1. "The Quiet American," by Graham Greene.
2. "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution," by Elizabeth Becker. This masterly account of that dreadful period finds dark strains in Cambodian history that prefigure Pol Pot. But it indicts the U.S. and China almost equally for a horror that was not inevitable.
3. "Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja," by Emit Gilboa. This short (but still a little padded) book of memoir/reportage is good about Hun Sen's post-Pol Pot thuggery and about the farang "flotsam" that washed up in Phnom Penh just after all the wars were over.
4. A wonderfully smart and poignant essay by Peace Corps old girl (but much younger than a lot of us) Darcy Meijer, about her teaching years ago in Gabon and then two decades later in Ho Chi Minh City. It's online on John Coyne's indispensible PeaceCorpsWriters.org at http://peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2006/0611/611wr-meijer.htm.
Incidentally, all of the above, except the online essay, are Chinese-mafia cheap knockoff copies we bought in Cambodia or Vietnam. Legitimate editions of these books were nowhere to be found. I did ask a bookstore clerk in Siem Reap if Elizabeth Becker would be receiving royalties on my purchase of her book, but the fellow pretended not to understand my question.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
HCMC-Hue
What Vietnamese trains lack in romance, they make up for in efficiency. If Metro North ran long-distance trains with sleeping cars, this is what they would look like---there's not a lot of romance in socialism. But the Hanoi-bound Reunification Express pulled out of Saigon Station---also non-atmospheric; was the French terminal building bombed?---promptly at one on Wednesday afternoon and delivered us on schedule Thursday morning at 8 in Hue.
The train's four-berth compartment was spartan, the bedding freshly laundered, and the one meal provided---rice and soup Wednesday at 5---edible. Two Vietnamese men entered our digs at 190:30 p.m., climbed to the upper berths, and went to sleep.
The train was plain but the scenery rich. Our window was only a little filthy, and anyway we could go out into the corridor, lower the window there, and hang out. (And warm up---the non-steerage cars of the train were frigid.)
At an average speed of 47 miles per hour (according to the Lonely Planet Guide, our god), the train rumbled across tropical hill and dale. There were the usual reassuring palms and banana trees, and rice fields, and also miles and miles of cashew groves---the Vietnamese, like the Cambodians, mostly eat the fruit (shaped like small bell peppers but pinkish) and sell the nut that grows off the bottom.
Sheets of veneer lay drying in the sun. There were cornfields, and bean vines growing up poles the size of telephone poles. We thought we saw big peppercorns drying on tarps, but those could have been dark beans. Once, Joe said, "This is the train trip we wanted."
Near the coast, we passed through a strangely arid area, like northern Mexico, and then it got wet again, with egrets posing in rice paddies, and then it was dark out, and we got out our books.
I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." (Or, it turned out, re-read it---I realized I had already read it in some past life, i.e., before leaving Pennsylvania.) On the train, I came to a passage where the decent, naive young American official Pyle, in Saigon in 1953 or so, worries to the older, harder British war correspondent Fowler that if the Viet Minh communists defeat the French, and "if Indochina goes..."
Fowler replies: "I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember---from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too."
This book was published in 1955---not bad. Greene was dead-on about the futility of the West's attempting to fiddle around with Southeast Asia. But the 500-year forecast I'm not so sure about. Like the rest of us around at the time, Greene did not know then about climate change. I haven't seen any forecasts about what global warming might mean for this region. But what if the monsoon rains double in intensity and inundate everybody and everything? Or what if the rains drift elsewhere and leave Southeast Asia high and dry?
Vietnamese agriculture has survived communism; these people are far too practical to muck up their own food supply. But can farmers here survive an American culture of SUVs and every tot brandishing a Weed Whacker? And of half of China and India in their own versions of carbon-dioxide-spewing Model Ts? And what about Saigon's own millions of fossil-fuel-eating motorbikes? Whatever the case, we're likely to know in far fewer than 500 years whether or not the small boys will continue sitting on the buffaloes.
In Hue, the handsome old Nguyen dynasty capital, just south of the pre-war "demilitarized zone," we adapted up again. In a droll attempt to gain good Internet access, we booked an upper-mid-range hotel called the Huong Giang. But with all the gleaming marble and stainless steel, and with all the daintily appointed rooms featuring bamboo elements that were decorative rather than structural, and with all the chirpy "Good morning, Sirs"s and "Have a good meal, Sirs"s endlessly raining down upon us, many things in this place did not work so well.
