Saigon Christmas Wonderland

Yule Never Walk Alone

Merry Christmas to all my blog readers. More bad puns for sure in 2008.

A Party Boat in the Hills of Dalat

We got away from Saigon kitsch and escaped to the hills. A remarkably cold climate which saw the Vietnamese dressed up for a big freeze whereas for me at least it was a Scottish summer's day and of course the hills made it all the more alpine, our sub-tropical year was quickly behind us as we embraced the cold air. Dalat is already pretty high up for VN and after a few hours walk through forestry planted by the French we got to a summit ( as high as Nevis) decorated appropriately with a statue of two lovers entwined, commissioned in white concrete.There were pony rides for those wishing to envisage themselves as cowboys with rustled squaws by their side and of course there was the chance to dress up as Hill Tribe Accessory; striped up for those stripped of rights; the nostalgic notion of ethnic communities that lack fundamental support who dwindle in nunbers, language and memory.
Thank goodness the government is doing something to address this issue.

There's a quicktime to the right of this with a peaceful moment.

Christmas in Saigon

The first of a few rough and ready slices of Christmas in Saigon served up with plenty of background atmosphere can
be viewed in the Quicktime movies hyperlink to the right.

Leaf Me Alone. A Spirit Hanging in the Sub-Tropical Forest ?

New Silva Rerum added

Chiang Mai

We needed this. Thailand before had been reduced to a supermarket sweep, a race against the clock, the ticking time of a weekend against the mad dash for all previously unavailable consumables; so give us tofu burgers and fennel toothpaste; underwear that fits and electronic gear that works after a few months in the cold heat of Saigon. This time we ventured beyond our epicureal desires and boarded a sleeper for a 12 hour journey to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, a well known stop for a previous, hedonistic generation.

We were rocked. In near sleep, in a twilight consciousness we could feel every bump, lurch and grind that the old train made. Of course, better nights sleep have been had, tucked up and duvet'd but this had an unusual element to the theatre of sleep. It was excting. Exciting to be woken up by a whistle that rattled the metal walls; odd to hear tannoy annoucements from a platform in some unknown country station where perhaps a single passenger was boarding or alighting and there we were in the haze of sleep, the limbo of travel, wonderfully, comfortably suspended in our bunks. This was recognisable travel where distance can be honestly measured by movement.



Chiang Mai was a port of call for market shopping with ersatz and authentic Hill Tribe wares side by side. This was a perfect stop for the tofu tourist and we ate well in organic restaurants and veggie havens where books from yesteryear lined the walls, where ideas from the past could be bought second hand. I remember being in shops like this where ideas were part of the commercial venture rather than a reassuring 3d wallpaper. Still, we bought what we could not get; we luxuriated in food and in an atmosphere alien to eating out in HCMC.

Then the trek with a guide that was completely enthralling. It proved demanding and somehow more raw, more basic than I had feebly imagined. I have always been a little averse to walking anywhere unless it was circuitous or had the promise of sweet reward [noises off]; I can understand the exercise element but tracing back ones steps with eyes invariably cast down to keep sure footing always struck me as some dull drudge; a Falkland yomp without the joy of killing. Sorry, but really I've never been a fan but consider me sold on jungle treks that seem to go vertical for hours with little let up apart from to cross some stream which some guide has been kind enough to bridge with a felled log. We were sweating pigly within minutes and the mozzies really took delight in biting as soon as we took a moment to rest. Still when we did stop there was a chance to hear the buzz and cry of the forest and breathe in the musk of decay. This was a sub-tropical forest of thick bamboo which the guide hacked away at with glee but there had been Teak here, an elegant and precious tree now mostly taken away, smuggled out for export.



There were times it was easy to imagine being lost in this place; a luxury of thought when in similiar forest trails not far from here, Hill Tribes like the Karen have pushed through invisible, man-made partitions and escaped into the forest as they left behind a Junta crackdown, a vicious follow-up unseen for the most part because of the camouflage of power. Still, there is progress for some ethnic groups like the Hmong on the Thai side of the border and the village that suddenly appeared out of the green was eeriely quiet save for a few children (girls) playing with piglets. The girls immediately decsended on Kate and went into a familiar ritual for all girls no doubt and certainly for these three who took delight in plaiting the strangely coloured hair. We had snaphot of existence which seemed simple and harmonious, there were bumper crops of cabbages in the field and the Thai King had donated a solar panel which allowed even in the wet season for there to be a few hours electricity every night.

