Harold Pinter

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter.

Rest in Peace.

Yuletide Greetings from Thailand

To all friends and family

We are on Koh Phangan in Thailand for Christmas and New Year.
I'd like to share Yuletide Greetings with friends and family and to thank you for your kind comments about the blog. It means a lot to know that people are reading about our lives in South East Asia. Thank you too for your emails and letters. Your words and
pictures bring a valued sense of home and connection to our continuing adventure.

A Ruin in the Forest near Hue

Hue

Hue had the $$!t bombed out of it in the American war and there is a sense here, even though people are friendly, that memories are longer and the party line is more strictly followed - the taxi driver gently but firmly corrects my use of Saigon to the simply correct name, Ho Chi Minh City. There are still bullets in the citadel, a huge expanse of half renovated religious outhouses - antiquity melded once again with modernity; a relationship not explained via scholarship but by the thick slap of concrete on to anicent stone. It's an eerie, atmospheric place but its quick repair raises the question whether the party people are preserving heritage or exploiting tourist potential.

Nothing new here. Except the concrete.



The art deco hotel, La Residence, had more sympathetic restoration applied and it oozed history from its port-holes and elegant swimming pool. Here the highest ranking Southern Vietnamese General and his family were captured when the northerners pushed south. And from here we hired bikes and were quickly off the beaten track, countless hellos from kids running alongside and, strangely, a few salutes from old men in suits standing silently in fields as families toiled the ground. It was cold here, and wet. It was a such a wonderful contrast to the smog embrace of Saigon.



Kate's Vietnamese is progressing pretty well, she can string simple conversations together whereas I seem to fumble and remember just complaints and negatives. Not needed here. Back in Saigon, the big city thing always kicks in but my phrases are out of place here. I guess being on the bikes, cutting away from the main streets and pedaling through a jungled,jumbled mix of sub-tropical and temperate trees; skirting proudly concreted homes where the owners stretch out in front of newly purchased TVs and then resting at an old temple with weeds growing out of the tiles, all of this has been an exercise not just for the body but for a sense of openness, a reminder not to let noise drown out silence; not to let stress batter peace senseless.

Build On Us

Credit Crunch VietNam

A Ten Minute Double Ring Halo

Sea air makes sleeping incredibly sweet... as Diane Cluck sings. This is further away from that but there can be autumnal daydreams in a two season, one temperature climate. The season or is that the times have changed here when Halloween skeletons ride mopeds embracing their Frankenstein driver, gathering all that is foreign to them. And teenagers gathering on a main street with matching mopeds and angled baseball gaps let roar their little engines, making proud the low cc and speeding off, full of joy under the ever watchful eye of everybody. The only revolution here is that of wheels but youth culture has its strength - from wifi freedom to fashion subversive, there is always a way to say you want to be different. Meanwhile in the newly opened bar/club/apparatchik jacuzzi called Fashion TV, the party people go there to celebrate with something slim in their hands.
More photos but missed the Halloween moments. Drat.

Saigon Scenes

the first of a few photos from around the city...The Vietnamese lady with Kate is Miss Hieu, a talented massage therapist who can work painful wonders on tired bodies. As you can see, I need a little more work...

This is Nelson Mandela

This is Nelson Mandela. Her name is Aung San Suu Kyi and she has just celebrated her 63rd birthday alone. She has been under house arrest which sounds like some cosy alternative to being in prison. Her husband has died while she has been in this prison; her sons have grown up and a nation she had democratic aspirations for has been drowned by nature and tortured by generals.She is now in her 13th year of detention. She isn't allowed to see family or friends as all visitors are banned. Scant reports say that her health is deteriorating.

Blogs coming from here tend to encounter problems if there are problematic key words ( think China) but there is little need to be circumspect about Burma. It's like it doesn't exist. When the monks bravely rose up last year not a word was mentioned in the media here. There are few good neighbours to this destitute country. When there are so many vested interests in a country's abundant resources it is not surprising that governments pay only lip-service to protest and the UN dispatches a toothless envoy. Rather than blogging about life here I thought I would post a couple of links that give an idea of life there.

