Thursday, August 29, 2013
VN note August 30, 2013
Change of plans. No Cambodia this trip. Found a small town in Soc Trang province where five rivers meet and some very nice people, Khmer.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
VN note August 25, 2013
Xe om
Reluctantly Saturday Kim persuaded me to travel with tour bus to Ben Tre.
The convincing brochure omitted any mention of visiting a coconut farm to watch the manufacturing of candy. Driving south, the Saigon river to our left, the guide picked up a karaoke mic and shared the itinerary for the day. I would miss only the final lunch event when I ditched the company in Ben Tre after some water travel out of My Tho with visits to a honey farm - the guide Hum likes honey - a trip in a big boat - Hum in means tiger in Vietnamese - transfer to a small boat sized for no more than five - if you are a pretty girl Tiger will share a boat alone with you and take special care of you because trust me Tiger does not lie - and a coconut farm where we'll watch local people make delicious coconut candy - yes you Westerners who like sweet things are not alone we Vietnamese like coconut candy yes yum.
The bus stopped forty minutes outside of District 1 near Ben Luc, a third of the way to My Tho. WC (water closet, toilet, narrow little thing) and coffee carts. Six buses. I'd rather roast in the sun than listen to Tiger tell more stories.
To make matters worse just as soon as he had the chance Hum picked up the mic and began a thirty minute lecture in botched English that sounds like a pinball hitting rubber bumpers how VN relies on the Delta for its food, how of the 88 million population 22 million live down here and other statistics that bear mentioning until he started in like a teen sports fan with statistics on rice production capacity and export markets in competition globally. Fine again though no mention of the actual agrarian issues such as sowing, harvesting schedules though there might be three per year bc the delta rains are normal and unaffected by typhoons like north in the country. Hum was fine again I was holding out patiently. Then he turned back into Tiger. Thailand is number one and India is never two and Vietnam is number three and always will be the third largest rice producer because India and Vietnam cannot compete with Thailand and they never will and .... Tiger does not lie. No you can trust me Thailand will always be number one and ... Tiger does not lie.
Dear reader, if you feel a loss of altitude we have just descended to sea level.
Fourteen minutes and thirteen seconds after the microphone off button barely made an aural snap the bus pulled into a My Tho parking lot to become totally randomly normalized among no less than twenty other buses. We were disembarked en masse along side a large tourism building that I'm sure is the only industry in Vietnam that competes with rice production - the stats on that economic race were apparently saved for the return trip. Two hundred people stood around looking at the alluvial wash of a milk chocolate colored river where some boats of various sizes would take us somewhere and perhaps separate from the love boat Tiger had arranged with a lucky pinball playa.
The phrase for get me the fuck out of here is spelled like this: toi muon bat xe di ta Ben Tre bang xe bus.
Actually try it and there will be great uncertainty among groups of three or more working people sitting along a roadside who either have no formal education or can actually read and write better than a couple of tourism agents in an ac office buttoned down in polyester. The term bat is outdated; nobody uses this word thing I've written a ta which might actually be meaningless; and the word for bus is buyt.
About seven thousand tourists take the same pre packaged trips a day mostly from Saigon where the stay in guesthouses or upscale hotels like Kim or the Caravelle. Where mat weaving demonstrations take place the weavers only look busy when groups pass by and at night they undo the weaving and recycle the materials the next day.
It was about 80/80 in the partial sun for a three kilometer walk in a general direct the polyester duo set me on.
Of the fifteout hello with a twist of outstretched handlebar hands the last one was the best. All got a subtle smile, more that you get from me in Saigon, which probably added to the gloom of the past couple days. This guy asked where I wanted to go and I said Ben Tre (pronounced them as bun tree) and with a small laugh and an offer on his moto; when I declined and walked five fucking feet he shouted then that the bus station was directly on my left.
of the people standing around no one knew where i wanted to go. didn't know where ban tray was either and being tourism illiterate my note made no sense so a couple pointed to the list of destinations and the very bottom was where I was going; the only bus without need for a ticket; the passengers were infected with laughter and my banshee destination and when I mumbled can mon instead of cam on for thank you two women rocked on their torn vinyl seats. A large Buddha of gold and a stand of burnt incense stick stubs was on the dashboard.