After the eight hour trek and bodies now damp after wading waist deep through ice cold water holding on to a log that had been feld between the two riverbanks we were able to sit down and watch a few Thais drink some hooch and do Karaoke in a shack in a clearing. It broke the calm and peace of the walk, replaced the exotic incense of the forest with the waft of cigarettes and alcohol but then something had to. I wasn't really watching or listening. I still felt as though I was moving through thickets of bamboo.

Cross-Dressing Borders

Please click on the link and see how the Japanese are countering their stereotype with full on panache and a samba'd verve. We are travelling now, this time to northern Thailand by sleeper train and then to embed with writing.

It's A Jungle in Here

Someone says we exported this. Did we? Aspiration certainly seems a globally imposed phenomenon. I've heard a few people take it on the cheek like plucky ex-colonials; dutiful apologists for a capitalist system that has been marketed so well, melded so aggressively into a new way of life here where mobile phones can be bought at every ten paces, where the shopkeep's Buddhist shrines are carefully attended with burning incense. The gods of good fortune and shopping share the same realm here and so now we are giving them, these Asians tigers, their due; giving them enough rope to measure how far they can go, as we stand by and maybe mop up a little too. Everyone wins. A cheap cost of living for sensitive ex-pats means nothing. The colonial regretters are side-lined; there is no time to pause or take a breath or to compare the good and bad of change, of history being napalmed, of US reparation myths dissolving as children are still born. Without limbs. Aspiration stands shoulder to shoulder with change and it can if unchecked, unparalelled create an immolating consciousness. As the rains pour, the tail end of weather, the crest of something else, this city is turning into a 24hour building site, feeding the rush for the new.

A joke. What do people in a hurry and the citizens of Moscow have in common? They are both rushin. It got a limited laugh that one, nearly as unfunny as making cracks about revolutionary leaders or, in some countries, royal familes. Maybe that is what is happening. It's too late to stop the trucks carrying tons of cement for new apartment blocks and offices and it's too early for satire.



But it's also useful to remember as we stand by, getting a mouthful of dust, an earful of noise, please don't get misty and wish for shacks and lean to's which are everywhere if you care to really look. While sounding off about the rape of lifestyle it is useful to look at people squatting in gutters swatting at Dengue flies. Those stripey fuckers can kill. That is real and happening for people not far from this expat block. Living with noise and bad air can make you want to garotte, vent anger on some worker hammering concrete at 2.00am but our complaints, our concerns and ultimately our care are mutations from the truth and heart of matter. The apartments we are living in screwed up the neighbourhood before we arrived so we are just the latest in a line of grumpy Farangs who are used to the peace and quiet of somewhere else with different noise. It becomes a homily of sorts. An ivory tower sort of thing. This has happened before and it will happen again.

Everything comes to we who wait.

Human Trafficing

A Short Film About Bo

This is the place for us.

Drums and Dragons

Two Quicktime films showing the annual Moon Festival celebrations

Nga bite sa de

" I am hungry."

There are diffferent kinds of hunger. There are gluttons who will crave more food when their belly obscures the floor; there are people living in the gutter, on hot, steamy streets with no light apart from the odd battery-powered flourescent strip that splashes cold light on a desperate scene; there are people, peaceful, spiritual people who have been pushed into a corner by a hunter and who cannot rest until action has been started, a sense of change undertaken. Somehow. And then there are those who are hungry for still more power who will stop at nothing to preserve a status quo that serves the few while denying the many.

There are no politics in this blog just a sense of humanity, a sense of brotherhood with saffron-robed monks marching in silence but with a strong voice for change.

Train to Saigon

One minute Quicktime movie added

This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land

Of course it was a blur; a pulped mash of memory and muse; of sights and sounds filtered through the skin of travel, osmotic sensations rippling. In the blink of an eye we came back; a red eye journey that was longer than just miles. It seemed to us, this journey, to stretch beyond continent and ocean; city and country. We have become more elasticated, as though we were both ready to be propelled back into the culture we had come from and probably never really left. We had arrived on the oft-kissed tarmac of Heathrow. Just as we knelt down to thank our lucky stars, someone sang a torch song and set themselves alight in Glasgow and the rolling, breaking, repeating news of CNN flashed in the arrivals hall unlikely pictures of fundamentalists being hooked by neds in a familiar location.

