The Alpha Project

A long time ago

2005-10-04T11:14:00.000+07:00

I'm not the greatest blogger I know. I realise I haven't touched this blog in almost 2 months. Doubtless everyone who has ever read it has dropped off by now. But anyway I am going to add something now about the trip we took to Sapa with Connor and Bin. It is actually about a food we ate there. Black chicken.

There seems something sinister about eating a black chicken. Something sacrosanct like peeing in a church, hotwiring a hearse or defacing a picture of a Cardinal. It seems like the sort of thing you would do in a devil worshipping ceremony. Put on some red robes, funk your hair up and eat a black chicken, maybe afterwards put a curse on your kid brother so he has a hiccupping fit during band practice or breaks his retainer eating a taco.

I’d heard about black chicken from a source, and that’s always the way with these sorts of things. Someone whispers something in your ear, you find a note taped to the bottom of your chair, instructions are lipsticked on your mirror when you come out of the shower, or thrust into your hand in the midst of a prison riot. I was told that it was medicinal in nature, a local delicacy in Sapa and worth a million sins. Though perhaps my mind conjured up that last part after I suffered a blow from a dinner tray during the riot.

Where we went to eat I couldn’t order it off the menu. I get confused about that. If it’s on the menu and I order it off the menu, does that mean if it’s not on the menu I order it on the menu and it’s off the menu. It’s something that needs the UN’s attention (oh yes in these times more than ever, my inner worrywart is saying). At any rate I ask the waitress to get me one from the market just outside and after agreeing to pay for the whole thing myself, someone is dispatched to carry out the deed.

This is the first time I’ve engaged in anything so blatantly corrupt and I’m a little bit nervous. I make the mistake of blindly selecting some preparation off of the menu and I get the yips when it comes out hissing and spitting on a steel plate. I’m sure the lights dimmed slightly when they brought it over but it might have been a power dip. It’s hard to pinpoint satanic intervention mixed up with genuine electrical inconvenience when I’m so far from home.

The chicken is black. I mean it really is black, the skin, the bones, the feet and the eyes too. The meat though, senor, she is not (my inner Mexican comments). Her taste is sweet and woody, gamey rough with a lemony tang from the preperation of lime leaves she has been smothered in. My skin prickles a little, but I feel no turning from the light in my soul and I admit a little bit of disappointment about selling my eternal salvation so cheaply. It tastes a little like eating one of the Marlboro Man’s calves, the Marlboro chicken, or a sandwich smoked under the bonnet of a truck.

I actually expect a bit of damnation to oocur later on that night. It wouldn’t be the first time on the road that I’ve been struck down and the market the chicken came from looked to be the same one Ebola grew up in. Nothing happens however and I get to cross the threshold of churches again with nothing more than the usual burning sensation. Live another day I say.

Easy riders

2005-10-04T11:13:00.000+07:00

I should mention that the trip in the post below between Dalat and Hoi An was taken on the backs, almost literally, of two motorbike guides out of Dalat. They go by the names of Paul and Joseph, a remnant of a catholic education, and collectively they belong to a part of the Easyriders, a group who nowadays have a substantial reputation for taking tourists on rides through the country.

They’ve both been at this for over twelve years and are both members of the original twelve strong crew who started the Easyriders in Dalat. Paul is in fact one of the riders we went with five years ago on a trip from Dalat to Nha Trang. That trip was particularly memorable, so it was never in doubt that we would go back again. When we found out that we had some time off in early July we decided to ride around the Central Highlands, and we knew we would have to search them out again.

Paul is getting on now. He has the look of a man who has spent a long time outside. His eyes have a smoky tinge around the rims of the irises that reflect time spent searching the road and the horizon. An artillery officer for the South Army in the war and born in Dalat, he has spent a lot of time in the hills where we travelled. His reflections on the scenes before us swept in and out of the present to encapsulate a time stretching back into a distant turbulent personal history (including time spent in a re-education camp) and beyond to the roots of Vietnam’s existence. Joseph’s own reflections were often less dramatic - he told us he was lucky enough to be slightly younger and so was a student in the war years - a dry wit slept at the corners of his mouth and could be roused at his leisure to have us grinning about something or other he had just thought of.

Perhaps it was dangerous leaving at the beginning of the wet season. This was the reason that we decided to avoid the landslide prone Northern Highlands and go through the middle of the country, avoiding the coast. We asked around a bit about routes and roads to take, and gained some insight into what people we talked to had done or heard of. However, on reflection it would be difficult to choose a dull section in the landscape. Mostly the roads were perfect. The main highway that heads to Saigon via this inland route is virtually brand new, mostly built by the minority tribes. It has in parts taken over the old route of the southern inland highway, which was built by the French before the war, then partly left to decay, and finally effectively destroyed by the bombing.

Now the road is almost gleaming in that way that fresh tarmac does. It has taken over large parts of the Ho Chi Minh trail and, as such, inspires much of the type of thinking that I have reflected on in the posting below. The hill-tribes, minorities and farming communities that it passes through, between the big cities of Da Nang, Kon Tum, Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot, are remote and captivating. At times we were spellbound by the forlorn existence of some of these people, at others my breath was taken away by their sophistication, such as the time I wandered into a Rong communal house in a small dirt and pigs village. In the musty dim blindness of the sudden relative darkness I was stunned to hear the question “Would I be able to help you at all?” peep out of a corner in pitch-perfect English.

Some things that we saw couldn’t be given an adequate description so I hope some time to show some photos of things. If you are planning on making a trip through the area don’t be put off by the uncertain nature of motorcycle travel or the unfamiliarity of the country. Take the advice of using these guides out of Dalat and you will be in very good hands. Beware though of others using the Easyrider name to get your business and visit the Peace II Hotel to find the original group. Their collective experience, honesty and reliability are worth every effort to locate them.

Trails and Jubilations

2005-07-18T22:06:00.000+07:00

The Ho Chi Minh trail winds in and out through the jungle canopy some way below us. At times it is clearly visible, two tracks of rutted reddish earth breaking a path through the trees, at others it is completely indistinguishable from the undulating green mass of leaves, vines, limbs and vegetation that have overtaken every surface from the valley depths to the peaks of the encircling mountains. Ranging up and down the various peaks without effort, the jungle moves and shudders under the sweeping rain that is coming over the horizon. One side of the road is overtaken by the heavy clouds whose approach had come in, unhidden by the mountains and the storm moves sweeping up the valley, around the curve of the hillside and is now beginning to speck the road surface in large dollar weight droplets that thwack my helmet and hands as I reach out to take the raincoat from the rubber strap securing it to the back of the bike. The jungle movement convinces us that there are monkeys ranging in the canopy, leaping and scurrying about in the downpour, seeking cover. Any amount of life could be hidden there in the mass of vegetation. Watching us.

Soon the rain has closed in behind us and as we ride around another curve in the endless sweep of tarmac that has been stretched around the girth of the hill like a belt, it comes not towards us but chases us down the line of the road. Its progress is slow and colossal, an overwhelming surge that has swallowed the line of the crests it overtakes. Ahead though, the line of sunlight that demarks its edge is sharp and brilliant, a crisp line in the sky like a bright bird in the jungle green foliage. It marks the crest of a wave that breaks along the edge of the mountain and rolls back, content to devour the space it has already claimed and leave us to stand by the roadside and watch it recede, our eyes drawn into the mass of green that carpets the land, the trees whose shaking leaves quiver beneath the drops, and the mystery of the invisible hidden beneath such an enormously powerful force of dominion. The inevitable and determined plunder of nature left rampant and untrammeled.

In its past the trail had been the subject of the most incredible bombing in recorded history. The sheer tonnage of munitions that would fall on it staggers the mind. More explosives than were used in the entire Second World War fought over three continents were rained onto this trail. Rangers in groups of three were dropped into the jungle to search out and report on the position of the trail, a trail that moved constantly to avoid destruction. It is hard to imagine from a distance how terrifying it would have been to have been dropped into the unknown green mass of the jungle and creep up and down these mountains searching for the path of an enemy you must also avoid.

Then, beneath us by a riverside whose reddish waters indicate the birth of the wet season and the scoured mountain soil being dragged seaward, comes the trail again. Just as suddenly as it had disappeared under the trees before the storm began, it flashes out from the dark tunnel of the jungle floor to shoot across a rough concrete bridge over the waters and join us on the high side of the river.

Here, a waterfall cascades down the side of the mountain dropping beneath a bridge that now holds weeds and saplings. The waterfall and the bridge both hold a story of flight by the Cambodian King seeking sanctuary in Vietnam’s Northern Communist Capital from Cambodian marauders. Long ago he had studied and lived in Hanoi and, with the overthrow of his government by the ruthless and monumentally insane Khmer Rouge, he fled to the safety of his old stomping grounds with his wife. There they stayed under the hospitality of the government, till the time came when change brought the Khmer into retreat and they could return to Cambodia. Along the same road they returned and under this waterfall they paused to bathe and refresh themselves. The queen washed her hair and gave the nameless cascade a story and a name.