The ride for an hour cost fourteen thousand or seventy three cents US. The clutch to the bus also warrants an expletive so take your pick. At one point the kid collecting money and closing the door almost shut with his foot took a very large spanner wrench and screwdriver to the underside of the buyt beneath the driver. This mechanical adjustment was necessitated following his check in the engine from a trap door below the deity. The women never stopped smiling when our eyes met and I haven't so non-cruised in a long spell.
The bus dropped me off at just the right place though I didn't know it. Going to the Oasis hotel without an address meant finding wifi. Wifi meant finding someone young to point out a router friendly place. That was going to be the Vut Uc hotel according to eye glass vendors in a cute shop that could have been on Court Street. Walk that way turn right then left. And the first hotel I came to I met Tam (pronounced Tom) who gave simple directions across the river to Ken's place. I tried to thank him and walked off then paused, turned around and went back to his small tourist agency determined not to let bad experiences get me down again. By this time I had become obsessed with xe om bikes and since talking to a Canadian economist in Saigon who bought one for two fifty US in Hanoi and sold it in Saigon for one fifty I was salivating but hesitant when I asked Tam two things: how to pronounce Ben Tre and it was possible to buy a moto. his suggestion to rent one sounded great. and why not rent. Of course he knows someone who rents motos and looking at my excellent map (International Travel Map by ITMB Publishing, Vancouver) settled with her on four days. Six hundred thousand or thirty USD and I bought a new helmet for five hundred thousand or twenty five US and I rode over the bridge to Oasis where I met Ken as he was rebuilding a pump he designed and built, I shook his greasy hands without pause. He likes the map too and turned me on to a trip south in the afternoon to Ba Tri in the southern Ben Tre provence. Down there, there he said, thirty km away they don't know what to do with whites because they never see them and if the police stop you they'll think the worst because what else would you be doing there. Kens from New Zealand his wife Hien is Vietnamese. Nice guy and warrants the praise you'll find on his website.
It's Monday morning at seven and the ferry to Tra Vinh I've wanted to take leaves at nine ish. Ill take the moto on the cargo boat that stops at the oasis pier. They'll load it I to the boat and unload at Tra Vihn. The plan is to drive south to Ba Dong where there's an old French hotel on a beach. Tuesday I ride to Cau Quan and catch the ferry over the river to see Kymer temples in Soc Trang on the way to Bac Lieu where ill stay tuesday then Wednesday morning ill ride to Nga Nam, where Nam means five and Nga means a meeting place and floating markets begin early.
Lots of driving but the distances are all kind if short at forty or sixty km.
oh and Ba Tri was amazing but I took no photos.
Ben Tre
Saturday, August 24, 2013
VN note August 24, 2013
The streets are crowded: Bui Vien in particular. Somehow I landed in the pulse and from my closed off room the heart beats regularly.
But when I walk in this quadrant around Pham Ngu Lao and Nguyen Thai Hoc there seem to be fewer people than can make so much racket.
Photogenic in a gritty way, dirty way. Shoe shine men, thin slung straps supporting boxes browned wood pass by time and again after replying no with their appeal pointing toward my canvas shoes, "hello my friend".
Noon: plans to travel with someone I met south about forty km to mangrove swamp of Can Gio by public bus caught near Ben Tranh Market cancelled - no show and didn't want to travel solo today. I wandered into Quan (District) 3 beyond War Remnants Museum. Didn't have the heart to venture past gate beyond a couple posing before a US tank. I understand from a coconut seller whose name is also Tom the museum is very popular with Americans. As he was gouging me for a fresh cut nut.
Walked past the women's museum of southern women they were closed.
A copy if French language Lonely Planet at Kim's wrote up a pho shop where the blurb mentioned vietcong ... Kim circled the block on my map.