The computer set-up---or "business center"---was a washout. A hotel worker tipped us off early not to bother. "The connection is not good," she said anxiously. Twice or more daily, we witnessed seried rank upon seried rank of Alsacians and Milanese glowering at computer screen informing them that "this page cannot be displayed." We thought of it as The Room of Throwing Up the Hands. (None of the local Internet cafes were up to the task either. Joe got two photos onto the blog at another hotel, until we were politely chased out for not being hotel guests. I'm posting this from Hanoi, where Joe has some hope of uploading pix.)
Worse could happen to us than a funnily inept hotel---we know that. Mai pen rai. Not, however, at 90 bucks a night, 50 (or 80) more than we customarily spend. But we'll long remember the Huong Giang. One night we saw a farang tour group seated inside the off-the-lobby Korean restaurant (we suspect the hotel is Korean-owned) gotten up in colorful silk "oriental" costumes as they fumbled with their chop sticks. One morning when the maid asked Joe, "Did you sleep well?"---all the staff have been hilariously over-programmed---he replied, "Very well, thank you. And how did you sleep?" That stumped her. At breakfast yesterday, where the swags on the buffet table reminded Joe of "cartoon ponies' eyelids," a large tour group arrived which Joe thought looked just like "the Pittsfield Country Club crowd." (You know who you are.)
Good things about so far unduly maligned Hue: It's a pretty, mid-sized city of French-built avenues and tree-lined streets on two sides of the Susquehanna-like Perfume river. The restaurants are good, with local specialties such as tasty glutinous rice cakes with crispy shrimp suspended inside, and a flat, pasta-like shrimp concoction that's steamed inside a banana leaf. Plus standard (i.e., superb) Vietnamese chicken, beef and pork soups and fried dishes. (A French place makes a mean house salad that I wolfed down without middle-of-the-night consequences. Travel in this region really has changed in that regard. The sign outside the Red Piano cafe in Siem Reap, Cambodia, promises "Style-Quality-Comfort-Hygeine-since 2002." And it was true. The bottled water is safe too. The label on the Uy Mey New Day Pure Drinking Water bottle in Phnom Penh guaranteed "Pure water, testing through DEIONNIZED highly isolating substance and germ, keeps in high quality.")
The other attractions in Hue include the Citadel, a fortified imperial complex built in the early 19th century. It was badly damaged in a post-Tet offensive major battle in 1968 (a cyclo driver whose services I declined yelled after me "Citadel---American bombs! American bombs!") and then left to crumble by the communists, who saw it as a relic of Vietnam's feudal past. Ten years ago the city of Hue saw tourism potential in the Citadel, and now it's a Unesco World Heritage site under restoration.
The Citadel is fun to amble around in, but even better is the Thien Mu pagoda, south of town. You take a "dragon boat" down the river to get there. The 1844 seven-story pagoda is an imposing tower with a lot of history, the most compelling being modern. The monks here organized protests against the crooked and repressive Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s when the communists were behaving similarly.
In 1963, a Thien Mu monk, Thich Quang Duc, was driven to Saigon in a robin's egg blue Austin sedan---it's on display near the pagoda---and publicly immolated himself to protest Diem's treatment of Buddhists. The news photo is part of history. Madame Ngu, Diem's sister-in-law, applauded this "barbecue party." Later that year, Diem was toppled---and murdered---with the approval of the CIA.
Even more architectually impressive than Thien Mu is the tomb of the Emeror Tu Duc (1848-83), built in the 1860s. This series of gracefully executed stone and brick buildings and monuments is set on some friendly low hills among groves of pine and frangipani trees. The emperor's geomancer, or feng shui expert, made sure the site had the approval of Tu Duc's ancestors.
More importantly for visitors today, the designers produced hyacinth ponds, moats, walls and buildings---residences, temples, family sepulchres, stelae---that were so elegantly and organically woven into the landscape that they give the sensation almost of having floated into place. (Actually, forced labor was employed.) Even the shadowy woods---the day we were there was overcast---felt protective and welcoming, a fine place to be laid to rest or just to take one.
