plans were obvious.

We prepared four courses:

• a banana flower/green papaya salad with carrots, the stems of water spinach and the barbequed chicken cut into thin strips, served with a lime juice /pepper/chile/salt dressing

• Pho, a noble noodle soup, consisting of the beef-bone broth spiced with seared star anise, shallots, garlic, cinnamon, and onion; rice noodles made from scratch, finely cut spring onions, served with a wild pile of raw greens and small bowel of “pickled” finely sliced shallots, garlic and chiles, and thinly sliced beef cooked in a ladle just prior to each serving-like thirty seconds.

• Fried marinated mackerel pieces done in peanut oil with fine lemon grass, mashed garlic-shallot-chile and garnished with lots of cooked dill and peanuts.

• Shrimp baked in banana leaves on a charcoal-fired brazier, flavored with a mash of garlic, shallots, chiles, black pepper and salt.

Two main features of Vietnamese cooking emerged in the Red Bridge experience that we were later able to identify at places like Hoi An’s upscale Mango Room: ample use of fresh black pepper and the shallot/garlic/lemon grass/red chile mash, which is performed with wooden mortar and pestle.

The key feature of the salad was not an ingredient but three utensils. One was a hand-mandolin of sturdy manufacture with double razor-sharp blades one-sixteenth of an inch apart and offset so that the blades were parallel. One used it as if you were whittling a stick, but nearly straight on. The result was finely ribboned cross-cuts of banana flower. These flowers are big buds about a foot long, weighing one or two pounds. We used one-third of a bud to serve eight. The ribbons were exquisitely finely cut purple on one side and gold on the other.

The next tool was a power-zester with six to seven small holes on the end of a metal handle. This device was also stainless. Imagine tiny brass knuckles, if you have ever seen the original. One drags this tool from one end to the other over a long a green mango, resulting in julienned strips of fruit five or six inches long and thin as a pencil lead.

Last came a custom device for flaying hollow stems like chives, green onions or water spinach, which was what we used this unit on. It was a long stainless steel rod nearly thin as a needle, through which you threaded the stem of the water spinach. At the terminus of the device was a multi-spoked set of fine blades ( imagine an umbrella or bicycle wheel). You merely pushed the stem towards the spokes and the water spinach was finely julienned as well.

The carrots were julienne-cut traditionally with a knife on a board.

The crucial act in the making of the pho, a noodle soup which is the Vietnamese national dish, sort of like our hamburger and fries, billions served everywhere, is in forming the noodles from scratch. A rice batter is begun the previous evening when washed raw rice is placed in water to soak. In the morning, a batter is made in a blender with the drained rice and new water so that the blend is thick as crepe batter. Careful to add the water slowly to the rice-batter because if its too soupy you will not be able to remedy the surplus of water for another 12 hours until your next batch of rice has soaked. This is not as easy as flour pancakes or using rice flour, which, while often used, creates an inferior product. If you blow the water just add rice flour, but do not say I said to.

Batter in hand, T-shirt dense cotton or silk fabric is stretched over a 12 inch wide pot of boiling water. The cloth is held down by tailor’s elastic, upon which the batter is ladled and spread deftly making a pancake 7-8 inches across. Get that fabric all tightened up like a drum head before the water gets hot, and leave a little hole to one side. Ladle on the batter, then covering the boiling pot for just a minute. A rice pancake is made and then coaxed off the fabric with a length of bamboo fifteen inches long and half an inch wide. The little hole to the side of your fabric trampoline is where you dip that bamboo for a little lubrication. You just shnuzzle the bamboo between the pancake and the fabric and lift it off, taking care to flip it over when laying it on a plate so the sticky side is up. After a dozen rice crepes have been made, gossamer thin, you fold the pancake over twice and then finely cut it into noodles, with a super sharp light cleaver that’s been rubbed with oil so the pancake won’t stick to the metal as you slice it. You may pile two or three folded crepes and cut them together just so long as the results are narrow. Now place cut servings in Asian soup bowls: the equivalent of two cut-crepes per bowl.

The dry herbs for the pho broth are lightly singed on the brazier/barbeque while held in one of those little mesh baskets used for fish on a barbeque. An old tea ball can be used as well, or merely pan-roast the herbs if the whole charcoal fire routine is just too much effort after all the noddle-making.

The very thinly sliced beef was placed in a large ladle and then immersed in the communal soup-pot of broth for a few moments. When it turned to a brown color it was cooked enough, then placed in the bowl. The definition of very thinly slice here is translucent.

Ngoc seemed to make the pho soup into a hot salad by adding a lot of raw herbs into his bowl prior to eating , and then replenishing the greens on top of the soup as they were consumed- I would say at least 3 or 4 ounces of coriander, basil, mint, lettuce and celery leaf by the time the bottom of the bowl was exposed.

The chopped green onions and the pickle group also add a lot flavor and texture to the dish, but watch out for the chile if you are not accustomed. It’s a small Serrano/thai type. One quarter of a jalapeno might also suffice.

* * *

The mackerel was marinated for a few minutes with a light dusting of powdered tumeric, salt and that pepper. It was fried in a thick ceramic dish on medium high heat. The dill was well cooked with the peanuts and the shallot/garlic/lemon grass/chile mash on top of the simmering fish but not mixed, taking care to not obliterate the fish chunks.

* * *

The banana leaves are seared for seven seconds on a side to make them pliable or else they will crack while being folded. They will change to a shiny color to notify when done. Once made limp by the fire, they are cut in half along the center vein of the leaf and then rolled to induce pliability and for compact storage on the prep table. Each serving will use 20-30 inches of banana leaf wrapper. The shrimp plus shallot/garlic/lemon grass/chile mash is folded up inside the leaf, forming a square, over and over, until the end. Begin with a square, folding into the middle, and then end with a square, then if you want, place in foil to assure that the sauce does not escape. These may be baked in an oven just as easily with the same results, but you will not have as great an excuse to consume beer to keep you cool while in front of the hot, smoky brazier.

* * *

Fresh, finely ground black pepper went into everything, including a bit on the salad.

Grilled Unicorn with Leather jacket

Tuy Hoa

24 December 2007

We arrive in Tuy Hoa on the southbound Reunification Express out of Da Nang at 6:45 PM on Christmas Eve, not nearly so wiped out as from our most recent 16 hour ordeal on the northbound, but hungry and ready to find four private walls. We are immediately enveloped in a mad Buddhist Christmas extravaganza as soon as we leave the station gate. Ninety percent of Viet Nam is Buddhist, but they just love Santa and anything that glows. Throw in a little Nativity and you got a party. A searchlight swings back and forth across the sky in the street not far from the station, however nothing specifically significant seems to warrant it. The entire place is bedlam.

A thousand people are at the receiving gates to greet about 40 people debarking the train. Its not that they know any of them, they just want to people-watch and air it out a little. The street is flooded with teenagers on motos, on bikes and teenagers on foot all whooping it up big time. There is a full moon rising over the sea a mile to the east and the air is filled with smoke, not ganga, just herbal smoke, stuff burning in piles. These people are high enough. No one is carrying a beer or anything like it. They are just ready for good clean, two-wheeled fun.

