Blog Addition

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated this site with a link to the Bangkok Post (on the right side of the page).

I've been using the Post's website to track the political protests in Thailand. My original plan was to travel through Cambodia, fly from Siem Reap to Bankok and spend Christmas on a Thai island. With the closure of Suvarnabhumi airport, the plan is still possible though without the flying part.

We'll see how the situation progresses!

A Vendor's Delight

Vietnam is hard to like. It is a country where everything is for sale all the time and where the people all have just the right price.

My first experience of Vietnamese capitalism comes early, on the night train from the border to Hanoi. I purchase a hard sleeper, which entitles me to a top bunk and mere inches above my head, but I take the wrong one in the wrong cabin. The righful owner eventually comes along and the conductor kicks me out. He leads me down the hall, barely stops to show me the proper place and brings me to another empty compartment.

What are we doing here?, I think.

Sitting down, he taps the long bottom bunk with a big grin and writes 70,000 VND (Vietnamese dong) on his palm.

"No," I turn without further conversation, take my top bunk with no head room.

This is just the beginning. In Hoi An, famed for its silk merchants, I shop for a suit and get the same response from most vendors.

"It your lucky day, I make good price for you!"

They even get upset when I make to move on. "Why you not buy from me?! I make good price!" Comparison shopping must be a foreign concept here.

In the end, the woman who gets my business charges much higher than the average rate for a full suit, but the product is higher quality and fits like a glove. I visit her store before all the others and she lets me go only with "I hope you'll be back." Turns out, I am.

She is the exception, not the rule and Nha Trang sees more of the same. Brad, a bulky Australian with Elvis hair and tatoos all over, and I head for the big, white Buddha in town and avoid vendors all the way. Brad has a way with them, especially motorbike drivers.

"You need motorbike?

"No, but d'you want my sandals? They're crap."

"Where you go?"

"To China, we're walking." And we keep walking.

At our destination, an Italian couple and kids selling postcards join us. While Brad tells a girl that he can't buy from her because he's an alcoholic and has no money, I am faced with a little boy, maybe 2 or 3 years old. He has big, round eyes, a downturned chin and a pudgy hand that asks a silent question. He barely looks at me as he stands there. I also notice that he wears Adidas flip-flops.

"No."

The kids work out that there is no money here and go back to their game, a version of hop-scotch, in the dirt. We watch and listen to their high-pitched screams. Brad says off-hand that he wants to take a picture of the sunset.

"I bet we could get you one," says the Italian girl and motions to the kids with a grin.

"Good price?"

"Yeah, just for you."

A fit of hysterics ensues. It's true: the kids will offer the best picture if we ask, bring us to the best spot in Nha Trang to take it - for a price. Only the sale matters. If these kids think they can make money off the sunset, they will come in with the hard sell no matter the cloudy day.

I begin to think that this behaviour is reserved for tourists. I sit over my meals and conclude that the Real Vietnam, the one where people have kids and talk to neighbours and live their lives, is beyond my grasp. I determine that commerce for the average Vietnamese person is a stately affair, a polite give-and-take.

But it isn't. On a local bus to the Cambodian border, vendors get aboard, thrust products under local noses and disembark at the next stop. One industrious salsman brings a portable loudspeaker and a microphone to say his piece. The only difference is that the language is Vietnamese, not English. At least they do the same for everyone, I think.

The thought is small comfort, though. Vendors here walk by and offer a product and then again five minutes later as if they didn't hear no the first time. They come right aboard the bus. They stand next to a restaurant table. They ask and they ask and they ask. "I make good price just for you!"

By the end, I have had enough. I arrive in Chau Doc and pay for a room at the most expensive hotel in town. I shave, put on a white dress shirt and smooth out the wrinkles. I flash a smile in the mirror, go down to the bar and delight in spending all my remaining Vietnamese dong on service with a smile.

"Your drink, sir."

"Thank you very much!"

From the patio, lights across the Mekong twinkle and blink. Palm trees wave in a thick, slow breeze and cars honk at each other in the street. I stand up to go. It is time to leave this country.

A Different Kind of Vietnam

From the top of the Rex Hotel, one cannot see across Saigon (officially, Ho Chih Mihn City or HCMC). Not to the river, not even to the downtown core. The hotel is not high enough and there are too many buildings in the way. A shopping centre spreads out across the street; skyscrapers poke up all around.

One can see, however, a thing that makes Saigon unique in Vietnam: an intersection that is gratuitous in its length and width. Le Loi has eight lanes of traffic that run northeast away from Ben Thanh Bus Station. Nguyen Hue, running northwest to southeast in the direction of the river, has four. Both roads are divided by large, long islands of greenery and palm trees.