The train's four-berth compartment was spartan, the bedding freshly laundered, and the one meal provided---rice and soup Wednesday at 5---edible. Two Vietnamese men entered our digs at 190:30 p.m., climbed to the upper berths, and went to sleep.
The train was plain but the scenery rich. Our window was only a little filthy, and anyway we could go out into the corridor, lower the window there, and hang out. (And warm up---the non-steerage cars of the train were frigid.)
At an average speed of 47 miles per hour (according to the Lonely Planet Guide, our god), the train rumbled across tropical hill and dale. There were the usual reassuring palms and banana trees, and rice fields, and also miles and miles of cashew groves---the Vietnamese, like the Cambodians, mostly eat the fruit (shaped like small bell peppers but pinkish) and sell the nut that grows off the bottom.
Sheets of veneer lay drying in the sun. There were cornfields, and bean vines growing up poles the size of telephone poles. We thought we saw big peppercorns drying on tarps, but those could have been dark beans. Once, Joe said, "This is the train trip we wanted."
Near the coast, we passed through a strangely arid area, like northern Mexico, and then it got wet again, with egrets posing in rice paddies, and then it was dark out, and we got out our books.
I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." (Or, it turned out, re-read it---I realized I had already read it in some past life, i.e., before leaving Pennsylvania.) On the train, I came to a passage where the decent, naive young American official Pyle, in Saigon in 1953 or so, worries to the older, harder British war correspondent Fowler that if the Viet Minh communists defeat the French, and "if Indochina goes..."
Fowler replies: "I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember---from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too."
This book was published in 1955---not bad. Greene was dead-on about the futility of the West's attempting to fiddle around with Southeast Asia. But the 500-year forecast I'm not so sure about. Like the rest of us around at the time, Greene did not know then about climate change. I haven't seen any forecasts about what global warming might mean for this region. But what if the monsoon rains double in intensity and inundate everybody and everything? Or what if the rains drift elsewhere and leave Southeast Asia high and dry?
Vietnamese agriculture has survived communism; these people are far too practical to muck up their own food supply. But can farmers here survive an American culture of SUVs and every tot brandishing a Weed Whacker? And of half of China and India in their own versions of carbon-dioxide-spewing Model Ts? And what about Saigon's own millions of fossil-fuel-eating motorbikes? Whatever the case, we're likely to know in far fewer than 500 years whether or not the small boys will continue sitting on the buffaloes.
In Hue, the handsome old Nguyen dynasty capital, just south of the pre-war "demilitarized zone," we adapted up again. In a droll attempt to gain good Internet access, we booked an upper-mid-range hotel called the Huong Giang. But with all the gleaming marble and stainless steel, and with all the daintily appointed rooms featuring bamboo elements that were decorative rather than structural, and with all the chirpy "Good morning, Sirs"s and "Have a good meal, Sirs"s endlessly raining down upon us, many things in this place did not work so well.
The computer set-up---or "business center"---was a washout. A hotel worker tipped us off early not to bother. "The connection is not good," she said anxiously. Twice or more daily, we witnessed seried rank upon seried rank of Alsacians and Milanese glowering at computer screen informing them that "this page cannot be displayed." We thought of it as The Room of Throwing Up the Hands. (None of the local Internet cafes were up to the task either. Joe got two photos onto the blog at another hotel, until we were politely chased out for not being hotel guests. I'm posting this from Hanoi, where Joe has some hope of uploading pix.)
Worse could happen to us than a funnily inept hotel---we know that. Mai pen rai. Not, however, at 90 bucks a night, 50 (or 80) more than we customarily spend. But we'll long remember the Huong Giang. One night we saw a farang tour group seated inside the off-the-lobby Korean restaurant (we suspect the hotel is Korean-owned) gotten up in colorful silk "oriental" costumes as they fumbled with their chop sticks. One morning when the maid asked Joe, "Did you sleep well?"---all the staff have been hilariously over-programmed---he replied, "Very well, thank you. And how did you sleep?" That stumped her. At breakfast yesterday, where the swags on the buffet table reminded Joe of "cartoon ponies' eyelids," a large tour group arrived which Joe thought looked just like "the Pittsfield Country Club crowd." (You know who you are.)
