The problem is that people are offended if you don’t want to drink their ice. I might as well come right out and say it… your dirty peasant ice isn’t good enough for me. Except that what I really want to say is, if you came to my country, you’d probably get sick from the tap water, too.
But it doesn’t matter. Most people here don’t speak English well enough to listen to complicated explanations of my rude behavior, and this is no time for simplifying complex issues. It won’t do to ask a simple question like, “Is it good ice?” The answer to that is always going to be an emphatic “yes!” It’s cold, isn’t it? Bad ice would be warm, and then it wouldn’t be called ice anymore.
Stupid tourist.
What I really mean to ask is whether the ice is made from filtered water. People here are scrupulously honest when it comes to questions about food, so if I am told the ice is made with filtered water I can count on that being true no matter how strongly the surroundings might imply otherwise. But if I’m not sure I am communicating that question exactly, I’m better off skipping the iced tea and settling for water.
If the water were cold, that wouldn’t be so bad. But as we wend our way south, further and further away from the large towns and into areas where refrigeration is less common, it becomes too confusing to ask for cold bottled water. What I end up getting is a glass of bottled water poured over ice. I give up and just get used to drinking it warm, even if I happen to see a frost box. It’s just not worth the trouble. When I sit down to lunch today, Mr. Tinh is already there and the waitress is tonging large chunks of tap ice into our glasses. When she gets to mine he motions to her and she stops. A moment later, an icy cold bottle of water, seal intact, appears at my place. Just what I wanted. He noticed! And he didn’t take offense.
That small act of kindness is the beginning of a more friendly relationship with the teacher group. Another of them, Mr. Duc, notices that I like the squash blossoms that are served with our fish soup, so he orders a whole extra plate of them. Later at dinner, when it is time to serve the rice, the tall thin one serves me first with a nice friendly smile.
Apparently, according to Vu, the teachers had been talking about me more than I thought. They would be chattering away and because they weren’t looking at me I assumed they were chattering about something else, but actually they were commenting about me. Such a big, clumsy American girl, they must have said. Vietnamese tend to be small, and the tables, chairs and serving spaces are small to match. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to put your elbows. I turn around and crash! goes somebody’s glass or my bottle of water. I pick up a piece of fish with my chopsticks and glop! it goes all over the tablecloth on the way back to my plate. I try, I really do, but I feel like a kid in my gawky stage all over again, my family just waiting to see what kinds of entertaining spills and crashes I have in store for them.
It is Mr. Ty, one of the drivers, who breaks first. I am trying to pick up a piece of fish from a clay pot about an arm’s length away. In my defense, the fish is still in one large slice with the skin and bones attached, so it is not easy to separate out a single portion with chopsticks. I finally have it, or so I think. I can feel my face shifting into a smile of satisfaction when somehow the chopsticks slip and criss cross over themselves. The fish goes flying and plops down in a very undignified way back into the saucy pond at the bottom of the clay pot. It is just too much for Mr. Ty (pronounced Tooey) and the stifled grin he was holding back breaks out into a quick but unmistakable belly laugh.
I join him and pretty soon we are all laughing at me together. Then Mr. Ty looks at me with sympathy and uses his chopsticks to pull at the fish’s skin so I can grab myself another piece. It turns out they have been worried about offending me, too. Having shared a good laugh together, we all become much more relaxed.
In spite of my clumsiness, the way we eat is really enjoyable and I do get better at it. The meal always begins with a small bowlful of rice served out of a central dish. Whoever happens to be sitting nearest the rice (or who happens to be hungriest) takes a bowl and starts serving. No matter how hungry you might be, though, you never serve yourself first. The first bowl goes to the person next to you. It doesn’t matter if the person next to you is older, younger, male, female, wealthy or poor. The teacher fills a bowl for the bus driver’s assistant, if that’s who happens to be sitting next to him, and if we’re the first two at the table, the bus driver fills a bowl for me. Once everyone has rice in their bowls, the first bite is always just a plain bite of rice. Then it’s time to explore what else the table has to offer.