This isn't what I've been used to over the past three weeks. Streets in Hanoi's Old Quarter were roughly four meters of actual road, with maybe an extra meter or so of sidewalk on either side - just enough room for motorcycles to park there. My bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang couldn't pick me up at the hotel because the street was too narrow. All throughout Vietnam, there hasn't been enough room for all the cars and bikes and people all at once.

Except here. Back at the same intersection, the sidewalks in front of the department store across the way are at least four meters wide. Motorcycle drivers - "you need bike?" - can lounge, parked, until they find a suck, er, customer and still allow for other people to walk by, four or five across.

Even the storefronts are broader. The vendors and silk merchants of Hoi An could have probably won the prize for commercial density - greatest amount of capitalism per square centimeter. But the retail shops and restaurants on this corner would not look out of place in Europe or North America. They are spacious.

I do not suggest that Saigon is the City of Excessive and Eternal Space; there are still tiny places. My hotel is on a little alley about three meters wide and I've noticed shops in other areas of town where the owner's home is tucked in the back or up a narrow set of stairs. I have had to step out onto the street to get around bikes and noodle stalls.

Some places, though, like the intersection at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue and the positively imperial roundabout at Ben Thanh, are exceptions that are unique to Saigon.

Saigon's website notes that, during the late nineteenth century, the French administered the south of Vietnam differently from the rest of the country and poured a lot of money into city. They made Saigon "the Pearl of the Far East". So history seems to account for the difference.

But whatever the reasons, Saigon has come a long way from its beginnings as a small Khmer fishing village to become a cosmopolitan city. It's just different from the rest of Vietnam.

Failing in the Clutch

The difficulty, you see, was the bus driver. He should have learned to drive standard before getting aboard.

It was a morning bus out of Nha Trang, headed all the way to Saigon. Normally, I would have taken a night bus to save on accommodation but the weather was not pleasant the day before. It rained buckets. Puddles at the curb almost met in the middle of the road. If the next day would be that foul, why kill time in the rain and then spend nine hours on the road? At least this way, I stood to have a nice evening down south.

We started at 8:30. Rice fields, roadside shops and palm trees rested in the sun. The bus stopped for a break and humidity dropped on me like a blanket in a stuffy room. Not an hour later, we pulled off the road again and I looked up, confused. The door opened to the smell of burning.

"Smells like he's burnt out the clutch," said Steve, a burnt-out Brit.

Off the bus, we looked at the wood shacks that housed who knows how many people. Locals peered out of the gloom at us. A little boy played in the dirt.

"We should start looking for houses here," said a huge Nigerian with a laugh. "Maybe I live here!"

The bus got going again, then broke down and most of us found refuge in the shade of a roadside cafe. The glasses of beer were cold, the ice in them just perfect.

An older and very round German strolled up. "They say we'll be here for a couple of hours."

With help from the mechanically-inclined passengers, our delay was not so long. The driver gave a short, sharp shot on the horn and we snatched up our bags and climbed aboard. The general consensus was that our bus was patched together well enough to get as far as Mui Ne down the coast where we would have to switch to other transportation.

But eternal hope was no mechanic and we would not get there. At every hill, the bus slowed down, stopped, rolled backwards and crept forward again - Steve was of the opinion that we would eventually have to get out and push. The gears gave a metallic scrape every time the driver shifted.

Tyler, a Canadian, was the first to lose patience. "First time driving stick?!"

"We should have dropped this driver a long time ago," grumbled someone else.

The bus gave up the fight for good on a shallow hill. The bald sun beat down, sparse shrubs and rocks no cover for us. Horse dung lay dried and smeared on the road. We kicked a soccer ball and avoided traffic.

The driver, seeking cover from the wind, leaned under the engine hood to light his cigarette.

We waited.

A replacement bus arrived an hour later. Coming from Mui Ne, it passed us going in the other direction, turned around and came back. The driver's assistant, leaning out the door, got a wide, toothy grin on his face.

"Byeeeee!" The bus accelerated as it passed us, then pulled off the road. I laughed.

"Where? Saigon or Mui Ne?" the driver's assistant asked.

"Mui Ne." We would get to the little beachside town by four in the afternoon and, with Saigon a further five hours away, I couldn't fathom getting off the bus at 9pm. The sun and sweat and waiting to go had beaten me. I needed to stop.