Of course it was a welcome blur. A year spent away from friends and family often felt like a long time. But I could never have allowed myself to feel too cut off as email, letters, blogs and texts saw to distance being shrunk to a matter of seconds. The cliche is that when you come back everything seems as though you never left, the status quo prevailing. I'm not sure that's true. People change and lives continue, hopefully happily perhaps even dramatically, but there is an inexorable sense of movement to coming back. Just as there can be to staying.

When I left I felt as though I was being ripped out of the familiar, torn from roots deeply embedded, a life impacted yet fortunate and I even imagined that it might be strange or awkward or even difficult to reinsert myself upon my return as though I might have gone native in the expat compound or become so jungled on deserrt islands that I could no longer see the vines for the leaves. Of course I learnt that people are strangely the same in either place. Sure there are ticks of culture that gob-smack; there are the layers of power and corruption that defy all optimism in the progression of humanity, there are displays of human love and kindness that bedevil definition and trite summation. If I have learnt anything this past year then I have understood that these ticks,layers and displays can be applied to either country.

And now posting from Mui Ne, the beach completely lashed by whipped up waves, their squall sounding menace and nearly drowning the sound of the dodgy ceiling fan rattling its noise, threatening to come loose and cut through the humid air of our bungalow. I have returned just as I know truly, deeply that I have left.

Click on the link called ' Sid and Lucas in the Borders' for the latest quicktime movie.

I Asterix: Free from speech

And so we came to our brave new world. A chip off the old block. Eastern bloc. We arrived with trepidation but with the hope of the resuscitation of our senses; from the ritual of routine to the edgy dance of expectation; from close proximity of the familiar to nuzzling with strangers in queues, in the streets as we shaved our safety limits, the protective barriers removed with the hope of fate. I arrived in the Tropics and packed everything with me; previous addictions, the ghosts of predilictions and the absorbing neuroses of the new. How would I survive without friends and the familiar ? I cut loose from an anchor. I am no longer at home. I am offshore now. Soon I will no longer be a resident of the United Kingdom but then it seems in my absence Scotland isn't either.



It is possible for me to vote from afar. How strange to be able to affect a change in a place where I don't live. How strange it must be for people to vote and affect no change in a place where they live. Does everybody live in the same place ?

Back in the ' old country' ( as one Alzheimered Cisco septogenarian walking the Saigon streets described his former life) resident status had previously induced apathy and anger at the futility of the vote. Who needs it ? Who needs them ? But truly is this not a priviliged position after seeing with my own eyes, mass numbness and an exploitable naivety. From Chairman of the board to Pol Pot. I could vote via d*m*cr*** ( can you fathom the asterix, the hysterics that necessitate such punctuation?) and make a country free and yet it is difficult to forget that there are countries that held ele**io*s recently for one party, the winner a foregone conclusion.

I am a guest, a working alien improving the prospects of a privilged few. I have been afforded the luxury of travel both within the country and some of its neighbours, Thailand and Cambodia. If I am tempted to make protracted statements about what I think is wrong like a kneejerk, reactionary expat getting boiled about poor service then it is always useful to remember earlier posts on this website and to recall the vibrancy of hope, the verve of the new and unseen, the untested and unknown.