Cambodia is far behind us now, the road to it having forked off before we reached Pleiku, but to our left Laos lies some 15 kilometres over the hills. At times the track weaved in and out of Laos and we pause for a drink by a stretch of dark brown track that leads up around an intriguing corner towards the border, beckoning us to follow it to where it might lead. The crossroads here has birthed a small collection of houses and buildings servicing the people eager to make money by stripping out the old timber and searching the hills for gold. The land is dark enough to be almost blood red and it has a sort of arcane fertility that grows anything that falls on it. Where the jungle has been cleared the red stretches are planted with mountain rice up to the crests of the hills. Small women and men bend over in the distance of the peaks and pluck and poke the earth walking side ways up the pressing slanted slopes to keep there footing.

In one stretch of uprooted, stripped and burnt jungle, where hills shapes can now be discerned and houses and farms have come over it like a rash, we pause to visit a pepper farmer and his family. A balding man with a semi circle of hair that begins and fails from behind each ear and whose boys sit in the shade helping him mend a mattock’s blade with a hammer and anvil, watches us coming up between the pepper vine strung tree poles regularly spread over a field. Each pole speared into the earth is as thick a telegraph pole yet only half the height and pepper vines are hung over them like garlands. For each pole here a tree has been cut down in the diminishing jungle and new moves are afoot to replace the practice with brick poles.

The family’s dogs run about on the ground and their white pelts have been long ago stained by the soil to resemble red foxes with black patches. They caper in and out from under the posts of the verandah in front of a simple three room wooden house, plastered inside with motorcycle pictures on one wall all fading to that blue sun drained colour of barber shop photographs. The man was from My Lai a long time ago and his forearm is marked with a tattoo recalling the date he joined the Viet Cong, a fact he tells us carefully after finding out we are not American. We talk and smiles are exchanged as tea is brought out for us if we want to have it. His wife comes out to join us, moving with the aid of a crutch, her leg missing beneath the knee on the left side.

Along many stretches of the road farms have ripped up the jungle and replaced its chaotic supremacy with an ordered relentlessness of their own. Between the avenues of rubber trees we scoot through an area of heavy police involvement, where minorities left over from the American war clash with the government over rights to the land. Resettlement of northerners to the centre has been a constant policy since the end of hostilities. Those Minority people who sided with the Americans during the war think they fare poorly, disadvantaged by the influx of these settlers. Now the jungle diminishes further to accommodate more and more settlers and more and more land is brought into productive use by the government. Hanoi Pho restaurants advertise from signs in the small wooden towns, an indication of resettlement evidenced in the migration of this and other northern tastes. Dog is copiously advertised even in areas where five years ago we had seen none. Coffee and tapioca crops range alongside mountain rice and pepper in the search to exploit this naturally fertile section of the country.

The newly rebuilt highway runs alongside many hills that remain bare. Green and undulating in what for our minds seems a perfect picture but represents the legacy of defoliants sprayed in some areas as far back as 1964. Near Pleiku and around Buon Ma Thout, the sites of major exchanges of military adventure, the sight of ruined land is common and hills marked by concrete memorials signal events that now witness only the passing traffic and the occasional interested tourist. In Buon Ma Thout and Pleiku both, there are memorials featuring tanks. The revelation of the battle for Buon Ma Thout was these tanks, which stormed out of the jungle to take the town and surprise the south. It hadn’t been envisioned that the NVA could bring tanks, supplies and fuel over the mountains and into the city. After the constant bombardments of the Ho Chi Minh Trail it was thought impossible to carry fuel through or build a pipeline that could survive. The city was defended by a meager amount of troops after a deception played out in captured soldiers, misleading maps, decipherable communiqués and a feint towards the heavily defended Pleiku emptied it of troops and with the tanks involved it fell quickly leading to the eventual capitulation of the south.

Pleiku in turn was destroyed but this was not until later, and after the war the Russians rebuilt it so that heavy soviet architecture blights the city where it had once been blighted with combat bases and airfields. Now the deserted military airfield bumps over the same lumpy section of ground, overlooked by the same murderous hills and still pockmarked with filled-in bomb craters that goats and chickens wander over today. Beside the runway we stop for a drink at a tea stall, set up to catch the passing trade and occasional war tourist stopping to look at the runway and photograph the chickens. These chickens, the owner believes, must be the most photographed chickens in the world; more famous than she is that's for sure.

Emerging from the mountains we joined the coast highway at Hoi An, whose blasting sunlight and ocean breezes seemed removed from the cooler mountains and curving roads. Before joining the highway we had left Dalat, its surging tourist boom heralded in more hotels every minute you look and a cascading flow of money that sparkles in new motorbikes on every corner. Between the two seemed another world, a darker more implacable place immune to the changes that have overtaken these two tourist Mecca’s. The jungle is steadily being eroded but the changes that this will bring are not the sort which will bring tourists.

Before flying out of Da Nang's airport the sun scrolled out an orange sunset that back lit the mountains we had emerged from earlier in the day. The tarmac reflected the sky in a blaze of colour and as this fell into night, the flight, that would take us back into Hanoi exactly one year to the day since we had arrived, was refueling and blinking a line of lights settling the scene. It did feel strange to be back in the midst of an airport after emerging from the deepest parts of the jungles. The concession souvenirs in the stores seemed even more empty and hollow than they ever had, the TV that broadcast a Korean soap opera had a flat colourless tone, the other tourists who sauntered about in matching Tiger beer shirts and took photographs of each other in front of the sunset seemed strange and far away.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired

2005-06-23T13:44:00.000+07:00

I'm not entirely sure why I should start with this, I guess there is something of laziness in the decision, although i am of the opinion that approaching anything directly is the dullest method you can employ, for what it's worth anyway, today I am extremely tired. I have been eating fried sausages on white bread with Heinze Tomato Sauce on them for the last two days and nursing a cold into the world. My arms are so weak I find it uncomfortable lifting them both off of the couch. it so happens the nights have been unbearably close the last two and i haven't enjoyed a full sleep in days. Put together with everything else and I'm barely here at all, a spectre in all but appearance.

Last night Kate fell down with something as well. She has a stomach pain that is cripplingly painfull for short periods of time then dissapears. No idea what it might be. She hasn't been drinking that heavily and neither have I. She has been a bit discomfitted and needed the bathroom but it seems to hold no answers to what has gotten hold of her. Last night she spent a lot of time jumping out of bed and kicking me. Today she has skipped out of work and lain on the cushions watching one after another interminable film and trying to ride out whatever is going on. She's faceing the decision of wether or not to go to the doctor and all the palaver that involves.

A long time back now, almost a year in fact, she went down very hard with Dengue fever. One of the tropical things that sound good to talk about long after you've had them. "Ah, yes, that time I had Dengue fever. I'll never forget the visions....." all told to rapt attention from whoever it is that you are drinking with. At the time however it was quite crippling. It did eventually result in a night spent in the French Hospital. "Beware the French Hospital" we were told, "It's where the first case of Avian Flu died." Kate spent the night locked to a drip being revived with bottle after bottle of viscous liquids. By her accounts the hospital was one of the best she had ever been in. Better in fact than any she encountered in Australia and the first she had ever been to that had staff dressed like hotel bell boys with gold piped jackets and trouser seams you could cleave a bullock with. It was however an expensive experience. Nothing to compare with the ludicrous and obnoxious SOS clinic where we first went but rich enough to make us broke for the rest of the year.

Now she is sleeping and I hope she will awake feeling a bit better. She has eaten, though nothing more substantial than toast and watermelon, and I wonder if it will make enough of a difference to avoid the doctor altogether. It's difficult judging just when to best go to a docotr. Were it me I wouldn't go unless I couldn't sew back on the arm myself, or that head wound was making me too dizzy to ride around. But its not me and you can only take chances so far. Just now in fact as i write this she has staggered in again clutching her mid section. It seems like it comes once every hour or so and theres no pain the rest of the time even when poked and prodded.

A bad stomach is nothing new here of course. Both of us have had the affliction more often than we would like. We try to eat everywhere but its not as you would expect, the more expensive places tend to be the ones that turn you inside out rather than the ones slapped down in the gutter. Nothing brings it on quicker than going somewhere 'safe'. Its a little part of life here unfortunately. You do get used to things and less and less affects you, or the affects get less and less, but there is always a time here and there where you are dropped to the floor by a salad or a spring roll that's been through someones hands.

There is therefore no real cure for it. You get sick no matter where you go. And there is no way to tell when it willl happen. We of course avoid the warm meat in the sun and that fish the woman on the corner has been trying to sell all week but we eat out most of the time and there is no way of knowing how your food has been prepared or who by. You step into the factoring of chance and blindly hope that nothing bad will happen.

Kate has gone back to sleep and will see how she feels afterwards. I'll get rid of the cleaner and sit down with a book then see how she is when its over. Hopefully everything will be back to normal.