Good things about so far unduly maligned Hue: It's a pretty, mid-sized city of French-built avenues and tree-lined streets on two sides of the Susquehanna-like Perfume river. The restaurants are good, with local specialties such as tasty glutinous rice cakes with crispy shrimp suspended inside, and a flat, pasta-like shrimp concoction that's steamed inside a banana leaf. Plus standard (i.e., superb) Vietnamese chicken, beef and pork soups and fried dishes. (A French place makes a mean house salad that I wolfed down without middle-of-the-night consequences. Travel in this region really has changed in that regard. The sign outside the Red Piano cafe in Siem Reap, Cambodia, promises "Style-Quality-Comfort-Hygeine-since 2002." And it was true. The bottled water is safe too. The label on the Uy Mey New Day Pure Drinking Water bottle in Phnom Penh guaranteed "Pure water, testing through DEIONNIZED highly isolating substance and germ, keeps in high quality.")
The other attractions in Hue include the Citadel, a fortified imperial complex built in the early 19th century. It was badly damaged in a post-Tet offensive major battle in 1968 (a cyclo driver whose services I declined yelled after me "Citadel---American bombs! American bombs!") and then left to crumble by the communists, who saw it as a relic of Vietnam's feudal past. Ten years ago the city of Hue saw tourism potential in the Citadel, and now it's a Unesco World Heritage site under restoration.
The Citadel is fun to amble around in, but even better is the Thien Mu pagoda, south of town. You take a "dragon boat" down the river to get there. The 1844 seven-story pagoda is an imposing tower with a lot of history, the most compelling being modern. The monks here organized protests against the crooked and repressive Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s when the communists were behaving similarly.
In 1963, a Thien Mu monk, Thich Quang Duc, was driven to Saigon in a robin's egg blue Austin sedan---it's on display near the pagoda---and publicly immolated himself to protest Diem's treatment of Buddhists. The news photo is part of history. Madame Ngu, Diem's sister-in-law, applauded this "barbecue party." Later that year, Diem was toppled---and murdered---with the approval of the CIA.
Even more architectually impressive than Thien Mu is the tomb of the Emeror Tu Duc (1848-83), built in the 1860s. This series of gracefully executed stone and brick buildings and monuments is set on some friendly low hills among groves of pine and frangipani trees. The emperor's geomancer, or feng shui expert, made sure the site had the approval of Tu Duc's ancestors.
More importantly for visitors today, the designers produced hyacinth ponds, moats, walls and buildings---residences, temples, family sepulchres, stelae---that were so elegantly and organically woven into the landscape that they give the sensation almost of having floated into place. (Actually, forced labor was employed.) Even the shadowy woods---the day we were there was overcast---felt protective and welcoming, a fine place to be laid to rest or just to take one.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
A night in Saigon
Joe had been telling me I was missing something memorable by not taking a nightime ride on a xe om. He had done it the night I was out of commission. Xe oms---aptly pronounced "zooms," I think---are motorbikes whose drivers cruise the city looking for fares. They are far more common than the metered taxis, and cheaper.
So last night, needing to go to a distant part of the city, Joe found the moto guy who had driven him several times and hangs out at a particular corner. That driver located a buddy moto guy, and off the four of us went.
I was Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday all over again, but this time with elements of The French Connection, Bullitt, GWTW (the flight from Atlanta as Sherman approached) and maybe Potemkin (now I know how the baby felt). Plus, of course, Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner.
It was terrific. The motobike traffic's movements are fluid, and you feel like you're part of great series of rivers rushing up and down the landscape, somehow crisscrossing and intermingling and constantly reforming anew. It has the same fluid intricacy of a hydraulic system, or of Disney at his best, in Fantasia. You know you could fly off and land on your unhelmeted head, and it'd be curtains, but some Buddhist living-in-the-moment feeling takes over and you are at peace in the steamy chaotic Saigon night under a full moon. We did see one minor crash; a truck hit a motorbike, then maneuvered and hit it a second time. The moto guy was unhurt but irked. My driver said of the truck driver, "Oh, beya, beya!"---he'd been drinking. But I knew that wasn't going to happen to us. (Joe said later he wasn't as confident as I was.) Bill T. Jones choreographed for his troup a thrilling dance I've seen twice, about dancers moving at high speed underwater trying to find the surface. It's done to Mendelssohn's bubbling and soaring octet, and last night I thought I had just a taste of what it must feel like to be part of that dance.