Could do an epsiodic, sit-com style recap; the first step on the archetypal, tropical beach, the first breath of hot, filthy Saigon air; wading into more work-based pressure and stress than ever I have ever had to endure; then finding myself at home and at ease with Kate. She was and remains my solace, my hope and my future. And soon as the shock of the new eases we begin to explore wilder shores and mountain air before swivelling experience again and making sure we shop to the hilt in Bangkok's open market before finding moments of such tangible hurt and nerve-shredding horror in the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh,Cambodia. And then there are the more day to day events. We watch as cyclos pedal by with sheets of glass stretched across half the road; we walk around the park where the whole of Saigon plays, exercises and snogs so innocently after dark. Here, is the Saigon that enthralls, amuses, saddens and befuddles. This is a place of contradictions, contrasts and contretemps. We are sickened by a multinational that raves it up in the park with loud music and loud colour ( the way to get attention here) as they seek to promote food supplements that swell the naturally lithe and svelte Vietnamese body. Of course it is cultural. A fat kid means prosperity, there ain't no heroin chic here. But we are also touched by the genuine innocence of people emerging into controlled awareness. There is a Blyton-esque feel to picnicing sexuality that camps out for brief moments in the twilight. There is only a fondle in the park before marriage. There is no where else to go. And of course the world over sexuality and gender is the basis of so much oppression and expectation. Of course the woman must be a virgin when she marries but a large number of south-east asian men will have visited a prostitute many times before they marry their bride.

And there came a time when we stopped traveling, when we were no longer explorers on well worn routes. We travelled without sweating a drop and we explored without a wilting map. We have been writers, not so much in residence but in quarantine but we have been here, existing with coiled imagination; in abeyance, in waiting, in research and in preparation. I have been both absorbed in the newness and reminded of the ' old country' , the things, desires that have come to reassert themselves so strongly. And The Lotus Seed performance, so well realised, helped with that. Writing coming to life can only serve to act as a prescient reminder that there is so little time and so much to say.



But that is also a well travelled epithet. Those who have read this blog over the year and who know me will have heard that many times before. A melodramatic conceit that I do my best to pass off as belief in myself. But as a final thing for this long,last blog of my first year here, it must be said that I have really appreciated the feedback you have given me about the blog and it's been good to know that it gives me a connection to much-loved friends and family in the old country.

It Means The World To Me

I was with the tea ladies, scurrying between their legs as they balanced trays of scones and chocolate crispies. The table was already groaning with white bread sandwiches, their crusts tidily discarded into their own bag near the piano of the music room. We were in the church hall and the stockinged feet friends of the Alloway Parish Drama Group were in full swing; egg mayonniase poised, vol-au-vents at the ready. With only a few minutes to the interval, there was still the urn to be boiled, still the napkins (paper) to be triangulated, it was all so reassuringly co-ordinated. Even my movements which I thought so subversive and covert must have been expected as though they knew exactly what the 10 year old self-styled food raider must have been after. They turned a blind eye as I scooped chocolate crispies into my hand as I flashed them a smile I hoped would be distracting.

I watched in fascination while my mother and her actor friends were on stage at the church hall. Normally this was a terrible place, a venue for enforced cub scouts until someone, perhaps not me, had had enough. I think I left of my own accord. I think I was thrown out. Either way it was a relief not to be toggled but to be enthralled by the smell of the well to do silently listening to an am dram denouement; or perhaps politely tittering as a Ray Cooney farce or an Ayckbourn witticism rang out. Here I was allowed my privilged scampering between acts because my mother was part of the suburban troupe who performed twice a year in halo'd surroundings.

I remember the excitment and nerve of seeing her on stage in Elvira, her Noel Coward bravura still ringing in memory, still recalled as a special moment. This was what it was like to perform, to be on stage, to be noticed for doing something. Perhaps being a teacher, the utlimate centre of attention, was not enough for her. She needed to feel the nerves of performance, the rush of adrenalin as the curtain parted. I can understand that.



And now I quickly take a look at the two actresses who are performing the adaptation of my Miss Globe X story in a Japanese-run cafe with an Indochine air. This is a first for everyone concerned and I suspect for Saigon itself. We are frivilous expats having an art thing of course but have slipped under the wire the virtues of airing gender roles and sexual stereotyping. In the marvelous performances of the two Miss Globes, there are the nuances of the narrative but also the live emotion of the moment. Leaping from page to mouth it is possible to vibrate with something here. It's such a sad yet angry story and it took on a life of its own thanks to the actresses and their intuitive director. There have been many collaborations over the years from a dingy urban warehouse to a sweaty Den Haag venue and each one has contributed directly or indirectly to the development of my writing.

It does mean the world to me.




There are two short Quicktime Movies. Miss Globe X Premier and Impromptu French Jazz Band. Photos courtesy of Robert Appino. Thanks Bob.