During the walk I took lots of pictures with the Olympus and a few with the phone to post later. Never found the sympathetic noodle rollers though I tried, there was a new car lot on the block which made me think about the construction cranes around town. I stopped into a clean and popular chain noodle shop with soup that's spicy and has shrimp balls flattened into the shapes of skipping stones. In restaurants are small wastebaskets beneath tables. Here they are yellow with green plastic liners, the effect is the color of limes. I put my paper chopstick wrap and membrane bottle seal on top of napkins and an empty cigarette box.
Without pen I am lonely; without paper I am in solitude. I am in a crowded soup shop and I can say thank you - cam on - yet still I often botch that and say can am which could mean anything as I get downcast looks with small nods of heads. I am also afraid for the first time traveling. I dont know why. maybe its the city. just as despair rises As I leave the waiter opens and holds the door with the humblest of smiles, his lips only slightly turned and his eyes expressive of sentiment.
There are storm clouds and the breeze is gusting. Cooling off is refreshing. I remove my cap and leaves blow on the walkway.
The sky breaks. Suddenly ponchos appear on all motos. Vendors lower umbrellas to provide tighter shields for their customers to sit beneath. A trinket seller adjusts her pant leg before donning clear plastic as a woman carrying limes skips pace between awnings.
A motoist waits for light beneath a tree just as it turns from drizzle to downpour. Her tan shirt turns a shade of brown. A spout creates a fall in puddle along curb a truck drives through and kicks up a spray soaking my pant legs a drop falls on my book and I retreat and stash the journal
Back at Kim's I'm drained from walk and heat and likely dehydrated. Ill need to watch for that sensation of fatigue apart from the lethargic emotion described earlier over soup.
I've arranged through Kim to travel by tour group in the morning to My Tho and Ben Tre. Ill jump off the bus at the second city and stay with Ken at the Oasis. He has info on transit by boat to Tra Vinh. Meanwhile Kim recommends the tour rather than a regular bus bc ill get to take a short ride along canals or something. I just hope there's no visits to coconut farms for ice cream. We are not visiting the Cho Chi [sp.] Tunnels.
VN pic Standing beneath an awning 082413
The median has small versions of the sort of French signs that read arret or do not pass. That might be wrong translation or spelling but the signs in this instance brought French influence to mind.
VN pic Still raining 082313
I like the strip of light in these two photos thought I'd share them both.
VN pic Average architecture 082313
There are many average streetscapes. This is one taken randomly I suppose for the composition of what's under the awnings and the sky. I like the windows also.
VN pic Shrine like 082313
There's beauty in the placement of tools. The broom leans up against a tree. The tree has peculiar growth - odd formed bumps and large thistles. These scenes harken to scenes of homeless shrines where a person would return to regularly and therefore maintain some simple obscured planted pot or stack of rocks with some plastic flowers. To the left of this shot is the street and between tree and traffic is a vendor's cart peddling bottles of sweet juices like Fanta. A moto stopped to buy one as I passed by. Depicting the use of tools interests me.
VN pic Coconut vendor strip 082413
Coconut vendor seduced me into buying one of his nuts about midway to end of wall. Around right corner is War Remnants Museum. Around the far corner marched the jovial men I mention in one of the notes. Saigon
VN pic a fine old hotel bldg 082313
The vertical white building is nice if you can enlarge image and see sign more so. Saigon
Friday, August 23, 2013
VN note August 23, 2013
Saigon where every scene is photogenic but I don't have the spirit on for picturing the scenes.
Phlem this morning. Woke in early afternoon and realized why moto riders, mostly girls, wear masks - reminds of how smoggy is the air.
The masked faces are monkeyed and Disneyed and animated. Helmets pulled low, long sleeved arms pressed together in unregimented formation at lights swerving insanely around cars pedestrians bikes carrying stacked baskets five feet high above seat so driver one handed hold one handed steers and the couple men with an eight foot pipe nearly take apart my hip.
Threaded through it all is industry and the building trades; and the masked motos. My nose hasn't felt this clogged since first arriving in NYC.
[(Wunderground dot com reports 82/74 temp/humidity. It's mild my notes read.]
No more than heat spell of last July that zapped all strength. If this were the sauna at the Y I'd wring water over the coals.