All the dishes are served in the middle of the table with, in the Mekong Delta area at least, a large pot of soup at the center of it, still cooking over an open flame. At first it’s just broth, fish, and a few vegetables or chunks of pineapple. Next to it is a huge platter piled high with leafy things, flower blossoms and whatever else happens to be local and in season. No refrigeration means everything is really, really fresh. Everyone dunks whatever they feel like eating into the pot and takes it out when it’s cooked. As we eat, the broth gets more and more flavorful so eventually we have some of that, too. No two spoonfuls taste exactly the same.
- - - - -
The students have been slowly warming up to me over the past three days. Mostly I think they’re just shy. They should be practicing their English with me by translating the lectures their teachers give when we visit museums and pagodas, but they worry about their pronunciation or whether they have the right vocabulary. Tonight we just hang out together. We go for a walk across Ha Tien’s “floating bridge,” stopping halfway out over the harbor to sit near the water and eat bags of longans, custard apples and lotus seeds. The students have been dying to hear me sing and so far I’ve resisted stepping up to the mic on the bus, but out here in the middle of the harbor I go ahead and serenade them with an off-key version of “Country Roads.” They are wildly uncritical. For them, singing is such a deeply ingrained form of expression that they don’t seem to care a bit how it sounds. We are bonding… that’s what matters.
Vong had told me about a floating bridge. From his description I recognize it the moment I step onto its loud, unstable metal surface. It was made with some of the “gifts” left behind when American troops started pulling out of Vietnam. South Vietnamese who were suspected of having collaborated with the Americans were put in “re-education camps” during this period, where they did various kinds of manual labor to earn their keep. One of those projects was to tear up a runway that had been laid down in the jungle by the Americans. Tear up thousands of feet of heavy duty metal strips that had been welded together and do something useful with them. That was the order.Tearing the metal strips apart with only the help of manual tools and carrying them one at a time on their backs, the prisoners used the pieces to build a bridge across Ha Tien harbor. To keep it simple and make it easy to take apart again if they needed to – to impede Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge for example – they supported the bridge not with pylons dug into the bedrock below but by laying it on top of a long series of small wooden boats.
It’s been there ever since, and for a few hundred dong you can walk across it or, like we do, walk halfway across and stop to eat fruit and sing songs. Did I mention that the Vietnamese love to sing?
Vong knows so much about the floating bridge at Ha Tien because he was one of the prisoners who helped build it. Before we leave Ha Tien I take some pictures of it for him, though I’m not sure if he wants to be reminded of the experience. He recognizes it right away when I show him, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
After our walk on the bridge we take a bicycle cart tour of the city. Then I buy everyone a round of fresh coconuts and we sit around at the coconut stand sipping on them. It has been a good day.
I thought this trip was going to be one tourist trap stop after another – it’s a tourism school after all, and the students are learning to be tour guides – but nothing could be further from the truth. There are actually very few tourists along this route and almost no foreign tourists at all. The places where we stop are of interest to Vietnamese travelers, like the Khmerian pagodas around Soc Trang that Western guidebooks call kitschy. They certainly have a unique vision of what is sacred… green and pink pastel paint, sequins, neon lights, pink stuffed puppy dogs, giant candles that could burn continuously for seventy years, and everywhere, strobe-lit halos around the Buddha’s head, flashing sequenced lights in bright colors emanating into and out of the Buddha. Seeing these in person makes me wonder what the word really means. Is it kitsch if the people who make it are sincere and find it awe inspiring? Isn’t it an insult to refer to anything sacred as kitsch? A question to ponder later, when I’m not seeing things for the first time every place I go.