We drove the last forty-odd kilometers down narrow roads flanked by pristine, blue-watered coastline and smooth sand dunes and fishing villages. After an hour, the new bus pulled into a quiet resort with little bungalows for rent. I stayed, along with Steve and Tyler and another Canadian from Edmonton, Jackson.

"We're heading for the water straight-away," said Steve.

Good idea, I thought. The sun shone and the beach chairs were plentiful. I changed and dove right in.

Crossing the Street

Crossing the street should make for a mundane blog topic. Then again, crossing the street in Vietnam is anything but mundane.

As opposed to the Western world, where there is an order to things, where everyone waits their turn, Vietnam drives headlong down the street and waits for no one. Pedestrians either pick their spots and go or wait forever on the curb.

Hanoi's Old Quarter was a baptism by chaos. Masses of bikes pouring down a street no more than ten to fifteen feet across would flow by with only the barest of seams evident between them. Where a crowd of vehicles had stopped at a street corner - there were traffic lights on certain streets - I always looked around me. It was possible that a bike would come flying through a left or right turn. Right of way didn't exist here.

Alright, uh, just go, I thought.

After several painstaking, stop-and-go trips across various streets in the capital I came to a conclusion: Vietnamese drivers expect pedestrians to walk into the middle of traffic - they don't wait, so why should people on foot? But in keeping with this logic, drivers also expect pedestrians to keep walking.

They don't expect walkers to scurry or dodge or shoot into gaps; that behaviour leads to accident and injury.

The trick was to walk normally. Pick a spot, step out and walk normally. I had to act like I owned the pavement that I walked on. I made eye contact with the driver bearing down on me, made him move around me.

Of course, there are caveats to the rule. I wouldn't walk in front of a car or bus. If I saw locals stopping at a curb, I wouldn't walk either (this rule applies to eating food as well). But I just walked. The traffic moved around me, fit itself into the space that I had left.

"I'd never think to cross like this at home," said an Australian I was with in Nha Trang. We had just walked into a roundabout with five streets feeding into it. We had no crosswalk, nothing.

"Oh yeah," I said, lifting my head and looking around me.

I hadn't thought about what I was doing. Stepping into a throng of motorbikes and cars had become a matter of course. It was second nature.

Just hold me back from certain death when I try to cross the street against traffic at home, okay?

Land and Legend

I have a reproduction of a Ted Harrison painting at home with the following caption: "The Land Here is Greater Even Than its Legend." With its contrast of reds and yellows and blues and a trail that stretches on to the sun, the painting makes the natural world seem bigger, too big to capture or overcome.

It came to mind when I visited Ha Long Bay. Everyone said that I couldn't miss this piece of coastline east of Hanoi, so once over my cold, I booked a cruise through my hostel and went.

The journey to the coast, down highways that ran past a Red River made taller by rain, had all the banter typical of a group of people who were only a group because they were on the same tour. The boys at the back of the bus tried to one-up each other with horror stories from the road; I shocked them with my experience of Chinese toilet etiquette.

"So this little girl steps off the bus, rips down her pants and lets fly right there at the steps!"

"Awwwwwww!"

Later, everyone sang along to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. A mass of people crammed together on a bus to start, we were now a group of friends ready for anything.

Except that we weren't. Drifting beyond the other boats - a virtue of being on more than a day cruise - the landscape took over. Rocks that stood over us, rose out of nothing but water, great angular things, silent and hard, dotted the water.

There was silence, but for the click and flash of cameras.

After kayaking and swimming, the party began. We backpackers, the young and invincible, played drinking games. We sang to Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger: Stand up beside the fireplace / Take that look from off your face / 'Cause you ain't ever gonna burn my heart out. We laughed and danced surrounded by stones, imposing shadows in the night, on still water, under light rain.

A kayaking injury forced me to take it easy the next day - a blessing in good weather and beautiful scenery. I baked in the sun and swam. I loafed on the beach. I took pictures that would never do justice to the rocks that rest, straight and thick and full, perfect pieces against an empty blue sky.

We ended our tour the following day. As we entered the city-limits, I was disappointed by the closed-in feel of Hanoi and wondered if the stories, the legends of Ha Long Bay could ever possibly live up to its land.

Bon Cafe

Tea is nice. It can be flavourful, aromatic and calming. The Chinese, in particular, do a wonderful job of making tea a variety of tastes and experiences. But for the coffee-drinker, China, with its teas and instant coffees, is a caffeine wasteland.

I am a coffee drinker and China was a trial.

Crossing the border from Hekou to the Vietnamese town of Lao Cai meant not only an end to a long, horrible day of travel, but also better prospects for satisfying my caffeine addiction.