Quick notes walking.
[ I went to the foot of Ham Nghi where one edition of one guidebook noted boats to the delta cities. I asked people in broken English spoken slowly with hand gestures. I must have looked like an octopus and sounded like a seal. I wanted to take a boat from the ferry dock that services the beach town that's not far from here. Where all the tourists go to break and burn. The trip I sought was from Saigon to Ben Tre.
No go. That service was discontinued a few years back. From the touts stood out a white shirted Saigon Travel lets call him a representative who told me about a ferry leaving from District 4 in the mornings. Its about four kilometers. He will take you by moto there for fifty [50,000] and indicated with a guiding hand to his right at a man standing rather humble but decidedly eager. My slow reaction of cost exchange, trustabity, veracity, safety took a couple stuttering moments. Ill talk about negation momentarily. Put the guy behind the deli counter into a jam where he squeezes his ass daily looking at the beach burned set in their pale or plastered coming or going and put him in a position of playing servant to the representative of touristic economy and we're light years away from the furtive eighteen year told he was on the block hoping to get more than a kiss from his girl. My umming ended and walked his way to the bike. Behind me the rep shouted to hurry to bring the moto over to take the customer to the ferry site to be safe to collect the fifty to come back to thank me [to thank me]. I missed something that I couldn't foresee him saying as I watched the driver run like the non-runner he was over to the bike. I can say I wanted to run with him but something told me to stop and wait for him to bring the bike to me. I did neither. He handed me a helmet and waited til I put it on. I straddled the seat and footed the pegs patted him on the waist and he drove off. I gripped the back of the scooter where the seat meets the frame where there's just enough room for my mits to hold on. These bikes are called xe om, where xe is moto and om means to hold on with your hands wrapped around the waist of the driver. We immediately left the lot and entered traffic in the wrong direction. I took note that it was the wrong fucking or fucking wrong direction but having witnessed the riders for a mere twenty four hours though nothing of his determination to cross kitty corner Ton Duc Thang. This is the most restrictive road I've crossed on foot with a major red striped barrier separating traffic in opposing directions so for him to get through it took that permanent scrunched ass character I'd initially succumbed to.
My biggest fear became my own ability to hang on should he slide out or brake hard. My thighs and feet were solid and my seat unsettled and arms relaxed but sturdy and grip locked tightly.
It was a trip. A navigation of extreme confidence in a greater belief of society. If there is anything more compassionately met with chaotic reality it's the spirit emitting from the xe om driver getting through town with a white man on his bike. I hope that sentence makes sense. The horn. The horn. And zoom zip a bike too close and like Asteroids the horn dissolves the imposing threat and again the horn as a truck pulls out crosswise to his route and from over his shoulder the truck transforms into a backhoe that was only jerking forward releasing a load.
My attention returned seconds later to the road in front of him. I was a spectator and had I been omming I might have felt his heart. The horn again and I thought of the battery drain of my camera each time I shoot and the lens retreats into the frame. Lucky for him the moto has a generator. Sometimes he spirits and then almost he stops. He pulls to the left of a truck and the right of that guy with the stacked baskets. He pauses on the gas as the bike goes low into its gears then turns down the throttle and back into a sprint. He crosses what might be a line in places or no division mark to get left of that truck where his shoulder might clip the mirror; oncoming traffic simply pull a bit to their right like people up and down the subway steps back home. He turns against traffic like push hands give way a bit then he's himself and defensive or offensive, it's hard to tell but there's a change. I recall distinctively how much this transit was a major success by negotiation. Again, I have little understanding of how this all work; I say today with three books of interest on my hotel desk that describe society in greater detail but seldom have I encountered in all if my travels a sublimely intent to believe in the other with certainty they believe the same, believe back. Chaos might be the wrong descriptor.