So last night, needing to go to a distant part of the city, Joe found the moto guy who had driven him several times and hangs out at a particular corner. That driver located a buddy moto guy, and off the four of us went.
I was Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday all over again, but this time with elements of The French Connection, Bullitt, GWTW (the flight from Atlanta as Sherman approached) and maybe Potemkin (now I know how the baby felt). Plus, of course, Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner.
It was terrific. The motobike traffic's movements are fluid, and you feel like you're part of great series of rivers rushing up and down the landscape, somehow crisscrossing and intermingling and constantly reforming anew. It has the same fluid intricacy of a hydraulic system, or of Disney at his best, in Fantasia. You know you could fly off and land on your unhelmeted head, and it'd be curtains, but some Buddhist living-in-the-moment feeling takes over and you are at peace in the steamy chaotic Saigon night under a full moon. We did see one minor crash; a truck hit a motorbike, then maneuvered and hit it a second time. The moto guy was unhurt but irked. My driver said of the truck driver, "Oh, beya, beya!"---he'd been drinking. But I knew that wasn't going to happen to us. (Joe said later he wasn't as confident as I was.) Bill T. Jones choreographed for his troup a thrilling dance I've seen twice, about dancers moving at high speed underwater trying to find the surface. It's done to Mendelssohn's bubbling and soaring octet, and last night I thought I had just a taste of what it must feel like to be part of that dance.
A day in Saigon
Three museums offer exhibits on the American war. They are pretty much in the same section of the city, so yesterday morning we set off on foot before the day heated up. After half an hour a cyclo driver spotted us consulting a map. Ken-like, he assured us that we still had a long way to go to the Museum of the City of Ho Chi Minh City. Then one of his confederates appeared, and we climbed aboard the two bike-rickshaws. We were suspicious, but we were already sweating through our T-shirts. The museum, yes, was only a hundred meters farther, and we had been mildly scammed. But you do want to help the cyclo drivers. Many were teachers and other professionals under the old regime and were denied employment under the communists. They barely survive. Joe's driver, though, cheerfully remarked midway in the short ride that he had been Viet Cong. Joe could think of not a single appropriate response.
The City museum is in a former French palace set among lovely gardens and less attractive artillery pieces. It depicts, mostly through photographs, the history of the communist struggle in Vietnam, dating back to the 1930s, then the French resistance and the American. There are tableaus of smirking workers and heroic portraits of Ho Chi Minh and other notables. The texts are full of the lingo of the era, lots of French colonialists, American imperialists and their puppets and lackeys. It feels loony, not just because few people on earth employ these terms anymore without irony or embarrassment, but because the museum is in a neighborhood that in significant ways now resembles downtown Fort Lauderdale. Look out one of the museum's big windows and you see the HSBC Bank tower. (In Luang Prabang, I saw a farang tourist wearing a red T-shirt with a gold hammer and sickle on the front. Sondheim: "First you're just a sloe-eyed vamp/ Then somebody's mother/ Then you're camp.")
The Reunification Palace is the former presidential palace of President Thieu. Built in 1963, not a great year anywhere for architecture, it's Texas A&M Student Union-modern on the outside, Scranton Sheraton on the inside. Down in the basement you can visit Thieu's bunker---it is spare---and then hike up to the roof to view the helipad from which the last American puppet flew into oblivion in April, 1975. It's a singularly unattractive place, but it's a perfect historical artifact. It instantly conjures up images of American diplomats in crewcuts and skinny neckties grinning and urging a corrupt regime to hang in there, guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
The War Remnants Museum is hard to take. Again, it's mostly photographs. It's got all the famous ones---you know what they are---plus many, many more that are far more graphic. These are the pictures of atrocities and grotesque bombing wounds and injuries that Americans are kept from seeing for reasons of "taste." To its credit, the museum also shows the grief and suffering of American soldiers. The awful tiger cages of Con Son Island, where the Thieu regime kept political prisoners, have been recreated here with convincing detail. The most depressing thing at the museum is a documentary film about the effects on civilians of Agent Orange and other toxic defoliants the U.S. dropped by the B-52-load on many areas of Vietnam. The filmmakers assert plausibly that a million Vietnamese were killed, sickened or deformed by what amounted to chemical warfare. In some regions many of the families had painfully deformed children. We've seen some of the survivors on the streets of Saigon, where they sell lottery tickets.