For the second time in ten days I see a policeman. Funny how, in this overbearing, restrictive, communist state there is so little physical evidence of authority. This one is a seasoned motorcycle cop in shiny knee boots and a gold helmet with the visor kicked up jaunty, trying to get traffic organized, yet he is but one against literally thousands of merry elves. He is so unique and benign, helpful, that I have to admire him, perversely. Once the kids see us, in the guise of the Three Reindeer, the entire street wants to try out a little English and that means kids fifteen to twenty deep doing a full neck-breaking looky-lou. Whoa!

“ Hello!”

“ Hello!”

“ Hello, How are you…oohh ah Hah Hah!” ( Giggle and almost falls off his bike)

This is repeated 65 times for about a mile as we walk stunned against the flow of all these darling teens headed up to where they are headed in order to turn around. An indication of how big a deal this evening is: a guy who owns a jewelry shop is in front of his place is taking a video of the procession, drinking beer with a pal in their lounge chairs like they are on Colorado Boulevard on New Years Day.

“Merry Christmas!”

You bet it is. Now instead of being Fish With Money we are Gawk Hollywood, celebrities with backpacks. These folks do not see many westerners, and that is exactly the reason why we wanted to go to Tuy Hoa. ¬ Roam The Planet gives “ sleepy fishing town” Tuy Hoa short shrift with its slight mention of the hilltop Champa spires and friendly folk, but I says, “oh yeah, off the tourist track, that’s for us.”

And there is not a neon pizza sign or necklace hawker in sight.

Christmas lights and bobbing full-scale automated Santas and Christmas Trees are everywhere, not because Tuy Hoa is a Catholic enclave; its just as Buddhist as the next town. While the immensity of Christmas celebration and the Yuletide decorations are not what they were in Hoi An, where the officials closed off ten blocks of the historic center and Europeans and Australians were thick, there are no foreign Christians in Tuy Hoa for whom all this cheer was built. I had thought that Viet Nam had gone twinkly green and red for our sake, but it turns out they like this party for Baby Jesus. Maybe because they really like babies. Maybe its in honor of all babies.

To add to our sense of being only loosely tethered to reality, we learn early on that this ain’t Hoi An, My Friend, and we no speak the lingo very good. These tourist zones ( Hoi An, Mui Ne, Nha Trang) thus lull you into self-assurance. Here, English not spoken. You are not in Ensenada, amigo, this is Tuy Hoa, Viet Nam, and just count your lucky stars their language is written in Roman letters instead of Asian pictographs.

You may not be able to pronounce it or understand it, but at least you can read it and turn around and write it down and show it to someone who can read what you have written, and we thank Heaven we therefore can write our own Rosetta Stone. Forget showing someone sentences printed in eight point font in a phrase book in the dark, going over potholes, swerving to miss the cyclists.

There are no taxis and we are reluctant to split up on motos at night in an unknown zone, get separated or maybe highjacked to God knows where. We keep walking. A darling teen angel cruises over on her motorcycle and offers to help. She calls a taxi on her cell phone and hangs around with us for ten minutes testing her English out with immense glee until the cab comes. Oh sweet necessity of language. I have gotten enough Vietnamese flowing to ask the driver to take us to a safe hotel please.

The road was so choked with merrymakers that the taximan gave up using his horn and eventually had to go with the flow. That is defeat. Vietnamese taxis don’t go down easily. The laughing bicyclists peddling four and five across overwhelmed him. Taxis here own the dotted lines in the middle of the road and wear out their horn defending it, but this driver knows when to drop it down a gear. This singular evening we coasted out of central city, mired in the Yuletide moto parade to our brand new khach san an ( safe hotel) on the outskirts, down by the sea….

…where a big fancy wedding is just breaking up. Pink balloons are every where, especially festooning the altar-like stage trimmed in gold. The parents of the bride and groom are kicked back on sofas having tea and a cigarette, dressed well in suits and evening gowns, while the young people finish their cake, and it could have been Trenton, could have been Woodland Hills. The confetti is in drifts. I am so poorly dressed in comparison to the wedding party that I feel naked.

We rent our four walls on the fifth floor, no elevator, wash up and head back out for some grub. The staff at our hotel, stacking chairs and sweeping up, is obviously done with service for the evening. We find another taxi which takes us all the way back up into the central part of town past probably five perfectly good restaurants, through the mad stream of young people on motos and bicycles now twice as densely packed as before. He lets us off in front of a swank place with smart chefs in tall toques loitering outside with a dozen beautiful service girls in their long ao dai dresses in front of long tables covered with table cloths and stainless hotel service chafing pots. Is that a wedding cake? Yes, inside is another wedding with two hundred people dancing in gowns and dark suits to American pop tunes beneath three gold disco balls. No way I am going in there in my surf shorts and tennis shoes.

Across the boulevard and over the river, bright lights beckon us and that seems where all the crowd is headed too because the traffic now thick as Saigon’s is crawling. We cross a river to a land more reminiscent of Vegas, but here in Viet Nam these glowing high rises seem dropped from the sky like meteors; nothing around them indicates they are part of an organic evolution. Rice paddies are across the street. These brand-new baby casino-like edifices are lit like Excalibur, with non-functional towers rising in the festive night, displaying absurd signage in giant state-of-the-art neon:

GRILLING ROOM
HIGH-TECH CAFÉ
ECO AND ENTERTAINMENT CENTRE

I begin to realize that vague phrases…sleigh ride together…let it snow, let it snow…so be good for goodness sake…have been pulsing around for hours and yet here they are concentrated, come from various sources, and the result is like Santa’s hip-hop DJ mix in Vietnamese. Better not pout…up on the housetop…yo-ho-ho, but not in the original.

I am so far removed from the western source of this merriment that Jingle Bells, in the tropics, in Asia, has absolutely no significance, not even irony. Lots of twinkle going on both side of the broad street. Uniformed attendants are conducting various cycles toward orderly parking and other men in khaki with epaulets usher the streaming, ceaseless, giddy horde through the tall gates into the grilling compound. Like everyone else it seems we do not know where we are going but we have arrived. Viet Nam has a penchant for uniforms, both public and private, in banks, airports, hotels, I have frequently observed, but they are benign and their wearers do not tote firearms and they seem helpful, not menacing.

Thousands of folks on motos and bicycles are still hollering and shrieking amid the flowing din of sputtering engines and beeping horns in front of these grand concrete and glass spectacles lit marvelously from every angle. We head for the grilling room to see what and if they really grill, and encounter another wedding party dancing ceremoniously under flashing Christmas lights. We wonder: Are they all getting married because of the full moon or because its Christmas Eve? This party is also enjoying some Christmas carol karaoke in three languages, maybe more. Jose Feliciano’s old standard Feliz Navidad is on the box as we sidestep the party and head up stairs where we hope some grilling may be going on.