As we dig deeper into the tiny villages past Can Tho it is easy to see how infrastructure challenges limit most foreign tourists’ experience of the Mekong Delta to a day or two’s meander around the northern half of the region. The roads are in poor condition. The bus slows to a crawl over the worst patches and our average speed is somewhere around thirty kilometers an hour. There are small bridges everywhere… in some areas, river tributaries function more as streets than paved surfaces do. Often, the driver’s apprentice jumps out to inspect the condition of a bridge before the driver rolls slowly onto it to test its strength. The boy stays outside watching until all our weight is back on solid ground, then runs after the bus and jumps back inside before the door slams shut. Larger rivers don’t have bridges at all, which means multiple ferry rides to make it all the way to the Southern coast of the country. It is not convenient. A foreign tourist with a schedule to keep would not have the luxury of moving so slowly.
- - - - -
If the road from Can Tho to Ha Tien was bad, the road from Ha Tien to Chau Doc is even worse. We travel only about 100 kilometers as the crow flies, but spend more than four hours on the bus. We’re close to the Cambodian border and the residents are noticeably poorer. The simplest of them live along the river in houses made of bamboo and thatch with the addition of some corrugated sheet metal or a tarp if they can afford it. Those who are slightly more affluent invest in some kind of stilt or platform system to raise their home above the flood level, but in many homes I see the water mark from recent flooding well above the floor line. They just prop their belongings up and wait it out. If the house doesn’t blow away in whatever wind might accompany the rainstorms, they move back in when the river subsides. If it does blow down, their neighbors will help them build a new one. You can’t really lock your door when you live in a thatched wall house, so they don’t have many valuables to lose. People here are remarkably unattached to things. I like that.
In an area where even the water buffalo are thin and hungry, everyone seems busy. They’re making something, fixing something, selling something, cleaning something, watching over something. The women, especially, are always on the move. Men are more likely to relax over a game of checkers or rounds of rice wine after lunch. What I see very few of are beggars. Maybe there aren’t enough people here to beg from, or maybe it’s an innate cultural work ethic, but everywhere I look, I see people trying to make a living out of something. The result isn’t an affluent community, but on some level it works. The Cambodians, who make up about half of the population in this area, seem incredibly kind, friendly, unresentful, often smiling even though their lives, for most of us in the West, would be considered unacceptably simple.
With the poor roads, often only pounded dirt and pitted everywhere with potholes, not congested by cars but slowed by water buffalo, pedestrians, and various two, three and four wheeled vehicles, the vast majority of which are powered manually, it’s no wonder that there are few foreign tourists here. I feel really lucky to be on this trip with an all-Vietnamese group, looking at the things they find interesting, accepting the inconveniences that they take for granted, seeing their country as they wish to see it themselves, without its make-up on. My Vietnamese companions form a large group, but they blend in so well that I am hardly noticed among them. When I am, it’s clear that the locals haven’t seen many people like me before. Very few places even make a pretext of translating information into English so I rely on Vu and the students and teachers to explain things to me as best they can. Sometimes that works well and sometimes it leaves me unprepared, but I’m over the cold that plagued me the first day and I have learned how to pack for anything without lugging along everything so I’m more game for unexpected adventures like wading through bat infested sea caves half filled with water. Still, some things are tough to take without a little mental preparation.
As the bus bumps and jostles its way along towards the border with Cambodia, Vu lets me know that we are going to be visiting another pagoda. He is really good by now about letting me know what’s coming up but most of the names are still a mystery to me, even in translation. The bat pagoda has bats, and the cave pagoda is in a cave, but the details about how they got that way are easier to figure out when we are actually standing there in person. Vu had called this next one something like the “poppet” pagoda, or “pat pat,” or maybe “puppet.” I go with “puppet,” make sure I have my instant pagoda skirt (the big scarf) in my bag and go back to looking at the scenery chug by.
Walking up its muddy path, the first thing I notice about the “puppet” pagoda is what looks like an amusement park style souvenir kiosk. That seems out of place so I wander off the path a bit to have a closer look. Sure enough, piled up in the windows of what is shaped like one of the kiosks at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk are mounds of souvenirs, all more or less the same size and shape… the shape of human skulls. What kind of puppets are these, anyway?
Believe it or not, I still don’t get it.