Thanks Harold

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his or her choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Winner

There Is Another Party Here

Of course this was a full moon party VietNam-style but lets try not to be condescending; no it didn't have the coolness of a Koh Samui sandfloor; of grooving Thai-dyed hedonists, still there, still not. And no, there was no Balaeric pick-up; thongs and songs in a post-Mediterranean setting, a site for disc eyes and incubating doubt. There was none of that. Instead there was guy with a couple of homemade fireballs which he acrobatically wooshed around him. A Danish man helpfully pointed out that the night before ( a pre-full moon party?) one of the fireballs had come off and spattered into the sand close to bare, tanned feet. This was what we were here for; moments on the sand, blissed and melded but always with the chance of being welded to the bean bag we had flopped on to after stiff Long Island Iced Teas. Sure, we could see it was unsafe and we crumpled backwards but we watched the fireball dancers dignify their lack of experience with pure enthusiasm. Thank XX we are not too jaded to see that.

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Music: Calexico/The Clash Guns of Brixton

Night Train to Saigon (Reprise)

music: Elfpower

Came back on the night train to Saigon, five hours from Phan Thiet and the beach. Sluggish and daylight at first as it passed through red sand dunes and into the countryside with its rasta Dragon Fruit trees, a crowd of nodding dreads with pink heads and green gills hanging limply in the air. A strange fruit. Then it sped up as it closed on Bien Hoa as though rushing to dismiss a city which had led a small-scale resistance against the northern communists even after the fall of Saigon. Inside the train, the Vietnamese are beginning to wake up from slumber or recover from being slumped on the floor, crippled with motion-sickness and soon it is our night train cutting through streets where a hand reached out could be touched and where we groan not quite arrived into a station dimly lit and we walk the last three hundred metres down the rusty track.

Parting Glances

Home is where the hope is; body parts don't come into it. We confirmed an expat status and toured our home; where before, a month earlier, we looked forward to coming home a month later we looked forward to coming to this other home, to this sub-tropical land. Tired of noise and clogged with dust we had left Saigon. On our return we spent just a few hours in the push and rush and made good time on the slow train to the beach. Home is where the palm trees are.

Home is where the cliches are. Nothing ever changes but of course it does. There is new life and sad absence; there is the blur of catch up; of a year's worth of nights out and evenings in crammed into some fizzy celebration with emotional greetings and premature partings. There are children a year taller, changed irrevocably from gurgle to speech and adults of course slow-changed, comfortably astride the slide to a certain age. Growth is such an optimistic state when young.

Homecomings whether to places of birth or relocation stir notions of staying put, of re-domiciling with the familiar, of re-navigating relationships with people and place; yes, home is where the roots can shoot into solid ground. I am back. I never left. But it is too soon. I am not done yet and though I don't want to backpack into somebody else's hell, I do want to settle and live in somebody else's culture. Home is where the absorption is and this life is filled still with some curiosity that hasn't been killed or that hasn't been numbed by not being...There is still life in Saigon; writing, Thailand and Japan beckon and there is much to be hopeful for. But with more than a glance I look back at so many hellos and goodbye with sadness and gratitude towards friends and family who made it an incredible month for me, for both us. Better not run shy of sentiment now because it's too late and sure I will post again with a different head, let's get cynical and aw that but for this moment, a huge and heartfelt thank you to friends and family.


Photos: Church in Xativa, Spain; Eric Ravilious art in Morecambe; Filip and young Pip in the hills near Glasgow; Kite-Surfing Boards at Mui Ne Beach

Warm Air Can Still Be A Draught

They are taking away the Cyclos. Another icon bites the dust, the march of progress of course, a roughshod quickstep over what was once essential but now inconsequential. So it was with London Routemasters; Glasgow trams, Shanghai rickshaws. Russian Trebant Taxis. What next? The Manila jeepney, the Thai songtaow...


The cyclos are as iconic for VietNam as the conicle hat. Although only seen in the major cities, they are for most people visiting the country a way of accessing some sense of the past that isn't enshrined in a museum or simply post-carded. These contraptions, bicycle meets rickshaw are still a way of life for a lot of people. They now ferry passengers from A to B in lesser quantities as people upgrade to motorcycle taxis but they also transport all manner of stuff that can't be shouldered on a motorbike taxi or squeezed into a car. Cyclos, ridden with grace and without urgency can carry an incredible range of things; from construction materials to bottled mineral water; from a baby palm tree to a drinks vending machine. The cyclo drivers are to a man, stretched and weather beaten; their elongated frames both skelatal and sinewy strong. The government has promised that these men will be given a motorised substitute for their pedal-powered cyclos. Considering the staggering rate of change in Saigon and the accompanying ability of a lot of Saigonese to adapt to that change, it may be just another moment of transition. But the atmosphere of an ex-colonial, 'Fall of Saigon' era city is rapidly going up in construction dust and the noise of millions of motorbikes.



Photo courtesy of Kate Hildebrand's travel blog.