Our waitress shows us to a table with the most fantastically awful leather upholstered chairs, like huge beachballs. I want to ship one back home as proof. They are bulbous and stuffed, done in broad bands of orange, green, pink and salmon, sort of like some of the painted statuary of sometime Buddha Hotei, the laughing Nirvana maker to come who we frequently see in the temples. There are perhaps sixty of these chairs around 15 tables upstairs. How could you be unhappy in a room full of these things? We crack the menus, order beer and lemonade and then my wife begins to apoplectically lose her composure, laughing in tears as she begins reading the suddenly too exotic offerings: … grilled lizard…with honey….braised rabbit ( a French tradition no doubt)… braised ostrich wings ( for the Aussie?)… interfering oi (?)….braised tortoise with Chinese traditional herbal medicine… …. Braised sentinel with honey ( apparently roast crab) …... ….potato crispy slices…Fish Fire Pot… Full fledged dove blood curds…and no doubt, the chef’s special…. grilled unicorn with leather jacket…

This is true grilling at its best. We guess that someone utilized an unsuitable computer program to translate some of these things. How else can one come up with grilled unicorn? Suddenly the smallest, skinniest Vietnamese Santa Claus appears, very cheerful, waving with his entire body and smiling underneath his white beard. He greets all the guests and is extremely happy to wish us, it would seem, above all others, a Merry Christmas. I have my picture taken with Santa flashing a Peace sign.

We order the fried rice, the crispy slices, some grilled shrimp and a fire pot. The beer, lemonade, rice and the fries come, but nothing else. We talk to our charming waitress for half an hour, elevating her English and improving our Vietnamese while obtaining her abbreviated life story, plans, wishes for the future and prospects for marriage. She needs to get married, she is twenty-five. When nothing else seems like it will come we are glad to leave anyway because the kids next door have just fired up some cigarettes and it looks like they plan to smoke more of them. Our waitress gets us a taxi.

Outside, on the street, its still Christmas mayhem. The joy is in the joy apparently, because there is little here in the traditional Christmas sense except the spirit of it to animate the festing, and in having one-another, which has been always the keystone to our own tarnished holiday. We roll to the honeymoon hotel, slowly amid weaving holiday cycles, emptied of all thought.

From Tuy Hoa to Doc Let to Dalat

December 25-27 2007

Reading: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

For an extremely decent price we hired a driver and car (late model Mitsubishi Montero) to take us in style from Tuy Hoa to Doc Let, a still-obscure coastal get-away on the road to Nha Trang in the south. Doc Let features at least three places to stay, on what we presumed to be clean beaches because there are no large towns or rivers near them. At Hoi An we had sat at the sand’s beautiful edge easily refusing the temptation to plunge into the brown effluent pulsing ashore from the admixture of the Hoi An River and the South China Sea.

There we studied maps for river outlets not too near towns so they might be clean, like Mui Ne had been. We wanted to get in the warm ocean, but not in Nha Trang, where many Vietnamese presumed we should go because tourism is its number one industry. That is where 400,000 people live and the Cai River and two major tributaries dump into the sea. We were also wary of what tourism begets in the local populace, and besides being tiresome the relationship fails to ennoble either party.

Doc Let promised to have been for the moment bypassed by souvenir trinketry and a westernized menu. On the way to Doc Let, which sits out on a dry reach forming Van Phong Bay, we studied the rest of the non-tourist coast by car, including the sweet little town of Dai Lahn and salivated over what treasure might await on the Hon Gam peninsula, only half of which is served by a paved road.

It won’t be long before such observations are shared by people who could exploit Hon Gam for this serenity, not merely generalist cartographers who rue what happens to places like Baja California or Costa Rica once the money comes. It’s not lost on me that I am a tourist, but I think my perspective is different from someone who sees a beautiful flat piece of land and schemes of a thirty-six hole golf resort.

Perhaps land-use policy and the yeomanesque agricultural system is a built-in buffer against would-be Trumps of the future. One observes an occasional public acquisition of farmland to widen the highway, which is imminently for the public good. Anywhere they can humans have sculpted a food-producing enterprise in this narrow place, on land and sea and these enterprises are like stitches in a garment-one can not fiddle with just a loop or two without putting at risk the integrity of the whole quilted landscape. Though they be entrepreneurially minded, if put at risk the Party probably has to defend these peasants.

We had no reservations for Paradise. We were just lucky that there was a room available, up a sandy slope from the manifest white beach and blue crystal water, for thirty-three dollars per night, all meals included. We stayed and swam and slept, wrote and read for two days and finally got tired of the food and decided to leave with a group of folks we had met there, three Canadians and some Irish expatriots who had resided in France for 20 years.

Our host was a virile eighty-one years old Frenchman of definite opinions who had proudly “made” a number of offspring with his young Vietnamese wife late in life. He was advertised in the tour books as “cantankerous”, however I explained to a table one evening that perhaps that was too harsh a word, and in any case one that none of the westerners understood, so I just said it meant that he was thoroughly opinionated. While preparing to leave we had encountered such contradictory argumentation from him that some of us half-jokingly began to plot our “escape”, once we knew he would be away at the market buying some more of those miserable little bitter-tasting fish he had been serving us. We might have stayed longer if he had not allowed so much dust to gather on his collection of French livres gastronomique. The constant supply of good water and fresh fruit was welcome, however, carrot salad with fish sauce and mayo three days running? Mon Dieu.

It also might have been a case of bad feng shui to have the entry way under construction during the highest point of the high season, and to have continually berated the workmen laying down the paving bricks while we were all trying to nap or read or write modest paragraphs about our stay there. Strife under the iron hand of the perfectionist French overseer was revisited. Why should he strive so hard to create when so late in life? Because of all those children to care for and to assure they have something to do? Collecting thirty tourists for a mild episode of Survivor could be an amusing method to obtain some entertainment, once boredom crept in upon his procreative activities. Let’s see if they will eat from this bowl of nearly unrecognizable cuttlefish and tough clams….

Vladimir hoped I would write something nice about him and I am trying to, but first I must be truthful and maintain my search for humor. One of our fellow escapees called him Vladimir, not Cherie as he preferred, and even if it was not a nickname it did loan a bit of strange mystery to our host. He said that when in New York forty years ago he replaced sun-darkened skyscraper glass on windblown scaffolds sixty stories in the air. Sometime later he was a handyman in San Francisco.

In Paradise we quickly learned here was no other outlet for diversion than oneself and the azure sea. The fishing town down the beach half a kilometer did not even have a store. The books in the lending library at Club Paradise ( its real name) were mostly in German, French or Norse, except a repellant copy of Lord of the Rings. I went looking there because I had accidentally left my March of Folly on the desk at the Hotel An Phu in Hoi An. I had seriously been looking forward to reading about the devilish doings of those Renaissance popes too.

The evening before we left we met a family from Austria. The eldest daughter, Nadia is a medical student at UC San Francisco also studying at UC Berkeley. We found very much in common with her and her mother, a peridontology professor in Strausberg. Mom is the type that enjoys places like Esalen, so she might like visiting Ojai. Nadia suggested she could counsel Dylan if he ends up at Berkeley where he has an application pending. Turns out Nadia’s brothers are organic farmers in Murphys, California and both she and I are big fans of Ignacio Chapela the windmill-tilting, charismatic UC Berkeley professor who I once called “ the most important man in California agriculture.” He might be the most important educator as well. We thought her proposed career-path in social medicine might mesh well with Sofia’s work and suggested that we could put them in touch with one-another.