Break that rusty chain

2005-06-21T20:49:00.000+07:00

You rattle the chain. You turn the lock. Rust stains your hands as you walk the spot along laneway tiled with grease past smoldering cauldrons that spit and hiss and slip out the front into the street. There looks that measure and find you short line the roadside in jeans and shirts and you sweat. A line that’s seems to get repeated and repeated again through every day now.

The corner flowers rot and fill the air in a drainsides grim wet with greenish hair. A swarming runoff an over worked drain, chicken’s feet, the flies, the meat and basket ware, the calamity of the streets and the traffics blare. Don’t pause or consider hesitation there’s traffic here that entraps anticipation. So move through streets, and jumping sounds and hustling bikes heaving you round with the softest breeze to unfix the air. The sense that order has skipped might be there for a moment. And so the trees, bewildered, stand in somber contemplation of a wandering careless fool in streaming chaos that has the streetlamps devout limbless attention. The wind its got a move going on between the arms and through the fingers shaking the leaves making them limber. A second here a moment there then it leaves, disappears, dieing to renounce the shiftless air, loudly, alone in a bar somewhere.

The school rises from the street like a giant concrete flea. Felled by a stroke of deliberation on the part of an omnipresent politician who has become a city somewhere south of here. Filled with baking forecourt, miniature transportation and over run with children shrieking. Colours and numbers and numbers and colours then around and around a gain. Colours and numbers and numbers and colours and numbers and colours and colours and numbers. Break a moment and hide from hello’s beside the streaked and clipped teenagers in the photo studio.

Make it through the day. The crisp air conditioner the perfect reflection of the wine glass at dinner. You hunt through memories for adjectives. You sort through ends and scraps and second hand deliver something you might once have thought or remembered. Perhaps.

By night the air is the trucks roar. The prostitutes impersonate roadside repairs and you wander home dragging yourself three feet behind. You rattle the gate and throw open the laneway black as a hole in the ground. Walk the bike into the mouth of darkness and close its teeth behind you. Rattle the chain and open the inner gate and the rust is there to stain your hands again. Climb the stairs and flash a green spark from the fans switch. Struggle through mosquito net into coma-less sleep sweating on the sheets.

A little bit of nothing really

2005-06-17T12:18:00.000+07:00

Work has accelrated of late and we are both being pushed hard. The early morning which used to belong to us to squander in bed has now been overtaken and I'm up every morning before 8 and sometimes before 7. I'm getting my first class of "what colour is this?" or "In the morning I brush my teeth" before I have even recovered from whatever dream I was shaken from. It's good for the money and to be truthfull it does make me feel like I am using the day a bit more, however too early is too early regardless.

Kate has taken on some more work with a company and is doing tests for all the students. She complains that it is too much work getting it started but eventually will pay off I'm sure.

I realise that I haven't added much to this blog for a while and this is not becaus we haven't done anything. This stuff about work is an indication though of whats been consuming so much of our time. Other than that we have gotten out of town a bit. We went to Bat Trang just the other day and rode around there for a while. We managed to find a house with a flat concrete statue of a Mig fighter jet on the roof and a chimney shaped liked a concrete rocket. In a village that was basicly no different architecturaly from any other. They did specialise in ornamental plants and the fields were covered with them. The plane on the roof could have been a celebration from the past or a homage to some fallen soldier it was impossible for us to know. Just down the road from there was the cemetary, a section of which contained the war dead, the rocket however makes me think that it was a celebration of sorts. Long before many countries, other than the USA and Soviet Russia, had been to space Vietnam had sent a cosmonaut, a fact celebrated on stamps and posters of the time, and perhaps here in a chimney.

In the house we have flowers again. Lotus blossoms both white and purple are in the vase over the fireplace and orchids and small flowers i have no name for but look nice anyway. Soon we will be heading for Dalat where flowers are grown en mass and will have the chance to ride along the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Central Highlands in early July should make a nice cool change from Hanoi's humidity.

That should be enough for now to keep this blog ticking over. I gues this has really been the equivalent of running a car round the block to keep the battery charged and I'm sorry for that. I will try and write again soon, something a little more interesting.

Another iced mango

2005-05-19T14:40:00.000+07:00

A mosquito net, a lens cap, two kilos of mangos, a blender and four green fist sized avocados. Spread out over a week, and yet that list of purchases sums up the time neatly for now. It’s summer full, heaving, sweltering, bloated and confusing, it has landed with a ferocity marked with nightly storms, battering rains, murderous heat and the same sun you’ve got only bigger in size, vigour and vengeance.

Wiping out a winter that now seems hopelessly misplaced, the heat has raised the city with a shocking casualness. By noon the streets are empty as everyone cowers inside and we sit in the cool tiled interior of our lounge room and, to the hum of the fans, consider blending up another round of mango and ice to compete with dehydration. There has been a strange taste in my mouth for the last two weeks that’s coming across as decay or death or something, my body falling apart as it tries to climb out of its skin and hide from the heat. At night the mosquitoes had been callously hunting us until we erected a net to hold them at bay. And now by night we lie besieged beneath a flimsy canopy of nylon while the entire world flings its insects at us.

A few days before, I rode out along some new roads around Hanoi with the aim of making use of the brief space between noon and work where the tires could keep some consistency without turning to mush. I took the camera and slung it behind me to keep the filter on the lens as clean as I could without its cap. God only knows where the thing went. It took me an hour before I found something to take a photo of. A bunch of guys were stripping the rubber off a heap of giant tractor tires and I thought it was a chance to actually take a photo of some people literally evaporating. The young guy who seemed to be doing most of the work had his shirt off and was sweating. In my life the only thing that I have ever seen as drenched in sweat had just won the Golden Slipper, and the work itself seemed like one of those eternal torments malicious gods set for the damned.

Not much further along the same road were a group of men attacking a bee swarm with a stick. If they had a fear of being stung they didn’t show it. They were lashing at the tree with enthusiasm and soon the air around them was thick with bees swirling like a storm. One of the men, a thin grinning man, was snatching bees from the air and popping them into his mouth like grapes. It wasn’t worth a photograph but the sense that it was worth capturing in some way made me think at the time of telling you about it here.

I took some casual photos of ducks and pressing machinery, the latter out of some misplaced obligation. Nobody seemed to mind having their photo taken. The ducks were mute on the subject of course, but the pressing plant guy swung his hose back and forth in such an obliging way that I couldn’t tell him I was only passingly interested in the size and strange shape of his machine and not him.

I eventually got to work with just the briefest moment to spare, on the way back passing another road accident with a crowd of onlookers and a bike on its side. The murals on the other side of the road extolled workers holding hoes and rakes and marching across a back-drop of fields that in the real non-mural world were diminishing rapidly. The fields were all turning into blocks of apartments and more houses.

The roadside murals and signs that sprout up along roads project the fears of moral and social decay that get summed up in the newspapers as social evils. Heroin in schools, AIDS, running over school children with your motorbike. They are all hand painted with lumpish, plain and strangely coloured people who ignore the rules of scale for traffic and architecture alike. Their world seems to be a visually simple one where heroin dealers are misshapen, shriveled aliens and happy people march in threes in groups of unlike profession: soldier, scientist, farmer, minority hill tribe person, minority fisherman, minority miner, and so on. The gigantic size of the traffic lights in their world doesn’t seem to worry them as much as the meeting of the rice grower and metal machinist in socialist harmony. The murals themselves on the roads outside of town are often painted on small block shaped buildings whose purpose is obscured from me. The buildings sit by the road above the houses, isolated and ugly, painted in government colours with no doors in their openings or glass in their windows. They’re variously filled with, cattle, families, workers or nothing at all.

In my mind there is now one of these strange buildings sitting empty above a field of rice, a mural on one side shows the tire scalpers, the bee scavengers and the ducks marching across a horizon dwarfed by gigantic mango blenders and mosquito nets. Their sweat drenched bodies glisten in the sun as they set to dismantling the season and the heat before it evaporates what is left of the countryside. In my mind it’s beginning to be summer and I’ll note here that I have a feeling it may be more than what we asked for.

The summer of all things

2005-04-11T23:05:00.000+07:00

Every winter is new and every summer the same as the last. Or is that every summer is new and every winter the same as the one you forgot about already. It makes no difference I guess. The seasons change or at least should be changed, at least once every now and then, because even weather goes stale after a while.

For us the moment is long overdue, but the last two days saw a brief change. The sun swam in the sky, the clouds were vanquished, the evening brought a breeze that made your head swim, the balcony doors were thrown open and I sat for a night on my own in the house drinking beer, eating pretzels and feeling the breeze wash over me. Who knows where summer goes but when it comes back you have to love it.

Now if it can stay we will have got somewhere.

The fruit is coming out in force on the streets. Basket carrying farmers line the pavements around my house with rambutans, jackfruits, prize mangoes, green oranges, limes, pineapples, tamarinds, watermelons, mandarins and whatelse, none of them in short supply. The police raid the street with a loudhailer and a flatbed truck and the farmers scatter, running to hide around the corner or in a laneway, giggling and looking harried, only to return as soon as the heat is off. They work every day and some have dead chickens or pigs feet, laid out like dolls legs on a wooden board.