After changing Chinese yuan to Vietnamese dong, I bought a ticket for the night train to Hanoi and went in search of food. I ended up at a restaurant in the square just across from the station and ordered pho, a soft drink - and a coffee.

I had encountered Vietnamese coffee before: a place in Victoria, Le Petite Saigon, does a very nice cup. A single shot of espresso sweetened with condensed milk, this one was glorious. I let the bitter-sweet roll through me. The thick and rich and slow liquid eased my wait for the train. The trip to Hekou didn't matter anymore.

But the experience wasn't just the flavour; it was the process of making the coffee, too. Though some places will pre-mix the drink, this tiny spot in Lao Cai did not. They did it right.

Out came a clear glass cup with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom. A metal filter rested on top of the cup and passed boiling hot water through a portion of tightly-packed grounds. I watched the water become a shot of espresso before my eyes. Drip, drip, drip. When it finished, I removed the filter, stirred and drank. Bliss!

Coffee-drinkers: welcome to Vietnam!

Tourism, Elections and Flood Water

The United States of America elects a new president and Hanoi lies under water. The hostel bar is open and backpackers raise a glass.

The centre of town, where a traveller can find the French Quarter, the Old Quarter and many of the tourist sights, is not flooded, though there is rain. The hostel is here too along with most of the city's affordable hotels and guest houses. We are relatively dry.

I am glad not to be under water. A cold has knocked me down and I spend a lot of time relaxing with a tea or a coffee, waiting for better health - occupations that would be infinitely worse if accompanied by streams and puddles.

With a lot of sitting around, I talk to the Vietnamese staff at the hostel. "The water at my home is up to here," says one, levelling her hand out at the shoulder of her five-foot-nothing frame.

"Really?"

I've seen the news with everyone else: cars half-driving, half-floating through puddles that really aren't; locals polling their rafts down major streets. But this girl doesn't look wet. She doesn't look like she nearly drowned getting to work.

The images of disaster are stuck on the TV screen. An old woman down the street is selling pho with green onions and chillis and duck. A stall around the corner lays out pork and onion fried in thick, greasy batter. It's happy hour at the hostel: two beer for 20,000 dong - $1.30 Canadian.

The usual suspects enjoy a drink. The English football fan, red-faced, stumbles as he goes for a smoke. The angry Australian, who speaks like a piece of propaganda, stabs the air and sips her beer when she makes a point. The newly-graduated university students make the most of cheap drinks.

I join some of them for sight-seeing in the morning. Under mostly cloudy skies, we see the Ho Chi Mihn Mausoleum and the Hanoi Hilton prison - both very interesting. We stop at the war museum for a bite to eat and a drink, where the trees send water down our backs as we look at the day's photos.

Next day, the 5th, I sit with a guy from New York and watch Americans decide who will lead them. There are no surprises early on. We get reports, between election results, of continued flooding in Hanoi and rain throughout the region.

Other backpackers join us and Pennsylvania tips in Obama's favour; we suspect something special will happen. A cheer hits the ceiling and we order a round of beer when CNN declares a winner just as results from California come in.

In his speech, Obama says that America has voted for change. I turn and head into the noon-day sun that has just begun to peek through the clouds. It is time for some fresh air.

Left is Bad

Left-handers write funny. They're demanding, too, and ask for all kinds of exceptions, like special scissors, from the right-handed imperialist oppressors (I've been reading my Little Red Book). Plus, they're sketchy: they use their left hands.

Being left-handed, I know all these things. I was, however, still taken aback by my encounter with the Chinese education system and its take on left-handedness.

To set the scene: I had met two Chinese girls, Jesse and Lemon, from the English language college in Yangshuo; they were eager to chat with a native English speaker and brought me back to their classroom.

When I got to class, Jesse and Lemon showed me a section from their workbook, which happened to be about left-handedness. I've struggled with exactly how to write this and have concluded that I should let a few of the better quotations speak for themselves. Here goes...

The section title: "A Clumsy World for Lefties".

"Employers have begun to think in earnest about the needs of lefties."

"Farmers can get left-handed tractors."

"Wives can get left-handed refrigerators."

As before, I will let these statements stand on their own, though I will say that a few Chinese got very confused when I didn't use chopsticks with my right-hand and were very shocked to see me use my left-hand for writing.

I will also leave you with a essay question. Is there anything inherently left- or right-handed about a refrigerator? Discuss.

Border Crossings: China-Vietnam

The difficulty, you see, was the bus. It shouldn't have taken so long to get to the Vietnamese border.