Water for Elephants is a quick little book I read through nearly to the end in one day while at Vladimir’s Paradise. I did not want to like it because of its simplicity and clichés that just could not be avoided I guess, but I learned a bit about the circus, and elephants. We left it at Vladimir’s because his English language selection needed the upgrade and we have to jettison cargo whenever possible to make room for gifts and souvenirs. So far I have dumped a long sleeved shirt inappropriate for this latitude, a pair of heavy Levis and a silk shirt I liked but was probably so threadbare already when I bought it at one of the thrifts in Ventura it was already doomed. It fell apart in Hoi An, where it had already been replaced by a custom unit from Bich My’s.

We were ten packed tightly in a small van on the morning we left for Dalat. Through the coastal plain to long, shallow Nha Phu Bay, filled from shore to shore with shrimp farms denoted every few hundred feet by a little cabin floating in the midst of the fence-like system of nets. The enterprise may have covered 2-3,000 acres. We turned inland above Nha Trang and began the long climb towards the Central Highlands along the Cai River. Upon entering the mountains it became obvious that the road was built through some very sketchy geology cut frequently by ceaseless streams and rivulets. We were in the middle of the dry season but the streams ran strongly from springs erupting intermittently from the granite.

After awhile I say: “I think its obvious why we have been the only vehicle on this road for the past twenty minutes.”

They all laugh. Then one of the women lets loose an “ Oh-My!” as we weave through boulders strewn across the road adjoining a thousand foot sheer granite drop. A spectacular waterfall framed in algae spills down the mountain.

The road is continually overwhelmed or threatened by mud slides. Cleared debris that can not be hauled off is piled high and over time the hundred and fifty inches of rain per year washes the fines down the sea leaving scrubbed stones, boulders and monoliths, some as large as one hundred or more tons, perched hopefully on dubious ground. We pass construction crews every so often running the ancient, ponderous highway equipment. There are faded yellow Komatsu and Sumitomo dozers, a smoky old Caterpillar motor-grader shoving shale into a windrow, battered trucks stained red from the iron-rich clays and ancient compaction rollers like Gallions and even a Buffalo Springfield, which should pretty well date it since they stopped making those machines even before Neil Young and Stephen Stills formed the rock band of the same name. Among the browned mountain men there are a lot of boys and some girls on these crews, flagging traffic, passing stones up hill in long teams, cutting stairways for the vertical water courses so erosion will not cut through, shoveling. The folks working on this highway don’t head home to kith and kin at the end of the day. Every few miles we encounter the shanty walls and blue tarps of squalid little encampments of workers with a bent old cook stoking a fire with pots hung over it and a tired cornucopia of vegetables awaiting preparation.

At one immense accident we encounter the engineering team and as we pass the chief engineer residing under a halo of responsibility with most of the minion engineers raptly drawn into a circle as he gesticulates at the vague solutions to the obvious improbability of taming gravity. As we slowly pass by, the tall, thin academic expert gives us a look of conviction that leads me to believe that he will obtain mastery over this mountain some day.

The Flowering Eden of Dalat

28 December 2007

We at least leap over the high mountain pass, somewhere near seven thousand feet, which is no Sierra, but I am overwhelmed by surprise, coming up abruptly from sea level, climbing. After a set of grueling switchbacks I figure, well, that’s the peak, and around the next bend is another vertical face. Every cc in the little bus strains to clear the final ridge and my mind is introduced to the unpredictably splendid sights of very large trees in a very old, pristine environment of ferns, mossy, water-worn rocks giving way on the other side to pioneer agriculture in clearings amid a conifer forest. Bananas lurk in a few places, small “ice cream’ bananas, a mile high and still tropical.

Dalat is advertised as a quaint village of French villas tucked into a mountain valley and logically my imagination prepares me for a place like Solvang, California was when I was young. Solvang is a place where the Danes made a little bakery center that went uber-kitsch with the lederhosen, doilies, bad Delft and the now-famous sugar overdose. In short, nothing is real but the calories and the ploy to take one endeavor, like a cookie, and make it a reason for an otherwise careful person to part irrationally with a significant amount of cash that they will forever regret. Forever, because that is how long it will take to sneak the Delft onto the yard sale pile. California is full of such madness. Knotts Berry Farm in Buena Park, California used to be a fruit stand. It got out of control once Mrs. Knott started making pie with her surplus berries and the best way to now survey the madness is to imagine how much electricity it takes to run all the ridiculous amusements at that non-stop circus. I would not be surprised if the bill is way more than a quarter of a million dollars a month.

Dalat uses all of its electricity much more efficiently and has little in common with amusement traps like Knott’s. I have breathlessly made a big deal over the cultivation prowess observed on each little parcel in Viet Nam, but in Dalat the horticulture is without comparison. Valuing every square inch of this eternal greenhouse, the flat ground and the terraced hillsides all around are devoted to plant industry. Most of the salad, the carrots and potatoes and non-Asian brassicas are grown here. They call such sights a profusion. When the roof racks of a forty-foot passenger bus are stacked with a few thousand gigantic cauliflowers what do you call that? The bumper-sticker should read I Brake For Brassicas.

There are also many greenhouses meant to protect the exquisite chrysanthemums, tuberoses, anthuriums, orchids, stattice and tulips from the rain. The Dutch are here, I have been told, and it figures. I hear they are in the Colombian highlands too. I understand that the temperature is always 74 degrees in the Colombia highlands, just as in Dalat.

Shangrila is a relatively useless descriptive because it has been misused to describe places like Ojai, California or Tashkent in Uzebekistan of the Hunzas. Applying the fantastic term to Dalat is more correct, and to attribute it to some false Shangrila like Ojai, where I live and grow vegetables, is an error because Ojai’s weather, while enjoyable, is marked by freakish temperature swings. It’s a nice place to grow tangerines but it is no Eden. Temps may swing during a winter day from a freezing 30 Farenheit to 87 F, and the valley definitely has seasons. Ojai-Shangrila can achieve get-out-of-town burning hot temperatures in the summer and can freeze keister in the winter. Twenty three degrees, a year ago, and that knocked the spunk out of my Romaine. Spring and fall can be perfectly idyllic, to be sure, except it may freeze on May Day and around Halloween a Santa Ana wind will kick up temperatures near one hundred Farenheit, dry the hills to tinder and then start a conflagration. That is no paradise, it is merely California, which to anyone from southern Colorado, like my grandparents, would seem like a paradise relative to Huerfano County. From them I learned to appreciate the place.

Dalat, on the other hand, produces an entertaining mix of pulsing strange succulents next door to avocados, tangerines, leeks, bitter melon and artichokes. Rogue papaya trees poke their unmistakable heads above the order on the ground. One may plant any of them on any day of the year but people here pretend they have seasons. Day length must wander back and forth a bit because we saw the season’s last persimmons in the market next to some “oranges” that are always green because it never gets cold enough to make them color up, and there are no oranges more orange than an Ojai Navel in December. Tomato seedlings were newly in the ground and ripe tomatoes were piled into little pyramids throughout the market. The tomato grown here is a four to six ouncer. Its probably a shipper they always harvest ripe for local consumption because they are always good. I never saw a beefsteak and rarely a cherry.