For this week Kate had been getting up for a 7am class of pharmaceutical employees and there, around the corner from the house, in what has always been a busy intersection of no note, was a morning fruit, fish and flower market we had no knowledge of. On the way home from dinner we went under Long Bien Bridge and bought oranges and rambutans to devour when we got home at midnight. The long curled spikes of the rambutans tickled our fingers as we ate them and our tongues tingled as we savored sweet white centers.

The fruit has erupted in force but it never really left I guess. Even in the middle of leaden winter there were green skinned oranges to juice and passionfruit brought up from the south. We could buy mandarins from one of the many headscarf wearing women hiding in our laneway or push through the crush of the market to get a mango or two to bring home and divide and consume. A week has passed since we bought the long green avocados that ripened on the kitchen bench in a day, turning from green to black in moments. The fruit now though seems new. New fruit for a new season.

Tomorrow there’s a chance the weather will be ashen. Today the sky snapped shut on us with a force and we remained almost totally housebound, stuck to the lounge, pinned beneath hangovers. The weather reports sashay back and forth. Tomorrow it will be 32 and sunny, Thursday 40 and hot, Friday cloudy and 23, Monday fog and humidity. They flit about between delusional extremes that never really arrive and people talk about the weather coming from Hong Kong with derisive despair as though it has been cast off or thrown at us. Today the specks of rainy mist clouded the air like flies, not rain. I had the balcony cleaned in preparation for something I’m not even sure will arrive. Nothing is certain other than that when it arrives summer will hit with everything it has.

I watch Nick at work like a barometer. His cool Chicago blood is too thick for the heat and when he begins to melt I’ll know to clean the fan and refill the ice trays in the freezer. Until then the limbo is terrible.

A fine lunchtime for a wedding

2005-03-25T10:47:00.000+07:00

I reached down into my belt and pulled out the pair of rubber gloves that were slung there. The oil in the air was thick blackening the fierce sun and I wiped some of it away from my brow before it could drip down into my eyes and surveyed the wreckage of the pipeline before me.

A geyser of oil was spraying thirty meters or more into the air from the ruptured head and the wind was taking hold of it throwing it back towards the houses and the school besides. This was going to be a tough one. One spark was all it would take to turn this world into an inferno and send us all to our fiery deaths. Armed with nothing more than the rubber gloves and a wet dishcloth I would have to tackle the beast head on before catastrophe could strike.

I gritted my teeth around the dishcloth and plunged forward tempting death to come at me.

“Mark?”

“Mark I have a question for you.”

“Um…yes Miss Nga?”

“After I get married how do I please my husband?”

“Er…”

Miss Nga got married on the weekend. It has been an event a long time coming. Due to astrological signifiers being unaligned and ages not meeting required metaphysical requirements it has been talked about for the last year or so as being soon to come but just not yet. Finally it has come and gone and things like how do I please my husband and what a “man blanket” is and why you need one in winter are no longer problems I have to deal with on a regular basis. Though now I know somewhat the feelings those who have flown single engine piper Cherokees through active volcanoes have encountered.

I’ve been to three marriages since I’ve been here and you’d think it was the only topic in the school. Whose getting married, when, why, to what and how. There is never a moment in our days in which this topic doesn’t seem to climb over the parapet.

Despite all this talk and dissection and constant preparation, actual ceremonies that we have attended have all been fitted into a lunchtime break at school. On the allotted day twenty or so of us mount up and ride our scooters to a house or a hall, descend on the tables like scavenging birds onto a packet of discarded chips, eat our fill and leave an hour or so later. There is little sight of a minister or any of that and nobody seems that worried for ceremony at all. Its not like the old days though, where you had to ask your superior for permission to marry and run the risk of having them say “No, I don’t think he’s such a good match. Why don’t you marry that young Christian in accounts. The one with the combover and hiccupping laugh. It would be much better for production.”

Miss Nga’s wedding was a small affair. There were about thirty of us all told including the family in the small empty cupboard, sorry school yard, where it was set up. It was casual enough in fact for the groom to not turn up at all. I asked about this seeming irregularity and was told he was going to come from his home village but had got a bit delayed. Nobody seemed concerned and when we had to leave an hour and a half later he still hadn’t showed.

Before marrying Nga had been worried about her weight. Not the traditional brides dilemma of fitting into her dress, but rather the opposite. She was worried about being to small and thin to get married. Nga has had a bit of a dark childhood; shadowed by dead mothers, evil stepmothers, deadbeat dads, little food and abandonment. And though her sister is quite strong and well developed Nga herself weighs about three grams and is less than three centimeters high. She’s in fact shorter than Kate who few can claim to be and she constantly points out seven year old children that are bigger, heavier, taller and denser than she is. Nothing will ever make up for the poor diet she had growing up but she desperately wanted to put on weight for the wedding.

When she first met her future parents in law her aunt draped her in three sweaters to hide her slight figure. Looking somewhat like a furry melon on legs in the June heat, she sweated and wilted her way through this tense encounter carrying plates of food and throwing around compliments all the while melting into a puddle beneath her coverings. No matter how much she complained her well meaning Aunt wouldn’t let her take them off. This jockeys regime of torturous endurance and sweaty suffering did nothing to fool her future father in law though, as one of the first things he said to his son was whether or not the bride might be able to carry a child. Presumably he followed this worry up with one about her dress sense in the middle of summer.

With the worry of the wedding coming up she lost even more weight of course and though she looked the part in her white wedding dress and makeup she altogether weighed as much as the glue eyed chicken sitting on the wedding table waiting to be consumed. I went a round with that chicken later on and can say that thin though it may have been a mouthful lasted you a good hours worth of chewing and even after death it was giving nothing up for free.

Meal devoured, groom absent, bride a wafer and beer sunk we rode off again to go back to work. Like a socialist Disney musical we work, we wed, we work here and nothing interrupts the progress of any. A few days later back at work I saw Nga and asked her how things were going now.

“Everything is good. I have gained some weight, and I’m very warm at night now, thankyou.”

On an aside J.C. told me of another incident with one of his colleagues. Apparently this woman turned up to work one morning looking quite chuffed with herself. She was rampantly smiling, bursting into song at all moments, dancing her way down the halls and generally prancing about with glee. Some inquiries regarding this unusual state of elation yielded little result to start with, but persistent arm bending and cajoling eventually brought out the facts. It seemed she smugly announced that her and her husband had been tangled up last night and had bizarrely stumbled upon something incredible. Mind-blowing. Devastatingly fantastic.

It was while they were tossing around that they ended up turned all around on each other. Her on top of him but the wrong way him facing head towards her feet and of course her facing head towards his. Then they took hold of whatever was in front of them and let passion run its course. Incredible. She hadn’t stopped smiling since.

At this everyone in the office without exception burst out laughing. 69. She had smugly rediscovered 69. Hooray! They couldn’t stop laughing all day. Needless to say now she has a numbered nickname and has to put up with a moderate amount of ribbing over her naivety. Not too much however. After all she is one of the top sharpshooters in the country and with another woman in their office goes off training every week.

Fifteen years to life

2005-03-01T15:16:00.000+07:00

A story in the weekend paper talked about teaching life in some of the outer provinces. The writer traveled out to visit some teachers who were living in the mountainous interior. He traveled out to the Da river then took the mail boat for six hours up river to where this commune was located on the isolated side of the river in rough jungle.

There he went to visit the school where the teachers worked and lived. The school itself was a small wooden sided and thatched building and near to this lay two houses that the teachers lived in. All 26 teachers lived together sharing the space. Single teachers were allocated a bed to share between two of them but married couples are allocated 4sq.m or enough room as they say for a bed and a desk to prepare lessons. Single teachers prepare their lessons on the dining table.

Teachers rely on students to supply them with wood for the stove and they rarely have anything to eat other than rice.

A quotation reads "The nearest market is 10km away, but if we go to Hang Mien it's 15km by boat. The markets are only held every 10 days so we can only ever buy eggs, dried fish and peanuts." All fresh food that they eat they have to catch. The only way in or out is by the mail boat. When the head teacher has to leave to go to district meetings or collect salaries he has to borrow money so he can buy shrimp to bribe the mail boat captain to let him on board.

The school is short of teachers still and most of the teachers who are there are from the plains of the red river delta. To overcome loneliness many have formed relationships with each other and married. The ministry of Education requires that all male teachers who are posted to the mountains must stay there for 20 years, while female teachers are there for 15 years before they can teach on the plains. But if they marry, they're unlikely to ever leave.

Take Away Chicken

2005-02-25T16:43:00.000+07:00

Over the rainbow

2005-02-24T15:36:00.000+07:00

They eat Ga snacks and Choco-pie and at times seem like they are from another world.