Dead Swimming Pools of VietNam

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Of course a World Heritage indicates a site of antiquity or beauty or of concern for the past as well as the future. It has been alleged that years previously Angkor Wat was an exotic location for corruption parties attended by those with money and power and who were chauffer driven to a certain Wat to party the night away while antiquity shuddered with a bass kick.

It's better now. Antiquity is privately owned and instead of rotund politicians raving it up on anicent stones, there are coachloads of Antiquity Admirers sashaying in flip-flops with the cultural conga, site maps in their hands and a hands on itinerary on their mind. To do Angkor Wat you need a plan; sunrise here, sunset here; optimum views, celebrated vantage points and in between plenty of photo ops for history renovated; of stone pillars being replaced with quick mix concrete. Nice. Maybe the weather worn carvings will be replaced with Artex: The Esoteric Series. As everyone points and clicks; presses and whirrs we are seeing a people through a viewfinder and recording only ourselves for posterity.

And what did we do? We arrived with only an hour to do the Wats, to cram in history, to traipse around with cameras at the ready to record history for ourselves except someone always get in the way - it's so crowded ( but not as crowded as it can be) that an atmospheric shot is ruined by a kid with an Angkor Balloon being chased away by a tour guide who is trying to squeeze his group through a gap made for svelte monks who are mostly hidden except for the few smoking outside the Wats. A queue forms next to them so that posterity has a suitably religious aspect.

Obviously I did not approach the visit with the diligence it required and looking at other tourists I was woefully under-prepared to take it all in, to attempt to understand and place in context this remarkable site. I became reactionary, digging my heels in like a kid not wanting to do any more. I distance myself from the hordes and yet I was part of the horde; tramping my own footstep into poorly managed paths and worn steps. This incredible site, these temples filled with stories will be bludgeoned into the ground unless managed conservation is put before profit. It is possible for sites like this to be viewed responsibly but it takes an effort to look beyond seeing the site simply as a way to generate money.

If the people local to the temple saw the profit of the $20 US entrance fee ( free to locals) then one might feel easier leaving the Wat as dusk settles but the kids still sell postcards and the women still hold out their skin and bone babies as evidence of our own deluded desire to be witness to history. It would make so much more sense to let the Wats be taken back by the jungle, to be reclaimed by the green and for us, every sandal-wearing, sweating frump to use that $20 to give the Cambodians some possibility of food and education. It's not the history, stupid. It's now.

And We Dressed up And Got Married With Our Feet In Warm Water

Click on the link to the right for photographs from Hong Kong and Phu Quoc.

Of course for a writer to say every picture tells a story there is a little twisting going on, like the writer knows there's a pun to be had at his own expense. Surely, he will say, when recovering his composition, every picture SHOWS a story, it doesn't tell it and then maybe with a touch of hubris he will say you need words to aid the visual, to elucidate the picture, to extrapolate meaning. What happened before, what happened after...

Or, with continuing Hugh Briss, the writer could caption each photograph with something witty, profound or sweet; be a sloganeer or a Hallmarked contributor; have a keyboard dripping with honey or treackly, trite truisms. But then captions seem like the worst of both worlds; a shoddy bridge between image and word; dumbing down the viewer with unnecessary description and ruining any evocative possibility in word.

So, is this a longwinded and pompous way of saying look at some photos of my marriage to Kate, ceremony and celebration, in Hong Kong and Phu Quoc ? Of course it is. This is a sample of photos received and big thanks to Charmaine, Robert and Carolyn. More to follow

April 7th 2008 Phu Quoc Island

Just back from Holiday in Cambodia (sic). Photos and words to follow about a magical week on the island.

Hitched in Hong Kong

Voyeur

After being in the mostly fresh air of Chaing Mai,(Tuk Tuk rides can be asphyxiating), it is a familiar shock coming back to Saigon. Greeted now at a new airport terminal by throngs of taxi drivers eager to turn off their meters for the short run to the apartment or at least to state an exorbitant price aimed to catch those unfamilair with the value of the Dong. I have mustered the effort to say ' I live here. I'm not a tourist.' in Vietnamese but it meets with little recognition all things being tonal and I have probably said. ' I would like two tins of tuna.I have large feet' but hey, one has to try...

Taxi drivers aside, it's the number of people here that struck home. Statistically, Ho Chi Minh City has 9 million people in its metro area where boundaries have been swallowed up by roads and construction whereas Chiang Mai has 700 000 people in its metro area. Of course, Saigon has 4.7 million motorbikes too which often seem like they are all on our nearby main road when you are trying to cross it but you are never truly alone here. Every street (apart from the main streets in the city centre) has its separate pitches where people eek out some kind living.