The marketplace is just as refined. Though the rice is grown down on the coastal plain, Dalat is where I first saw the many varieties of rice they cultivate. Seven kinds of individually named rice, some long, some tiny, some orange, some brown, were sold out of big bags for around twelve cents a pound. The value of this staple is a true measure of the cost of living. So too would be carrots, cucumbers, broccoli and storage onions all between 12-15 cents per pound. We observed a rainbow of very good quality dry beans and peas. This is also a place that grows so many artichokes that they cut them up and dry them to rehydrate for soup later. A local brew is artichoke root tea.

The city of Dalat bears no resemblance to Solvang. San Francisco is probably more apt. The French invented Dalat a hundred years ago once they discovered that its sublime clime and alpine lakes would make a good get-away from sultry Saigon in the hot rainy season. They built fine buildings and laid out streets on the ridges and set out nice three story villas in rows with landscaping and stone paths and patios. Ever since that model was set down the people have built larger and finer buildings and it does not matter if it’s a four star hotel or a government building they all look proud as a Stanford lecture hall. Begonias, nasturtiums, pansies, birds-of-paradise, orchids and a hundred varieties of geraniums blaze from mossy pots everywhere. The city has also planted the formal areas around the stunning lakes in the middle of town with these same species. May I be excused for attempting to describe the place as Dalatful?

That variety of joke is not exactly low-hanging fruit.

Owing to our time constraints we elected to hop on scooters for an abbreviated tour lead by Le Binh. Binh is a man a little younger than I who was in the South Vietnaese Military Academy ( like West Point, he explains) when the war ended, so he “ did not see the battlefield.” Like Tran Van Theiu in Hoi An, Le is pretty underemployed, marked as not worthy for advancement due to his participation in the South Vietnamese armed forces.

Our trip included a stop at Crazy House which seemed plucked from one of California’s Knott-like traps, perhaps more like the haunted Winchester House. Crazy House though began as an eccentric patrician’s experiment in making concrete look like tree branches and roots, his own amusement. The original owner once live there, designing on whim, as does his daughter now. Piles of cement, brick and rebar twisted into strange shapes were being transformed by labor as we climbed around, for about fifteen minutes.

Binh and the boys then took us to a large Buddhist monastery featuring landscaping, cleanliness, marvelous prayer halls, glum Buddhists and a stunning collection of bonsai. I guess they were not members of the Best Joke In History sect. Olivia noted one monk walking around with one hand on his head who quickly replaced that hand with the other when the previous one grew tired, we supposed. We’ll need to inquire about that.

We picked up some minority-peoples handcrafts and then, paradoxically, went to where they were being made, in a village fifteen kilometers outside of town. It was a fitting way to have taken my last ride on the back of a motor-scooter in Viet Nam. I am grateful that a long section of the highway was under construction so traffic was held to a dusty crawl. As it was, the big inter-city buses, the ones with the cauliflower all over them which are always triple passing tractors and another bus way, way into the oncoming lane, were hogging it up as usual, but only at twenty kilometers per hour and that gave us just enough time to steer off the broken precipice into the squirrely gravel and sand on the shoulder. A rivet nicked my shoulder as one leaned over into a deep turn, but don’t tell my mother.

Through the carrot and broccoli fields we zoomed, to Chicken Village. We had no idea what we would find there. I had thought it was going to be a chicken farm and we had briefly asked one-another casually and rather preposterously whether we should expose ourselves to the Asian Bird Flu. After the motos, though, what was there to be concerned about? But there was no chicken farm, just a chicken sculpture. I assumed it might be borrowed from a page in Knotts, but was assured by a story.

A captivating Kho Kho peoples village woman told us that the reason why the looming giant mud and concrete chicken with nine spurs had been built in her village was to commemorate the story of a poor girl. The girl very much wanted to marry a boy but this boy was not of her social rank, he was a rich boy and the rich boy’s family wanted him to marry a rich girl so they asked that the poor girl’s family provide an impossibly valuable dowry, with five water buffalo and twenty bags of rice and a chicken with nine spurs.

No one had ever seen a chicken with nine spurs, but that girl really wanted to marry that boy and no other so she started combing the countryside looking for that chicken. She disappeared for a long time into the mountains and then word came back that she had been eaten by a tiger. This made everyone in the village very angry with the boy’s family because they had made that poor girl go out looking for something did not exist because they did not want their boy to marry a poor girl. So they extracted a huge sum from the rich boy’s family and used it to build the monument to the girl and her love and the greed of the boy’s family and it is an absurd figure, with massive spurs weighing down the poor chicken, like our pettiness and greed disfigure us.

The Central Highlands

28 December 2007

One inevitable result of having so many people in Asia is that the earth is constantly being manipulated either to accommodate the designs of the people or to feed them. Nothing is static except the highest rocks. I imagine the physical circumstances must be similar in China, The Philippines and Indonesia, and while development and re-working the landscape is common anywhere in the Human Age, in Vietnam the dirt is carved and formed with such cooperative energy that it is the earth itself that seems on the move.

Big shovels claw at hillsides to obtain fill for the new highway, harvested stone is cut and hauled from quarries, water buffalo and two-piston paddy tillers turn the soil over once again for rice, beans or cassava, a woman who runs a kitchen ware shop in the central market comes home from work and in the cool of the evening hacks away at the vegetable beds in the front yard that are going to be planted with some broccoli transplants her brother in law grew for them.

Nothing is stable except the irredeemable mountain sides. The agriculture seems timeless, as if these rail-thin peasants have been chopping on the same rice checks and cabbage patches forever less one day, but this system of farming is pretty new for the current tenants. It probably was the way it was done before the Europeans came and seized this part of the world, making village subsistence and princely fiefdoms conform to plantation-style agriculture meant for export.

When finally the west and its clients had been removed in 1975 the peasants were each given a little less than two acres apiece to farm on and build a little house on. This is the cooperative system one observes today, with narrow bands of strawberries, eggplant, beets, parsley, bok choy and dozens of other green vegetables, cut flowers and potatoes intensively farmed around Dalat. Coffee then dominates the landscape north and south of Dalat, spreading out into the vales and on slopes everywhere.

The Central Highlands is the gritty backbone of Viet Nam, where crop production is continuous, perhaps as many as four or five crops in a yearly rotation compared to rice, which is a once-a-year event. The highway is jammed with product moving back and forth, to debarkation centers where ten souls scramble over a mountain of daikon, packing it into bags to go down the hill to Saigon with other trucks laden with flowers, lettuce, beans, escarole and potatoes. Two-wheeled tractor-tillers pull wagons full of wood, bananas, coffee, forty-pound baskets of strawberries, hogs, chickens alive and dead, and all the aforementioned stuffs with people clinging to the ropes tying down the containers. Some goes south, some goes north to some appointed rendezvous with larger transport. Ten wheel Daewoo and Mistubishi thirty ton behemoths piled to the sky churn the dust ceaselessly on deadline missions. Buses are crammed with produce and other market items, mostly headed downhill to Bien Hoa, Saigon, Vung Tau and a thousand smaller habitations timelessly linked.