The City museum is in a former French palace set among lovely gardens and less attractive artillery pieces. It depicts, mostly through photographs, the history of the communist struggle in Vietnam, dating back to the 1930s, then the French resistance and the American. There are tableaus of smirking workers and heroic portraits of Ho Chi Minh and other notables. The texts are full of the lingo of the era, lots of French colonialists, American imperialists and their puppets and lackeys. It feels loony, not just because few people on earth employ these terms anymore without irony or embarrassment, but because the museum is in a neighborhood that in significant ways now resembles downtown Fort Lauderdale. Look out one of the museum's big windows and you see the HSBC Bank tower. (In Luang Prabang, I saw a farang tourist wearing a red T-shirt with a gold hammer and sickle on the front. Sondheim: "First you're just a sloe-eyed vamp/ Then somebody's mother/ Then you're camp.")
The Reunification Palace is the former presidential palace of President Thieu. Built in 1963, not a great year anywhere for architecture, it's Texas A&M Student Union-modern on the outside, Scranton Sheraton on the inside. Down in the basement you can visit Thieu's bunker---it is spare---and then hike up to the roof to view the helipad from which the last American puppet flew into oblivion in April, 1975. It's a singularly unattractive place, but it's a perfect historical artifact. It instantly conjures up images of American diplomats in crewcuts and skinny neckties grinning and urging a corrupt regime to hang in there, guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
The War Remnants Museum is hard to take. Again, it's mostly photographs. It's got all the famous ones---you know what they are---plus many, many more that are far more graphic. These are the pictures of atrocities and grotesque bombing wounds and injuries that Americans are kept from seeing for reasons of "taste." To its credit, the museum also shows the grief and suffering of American soldiers. The awful tiger cages of Con Son Island, where the Thieu regime kept political prisoners, have been recreated here with convincing detail. The most depressing thing at the museum is a documentary film about the effects on civilians of Agent Orange and other toxic defoliants the U.S. dropped by the B-52-load on many areas of Vietnam. The filmmakers assert plausibly that a million Vietnamese were killed, sickened or deformed by what amounted to chemical warfare. In some regions many of the families had painfully deformed children. We've seen some of the survivors on the streets of Saigon, where they sell lottery tickets.
Monday, March 5, 2007
Sihanoukville-HCMC
The young Swedish couple, Malin and Yohan, who had just taken over the Malibu Bungalows, said they hope to remain on the mellow Cambodian seaside for five years of "just breaking even." Unless they are opera fans---the port of Sihanoukville has a commercial center and a beach area but not much else---it should be a satisfying sojourn on the Gulf of Thailand.
The Malibu is eight or ten thatched wooden bungalows spilling down a steep hillside among banana and lime trees, with a quiet beach at the bottom, rocky on one end and sandy on the other. Yohan said, "When Swedes travel they don't travel to somewhere but from somewhere." The Malibu, though, is worth any effort to reach. It has a beflowered, terraced restaurant above the cottages serving banana pancakes for breakfast and rice dishes or club sandwiches for lunch. A few hundred yards to the north is the Sokha Beach Resort, an $180-$500 a night joint with an air-conditioned gym and guards to chase the riffraff (us) off their beach, but lacking the sweet simplicity of the Malibu ($35). We stayed four nights.
Bus travel in Cambodia can be good where the roads are decent. We traveled from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by bus, then down to Sihanoukville. So the $16, eleven-hour trip from Sihanoukville to Ho Chi Minh City seemed like a good idea, and it was. The air-conditioned Hyndai coaches are roomy enough, plus on the windows you get bright pink curtains with white ruffles. Joe said he felt as if he was perched inside a sea anemone. I thought I might be in Barbie's playhouse. There were music videos, too, about young Cambodian couples having relationship issues, which on the rockier segments of highway neatly combined lovesickness with motion sickness.