A Scattering of Seeds in Saigon

You are welcome to attend. I wish you could. Some familiar faces would be great. A diversion from the horror of the last post; a thankful sideshow to the ongoing apocalyptic epic that has us singing and dancing in the twilight of the oil age.

Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies

Quotation from Pol Pot. Photographs from Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Button added in support of the kidnapped Alan Johnston. Please click if you wish to add your name to the petition.

Road Trip

In the back of Volvo, not just the back seat but the open plan boot of that old yellow estate. My father used the car for company work that took him length and breadth but during school holidays we piled in, the gang of four children and headed for summer Lake District or winter Darlington. Being the youngest and of course the smallest I was put on the bench seat at the back of the car, getting bumped by bags and ribbed by unwoven spears of wicker as the picnic basket unwound.

In a here and now minibus with room to stretch we have an altogether different, decades later, view. At first we see town planning as vomit on a drawing board, as sophisticated as a backhander to a man in a suit. Any suit. Any where. But here. Here, it is okay to build a road connecting someones A with someones B, it's okay that we can speed through communities that have grown up beside the road even before the last tar of mac. It's okay because people can and do make a living beside the road, with cha da and pho all on offer. Then a woman still living in yesteryear, still being treated and paid as of yesteryear, tries to cross the road on her rickety bicycle and she is ploughed through by both lorry and bus, a double whammy of vehicular action, of human corrouption. Note to self and to censor: Don't let the people make their home by the motorway.

One night when I was some age, old enough to give words and image to memory but young enough still to have my Rupert the Bear pyjamas, my father came home after a long business trip. At that time he was working in Novi Sad in the former Yugoslavia, a good job by all accounts but one which kept him away for months at a time. This was a journey back from the East to our West Coast home. I remember a few things. The expectation of seeing him; my mother worrying about his late arrival and busying herself with supper arrangements and breakfast preparation and then the news, breaking as it would be called now, breaking our calm as it would be called anytime. A pile-up - which seemed to happen more then - on the M1, dozens of cars involved, thick fog at play. A number of fatalities. When my father walked through the door, several hours later, he was walking wounded; ashen and frail, a limp arrival, a forlorn but desperately needed welcome home. Turns out that the back seat that I had so resented sometimes, that me and the vomiting, shitting dog had shared had been concertina'd along with the long bonnet while my father remained safely cocoonned at the wheel. As he shakily told the story of his journey back from Europe, he told us that the driver in front was okay but the one behind had been killed, the tail end of the pile-up still having enough force to take life.

Dalat. Buon Me Thuot. Mui Ne. The road once we were beyond town planning horror provided a suitable artery to witness the many lives of people here. We stopped by a road side cafe and sat on ubiquitous too small chairs. We were the only customers apart from 6 soldiers nursing six strong iced coffees and enjoying a raucous game of dominoes. Apocalypse that GI image. Not exactly roulette and dear deer hunter; not really the colonel in his labyrinth... These cheery and welcoming soldiers were seemingly unaffected by the offensive fire of incredibly loud euro techno that had us shouting out orders to the gum-chewing waitress. Yet again, we were witness to the fact that the only real danger to life here was the bombardment of bad taste; the flack of crap...

We lurched to a river and my companions bathed in the cool mountain water. We were truly in the back of beyond,a local sketch/map and a resourceful driver our best hope. Finding an antless rock to perch on it was possible to be still for a moment after the bumpy journey across coffee country and trees abundant with limes and dragon fruit. Here two whities bathing in the water brought much mirth from the dark skinned children who had been playing in the shallow, dry-season river. Just beyond them, adults were using the river as their valuable resource, a place to wash themselves and their clothes. Two men carefully assembling branch and twine to build a bridge between the two shores took time out to wave at us all. More people, adult and children came to the water's edge. We were sudden and unexpected entertainment. It was their stage. We trod lightly, carefully. These same people must have stared up in wonder at the approaching roar of engines, the sky suddenly filled with noise. These same people must have wondered who would have wanted to burn their land and fill the air with the smell of burning gasoline.

Please have a look at the two Quicktime movies added to the links above. Phu Quoc Island and Day of the Cicada. Both give a flavour to the journey.