From Bao Loc to Dinh Trong coffee is planted from ridge top to ridge top all the way to the street and into most front yards. I have been driving through almost solid coffee for forty minutes at around fifty miles an hour. An average of 10,000 feet of coffee is on either side. That is 60 square miles of coffee. I can imagine unseen broad valleys beyond the highway which are similarly planted. Diversity has disappeared under the dark green mantle of Arabica bushes, many with red cherry coffee on them still and coffee pickers stripping the last of the crop.

I don’t know if coffee replaced anything that was previously growing on these hillsides but the land seems perfect for it. Perhaps they grew sugar cane here formerly. There is some scraggly evidence that it was grown here, with bananas, mangos and other fruit. But the market for coffee is international. To consume it a social drug-imperative, its demand hugely larger than any trade in mango lassies. Bananas, big as they are on the market, are not traded on the Chicago Board of Trade with soybeans and cocoa like coffee.

It’s a very good thing they have the hands to pick and play with it because java is a labor intensive habit. I wonder if the sky is overcast as a rule because it has been clouded over for the short time we have been here. If so, that means this place could do well to plant some Arabica beans to compliment all the Robusta that we see, and thereby obtain higher revenue for gourmet beans as in Kona, Kenya, Jamaica, and Sumatra.

The harvested beans once washed are laid out to dry on concrete patios where it is being turned by hand in the sun then covered overnight in tarps. Coffee is in bags on the side of the road on the land and in your cup. Drying coffee is the most common activity along the rural highway, interspersed with welders, soup kitchens and schools. One would think the servings would be a bit larger with all this surplus java around. In every local café we are served in demitasse, following perhaps a French tradition.

I should think the people would be well-served if the government made a decree doubling the price paid to coffee farmers. We saw three varieties of roasted whole coffee beans at the market in Dalat selling for a dollar thirty a pound, which has to be close to the international bulk market price. This finished product is sold in Viet Nam at one sixth of retail US, but even then it must be a rewarding crop. Around Bao Loc there suddenly was a swarm of 15- 20 horsepower Shebura and Kubota tractors parked in private stalls and a few nice dealerships too.

Further down the coffee trail the monoculture finally opens up to tea.

Sophisticated Saigon

30 December 2007

Still Reading: Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan

It is difficult to really prepare for Saigon, in terms of its physical appearance alone, irrespective of the American history. It is an error to expect anything like the black and white three or four story colonial backdrops of a 1967 television newscast. Saigon now comes in color, forty luxurious stories tall. Its an important international city crawling with concrete trucks headed to the numerous big cranes lifting up the metropolis, while on the ground are open-air markets still selling the same things the same way after hundreds of years. Three centuries of admirable architecture blend fairly well, even complementing one another. The shuttered-window charm of the past rarely is outdone by the muscle of the marble and glass present, nor by the chic brass-rail, window-mirror touches straight from Paris or Rodeo Drive.

The peculiar sophistication is both homegrown and international. Why does it feel seamless? Because so much is new that mind and eye haven’t the facility to discern, compare, criticize? Because I never saw it any other way?

An ancient Annamese crumbler right next to a new, hot red extruded polymer/stainless boutique neither diminishes the fancy neighbor nor suggest that the place with the cracked plaster is doomed. A lot of recently redone places have merely sandblasted time from the surface and exposed masonry that is worthy and once the orchids and bonsai are in place prove that it has its own recycled groove going too. Wealthy Japanese tourists may not go to places like Le Fenetre Soleil, but their children do by the dozens. It is a resurrected café with old furniture where shaded lamps light nooks and even beds, while we consume crepes, soups and a good, cold French white wine.

I think that I must have been in a bad or indifferent mood when I read Richard Brautigan’s books thirty-five years ago. The crowd I was in with at the time thought they were writers and I remember feeling obligated to dismiss Brautigan as a lightweight because he wasn’t Thomas Pynchon. Now I admire the big crazy stories told so sparingly. Enough was enough. Part is written in the first person. The other narrative is omniscient. I like his falsely self-effacing self-characterization. He’s a crazy obsessive-compulsive but so ‘good in bed’, that the ‘heroine’ wastes two years of her life making love to him when she knows she should not be with him, and she should know because she is a psychiatrist. I enjoy the absurd, surreally satirical social impressionism that governs the book, an attitude I don’t think could be called censure. Sombrero Fallout has an Asian woman in it, a Japanese-American who is the psychiatrist. A strand of her black hair is a key feature of the narrative. I am surrounded by people with black hair. Many are Japanese tourists. A town also goes berserk over an implausibility, weapons and violence enter the picture, and when Viet Nam is referenced twice in passing I realize that in the early seventies it was bound to surface somehow. Brautigan’s description of a man’s brain exploding with thought like a pop-corn popper is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time.

Saigon is like New York in terms of the condensed, crushing bustle. In L.A. you only get the sense of business fever on the freeway or at the port where it should be obvious, or at the produce market. Every city has got delivery going on but task-urgency is a rare quality. They start work early. I am always up at dawn and I can sense the throb. Trucks must offload away from the Saigon city center and things get jobbed out from there into bobtails and snappy little 800 pound minitrucks. The pick-up is a rare model. There is no place for a semi downtown, and how could one deal with the cycles? I hope the guy on a Kawasaki hauling ten foot lengths of three-quarter inch rebar over his shoulder gets a truck sometime soon. Chickens are being delivered on the back of a bicycle, just like they were in Binh Dinh, but here so is the Johnnie Walker Red Label. Commerce is latent, implied and obvious. I look to see if they are quoting an Oppenheimer Viet Nam Fund in the international papers. The huge signs announcing Siemens, Samsung, LG, and a host of local telecoms already seem dusty and faded from the sun. There are a lot of big neon signs up big as the Samsung with logos and corporate ID on them I have never heard of. My ignorance is just another means to measure their vitality. The place is rounding into form. The highway expansion already fails to handle the freight traffic efficiently. Saigon probably covers two hundred square miles.

District One, the oldest part of town, is built on the river and is the center of upscale tourism, government and banking. French Colonial-era administrative structures, graceful treed boulevards and traffic circles combine with monumental historical statuary of liberation, some depicting a story centuries old.

Luxury hotels, of which perhaps six would qualify as world-class, at least in terms of appearance and the potential cuisine, are mostly in the central district, which is almost entirely devoted to tourism: travel agencies, luggage, souvenirs and crafts, fashion, restaurants and bars, taxis and the pedal-rickshaws called cyclos, massage, sexual massage and sex. The only reasonable excuse why Annam Gourmet has nearly as many one pound bags of Bob’s Red Mill Organic flours, beans and grains as a Whole Foods is because a significant number of westerners who have kitchens here demand it. Annam’s bulk 2 foot long cinnamon sticks are trippy. Their wine selection shows knowledge. They have gruyere and Roquefort from Europe. No one eats cheese in Saigon unless they are a seventeen year old pizza addict from Cali. Unless they moved here from France.