My notes do not capture this. I had no time on the streets to reflect. We arrived at the dock and there was nothing there. Two older women, older like seventy five and eighty, sat in chairs under partial shade of a cargo truck with a small table holding two cups of coffee and a stainless steel pot answered the drivers questions my questions as to the ferry. We had pulled into two previous lots along the water before he realized this was the place. There was a place where a large ferry of about fifty feet might pull up where flotsam held place by an industrial wharf. The ferry leaves at five today. Pause for inquiry. I leaves all days. Pause. How much, i ask. Seventeen. How long? Six hours. The tickets, i ask. Office? There's no office. On the boat. On the floatsam pile ill drop my cash like a burni g prayer into the water. I can't imagine a Vietnamese with an office job going down there at five am to catch a boat.
We rode away with him asking where I wanted to go. I told him to take me to District 1. He asked if he should take me to the hotel. I was vague. More of the traffic and it all felt normal like. The oncoming cars motos, there was one black Bronco-like truck that didn't seem to care about shit but he lasted one fifteenth of a second from my point of view. Half the moto riders wear masks and very few smoke cigarettes.
My notes don't read this. I had a chance to write a bit after stopping for soup I hope won't sicken me.]
Table plastic soup steams pork curled lettuce leave horns pitch high gears grind low what to do with plastic seal of Aquafina.
Dock at foot of Ham Nghi no go on cargo boat. Xo Am bike drove to district 4 dock where ferry leaves for Ben Tre at 5am everyday.
Silly me I didn't mark the spot on a map! That early is too soo to travel on memory.
The plastic table is on Le Thi Hong Gam at Ky Com. I came up Calmelte from where the driver left stopped over the Cau Calmelte. If we were in district 4 and I remember the general direction we rolled through the ferry was on the Cau Kenh Te canal or river I guess along Ton That Thuyet and I guess I didn't see a bridge leading over the canal or river I guess into district 7 so I'm going to ask Kim to ask if she knows of a ferry landing near Ton Dan a Main Street in D4.
Oh shit, now I see a temple on the map and recall one on a street so I'm all confused by the map itself. Kim will help.
I'm photographing hardware stalls & storefronts. There are small plastic baskets in what we might separate spoons in a kitchen door. Nails. My pulse races quicker than in a room full of bar girls. And then there are the sinks hanging from the awnings and steel shelves dismantled and a minuscule lady reclining in a plastic chair waiting for - who? - the competition is fierce along Calumelte not to mention - but I've just - the market full of tools and building supplies I wandered through yesterday looking for a simple small pocket knife and simple string. Nothing simple going on and a commercialism I can't fathom like that in the lives of deli workers back in the City but then again much more so. I've been hungry with shit jobs and broke with a poor attitude but I've never ... been ..
I am consoled by an improved breeze blowing the leaves, now limbs above me. Bikes pass by in both directions with such persistence I think of Aggasi and Federer. I don't know tennis either and feel my spirit decline. I harbor guilt over a quarrel I had with the xo am [xe om] driver when he dropped me off and we disagreed on the rate. He was right, the trip originally was priced at 50 [50,000 or 2USD] but I told him I would give him only 50 - he dropped me off not at the destination but in D1. He drove an extra kilometer out of his way and I pointed out that 50 isn't that much (to his disagreement) and that where we stopped is on his return to the pier at Ham Nghi.
When I withdrew a million earlier the receipt said I have 5 million remaining [available credit.] I can only hope that's not the case as there certainly should be more reason for me to be a rich white tourist. He'll I should be a multimillionaire.
There's nothing like crossing Trang Hung Dao to revive my spirits.
A man cleans a gearbox on the sidewalk. The part is in a plastic pan like you'd wash a baby. His brush dips into the solvent and strokes the steel casing.
Police in Poland once followed me three blocks while I stopped to write about everything and photograph all I saw.
[There are police and security and federal officers and they wear blue and green and tan and carry holster that have tools or bound pads but they don't carry guns except the heavies in high boots. These regulars sit on stools or stand around chatting or lean against upright poles outside banks and scooter stores and the fish vendor and the shoesman's stall where two hundred styles of brown and black rubber sandals are displayed.
I don't like this place but its beautiful in its way.
I try to get the xe om driver out of my mind he lurks there for a couple dollars. I've just fucked myself. How to forgive I don't know.]
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