One of the things you feel inside a Cambodian bus is powerful. The might-makes-right highway rules make for a speedy trip. The driver was not reckless, but it was his clear intent that everything and everybody should move aside as he barreled along. Every several seconds he blared his horn to make sure his intentions were known across the land. Ducks and geese and tuk-tuks scurried, sometimes with nanoseconds to spare. Once, Joe said---though not loudly---"Somebody should take that horn away from him."
We switched buses in Phnom Penh, and the conductor coolly appraised our Vietnam visas, which we had obtained in Sihanoukville. The bus company, Sorya Transportation, wanted no trouble at the border. And there was none. The Vietnamese immigration station resembled a Florida Turnpike Burger King, and the staff there moved us along with an almost identical cool indifference. (One immigration official did ask Joe if he wanted to buy a phone card.)
The first thing that hits you about Vietnam is its infrastructure. That is, it has some. Laos, poor to begin with, and Cambodia, ravaged by the loss of an entire generation of smart, skilled people, often just barely seem to function. Vietnam welcomed us with an impeccably maintained four-lane highway and crowds of people along it looking well-groomed and purposeful. Many of them appeared to work in the tidy garment factories we saw. Even the rice fields seemed greener. In two areas the fields were dotted with dozens of kids flying kites.
In late afternoon, as we approached Saigon (as it's still called by most of its residents), the crowds and traffic thickened and then thickened some more. Soon we realized we had seen the future, and the future was riding motorbikes! It wasn't just a sea of motorbikes, it was galaxies, entire milky ways of motorbikes. It was a Busby Berkley "Gold Diggers of 1935" production number of endless bevies of motorbikes that just kept coming and coming and coming. It wasn't done with mirrors either. Vietnam's 60 million people own over 8 million motorbikes, and the highest percentage of those are in Ho Chi Minh City, population 6 and a half million. In the midst of this, our bus felt like a big (inedible) bug being carried along on a sea of army ants. Not militaristic army ants, though. As in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the men and women on HCMC motos looked serene in their nicely ironed shirts and slacks as they maneuvered silkily in the fuming borderline-chaos.
We had heard conflicting reports on HCMC. Foreigners who had lived here came to love it. Visitors often weren't so crazy about it. The rap is, it's big and hard to get around in---imagine New York with no subways and few buses and everybody on motorbikes---and the people are pushy and and always on the make. Oh, but wait. That IS New York with motorbikes. And many of the same things we like about New York---the good-natured brashness, the variety, the mental keenness and agility, the center-of-the-known-universe confidence or even arrogance, the neon, the racket, the sense of danger and possibility---you feel all this every time you walk out the door in HCMC. It's New York-East. Or, since they were founded around the same time, maybe New York is Saigon-West.
Not that I have walked out the door of our hotel, the Bi Sai Gon in Minihotel Alley, as often as I would have liked. I came down with a case of the toot-toots (I blame some dubious Cambodian fried rice) 12 hours after arriving here. With the help of antibiotics and the exquisite pho (chicken rice-noodle soup) from our little hotel's little restaurant, I am almost fully recovered. And so we'll have a report in a few days---maybe from Hue, where we go by train on Wednesday---on Joe's busy HCMC life (still no photos for the blog, alas), and ours, which is about to resume.
Note: Our visas call this country the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But the Vietnamese are plainly too smart for Marxism. Their charging-away economy---8 percent a year growth---is pure market mayhem, and it's working. Their politics are still Leninist, though, and you have to wonder how long that can last. That question---here and in China---has to be the big one in Asia's speeding-motorbike future.
The Malibu is eight or ten thatched wooden bungalows spilling down a steep hillside among banana and lime trees, with a quiet beach at the bottom, rocky on one end and sandy on the other. Yohan said, "When Swedes travel they don't travel to somewhere but from somewhere." The Malibu, though, is worth any effort to reach. It has a beflowered, terraced restaurant above the cottages serving banana pancakes for breakfast and rice dishes or club sandwiches for lunch. A few hundred yards to the north is the Sokha Beach Resort, an $180-$500 a night joint with an air-conditioned gym and guards to chase the riffraff (us) off their beach, but lacking the sweet simplicity of the Malibu ($35). We stayed four nights.