Marriot’s New World Hotel, a gorgeous island of cool silence away from the cautionary street, had just closed down what appeared to have been a satisfying morning buffet, so we had to settle for a barely mediocre breakfast off the menu from a waitress who had expected that her shift would have ended when we showed up at ten-oh-seven. Ordering off the menu cost three of us $37.00 for old scrambled eggs probably off the now deposed buffet, coffee, orange juice, croissants and toast. This is more than twice what we paid for five times the amount and quality of lunch in Dalat. But these comparisons are rather worthless and display provinciality of mind. This circumstance is merely another episode of The Farmer and the Cook versus Beverly Hills. The thing to note is that at the New World we were also paying for comfort within the forty foot high glass walls looking out on a boulevard rampant with noise and exhaust. Later, at another place, we can’t order because the place smells of the sewer, cigarettes and engine fumes, and that will put you off your feed, partner.

Hotei, Christ, Allah and Vishnu

Room 503 by the Saigon River

1 January 2008

Hotei, Christ, Allah and Vishnu were in a bar in Saigon in the early afternoon trying to get their game back after the wildest New Year’s Eve party they had ever seen. They had danced and sang on stage and drank to their contentment of the fine rum made from local sugar cane. Jesus had lost his shoes and Vishnu had lost his girl. But there were more of both, somewhere. They had danced with all the revelers until their legs gave out at 2 AM, which in happy coincidence was when officials from the People’s Committee for District One pulled the plug on the amplifiers and the boys in lovely green uniforms with red epaulets began to politely shoo all the folks home to bed. Security had looked so kind without their helmets on.

Now the fabulously exalted beings were drinking beer, slowly, trying to put the wind back in their sails. They all knew there was a second wind out there somewhere. Hotei was buying, as usual, and drinking as much as any of them though he did not need the cure nor did he seem to have been more joyful than normal the evening before nor was he getting drunk now, but he was making sure everyone else had a full glass in front of them. They also needed some socialization.

“ Jesus, I did not know you could party like that.”

“ I do if I have a reason.”

“ So now you have a reason?”

“ Yes, I do.”

“ And you Allah, you really have some pipes!”

“ I had to distract myself with song, I have a lot on my plate right now.”

“ Vishnu, what happened to your girl?

“She sort of warned me long ago that she was infatuated with Ganesh. When I saw them together at the last, I just had to let them go. When it comes right down to it, he’s strong competition in this day and age. May he be stronger still. So good luck to them both. I will love her later.”

“ That’s magnanimous of you.”

“ Got to be. Things are pretty whack, Hotei.”

“ Yeah, man, aren’t you about due?”

“ Every century it seems so. Every generation clamors to be set free. But they really do not want it enough or they would stop acting so insane. Bombs. Genocide. Contrivance that kills slowly. They say they want to be free but they are too busy laying in the bars of their own prison.”

“ I thought that you might come to end all that.”

“ Like he did?”

They all turned to Jesus, who shrugged and then said:

“ You got it wrong. I came to warn, not to deliver. The thief in the night thing still holds you guys. Like they say: I’ll Be Back!”

“ I never liked that metaphor you know.”

“ The thief thing? Yeah, I never acknowledged it formally, but it stuck and now I have heard it so much I can’t help using it too.”

“ Yeah, we need to change all that. Take out the fire and the fear. We are not thieves. We come to deliver, not steal. Leave it up to one of them to get it wrong.”

“Maybe it’s the fear that causes all the insanity.”

“ No not really. The ones that are good are probably going to be mostly good, and the bad ones we will never understand until they understand themselves.”

“ No, I say cut down on the fear.”

“ Maybe we should get rid of Hell.”

“ Whoa.”

The notion was not new-what really is? But still, it was a grave prospect. Hell has it uses.

“ Yeah, Hell has not really panned out like it should have. We have better luck getting bad people to wash their hands after going to the toilet than we do warning them they will roast forever like a boar on a spit if they don’t straighten up.”

“ See, that is so unbelievable anyway. Boar on a spit….”

“ Yeah, who will fear that sort of anachronism when the end of a Nintendo game seems worse?

Allah really overdoes the intellectual thing sometimes, but it’s not his fault.

“ Well, that kind of imagery worked for quite a long time.”

“ But not on this bunch.”

“ No, they are so crazy that their bad is good and their good is so bad that they will never come correct.”

“ Allah!”

“ I need another beer.”

“ Make mine a Mojito.”

“ Yeah, four, no make that five Mojitos. I have a guest coming in a few minutes.”

“ Who?” They all asked Hotei in unison. They did not like surprises, especially when still hung-over.

“ You’ll see.”

Hotei, Jesus, Allah and Vishnu sipped on their delicious Mojitos but were careful to not empty their glasses before Hotei’s guest showed up. They had the good manners to not slurp them down in a few gulps even though they were the best Mojitos ever made and in nice tall glasses. They were like double Mojitos with a lot of mint leaves on top but not so much mint debris mixed into the liquid. The bartender knew better than that, especially with such a discerning crowd. He hoped they tipped well, actually.

The guest’s Mojito sat on the table in front of them and as they watched it, condensation slowly ran down the surface of the glass until a small puddle had gathered at the base. Still they sipped and as they sipped, carefully now, because it was sort of early to go for another and the guest still had not arrived, they sought to distract themselves so they talked about what might be in store for 2008. It did not look so good, but then again, when does it?

“ That’s a crummy deal you’ve got in Pakistan, Allah.”

“ Tell me about it. And they think that more punishment is the answer.”

“ Yeah, there is so much mayhem I don’t know who would be favored and who would be condemned.”

These coarse comments were unusual because of the festivities of the evening before but they nonetheless revealed the emerging truth, in that though the fullness of being might come, its delay was as wearing on its sublime agents as it was on humankind. At one point, they all knew that the waiting had gone on long enough for whomever Hotei had invited and when all stretched forward and gave a big sigh the ice in the guest-Mojito spun around and uttered a very slight clink. As the melted cubes swirled in the glass, of their own volition, in walked a slim, slight personage in shining white. All but Hotei exclaimed in unison:

“ Mother!”

“ Astarte!”

“ Shakti….”

They all sat bolt upright with a tremendous start that rattled the solar system, just a wobble really, but it made everyone at Pulkovo, Cal Tech, Lick and Lowell get on the phone to each other and sputter on for hours, without resolution.

Jesus, Allah and Vishnu did not have to ask any questions because they are far too smart to embarrass themselves when confronted with the obvious.

Avalokita, which is the name Mary-Astarte-Shakti always preferred throughout the ages because the Buddhist’s hadn’t been as heavy-handed with her myth, sat down in front of her drink but quickly slid it over to Hotei because she knew he would not protest.

“ I am surprised that you are surprised.”

“ Well, I thought it could be you…”

“Not me, frankly, we have enough divisiveness as it is.”

“ Maybe I can help change that. We all have to admit that things need a nudge.”

“ You can take over the whole shooting match as far as I am concerned.”

“ Bad choice of words, son.”

“ Right, but you know, garbage in garbage out with all the vernacular I am exposed to.”

“ Still…”

“ I agree though,” said Vishnu. “ We could use a jolt. I hate it when time really seems to stand still.”

“So it’s settled?”

“ I am down.”

“ I always was.”