It's a world of order and ranking, where younger is addressed as "em" or "chau" and older "chu" or "co". That is older than you but younger than your parents. Older than your parents is "bac" or "Ba" and "om" if they are very old. And there is more "Chau", "Em", "Anh", "Chi", "Chu", "Co", "Bac", "Om", "Ba" like the notes of a scale, fa, so, la, ti, ba, om ..... but then it changes all over again when you get married, because then it depends on the age of your husband, and in fact your name, if you are female, changes to "Em" meaning younger, even if you aren't younger but older. And teachers are "Thay" and "Co" not "Chi" or "Anh" or "ba" or "fa" or "la-ti-doe". It breeds complication in multiples and is all like science fiction to an outsider, like stumbling into an isolated colony in the pages of a book.

In the outer villages the children are named after something offensive until they are seven or nine or somewhat older, to ward off evil spirits that might bring disease or early death. Children might be called dirt, or pig or penis or worse and tradition in certain parts means newborns are insulted rather than complimented.

"Your baby is so ugly."

"What a pig!! Oh my god I feel like cutting my eyes out."

"How does such a scrawny neck hold up such a pumpkin of a head? If it was mine I would bury it under a tree."

The more vile the insult, the better. You're not interested in the baby. You think that it's inconceivably disgusting, a runt, and an animal. Your not going to come around when no-one is home and steal it or kill it out of jealousy.

And then when the children get older they get a new name. Something nice like flower, or sunspot. The new name is the one they start telling new people, and the old one is kept for family if they want to use it or discarded like a shell. A childhood name for your safekeeping, it's more science fiction.

Future supernova eruption flaring off the coast of Hoi an

2005-02-18T17:11:00.000+07:00

Hoi An Old Town

2005-02-18T16:41:00.000+07:00

Fishing Nets on the River In Hoi An

2005-02-18T16:35:00.001+07:00

The Japanese Bridge- Hoi An

2005-02-17T16:46:00.000+07:00

Captain Pugwash

2005-02-16T17:13:00.000+07:00

Hoi An

2005-02-16T16:17:00.000+07:00

We rode the train back from Hoi An through sun cracked afternoon skylight along a horizon brimming with clouds. All of us in our own way, were quietly soaking up the last of our holiday while the train rocked back and forth in that semi drunken sway all trains have. Past the windows rushed rice fields and beaches and despite all the abundant spectacular scenery and mood of drifting sleepiness, nothing could have been more obvious to all of us than the fact that we were heading in the wrong direction, going backwards away from where we wanted to go. A morning work alarm clock was ringing somewhere and the clatter of the train tracks couldn't begin to drown it out.

The sun outside had been holding itself out against the clouds just as it had all week. For days on end it had shone without a hint of winter, whole and round in the sky belting out all day long, those clouds that now sheltered the mountains had closed in only at the end to send us off with a flurry of thin rain. The clouds now swept in to cover the distance behind us as though securing a door. Hanoi ahead would be as empty of light as it had been for the last two months, cloud driven and hopeless, and here above us still was the last breath of sun we could savour while it clove apart thunderheads in the far distance and steamed the air in shafts like steel.

It had been high sun that we lay under on the beach at Cao Dai and drank in like parched whalers. By day we had wandered the small trading towns streets and looked in at the wharf side buildings whose wide open fronts and gaping balconies had made us feel an openess that the dimensions of Hanoi lacked. The street signs and buildings said the city is old and was old and had been old for a long time, a port of call for the Chinese and Japanese merchants who brought goods in through the centuries and slowly intermingled with the locals setting up homes and families and bringing with them their architecture and their bridges and their food. They had widened the scope of Vietnam just as the priests from India before them and the French invaders after. They had all come and gone and what remained were the things they had brought with them.

In the train it wasn't difficult to configure the differences that were overtaking Vietnam even now. I read in my magazine that the minimum wage for public servants had been increased to 290,000 dong a month, roughly $20 USD or $26 AUD for the train staff in the corridor outside. Bribery and soft money go a long way towards making up this wage if you're in a position to receive it, but a brakeman on a railroad doesn't get a lot of opportunities for back handers and so makes do on what he can. On the road running parallel to the tracks a Korean bus, that would have been old if it was fifteen years ago, was keeping pace with us as we slotted through villages and fields. Just as it would draw in front of us another small cluster of low concrete buildings loosely clustered together would appear and we would catch back up as it slowed down to accommodate the town. These buildings, all single storey and small, most no more than one room, were ubiquitous everywhere we went. They allow little for cold weather, which is rare this far south, but they could hold out a decent typhoon, which is a much more likely outcome. Considering incomes mentioned above they represent a significant advance for the country and a satisfying improvement in living standards for most. Doubtless after the present stage has passed on it will be these buildings that will remain, and a way of thinking and memory of achievement. The newspapers reported Vietnam as being one of the few countries in the world whose general population anticipated future growth and improvement over the course of their lives.

Beyond the older quarter of Hoi An these self same buildings had been built in lots of the villages surrounding the town. JC and I had ridden out of town onto a dubious island the day after Tet began and, after rejoining the mainland unexpectedly, we found enough of these to shelter for doomsday inside of. We rode on through green, green rice fields, empty of people thanks to the national holiday, yet still staffed by so many long necked white cranes that we had stopped to take photographs of the scene. So much green in the fields that it looked, if anything, insincere or indulgent particularly with these white birds who strode about in lab coats moving through the shifting stalks, sticking their heads out before themselves when they walked in gawky hiccuping strides. As a scene it was incomparably photogenic, big sky, big fields and colour straining at the seams, however it was all being mocked by five six years olds in a roadside shack three hundred metres away blasting out tinny mickey mouse karaoke with a set of "Way Loud" speakers and twin duelling microphones. They were flexing their squeaky vocal chords around some pretty atrocious pop songs at a volume set to shatter stone and could have cared less about the same old boring field they saw every day of their lives. "Way Loud" by the way was the brand name of the speakers.

If the kids' distractions gave a little indication of how low the field was on the top sites for the village, then it was soon after fortified by an old lady who came tottering up the side road to correct us. She walked the five hundred metres from her house to where we stood, to purposely instruct us about what was really worth taking note of. JC who had been taking photographs of a sluice gate had his sleeve tugged and his attention diverted to the dirt track and the houses beyond from which she had just emerged. He said hello in his best Vietnamese and then through a struggled conversation of points, mimes and misunderstood questions, figured out that she wanted us to follow her and that it was the best possible thing we could do and that if we thought the sluice gate was something and the drainage ditch we had been inspecting was spectacular, we were about to be in for a real treat. We of course duly climbed back on the bike and rolled along behind her.

For the duration of our slow trip down the track towards the village we talked about the concrete houses, and the small decorated pagoda that stood near the begining. The woman moved incredibly slowly which made it difficult to follow her on a motorbike without actually overtaking her. In our minds it occurred to both of us that maybe she was taking us into her house for something, or had some Coke to sell, which would have been fantastic at about that time. JC considered the likelihood of her showing us the MIA US marine she had been keeping locked under her floor for the last thirty years. She led us on though, past the little stall with warm Coke bottles in a house front, and past the other houses along the dusty track. We rolled along chatting and wondering, pondering what could possibly be here when, with no further fanfare or announcement of any sort, she pointed off to the right of the track at a smallish, thin and not particularly spectacular cow, who stood there looking over his rump back at us. Right then. So no Coke, we concluded.

She had wandered off at the same explosive speed she had been going and without any further interruption disappeared into a house. Village life is of course slow and it's no surprise then that expectations of a better life here are higher than in countries who have already seen so much change occur that they can't imagine any more. The new cow was probably, for her, something spectacular. On the train, the majority of passengers in the sleepers travelled six to a cabin and smoked and drank to pass the time. Food came around in sealed plastic containers but was largely ignored or toyed with while everyone waited for the trip to go by till they were home again and they could eat a real meal. In the cities the pace of change was coming faster than out here and most could see a future where they were flying home for Tet rather than cramming into the train. Beyond the padlocked doors of the soft berth sleeper and soft seat carraiges people on the hard seats were looking forward to moving up the train themselves, and so it was, all over the country. People seem to be genuinely looking forward to new cows and better times all round.

A train ticket can represent quite a large outlay of money for some people. Tet is perhaps such a spectacularly well loved time of year because so much money is suddenly flying about. A lot of wage earners recieve an extra month's cash now and most others receive some sort of bonus amount. Giving money away is also as big a part of it as recieving money. The small red envelopes of lucky money shoot out quicker than the hands offering them and everyone seems happy and smiling. Children get the most, with a new born being worth their weight in cash. Quite a lot of children give the money to their parents and amounts over $10 USD are rare, but still the amount of extra money flying around is evident everywhere.