“So many,” Vu says when I wander back to the path.
“At least they’re not real,” I joke.
“No, they real ones.”
“What?” Vu has such a matter of fact way of saying things. Real human skulls? Where the hell are we?
Outside, a small open air room displays photographs taken by the Vietnamese army when they finally got through and chased the Khmer Rouge forces out. Among other atrocities, three of them show the naked bodies of women who had been impaled through the vagina on bamboo spikes. One of the students runs back outside to vomit. The skulls in the “kiosk” had been carefully sorted by age and gender… eighty-eight of them had belonged to females between the ages of sixteen and twenty, my daughter’s age. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
My daughter had been reading a book about Pol Pot’s attempt at genocide recently, so I got a copy of the brochure for her even though it was only available in Vietnamese and Cambodian. I couldn’t help but think of her with my eyes glued to those skulls. Eighty-eight teenage girls just like her. She may have more options living in California in 2006 than they did living in Ba Chuc in 1978, but I’m willing to bet they were also bubbly and pretty and eager to see what life had in store for them, even if that “only” meant who they would marry and how many bags of rice they would harvest together. How must it feel to be completely helpless as your teenage daughter is tortured and mutilated before your eyes? And what makes some human beings so cruel and hateful that they would do such a thing?
The pagoda itself is not only a memorial to the past, but a place of prayer and education for the present. Its altar is one of the most interesting I’ve seen on my trip so far. Unlike most pagodas, where the central focus of the altar is a statue of Buddha, or temples where the focus is a statue of the person or people the temple is dedicated to, what stands at the center of the altar of Ba Chuc’s pagoda is nothing. Empty space. I think maybe it is under renovation but I want to be sure. “Where’s the Buddha?” I ask.
“There’s no Buddha here,” Miss Cheng tells me. “It’s a very special kind of religion. Not many people. They don’t have any Buddha.”
Nothing but emptiness, by design, at the center of the altar. Another thing I will have to read more about when I get back.
- - - - -
This is the last full day of our tour and we are topping it off with a visit to the Tay An pagoda in Chau Doc. We are lucky to get there as the monks chant their 4:00 pm prayers accompanied by various instruments which I find fascinating – a gong, a drum and a large, hollow wooden globe. As always, I can’t understand the teacher’s lecture to the students about the design and history of the pagoda so it is nice to shift my focus to music, which needs no translation. Mr. Tinh tells me later that the instruments and chants are used four times a day to call in guardian spirits to protect the Buddha.
From here, the question is whether or not to go to the top of Sam Mountain, or Nui Sam as the Vietnamese call it. It is getting late and the road is unlit, so walking is not an option anymore. Motorbikes are the way to go, I am told. The half dozen people who want to go agree to take motorbikes, so I go along with it.
Now I have to preface this by saying that I have read the stories about Western tourists being driven off by phony motorbike taxis, taken to some isolated part of town and robbed. I suppose the same thing could happen in a car taxi but legitimate cabbies at least have signs and meters and, if you’re lucky, ID cards to let you know that, yes, this really is a cab and this guy really is a cab driver.
There are fake cabs in Vietnam, too, but they’re pretty easy to spot. A little scratch at the logo on the door to see if it’s painted on or just a big magnet, a tug at the lighted meter on the roof to see if it’s attached or comes off in your hand. Does the cabbie turn on the meter without asking or does he try to negotiate a price with you? If he does have a meter, does it start at 12,000 dong like it’s supposed to? If you don’t like it, you just open the door, wait for him to stop, and get out. No questions asked. And even if you do end up in a “fake” cab, it doesn’t mean the driver is out to rob you, it just means he wants to operate his business without all the red tape involved in being an official cab driver. He’s just trying to earn a living. It also means you might pay a little more, but then again, if you negotiate well you might pay a little less. I’ve had it go both ways.