“ Ok, so how about another round and let’s have some laughs!”

***********************************************************************

I have been studying Buddha having set aside everything I know about Buddhism. I was at first not reading any texts or talking with anyone about it, merely observing the temples and all the Buddha figures in Viet Nam. There are some words on these temples and monasteries but I understand few of them and those I do learn evaporate like the vapor on morning soup.

I then began reading about Buddhism online in the land of the Buddhists and the effect of the reading is new. The freedom to flip around cost-free is enormously gratifying. The demands of any religion are so great that free access to the information should be required. You also get to automatically learn of the nuances, schisms and splinters through the agency of Google and Wikipedia. Fairly free of charge. Normally this costs a lot of time and money and often, as once was sagely said, time is money.

In my own experience with the always troublesome relationship between money and religion, an abnegation of personal capital, thrown onto the roulette wheel/potlatch fire of belief, helps to free oneself. But if I had to pay it would be OK. I am just saying that dilettantism should not cost much. But on the other hand, tithing ended up being an act I anticipated positively. Come to think of it I am spending a fortune I do not have to learn about Buddhism.

Hotei, the unborn Buddha yet to be, is a good totem, a reassuring conductor. His statuary are very common on Viet Nam’s Central Coast near Ninh Hoa in particular, but he is welcomed everywhere. He is a souvenir favorite, of course. The Hotei spaces invite like a multi-colored fun house, but reverence still must be maintained. There the well-fed, bald, boldly painted, seated Jester in gaudy fleshy salmons, blues and pinks looks as if he has either just heard or told the funniest joke ever in the history of the world.

It was Hotei, also known as Maitreya in India, who allegedly counseled Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater to select Jiddu Krishnamurti as the next Jesus incarnation, which is of peculiar interest to people who live in Ojai, where Besant and Krishnamurti planted an important legacy.

I am not certain that such ideas could jibe entirely with Christian faith and scriptures, however, after 2000 years interpretations, translations and the frail operations of humanity have altered nearly all the great spiritual traditions. So who’s to know and make sense of it all? They call it faith. The inherent confusion in all of it is on display in any older Buddhist temple where the revered pantheons and sculpture and histories display just one sliver of belief. A Catholic church will do as well.

Hotei is described as a hoped-for facilitator of mass entry into Nirvana. The unborn Buddha who has big plans. His tradition seems somewhat Savior-like. There are different traditional incarnations of the Enlightened One. Buddhas have reappeared occasionally ever since Siddhartha, but all the Buddhists are not in agreement, of course on the question of who qualifies, and all in all that is not that important.

Mobility

2 January 2007

Saigon

1. Foot

The best way to safely cross traffic on foot in Viet Nam is to use one of the larger or slower vehicles, even a postcard vendor, or a crossing anomaly like a gaggle of fearful or unseasoned tourists as a cover, like a tight-end blocking for you up-field. The effect is like pilot fish cruising safely in the shadow of the shark. An antique delivery vehicle, say a rickshaw carrying banana leaves seven feet high and five feet wide obscuring half the lane is very good, so too is a municipal bus unloading, the bigger the better. Pedestrian sport in Saigon, however, is the street crossing Olympics, so if you can, it may be best to train in Da Nang or Nha Trang before coming to the big leagues. Provincial seasoning will get your fish-eye going and hone your intuition.

There are many ruses, gambits and tactics while crossing. Perhaps the most beneficial of all protections is the slowly arcing boulevard u-turn effected by taxis and the elite, particularly officialdom. When I see a 500 series Mercedes slow down on the right and the driver has his head out the window looking back toward the traffic he is about to cut off I know a generous circle of safety is being created. I became so adept at this maneuver that I could even aid my benefactor by inching into the first few feet of the roadway like a good pilot fish ( if anything menacing was not approaching) and provide minor assistance. Together we simply slide sideways across the equivalent of three lanes of traffic, all of which comes to a steady and appallingly patient crawl while we terminate our cooperative strategy. Other drivers don’t even bother to honk. Bicyclists halt impassively. Nobody hollers or even grimaces. I think it may be bad form to show you care. This dodge is especially useful at night when vision is impaired but speed has remained constant. Internal safety computation is usually achieved after a three to four day immersion in traffic when suddenly your intuitive guidance system locks in. The sensation is as magical as attaining your first belt in Aikido. It is described mathematically as:

2s X N/m200000000000/p { D } ( or) d
V-420/OK (gmt)

The formula is correct for all time zones in Southeast Asia. D ( Death) or d ( destruction) are always constant, no matter the hour.

Crossing is normally accomplished by jaywalking in the middle of the block. A slightly oblique angle is taken as one begins the cross. Fixing on a target which will increase your chances of survival at the terminus, such as a parked moto, is well-advised. One looks both right and left to observe the quantity and speed of oncoming traffic. It is not usually the first few moving objects that you will focus on but the pattern and composition developing thereafter. Is that seventh, speeding, moto driver threading just a little too much?

Traffic signals have their own special charm but they will hold surprise, for what we might call lawlessness in the west is mostly excused on the highway in Viet Nam. Motorists don’t exactly run the reds, they just got caught at the end of a natural pulse of traffic. Braking hard to comply with the light may be worse than just going with the flow. If perusing a crossing opportunity when a traffic light is involved, take care if 134 motos, 12 cyclos, five taxis and two minibuses are coming off a long red light because one might have better luck trying to cross the starting line of the Dakar 1000. You have to stay clear of the pent-up need to accelerate and get on with life if you intend to get on with yours.
A splendid introduction to traffic design in Viet Nam are traffic-light timers. They are boon particularly to pedestrians. Once a light has gone green, a highly visible numerical counter displays the time left on the green a second at a time until Time’s Up! STOP. The same is in place for the reds, in order to chill the gathering crowd and let everyone know that their time is going to come. 5-4-3-2-1….I don’t really need to remind you about that Dakar starting line phenomena again, right?

Always moving forward is the national mantra. One must never go back, when crossing, just as when living, because the lack of resolve will create a chain reaction of indecision and then flawed reaction that puts at risk not merely the entire flow of traffic but your safety, the safety of your fellow travelers and everyone’s appointment with fate. Don’t even feint. Unborn children meant to win Nobels in Literature or bring a future flood of cocoa to the countryside are at risk. You may pause out of deference to metal and momentum, but be blithe and appear unintimidated by your proximity to circumstances which will provoke serious injury.

Nonchalance is always rewarded. Inch forward resolutely and the cycles will oblige like swallows banking slowly to port when the leader’s seventh feather on the right tail foil flips down. Four-wheeled units may accommodate your presence, and may not insist on the right-of-way if hemmed in by slow traffic, but beware lightly traveled traffic circles, especially if you are almost in the clear because that is when variables are most numerous. Refrain from testing their braking ability at night, and as dear Mr. Jagger once suggested now long ago, if you can, wear white.

When traveling the area parallel to the street, use the sidewalk/pedestrian area as much as possible, taking care to zig and zag politely as you encounter sunglass vendors, book vendors with books strapped together ten-feet high, women who want to touch you, barbeque, soup and drink zones, tourists, locals on a mission, attendants in epaulets