After inspecting the cow in the village we moved on to find a dice game in full flow, surrounded by a scrum of children throwing down 1,000 Dong on the results. The two dice were made of paper and hidden under a bowl and plate and a selection of animals and figures were coloured onto them. The children were frantic and having a great time, every face eager and excited. I bet twice and lost 6,000 Dong on the damm fish before getting a good enough look at the irregular shape of the dice to move on, vowing to come back next year and take the little punks for every cent they had. Gambling and its pal drinking were blowing around everywhere. The idea that drinking in the morning isn't on has no taker in Vietnam. More than obvious is that Tet is one of those rare times when everyone has a holiday, everyone has money and everybody wants to drink. Tent Karaoke was rampant out of the town, as was being drunk in a tent yelling into a microphone. The sound of this would travel for miles around and no matter how bad the singer was nobody seemed to care.

By nightfall, the train food had come around again. The light outside had left abruptly without much notice as those clouds swallowed up the sun before it could reach the horizon, robbing us of a sunset. Hanoi was drawing nearer with its seasonal fog and heavy chill, a thought best avoided while we settled into bed and played twenty questions to pass the time.

Our first hotel in Hoi An had been a make-do choice. The cheapest place in town you end up in when you're passing through, two beds pushed together to make one, with a single mosquito net stretched to cover a section of the middle barely half the bed wide. The noise on Tuseday night, Solar New Year's Eve, of motorcycles roaring up and down the town had been industrial, and with the shower allocating water like a rationing we sought out better digs as soon as we could.

Food had certainly been more of a pleasant diversion. With a country still fragmented by a slow and difficult transport network, and a history long enough to accentuate differences, most areas of the country have their specialities. In Hoi An they made white steamed dumplings and noodles with pork rinds. The restaurants around the town reflected the wealth that tourists had brought there and most of them were of excellent quality. Wealth though did not solely lay in these, bars were making a roaring trade and here another of regional Vietnams peculiarities was always evident. In Hoi An the beers available were Larue and Larger, and none of the Hanoi beers could be found anywhere. Larger lager featured a logo of the Japanese covered bridge in the centre of the town and was scarce amongst the tourist sites. being mainly the beer of choice for the locals. Drunken backpackers were heavily indulging in whatever beer they could find and the mood in some of the bars reflected just that. In our hotel there was a sign describing appropriate behaviour in the hotel and the town. Decorum in Vietnam is reserved and dress covered. The scenes in some of the bars were rioting through the regulations at a sprint. One of the rules for the hotel is that prostitutes or smelly things are not permitted in the rooms.

The centre of the town had been made a UNESCO world heritage site due to its ageing architecture and historical significance as a trading port. We drank coffee in one of the older houses from the French occupation, overlooking the river amidst croaking frogs and puttering river traffic, and it wasn't hard to imagine yourself being back in another time, amongst the fortune trading expatriates who had been coming here for centuries. On the other side of this river, where the architecture leaned towards concrete and bamboo, the locals continued in more modern times to sweat and work to get ahead. In search of Larger Lager JC and I sat in one of the locals restuarants watching corn fields and drinking while a fishing bird dove repeatedly into the shallow water to spear fish on its short sharp beak. On a later trip through the same area and further afield, Kate and I were invited to eat lunch with a family in their plywood house where a table laden like a brewery truck sweated to keep its legs underneath it. Important or beneficial guests are a necessary portent for the future year during Tet. Here, the pigs and the chickens strutted around as they always had and the Unesco listing had had little impact on the village life beyond the confines of the town, but a new year could bring anything.

The French have come and gone now in Vietnam, unlikely to ever strongly return. A long time prior to their arrival however an earlier civilization had been driven out of Vietnam. Taking a diversion up into the inland hills we had visited the temple complex of My Son ( Me Seoonn). A Champa temple site built from interlaced red bricks sat upon the most purple-red mud you could imagine. We spent a morning wandering around the decaying ruins of this Hindu influenced Cham civilization. Similar in style but the traditional enemy of the Angkor people, these temples sit in a classic jungle setting and are the spiritual home to a group of people who still exist in Vietnam, testament to the number of sub groups and minorities that the land is home to. Every year a large festival is held on the site to honour the ancestors as well as many armed or elephant headed gods that once commanded a land unknown to the west in its time, and a people who were driven from power, influence and importance by time as much as by their enemies.

As the train ran on through the night we continued up the land, progressing through the thin strip in the middle over which much of the American war had raged in oblivious darkness. It is the focus for many of the tourists who come from America in particular, but is largely empty of debris. To speak to most Vietnamese you get the impression that most of what they are interested in is in front of them. We spend so much time looking at ancient buildings and ruins, but these things are to the Vietnamese what remains in place after history has moved on. People seem more concerned with history in the making and seeking this out than searching through the wreckage of the past for satisfaction. History rolls onward and onward, for a brief concieved moment you are in front of it and for the rest you are behind it and for the briefest moment of all you are within it, with your chance to do something with it. Tet is the time of new beginnings, resolutions and determinations, a period of looking forward into that future and writing it.

We slept fitfully in our bunks as the train rolled on and were awoken as it entered the outskirts of Hanoi. At 5am the night was still dark and mist could be seen creeping in around the buildings. The station with its usual assortment of harrassing cab drivers almost broke us as we stumbled about sleep still clinging in rags to us, and when we collapsed into bed we drew tight to one another to warm up. We set the alarm clock and fell back into sleep.

Everything fits on a motorbike

2005-01-29T01:18:00.000+07:00

Photo thanks to Mark Lowerson's brilliant photography skills while travelling on the back of a motorbike! Harder than you might think.

Sooty in the lands of corn and Christ

2005-01-28T15:33:00.000+07:00

Winter entered its thaw this week. The sun flashed in a sky so unused to accompaniment that it shocked us to see blue in it again and we decided to take to the roads around the city for a stretch of the legs.

Over the main bridge from town, the river runs below you as a reddish brown strip cut with barges and long river boats running back and forth and up or down it. At its middle, a wide stretch of brown, buttery, rich-silted soil sports corn crops. On either side the banks have been mapped out with small plots growing an assortment of vegetables and plants. Start to cross and it's a hustle of maddening traffic, but you then get into the country even before you've made it half way.

On either side of the river run two large dykes to prevent flooding and the main roads along both sides run atop these. The city side is a busy four lane or more throng of trucks and bikes that threatens at every moment to completely entangle you in the crisscrossing tentacles of its traffic. The other side, running south, is a homely two-lane stretch of concrete and gravel that is randomly homicidal in the casual way of farm machinery.

The roads running off of the countryside dyke diminish rapidly into thin concrete strips in the villages close to town, and rutted dirt roads that heave you about with carnival ride abandon on their way to farm plots or dumping grounds. It's true though that even in the city you can find dirt roads that weave about through the rougher parts of town. Those muddy patches take off suddenly from the main roads, shooting down brief openings between a pair of buildings. They slither on between narrow low houses and past shuttered doorways, curving back and forth over uneven ground only to burst out again on the other side of the city to join another main road. They give the opinion of having been opened up overnight by industrious locals capable of shifting buildings and parting concrete, or having simple started off as cracks between paving stones on footpaths that have progressed with time to become common paths and will eventually become roads in their own right. They make you think that perhaps all the roads had been created in this way, as the city cracks and expands like clay in the sun.

It wasn't far out of town that we came across a small village whose centrepiece was a large church. The church was built in 1913, according to its front, and had the flowing, curling embellishments of a pagoda, draped like the tails of a dragon about its traditional rectangular block and towering spire. They bordered the sides and slid across the front without overwhelming the Christian design. Down each side of the building, rows of palms trees had also been planted. Behind the church and down one side, a woman was drying corn kernels on the flat concrete, taking advantage of the sun while it lasted.

In fact the entire village there was corn and Christ. The former spread for drying wherever we looked and the latter represented by crosses over doorways and on rooftops. This, and the heady embrace of Christmas we had witnessed over December, made a mockery of the US State department's 90 day warning given to Vietnam for abuses of religious freedom over Christmas.

Before we left the village Kate got a glimpse of a dog being roasted on a bed of hay. We went back so that I could see, but by then it had been covered up and the new hay was ready to be lit. They did offer to share but we declined. The dog was no bigger than a suckling pig.

On our way back to town we came across a charcoal maker building bricks from wet soot. He had taken a mass of this from his barrow as we approached and, combining it with sawdust, he pushed it into a mould that he pressed down by hand, to turn out round bricks with holes in the middle leaving them to dry in the sun. His hands and feet were pitch black from the work and he had made a few hundred of these round burners that make up the majority of the cooking fires about town. He didn't mind our attention, though perhaps found it a little peculiar to find himself in the spotlight all of a sudden. This was the first time we had seen anyone doing this and Kate took her new camera out and took some great photos of him.

tintin

2005-01-28T15:31:00.000+07:00

tintinbomb copy, originally uploaded by MJE.

Tin Tin works some magic over a piece of unexploded ordinance - All apologies to Herge

Too cold to sleep on the desks

2005-01-13T14:34:00.000+07:00

Today the mercury hit its highest mark at 7 degrees. A bare and thrilling temp that had us hopping about on the tiled floor of our house. At eleven, my boss rang to inform me that the little kids wouldn't be coming to school today, it was just too cold.