Mekong

So much of movement, of relocating from A to B, in transit, en route and in the hasty retreat from work is done by taxi. Our metered chauffeurs are usually silent, the language barrier scuppering clichés of chatty cabbies or grumpy road experts. But not always silent. In the throb of Ho Chi Minh traffic, many a driver ( man and woman) seems capable of haughing up a steady stream of flem to be spat out the hastily rolled down window or indulge themselves liberally in neck twisting and knuckle crunching to be accompanied by self-congratulatory sighs while a few mad and fairly scary times, a driver has sung airily into the vanity mirror while swigging from a bottle of rice wine.

In the Mekong, a few hours ( sober) ride from the city we had come to a homestay, where a Vietnamese family give up a portion of their house and play host to sweaty foreigners who pay a small amount USD for an incredible experience. Within half an hour of arriving we are sharing a beer while losing balance in hammocks stretched across the wooden balconies that overlook a slow-moving and tiny tributary of this huge array of water.
 
Our water-taxi, a pleasure boat with eight itsy bitsy chairs phfut phfuts along the canals allowing us to breathe in green scent and then travel on further and apparently deeper into foliage, where we can see trees gracefully holding fruits; green upward-pointing bananas, balanced like clustered dancers on their points; and stranger fruits hanging like swollen red lips, the Nah,whose flesh is very sweet and disturbingly warm. A fond kiss. Aye.


Our water taxi driver silently, perhaps deafened by the ceaseless chug of the boat’s engine , takes us as far as he can into smaller and smaller canals. There is no moan from him, no capitalising on our apparent riches, no anger or frustration when other boats come near or when knotweed threatens to engulf us all. Instead, he takes us serenely into the lightness of being, the ease of sightseeing, of gliding on silk water. Of course, I trailed my fingers in the water. Of course, we saw Vietnamese half-immersed in the water we dallied in, their hands lifting carefully arranged nets and cages, hoping that they had trapped some useful life.

Later, the noise of boats fades into the dark and our homestay hosts having been warned of our vegetarian status lay a table in the middle of the wooden platform and put on a Blyton-esque spread of wonderful food including green aubergines we had seen growing along the river bank and now fried in garlic and lemongrass and we smile when we see our tofu. Half an hour earlier a canoe paddled by a woman, swaddled against the burn of the dying sun, bumped against the wooden jetty and she held up a bag of tofu, fresh from the market. The process to this food was a privilige to witness. This was far away from a supermarketed life. We knew exactly where our food had come from.

Follow the 'Mekong' link for a little Quicktime movie and see what you make of this somewhat large spider.

Chuc Mung Nam Muoi

It's in Our Nature

There have been many moments in woods and forests; sucked down as a child into the soil, nails clawing into earth then digging up worms for inspection, old toys, old soliders who had been buried alive in some previous battle. In the wood near my home it was possible to talk tactics with friends, shocked and awed by the scale of possibility. Now that it was summer we could eschew our bedrooms and open a new front in local woods with a new enemy, the unforseen.

In Cat Tien, a National Park 150km from Saigon, it must have been the unseen. One moment the forest we now walked through would have been cawing and shrieking with life, the scurrying sounds of beasts of fur and scale, rushing on through the thick vines that had been winding themselves around the Mahogany trees for centuries. And the next it was bludgeoned into eerie silence, just the lick of flames and the settling of chard embers to be heard. Millions of gallons of agent orange, a herbicide kept in containers with an orange markation strip on it, had been deployed to rid the forest of the Mekong and other areas of dense vegetation and hence cover for Minh's forces. The troops spraying the chemical were told it was harmless to humans but immediately children were running down roads, their skin disintegrating before photographers' eyes and then later, enlisted GI's found themselves the proud fathers of babies with half-limbs and sunken eyes.

Earlier we had been in an altogether different forest; one where trees and vines grown for centures were wild and furious, a literal jungle of entanglements, of varicose veins enveloping trees which stretched towards the canopy, their thick, wide roots giving shelter to alarmingly large beetles and twilight fauna. The defoliated forest had an evenness to it, all the trees were just 30 something years old, rising as they did out of contaminated ground. But it was good to be in the more primevil wood, you could sense a link stretching back millennia before man with poisoned ideas interrupted. Here we heard but did not see the monkeys, their howl making us jump with fright and then, and then a moment, straight out of the image bank, a moment catching us timely now, sweet posterity.