On our street alone, Nguyen Van Thu, there is:

a man selling mangoes, (green) oranges, dragon fruits
a Banh Bo vendor ( street food)
a Quan An ( a local restaurant with tables on the street)
various iced coffee and tea stalls ( 5.00am - 9.00am)
various motorbike parks each with one or two attendants who charge 2000 dong per bike ( 8p)
a car park attendant who bills the growing number of car owners.
a fruit and veg shop that spills out on to the street
Xe Om ( motorbike) taxi drivers at both ends of the street

Our street isn't that long and its amazing how much activity occurs on it with only a brief respite from 12.00 - 4.00am. Well before dawn the street creaks into action. An ostentatious cafe at the near corner has recently opened called Cheery Cafe and has decided to wake up its neighbours by blasting techno at 5.30am.Not much cheery about that but I suspect the noise hardened Saigonese won't mind. I guess there is comfort in knowing that you are rarely alone but for foreigners and westerners especially with their sense of space and privacy, it takes some getting used to. Always being watched can make you believe that every third person hanging around the corner doubles as a goverment agent ready to pass on the important yet inevitable news of just how many decadent westerners tumbled home drunk on a Friday night. Of course this does happen, there are always stories abounding about such things but mostly there is simply a sense of curiosity ( and amusement) about the way we lead our (relatively) priviliged lives. There is more kindness than anger on these streets; there is more energy than disillusionment amongst our neighbours here and although our lives seem quite seperate some times - by buying fruit from the stall or getting a coconut from the impossibly laden concicle-hat woman who passes by sometimes - it is possible to be part of a community and certainly do no harm to it.Yes, we can feel squeezed here, stared at as though we had numerous heads and nearly run over on a daily basis but it does feel like a welcome home.

One Night in Chiang Mai

A Celebration in the foothills. See the quicktime movie to the right for an excerpt.

Thanking the Monkey

We could have called it Holiday of Fear; got tabloid on our vacation using descriptors that wouldn't be found in the guides. On island and in primary forest there were moments of fright, waking up in a cold sweat; staying awake in a hot sweat. Our imaginations have got used to these conditions; they are ready to play tricks, tease with possibility and fake for fun whatever the weather.

On Phu Quoc, the Joyeux Noel of our French hosts was mixed with the usual fights to the death in the bathroom colliseum; as strange armoured flying beetles throbbed and crashed into walls, their rioccochet was a thud, a crack in the night that was matched only by the squeal of their prey, some less armoured, grounded creature who screeched out of something, like a cry from deep inside some impossible throat. Of course we cowered under our flimsy mosquito net, wondering how it could be reinforced, sandbagged against the flow of nature that flew, crawled and slithered in to our room. Certainly, there was atmosphere to the bungalow; it has been described before but sometimes in the dead of the night there were dreams cast of air-con'd concrete sealed off from nature.



In the mountains, in Dalat, our Vietnamese companions had been dressed by purchases from the Russian market; leather jackets that came in with James Dean and lingered somehow with the Fonz (ouch). They were proudly worn inside and out, warmed leatherettes in the brisk air of this mountain town. We managed to find a trek that took us, at first, not to a mountain as we had hoped but to a typical VN attraction, a challenging mixture of pink concrete and booths hiring the instant Hill Tribe look. Only later did we discover an alternative route that took us through honeysuckled tracks to patches of open ground with a view that stopped then opened the heart.

Then to Cat Tien, a huge natural resource and nature reserve only slightly tainted by party, only slightly flawed by the rush to commemorate human achievement in adversity while narrowing the opportunities for sustaining natural bio-dioversity. Still the Massage Parlour was in full swing; like the monkeys in the trees, a cheeky family of Macats who surrounded our house - the house which we had already plaqued as Blair Witch: The SE Asian Connection; its damp walls, empty rooms with dark wood doors and a meeting room downstairs, eight chairs and scarred round table that reeked of Hammer House and red velour rituals.

The monkeys tamed by relatives entertaining them with scraps; kicked over the bin like Friday night louts and then tore across the roof, banging into the windows which was a light tap with the young ones but a heavy thud with the dad's weight. And then as I tried to record an image of our visitors, a couple started to try the handle of the door, rattling it as much as our nerves. There was a moment of strange quiet, an awkward stillness amidst all the rush of activity. We looked each other in the eye, one of the older ones and I. A powerful sensation; an evolutionary deja vu. We had already met.