Bus travel in Cambodia can be good where the roads are decent. We traveled from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by bus, then down to Sihanoukville. So the $16, eleven-hour trip from Sihanoukville to Ho Chi Minh City seemed like a good idea, and it was. The air-conditioned Hyndai coaches are roomy enough, plus on the windows you get bright pink curtains with white ruffles. Joe said he felt as if he was perched inside a sea anemone. I thought I might be in Barbie's playhouse. There were music videos, too, about young Cambodian couples having relationship issues, which on the rockier segments of highway neatly combined lovesickness with motion sickness.
One of the things you feel inside a Cambodian bus is powerful. The might-makes-right highway rules make for a speedy trip. The driver was not reckless, but it was his clear intent that everything and everybody should move aside as he barreled along. Every several seconds he blared his horn to make sure his intentions were known across the land. Ducks and geese and tuk-tuks scurried, sometimes with nanoseconds to spare. Once, Joe said---though not loudly---"Somebody should take that horn away from him."
We switched buses in Phnom Penh, and the conductor coolly appraised our Vietnam visas, which we had obtained in Sihanoukville. The bus company, Sorya Transportation, wanted no trouble at the border. And there was none. The Vietnamese immigration station resembled a Florida Turnpike Burger King, and the staff there moved us along with an almost identical cool indifference. (One immigration official did ask Joe if he wanted to buy a phone card.)
The first thing that hits you about Vietnam is its infrastructure. That is, it has some. Laos, poor to begin with, and Cambodia, ravaged by the loss of an entire generation of smart, skilled people, often just barely seem to function. Vietnam welcomed us with an impeccably maintained four-lane highway and crowds of people along it looking well-groomed and purposeful. Many of them appeared to work in the tidy garment factories we saw. Even the rice fields seemed greener. In two areas the fields were dotted with dozens of kids flying kites.
In late afternoon, as we approached Saigon (as it's still called by most of its residents), the crowds and traffic thickened and then thickened some more. Soon we realized we had seen the future, and the future was riding motorbikes! It wasn't just a sea of motorbikes, it was galaxies, entire milky ways of motorbikes. It was a Busby Berkley "Gold Diggers of 1935" production number of endless bevies of motorbikes that just kept coming and coming and coming. It wasn't done with mirrors either. Vietnam's 60 million people own over 8 million motorbikes, and the highest percentage of those are in Ho Chi Minh City, population 6 and a half million. In the midst of this, our bus felt like a big (inedible) bug being carried along on a sea of army ants. Not militaristic army ants, though. As in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the men and women on HCMC motos looked serene in their nicely ironed shirts and slacks as they maneuvered silkily in the fuming borderline-chaos.
We had heard conflicting reports on HCMC. Foreigners who had lived here came to love it. Visitors often weren't so crazy about it. The rap is, it's big and hard to get around in---imagine New York with no subways and few buses and everybody on motorbikes---and the people are pushy and and always on the make. Oh, but wait. That IS New York with motorbikes. And many of the same things we like about New York---the good-natured brashness, the variety, the mental keenness and agility, the center-of-the-known-universe confidence or even arrogance, the neon, the racket, the sense of danger and possibility---you feel all this every time you walk out the door in HCMC. It's New York-East. Or, since they were founded around the same time, maybe New York is Saigon-West.
Not that I have walked out the door of our hotel, the Bi Sai Gon in Minihotel Alley, as often as I would have liked. I came down with a case of the toot-toots (I blame some dubious Cambodian fried rice) 12 hours after arriving here. With the help of antibiotics and the exquisite pho (chicken rice-noodle soup) from our little hotel's little restaurant, I am almost fully recovered. And so we'll have a report in a few days---maybe from Hue, where we go by train on Wednesday---on Joe's busy HCMC life (still no photos for the blog, alas), and ours, which is about to resume.
Note: Our visas call this country the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But the Vietnamese are plainly too smart for Marxism. Their charging-away economy---8 percent a year growth---is pure market mayhem, and it's working. Their politics are still Leninist, though, and you have to wonder how long that can last. That question---here and in China---has to be the big one in Asia's speeding-motorbike future.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
No pix for now
Sihanoukville has its seaside charms but not its computer charms. So none of Joe's wonderful recent photos will appear on the blog soon. We're hoping for better facilities in Ho Chi Minh City, where we arrive Saturday. They had all those tunnels. Maybe they'll have Adobe Photo Shop.
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