Not so easy with motorbike taxis. A motorbike taxi is just some guy with a motorbike who decides to give people rides for money. As best as I can tell, it could be any guy. All he needs is a motorbike and enough English to call out “motorbike, Madame?” and just like that, he’s in business. Does he drive well? Who knows. Is he insured? Who cares? Nobody is insured in Vietnam. Does he know the way? Probably. Will he give you a helmet? Don’t be ridiculous Does he follow any kind of standardized pricing structure? Nope, he’ll take as much as you agree to. Does he follow any rules at all? Apparently so, as I am about to find out.
Quite aside from the complete lack of regulation and aside from the whisked-away-and-robbed stories, the whole concept of a motorbike taxi makes me a little bit uncomfortable. Think about it. You sit down on the back half of a small padded seat and wrap your thighs around some guy you’ve never seen before. If you had anything other than his body to hold on to you would, but it’s just you, the seat, and this guy’s butt between your legs so you hold on to it with as much dignity as you can.
Now hold that thought.
So here we are, five of us in front of Tay An pagoda and Mr. Tinh is trying to negotiate the flock of motorbike taxi drivers down from $1.90 a person to 80 cents a person. Mind you, this is to take us up the mountain, wait for us to visit there, stop on the way down at a small monastery carved into the hillside, then take us back to our hotel, an excursion of an hour or more, easy.
My theory is, if I’m about to get on the back of the guy’s motorbike I don’t want to piss him off. I want him happy. I want him thinking, “Score! I got the tourist! She’ll probably give me two dollars and not even argue about it… maybe even tip me too if I’m nice to her.”
I’ll be nice to her. That’s what I want him thinking.
But no, Mr. Tinh is a hard bargainer and these guys are starting to get that cheap-bastards-let’s-burn-their-kneecaps-in-the-turns looks on their faces. Why did I pick today to wear a skort and flip flops?
We finally negotiate a price of about ninety cents each and off we are. Mr. Tinh’s driver takes off first and turns left down the street while the rest of us figure out which motorbike to get on. My driver races his engine and tears off before my feet have even left the ground and turns off to the right, then to the right again down a street that does not seem to be in the direction of the mountain.
Now let’s see if you’re paying as close attention as I am. Mr. Tinh’s driver went left… mine went right. Not a good start.
Never wanting to assume any malicious intent in others, I try to politely ask him if he realizes he was supposed to follow the others, but of course he can’t (or chooses not to) understand me. I drag one foot on the ground for a while and that irritates him enough to make him at least slow down. I must put in a plug for the K-Mart flip flops that I took from Stephanie’s closet before my Mardi Gras trip and have been with me ever since, and which are now putting up with the abuse of being dragged down a dirt road without any apparent signs of wear. Then I see Vu and Miss Nge racing down the street after us yelling something at me. I can’t make it out at first but then… yes, it is Miss Nge’s normally quiet, polite voice screaming, “Miss Patti, stop! Make him stop!”
That makes me concerned, but it also makes my driver speed up again. I am not worried so much that the guy will rob me. I don’t have much on me to take anyway and I know that Vu will keep following us no matter what if I am actually in danger. I just figure that no motorbike pursuit could possibly end well. I wonder how scraped up my legs will be after we crash and what kinds of burn marks the tailpipe will leave on my calf if we fall to the right.
Suddenly, a fourth motorbike, this one with no passenger loading it down, passes us up and cuts my driver off, forcing him to stop. I take the opportunity to hop off unscathed and wait for Vu and Miss Nge. What’s happening? What are they all yelling about? Are they telling him not to give motorbike taxis a bad name by robbing tourists and leaving them in the middle of nowhere? Good for them.
I should say that this was the first time since arriving here that I felt threatened by anyone. I’m sure I’ve been overcharged for things but that’s my fault as much as theirs because bargaining is such a part of the culture here and I mostly refuse to do it. If something costs more than I think it should I usually just don’t buy it. But physically threatened? Or even feeling that someone was trying to pick my pocket? No. The closest I came to feeling that was a little old lady who helped me across the street during my first few days here and I thought she might badger me for a tip or something after getting me safely to the other side. But she just smiled at me and went on her way.