Children here tend to go to school for about five or six hours a day. They go in the mornings or the afternoon, and at lunch they, like the rest of Vietnam, take a nap for an hour or two. In winter when it is too cold to sleep on the concrete floors, they sleep on top of the desks. On very cold days when the temperature gets below 10, they get to have the day off if they want to.

The schools, as I mentioned, are concrete. At lunchtime the sound is incredible. The reflective concrete resonates any noise, and the constant screaming and screeching of children playing, fighting and shouting booms over the neighbourhood. It seems as if you have come across a caucus of parrots in full voice, the voices boom out into the air, scaring rain from the clouds and real birds from the trees. Put a hand up against the outer walls and you can feel the foot thick concrete moving in and out like speakers. Children living in this world develop thick calloused eardrums and voices that can drill through sheet steel. The standard of building used to construct these schools was honed by bomb shelter makers during the American war and can withstand a nuclear detonation.

Speaking of which I don't think I've mentioned the recovery of a bomb from a village in the central highlands last month. It is still not unusual for bombs to be dug up, particularly by farmers, and Hanoi is littered with small and large lakes created by the bombing of the city over thirty years ago. The announcement of a bomb being found would therefore not attract too much notice if it weren't for the size of this particular incendiary. This particular bomb weighed in at 5.5 tons, about equal to 3 Mitsubishi Magnas and a Holden Barina piled up together. Over 3.5 tons of explosive was removed from it, after they dug up hundreds of cubic metres of soil and rock to get to it. To give an adequate comparison, that is about the weight of 35 Westinghouse 520L fridges, that is the hefty size of fridge. The previous biggest was a contrastingly lightweight 1.4 tons. They estimate that there are still 300,000 tons of unexploded ordinance still ticking away here and children and scrap metal workers are still killed by it every year.

Notes on Winter

2005-01-06T13:33:00.000+07:00

Winter here came suddenly. Without precursor we went from sweat inducing temperatures of around 25, down to 10 overnight. For a brief time this is where things stayed, while we huddled under our blankets and burnt all our firewood, then it jumped back up five degrees or so and things became bearable again.

As a temperature of course it's not very low at all. Nothing to compare with the frozen wastes of the northern part of the continent, or Alaska, or someplace where removing your clothing at all is something they only do before burning your deceased body for warmth. However the bathroom has become uncomfortably like an ice chest in the mornings, and the mornings themselves are fast disappearing before we rise for breakfast. Last Monday in fact, breakfast only came at 4.30 in the afternoon.

Although the women have shown of late a love for knee high leather boots giving the streets a brothel like atmosphere, at nights they dress fairly poorly for the weather here. The women can often be seen hopping about in skirts and stockings with younger girls wearing less, as is the norm everywhere. The men all wear hats, the older men favouring berets and pork pies and the younger men Nike or Adidas beanies. A new jacket I've seen is a type of pea green, elephant corded thing, that looks brutally ugly in a wrecking ball way. It's bulky and lumpy and screams prison issue and has a slight popularity. Nothing in comparison to a Manchester United shirt though.

Winter hasn't stopped everyone from eating out on the streets. As a city, it is set up for outdoors living. Most restaurants popular with the locals are open door affairs or more often no door at all. Most people just pull up a footsool to a plastic table that has been set up on the footpath and eat there. These sorts of restaurants spring up in the early evening or at lunch time and then disappear again until the next day. In the busy areas footpaths often serve two masters, as it were. By trading hours they have a shop front where people park their motorbikes before entering, but by night these footpaths have been changed into restaurants, teeming with guzzling patrons churning their way through steamed crabs or fried tofu with mountains of noodles. Most restaurants will have five or six small tables and one or two persons serving them, however there are also the basket carrying women who sling a whole restaurant on a pole over their shoulders and set up for one or two people at a time, wherever they stop. They keep four footstools in one basket with some plates and a flaming charcoal bricket in the other under a pot of boiling stew or soup. They carry the whole affair around the city, stopping here and there all night.

In people's homes there is very little in the way of insulation from the cold. Most people's rooms are very open and many don't have glass in their windows. To ward off the chill shutters are closed up and doors unopened so that these rooms become little boxes. They must however be cold boxes as they are all concrete, with concrete floors and thin mattresses often sitting directly on the floor. The restaurant beneath us has no bedrooms at all, well actually no rooms other than a dining room, as all cooking is done outside and the only real room they have is reserved for the patrons. At nights the staff roll out a bedroll and sleep on the floor beneath a thin blanket. Most of the staff seem transient and the life is quite hard for them here in the city. What lures them though, is the promise of a better life than in the country, so how grim that can be I will leave to your imagination.

Luckily there is no great wind so, though it is cold, it could be worse. The skies however are a formless continuity of grey. They closed in over us about three weeks ago and apparently won't lift again until March. The bleak mood they purvey is limited to lack of sunlight, with little in the way of rain coming from them.

Coincidentally the cleaner just arrived with a man to deliver firewood. Two heavy cords of wood for 52,000 dong about $4.50 AUD. That should warm things up for us.

The transparently offensive Golden Child

2005-01-05T20:43:00.000+07:00

The new teacher has begun to grind on everyone’s nerves. His colourless obnoxiousness, highlighted by a dull appreciation of his situation and the country he exists in, is starting to pull at everyone's reserves of patience. Stalled in the process of becoming a police officer, he had been handed a job at the school by his father's best friend, the coincidental owner of the school. To him, the country is a backwards castaway from colonial times, foolishly thrown away by an ignorant people. It took him barely a moment to distance himself from every person he met. His blunt thoughtless manner did little to cloud a dim wit and a slow mind.

“I think he knows he’s stupid.” someone told me.

“Well, you know man, it’s not something he hides.”

“I think that somewhere in his mind, the old reptile part of his mind, he knows it. And he’s developed that booming voice to cover it up. He just hypnotizes people with it so they don’t say anything back. Like a tiger, you know, roars to keep it's prey from moving.”

“They're like too stunned to talk to him.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, I know how they feel man.”

The nickname he has is one he was given even before arriving, The Golden Child. It seemed a bit unfair at the time, and everyone agreed not to use it when he arrived, but it turned out to be spookily appropriate.

Stunningly obnoxious, if he had been raised by the KKK they couldn't have done a better job. From Git'ton, Twatsford, or Lower Wanking Tosser, he's about twenty two, thin like plywood and taller than me at about six foot seven. He also has one of those receding chins hermits hide, or that geologists cover with beards. The Police, he told us, put him in a two year holding pattern for training, a somewhat incredible story English friends have said, whose immediate conclusion for refusal by a desperately short police force had been - Ahhh rascist!

So why the hell am I writing anything about him. Well, he might be staying longer. It seems that he's somewhat given up on the Police now, after realising that, to quote "any old Asian woman can get a job in front of me." So he wants to stick around and do more teaching. It's going to get interesting around here soon.

The Nose Knows

2005-01-01T10:53:00.000+07:00

Tu's first Birthday- Tu has two

2004-12-29T10:57:00.000+07:00

The Silly Season at The Spotted Cow

2004-12-29T01:16:00.000+07:00

Starvn - The Window Cleaner

2004-12-28T21:00:00.000+07:00

The true miracle of Joseph Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness", and there are a few in there, is that he wrote it, not in his first language, but his ninth. Language was something he was a bit of a marvel at and he got around to mastering four and dabbled in five others. The fact that he then went on to write one of those few literary classics still enjoyable after roughly a century in print, in his non-native language is stupendous.

He's not alone of course. Nabokov wrote some novels in Russian that were translated into English then others in English which he self translated into Russian. "Lolita”, with its subtle dexterity of language that earned its own somewhat fairy kingdom title of "Nabokovian language", was written by a man who could have quite easily done so in three different tongues. He also found time to discover some previously unknown species of butterflies while he did so. That thought alone conjures dexterous images of him scribbling nasty pen portraits with one paw, while thrashing the rose bushes outside his study window with the other.

Few born holding the language write in English as exceptionally as those two and the list undoubtedly goes on. Tolkien after all invented a language to write parts of his novels in, then he went on to insist that the whole thing was pronounceable, grammatical and, in a fanciful moment, useful.

Perhaps I think it’s so spectacular because of the problems I am having teaching children the basics. I think it would have been easier at times to have written my own autopsy, or at least help out in some ways. I doubt if there has been a moment in the last two years where I have had a complete grip on the situation and, if honesty is truly a worthy characteristic, I confess to more than one time within there where the situation was almost entirely ungraspable.

Words in the English language flap about like mudskippers drunk on cherry brandy, driven by a system that seems perverse or cruel or worse. They total a huge number I'm told, perhaps 60% larger than most other languages. Semantically, they borrow from just about every source, manipulating and mangling the ones they don't understand and completely inventing others when they need to infuriate the French.