I had taken similar trips over my last few days in southern Yunnan. Local transport had gotten me from Tonghai to Jian Shui in two hours, from Jian Shui to Gejiu in two hours. We zipped along the highways, made good time.

Gejiu is about 150 kilometers from the border station of Hekou and my travel guide indicated that the border would be open until 5pm. Leaving on the local bus at 10:30am, I saw no reason to think I wouldn't make the border by then; there was lots of time.

I sat back and watched the scenery change in front of me. The early morning had damp streets and a low-hung fog nestled in the mountains. As we got farther south, though, the air got thicker and palm trees took over from vegetation that looked vaguely alpine.

Then I looked down and noticed the road, which had become nasty and rough. The driver wound us through large potholes and dirt roads-turned-mudpits from the rain. He avoided livestock and other drivers. He mopped the sweat from his head with a grubby towel.

I began to re-think my travel estimate for Hekou. It was 12:30, two hours into the journey.

We could have gone so much faster, too. About three hours in, a concrete lane appeared above us, which was supported by great stone pillars. The highway!, I thought. Surely we'll get on the highway!

We did anything but get on the highway. We drove next to it. We drove above it. We even passed underneath it - several times. We did not get on the highway!

Instead, the bus continued down muddy dirt roads and the signs that told me the distance to Hekou gave cause for concern. It was 1:30pm and still 80 kilometers to the border.

A half-hour later, the bus stopped in a village to let army officials inspect our identification. "Ca-na-da," said one. "Canada!" She rushed to tell her co-workers so they could see my passport.

I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and caught the driver's eye. "Hekou," I said and tapped my watch.

"Three," he said and pointed. Great: either we get there in an hour or it's going to be a long afternoon.

Even the Chinese passengers seemed concerned about the journey's length. When we started up again, I caught the word Hekou during one sharp exchange in which the driver's assistant held up two fingers, then four. There were yet more numbers to obscure our arrival time.

Eventually, the roads cleared up and became paved, semi-flat. It was 3pm and I thought, if we make good time the border will still be open.

At just after 4pm, the bus rolled into the Hekou bus station - five-and-a-half hours to go 150 kilometers. I found the border and crossed it.

Round Mass of Food 2: Yunnan's Revenge

My favourite cookbook, Hot Sour Salty Sweet, follows the authors' culinary adventure down the Mekong River. It includes recipes from Laos, Cambodia and Thailand but also has entries for Yunnan province in the south-west of China. The trip to Vietnam took me through Yunnan where I found food deserving of being in a cookbook.

My first experience of the cuisine came at a Kunming noodle stall. With Chinese characters and no pictures, one of the staff picked out a plate of noodles with thick, spicy sauce. I could see the chili peppers. There was shredded chicken, sliced pork, a soft goat's cheese and tiny, crunchy croutons. The variety of flavours and textures filled the hole in my stomach and cleared out my sinuses.

Down the road in Tonghai, I found the street of flaming woks. The entire lane on one side had open flames and coal-fired grills. The stall where I stopped laid out various meats and vegetables with bowls of noodles; they sat next to a big pot of steaming broth, the ingredients for noodle soup. Beside the grill lay piles of skewered and spiced meat: pork and beef and seafood.

I stuck with bao dzu. The girl put a wok over the fire, then a metal stand with a hole at the centre into the wok. She ladled water in and placed a tray of uncooked bao dzu over the stand's hole. Another girl covered the tray with a bamboo teepee. It was a tower of metal and fire and wood to steam my pastries.

When the finished product came, I was given the standard condiment in Yunnan: a bowl of chili sauce with green onion and cilantro. The spice and freshness of this sauce turned bao dzu, a Chinese standard, into a regional specialty. I munched away and stared into the night while noodles stir-fried to my right.

Farther south, Gejiu provided equally great food. Shown around by a local who worked at my hotel, my first meal came at a stall down an alley. The two of us picked ingredients from a slotted, cafeteria-style window. Ground beef came in a rich, tomato-y sauce. Mushrooms kept their fungal flavour in amongst the chili peppers. The steak arrived with the texture of jerky and a slow heat. Roast cashews and spinach in a piping hot broth provided a counterpoint to spice.

I next got a taste of Yunnanese barbeque. An old man with wide eyes, a toothy grin and strict, but sparse grey hair manned the grill. Wielding scorch-tipped chopsticks, he handed over slightly darkened potatoes and pastries. We dipped them in a sauce, spicy and salty and sweet all at once, our knees to the low wooden table, the flies circling on a warm afternoon.

The following day, I headed for Vietnam and wished I could take the food with me.