“Just get on this one,” Miss Nge says, motioning to my hero, my new driver, or both.
“What was the problem with the first one?” I ask.
“No problem. Don’t worry,” and she bends over to put my foot on the peg.
“OK, but please tell my driver to stay behind you, not in front. I don’t want him to get out in front of everyone else when I don’t know where we’re going.” I remember some of the things my mother taught me about personal safety in unfamiliar places.
“No problem.” But this guy doesn’t show any intention of racing off ahead so for the moment I am able to relax and enjoy the ride.
Once the residential streets are behind us, the road going up the hill is, to put it mildly, unimproved. Small waterfalls criss-cross the hillsides and run off along the street. Sometimes the water is several inches deep. Later, we ride over more and more muddy patches… great, more mud, I think. Further still the pavement begins to crumble and eventually turns into a mix of pavement and loose gravel. As the roadway morphs from one texture to another, I wonder what each will feel like as it rips into my bare flesh if we skid and fall over, and what kind of scar it will leave.
I do manage to take my eyes off the road long enough to catch glimpses of the sunset each time we round the west-facing side of Nui Sam. As promised, it is spectacular, the Gulf of Thailand in the distance, bright green rice paddies in the foreground and a deep orange blob melting into the hills. It reminds me of my new creamsicle dress but I quickly put that image out of my mind.
We don’t stay long before heading back down again because the roadway isn’t lit. I am skeptical about flying down the wet, muddy, disintegrating road, but for some reason the way down turns out to be less unstable than the way up. I even enjoy the sensation of wind rushing through my hair and drift off for a while to thoughts of people back home, motorcycle rides I would like to take. I take a nice, slow, deep breath of clean southern air and… oops, what was that that just flew up my nose? Damn! There’s some kind of bug in my nose! And oh, so gross, it’s still moving. Of all days to leave behind my new smog mask. Now what do I do?
Yech.
The bug is a distraction the rest of the way back. I can’t get to my stash of tissues without letting go of my driver’s shirt with both hands and that is out of the question. Instead, I resort to something so disgusting I’m embarrassed to admit it. I take one hand off my driver’s shirt, plug up my right nostril, and blow. Hard. The way gross guys do when they can’t be bothered to use a handkerchief. With a bug of unknown size and species writhing around in my nostril, I don’t care.
So disgusting and it doesn’t even work. That bug is with me, or feels like it is, for the next two hours. During dinner I am so busy worrying about whether it is going to crawl out of my nose that I absent-mindedly shove a whole piece of fish in my mouth without checking for bones first. Wouldn’t my dinner companions get a kick out of that? After entertaining them all week bumping elbows and spilling things I would top it off by having a live bug crawl right out of my face during our last evening together. Are all Americans like this? And now I have a mouthful of bones to spit out for good measure. Wonderful.
I spit the fish out using my most graceful everything-in-my-mouth-has-to-go tactic – also a token from my mother, who didn’t teach me how to avoid getting into awkward situations but taught me well how to get out of them – and try to appear normal.
Back in my room, bug mysteriously gone for good in one direction or another, I decide that, all in all, I am glad I went up Nui Sam. If I had it to do over again I would probably do it as a hike, early morning, with a long stop at the cool monastery on the way down. And the dispute with my first driver? It turns out that his infraction was to push his way ahead in the cab line. Like taxicabs, motorbike taxis apparently line up in a self-policed sequence to wait for business. This guy jumped the queue, so the other drivers went after him to right the wrong. My “hero” was just the guy who should have been my driver in the first place, racing out to claim his fare. So what were they really saying while all that yelling was going on? Probably something more along the lines of, “Hey, you can’t cut in front of Minh like that. It’s not fair!”
“Well she got on my motorbike, so there!”
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have let her get on. That wasn’t nice and you know it.”
“Fine. Let Minh take her then. I didn’t want that big clumsy American girl anyway. She drags her feet.”
No comments:
Post a Comment