At any rate when English stands up at important gatherings it claims a structure and a reason based on solid rules. Nothing is true in that however, and so teaching it has taught me. English is the largest single addendum page in history. It did after all invent the phrase the exception is the rule, and what a twisted piece of work that one is. A self-negating piece of mental shrapnel. In fact there is not a rule that is a rule. There is not a rule that isn't more of a guide in the loosest form, the sort that lose their way and the boat they’re in charge of, damming all, drowning the worst. For example (and I only want to give one of these or we'll be here all day) think for a moment about when to add 'the' to a place name in a sentence.

Got a rule in your mind.

Does it go something like this? 'The' goes in front of places that don't have a capital, in order to tell your friend what you are talking about. You don't use it for names, unless of course it’s a big thing like the Pacific Ocean or the San Andreas Fault, or the Moon or the Sun as there is only one of these. But, once again, not for Jupiter or Mars even though there is only one of each of them and when you think about it they’re both pretty big. I guess it's there for the Earth, but only if you seem to want it to be, not in sentences like "Earth has made some terrible mistakes". Rivers have a 'the' and mountains if there are rows of them like the Alps or the Pyrenees, however not if they just want to hang out on their own looking cool like Everest, K2 or Kilimanjaro. Buildings get 'the', however they then drop it if they have a capitalised title as in the sentence "Lets destroy Sydney Opera House." However you can just as well get away with saying "I'm going to destroy The Sydney Opera House" and nobody is going to take you to court for it. You can go home, but not go to the home, unless it’s for the aged, and you can go to court of course, but you just can't go to police station unless you have a bit part in All Creatures Great and Small. You go to sea as a sailor, but live near the sea if you’re a seasider. You go to prison after court to serve time, but go to the prison after church to serve lunch to the prisoners, unless you go to the church after prison to hide out when you break out. The Cape Tribulation isn't a place and neither is Cape of Good Hope. The North and South Poles are there but not The North and South Americas. Big boats like the Bismarck have 'the' off the forward bough, but not little boats like Brindabella. The Sudan is a place but not The Wales. The West Indies but not the West Germany. The Hague, not the Paris. The Yemen but not the New Zealand.

And let’s just stop there, shall we?

I did cheat a bit because I looked up some of these things in a grammar dictionary but solely because I spent a fruitless hour and a half trying to explain them all to bemused students who expected their teacher to know something. More fool them. I guess you get the bombastic point though, the rules of English are bursting with whimsy, caprice and other words my thesaurus knows. As a rule a little like a romance novel. Characters full of bluster, situations without reason, circumstance and chance seemingly determining everything. But then again rules are made to be broken.

Anyway Conrad wrote fulsome literary worth in five languages and I found a window cleaner called "Starvn" today.

Stay Gold, Ponyboy

2004-12-25T10:55:00.000+07:00

The Kris Kringle theme was gold for under 50,000. That's dong, not dollars.

Christmas Day, Tu and two Marks

2004-12-25T10:00:00.000+07:00

The German

2004-12-22T15:30:00.000+07:00

The German has a shop on the corner down from our house. In children’s book fashion he is a peculiar man. Round faced and self-amused he keeps a cat tied to a string under the tree in front of his shop.

He sells us water from time to time and, by the looks of things, makes his living from drinking whiskey. He is Vietnamese but speaks to us in German because, well, we don't know Vietnamese. The poor animal he has mews sad notes to accompany the traffic and in turn looks either forlorn or abandoned. In a place where there are no shortage of ways to diminish your personal space and life’s processes are all carried out within elbows distance of everyone else, the squeeze on a lowly cat gives little room for stately dignity.

In fact the night before last we saw another cat at a party on the roof of a friend's house. The party was small but had three musicians playing in a corner, one had a flute the width of a pipe, one a short square guitar and the third hit a strung box with small hammers. They needed shoes with curling toes and bluish hair teased up into space to become the Dr Seuss characters their instruments meant them to be, but they sounded spectacular. In a corner of the roof was a cage the size of two dishwasher boxes with another cat in it. Dr Seuss, Dr Seuss, Dr Seuss.

The cats though are all thin and meatless like birds. There is not a loose fitting coat amongst them and though there are enough rats for an army, I haven't seen a cat with a paunch yet. The size of the rats might in fact be the problem. I've seen rats that I can only describe as medieval in size and a smart cat who took one on would be wise to do so from a distance, using a rocket launcher.

Cats get taken for walks around here but seem to clamber no human attention. Dogs always look for a meal but never for a pet and chickens are just chickens same sense as anywhere. The traffic blindly hurtles about like sheets of tin roofing in a hurricane, yet you catch chickens that wander through the middle of it, seemingly oblivious to the cascading chaos, imminent death or onrushing dissection in moped form that is pelting towards them.

Sweeping animals aside for a moment, the traffic statistics that I've read are monumental. They speak of fatalities that would blanch a coroner, occurring with the regularity of ad breaks during the cricket. Some of the newspapers print them on the back pages along with pixilated and blurry black and white photographs of the scene. Seeing as how the photographs often include bodies or smears of dark grey matter leading from a spot on a road to under a bus, it is a blessing they are not in colour or distinct. They don't publish the causes, but I'm sure a significant number of them are chickens.

Roses at the flower market

2004-12-15T01:17:00.000+07:00

Hanoi flower market

2004-12-14T22:25:00.000+07:00

When I lived in Lismore I liked those moonless nights that would cover the sky in stars. A moonless night free of clouds was always spectacular. The nights seemed vast and deafening. I saw specks of meteors flaring over the hills trailing greenish tails that would wink out of existence moments before reaching some distant hills. It was something only possible where light was sparse and time slow.

The stars and sky were vast, something I had never encountered before. Beyond the dome of light that always covered the cities they had been there but always invisible and occluded, distant and ineffectual.

In Hanoi I marveled at the noise. It would wrap around my ears and cloud the air, as dense as a swarm, coming in ceaseless waves. Then at night, riding home drunk with beer, the road empty and welcoming, the sounds would have all left. The city would feel empty and solitary as though everyone had packed up and left the stage. Then the sound of my own engine could fill a street, the drop of my feet onto the path bounce around inside the walls of the alleys.The scrape of metal when the gates heavy lock gets pried from the wall could seem immense and warning. In the same sense that the stars had remained hidden by the lights of the city, I got to feel that this silence had always lain hidden behind the noise that crowded the air. In that late night emptiness you get a sense of ownership over the world. You can stand alone in it and feel peacefully happy.

When parties would spring up, the local Hanoi Vietnamese in turn spring from their chairs at 10 o’clock and unanimously leave. Meals get eaten early and lights turned out before 11. Most often the gate to the laneway is shut before this even and lingering in the bars beyond always involves a spell of sitting in darkness while the bar feigns emptiness to patrolling police trucks. Early to bed is the rallying call.

Mornings in contrast are exasperatingly active. Badminton courts spring up on sidewalks and in parks, as masses of shuttlecocks dive about through the air. Bowls of soup and noodles in oceanic proportions get divided and conquered from footstool like chairs on the concrete while shoe shine boys send flurries of brushes rising and falling, the bows of an energetic black polish orchestra intent on removing scuffs, scrapes and scars from footwear.

I felt compelled at night. Somehow the emptiness drives you towards a goal you have no secure impression of. Too drunk or tired to actively participate in conversation or actions, I would often find myself willingly being coerced into late night forays to the flower markets, out on the major Dyke road far from home. Here at 2.30 or 3am the day seems to have its beginning. The motorbikes and bicycles would arrive straddled with vast bundles of flowers and in the weak streetlight of the Dyke road weave in amongst each other searching for space to prop and stand, allowing their owner to wander off in search of beer or food.

Roses come in vast quantities with their petals singularly clasped in a newspaper hood tied with grass. The reverent look they then possessed delicately contrived to prevent damage on the long journey here. Irises and Gladioli’s come in bundles thick as the trunks of trees, heavy enough to send bicycles weaving in to a stop. Here before the day can really begin and night still holds sway in darkness their colors are muted and dim, yet by day they break through the static roadside chaos of the stalls, and the traffic, to draw in buyers with sudden flaring colors. Color it seems begins here as well, in the muted streetlights from the Dyke.

At night we always arrived before the market could begin in earnest. At the times we would be there, you could watch the market being constructed, the space of what by day turned into an empty parking lot for the motorcycle market that slept next door. We seemed to always arrive before selling had begun, the earnest business of trade would begin after we had left. We saw the edge of the torment and got to enjoy the breeze that stirred the night. We were spared the later flurry of blusterous energy, when the real buyers came in to cut and quarter the price of each petal down to a fine bone. When we went we bought armfuls of flowers for a pittance and drank watery icy beer from the stalls between mouthfuls of rice cake or noodles.

There where the city seems to begin the noises are low, the conversations muted by tiredness and darkness. The hustle would flow out from here gaining strength from the day and the throngs of people rising to meet it, till awakening sober and aching next morning you can see the bounding chaos of noise and activity that had been born in the emptiness of a parking lot along a near empty road at the edges of the city.

Going to Ba Vie Mountain

2004-10-07T10:52:00.000+07:00

And it was a scorcher!