We heard them first, a flap of wings that was languorous but not weak, a slow rhythm that was no mere domestic flutter but a
sound that gave us a pre-historic flight, a rippling fright as though we were going to be swooped on by some jointed bird and carried to the laughing Howler monkeys. As it turned out, we looked up and saw pie-eye'd Hornbills (ok, I ain't no orniphologist) with a huge wing span and a call that dropped on us as they glided through the canopy. Around us, their sound was absorbed into the soft tread of hidden life. We stopped for longer than we had intended and met silence with silence.

Then later we trekked a few hours to a crocodile swamp which at first didn't live up to its name. We were to stay in rudimentary rooms, a bed with a mosquito net and nothing else. When we had hung our nets we took up our position at the top of the wooden, ranger's lookout. Below us our guide was chatting with the rangers as they all busied themselves with cooking their evening meal, fish caught just a few hours before from the lake that was supposed to contain our crocs. From our perch the five of us looked beyond the Beware The Crocodile sign that appeared to have been chomped quite heavily and strained our eyes to see something other than the flying fish, the exotic skimming birds that suddenly didn't seem worth our attention.

Eventually, a long eventually, having doused ourselves liberally with alcohol we had carried from our drop-off point, we took a walk beyond the sign on a moonlit-night, a good night to see them according to our guide. And as if cajoled by our wishful thinking, blubous eyes radiated and reflected in the night and with closer inspection at the water's edge, the gnarled and scaly body of a fairly docile male croc lurked for us to feel relieved. That nature had represented itself well.


I was lucky that my soldiers were not destroyed, buried or most commonly due to our flibbity concentration, missing in action as whole battalians could be mislaid as we fought over our strategy, our common goals. Such was our game at the age we were, our battles were of World War II, our imagination synchronisnng with what we had been taught. Our forest, our play was rich and dense, full of wonderfully fearful pretense. Of course we had know idea what the death of our soldiers meant as they valiantly balanced on top of mole hills. But we would have noticed a bomb that took away our cover and stripped the woods of their life. We would have noticed the death of nature and we would have noticed our skin falling like dead leaves to the soiled ground.

Have You Feeling Today Sir ?

So many things have been lost in translation. Not just here where here is the last day at Quy Nhon in Central Vietnam; not just the tonal gymnastics of Vietnamese that is tackled with a kind of obdurate pessimism by expats. It's too hard. It's too difficult to understand... It always is. Not just here. Miscommunication is everywhere be it from a cell phoned gallows to a carnivorous public; from the struggle against freedom from inspiration to endless muzak blighting our ears. Both here in our retreat and 'out there' there is little to understand and too much to witness.

When we arrived it was as though we had arrived to the West Coast of Scotland. I hadn't expected to see such high waves nor a scurrying, howling wind that had other visitors running for the cover of the foyer. Unfortunately, they had come for a hot slice of paradise and had been served with a cold shoulder. They had been shunned by the sun and now a torpid malaise hung over the resort. Children played increasingly anarchic games of pool while sun-seekers, their tans fading by the second, thumbed too quickly through Der Spiegel or Les Temps du Mauvais occasionally glancing over to their partners, in boredom, in the gradual quaffing of wine to ease then ooze the horror of another day without tropical heat. We were lucky. We basked in the cold after the fug of Saigon and we embraced the wind that rushed around our room like a dog chasing it's own tail. We were dizzy yet delighted to be duvet'd.

We were not typical visitors. We saw neither Cham Tower nor local fishing fleet. We did not tour but were lured, away, retreating writers limping into the sunset with the weight of...Ok. You get the gist. We missed out on the outside world in order to spend time in the inside world. Crazy. Stoopid. A waste of paradise. Of course. Not. For us, this has been time well spent in a slower, more reflective place and it's been good to breathe clean air.

I will miss the sound of the waves that seemed to break so close, the lick of their fury spattering white foam on to our windows. But now that we are returning to the city we can rejuvenate our senses and let memory play its important part in who we are. If our night thoughts have been shaped by the rush of wind and surge of tide then of course we can have that in our apartment: our wirelessed, broadband(ish) connection means that we can upload the sound of the sea and hear waves looped with an optional seagull plug-in. The wonders of technology. Nature has a lot to learn.